They were indeed not used to the presence of survivors. It was good they were surprised as well as outnumbered. After so many days of moving horizontally through the water, the boarders had a difficult time running across a solid surface.
The second loader reacted. He wore nothing in the way of a weapon, so he hefted a slim, salt-stained cylinder full of supercooled argon and swung it in the general direction of the onrushing Merced.
The scientist's leg came around in an unexpected arc to connect solidly with the loader's forearm. The cylinder fell to the deck. Without pausing, Merced continued to spin, flying through the air. His back foot landed on the other man's chin. The man collapsed like a waterlogged steak.
Meanwhile, Mataroreva had returned from forward and was able to help Cora and Rachael subdue their antagonist. Neither woman had any military training, but each was sufficiently enthusiastic to keep the first loader occupied until Mataroreva could arrive to finish the job.
Breathing in long, painful gasps, Cora walked over to join Merced. "Odd sort of talent for a biologist to have. Do you find you have to knock out many fish?"
Merced grinned uncomfortably at her. "You know that sort of thing won't work underwater. Too much resistance. It's only a hobby. It's a good way to keep yourself in shape when you spend a lot of your time on your butt studying tape chips."
"Uh-huh." Cora did not sound at all satisfied, though (he explanation was perfectly sensible. She watched as Rachael finished hauling a container they had brought with them onto the deck. It contained the best of the food concentrates-no crew quarters likely meant no autochef-and, of course, her damnable instrument.
"In any case," Merced began, looking down speculatively at the man with the shattered jaw, "I don't think that..."
"What's the matter? Pucara?" The biologist was gaping past her. He made a funny sort of gargling noise. Then his eyes rolled up and he toppled over onto his victim.
Spinning, Cora confronted two gelsuited figures standing on the foredeck. One flipped back her mask. She had short blonde hair, an unfriendly grimace, and a tight grip on the handle of the weapon she cradled. It was stubby of body, with an incongruously long barrel, all stinger and no bee. Cora recognized it readily enough. The gun was intended for underwater defense and used compressed gas to fire small darts. Each dart contained a powerful soporific. The intensity of the drug varied according to what one expected to have to defend oneself against.
As the woman had just demonstrated, the weapon worked very efficiently out of the water. It was tubed to her gelsuit airsystem, powered by the carbon dioxide from her own lungs.
Her slightly taller male companion stood alongside her. A similar device was held loosely in his left hand. The other was peeling gelsuit.
"Where did you people spring from?" The woman's query was a mixture of resentment and surprise. "You, fat boy-hold it right there or it's sleepy time for you, too." Mataroreva, who had started edging toward the railing, was forced to halt.
Rachael was kneeling alongside Merced, showing somewhat more than ordinary concern. "How strong was the dosage, damn you?"
"Not very. He'll sleep for a while and be good as new." The woman's tone turned threatening as she studied the two bodies by the hold opening. "That's more than you can say for Solly and Chan-li."
"We're from-" Cora started to explain.
Dawn cut her off quickly. "We're the last survivors of Vai'oire. Don't talk to us about sympathy."
"That may be." The woman leaned against the inner wall of the cabin. Her companion, Cora saw to her dismay, was already yammering into the ship's transmitter. "It's no concern of mine. We'll let Hazaribagh decide whether it's necessary to know where you come from." She smiled meaningfully. "There's no doubt in my mind where you're going. Though I may be wrong."
"You've killed several thousand people," Cora said angrily. "Why pretend you're going to treat the five of us any differently?"
That caused the woman to frown. "We haven't killed anybody. At least, I don't think so."
"What are you talking about?"
"I said, we haven't killed anybody!" The woman, to Cora's great surprise, appeared honestly upset. "I think that's about enough talking." The muzzle of her weapon swung several degrees to starboard. "And if you take one more step, fat boy, I'm going to put one of these into you. At this range I couldn't miss."
Mataroreva, who had used the conversation to gain another couple of meters toward the cabin, said quietly, "You keep calling me fat boy, and I'll make that toy pistol into a necklace for you."
"Okay." She took a couple of nervous steps backward. "Standoff, then. You keep your feet still and I'll do the same with my mouth."
For all her initial bravado, the woman did not strike Cora as a coldblooded member of a band of ruthless killers. What was going on here?
Undoubtedly they would soon find out. Other divers appeared, to desuit on deck while muttering with seeming confusion about the presence of the five strangers. The subjects of their attention had been herded together just in front of the open hold.
Mataroreva and a groggy Merced gave some thought to their making a concerted charge for the railing, figuring that if they all went in different directions, the woman couldn't hit more than two of them before the others were well on their way to the secret places of the reef.
It was Merced who finally vetoed the idea. Even if three of them made it successfully over the side, these people doubtless possessed at least the standard varieties of detection equipment. They were obviously adept at ferreting out sunken valuables. It would not be difficult for them to find a few divers.
A better idea might be to rush the woman, since no one else had yet thought to bring up additional weapons. Unfortunately, this idea lost its appeal when five more divers appeared, all of them armed with identical gas-dart weapons save for one. The latter carried a squat device that projected explosive shells for dealing with particularly stubborn forms of sea life.
So the captives waited and pondered the possible profile of the person the woman had called Hazaribagh, who would decide their fate. At least they weren't to be murdered out of hand. And why should they be? Hadn't the woman insisted she and her cohorts had killed no one?
It seemed to Cora that the more they learned about the destroyed towns of Cachalot, the less they knew. It was like breaking an egg. Instead of finding a yolk inside, they found two more eggs. And four inside the two. And so on and so on, on to utter frustration.
A guard kept watch on them all night. In the morning they were given a surprisingly pleasant meal. Rachael asked for permission to take possession of her neurophon.
The woman withdrew it from the watertight container but paused before handing it over. As Rachael watched anxiously, the woman and another of their guards removed a back panel. The two of them consulted before the first dislodged a pair of tiny solid-state modules. Then the instrument was handed to its owner.
"Now you can play all the music you want," the stocky blonde told Rachael pleasantly, "but without neuronics. In the proper hands, that otherwise delightful device could be very disconcerting if someone knew how to maltune the projections."
"I wasn't thinking of that," Rachael protested indignantly.
"Maybe not. But I am."
The midday meal passed with the divers continuing their salvage operation. Soon after, another vessel appeared on the horizon. It was much larger than either of the suprafoils. It was also of old-fashioned but proven design. There were no foils. Beneath the double hull of the massive catamaran, a foil could fit neatly alongside hull doors and portals. There it could unload even in rough weather, shielded by the bulk of the mother ship.
The sleek mass anchored nearby and their foil pulled in underneath. Cora noted the blotches on the twin hulls and on the huge deck shading them. The craft was well used.
An elevator descended to the deck of the foil. They boarded and were carried up to the larger vessel's main deck. A walkway took them to a second deck near t
he stern. In addition to communications equipment and a recorder, they found chairs, tables, a portable autochef, and several very large men holding large guns.
There was also a small, dusky character clad in a khaki-colored shirt and vest. Several necklaces framed his thin brown chest and the white and black hair sprouting there. White teeth alternated with faceted red and yellow gems in the necklace. Straight black hair was combed directly back and tied in a knot with red and yellow cord. Extremely bushy white sideburns flanked the narrow, tiny face.
A thin black and white mustache curled upward toward ink-black eyes, was dampened slightly when the man took a drink from the tall metal glass on the table in front of him. He looked for all the world like an elderly bureaucrat on vacation. But his face, as he turned to inspect them, was troubled.
"Hazaribagh. Dewas Hazaribagh," Mataroreva murmured.
"Yes. Mataroreva, isn't it?" The man's voice was high, and as sharp as a paper cut.
Cora's gaze traveled from stranger to companion.
"Yeah, I know him now," Mataroreva said. "He manages this factory ship. Independent operator. The two foils are gathering and scouting craft for the big one, in case you haven't figured that out already. A modest operation, if I recall the lists right. Not the largest working on Cachalot, nor by any means the smallest."
"A correct appraisal," Hazaribagh agreed easily. "Honest folk trying to make an honest living by fighting whole floating towns financed by huge interstellar companies and big new ships bankrolled by wealthy merchant families. That kind of competition makes mere fiscal survival a matter of thin margin."
" 'Honest living,'" Dawn sneered. "I could laugh, if you hadn't just murdered every friend I ever had!"
"You're a former inhabitant of Vai'oire?" Hazaribagh looked shocked. "I was told, but I didn't..." His voice changed as he abruptly took a different tack. "Are you all former townsfolk? Which of you are and which of you aren't?"
No one said anything.
"Come, come, it really doesn't matter where you're from. I'm just curious." He pointed at Mataroreva. "Him I know from the planetary gendarmerie. The young lady who just spoke," and he indicated Dawn, "has confessed that she resided here. What of the rest of you?"
Cora, Rachael, and Merced remained silent.
"Well, you disappoint me. But as I said, it doesn't really matter. Keep your little secrets, if you must."
He looked back at Dawn, his fingers flicking away the condensation from the chilled flanks of the glass in his hands. It exuded a sweet aroma.
"I'm being perfectly honest with you. I said 'honest living.' Well, perhaps 'semihonest' would be more accurate now. But we're no mass murderers, no matter what you think."
"How do you do it?" Cora blurted, unable to keep her curiosity in check any longer.
"Do what?"
"Control the cetaceans. Order them to destroy- She stopped. Hazaribagh was laughing. In the face of such callous indifference to death, Cora could say nothing. He did not laugh so much as chirp.
"Really, lady, you ascribe to me qualities and genius I truly wish I possessed. Sadly, it is not so. I am not the mad scientist of so many tridee thrillers. I'm not even a scientist. Only a businessman casually employing oceanographic technology. Certainly I don't have the knowledge to carry out mass murder, even if I wished to do so. Control the Cetacea? No one can do that."
"Then," Rachael hesitated, "then how?..."
Hazaribagh put up a hand for silence. Walking over to the upper deck railing, he stared in the direction of the reef and the former anchorage of Vai'oire Town.
"We happened on Fa immediately after it was destroyed. It was pure accident. There was no signal from them, no indication of trouble. We just happened to be in the area. We were utterly stunned by what had taken place, and the first thing we did was look for survivors." Dawn made a noise. He turned, glared hard at her, his voice rising.
"Yes, we searched for survivors! We suspected it was the whales. Maybe they hadn't perfected their method of assault yet-Fa was the first town to be hit. We saw a couple of big backs floating around. When the baleens noticed us, they vanished. Our sonarizer patterned them before they all got out of range. We noted fifty, and more had probably fled before we arrived. If they hadn't run as soon as we appeared, we'd have been the ones doing the running, I tell you.
"That was the first and last time we saw any whales near the towns. We found no survivors." Dawn said nothing this time. "Nor any bodies. It puzzled us greatly. Our first thought was to beam in notification of the disaster, but"-he spread his hands-"to what end? As I said, there were no survivors. And there was a great deal of very valuable material floating around our ship, preparing to sink or drift off into the sunset. What could we do but recover what was available? The ancient laws of salvage apply.
"After that, we tried to plot the location of towns which seemed near unusually large concentrations of baleen whales. We also learned that the attacks always took place under cover of storms."
"Just baleens?" Cora asked.
"We never saw any toothed whales," Hazaribagh informed her. "Most curious, I tell you. You would suspect them the most likely of all the Cetacea to plan and carry out such an attack.
"I want you to know also that we always searched for survivors, but never did we find any. At War-mouth, other vessels arrived before us. Vai'oire makes four out of five for us, however. A good percentage of prediction. Salvage is far more lucrative than gathering fish or molluskan products. We have several off-world buyers who are pleased to purchase our offerings, whether they be cargo the towns were storing preparatory to shipment or valuable electronics, or even personal effects. We are not discriminating, I tell you."
"If you're not controlling the cetaceans, then who is?" she wondered aloud.
"Why must anyone be controlling them?" Hazaribagh asked. Perhaps no scientist this one, but an astute observer of life. "Why can't they be controlling themselves?"
"Baleens are incapable of such concerted action," Mataroreva insisted.
The factory manager turned on him. "How do we know that? How much do we really know about the Cetacea beyond what they choose to tell us? Abilities may mature in a thousand years. Simply because a man does not talk is no indication he is an idiot. He may simply be a noncommunicative genius."
"Only one thing prevents you from receiving absolution," Cora stated. "You knew! You knew from the start that whales were responsible. If that information had been communicated to Administration on Mou'anui, then Vai'oire, Warmouth, and the others might have survived, knowing precisely what to expect. But you couldn't do that."
"Of course we couldn't," Hazaribagh admitted. "I don't see how you can hold us accountable for the nondistribution of knowledge. We've harmed no one. There's nothing criminal in opportunism, I tell you. If we had found survivors, now that would have presented us with a problem. But we never encountered any... until now."
He tapped the sharp edge of his chin with the rim of the cold glass. Ice clinked within. "Now there are five of you. A situation I hoped I would never have to deal with." He paced in front of them, gesturing with hand and glass. "You see, this has become an extraordinarily profitable operation for us. One I am loath to relinquish."
It took considerable courage for Cora to say, "By withholding this information, you become guilty of murder by oversight."
The accusation did not upset Hazaribagh. "Oh, I doubt that a Church court would convict us on that. If I were to let you go freely, however, it could complicate things for us by leading, as you say, to the prevention of such unfortunate incidents in the future. I am not sure we can go back to the ill-rewarding occupation of fishing. While I would not go about destroying towns with a casual wave of my hand, even if I could control the baleens, I think I could see my way to order the elimination of five embarrassments... I tell you."
Cora stiffened. So they were to be killed after all, though not for the reasons she had first suspected. It was small consolation to see Hazaribagh w
restling with the decision.
"You must try to understand my position. My people and I have made more profit in the time since Fa was destroyed than in our previous thirty years of licensing on Cachalot. We're not ready to give it up. And while we would not murder the town people, we of the boats bear no love for them, I tell you.
"As to why the baleens have suddenly become subject to organized mass insanity, I have certainly given it some thought." He shook his head. "I have no better idea than any of you. Unlike you, I do not much care, as long as they continue their actions. We have passed many whales, many baleen. None have bothered us.
"If we should eventually be discovered salvaging the rums of some town, then and only then will we have to curtail our activities. But such an operation would make us guilty of nothing beyond illegal confiscation of private goods. The court would fine us and warn us, but that would be all.
"Three more months," he told them firmly, "at the current rate of destruction will enable my people and me to make enough credit to quit Cachalot forever and retire en masse to one of the pleasure worlds like New Riviera. Perhaps at that time," he added thoughtfully, "we will reveal what we know about the baleens' responsibility. Thus we will retire as heroes as well as newly wealthy."
In a perverse fashion Cora discovered she was disappointed. She had expected some extraordinary genius to be behind all this. Instead, the only humans so far known to be involved had turned out to be nothing more than petty crooks.
"If you intend to quit in three months," Rachael pleaded, "why not just hold us for that time and then let us go?"
"I'm sorry," Hazaribagh said genuinely. "I don't think that would be good business. You now know all about our activities. Despite any promises you might give, I'm not sure I could trust you to be silent in this matter. I think it would be safer to dispose of you, much as I regret the necessity. As to the manner of your death, I think that it will be ascribed to the general destruction of Vai'oire."