“No idea,” Nicholas replied. “Can you take him?”
As the craft approached the canal, Pieter rose from the passenger side with the long barrel of his shockgun before him. He trained it on the howling beast.
The intruder’s jaws snapped shut. It looked up at Pieter, looked across at Nicholas, then stepped one of its giant hooves forward over the lip of the canal.
“I got him,” Pieter said. An electric bolt leaped from Pieter’s gun to the shattered cobbles.
But the intruder was gone. Nicholas watched him plunge into the dark water of the canal and sink out of sight.
“Did I get him?” Pieter asked, close enough that Nicholas heard the man’s voice both in realtime and in echo from his earpiece.
“Not even close.” Nicholas holstered his chemical gun and drew a shock pistol from his hip. He fired a bolt of electricity into the water. “Pieter, shoot him!”
“Where?” Nothing was visible in the canal.
“Everywhere!” Nicholas kept firing, bolt after bolt into the water. The charge meter on his gun sank towards zero.
Finally catching on, Pieter launched repeated bolts of electricity into the canal, filling the air with thunder and smoldering ozone.
“I’m out,” Nicholas said.
“Did we get him?”
“I can’t see anything. Ping it.” Nicholas heard a faint background hum through his earpiece as the craft’s sonar activated.
“I'm ahead of you,” Pieter said. “How fast you think it can swim?”
“I don’t know. Ever seen anything like that before?”
“Never. We should report it to the priests.”
Nicholas looked up and down the canal, searching for any disturbance in the canal surface. He tuned out the faux-Viking boatload of screaming tourists. The watercraft’s mechanical oars swished double time, and he heard a modern hydrogen engine kick to life deep inside. Good. He needed those civilians out of harm’s way.
“We’ve got nothing!” Pieter shouted in his ear. “That blasphemous thing has disappeared.”
“Impossible. Check again.”
“We did, Nick. He’s not in the canal.”
Nicholas looked along the canal again. The creature couldn’t have emerged without drawing the crowd’s attention. He looked the other way, up the canal, past the Viking tour boat with its ridiculous oars dipping and lifting to imitate the rowing of ancient seamen. No noticeable disturbance that way, either; the crowd had shrunk back from the canal, but not fled, survival instincts conflicting with the reluctance to miss a spectacle.
Nicholas glanced at his watch again—now he was officially late to the Temple. Kemala would be fuming.
The Viking drakkar listed slightly in the water. Nicholas looked at it carefully. The oars extended, dipped, pulled, lifted—and again. Had they dropped a bit lower the second time? He watched again—the oars lifted, swung forward, dipped into the water, and this time the wide paddles at the tips submerged completely, leaving only the oar shafts in view.
“Pieter, drop me a line,” he said. “I need to get to that tour boat.”
“You sure?”
“Where else could it go?”
The hovercraft drifted above Nicholas’s head, and a cable fitted with circular rungs unspooled towards him. Nicholas grabbed one rung in his hand and slipped a foot into another. The hovercraft ferried him over the canal to the tour boat. Nicholas held a finger over his lips to request quiet from the passengers. Thankfully, they cooperated.
Nicholas dropped onto the deck of the boat. The pilot, a gruff middle-aged man in a horned helmet, scowled at him.
“She’s sinking,” the older man whispered. “You’ve breached her.”
“Not us,” Nicholas whispered back. He pointed a finger straight down to the oaken boards of the deck and raised his eyebrows.
The drakkar pilot’s eyes widened and he nodded. Without a word, he led Nicholas to the tiny cabin, an enclosed wooden structure shaped to look like a rowboat inverted and tied down for storage, just large enough for the pilot’s chair and controls. The pilot grabbed the chair and slid it aside, revealing a hard plastic panel underneath.
Nicholas gave the pilot a quick nod of thanks. He opened a pouch on his belt and withdrew a compact orange ball, small enough to conceal in his hand. It was packed with enough tranquilizer gas to stop a rioting mob. He hoped one ball was enough to put the blasphemous creature down, because he didn’t have a second one. Nicholas had carried the device on his belt for four years, ever since he got his badge. He’d never needed it before.
Nicholas crouched next to the panel. He paused, drew a deep breath. He had no real defense if the creature was waiting down there in the dark, ready to ambush him.
The Great Man watches over me. He mouthed the prayer as he mentally recited it. He guides my life along its proper channel, and into its proper destination. Again, he touched the miniature caduceus hanging around his neck, the symbol of his faith.
Nicholas slipped his fingers under the panel latch, working as quietly as possible. He raised the ball of compressed gas over his head. Then he took another breath, lifted the panel open and peered into the greasy machinery below.
The darkness below deck reeked of mold and stale water. A steep, narrow rack of stairs led towards the unseen rowing pistons, which tapped out a staccato as the oars reached forward, dipped, pulled back through the water.
A massive gray shape boiled up out of the dark. Nicholas twisted the gas ball in his fingers, turning the upper and lower halves in opposite directions. He hurled the ball at the approaching monster, then slammed the panel shut and threw himself down on top of it.
The monster crashed against the underside of the panel. The trap door slammed up into Nicholas’s chin, cracked his teeth together and flung him back against the cabin wall.
For a moment, panicked thoughts rushed and collided in his brain: it’s free it’s gotten loose. Then the hard plastic access panel clapped back into place. Nicholas grabbed onto the seat of the pilot’s chair and wedged his feet against the cabin wall, bracing himself in case the weight of his body wasn’t enough to hold the panel closed.
He struggled to draw air; the impact had smashed the breath from his lungs. If the man-beast charged like that a second time, it would knock Nicholas aside, and maybe snap a few of his ribs along the way.
The lid lifted again, but with much less force, as if a timid dog were trying to nose it open. Thick orange tranquilizer gas curled up around the edges of the trapdoor, and Nicholas forced himself not to breathe, despite his desperate craving for oxygen. He was behind on his tranquilizer antidote; the situation with Kemala had distracted him all month.
The lid slipped back into place. The drakkar’s hold would be brimming with tranquilizer gas. Nicholas hoped he hadn’t killed the blasphemous man-beast; dead monsters told no tales. In any case, the safety of these passengers came first, regardless of what information the creature might have.
Still resisting the urge to breathe, Nicholas rolled to his feet. He stepped out of the cabin, nodded as he passed the boat pilot, managed to walk all the way to the edge of the deck, and then filled his lungs with air that tasted of the blooming clusters of water flowers on the canal surface. He’d never appreciated how fresh and alive the air of his city tasted.
Five additional police hovercraft arrived, and Pieter dropped down from his own craft onto the boat, charged shockgun at his side. He carried the industrial-sized model normally mounted on the hovercraft hull, having clearly decided that the smaller version on his hip wouldn’t be sufficient for the man-beast.
“Is it here?” Pieter asked.
“Yeah. He’s either tranqed out or pretending to be. Grab me a gas mask and I’ll go in with you.”
“Forget it,” a woman’s voice said beside him. Nicholas turned to see Fahari Sgaal, a tough, muscular woman who’d been a year ahead of him at the academy. She dropped on a cable from a hovercraft onto the deck of the boat. Two more cops joi
ned her, carrying the big shockguns. “We’re here to back you up. Now back up.”
The police officers moved toward the cabin, weapons raised. Nicholas tried to follow them, but Pieter shook his head.
“I thought someone was running late for Temple,” Pieter said.
Nicholas froze. One crisis after another. Police dropped down around him, securing the ruptured drakkar with cables to keep it afloat. Overhead, hovercrafts struggled to lift the boat higher. The situation was under control.
Nicholas stepped onto one of the hovercraft and asked the driver for a lift to Temple Plaza.
“Say hi to your wife for me,” Pieter said.
“I’ll be sure to blame all of this on you,” Nicholas replied as the craft rose away from the canal.
About J.L. Bryan, Author of Helix
J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in Atlanta. He is the author of five novels and one collection of short stories. Visit his website: http://jlbryanbooks.com
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