Daniel flicked off another piece of nut meat. He held it out to her between his thumb and the knife blade. She shook her head; she was still doubtful whether her modest breakfast of crackers and meat paste was going to stay down.
“What I was more worried about than damage,” she went on, “was that I’d lose it and not be able to find it under water.”
The Ahura had fallen entirely within the lagoon. The yacht’s stern lay on the reef so several feet of the inverted hull were above water. Sailors diving beside the wreck were coming up with stores and equipment.
The water was a sickly green, a combination of colors leached from vegetation on the surrounding islands and the blood of the creature that had destroyed the yacht. Adele assumed the low, gray mound floating a hundred feet from the shore was the sweep’s corpse.
“It’s huge,” she said, looking from the lagoon to Daniel. She couldn’t imagine how he’d been able to aim as the Ahura shuddered up on end. She’d barely retained her holds on the bulkhead.
“Yes,” Daniel said with a smirk of fully justified pride. “It’s not a new species, I suppose, but it still should get my name into the records somewhere, don’t you think? Big game hunting if not zoology texts.”
He laughed with the easy assurance Adele had come to associate with him. “It was too big to ever leave the lagoon. It certainly wouldn’t have had any competition for food inside the ring of the atoll, but I’ll be interested to learn just what that food could be.”
Barnes sat on the vessel’s stern, holding tarpaulins and rope knotted into a pair of saddlebags. They hung to either side of the hull. Cafoldi, one of the divers, came up from the foul water with a shout and a submachine gun in his hand. He splashed on three limbs to the vessel and thrust the weapon into the bag on his side.
Ganser and his Kostromans kept their distance, glowering at the Cinnabars. They weren’t precisely under guard, but any attempt to rush Daniel would have to get past Dasi holding an impeller by the barrel as a club and Hogg, who was trimming a point on a sapling he’d cut down with a knife much sturdier than the one in his master’s hand. As a spear it looked crude, but nobody who knew Hogg would doubt it was lethal.
Lamsoe and Sun sat cross-legged on a mat of leaves cut from a parasol-shaped shrub. They were each stripping a submachine gun to its component parts. Adele obviously wasn’t alone in doubting that any locally manufactured electronics, electromotive weapons included, could survive immersion in salt water.
She wasn’t sure what the sailors could do to refurbish the guns, however. Flushing in fresh water, sun-drying and prayer, she supposed, but she recalled Daniel’s question whether there was any fresh water on the island.
“Do you want me to call Kostroma City for rescue?” Adele asked quietly.
Daniel looked at her in surprise. “Good heavens, no,” he said. “That’d be the same as handing ourselves over to the Alliance.”
His concern broke in a smile. “We’ve invested quite a lot in avoiding that already. I don’t think we need to give up just yet.”
“I, ah . . .” Adele said. She looked at the web of jungle, then behind her to the open sea. You could sail a thousand miles across that ocean without finding land more promising than this on which she stood.
She knew that. She’d just come that thousand miles and more.
“You think we can live here indefinitely?” she said. “Well, I suppose you’re the expert. . . .”
Daniel laughed aloud. “Now, did I say that I’d rather leave us here forever to rot than wait in a camp on Pleasaunce for an eventual prisoner exchange?” he said. “This is a delay, Adele. But we needed to lie low for a time anyway so we’re not really losing anything.”
He nodded toward the Ahura’s stern. Barnes was standing, holding one end of a line over which he’d strung the bags of salvage. A sailor stood in mud to her ankles pulling the bags to the shore. Two others waited nearby to empty the gear; the divers held on to the yacht and chatted while they waited for the bags to return.