The Beast of Cretacea

by Todd Strasser

  The mess door opens again and Tashtego enters, rainwater dripping off his foul-weather hat, and a bandage under his left eye. “They just dragged it up the slipway! First terrafin of the voyage.” He rubs Ishmael’s damp head. “This crew owes you big time, squirt.”

  “Not just me.” Ishmael nods at Queequeg and Gwen. “It took all three of us.”

  “True, true.” The barrel-chested harpooner leans close and continues in a hushed voice: “If I was you, I’d find Starbuck quick. There’s mutterin’ that you don’t deserve the bait because you didn’t actually stick the beast.”

  Billy rocks back. “That’s c-crazy! If they hadn’t risked their lives to s-save Daggoo, you never could have fired that harpoon!”

  “Hey, if it was up to me, you’d have that bait and more,” Tashtego tells the chase-boat crew, and then focuses on Ishmael. “I’m just sayin’, you better speak to the first mate before the naysayers get too much of his ear.”

  Ishmael starts to rise. Gwen does, too. “I’m going with you. No one’s cheating me out of that money.”

  But Ishmael slides his hand over hers. “Let me go first and see what I can do. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try it your way.”

  The first mate isn’t in his cabin. Ishmael hesitates at the bottom of the ladderway that leads up to the captain’s chambers on the A level. If Starbuck is up there with Ahab, should he interrupt them? Doing so might work against him. Then again, Tashtego made it sound like time was of the essence. Ishmael starts up the steps.

  “Ain’t up there, lad,” a voice croaks behind him. It’s Tarnmoor, one knurly hand clinging to the rail, the other to his bucket. “Outs on the flensing deck, he is.”

  “How’d you —?” Ishmael doesn’t bother finishing the sentence. He should be used to old Tarnmoor’s mysterious abilities by now. “On deck? In this storm?”

  “Just a spot a’ heavy weather, lad. Nothin’ he ain’t seened a hundred times before.”

  Ishmael throws on rain gear and pushes through a hatch out into the storm. The wind is blowing even harder than before, the warm rain stinging his eyes, but he can make out the terrafin spread flat on the flensing deck, the yellow tub still impaled by its tail. The beast is crisscrossed by heavy ropes lashed tight to keep it from sliding loose while the ship tosses and rolls.

  In the middle of the terrafin’s back is a great gaping red wound left by the cannon’s harpoon. The wound is big enough that a man could practically crawl through it. Surely the harpoon cannon is overkill for a creature even this size. It’s like using an ax to chop scurry. Ishmael is wondering how massive a creature such a large harpoon could be for when the ship pitches sharply and he has to grab onto a hoist cable to keep from sliding clear across the deck. Tarnmoor must have been wrong; it’s crazy to think that anyone would be up here in a storm like this.

  But out of the corner of his eye he spots a figure in dark rain gear near the tail of the terrafin. It’s Starbuck. Ishmael begins to move closer, but stops when the first mate surreptitiously glances around. Ducking behind a crane tower, Ishmael watches Starbuck carefully cut into the base of the terrafin’s tail. From the dark folds of skin and red flesh he extracts a small sac that glows bright chartreuse, and places it in a container. Then, walking with a wide gait to steady himself on the rocking deck, the first mate starts making his way toward a hatch.

  Ishmael waits before following. What did the first mate remove from the tail of the terrafin? What could glow so brightly and yet come from inside a living creature? Whatever it is, Ishmael knows enough not to let on that he’s seen the first mate take it.

  A minute later, he pretends to run into Starbuck in the passageway. The first mate frowns when he sees Ishmael in rain-soaked gear. “You up top just now?”

  “Making sure Chase Boat Four was secure, sir. It’s pretty rough out there.”

  “Good thinking.” Starbuck starts around him.

  “But sir? I’m glad I bumped into you. Wonder if we could talk about the terrafin?”

  Starbuck stiffens.

  “About the bait,” Ishmael adds.

  “Oh, that.” The first mate relaxes. “Not now, boy. I’ve got something I need to do.”

  “Maybe in half an hour?” Ishmael asks.

  “All right. Half an hour.” Starbuck brushes past and hurries off.

  Thirty minutes later, Ishmael knocks on the first mate’s door. Starbuck answers, wearing a red silk robe, his black hair disheveled. Ishmael notices a tuft of white chest hair poking out at the point where the robe closes.

  “What is it, boy?”

  “About the terrafin, sir.”

  “What about it?”

  “With all the excitement, I wanted to make sure you remembered the bait, sir. We agreed on ten thousand.”

  The first mate mulls this over. “Well, I don’t know about that anymore. You didn’t stick the beast.”

  “Sir, with all due respect,” Ishmael begins to argue, “if we hadn’t risked our lives to save Daggoo, Tashtego could never have —”

  Starbuck glances back into his quarters, then cuts him short. “Now’s not the time, boy.”

  “But, sir —” Ishmael can’t allow this to be swept aside. Not after he risked his life and the lives of his crew. And not when the lives of his foster parents are in the balance.

  The first mate’s jaw sets, and his face begins to harden. He’s about to say something when Charity comes into view. She’s tottering unsteadily, tugging her fingers through her brown hair. Still, she looks much recovered from her ordeal with the pirates. The bruises on her face are gone, and her skin is practically glowing again. Ishmael is so distracted by the changes to her features that it takes a moment to realize that her eyes have a strange pinkness. To Starbuck she says, “There’s only one reason you got that terrafin, and it’s because of Ishmael’s crew.”

  Starbuck gives her a frosty look. “Did I ask for your opinion, woman?”

  “If it weren’t for the three of them, you’d almost surely have lost the terrafin and Daggoo,” Charity goes on. “Looking at it that way, I’d say you got quite a bargain for a mere ten thousand.”

  Starbuck’s countenance goes flat for a moment while he gazes off. “The three of them? I ordered Queequeg not to go, did I not?”

  “For Earth’s sake, Starbuck, leave it alone.” Charity takes his arm and turns him toward her. “You got what you needed, didn’t you? Let it be.” Something deep and wordless passes between the two, then Charity nods to Ishmael. “Don’t worry, honey. You’ll get the bait.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Starbuck snorts.

  “Yes,” Charity says firmly, “you certainly will.”

  She closes the door.

  The storm continues into the night, the ship lurching and tossing so severely that once again the crew’s magnetically levitated sleepers can’t compensate. Even when sailors can keep from falling out, their possessions topple to the floor and go sliding this way and that.

  Ishmael and Pip are exiting the washroom, hands tight on grab rails, when the ship lists violently, slamming them both into the wall. A palm-size tablet tumbles out of Queequeg’s curtained sleeper, clatters to the floor, and skids toward Ishmael’s feet.

  The small tablet lies faceup, the screen white and covered with lines of black symbols grouped in twos, threes, fours, and sometimes more. They are the same undecipherable sequences of characters that Ishmael saw on the tablet he and Archie found years ago in the abandoned shack in Black Range.

  Now several things happen at once:

  Queequeg jerks his sleeper curtain open, a look of alarm on his face.

  Ishmael and Pip both reach down for the tablet.

  Their wrists graze.

  Ishmael is jarred by the electrical shock he feels.

  Pip straightens up and stares at him with astonishment.

  Queequeg hops out of his sleeper and snatches up his tablet just as the ship again rocks violently, causing them all to grab for handholds to keep from fa
lling.

  His face only inches from Ishmael’s, Pip asks, “Who are you?”

  But without waiting for an answer, Pip turns to Queequeg. “And you!” He points to the tablet. “You’re . . . a Lector?”

  Queequeg averts his eyes.

  “Of course! I should have known,” Pip goes on. “All that business about oceans and coral reefs and rain on Earth.” He gestures at the tablet. “This is where you got that nonsense.”

  The tablet once again in his possession, Queequeg scuttles back to his sleeper, closing the curtain behind him.

  The ship pitches again, and Pip and Ishmael struggle to secure their footing.

  “Were you sent here?” Pip whispers.

  “To Cretacea?” Ishmael shakes his head. “I volunteered.”

  Pip gives him a deeply perplexed look. Then the lights go out, and in the crazed reeling of the ship, he and Pip climb back into their sleepers in the dark.

  “Here’s where you’ll sleep,” Petra said. The room wasn’t much larger than the playhouse at the foundling home — the bunk bed Joachim had built for them hardly wider than their shoulders — but for the first time in memory, Archie and Ishmael had their own places to sleep.

  Despite almost immediately feeling comfortable with these new adults, at first the boys were reluctant to speak to them. After being so insular for so long, they found that words were slow to come. But Petra and Joachim were patient. Every day and night, one or the other would go away to a place called “work.” When one was gone, the other would sleep for a few hours and then spend time with the boys — taking them outside to play, telling them the names of unfamiliar things, or teaching them how to add and subtract in their heads, but never allowing them to run free with the packs of children who roamed the grimy streets and abandoned lots.

  It was only after the boys had begun to communicate with their foster parents that Ben started taking them for walks and on adventures.

  “That’s the Zirconia Electrolysis plant, where your parents and I work,” he said one afternoon, pointing at the huge, soot-covered, nearly windowless complex over which loomed four tall smokestacks spewing black exhaust into the Shroud-blanketed sky.

  “What happens there?” asked Archie, propped on his crutches.

  “The conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide. We need the oxygen to breathe.”

  “What’s that?” Ishmael pointed at several black hills behind the building.

  “Coal. They burn it to produce the energy for Zirconia Electrolysis.”

  “Will we work there someday?” Archie asked.

  Ben looked out over the blackened rooftops of the hovels and shanties that made up most of Black Range. He coughed and then spit on the ground. “Not if I can help it.”

  Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!

  Machine-gun fire whistles overhead. In Chase Boat Four, Ishmael and his crew duck. A quarter mile astern, raised up on hydrofoils, a black ship races toward them. They see a bright muzzle flash, and an instant later another volley of rounds whizzes past.

  “Pirates!” Queequeg shouts.

  “Hold on!” Ishmael jams the accelerator forward, praying the RTG won’t stall. It doesn’t, and the chase boat lurches ahead.

  Only moments before, they’d paused from hunting to behold a wondrous sight in the distance: a turquoise lagoon edged by a thin ribbon of white sand, with lush, jade-colored hills rising up behind. Flyers soared over the summits, and a thin white waterfall cascaded from a distant peak. The sight was so stunning that they’d almost forgotten they were following a pack of long-necks.

  Now they’re running for their lives. “C-call the ship?” Billy yells, bracing himself while the chase boat bangs over the waves.

  “We’re out of range!” Ishmael yells back. The two-way is usually good up to fifteen miles, and he estimates that they’re at least thirty from the Pequod.

  “Can we outrun them?” Gwen shouts.

  Ishmael has pushed the chase boat to top speed, but up on those hydrofoils, the pirate ship has no problem closing in.

  Clinging to his seat, Queequeg catches Ishmael’s eye and nods at the machine gun in the stern. Ishmael shakes his head. So far he suspects that the pirates have been firing warning shots over their heads. Should Chase Boat Four begin shooting back, it could become a real firefight.

  The pirates are being smart, angling their vessel to force the chase boat nearer to shore. As Chase Boat Four’s lead over the pirate ship shortens, Ishmael is aware that they’re getting dangerously close to the rock outcroppings and shallow reefs that separate the placid lagoon from the rest of the ocean. The crew glances worriedly at him, clearly wondering about his plan for escape.

  Except Ishmael doesn’t have one.

  The green coast is close now — too close. Ishmael can make out the brown shafts of the tall plants lining the shore. Ahead off the starboard side, waves rise up and crash into white foam on the long, barely submerged reef.

  Rather than avoid the reef, Ishmael steers toward it. Billy grips the gunwale, his knuckles turning white when he realizes what Ishmael wants to do. “Y-you’re going to try to g-go over that?” he yells.

  “If we catch a wave, maybe we can surf over!” Ishmael yells back.

  “Or capsize and sink!” Gwen shouts.

  Rat-a-tat-tat! Above the whine of the RTG and the howl of the wind comes the smack of machine-gun fire much closer than before. A bullet whizzes past Ishmael’s ear. Others splash into the water around them, kicking up bursts of spray. The pirates are no longer aiming high with warning shots. Now they’re trying to draw blood.

  “Everyone down!” Ishmael jerks his head at the machine gun in the stern. “Queek!”

  Queequeg scrambles behind the machine gun and returns fire. Bullets whiz back and forth, pinging off the pirate ship’s metal hull and peppering the water on either side of the chase boat’s pontoons. By now the heavy surf crashing on the reef is only a dozen yards away.

  Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat!

  The pirate ship is angling in at high speed, its machine gun blazing. Crouching low, Ishmael steers Chase Boat Four up along the backs of swells, searching for a gap in the reef or a large enough wave to carry them —

  Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat!

  “Ah!” Billy clutches his thigh. Blood begins to spread around his fingers.

  “Hold on!” Ishmael cuts the chase boat’s wheel sharply. They speed up the back of a large swell . . . and take flight.

  In the swamped chase boat, Queequeg kneels beside Billy, who’s still clutching his thigh and grimacing while his blood turns the seawater pink. A moment ago, a torrent of hot water crashed over them when the nose of the boat plunged into the lagoon. Only the pontoons kept them afloat. The RTG quit, and now they wallow in the calm, sunlit waters, the thunder of crashing waves — and machine-gun fire — behind them.

  Rope and loose rain gear float around Ishmael’s knees while he watches the very top of the pirate boat’s cabin cruise past outside the reef, the breaking waves blocking its approach. Gwen starts bailing, and he tries to restart the RTG.

  Nothing happens.

  “Bet the water’s shorting out the battery,” Queequeg says while tightening a tourniquet around Billy’s leg to slow the bleeding. Billy groans in pain as Queequeg helps him to a seat.

  Suddenly Gwen looks up and points.

  Two hundred yards down the reef is something Ishmael hadn’t seen earlier — a gap where the waves aren’t breaking. That means the water there must be deep enough for a boat to broach.

  Maybe even a pirate boat.

  Ishmael’s stomach knots. Without a functioning RTG, Chase Boat Four is easy prey. They watch helplessly while the pirate boat starts to nudge its way into the gap. In the bow a pirate with a long pole is testing the depth to be certain their vessel can make it.

  Once the pirate ship clears the gap in the reef, there’ll be nothing to stop them from seizing the chase boat and its crew.

  Sploosh!

 
A thick white column of water bursts up into the air near the pirate boat. The man in the bow drops the long pole and staggers backward. Ishmael searches for the large humplike beast whose spout he assumes caused it.

  But almost immediately there’s another huge splash, and then another. They’re not beasts spouting, but massive stones falling out of the sky! The crew of Chase Boat Four watch, stupefied.

  Crash! An enormous stone smashes onto the deck of the pirate boat, causing the entire vessel to shudder. Pirates scream and dash this way and that. As more stones fall, the engine roars and the boat begins to reverse back through the gap in the reef.

  The chase-boat crew cast their eyes upward, searching for the source of the barrage, but there is only the empty blue of sky. Ishmael glances curiously at Queequeg, who seems to know so much about so many things.

  “Don’t look at me,” Queequeg says. “I know it rains water, but I’ve never heard of it raining rocks.”

  Another groan from Billy brings them back. Queequeg tightens the tourniquet and presses a rag against the wound to stanch the bleeding.

  “How bad is it?” Ishmael asks.

  “I don’t think it hit an artery, or there’ d be a lot more blood, but I’m worried the bone may be broken,” Queequeg answers.

  “It h-hurts.” Billy moans through clenched teeth.

  By now the pirate boat has fled and the big stones have ceased falling, but Chase Boat Four is still adrift in the lagoon, and there’s only so much Queequeg can do for Billy. Getting him the care he needs means bailing out the chase boat, coaxing the RTG to start, and hustling back to the Pequod. But it also means leaving the protection of the lagoon and going back into the ocean, where the pirate boat may be lying in wait.

  The blistering sunlight has started to dry the shoulders of their soaked uniforms. Gwen, who’s been bailing water nonstop, suddenly pauses and stares. Ishmael follows her eyes. A narrow craft with a white sail and outrigger is coming toward them from the green shore.

  “Keep bailing.” Ishmael steps behind the machine gun, swinging the barrel toward the approaching outrigger. There are six figures in it: four rowing, one steering in the stern, and one crouched in the bow.