That’s when somebody suggested the use of grenades, thrown by hand or by some kind of launcher. Conversationally, it was only a baby-step from there to somebody saying, half-jokingly, “nuclear hand grenades”. There was general laughter all around, but I could feel Eichra Oren stiffen suddenly with apprehension. I understood that my boss wasn’t hearing that as any kind of a joke. It is practically a fundamental tenet of p’Na, or at least a first corollary, that there is no ethical way to use nuclear or other indiscriminate weapons, and avoid injuring or killing other beings who have not initiated physical force against you.
In the Elders’ world, the isthmus that once connected the north western continent with the south was severed millions of years ago through the use of industrial atomic explosives. Today they’re used a lot in Lunar and asteroidal construction. There are plenty of the damned things lying around here and there. I stopped listening when I felt faint tendrils of thought—I couldn’t determine their origin—concerning the tactical use of such devices against our new Planarian enemies.
The veek soared over a low hill, giving me a fluttery stomach.
“It’ll be some while,” Eichra Oren told me late the next morning, “before Misterthoggosh and his myriad partners have extracted enough information—from the abandoned submarines and maybe even some of their former passengers—to form a coordinated plan of action. It’ll be my job, then, to look it over and decide whether it’s ethical or not.”
I remembered the ominous way that last night’s meeting had broken up. In fact I’d hardly been able to think about anything else. I told Eichra Oren about that last wisp of thought I’d intercepted more or less by accident, about using thermonuclear earth-moving tools as weapons.
He nodded. “I caught that, too. I think it was Misterthoggosh. But he’s hired me to keep him ethical, and by p’Na, that’s what I mean to do.”
“One way or another?” I asked. I would have raised my eyebrows.
“One way or another,” he replied, the image of his assessor’s sword flashing through his mind. He’d meant me to see it. Implants are seldom that leaky. Human being and giant cephalopod locked sword and tentacle in combat: you could get obscenely rich selling tickets to that one. Then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe somebody had deliberately let me see—or “feel” was more like it—that errant thought.
“If it is ethical, Boss, will we have a part in carrying it out?”
He nodded. “Almost certainly, Sam. I would be professionally and ethically obliged to insist upon it. But they have an enormous number of preparations to make, including refitting the Treemonisha or taking her out of mothballs, or whatever. And meanwhile, as you may remember, we still have some unfinished business to attend to back home.”
I remembered something vaguely about a ship, but I must have been more fatigued than I realized at the time. It had been quite a day. I slept well enough, but there’s nothing like your own bed in your own home.
Which was where we were headed at the moment, once we’d dropped the delectable Lornis and her supercilious monkey at Eneri Relda’s for the duration. Both females had been worried it wasn’t safe for Lornis to go home alone, but neither of them wanted to move in and live with Misterthoggosh.
I’d noticed that Eneri Relda had been suspiciously quiet about the many charms of Lornis Adubudu recently. This was looking serious. If anybody knew all about the persuasiveness of silence, it was Eneri Relda.
The veek knew the way, and Eichra Oren kept an eye on it. I was suddenly exhausted again. I’d spent hours in the local cut-and-pastery with a six-inch knife cut on my haunch, an inch or so deep, being kept closed by the judicious application of tissue glue. Getting the muscle fibers reconnected and functioning had been particularly painful and time-consuming. My insectoid doctor—Dlee Raftan Saon—had ordered me to rest. I fell asleep after we offloaded the boss’s mother and his would-be girlfriend. He didn’t wake me up until we pulled up to the house.
There was an actual hand-written letter waiting for us, its blue paper envelope thumb-tacked to the door. As Eichra Oren pulled the tack out, the house gave a little sigh of relief, and the hole began to dwindle. It vanished before we got inside. He asked the house to fix a pot of coffee for him and nice hot bowl of hot and sour soup for me.
The letter, neatly hand-written on pale blue stationery read:
My dear fellows,
Please don’t feel badly for me, my good friends. When I got home I took a good hard look at my mother Shwaseem and my sister Surusu, both of whom you’ve met, and I decided that I didn’t wish to spend the rest of my days married to anyone like them. My fiancé Shaalara is a different sort of entity, beautiful, exotic, graceful, her every breath a dream of romance. A single night of love with Shaalara, if that’s what it must be, is far more to be desired than a lifetime of …well, I’m sure you understand. Thank you for bringing me home.
Your friend,
Meerltchirt of the Fronzeln Zirnaath
“She’s going to eat him,” I said, suddenly yawning.
Eichra Oren nodded. “I know.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Treemonisha
EXACTLY LIKE THE PROVERBIAL ICEBERG (MIND YOU, I’VE never actually seen an iceberg, myself, so I had to take Eneri Relda’s word for it) a full nine-tenths of the enormous volume of Misterthoggosh’s submarine cruiser lay below the waterline, even when she was nominally on the surface.
All that showed of the Treemonisha above the ripples at the deepwater quay where she was berthed was a giant suite of navigation and control theaters—most of the hull was some kind of perfectly transparent material—a streamlined housing for dozens of periscopes and communications masts, the broad passenger boarding bay which put me in mind of Misterthoggosh’s garage door, and the transparent upper curve of a large and luxurious passenger and guest “saloon”—roughly the size of three jai alai conchas laid out side by side—that occupied the upper half of the forward section of the enormous submarine vessel.
“The lower portion of the vessel’s forward section is reserved for those of us who make a habit of acquiring their oxygen through gills.” The speaker was Misterthoggosh, communicating with everybody through his separable tentacle, which was acting as our guide as we entered the plastic concertina leading from the dock into the side of the great ship.
“Ladies and gentlemen…” As we exited the boarding tube and stepped across the gasketed threshold of the barn-sized hatch, the tentacle stood up straighter on its little scooter. “I give you…Treemonisha!”
The great ship, named after the heroine of an opera written by the outsized mollusc’s favorite composer, was shaped something like a fat pumpkin seed. She was flat, her blunt end forward, tapering off toward her stern. “She is propelled gravito-hydro-dynamically,” the tentacle explained. “The force-fields embracing her hull seize all of the water within about a fathom of her skin-plates from nose to tail, and hurl it aftward, behind her, as if from a vast bucket being poured down a well.”
On Jupiter, I thought, guessing that the g-forces involved were horrendous.
“Nobody seems to know—or they won’t tell me—how fast she can go, or how deep,” I told the tentacle. “I can see that she’s braced inside to resist titanic pressures—” I pointed my nose at a huge lustrous white metal truss, at least a foot thick and pierced with circular lightening holes I could have jumped through, curving upward through the deck-plates to lie across the boarding bay’s high ceiling overhead.
The tentacle nodded, somehow. “She’s prepared to back it up with structural force field generators in an emergency. I can tell you that the entire aftward half of this vessel consists of nothing except the powerplant, generating and harnessing exactly the same forces that are at work in quasars. It was producing and managing energies at this cosmic scale that taught us what we needed to know to travel between universes.”
I noticed, of course, that the tentacle didn’t answer my question about maximum speed and depth. Nor
had it mentioned the unmistakable fact that the Proprietor’s private pleasure-craft bristled with weapons of every imaginable kind, all of them powered by that quasar plant.
From approximately where Eichra Oren and I lived and had boarded Treemonisha, to where we were headed—presumably the bad guys’ invasion base—was roughly 1500 miles. Some sadist on the great ammonite’s staff had let it slip that our submarine journey would last at least ten hours, bring your toothbrush. My personal take was that traveling that fast underwater would require some cosmic forces, all right.
We had departed at midnight, although chances were pretty small that we’d successfully evade spying eyes that way. By the time we got where we were going—mid-morning—it would be darker for us than it was now. We were headed for the abyss, the deepest spot in the Inland Sea. Three miles: excepting the occasional luminous octopus or eel, any light you have to see by is whatever light you brought with you.
Three miles deep, they were all saying. I wondered how close that came to the great ship’s limits. My guess was that she could lie safely on the silty bottom of some of the truly abyssal trenches of the Greater Ocean, easily twice as deep an anything Our Sea had to offer, otherwise Misterthoggosh wouldn’t have bothered to have her built.
In some ways, I’m sure we appeared more like passengers boarding a pleasure cruise ship than an expeditionary thrust in the first war to be fought on this planet for millions of years—and the first ever against creatures from another universe. I was also guessing that the Elders had forgotten, after all this time, what war is supposed to be like.
It didn’t look much like a military mission. There wasn’t anything resembling a uniform anywhere, even among the crew. Eichra Oren wore horsehide sandals and blue denim trousers, with a loose, brightly colored floral patterned shirt he’d purchased when he’d visited a volcanic island chain in the middle of the Greater Ocean. Before my time.
I’m no expert, but I read a lot, and always listen as hard as I can. For example, Eneri Relda came along. While perhaps not the oldest sapient on this version of Earth, she was close to it, and absolutely the most revered. She had her own stateroom, aft of the saloon, and had brought an egg—another damned flying serpent—to keep warm in a way that undoubtedly made that egg the envy of every male mammal aboard.
“It isn’t so much to incubate it,” she explained with a modest hand over her décolletage. “The species is warm-blooded. Keeping it close this way simply guarantees that the hatchling will imprint on me.”
Sprightly music issued from somewhere overhead: Ragtime Dance.
A heavily bandaged Squee-elgia limped behind her looking game and fierce, like an angry, freshly-plucked chicken. Half the ship’s crew were people of her species. Most of the rest were spiders of various persuasions.
Lovely Lornis, too, had talked her way onboard, presenting herself as her dad’s administrative assistant. “Daddy arrived just in time,” she began. “The poor dear endured a suborbital flight at three full gravities, over two oceans and a couple of continents, just to get here.”
From the resigned way “the poor dear” hunched his shoulders up around his hairy ears—as if he were headed into a hailstorm—I could see that he was long accustomed to letting his pretty daughter have her way, as what red-blooded male of just about any species wouldn’t have? On the other hand, I could also see how she’d been attracted to the violent and crazy specimen of H. gracilis she’d married. Unlike most males of his species, Alfarz Adubudu actually looked dangerous, in the “wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley” manner.
“That also explains her attraction to you, Boss,” I conveyed privately, having given him my whole thought process on the matter in the same way. “You can be pretty dangerous, yourself, given the right circumstances.”
Eichra Oren ignored me. It was better than what he might have done. We went forward to join the other lung owners in the passenger saloon.
Misterthoggosh or somebody (I don’t think it was the separable tentacle) mindcast a map to the implants of anybody within range. “As you may know, the Inland Sea is not quite divided into three separate bodies of water,” he said, “by two very large peninsulas that enter it from the north, and from the super peninsula of the Great Continent many of us call home. None of these features had names, of course, before the Appropriations began. We of the Elder race knew less about the land surfaces of our own planet than we knew about the backside of the Moon.”
And they cared even less. The nautiloids, almost unanimously, were famously averse to—terrified by—space travel, putting it as mildly as I can, and to most of them, that included anything above sea level.
“The first peninsula looks rather like a comically high-heeled human boot—witch’s footwear, or so tradition would have it. Aboard Treemonisha we shall first travel toward it, between the Brother Islands, around the toe of the boot—doesn’t it look like it’s about to kick Triangle Island out of the Inland Sea, over the northwest corner of the South Continent, into the Lesser Ocean?—toward the second peninsula, messily composed of tiny desert islands and goat crags.”
But by that time, I’d lost interest in the travelogue. I wandered off in search of an acceptable tree or hydrant-substitute to pay my respects to. Then a nice steak and eggs breakfast, I thought, starting with a cocktail. Something with tomato juice and that distilled agave liquor that they manufacture so well at the bottom of the Northwest Continent.
Summoning a map, I discovered I was aimed in the wrong direction, and had just turned around, when the entire ship rang like a great bell and shuddered from a severe blow somewhere aft. The air was filled with screaming and shouting. The floor I was crossing looked like black marble, highly polished. I couldn’t stay on my feet. The dark sea at whatever depth we traveled lit up very briefly on the port quarter,
Naturally, a lot more wailing and yelling followed, from the vocal apparatus of at least a hundred different species. It would be far worse below, where the water that the passengers lived in would have conveyed the initial shock and subsequent noises of terror much more efficiently.
A single voice, auditory and electronic, drowned out everybody else’s: “This is your captain. We are under attack. There has been no hull breach, or any other damage. Nor is there word so far of serious injuries or fatalities. Force-fields are at one hundred percent. Hang onto something solid, please, while we get the inertial dampers back online.”
Hang on with what? I don’t have any thumbs!
Suddenly I heard an extremely familiar voice—and mail-order accent. “Zese Grays! Zey geeve ze seafood a bad name!” Apparently Renner and Bask were aboard or inboard, or whatever they called it. Even rattled as I was, I hoped they were here in a professional capacity.
I never had gotten my bouillabaisse.
Somebody bundled me up abruptly from behind and lifted me off the slick floor in powerful arms. One whiff informed me that it was Eichra Oren, and the same whiff revealed that Lornis was right there beside him.
Beside us.
“This is far from over,” my boss said, via implant. I felt Lornis listening, too. “Apparently we ran into some kind of patrol. Dumb. There’s a lot worse news on the way. We’re going someplace where we can—”
“Be safe?” I finished his sentence hopefully.
“Be useful,” he corrected. “There is no place safer on this vessel than any other place. We’re at least a thousand feet down by now. If the hull or the force field supporting it goes, then we’ll all be fish-food.”
Lornis: “Although at this depth we won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”
Which inspired what was possibly the weirdest thought I’d ever had: it only seemed fair in its way, having eaten so many fish myself. I refrained from passing the bizarre idea along. It might be taken as a symptom of head injury, when the truth was that I had just been born strange.
We came to one of many transport tubes, a black plastic cylinder with an oval plastic door that opened when it sensed u
s coming. Eichra Oren put me down on a rubbery gridded carpet, and told the porter “Swordfish”. I would have guessed “Rosebud”. It beeped politely and we were on the way before my boss could even draw a breath from having spoken.
I enjoyed watching Lornis draw a breath.
When the transport door opened, it was on a much odder scene than I had imagined. Instead of dozens of individuals, brightly lit and seated in steep tiers at consoles, frantically bashing buttons and sliding controls, while younger, lower-ranking personnel rushed from station to station carrying orders and information, what opened before us now was more like a theater, comfortable chairs arranged in rows, rows arranged on a slight angle, under sufficient, but comfortable lighting.
It was surprisingly quiet, for the most part, a low, murmuring everywhere that indicated people of several species who couldn’t think into their implants without moving their mouth parts. Arms and legs were almost motionless. The whole scene appeared more than a little religious, like a prayer vigil, but the goddess they all prayed to was Treemonisha.
To one side, on a rounded, slightly elevated platform, sat the captain, I assumed, an extremely large gray spider with eight black, shiny eyes. A large screen stood behind his shoulders. showing us Misterthoggosh, who seemed to be watching everything that was going on here. If I’d been the captain, it would have made me very nervous and angry.
Just then, another blow shook the vessel, this time toward the bow, and immediately followed by another. Just before the first explosion, I’d felt dozens of invisible fingers flow upward from the floor and embrace my lower limbs, keeping me and everybody who was standing, steady. The technology was new to me, and felt extremely creepy.
“Oasam Otusam?” Abruptly, I felt a presence behind me, a tap on my haunch, and turned. It was Aelbraugh Pritsch, of all the people in the word.
“What can I do for you?” Eichra Oren and Lornis were interested, too.
Blade of p’Na Page 24
