Drowning World Read Online Free Page A

before her seemed quite competent. Given that, there was always the slight chance they actually
would
find the misbegotten bioprospector alive somewhere in the unmeasured depths of the Viisiiviisii.
    Turning back to her desk's readout as soon as they had departed, she could only hope they might manage to do so before they killed each other.

2

    S hadrach Hasselemoga had come to Fluva hoping to make a killing—of the financial kind. He had sincere hopes of making a fortune—always a possibility where the discovery of useful, previously unknown botanicals was concerned. While others might find the combination of soldier of fortune and botanist (with a special interest in mycology) a peculiar melding of professions, to men and women engaged in Hasa's line of work it was perfectly natural. People had indeed been known to kill one another over the discovery and possession of something small, green, and deceptively insignificant. They were willing to go to such occasional extremes because alien botanicals were frequently the key to the gengineering of everything from new pharmaceuticals to artificial flavorings, and much else besides.
    Too bad he hated his new posting.
    There wasn't much about it he didn't hate, from the constant rain to the molds and fungi that matured so fast you could watch them reproduce on your supposedly spore-resistant clothing. Or on your face, if you weren't careful. One poor
simick
who had gone hunting for a celebrated lotion-oozing slime mold about a thousand kelegs to the north of Taulau Town had been found only a hundred meters from the safety of his skimmer. Apparently, he'd become disoriented in the varzea and had wandered around unaware that the mold he'd collected had enthusiastically transmuted in the warmth of his collection pack into an ambulatory amoeboid state. Its potential lotion-generating properties notwithstanding, it had invaded his body right through the allegedly impermeable material of both pack and clothes, whereupon it had then proceeded to bed itself down nice and comfy inside his vital organs. Harold Tsukakaza, yeah, that was his name. He'd been lotioned to death.
    Perambulating slime molds were the least of a person's worries on lush, fascinating, deadly Fluva. There were fungi that put out toxic mycelia and actively hostile basidiocarps, rusts that gave new meaning to an old word (and class), and all manner of nasties that made their homes in the trees or in the waters of the flooded forest. The Viisiiviisii was no place to be marooned. Hard to walk out of the woods when the base of the tree in which you found yourself stranded was twenty meters or more underwater.
    Then there were the natives. The happy, smiling Sakuntala and the hardworking, comparatively diminutive Deyzara. Except that the Sakuntala were as likely to cut your head off as offer you a cup of traditional katola and the Deyzara would bow enthusiastically and wave their trunks in their disarmingly disconcerting fashion while quietly picking your pocket. Not that his own kind were much better. Among the many different species of sentients Hasa had encountered in his travels (and there had been many), humans fell somewhere in the shifting middle of the sentient muddle. That they were not as obvious cheats and liars as the Deyzara or as blatant deceivers and cutthroats as the Sakuntala was only due to the fact that power and experience had rendered them a tad more restrained.
    Now, seemingly good and stuck in the middle of nowhere, and an unrelentingly hostile nowhere at that, he was going to have to rely on those same self-serving sons-of-bitches to extricate him from a bad fix not of his own making. Hasa was reasonably willing to take responsibility for his own mistakes. But he'd done nothing wrong this time, certainly nothing that should have led to his current imbroglio.
    He'd done everything right prior to setting out: had the skimmer thoroughly overhauled and checked out, paid any overdue bills, settled with