She swiveled her head, peering across the waves, one hand on a holstered pistol. “Shut up!”
I get that a lot from partisans.
She hissed, “You think rhiz hunt only at night?”
Jude had already hopped into the skiff, as lightly as a landing gull. I followed, and would have stumbled into the slop that sloshed the boat’s bottom boards if he hadn’t caught me.
The woman motioned us to sit, facing her, on a plank shelf while bilge that stank of shellfish lapped around our ankles.
She poled us out into the current, which ran toward the sea, then shipped her pole and whispered, “You two watch behind us. You spot a wake, speak up.” She pointed. “There’s a big, bad-tempered one that’s lived under a ledge over there for thirty years.”
Jude leaned toward me and whispered, “A rhiz won’t attack a boat almost as big as it is. But the water’s so shallow here that if one swam beneath us he’d capsize us. Once we went in the water…”
The warmer brackish swamps of this continent’s south coasts were still ruled by aquatic scorpions big enough to crush a man in one claw. Here in the continent’s north, a sea colder and clearer than the scorpions liked lapped raw, bald granite. The near-shore shell fishing in tidal pools was spectacular. Trilobite done right makes lobster taste like Meals, Utility, Dessicated. The lobe-finned fishes that flopped across the tidal flats to feast on the trills were, in turn, feasted on by lifeboat-sized lobe fins that mimicked the rhizodonts of Earth’s Upper Paleozoic.
We drifted with the current for an hour, past a landscape as gaunt as skulls, greened only by algae and lichen that invaded cracks in the continent’s ancestral granite. The greenery was the same stuff that the Tressens cultivated, then refined, to run their cars.
I shook my head and sighed as we drifted. Most places where the Slugs had abandoned humans across the Milky Way, we hairless apes had proved ourselves a wonder of resilience and ingenuity. After thirty thousand years on the naked Paleozoic pebble that was Tressel, mankind had sprawled across this world to build a mining-based early industrial civilization, evolved without beasts of burden, without conventional agriculture, and without fossil fuels. We were, however, also beating the crap out of one another and out of the planet, which killed the wonder for me.
We passed one pole boat like ours, drawn up alongside a tide pool. The skiff’s fisherman waded knee deep, staring down into the pool, his trident at port arms. A net bag at his waist, already half full, pendulumed as he waded.
Jude didn’t notice. He had spent the last hour watching the woman as she mended net bags and sharpened her tridents with hands that looked more like a harpist’s than a fisherman’s. He pointed at her hands and smiled, the way his father used to smile at cheerleaders. “You’ve had practice.”
She kept her eyes on her sharpening stone and shrugged. “My family’s lived here a long time.”
I said, “You don’t like us.”
She shrugged again. “You, you’re all right. You smell like fish.” She jerked her head at Jude. “This one stinks of the RS.”
Jude stiffened.
She snorted at him. “Your pictures don’t do you justice, Vice Marshall. Don’t worry. I’ve learned to stand the smell of Planck. I can stand the smell of you.”
“You know why we’re here, then?”
“I will after I get to know you better. Planck thinks we’re hiding him. But maybe we’re holding him for ransom. I haven’t decided yet.”
I raised my eyebrows. “We” were hiding Planck. But “I” would decide. The pretty girl with the dirty face was calling the shots.
Another hour’s drifting brought us to the sea, where Green Eyes raised a square sail, then let the wind bear us north. I scanned the waves. Bigger water, bigger predators.
The woman sat down behind us, at the skiff’s tiller, and smiled for the first time. “The rhiz hunt where the small fish go to feed, in the shallows. Relax now. Enjoy the ride.”
I glanced over at Jude, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman. He was already enjoying it.
I saw no evidence of human habitation on the slick rock coast as we sailed north. The woman was as serious about hideouts as she seemed to be about everything else.
The three of us finally tugged the skiff onto a rocky beach pocked with tide pools as the sun was setting. Fifty yards away, silhouetted against the sun’s orange disk, on fifteen-foot-high stone stilts, stood a peak-roofed fishing shanty bigger than a bus garage.
I visored my hand above my eyes to look at it closer. A chimney extended above the roof, but despite the early-evening chill, no smoke curled from the chimney. From a dark window slit on the shanty’s wall nearest us, something poked out.
Jude reacted before me, knocking the woman and me to the rocks. “Gun!”
FORTY-SIX
THE WOMAN SHOVED JUDE AWAY. “Get off me, you idiot!” Then she rolled back on her stomach and cupped a hand around her mouth. “Pytr, it’s Celline!”
The gun barrel didn’t waver.
She waved at the window slit.
“Ah. It’s you, Miss.”
She got to her knees, brushing sand off her armor. “Pytr, we’re coming up.”
Judging by the algae that painted the shanty stilts two-thirds of the way up their length, we had arrived at low tide. The woman scrambled up the slippery ladder to the broad deck that fringed the shanty, its rails hung with fishing gear, and we followed.
The room inside the shanty door was large enough to park a couple of medium-sized trucks and was furnished with old and simple wood pieces. A stone fireplace at the room’s opposite end ran the wall’s length. Above the fire-place mantel hung a twenty-foot-long fish that looked like a fat moray eel with a head as large as a kitchen dishwasher. The rhizodont’s low-hinged mouth gaped like the dishwasher door was open and had been mounted to display a forest of needle teeth.
Beneath the fish a man with shoulder-length gray hair, wearing a lober fisherman’s coarse cloth tunic, knelt with his back to us. An Iridian military rifle as old as he was leaned against the fireplace. He poked a peat fire, tiny upon the immense hearth, to life and shouted louder than necessary into the peat as it blossomed into flame, “Tea in a moment.”
I crossed the room to the rhizodont and ran my fingers over the cracked lacquer on its scales. “Your fish makes quite a centerpiece for your place, Pytr.”
The old man stood and turned toward me. Beneath the gray hair, his right ear was missing and a scar slashed his right cheek from eye socket to chin. He cocked his head as he tried to read my lips. I repeated myself, louder.
Finally, he nodded. “Not my fish. Not my place.” He pointed at the green-eyed woman who had called herself Celline. “Her grandfather built this place and caught the big fish.”
My wrist ’Puter had been vibrating, at closer and closer intervals, for the last five miles as we had approached the shanty. Two closed doors led off the main room. I stepped toward the left door, and the vibration became constant.
As I stepped, Pytr snatched up his rifle.
Celline sat on a stool near the shanty’s front door, stripping off her armor.
I pointed to the closed door. “The chancellor’s in here.” I hefted my pack. “I’ve brought medicine.”
Celline cocked her head, made a small nod. “They said you motherworlders are fey. I never believed it.” Then, louder. “It’s all right, Pytr.”
Pytr lowered his rifle, waved me to the door with its barrel.
The place was more lodge than shanty, and I found Aud asleep in a bedroom at the end of a hallway. One of Aud’s legs had been splinted and elevated, a decent job. A bloodstained field dressing swelled from the side of his head.
I sat on the bed edge and whispered, “Aud?”
He stirred and muttered, eyes closed.
I felt his forehead. Hot.
I grasped his wrist, not to take his pulse but to admire his bugged watch. Without it, bless the Spooks after all, we wouldn’t have found Aud, and my friend would have died.