Everything on the sand, N’ Gana and Mogutu looked around. “Everybody out? Where’s Hamille?”
“Here!” the Pooka responded in that forced air whisper. “Barely.”
The colonel nodded. “Socolov?”
“Here!”
“Father Chicanis?”
“Here!”
He sighed. “Well, all right then. Stand away from the boat. If I know it’s empty, then it knows it’s empty!”
As if on cue, the lens closed up, there was a hiss of a seal, probably to preserve it, and then the thing, which was only a dark hulk in the dim moonlight, seemed to virtually disappear. There was still a shape there, but it was dead, inert, even to look at in the dark. The effect was eerie—and lonely.
The colonel looked at his watch. It was a wind-up mechanical type that was still silent, with no telltale ticks. They all had one just like it, synchronized from the start. The dial was luminous, and they’d all charged theirs just to have use of it once down, although the lighting would fade quite quickly now. All the watches were adjusted to the Helenan day, which ran twenty-five hours fifty-one minutes twelve seconds standard. Since all planetary times were adjusted to a twenty-four-hour clock locally, that meant each hour was going to be roughly sixty-four minutes long, give or take. That wouldn’t disorient any of them.
“There’s some palms and brush for cover over there,” N’Gana told them. “Everybody carry something and let’s get away from this site just in case somebody comes looking.”
“I feel like I was in a building collapse,” Katarina Socolov complained.
“We all got bounced around, but it will pass,” the colonel responded. “Being face-to-face with Titans is more permanent.”
They got everything away, then broke off some large leaves and used them to wipe out the tracks from the now dormant little boat to the brush.
“Probably not good enough, but it’ll have to do,” Harker told them.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mogutu replied. “High tide comes almost up to this first line of brush. You can see the driftwood stacked up along here. In a few hours there’ll be no sign anybody was ever here, and in a few days even the boat will be hard to spot, just another piece of junk.”
“I want to get everything unpacked and sorted and repacked,” the colonel told them. “We’ll rest here until sunup.”
“Aren’t you afraid crossing over in daylight will make us sitting ducks?” the cultural anthropologist asked him, worried.
“It won’t make any difference to them when we cross, anymore than it would to us,” the colonel assured her. “We don’t have night limitations beyond a certain technological level that Mogutu and I have long since passed. They don’t use orbital satellites, since they already own the place and don’t seem to give a damn what might be left over crawling around on it. For us, making a crossing in two collapsible rafts is going to be a challenge no matter how much we’ve practiced. This is real ocean. Let’s at least see the immediate danger instead of worrying about theoretical ones.”
It was sound advice and hard to argue with.
“Once we sort our stuff and get our packs done, I’d suggest most of us get what sleep we can,” the colonel continued. “It’s going to be a very long and physically demanding day tomorrow.”
Some of their packs did contain weapons, but weapons, it seemed, from another age. Only N’Gana and Mogutu had rifles—sleek, mean-looking devices suited to a historical epic, along with crossed belts of clips of ammunition that seemed barbaric. Copper-tipped projectiles shot into people or things by using essentially the same principle used to make rockets. Ugly, messy, and not very sure, but using absolutely no electrical power of any sort or source.
Katarina Socolov and Gene Harker got equally wicked crossbows. “Not much at long range,” Mogutu admitted, “but at short range they’re very effective. There’s a small cylinder of compressed gas in each stock that accelerates the arrow, or bolt as it’s called, and gives it added range to maybe, oh, fifty to a hundred meters depending on the target. Even when you run out of gas cylinders, so long as you’ve got bolts, you’ll still have a weapon that can handle twenty, thirty meters sure. Ask the doc for sighting—it’s her weapon, basically. It’s pretty easy, though.”
Harker sat down next to the woman, who was checking her own crossbow out. “You actually good with this?”
She nodded. “Sure. Against targets. Used to be a hobby of mine—ancient and medieval weaponry that didn’t require a lot of upper body strength. If they’d invented these gas cylinders back then, women wouldn’t have had such a tough time getting equality.”
“Doc—Katarina?”
“Kat. It’s easy and it’s kind of an identity thing, like a meow-type cat or maybe a lion.”
“Okay—Kat. I’m Gene. No use for rank here, except maybe with the colonel. So, how do you sight this?”
She showed him, as well as some of the other finer points. Actually getting decent enough to hit the broad side of a mountain with one of those bolts, though, would be a different story.
Other weapons included a Bowie-style knife with a serrated blade made of a substance that looked and felt like steel but could cut into softer rocks without problems, and a kind of formalized blackjack, a baton, which he knew from the military police. Weighted, it could knock people cold and crack heads, but it wasn’t considered a deadly weapon. In a close fight against too many of the enemy, it might just be an equalizer.
Beyond this there were a couple of weeks of concentrated rations, a bottle each of desalinization and sterilization pills, and a small medical kit. That was about it.
The colonel supplemented his rifle with a rather fancy saber which he wore in a scabbard, hanging from his pants belt, and he, too, had a baton but on the other side in its own carrier.
Each had all his or her spares in backpacks and they then buried the duffels in the sandy soil just in back of the driftwood, so tidal erosion wouldn’t uncover them. Only the Pooka, which the colonel had called Hamille, revealing a name for the first time, had no pack or apparent weapons. There was no telling what it ate or drank, but it was damned sure it had no shoulders to carry a pack, and it seemed quite happy to just be itself. Harker decided not to ask right then, but wondered whether the creature’s civilization was so industrialized and automated that they no longer had the means to produce these things that didn’t require power. Or perhaps the Pooka was in its own way as alien and inscrutable as the Titans.
Finally, they settled down in the bushes to wait until morning.
Nobody really slept, but nobody really wanted to talk and risk disturbing the others, either. The sudden heavy gravity, the bumpy ride down, the tensions and stresses and the anticipation of the unknown all combined to make each one feel older than the old diva who’d brought them all together, yet too young to die.
Harker could barely suppress his satisfaction at seeing the great Colonel N’Gana, legend and mercenary, seasick as a rookie in weightlessness training as they paddled their boats in toward shore. The colonel’s dark brown complexion seemed to have lost its luster. In its drab new exterior it had gained a little green and gray.
Of course, Katarina Socolov wasn’t doing much better. Clearly sailing wasn’t in her background, either. It was difficult to tell about the Pooka, who couldn’t row anyway, but it had withdrawn into a coil with its head near the bottom of the boat.
Fortunately, Mogutu seemed to either be experienced at it or at least have it in his blood; with the colonel and the Pooka in his boat, he was really the only one doing any real work at rowing them in toward shore. At least it wasn’t all that rough, not for open ocean, anyway. Harker suspected that there was a definite continental shelf not far below and that it probably had either a great deal of sand built up or some sort of reefs, perhaps coral-like, that broke up the waves.