Having eleven mecs scattered through the boat was all very well, but there was only one of him in the van to operate them. Besides cutting equipment cables up on the bridge, shorting out the engine starter, sabotaging the galley, and deploying his other troops, he had kept his audio system tuned to the mec up on top of the cabinet in the salon in order to listen in on what was happening with Michelle. But there was a limit to how much he could keep up. It had been bad enough when he could switch from one to another and move them into place surreptitiously, before anyone on the boat—other than Michelle—knew what was going on. Now that things were happening, he was losing track of which mec was where and their different situations; and as often as not, there simply wasn’t time to coordinate his moves, even when he did know.
So far he had lost two and was about to lose another. The one he had left in behind the main breaker panel on the bridge had stopped responding; one, he had sacrificed to short the starter in the engine room; and the one he had just thrown off the cabinet in the salon had been almost out of charge anyway.
He had to get back to the telebot that he’d managed to get outside and left hidden temporarily behind a rope locker by the entrance foyer in order to intervene with Michelle, even though it was being chased, shot at, and obviously in a tight spot. He rolled and clutched to entangle himself in Vanessa’s hair, pinched at her fingertips when they came clawing at him, and then switched back to the telebot’s channel. . . .
Only to find himself cartwheeling through the air, then falling toward shifting hillocks of wind-jostled water. There was a shock as he hit resistance, a brief impression of sinking through green, opalescent light. Then nothing.
Three gone. Then the noise from the salon faded in his ears and died. Corfe transferred his audio input to the remaining acoustic mec, lodged under the bedside table in one of the guest staterooms. It brought sounds of too many voices yelling at once, with banging and noise in the background, for anything to be comprehensible. No time to wonder about that: Check back with Michelle.
He activated the mec still tucked behind the edge of the carpet under the salon table. It showed Payne trying to help Vanessa disentangle the mec from her hair, Garsten turning away to meet another figure approaching from the far-end door. Michelle had moved back, away from Payne and Vanessa—she seemed okay for the moment. A chance for a quick review elsewhere. Corfe juggled channels frenziedly.
The KE was posted as a lookout on a ledge in the corridor leading aft from the salon. All was quiet there.
Back to the surviving telebot, which he’d left below a life preserver on the boat deck just behind the bridge. A crewman was rampaging around in the wheelhouse, obviously searching, moving closer. Situation getting risky.
Meanwhile, the audio continued bringing voices from the stateroom area midships:
“Look at this. It’s cooked.”
“That’s what we’re looking for. You two take that side. Start looking everywhere.”
“You mean there’s more of them?”
Feet thumping; objects moving; doors slamming.
Corfe had a general tool-utility mec in the engine compartment, which had climbed part of the way up to a fuel supply line. Could he afford the time to move it the rest of the way?
“Hey, guys, what’s that? Look, is that one? I think I found one.”
Corfe groaned. It had to be the one that he’d been forced to leave at the base of a wall while he attended to another emergency. He hastily switched channels to it and found he was being nudged by a wooden mainmast leading up to a huge figure looming silhouetted against light. He was prodded out onto an open expanse of floor; then the heel of a huge boot was coming down on him like a swooping dragon.
Five gone.
Too much to do. There wasn’t enough time for anything. He was overwhelmed. . . .