Read Across the Sea of Suns for Free Online

do whatever they liked about task assignments. Now he had to maneuver.
    He knew what he was and that they should not make a ceramic saint out of him … but still, the illusion had its uses. They gave him more privacy than the usual crew member, let him and Nikka carve a flesh apartment for themselves in
Lancer’s
rock. And the privacy gave him time to think.
    Nigel straightened up from his gardening. He felt a twinge in his back and then a sudden lacing pain. The shock of it made him drop three tomatoes he had plucked. He winced and grimaced and then, before anyone saw the look, made his face go blank. The pain ebbed. He bent carefully to pick up the dusty tomatoes. Traitor muscles along his spine stretched and protested. He let the pain come flooding in, feeling it fully and so disarming it. Enough for today. A legend should not display back problems if he could help it.

ONE
    W arren watched the
Manamix
going down. The ocean was in her and would smother the engines soon, swamping her into silence. Her lights still glowed in the mist and rain.
    She lay on her port side, down by the head, and the swell took her solidly with a dull hammering. The strands that the Swarmers cast had laced across her decks and wrapped around the gun emplacements and over the men who had tended them.
    The long green-and-yellow strands still licked up the sides and over the deck, seeking and sticking, spun out from the swollen belly pouches of the Swarmers. Their green bodies clustered in the dark water at the bows.
    A long finger of tropical lightning cracked. It lit the wedge of space between the hovering black storm clouds and the rain-pocked, wrinkled skin of the sea. The big aliens glistened in the glare.
    Warren treaded water and floated, trying to make no noise. A strand floated nearby and a wave brushed him against it but there was no sting. The Swarmer it came from was probably dead and drifting down now. But there were many more in the crashing surf near the ship and he could hear screams from the other crewmen who had gone over the side with him.
    The port davits on the top deck dangled, trailing ropes, and the lifeboats hung from them unevenly, useless. Warren had tried to get one down, but the winch and cabling fouled and finally he had gone over the side like the rest.
    Her running lights winked and then came on steady again. The strands made a tangled net over the decks now. Once they stunned a man the sticky yellow nerve sap stopped coming and they lost their sting. As he watched, bobbing in the waves, one of the big aliens amidships rolled and brought in its strand and pulled a body over the railing. The man was dead and when a body hit the water there was a frothing rush after it.
    Wisps of steam curled from the engine room hatch. He thought he could hear the whine of the diesels. Her port screw was clear and spinning like a metal flower. In the hull plates he could see the ragged holes punched by the packs of Swarmers. She was filling fast now.
    Warren knew the jets the Filipinos had promised the captain would never get out this far. It was a driving, splintering storm, and to drop the canisters of poison that would kill the Swarmers would take low and dangerous flying. The Filipinos would not risk it.
    She went without warning. The swell came over her bows and the funnel slanted down fast. The black water poured into her and into the high hoods of her ventilators and the running lights started to go out. The dark gully of her forward promenade and bay filled and steam came gushing up from the hatches like a giant thing exhaling.
    He braced himself for it, thinking the engine he had tended, and the sudden deep booming came as the sea reached in. She slid in fast. Lightning crackled and was reflected in a thousand shattered mirrors of the sea. The waters accepted her and the last he saw was a huge rush of steam as great chords boomed in her hull.
    In the quiet afterward, calls and then screams came to him, carried on the gusts.