Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

She looked out at the beach. There were perhaps five, six meters to the start of the rocks, not much more.

“Go, little lady!” the priest shouted. “I will cover you! Just follow my footprints!”

She started, then froze. “I—I can’t seem to move.”

“You go or I’m going to pick you up and throw you out on the sand,” Harker snapped. “Now!” He moved as if he were going to do just that, and she shot him a glance of fear and hatred that he’d not seen in many years, not since he was training recruits in Commando units, but she went.

Almost immediately the sands began to come to life again, but now Father Chicanis took aim and started firing.

The sands suddenly erupted and there was a tremendous angry roar, and a knifelike claw bigger than a man shot out of the sands and straight into the air. Chicanis ignored it and concentrated on a spot to the right and just a bit back of the claw; it was clear that he was hitting something big and nasty from the way things were shaking. It was almost as if the sands had erupted in a kind of volcanic fury.

Harker didn’t wait to see the show. He took the boat line and made for the rocks, dragging the boat behind him. Only when he felt he was on the rocks did he turn and call, “Father! Help me pull it in!”

Chicanis was by him in an instant and the two pulled the boat onto the rocks. Harker immediately looked inside for another rifle. He’d had some elementary instruction during the time on the island, but he knew damned well he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with one. On the other hand, he could hit a beach, and anybody could hit one of those monsters that lurked below.

He took one glance around and saw Katarina Socolov sitting on the rocks, line still wrapped around her right hand, staring straight ahead, not at them or any action, as if in shock. She would have to wait; there was a second boat to get in.

Chicanis pointed to the sands where something was still convulsing. “We may be in luck! That’s a smaller one than I’m used to, and to put up that much fuss I’d say another one is taking advantage of its weakness and attacking it.” He turned and waved Mogutu in.

The colonel wasn’t any more thrilled by the sights on the beach than Socolov had been, but he understood the problem and had faced equally nasty creatures in the past.

“Probably should have used the machine gun,” the priest commented to himself, ejecting a clip and slapping in a new one. “Oh, well, too late now. Here they come! Think of a blind crab, Harker! Don’t shoot the claws, shoot the body!”

Mogutu had thought of a machine gun, but he was more concerned with just getting on shore near the rocks. He wasn’t as precise as Harker, and at the last minute the boat was lifted up by a wave and deposited slightly inland on the beach about ten meters away and perhaps twenty meters from where the monsters were obviously ending their fight.

“Get out and both of you pull the boat here!” Harker virtually screamed at them. “We’ll do the cover! Get a move on! They’ll be able to feel you walking through the bottom of the boat!”

The idea was sufficient to get even the still pale N’Gana moving. Mogutu lifted his machine gun and sprayed the area around where the underground titans were going at it and then started some bursts along the path where they would have to run pulling the boat and its contents. To everyone’s relief, nothing erupted, and that was enough for the two mercenaries, who leaped out of the boat and began pulling it on the run toward the rocks.

Suddenly something popped from the sand under the rear part of the boat with enough force to throw it into the air several meters and spill out some of the contents. Said contents included the Pooka Hamille, who launched into the air and went into a steady whirling motion that made him next to impossible to see in detail. He was a long sausagelike blur, and he was headed straight for the rocks.

“I’ll be damned!” Harker muttered as he fired into the area around the back of the boat. “The damned thing can fly!”

The Pooka may have been able to fly, but it wanted to fly as little as possible. As soon as Hamille cleared the sands and saw rock, it landed with a loud splat and immediately coiled and turned, tentacles emerging, watching the two mercenaries. Harker made a mental note to remember how fast the Quadulan could move if it wanted to.

Something was pushing the sand up like a wall, catching and overturning the boat. The two men knew they couldn’t save it; they dropped the lines and ran like hell.

The wall followed at almost the same pace, but as soon as they hit the rocks it stopped and then subsided.

“The supplies!” Mogutu gasped, breathing hard but pointing at the overturned boat. “We have to get them!”

Harker and Chicanis looked at him. “You volunteering, Sarge?” the Navy man asked. “Cause I got to tell you, I don’t want to get back out there until I’m ready to leave. And we have our boat and supplies!”

“I could order you to get them,” N’Gana said sternly, out of breath but recovering rather quickly now from seasickness.

“Colonel, you and I both know, as old fighting men, that there are orders you give because they will be enforced and orders you give because they should be enforced,” Harker responded. “And then there are orders that are meaningless. That would be this case. I thought you divided things pretty well between the two so there was some redundancy. We’ve got one. Let’s leave it at that, unless you can figure out an easy way to get them.”

N’Gana and Mogutu both looked back at their boat, upside down in the sand. To get the supplies, somebody would have to run toward the sand monsters, turn the boat over, then drag the supplies up on the rocks. The question was whether or not it was worth it.

“You’re right, Harker,” the colonel said with a sigh. “But we’re down to one change of clothing each, and we’ve more than halved our guns and ammunition. It will be pretty tight.”

“Colonel, human beings have somehow managed to survive here, at least in small numbers, with a lot less, I bet,” Father Chicanis responded. “I think we will cope.”

Harker stared back at the other boat. “The supplies will probably stick in the sand, for all the good they’ll do anybody. Looks like the boat will go back out with the tide, so at least there won’t be obvious signs of a landing here in a day or so. Let’s get the boat up and into the brush and hide it, then take inventory. I think we should be inland and well away from the beach before nightfall.”

They all turned to business, then stopped. Katarina Socolov was still sitting there, still staring.

Harker went over to her. “It’s all right. We made it. We’re here! We’re alive!”

When she didn’t react, he put out a hand and touched her shoulder. She suddenly whirled and screamed, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you touch me!”

“I won’t touch you,” he responded gently. “Not unless you don’t get off this coast.”

Katarina Socolov had not said a word after they got the supplies from the surviving boat unpacked and divided up. There were now only three backpacks for the five members of the team who could handle backpacks, the Pooka being built for different things. Mogutu took one, Father Chicanis took another, and Harker took the third. The commander of the expedition had not volunteered, and Socolov, though she had trained with a heavy pack, was nonetheless the lightest and smallest of the humans. She also gave no sign of volunteering.

Harker wasn’t sure if it was shock, self-doubt after the rugged landfall, or his own harsh barking at her to do what had to be done that was causing her sudden withdrawal, but for now they had enough of problems that he decided not to push it. Either she’d snap out of it and rejoin the rest of them or she’d break, in which case, in the cold reality of survival in hostile territory, she would become a liability.