by Conner, Jack
Column after column of bombers dropped their armament on the miles-long back of the Starfish, but it didn’t seem to feel the explosions in any appreciable way; it didn’t slow, or shudder, or veer. Smoke rose from it, and black patches showed on its exoskeleton when the smoke cleared, but that was it.
Coral reefs, the quickly growing Atomic kind, covered the creature in tiered, colorful shelves and mountains. The Starfish had been traveling for many miles under water, and life had grown onto it, into it. Millions of fish would be flopping, dying on its back between the reefs. Small floating gas-squid numbering in the thousands or millions drifted across the Starfish’s back and sides, snatching at the dying creatures when they could. Avery saw all this activity only as tiny motes infesting the vastness of the great being, but he could see enough to know that the Starfish had become its own ecosystem.
Janx was the first to speak:
“A starfish. A fucking starfish ... as big as a city ... gods below ...”
Avery opened his mouth to add something but couldn’t force his mind to take any coherent form.
One by one the columns of bombers launched their assault on the Starfish, and plumes of smoke obscured the sky. Other than obliterating great chunks of living reef—and perhaps, Avery thought, some small pieces of Starfish exoskeleton—the bombs produced no visible effect. The Starfish kept destroying wave after wave of buildings, knocking them into each other and then sliding over them. Avery and the others watched as it swerved around the rocky uprising in the land on which the hospital sat (land grew higher away from the sea, eventually flowering into mountains north and east of the city) and continued on, devastating block after block, unstoppable. The planes could do nothing.
“So,” Layanna said quietly. “This is how they respond.”
Avery tasted bile in the back his throat. “We knew they’d retaliate somehow. I just didn’t think it would be so ... so ...”
“Big.”
The others were looking at them strangely.
“You know something we don’t?” Hildra said, patting Hildebrand to reassure him.
“This is it,” Avery said quietly. “What Sheridan warned us about. The vengeance of the R’loth.”
“You mean, like, over what we did—the Device?”
What I did, you mean. “Later,” Avery said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“We did this?”
“We need to get back to the Verignun,” Captain Greggory said, evidently not willing to be dragged into their discussion; perhaps the implications frightened him.
“The ship will still be there?” Layanna said.
“Oh, the lads’ll have taken her out into the bay, but we’ll be able to steal a boat or skiff or somethin’ and reach her. They’ll wait for me—for a while, at least. Unless the thing moves toward the bay.”
Avery paused. Gathering his strength, he said, “On the way we’ll need to get samples.”
“Samples?”
“Yes, of course,” Layanna said, as if just realizing. “If nothing else, the bombs have dislodged portions of the creature, more than enough for a few samples on which to conduct tests.”
“Perhaps we can find some weakness,” Avery agreed.
“You’re mad,” Greggory said. “Both of you.”
“We’ll bring the samples back to the mainland to study,” Layanna said. “The cold storage units aboard the Verignun should preserve them for us nicely.”
“The hospital should provide us with the tools we’ll need to collect the samples,” Avery said.
“We’re not going treasure hunting,” Greggory said. “Or sample hunting, either. We get to the ship and get out of here.”
“We won’t have to go out of our way,” Avery assured him. “We’ll have to make our way through the devastated portions of the city anyway to get to the harbor. Swinging through the path of destruction is our best route. It’s either in the thing’s wake or in its path. And in its wake we can collect the samples we need.”
The captain couldn’t seem to find a way to reasonably object. In a voice that was almost a growl, he said, “Let’s make this quick.”
When the Starfish was far enough away, they set off into the city. Avery hated to bring Ani into the madness, but there was nothing for it. Stealing a van that had wedged against a shop wall after Janx and three of the whalers were able to haul it out using a toppled street sign as a lever, they threaded their way downhill. Sounds of screaming, the rending of metal and great crashes filled the air, the impacts from falling buildings constantly shaking the ground, detectable even over the jouncy suspension of the vehicle. Avery saw frightened, angry faces all around, some bloody, some in tears. Looters smashed shop fronts and absconded with what they could carry. Bodies littered the ground before one shop, and the corpse of a man carrying a shotgun slumped against a wall. A young woman with her clothes torn half off and her throat slashed sprawled in the road some blocks further on. Ahead buildings blocked off the sight of the Starfish, and as they drew closer to the area of devastation dust began to fill the air, debris from the fallen structures, perhaps even bodies, obscuring sight further.
At last they began to catch glimpses of the creature, just bits and pieces between buildings: great sliding masses of spiky exoskeleton, mountains of bright coral jutting from its sides, seaweed dangling, gas-squids bobbing here and there, lightning crackling and vapor issuing from sphincters. Seeing it from below, looking up at it, a thing as tall as the tallest skyscraper and miles across, one could appreciate just how vast it truly was.
At the wheel, Avery steered wide around the creature and entered the wide swath of rubble and slog and horror left after it had passed. Having moved beyond the sea, the creature had flattened everything it had rolled over, carpeting it all in muck from the sea bottom. As the van stopped and its occupants climbed out, Avery wrinkled his nose at the stench, part ammonia, part minerals and brine.
“Fucking look at this,” Hildra said, kicking aside a piece of rubble. The action unleashed a wave of debris, and she leapt back at the crevice suddenly formed beneath her. Avery caught a glimpse of a severed leg vanishing into shadow.
“Be careful where you step, darlin’,” Janx said, to which Hildra flipped him the finger, but she looked ashen.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Layanna said.
Janx, Hildra and the whalers watched over Avery and Layanna—not that they needed it; the looters and rioters were far away—as they brought out their equipment and collected samples. The Starfish had accommodated them handily, bombs as well as its own remorseless smash through the city having broken off countless bits of exoskeleton, some revealing a honeycomb structure inside tacky with the creature’s blood or ichor. Avery and Layanna had brought numerous jars, vials and sealed containers from the hospital to collect the samples in, and they did so quickly and efficiently.
Afterward, the group resumed its journey toward the docks. Looters picked through the ruins around them, but it was not avarice in their eyes but the blankness of unimaginable loss and trauma; greed was simply the only crutch they had left to fall back on. Avery saw one little girl perched on a man’s shoulders, probably her father’s, as he pried a piece of siding away from a blasted stone wall and picked up the handle-piece of a two-piece telephone that had been trapped behind it. Together man and girl eyed it blankly as if wondering where this new piece fit in the scattered jigsaw puzzle their lives had become.
Other people helped those trapped in the rubble, giving survivors first aid and arranging the dead in long lines. Soon those lines would be very long indeed, perhaps even several people deep, and that’s if the Starfish didn’t simply veer back and obliterate them.
The greater majority of the people, however, simply fled toward the mountains outside of town.
In the distance, two of the great limbs of the Starfish could be seen past the bulwarks of listing towers, then dust cloaked the creature.
It took a long time for Avery’s group to re
ach the docks, and it was as Captain Greggory had said; they were able to steal a fishing boat (one of the few left, and only after removing a corpse from it) and take it out to the Verignun, which waited in the crowded bay for its captain to return or for a decision to be made about new leadership. The sailors rejoiced to see Greggory clamber over the gunwale, and he immediately ordered the ship to be made ready to depart.
Layanna, Ani, Avery, Hildra and Janx grouped at the stern and watched the obliteration of Ethali, capital of the Azad Islands, and the slaughter of, likely, hundreds of thousands of people.
Avery saw a ruin of his own making.
* * *
“What was it, Papa?” Ani said. Tears stained her cheeks. Shock and sadness had stamped her deeply. Stamped all of them.
On his third bottle of ale, Avery said, “I’m not sure, honey.”
“Does it have a brain?”
“I don’t know. I would assume so, though it may not be intelligent.”
They were in the cabin Layanna, Hildra and Ani shared—Layanna and Ani occupied the two beds while Hildra, at her own insistence, slept in a hammock—passing around drinks Janx had brought over from the cabin he and Avery cohabitated in. Hildebrand had withdrawn into a corner and was making frightened noises, his eyes wide and his sides shuddering. Hildra let him sip from her bottle to calm him.
“So that was your people’s work,” she said to Layanna.
“I’m sure it was.”
“This is what Sheridan warned us about,” Avery said softly. “Now that the R’loth can’t rely on Octung, they’re having to continue the war themselves. This is how they mean to do it.”
Layanna nodded. “I’m amazed they were able to fabricate this ... thing ... so quickly.”
“Is that what they did? Manufacture it?”
"Or grow it, yes. Or bring it over from ... elsewhere."
Avery resisted a shudder.
“And so quick!” Hildra said. “It's only been, what, a coupla months, since we flipped on the Device."
"We're assuming this is some response to that," Avery said. "It’s always possible that the Starfish could be the result of a project they started earlier." It’s what he wanted to believe, was desperate to believe, but Layanna was soon to crush the notion.
"No," she said, with certainty. "This thing is new."
“Think it’s headed toward the mainland?” Janx said. “I mean, the Gyrgins are east, Ghenisa’s west, and the Azads are plumb in the center.”
“We must assume it is,” Layanna said.
“We’ve got to warn them,” Avery said. “Prepare some defense."
"That won't be easy,” Hildra said. “Shit, we’re wanted fugitives back home, and that’s where this ship is goin’. It operates straight out of Hissig.”
"It won’t be easy. But with the samples we collected it might just be possible.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know. Find some weakness of the creature.”
“Kill it?”
“That would be the goal, yes.”
They digested this in silence.
Janx’s gaze swung to Layanna. “What if you do? Find some way to fight the beastie, I mean. That it? You and the doc figure some way to end it and it’s over? The fucking R’loth ain’t got another pet waitin’ to unleash on us, have they?”
Layanna held his gaze. “It’s always possible that there are more than one of these creatures. Where they have made one, they can make two. And since I doubt the creature could travel a thousand miles overnight, there must at least be that many. But yes, Janx, even the resources of the R’loth are not inexhaustible. This is their one last big push to win the war. If we defeat the Starfish, we defeat them.”
Avery frowned as a thought occurred to him. "Sheridan," he said, and they glanced at him sharply. "I wonder ... she didn't come with us into port. She said she was feeling poorly, remember."
"Yeah, so?" said Hildra.
"It's probably nothing. I just wondered if it were possible that, well, that she could have known ...”
Later that night, when Layanna and Ani had retired to bed, and Janx and Hildra had gone off to drink with the whalers in their quarter of the ship, Avery lay on his cot alone for a long time, watching the play of light on the ceiling coming in from the porthole. One of the occasional pseudo-auroras was occurring over the sea, and its eerie yet colorful lights shimmered in his cabin, drowning him in another world. He didn’t see the lights. He saw only the destruction of Ethali, its proud buildings ground to slog, its people crushed and vaporized and made homeless. He saw the fires and heard the screams.
I’m so sorry. Hildra had said it had been all of them that caused it, but that wasn’t true. Avery alone had activated the Device, and he alone, of the whole group, had known the consequences.
Don’t be so dramatic, Frank. It’s not all about you. Besides, if he hadn’t fired the Device, Octung would have won the war. They would have conquered first the continents on this side of the world, then the other. Nothing could have opposed them. They would have forcibly converted all the humans on the planet, infected them, a process that would have killed millions, even billions, turning the rest into slaves if they were lucky, food for the gods if they weren’t.
Avery had done the right thing. He had.
And yet ...
The wrath of the gods is upon us, and I’m the one who incurred it.
What could he do to stop it? Would some samples of tissue really be enough?
He tossed and turned, trying to sleep, then trying to watch the lights dancing ghostily on his walls, flaring suddenly as a lance of lightning lit the whole aurora, making it shine like a luminous cloud. Avery had heard that the auroras could be deadly, that ships could vanish in them, that they could even drive men mad, but they were lovely to behold. Still, he found no solace in the display.
But I know where I can, don’t I?
He snorted. Then, not allowing himself to think about it, he threw on some clothes and slipped out the hatch. Making his way down the hall, he paused before Sheridan’s hatch, wondering what her thoughts on the Starfish were, wondering if she were awake, basking in her own righteousness or, perhaps, even mourning the many who had died today.
“Would you like to speak with the Admiral?” inquired the sailor assigned to watch Sheridan’s door.
Avery paused a moment more, then shook his head. “No. Thank you, no.”
He moved on, ascending two decks and coming, at last, to the bar.
Chapter 3
“I’m still having those strange dreams,” Ani said.
“Dreams?” Avery repeated, but he was thinking, Please, no. He and Ani were taking a walk on the outer deck, enjoying a little father-daughter time—or they had been.
“You remember, I told you,” she said. “There’s a door, a huge, crystal door, and I’m walking closer to it ... closer ... but I never seem to get there. And there’s weird sounds. Music. Bells. Singing, but creepy. And a heartbeat. A huge heartbeat.”
Avery thought of a monstrous heart that was all too familiar. “You’ve had this dream since you’ve been back with me?” He’d hoped her recurring nightmare would have faded after she left Octunggen custody.
“It’s coming more and more often.”
“It’s just stress,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just stress.” But inside he was unsure. No one had been through what she had before, and its possible implications frightened him deeply.
Suddenly, she brightened. “Look!” She ran to the gunwale, the boots of her environment suit clomping on the metal deck. “A squid!”
Something squirmed, white and ghostly against the stars. Crying in delight, Ani turned back to him, making sure he’d seen it—as if he could miss it. The great white translucent cephalopod floated almost serenely over the waters, its dangling tentacles drifting slightly behind it as it coasted over the bubbling, vapor-wreathed ocean, in a course that took it, Avery noted, perilously close to the ship.
&nbs
p; “I see it,” he told her, as a burst of lightning exploded upward with a great boom about a mile or so to starboard. He could see Ani’s pale, excited face through the glass of her face-plate for just a moment before she wheeled back to face the creature.
“She’s a big one,” Ani said.
They’d passed several other floating giants since leaving the Azad Islands three weeks ago—this was an active area for them, and getting more so by the day—but Avery had to agree; they had been puny compared to this one.
“Why do you think it’s a she?” he asked.
“Cause she’s so pretty.”
Avery had to smile. From a scientific point of view, the squids that prowled the skies over this region of the Atomic Sea (on the maps, this was known as the Verragazian Ocean) were certainly fascinating, quite a different species from the ones that had migrated over the Borghese months ago, longer and tapering, gracile and white, but, as far as he was concerned, the creature drifting toward them was a perfect horror: spectral, unnatural, and probably hungry.
Sure enough, scintillating particles floated down from it to alight on the sea, and the water began to churn where they struck.
“Ain’t she a beaut,” said Janx, approaching.
“She is,” Ani said. She pointed again, this time to the shining flakes drifting down from the squid toward the waters. “What’s that?”
Avery could see Janx start to answer, then ruefully close his mouth.
“Waste matter,” Avery said. “It emits waste, which attracts little fish that feed off it—”
“Eww.”
“—then bigger fish come to the surface to eat the little fish. Those—”
