Startide Rising (The Uplift Saga, #2) - David Brin Page 0,109
drew him onto a stretcher, her face never leaving his sight. Tom felt life might slip away if it had. Working to pump remedies into his veins, she had kept on murmuring, “There now, it’ll be all right.… Say, don’t you recognize me? We’ve never been introduced, but they’ve been nagging us to meet and get married.”
That first time, under the hellish sky of Venus, he had never once lost consciousness because of her. Now though, all he had was memory to cling to. Awareness bled away like bitter, irretrievable air.
His first thought, on coming around, was a vague surprise that he was still breathing. Tom thought the battle-storm was still going on, until he realized that the shaking he felt was his own body. The roar in his ears was only a roar in his ears.
His throbbing left arm was draped over a thick horizontal stump. Scummy green water came up to his chin, lapping against the finned facemask. His lungs ached and the air was stale.
He brought up his trembling right hand, and pulled the mask down to hang around his neck. The filters had kept out the ozone stench, but he inhaled deeply, gratefully. At the last moment he must have chosen immolation over suffocation and struck out for the surface. Fortunately, the battle ended just before he arrived.
Tom resisted the temptation to rub his itching eyes; the slime on his hands would do them no good. Tears welled at a biofeedback command, flushing most of the binding mucus away. He looked up when he could see again.
To the north the volcano fumed on as ever. The cloud cover had parted somewhat, revealing numerous twisted banners of multi-colored smoke. All around Tom, small crawling things were climbing out from the singed weeds, resuming their normal business of eating or being eaten. There were no longer battleships in the sky, blazing away at each other with beams of nova heat.
For the first time, Tom was glad of the monotonous topography of the carpet of vines. He hardly had to rise in the water to see several columns of smoke pouring from slowly settling wrecks. As he watched, one faraway metal derelict exploded. The sound arrived seconds later in a series of muted coughs and pops, punctuated unsynchronously by bright flashes. The dim shape sank lower. Tom averted his eyes from the final detonation. When he looked back he could detect nothing but clouds of steam and a faint hissing that fell away into silence.
Elsewhere lay other floating fragments. Tom turned a slow circle, somewhat in awe of the destruction. There was more than enough wreckage for a mid-sized skirmish.
He laughed at the irony, although it made his abused lungs hurt. The Galactics had all come to investigate a counterfeit mayday signal, and they had brought their death feuds along to what should have been a mission of mercy. Now they were dead while he still lived. This didn’t feel like the random capriciousness of Ifni. It was too like the mysterious, wry work of God himself.
Does this mean I’m all alone again? he wondered. That would be rich. So much fireworks, and one humble human the only survivor?
Not for long, perhaps. The battle had caused him to lose almost all of the supplies he had struggled so hard to recover. Tom frowned suddenly. The message bombs! He clutched at his waist, and the world seemed to drop away. Only one of the globes remained! The others must have popped out in the struggle below the clinging vines.
When his right hand stopped shaking, he carefully reached under his waistband and drew out the psi-bomb, his very last link with Streaker … with Gillian.
It was the verifier … the one that he was to set off if he thought the Trojan Seahorse should fly. Now he would have to decide whether to set off this one, or none at all. Yes or No were all he could say.
I only wish I knew whose ships those were that fired on the Tandu.
Tucking the bomb away, he resumed his slow turn. One wreck on the northwest horizon looked like a partially crushed eggshell. Smoke still rose from it, but the burning seemed to have stopped. There were no explosions, and it seemed not to be sinking any lower.
All right, Tom thought. That will do as a goal. Looks intact enough to have possibilities. It may have salvageable gear and food. Certainly it’s shelter, if it’s not too radioactive.