Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

Ruiz shivered, and feathered the sail into the wind, adjusting its camber to its maximum flatness. Still the boat rushed along in a welter of foam, quivering with the urgency of its passage. Ruiz grew more anxious.

With complete darkness, the speed became more frightening, and the growing seas more ominous.

Ruiz struggled with the helm, trying to take the seas consistently on the quarter, so that their force shoved the boat harmlessly ahead. But the sound of the wind sang a higher note, and the boat was beginning to move so fast that Ruiz worried it would fly down the face of a wave and bury itself in the back of the next wave.

He tried to remember what to do, tried to pick the bones of memories from a long-ago time, when he had fought a campaign on a water-world.

Finally it came to him. He waited for a lull. When it arrived he cranked the jib slightly to weather, put the tiller down to leeward.

The boat paused in her headlong rush, spun up into the wind, and sat there, riding the waves like a duck.

Ruiz lashed the tiller down, wiped the spray from his eyes, and crawled into the coffin-sized berth in the weather hull. He latched the hatch carefully and lay down on the thin cushion.

For some reason, a thin thread of happiness ran through him. He didn’t know why. The boat jounced violently, the wind shrieked, breaking crests thumped the topsides.

But after a while, remarkably, he slept.

He slept, in fact, until well after daybreak, and it was the silence that finally woke him.

When he went on deck, he found that the breeze had dropped to a zephyr, and the boat sat on a glassy sea. A leftover swell lifted the boat up and down, and Ruiz was once again glad he didn’t suffer from motion sickness.

He unlashed the tiller and set his course toward Sea-Stack.

His progress was less impressive than it had been the day before. He could coax only three or four knots from the unsteady wind. He experimented with the wing. He trailed a fishing line, with no results. He took a sun sight and pored over his charts. He couldn’t be certain how much the storm had set him to the east until he could get a crossing line in the afternoon. He kept glancing to port, as if he expected the low coast of Namp to appear there.

In the early afternoon he saw a margar, a lone bull who came to the surface to clear its spiracles, two kilometers off the starboard bow. The great reptile rolled on the surface in a thrash of foam, its spiracles moaning, one upraised vane catching the sun with a white glitter.

Ruiz held his breath until it had submerged. Had it seen him? Would it be interested in his insubstantial craft?

Time passed and he remained uneaten.

He was beginning to relax when he saw a slim black hull on the eastern horizon.

When it suddenly veered toward him in a cloud of spray, he wondered if perhaps it might have been better to be a margar’s dinner.

No, he thought fiercely. None of that. He checked his wireblade.

In a few seconds he could see clearly the glaring raptor eyes painted on the approaching boat’s bow. Castle Delt, he thought, shocked. The vessel was a small, fast, open-cockpit squirtboat, used for reconnaissance and infiltration. Two armored figures crouched behind the boat’s windscreen.

He touched the haft of his wireblade — an absurdly inadequate weapon. He cast about desperately for a plan, but nothing came to him.

Eventually he decided that his best course would be to present the appearance of helplessness and hope that the Deltans grew careless.

He pinched his cheeks until a prickling warmth told him they were pink, and combed his fingers through his tangled hair, smoothing it as best he could.

The boat came alongside, sending a wave splashing over the catamaran’s port hull. Its engine roared and then fell to a low throb. Grappling pitons fired into the catamaran; their lanyards retracted, jerking the boats together.

Ruiz smiled brightly at the boat’s crew — two black-masked Deltans, their light armor painted in black and fluorescent green stripes. Red chevrons on their masks identified them as members of the officer class known as Sub-Dominators: young, untried, platoon-level commanders. They weren’t wearing their helmets; apparently they considered him easy prey.

One held a splinter gun in his hands and played carelessly with the safety lever.

“Hello,” said Ruiz, standing up, hands clasped at his breast. He pitched his voice as sweetly and hopefully as he could. “I’m so glad you’ve found me!”

One of them laughed, with a somewhat forced harshness. Ruiz could imagine him in a classroom, with some scarred veteran saying, “Laugh to curdle the blood! All together now: laugh!”

His hopes rose.

“Yes,” said Ruiz. “I don’t know what I would have done.” He simpered, and thrust out his hip and made his body seem as soft and vulnerable as he could.

“What are you doing out here, boy?” demanded the one with the splinter gun.

Ruiz assumed a theatrically tragic expression. “Roderigo harvested our village, kind sir. I escaped, through great good fortune — or so I thought…. And then I found myself out on the sea, alone. With no protector.” Ruiz licked his lips, widened his eyes.

The laugher practiced his bloodcurdler again, this time with more confidence. “We’ll protect you,” he said. “Come aboard.”

Ruiz clambered over the gunwale, moving with an eager dainty awkwardness, as if the hard steel of the rail hurt his hands. “Oh, thank, you, kind sirs, thank you,” he babbled.

The one with the splinter gun latched back his safety and fired an economical burst, cutting the catamaran in half. Ruiz concealed a wince; he had grown fond of the fragile thing.

“Perhaps you have something I could eat; I’ve drifted for days and the emergency rations were unbearable.” He rolled his eyes and smiled, as he settled between the two Deltans.

The laugher stood and began to unbuckle his armor’s pelvic girdle. “I’ve got something you can eat,” he said jovially.

“Oh no,” said the one with the gun. “I don’t take your leavings this time. Me first.” He didn’t exactly point his weapon at the other Deltan, but the muzzle wandered close.

“Sirs, sirs,” said Ruiz nervously. “No need to quarrel. I can surely satisfy you both at the same time. For what other reason did the deities give us more than one erotic orifice? Women are more blessed in this regard than we are — but there are only two of you.”

They both laughed, less harshly — Ruiz detected a note of relief. The one with the gun locked it to a retaining clip, and they both unlatched their armor.

The laugher stretched out in the bows; the other stood behind Ruiz, fingering himself.

It was too easy. But he accepted his good luck, as he was required to do. The wireblade slipped from its hiding place and he stabbed backward into the groin of the one there, ripping the blade transversely free. He reversed the point and drove it up into the laugher’s belly.

Almost before the man could react, Ruiz sawed the knife back and forth, withdrew it, and turned to finish the man who had carried the gun.

He hardly noticed the screams, even though they were more bloodcurdling by far than the laughs had been.

When it was over, and the corpses gone over the side, Ruiz examined his prize. The squirtboat seemed in fine condition, apart from the blood that spattered it. Its fuel cell registered a full charge, the engine purred. He rummaged through the lockers and found a good selection of weaponry in the portside one: splinter guns and ruptors, monomol garrotes and elbow axes, stun grenades and nerve lashes.

In the starboard locker he found pouches of irradiated rations and cases of potables. He opened a pouch of stew and a chillcan of beer, but he suffered from an odd lack of appetite.