Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [151]
“You have to get rid of the killer anemones, Ike,” Matthew said, deciding that the time had come to take command. “Use the flamethrowers. Then you have to check the equipment and the supplies, to make sure exactly what’s missing. Then you have to get me down.”
“Haven’t you got that in the wrong order?” Ike objected. “It’ll take at least two of us to clear those monsters way.” He had obviously seen the current occupants of the disputed area.
“We have to find Dulcie first,” Lynn said.
“No,” Matthew put in, knowing that he had to make good his bid for authority if he were to make it stick. “Ike’s right. It’ll take two of you to take the territory back—but you have to be careful. If Dulcie can make her own way back, that’s great. If not … we have to make ourselves safe first. There’s no time to waste. You have to get moving now.”
This time, they accepted the necessity. Ike appeared on the edge of the ill-cleared area within minutes, clad in ochreous armor. Matthew watched while he spent a few minutes making sure of the lie of the land, testing the speed at which the giant slugs could move.
“Just kill the bloody things, will you,” Matthew shouted down to him. It wasn’t the sort of thing an ecologist ought to say, but the urgency of the situation overrode other considerations.
Ike had already taken an opportunity to begin delving in one of the ragged heaps of cargo, freeing the flamethrower. He carefully fitted the canister of propellant to his back and placed protective goggles over his eyes, while the tentacled slugs went contentedly about their business. When he eventually let fly, in a series of short but lethal bursts, he managed to roast more than twenty of the monsters without placing the boat or its cargo in the least danger. He had to pick off half-a-dozen more one by one, using more subtle but equally lethal instruments, but he completed the task as quickly as was humanly possible.
Only then did Lynn limp out of the purple backcloth. She had put on her own armor, but she was moving as freely as anyone could have expected, given her injury.
The stink was appalling. Matthew’s nasal filters had carefully screened him from those complex organic odorants to which he might have been allergic, but the cruder fumes of burnt flesh posed no threat of that kind, and he was permitted to experience the full measure of their unpleasantness.
Lynn set to work immediately. “It’s okay,” she said to Ike. “I’m fine as long as I don’t have to walk far. I’ll take care of the inventory while you find a way of getting up to the cliff top and freeing the cable. When that’s done, we can all pitch in. It’s about time Matthew started doing his share.”
“What if more of them come?” Ike asked.
“Matthew can drop the rifle down to me so that I can blast them at short range.”
“We didn’t come here to conduct a holocaust,” Ike said, sorrowfully. “This is getting way out of hand.”
“We’ll go back to being Mr. Nice Guys when we’ve got back to being Mr. Safe Guys,” she countered, grimly. “We’ll put a cosmetic gloss on the story when we relay it back to Tang if you like, but until further notice I’m the original devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways colonist, okay?”
“If you say so,” Ike conceded, a little stiffly. He raised his voice to say: “I’m on my way, Matthew. Just sit tight for one more hour.”
“Whatever you do,” Matthew shouted down “for heaven’s sake don’t fall.”
Ike’s only response to that was a gesture of contempt.
Having watched Ike do his painful work. Matthew now had to watch Lynn doing hers—but she didn’t have to call for the gun. The odor of cooked flesh was entirely alien to Tyre, and it seemed to function as powerfully as a deterrent as their spillage of the day before had functioned as bait.
It wasn’t obvious that the work of reassembling the boat could be completed that day,