Moe nodded.
“Now!” Bekiaa said.
The Marines pointed the directional lanterns aft, and the first thing Bekiaa saw was a swarm of bright yellow eyes that not only reflected the light but almost seemed to intensify it. There was a collective shriek that sounded like the big circular saw at the Baalkpan shipyard hitting a knot, and slim, webbed, almost grotesquely clawed hands moved to protect the brilliant eyes. The whole aft part of the ship was working with the things! She couldn’t see much, but they were shaped like a cross between the huge monster they’d killed the day before and some kind of furless, slimy-skinned Grik! They weren’t as large as Grik-they didn’t seem quite as big as she was-but they’d gathered with sufficient stealth that clearly even Moe hadn’t caught on for a while.
“What do we do, Lieuten-aant?” a Marine nervously asked.
“Hold your fire!” The things had recoiled from the light and for the moment just stood there, blinking huge eyelids. Her own vision was clearing a little. The sudden glare of the lanterns and the even brighter yellow orbs had left afterimages swimming through her sight. Like Grik, she concluded, but not. Webbed feet and hands; a longer, slimmer tail with something like a fin down its back. Their coloring was dark, with lighter splotches, and they weren’t as heavily muscled as Grik. Their handclaws were even longer, as she’d first observed, but their teeth not as wicked.
“What are we going to do?” the Marine demanded again.
“I don’t know!” Bekiaa almost shouted. The creatures stirred at her harsh voice, but didn’t advance.
“I think, of a sudden, they not know either,” Moe said.
Bekiaa took a deep breath and advanced a single step. “Hello,” she said, hoping her voice was firm but nonthreatening. The creatures babbled excitedly among themselves in a croaking, grunting gibberish, punctuated with high-pitched exclamations.
“Maker!” Bekiaa hissed. “I wish Mister Braad-furd was here!”
The door behind them opened suddenly, and Dean Laney came out, groggy eyed, already fumbling with his belt. Apparently he’d been awakened by a call of nature. Noticing that the guard was all silent and standing, he looked aft at the scene illuminated by the lantern. “Jumpin’ Jesus!” he practically squealed as he pulled his “new”. 45 from his pocket.
“No, Laay-nee!” Bekiaa yelled.
“Help!” Laney screeched over his shoulder, at the lounge. “There’s Grik-toads takin’ over the ship!”
“No!” Bekiaa screamed again, just as Laney began firing as fast as he could pull the trigger.
Lieutenant Bekiaa-Sab-At was a veteran of fierce fighting; she had to be to have become a Marine officer. She’d never led before, however, beyond an NCO level. She’d never been “in charge.” Still, she knew Captain Chapelle would back her up regardless of her decision, and she couldn’t possibly screw things up any worse than Laney had just done. Over the next eternally long split seconds, she contemplated several alternatives. With Laney’s shots, several of the creatures fell writhing on the deck and quite a few others simply leaped over the side in panic. Most seemed stunned. A few crouched and advanced purposefully, either armed just with their amazingly long, curved claws or clutching a stone or jagged piece of bone.
Feeling the heft of the musket in her hands, she was sorely tempted to shoot Laney down, or at least bayonet him… a little. She’d established that the creatures could communicate among themselves, and she might have been able to make some kind of nonviolent contact with them. If they saw her kill or wound the one who’d harmed some of them, the… opportunity… she’d sensed might be restored. That was a serious gamble. It was obvious the creatures had come to kill them. Only discovery and the bright lights had given them pause. Maybe a hasty defensive formation, strengthened by the others as they awakened and emerged from the lounge would work? Perhaps the creatures would respect the threat and the reluctance to harm more of them implied by that? Impossible. That would leave the work group backed up against the superstructure with dwindling options. There was no telling how many of the things there were, how many more might come, the longer this confrontation lasted. If they could climb the hull-how did they do that?-they could climb amidships too, and drop on them from above.
A ragged volley from forward cinched her decision. Mere seconds after Laney’s shots, they were coming over the bow as well. It no longer really mattered what difference Laney’s shots had made, if any. The expedition to recover Santa Catalina now had an enemy all its own.
“Marines!” she shouted. “Pre-sent! Take care not to hit the crates,” she reminded them. The first attackers, still visible in the light of the lanterns that had hastily been set on the deck, were only a few strides away. “Fire!” Tongues of flame stabbed out from the muskets and the building charge shattered under the onslaught of eight loads of “buck and ball” and a sudden cloud of choking smoke. Bodies flopped on the deck and writhed and thudded with spastic, distinct, fishlike sounds. An eerie groan swept through the attackers and more splashes were heard as others abandoned the fight. “Mister Laay-nee, get back inside,” Bekiaa ordered. “No one is to come out in ones and twos. They must form squads of at least six or more and come out together. Everyone at once would be nice. Send squads to relieve the forward guard as well. We cannot let them inside.” Forgetting Laney, she turned back to the front.
“Reload!”
“What the hell’s going on out there?” Chapelle demanded when Laney staggered, wide-eyed, back into the lounge. Lanterns were being lit and Marines and Navy salvage workers were snatching weapons and clambering for the door.
“Monsters!” Laney declared. “Slimy, toadlike, Grik-lookin’ bastards! There must be thousands of ’em!” They heard muffled firing from forward. “Oh, yeah, that ’Cat Marine said to send help to the other guards. They’re attackin’ all over the ship!” Amazingly, the big man seemed close to panic. “God a’mighty, all I wanted was a whiz over the side!”
Isak and Gilbert appeared, grimly holding two of the long, heavy Krags they always bitched about, and Ben had his pistol and an ’03 Springfield.
“You, Gilbert, go forward with Jannik-Fas and two squads of Marines.” Russ said. “They may need your help with a repeating rifle.” Another volley crashed outside, punctuated by weird cries. “Isak, you come with me and the rest of the Marines.”
“What about me?” Ben asked angrily.
“You stay out of it, hear? This whole trip’s for nothing if you get yourself killed! Know anybody else that can fly a P-40? You stay back with the rest of the Navy ’Cats. Send a runner forward with Gilbert. You’ll have to send reserves wherever they’re needed.”
“Goddamn it, Russ!”
“Just do as you’re told, flyboy.” Chapelle grinned. “Everybody knows you got plenty of guts. You can break your neck later in an airplane, and it’s none of my business. Right now you’re my responsibility!” He looked around. There were about seventeen with him, not counting Isak and Laney. Laney had an ’03 now, bayonet fixed. “Let’s go!”
They poured out the door yelling like fiends, just as Bekiaa, Moe, and the four remaining outside Marines charged, bloody bayonets lowered. Russ and his reinforcements flowed around her, firing independently as soon as their front was clear. Russ immediately saw that there weren’t “thousands” of the bizarre creatures, as Laney said, but there were more than a hundred. Quite a few lay dead, and a steady trickle of the remainder was jumping over the side, but a cohesive mass was still fighting determinedly, even in the face of their assault. If they were similar to Grik in other ways, they apparently didn’t panic en masse.
Russ fired his Springfield, careful of his shots in the dark with the precious ammunition. One of the creatures he’d thought was dead suddenly latched onto his foot with a long, sticky tongue, and he shook his leg violently as a primal revulsion coursed through him. He stabbed down with his bayonet, pinning the thing’s head to the deck, and finally managed to pry his foot free.
“Watch out
for their damn tongues!” he warned, perhaps a little shrilly. “They’re just like the one that big monster had!”
“EEEE W W W W W!” squealed Isak, as he started jumping in circles. He’d stepped on an entirely dead tongue that had glued his shoe to the deck.
Laney shoved him forward, out of his shoe and back into the press. “This ain’t no time for ballerina tryouts, you nitwit!” he growled. Apparently he’d gotten over his own initial shock.
The weight of the attack, and possibly the unexpected violence and remorselessness of it all, not to mention the now steady hail of bullets that shredded bodies far beyond the natives’ ability to inflict any harm, backed the dwindling horde of slimy creatures up onto the fantail. They continued to resist, slashing at bayonets with their unnaturally long handclaws with an almost metallic shkink sound, but the steady fire and the bristling wall of bayonets kept those foreclaws from reaching much flesh. Russ did see one of the creatures dart its tongue out and snatch a musket right from the hands of a Marine-and then drive the bayonet through its own head when the tongue retracted. It was probably the most bizarre thing he’d ever seen, and he imagined the macabre humor of the image would stay with him the rest of his days.
From within the milling mass, a thrumming bellow arose, like the steady roar of a thousand frogs. The creatures fighting on the fantail seemed to pay it no heed, but suddenly there was firing from the direction of the lounge again! Behind them! Chapelle risked a glance, and there was Ben Mallory with about twenty Navy ’Cats armed with muskets, shooting at more of the monsters trying to clear the rail.
“Son of a bitch!” Russ murmured. “They sucked us in and tried to flank us!” He raised his voice. “Bekiaa, keep up the pressure! We got company!”
Lieutenant Bekiaa also risked a glance. “We will. Take that damn Laay-nee and a couple Marines. We can spare them here, but those things must not get between us!”
Russ pushed another stripper clip full of. 30-06 shells into his rifle’s magazine. The clip fell away and he closed the bolt. “Yeah,” he said. “C’mon, Laney!”
Together with two lightly wounded Marines, reloading as they ran, Russ and Laney sprinted around the wide cargo hatch and the big crates cradled upon it. Yellow eyes peeked over the rail in front of him and Russ fired low, between them. The eyes disappeared. As he neared, Russ saw that Ben and his reserves were doing essentially the same thing. Few of the creatures were reaching the deck, and those that did died almost instantly. Ben was firing carefully, aiming his pistol with every round, each shot pitching one of the creatures backward as soon as it showed itself.
“I thought I told you to stay out of it!” Russ said breathlessly.
“I did stay out of it,” Ben replied. “As long as possible. I decided I was perfectly happy to let you deal with these nasty frog-lizards, or whatever the hell they are.” He fired again. “It isn’t possible now. Sneaky bastards tried to come up from below! They undogged the hatches, Russ! I’ve got some guys watching them now, but it came as a hell of a surprise. I also sent half the reserves forward when I saw what they were trying to pull back here.” He shook his head. “A hell of a thing. They aren’t running either, not like Grik, and they don’t really even have weapons. God help us if the Grik ever learn to fight like this!”
“God help us tonight!” Russ replied.
Ben shook his head. “They’re about done, I think. Their scheme didn’t work, and isn’t going to. If they’re as smart as I’m afraid they are, they’ll figure that out pretty quick. Back here, we’re just killing them.”
Ben was right. A few moments later, the thrumming roar sounded again from aft, followed by another one forward. No more heads appeared over the bulwarks, and toward the fantail they heard almost continuous splashes as the creatures there suddenly jumped over the side. Ben dropped the magazine out of his Colt and pushed down on the remaining cartridges with his thumb. Taking a few loose rounds from his pocket, he refilled the magazine and shoved it back into the pistol. Only his slightly trembling fingers betrayed the fact that he’d been nervous at all. Flipping the thumb safety up, he dropped the pistol back in its holster. “It was a tough fight, Maw, but we won,” he said softly.
Bekiaa, Isak, and Bekiaa’s remaining Marines slowly, carefully, worked their way back across the corpse-strewn deck. Only now, in the light of more lanterns, could Russ see that nearly all of them were at least lightly wounded. God, he thought, I hope Those damn Things’ claws aren’t poisonous!
“Double the guard for the remainder of the night,” Russ said. “No wounded, though. If you even got a scratch, get it looked at now. Pass the word.” He sighed. “First priority tomorrow is getting the generator up and running; power every bulb on this bucket we can get to light up! We need to send a message to Tolson too. Tell them we need reinforcements and the rest of our salvage crew…” He paused. “But what if those slimy devils gang up on the barges? Hell. Lieutenant Monk’ll be in charge of the next bunch. He’ll have to make sure they’re ready for anything, that’s all.”
“What about the wounded, Cap-i-taan Chaapelle?” Bekiaa asked.
“I already said I want them looked at,” Russ repeated tiredly.
“No, I mean the ‘enemy’ wounded.”
“Maybe somebody ought’a throw some water on ’em,” Gilbert said, looking at the half dozen “frog-lizards” gasping in the meager shade offered by one of the crates. “They’re gonna dry out like a smushed toad in the road.”
Isak shrugged. “Let ’em. Nasty bastards!” Isak was missing a patch from his scruffy beard on the left side of his face, courtesy of one of the sticky tongues the night before. He also had a bandage around his left hand where a couple of claws had “barely” touched him. He hadn’t even felt the “scratch,” but it nearly severed two of the tendons in his hand. A little polta paste and the company corpsman, or “corpscat”-whatever-had absolutely, positively assured him he’d be okay. Maybe. Twenty-odd Marines had worse injuries, and three had died. Two of the dead would be burnt in the Lemurian way. One would be buried, the “Navy” way, per his dying wish. All their names would be added to the growing tablet monument on the parade ground in Baalkpan. The dead frog-lizards had been thrown over the side.
“What’re you two doin’ here?” Laney snarled. “I been lookin’ all over for ya. We gotta raise steam today and check for leaks.”
“You ain’t my boss no more, Laney,” Isak declared. “Lieutenant Monk’s over all of us. Far as I’m concerned, until he gets here-today, I hope-we’re on ‘official terms’ only. I don’t even gotta talk to you ’cept in the line o’ dooty.”
“This is duty, you moron. Cap’n Chapelle’s orders. ’Sides, we’re all still snipes, and I’m King Snipe… unless you want to strike for the job.”
Isak took a step back. Laney probably had a hundred pounds on him. “I ain’t goin’ down there where them tongue-grabbin’ buggers can get me,” he insisted. He held up his hand. “And besides, my best flipper’s wounded.”
“Since when are you left-handed? Don’t worry about it. A squad o’ Marines has already been below, checking stuff out.” He grinned savagely. “Found some more crates of them tommy guns too. Anyway, all the frog-lizards is gone-and there weren’t none in the fireroom anyway.”
They heard a splash near the “prisoners” and turned to see that someone else had had the same idea as Gilbert. Chapelle, Bekiaa, Jannik, Moe, and Sammy were standing near the dripping prisoners. Mallory was there too, but keeping his distance. Probably under orders. He had his pistol out, though.
“Oh, well,” Isak sighed. “Since I ain’t gonna get to watch them bastards desiccate, I might as well get some work done.”
“Now what?” Bekiaa asked.
“You said you got the ‘feeling’ you might have communicated with them last night. Somehow. What made you think that?”
“I don’t know if I ‘thought’ it, really,” Bekiaa replied. Her tail twitched irritation, but from her blinks Chapelle knew she was
irritated with herself. “Whatever it was, the feeling was gone as soon as Laay-nee started shooting.”
“Shooting make no difference,” Moe said. “They come to kill, not talk. No can talk. They come all over ship. Even we talk to these”-he indicated the area aft where his group had fought-“we not talk to others… ah… for-ord.”
“He’s right,” Chapelle said. “Maybe you startled them, or even got the group aft wondering a little, but they hit the guards forward at the same time. One way or another, the fight was on. There was nothing you could have done. They did come to kill us.” He paused, looking at the creatures. The dark color he’d noticed the night before was a brownish purple and the light was a yellowish orange. Weird, but probably well suited to the dingy water they lived in. They wore no clothes and had no implements, no ornaments of any kind. There was no physical evidence that they harbored any intelligence whatsoever. But last night they’d employed what could have been a damned effective tactic, and their “operation” had been well coordinated. “Throw some more water on them,” he said, and when it was done, he watched the creatures’ reactions closely. Four of the six didn’t seem badly injured, and they continued staring at him with their weird, almost fluorescent eyes, but it seemed to him that the water did give them some relief. They weren’t gasping as much, anyway.
“I wonder,” Russ said quietly. There were still a few dead monsters on the fo’c’sle that hadn’t been dumped yet. He called for one. When it arrived, carried between two disgust-blinking Marines, he had them lay it down in front of the prisoners. They showed no reaction, but of course there were several weapons pointed at them. “Jannik,” Russ said, “I want you to poke your sword in that thing’s tongue and make it flop around. Make it look like it’s striking.”
Jannik looked at him and blinked, but then did as he was told.
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