Skeen's Return (29 page)

Pegwai chuckled.

“Hah! Any more of that, I bite.”

The morning steamed on. Subdued voices from the deck passengers. The shouts from the crew and their work chants seemed muted, lifeless. The wind dropped yet more, the sails began to wrinkle and sag. The cook's helper brought a bucket of fresh water to Maggí. She continued her driven pacing, slopping water on her face and arms, dabbing at her not-hair. The silvery filaments writhed and crackled with small explosions of cold fire, otherwise lay flat against her skull.

Afternoon. Idling in the water. Crew lounging about, half asleep, drained by the heat and the morning's labors. Deck passengers soddenly asleep, most of them. Alertness at its lowest ebb since Efli Baq. Those few awake breathing through their mouths. The air had little virtue. Unless they took in great gulps of it, they felt they were suffocating.

Timka came out of the shadows below and stood blinking in the reddish hazy light. Her light robe sagged about her; under it her flesh shifted and rippled as if the breathless heat made it uncertain of any form. Heavy eyed and slow footed, she climbed the stairs. Maggí glanced at her, went back to staring at the sails, grimly silent, waiting with the same exhausted sag for something to happen. Anything.

The lassitude broke apart.

With a wild scream, Chulji plummeted through the rigging, snapped out, shifted to Skirrik the moment he touched down. Still tottering, he waved an arm about forty-five degrees east of the ship's bowsprit. “There,” he squeaked, “The blow, the blow, about five, six stads off.”

The crew jolted to life, ran for the crossbow chest, snatched up bundles of bolts and scrambled into the shrouds; they were at their posts before they were fully awake.

The quiet, drowsing deckwell got suddenly busy, some passengers chasing down children and herding them to the hold prepared for them, others on their feet, flexing arms, doing kneebends, swinging spears and halberds; a chaos but an orderly one, each individual movement fitting neatly into a defensive whole.

Lipitero stripped off her sweaty robe, clicked open the case and lifted out the excavator. She danced claw tips over the top of the cube and it deformed, extruding handgrips, dropping the main weight into a teardrop hanging off the shooting tube. The hover field glowed a rich orange about her; with a straining wavering whine, slowly at first then more quickly, it carried her to the top of the mainmast. She stepped onto the small circular platform there, eased herself down onto it, wrapped her legs about the mast, rested the weapon on her thigh. Tense and filled with a heavy distaste for what she had to do, she waited.

Timka cast off her robe, shifted to sea eagle and went winging away. Chulji followed her.

Maggí leaned on the forerail of the quarterdeck, eyes moving constantly. She'd worked out her tactics during the tedious wait for this moment and given her orders. Now she watched to see if there was slippage between theory and practice.

Skeen pushed a last time at the damp hair straggling into her eyes and got to her feet. She stood waiting for Pegwai. “Five, six stads. How much time does that give us before this mess starts?”

He grunted, shook out the skirts of his scholar's habit. “Given a good wind, the Kiskar would make that in ten minutes. Swimming?” He shrugged. “No point your coming down too. I'll meet you on deck with your Min slicer.”

The sea eagles came screaming back, circled round Lipitero, pointed the line for her. She eased around until she was facing between them, steadied the excavator, called a warning to them, touched on a blade of light that was a meter wide and a hundred meters long; a deep harsh humming filled the emptiness between sea and sky. She played the beam through the water. Steam sprayed up and out, a hissing that screamed around the thrum of the excavator; the water boiled and shivered, turned pink with the blood of the Pochiparn, foamed and blanched with the colorless colloid that ran through Min flesh. When she saw the shadows of the Min swimmers flicker and disappear, diving deep, she shut down the beam and began working on the fairly complex problem of changing the form, length and properties of the light blade.

Tentacled shapes came shooting from the water like squameri seeds pinched between thumb and forefinger; they swarmed up and over the rail with a lithe, undulating movement, shifting in mid-leap to their land-fighting forms—bipedal, hairless, translucent cyanic flesh more slippery than oiled porcelain and far tougher. They were clumsy out of water, but terribly hard to kill, trained to shift to an alternate form whenever their prey managed a damaging cut or got a shaft in a dangerous place. With the shift, the bolt would drop away, the wound would close over. A second shift and they were more dangerous than before. They went after the defenders, tentacles flailing, caught them and squeezed, a slow crushing death. Those of high rank carried cutting weapons adapted to their tentacles; none had projectile weapons of any sort, their eyesight out of the water wasn't all that good. The fighting ground being limited to the ship's decks and the shrouds, they had only to press and press until they cornered crew, passengers, and the renegade Min they'd been bought to kill, to slash and squeeze them till only gunja were left alive.

In the shrouds and on the decks, crew shot and reloaded, a rain of bolts that managed some damage in spite of the fluid shifts of the gunja; most of these flickered through the double change and lost the bolts without losing a step. Kneeling behind the forerail of the quarterdeck, Pegwai chose his targets, put a handful of darts in each, overloading their systems with the drug before they could shift it away. As they got among crew and passengers, he had to be more careful, the darts wouldn't kill, but the Fish would if a fighter collapsed before one of them. The Aggitj raced along the rail, working with saber and spear, agile and serious for once, doing a dance they'd learned from birth on the dueling grounds of the ancient holds. Boy and Beast scooted about after them, keeping low, spitting their poison at Min legs, tentacles, whatever they could reach without damaging defenders; they spat and Min melted into a sticky slime. As soon as Lipitero shut the blade off, Timka plummeted to the quarterdeck, shifted to the cat-weasel the instant her feet touched wood. She loped to the maindeck and wriggled through the fighting to Skeen's side; the Pass-Through was striding about, using her bladed staff with deadly effect, cutting the attackers to such small pieces she got the S'yer more often than not, though when she missed, the undead gobbets of flesh oozed together, forming a new gunj. Ti-cat took care of those, slashing through the S'yers with a fierce satisfaction. Each one down was one less to come at her again; unlike Lipitero she wasn't bothered by the killing; the dead had passed beyond pain and anger, she hadn't. More Min came. And more. When she had a moment to think, Timka knew it had to be more than one cell attacking. Min and more Min, swarming over the rails. Pegwai refilled the reservoir of the darter and went on taking out as many as he could hit. Beside him Houms and the best shots among the crew picked off more, distracting those they didn't manage to kill so the Aggitj, Maggí, the crew, the deck passengers, Skeen and Timka—whoever happened to be nearest—could finish the job. Poison exhausted, the Boy found one of the jagged stone Sea Min knives and scurried about, slashing at Min legs with it. He was kicked and grabbed at, but he was old in surviving and wriggled away before the tentacle could get a firm hold on him. Fluids from the dead and dissolving Min turned the deck into a mud slide, the Min sliding in the leavings of their flesh as badly as the Nemin did. Cursing, grunting, panting, screaming hate and pain, hissing, thuds, wild shrieks from both sides, the struggle went on and on, neither side gaining an edge.…

Until Lipitero up above finally finished her adjustments on the excavator, shortening the beam so she wouldn't punch holes in the ship, refining it until it was a rod of light a hair thick; she set it on millisecond bursts, eased out to the edge of the platform, hooked her feet into the ropes to steady herself and began picking off Sea Min, working around the edges of the struggle, triggering the burst only when she had a clear shot. Each Min she hit exploded like a tuber a cook had forgotten to prick.

One. Two. Five.

They were gunja drilled to blood and sacrifice; they endured and ignored all death, even the agony as Chalarosh poison dissolved their still living bodies, but when hot dripping bits of their brothers splattered over them, they faltered. The death struck and struck. They saw nothing, heard nothing. They died.

Nine.

They began to mill, moaning with fear and indecision. Their leaders were down, they moved in the residue of their own; invisible death came from nowhere, one cell had lost two thirds of its members, the other, half. Another exploded.

Eleven.

They broke and went overside into the sea.

The deck stilled.

Maggí rubbed at a weal on one arm where a Min tentacle had caught her. She nudged the comatose body of a darted Min with her bare toe, spat with disgust. “Houms,” she called. Her not-hair writhed about her head, lines of weariness dragged down the corners of her mouth. She swung around. “Baliard, Tritz, Ishal, Za Grann.…” Her crew—one by one she named them. Battered and bloody they gathered around her, those that could walk.

Ti-cat watched for a moment, disturbed by the smell of the blood (that was the cat speaking in her); she glanced up. Chulji was aloft again, watching to make sure the decimated cells didn't reform and return. He glided in slow circles, wings outstretched. She could feel his weariness in her own bones. She wasn't so tired right now (that was the cat too, she was always surprised by the amount of energy the cat had), but she would be the moment she shifted. She ran up to the quarterdeck, swished her tail at Pegwai. He was refilling the darter's reservoir again from the bucket of fresh water Maggí had provided; he stopped what he was doing and watched her shift through several forms, losing cuts, bruises, Min fluids and splotches of blood somewhere in the transformation. She finished as Pallah, pulled her robe on and jerked the belt tight. She was clean, almost cool, as neat as if she'd just come from a long thorough bath.

Pegwai chuckled. “Don't get too close to Skeen, Ti. She's not going to appreciate the contrast.” He sighed, “I've never really envied Min before.”

She smiled at him, too weary to respond with more than a nod. She went down to find Skeen.

Three of the crew were dead; others were carrying the last of these up to the quarterdeck where they'd be out of the muck. Maggí was standing over the cook's helper, a Pallah boy barely past puberty; his arm was out of its socket. Maggí put it back in, the boy screamed and fainted. She stepped aside and let two sailors take him below. The cook was in sickbay receiving the injured; he'd see, to the boy. She looked after the bearers, saw Timka, beckoned her over. She scraped her hand across her face, looked down at herself, then examined Timka clean and cool. “Min,” she said, exasperation in her voice. Then she shook herself, “Ti, I could use some help in sickbay. Up to you.” She swung her arm to take in the deck. “I've got to do something about this mess.”

“Yes, of course. I'll fetch Skeen.”

“Skeen? Ah, yes. If she will.”

Skeen had her hip hitched on the rail; she was leaning into the shrouds staring at the sluggish water brushing slowly past, her eyes were heavy and she looked as exhausted as any of the rest. She was covered with blood and Min fluids, there was a small cut up near her hairline, an angry abrasion on the back of her hand, small round scabs like bloody freckles scattered across it. The staff with the knife embedded in the end lay rocking slowly against the rail, smeared with colloid and blood for half its length.

“Skeen?”

Skeen yawned, moved slightly so she could see Timka. “Min,” she said, exasperation in her voice.

“That's three of you. No imagination, you Nemin.” Timka stopped talking, lifted her head, startled. “Am I dreaming, or was that a breath of wind?”

Skeen slid off the rail, looked up. “Hai, Petro,” she yelled. “It blowing up there?”

The Ykx's voice came drifting down to them. “Yessss, better by the minute.”

“You coming down?”

“In a little. I like it up here. Cool.”

“Hah. If I had two hands, I'd be up there too.” Skeen yawned again. “You wanting something, Ti?”

“Maggí needs help in sickbay, I'm going. You?”

Skeen looked at her hand and the handless arm, she plucked absently at the eddersil tunic. “Me and my clothes need a bath. You go down, I'll wash.” She looked at her sleeves and sighed. “And borrow one of Petro's robes. This sort of thing keeps up, I'm going to need a change of clothes.”

The children were out of the hold, helping tend the wounded among the passengers, fetching buckets of sea water so their elders could scrub the muck off the wounded and out of the well.

The ropes were creaking as the winds strengthened, the sails booming out. Houms was bellowing orders to the weary crew; half of them were working the ship, the other half were rolling the darted Sea Min overside and scrubbing the residue off the deck planks.

Maggí inspected all that with satisfaction, nodded as she saw Skeen and Timka go below. She crossed to the well. “Indu Annaji, any dead?”

A hefty Balayar woman looked up from the head she was bandaging; she was a series of soft squares, square head, square body, arms and legs jointed rectangular solids. “Lifefire's blessing, no,” she boomed. Her laughter was as large and solid as her body, as infectious as measles. “Ykx's blessing, I should say, say it loud and clear. Pop pop spit, like boiling mush.” She laughed again, sobered. “We'll take care of our wounds, Captain, but when you're not so busy, some tea and hot broth would go down easy.”

“I hear you, Annaji. When I can spare the cook from the wounded, you'll get that and more.”