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Twisp shuddered and looked at Scudi and Brett. "That's not what it said to me. How about you, kid?"
"It showed me the launching of the rocket."
Brett closed his eyes. Scudi pressed herself against him, leaning her head into his shoulder. He knew the experience they had shared: thousands of people alive now only in the kelp's memories. The last agony of the Guemes Islanders was there and everything the dead had ever thought or dreamed. He had heard Scudi exclaiming in his mind: "Now, I know what it feels like to be a Mute!"
Scudi pushed herself a bit away from Brett's embrace and looked at Twisp. "The kelp said it's my friend because I'm one of its teachers."
"What did it say to you, Twisp?" Brett asked. Brett opened his eyes wide and stared hard at the long-armed fisherman.
Twisp inhaled a deep, quick breath and spoke in a sharp voice: "It just told me about myself."
"It told him he's a man who thinks for himself and likes to keep his thoughts private," Nakano said. "It told me we're alike in this. Isn't that it, Twisp?"
"More or less." Twisp sounded embarrassed.
"It said our kind's dangerous to leaders who demand blind obedience," Nakano said. "The kelp respects this."
"There! You see?" Bushka smiled at them, lifting a lasgun out of the pile of weapons he had taken from the people off the LTA. He balanced the lasgun on his open palm, staring at it.
Panille turned from the hatchway and looked at Bushka. "You all accept this?" His voice was flat. He glared at Nakano. "Only you and Kareen and I are left!" He jerked his chin toward the hatchway. "Where are the others?"
Silence settled over the group.
Panille turned toward the perimeter of kelp visible in the darkening light. He remembered hurdling the glut of kelp and reaching for Kareen as a giant vine released her. She had grabbed him close and they had clung to each other while cries of fear lifted all around them.
In that instant of kelp-awareness, he had been inundated by Kareen: Gallow's captive - sent with Nakano to be used as bait in the capture of Dark Panille. She had her loyalty problems, too. Her family, with all its power, wanted a hold on Gallow in case he was victorious. But Kareen loathed Gallow.
Kareen's fingers had held a painful grip on Panille's water-frizzed hair while she cried against his neck. Then the kelp had returned ... and touched them once more. They had both felt the kelp's selective fury, sensed the leaves and vines writhing seaward ... bottomward. Presently, the hatchway had framed a churning gray sea, not a sign there to betray the fact that humans had been removed from the foil ... and drowned.
But that was the past. Bushka cleared his throat, breaking Panille's reverie. "They were Gallow's people," Bushka said. "What does it matter?"
"Nakano was one of Gallow's people," Twisp said.
"It's not an easy choice," Nakano said. "Gallow saved my life once. But so did you, Twisp."
"So you go with whoever saved you most recently," Twisp said, scorn in his voice.
Nakano spoke in a curious lilting tone: "I go with the kelp. There is my immortality."
Brett's throat went dry. He had heard that tone in Guemes fanatics, the hardest of the hard-core WorShipers.
Twisp, obviously having a similar reaction, shook his head from side to side. Nakano did not care who he killed! The kelp justified everything!
"Gallow wants Vata," Bushka said. "We can't allow that." He passed the lasgun to Nakano, who slipped it into its holster at his thigh.
At Bushka's movement, Twisp put his hand on his own weapon. He did not relax even when Nakano displayed empty hands and smiled at him.
"Seven of us," Twisp said. "And we're supposed to attack a place that could have more than three hundred armed people in it!"
Bushka closed the hatchway before looking at Twisp. "The kelp told me how to kill Gallow," he said. "Do you doubt the kelp?"
"You're damned right I do!"
"But we are going to do it," Bushka said. He pushed past Twisp and went up the passageway toward the pilot cabin. Brett took Scudi's hand and followed. He could hear the others coming after them, Twisp muttering: "Stupid, stupid, stupid ..."
For Brett, Twisp's voice lay immersed in what the kelp had insisted, a chant imprinted on the vocal centers. Certainly this was what the kelp had told Bushka.
Drive Gallow out. Avata will do the rest.
The chant surged there, background to a persistent image of Ward Keel imprisoned in plaz, beckoning to him. Brett felt sure that Keel was Gallow's prisoner at this outpost.
Panille went to the left-hand pilot's seat and checked the instruments. The foil was making minimal headway in the wide circle of open water enclosed by kelp fronds.
Brett stopped near the pilot station. Feeling Scudi's hand tremble in his, he squeezed her hand firmly. She leaned against him. He looked out the plaz to his right. Framed there was a churning gray sea. Rain slanted with a stiff breeze. Kelp fronds lifted and danced on the wavetops, smoothing them and dampening the chop. Even as he looked, darkness settled over the sea. Automatic lighting came on to rim the edges of the cabin ceiling. Course vector lights winked on the screens in front of Panille.
Twisp had stopped at the entrance to the cabin, his hand on the lasgun, his attention on Nakano.
Noting this, Nakano smiled. He moved across in front of Brett and went to the pilot station beside Panille, activating the exterior lights. A spotlight fa
"Dashers!" Panille said.
"Look at that big bull!" Nakano said.
Brett and Scudi stared out at the scene, the blanket of kelp, the hunt of dashers.
"I've never seen such a big one," Ale said.
The hunt swept along in an undulating glide behind the monster bull. Nakano tracked them with the spotlight. They circled the dark perimeter of kelp, then worked into the leaves.
Nakano turned from the control station and opened the plaz hatch beside him, letting in a damp rush of wind and rain. Lifting his lasgun, he sent a burning arc at the hunt, tumbling the lead bull and two followers. Their dark green blood washed over the kelp fronds, foaming in the waves.
The rest of the hunt turned on its own dead, spreading blood and torn flesh across the fan of light. Abruptly, kelp stalks as thick as a man's waist lifted from the sea, whipped the gore to a foam and drove the dashers from their feed.
Nakano drew back and secured the hatch. "You see that?" he asked.
No one answered. They had all seen it.
"We will submerge," Bushka said. "We will go in with the foil underwater. Nakano will be visible. The rest of us will appear to be captives until the last blink."
Brett released Scudi's hand and crossed to confront Bushka. "I'll not have Scudi used as bait!"
Bushka made a grab for his lasgun but Brett caught the man's wrist. Young muscles, made powerful by months of hauling nets, flexed once, twisted Bushka's wrist and the lasgun dropped to the deck. Brett kicked it toward Twisp, who picked it up and hefted it.
Bushka eyed the weapons he had left near the passage entrance.
"You'd never make it," Twisp said. "So relax." He held the lasgun casually, muzzle pointed downward, but his ma
"So what do we do now?" Ale asked.
"We could run for the Launch Base and alert everyone to what's happening," Panille said.
"You'd start a civil war among Mermen and the Islanders would be drawn into it," Bushka protested. He rubbed at his wrist where Brett had twisted it.
"There's something else," Scudi said. She glanced at Brett, then at Twisp. "Chief Justice Keel is being held prisoner here by Gallow."
"In Ship's name, how do you know that?" Twisp demanded.