I fished in my pack for tools, then removed the head wound’s dressing.
The woman entered the room, stood behind me with arms folded while I worked. With a magnifying explorer, I located and then plucked out a metal splinter that had either been part of Aud’s car or of the bomb that blew it up.
She said, “I thought you were a soldier, not a surgeon.”
I lifted the magnifying explorer in my right hand. “Mag-ee makes every soldier a surgeon. Or at least a medic. As long as this little light shines green, I can poke around and pull out anything I find without hurting my patient. If things get hairy, the light turns amber and I back off. Motherworlders aren’t fey. We just have good tools.”
Mag-ee also prescribed antibiotics. After I inserted the cartridge that it told me to, it administered them. Recent bitter experience with Ord on Bren notwithstanding, Tressel’s bugs croaked nicely after a shot of the right Earthmade stuff.
“You have the tools to get rid of the RS. But you don’t.” She tossed her head in the direction of the fireplace room where Jude and Pytr waited. “The motherworld handed Tressel to the RS. You even let your young friend in there serve them.”
I winced as I rummaged through the med kit Bill the Spook had provided. “The tilt? Tressen would have won the war eventually, regardless. And there would have been fewer of you left on both sides. Besides, my ‘young friend’ isn’t even sure all the stories about the RS are true.”
“Then he’s naive.”
“He is that. What does that make you?” I read Aud’s pulse off the Mag-ee. “You had a chance to kill off this big RS fish right here. Why didn’t you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me.”
“I told you. I may decide to use him as a hostage.”
“Zeit doesn’t want him back. Zeit wants him dead. How’d you get hold of him, anyway?”
“After the assassination attempt, the chancellor made his way here, to find Pytr. Planck was even more dead than you see him now. Planck saved Pytr’s life once. Pytr insists that Planck can’t possibly know what the RS has been doing. I find that hard to believe. But I’m taking a chance because Pytr’s been my brains and my conscience since I was a teenager. Do you know what it’s like to trust someone like that?”
I nodded as I applied a fresh dressing. “I lost someone like that, not so long ago. I know how I got to be a general. How did a fisherman’s daughter come to be running the Iridian resistance?”
She scuffed the floor cobbles with her toe, shrugged. “Nobody runs the resistance. It’s just pockets of survivors here and there. We keep our heads down and hope something will change for the better before the RS exterminates us all.”
After I finished playing doctor, Jude and I got assigned a bedroom to share. If Pytr and Celline trusted us, they didn’t trust us to split watch with them. Celline took the first watch. Jude complained, out of chivalry. I didn’t, out of old age.
Jude and I lay on rock-hard cots in the dark. He said, “What do you think of Celline?”
“I think she’s smarter and tougher than most fishermen’s daughters.”
“She’s beautiful, too.”
I rolled over and faced the wall. “So’s the sunrise. Go to sleep and maybe you’ll see it.”
Outside on the decking I heard footsteps as my godson’s beautiful crush padded around in the dark, armed to the teeth. Overnight, the tide had come in, so the sound of waves against the shanty’s pilings metronomed me to sleep.
I woke before the others, at first light, because after a lifetime with Ord I had forgotten how to sleep late. I dressed, checked on Aud, whose fever had come down nicely, then tiptoed out onto the deck, where deaf Pytr snored with his rifle across his knees.
I stretched out kinks that I didn’t have when the likes of Ord taught me to wake up too early, as I barefooted around the shanty’s deck. The tide had gone out again and was now running in, the sea lapping a foot up the shanty’s pilings. Ocean whisper coupled with the drone of rainbow-winged dragonflies skimming the swells like the birds that lay millennia in Tressel’s future. The serenity contrasted to Manhattan, or Mousetrap, or Marinus, or the Republican Socialist sterility of Tressia.
My stomach reminded me that the dragonflies, like the pterosaurs and gulls that would usurp their ecological niche, were hunting breakfast among the waves.
Our host and hostess had each been up half the night. The nearest chicken nested light-years away, so there would be no eggs to scramble on this crisp seaside morning. Like the thoughtful guest I was, I rolled my pantlegs above my knees, slipped a trident and a shellfish creel off a rail, and tiptoed down the shanty ladder to spear fresh trilobites for breakfast.
FORTY-SEVEN
COLD PRICKLED MY NAKED ANKLES as I waded against the incoming tide. Twenty yards seaward from the shanty, I reached the nearest tide pool, where the water deepened until it chilled my knees. Trident at port arms, like the fisherman we had passed in the estuary the previous afternoon, I peered down into water as clear as aquamarine gin. Multicolored invertebrates, some spiked, some tentacled, clung to the rock bottom like an animate English garden. Among them crabbed trilobites the size of flat shrimp. All crust and no filling, the little ones were also too quick to spear, and I bypassed them.
It took me ten minutes to spot a six-pounder, fat and spiny. I slid to one side, so my long shadow thrown by the rising sun wouldn’t cross him, then drew back the trident.
I held my breath, then lunged at breakfast. As the trident’s tines splashed into the water, the trilobite shot away. Into its place, where my trident’s tines struck, flashed a dull red streak.
“Damn!” I lifted my trident two-handed, like a full pitchfork. Impaled on the three tines squirmed a three-foot-long replica of the lobe-finned giant that hung above Celline’s mantel. Fins as sturdy as stumpy legs, which enabled the lober to wriggle across rock from pool to pool and meal to meal at low tide, thrashed, and a mouth filled with needle teeth snapped. No wonder lober fishermen wore leather armor.
My accidental catch weighed ten pounds if it weighed one, and lobers were better eating even than trills. The fish’s struggles subsided, and I cocked my head and said, loud as if the fish could hear me over the tidal rush, “See? If you hadn’t gone after the little fish, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The tidal rush had not only grown louder, it had grown irregular, a rhythmic splashing behind me.
I turned with the trident in my hands.
Twenty feet away, a rhizodont as big as the twenty-footer that hung above Celline’s mantel eyed me head-on. With two-thirds of its body above the waterline, its mouth gulped like, well, a fish out of water, and its pincushion of teeth dripped seawater like it was salivating over a snack.
Which it was.
“Crap.” Slowly I turned toward the shanty. What had I just told my victim about the perils of pursuing little fish?
The great fish lunged toward me, lurching on thick, lobed fins, flopping side to side like a GI low-crawling under barbed wire on his elbows. Semi-submerged bulk buoyed by knee-deep salt water, the fish closed the gap between us faster than a man can jog.
I sprinted away like my hair was on fire, screaming. But high-kneed in the tide pool, I was moving slower than a man can jog.
When the gap had narrowed to fifteen feet, I chucked the fish and trident back at the monster as a peace offering.
The trident wedged between teeth in the beast’s lower jaw like a canapé on a toothpick but didn’t slow the rhiz.
The shanty ladder was ten yards away, but the rhiz was now ten feet back.
My bare foot came down through the water onto something that exploded pain into my arch like a land mine. I stumbled and fell face-first into the shallows.