by Conner, Jack
The great beast screamed, a terrible bird-like shriek that sent chills through Avery’s body, but amazingly it did not release its grip on the ship nor stop causing destruction all about it.
Two pink-white tentacles shot toward the officer who had fired the flare and twisted him apart in a shower of blood that drenched half a dozen nearby men and women, then dropped the spurting chunks to the deck.
Avery heard cries from above and craned his neck to see that another squid had attached itself to one of the smokestacks. The animal had set about destroying the crow’s nest, presumably because it was an easy target, and hurling its pieces to the ground. Crew members screamed and scattered or were crushed. Satisfied with the nest’s obliteration, the squid launched itself off and resettled along the hull, where it bit and scraped and thrashed as if trying to tear away the hull itself.
The other two creatures attacked the ship as well as its crew. They weren’t powerful enough to destroy the Verignun, but they could cause it great injury, especially with their inexplicable mania—why would an animal persist in attacking even after having its eye shot out? Avery couldn’t make sense of it.
He didn’t grab a harpoon or assist in the fighting. He knew his talents better than that. He ran to the nearest downed person and aided the ship’s medical staff in seeing to him, then the other wounded. Many of the sailors’ suits had been ruptured, and they had to be rinsed immediately or risk infection from the sea. Avery helped carry one after another to the buffer rooms between the outside and the inside decks, stripped the men and women of suits and clothes, rinsed them off, then helped carry them to the medical bay, where he set bones, sewed up wounds and made sure those who had had arms and legs torn off did not bleed out. Many were too far gone to help, men and women with pieces missing in their sides or throats where the squids’ beaks had bitten them; they were doomed and the medical staff didn’t waste time on them. Avery sweated as he worked, patching up injuries and running IVs, jumping at the sound of screams and squiddy shrieks not far away.
At last he sensed the ship change course and looked up. The ship had been idling, but now he felt it start up again and veer to one side, then keep going. A complete reversal? After finishing up with a patient and having no more pressing business, he excused himself and made his way back to the bridge, where the captain, having returned to his post and removed his helm, wiped blood from a cut on his brow, glaring out at the night with wooden teeth clenched rigidly.
“Why are we turning about?” Avery said.
“See for yourself,” Capt. Greggory grunted and gestured vaguely behind them. Since he didn’t elaborate, and Avery couldn’t see what was behind the ship from here, he had little choice but to shrug on another environment suit (it was better to be safe than not, he supposed) and reemerge onto the deck. He staggered aft, where a small crowd had gathered at the stern. The squids had left, and Avery could see them slipping away like ghosts into the night—three of them, anyway. Perhaps one had been killed. Sure enough, he saw a pale, bloated body glimmering on the surface of the sea.
No, two ...
“Did a fifth squid attack?” he asked.
The nearest sailor shook his head. “We cut the squid mother lose.”
“Mother?”
Then Avery saw it, or part of it. “You mean the one Sheridan shot ... the one we tied alongside ... was about to lay a clutch?”
“Looks that way. One of the attackers ripped it apart and ate the eggs, what were left of ‘em.”
“‘What was left’? What about the rest?”
“Don’t know, but only a few were left. Anyway, we cut it loose, and they’ve gone.”
Avery stared at the two drifting bodies—one of the mother, one of an attacking squid the sailors had killed—then noticed something else, something beyond the gargantuan corpses: lights. Lights, far out at sea in the direction the ship had been going. The direction Sheridan had been headed.
“A ship,” he said.
“Not one of ours,” someone said. To Avery’s surprise, it was Janx. The big man had come out of his hole, drawn by the activity, though he looked gaunt, pale and sickly, and his gaze was tired when it met Avery’s. “Not Ghenisan. And there are other ships. See—there, and there.”
“What … ?”
“Remember the pirates being executed in Ethali, how they were just a sign of the times?”
Avery’s mouth went dry. “You can’t mean … ?”
“I’m afraid so, Doc. Looks like we’re tryin’ to outrun ‘em.”
Avery glanced at the wreck of the crow’s nest, realizing. “She called them. Somehow she knew how to get in contact with them, had them meet her here. She must have asked them for a squid-infested location.”
“Clever bitch, ain’t she?”
“And the squid eggs ...”
“She or one-a her helpers—looks like she recruited a couple bad boys, maybe promised ‘em places on the pirate ship; they were seen by Greggory’s people—well, one smeared the eggs on the hull."
"To draw in rival mother squids, yes." Avery knew the animals would turn berserker to destroy another mother’s clutch of eggs, even kill themselves doing it; squids were cannibalistic and in some species a mother would do anything to remove rival bloodlines and, simply, rivals. Sheridan had known the big squid was pregnant. That's why she had shot it, why she had gone out on deck despite it not being her turn outside; she’d been watching through her cabin porthole, waiting for just such a chance.
Light blazed to starboard—not an eruption of gas but something else.
“Gunfire,” Avery breathed.
Janx swore. “A ship’s guns, a few miles out.”
“Could it really be … pirates?” Avery just barely managed not to stutter.
Janx’s hands twisted about his harpoon. “They’re comin’ from different directions.”
“Yes, of course … She used the squids to delay our going after her—and distract us—while the pirates moved in.”
“They’re closin’ in fast.”
Chapter 5
Sailors and whalers poured out onto the decks in even greater numbers than during the squid attack, grabbing harpoons or guns. They weren’t military people, but they were armed. The ship even boasted two large guns, one fore and one aft; since the ship didn’t have a fleet to protect it from marauders, it had to provide its own defense. Usually pirates didn’t bother with whaling vessels, but prudence was wise.
“How many of them are there?” Avery asked, squinting into the night but unable to make out much what with all the lightning and assorted phenomena. “How many ships?”
A nearby sailor spoke up: “Half a dozen, easy.”
“Maybe more,” said another. Their voices were bleak. They must not think much of the Verignun’s chances.
The enemy bore down on her, each vessel different from the next. The two that possessed ship’s guns were mismatched, one a whaling ship not too dissimilar from the Verignun, one a small navy ship—not Ghenisan, Avery could tell. From its sinister black lines, he judged it to be Ysstral. The Verignun was outgunned and outnumbered. Avery could see no way those aboard it could escape or prevail.
Captain Greggory, scanning the enemy ships through binoculars from the foredeck, seemed to realize it, too. Avery could see the captain’s posture go stiff, and when he lowered the binoculars his face was visibly gray through his face-plate.
“Lay down your weapons, folks,” he called. “And then lay down yourselves. We’re surrendering.” The captain gave an order to a runner to have the engines stop, then sank to his knees and laid himself out on the deck.
The crew stared at him, then each other. The pirate ships closed in. More warning shots thundered over the bow. The ship slowed, then stopped. As if in a dream, the seamen lowered themselves to the deck, following their captain’s example. Janx threw down his harpoon and did the same, beckoning Avery to follow.
“Will they spare us?” Avery asked as he obeyed.
�
��That’ll depend on who’s leading them. Greggory gave us a shot, though. If they’d had to run us down, things could have only gone one way.”
As the pirates neared, the crew of one of their ships, the largest one—the stolen Ysstral warship—threw grappling hooks across and secured the Verignun against it. Pirates hurled gangplanks over, and tides of them streamed onto the Verignun’s decks. Every single one was a mutant, and none wore environment suits. Fish men, frog men, shark men, anemone men and hybrids, all covered in scars and ragged, often ill-fitting clothing.
“So they did it, after all, the dumb bastards,” Janx said. Avery waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.
The pirates secured the decks and began binding prisoners. As two began tying Avery’s hands, Layanna erupted from the interior of the ship, air seeming to explode around her, knocking all those nearby back.
Strange lights lit the area, and smells were born, died, and sounds like the roar of an alien ocean filled Avery’s ears. Layanna’s other-self emerged, her amoeba-facet, a great gelatinous mass, whitish and translucent for the most part, with just the hint of a definite shape. It pushed out, and out, tendrils like the limbs of starfish shoving toward the crowd, some tinted pinkish or orange or purple, with feelers or tentacles shooting from their tips, long and grasping and dexterous. They seized up the nearest half dozen pirates and hefted them screaming off the ground. One burst into fire. One melted and drizzled through the coils of her tentacle to the ground, where the remains steamed gruesomely. The rest she shoved through her semi-porous amoebic wall, and the acids filling up her interior, lit by bobbing organelles that shone with eerie light, reduced them quickly to bone, then not even that; she’d eaten them. Their dissolved flesh swirled about her sac like ghosts, like vapors, and in the midst of it all her human self floated several feet above the ground, eyes closed, face serene.
She was anything but. In a rage, Layanna set about the pirates, slaughtering them left and right.
Some fired at her. Most ran. She could kill them to a man, Avery thought, leaping from ship to ship until they were all dead or driven off. On land, she could only exist in this state for a few moments, as she needed energy from the sea, usually in the form of unprocessed seafood—or infected people—to sustain it, but here she could draw on the sea directly. What’s more, the pirates, all being mutants, would only feed her more. She might well be able to kill them all without reverting to her human form. Silently, Avery cheered her on. She can save us all!
A particularly large pirate stepped forward, his eyes watching her closely, but not in fear, Avery sensed, but something else—expectation? Eagerness? Avery noted the coordinated way the pirates ran from her, almost as if her coming had been anticipated.
“Now!” the large pirate said.
Four figures emerged onto the Ysstral warship deck bearing whips, whitish in color, each emitting a sort of electric hum. Steaming fluid dripped from their ends.
Holding the whips expertly, the four pirates stepped toward where Layanna was occupied with several others whom she’d backed against the stern gunwale.
“Layanna!” Avery shouted.
The pirate that had been about to tie him up punched him in the kidney instead, and Avery folded, his knees going out. He tasted bile in the back of his throat to mix with the blood from where he’d bitten his tongue. Layanna gave no sign of having heard his warning.
The four pirates with whips, having crossed to the Verignun, cracked their weapons as they came at her, and with each crack water droplets sizzled on the lashes. She didn’t see them until the first whip struck her. When it did, her whole amoebic body seized up, shuddering and glowing brightly, like a firefly. From the agonized look on her face, Avery could tell it was debilitating and painful. She began to turn and face the four, but another whip struck her, then another, and with each one she shuddered.
She reached out a tentacle toward one—
A whip blasted her. The tentacle collapsed.
She stretched out a second limb—
Again.
They had half fanned out around her, partly encircling her, whipping her from all sides. As each weapon fell she jerked and glowed, pain in her face. Her amoebic self began to shrink.
No, Avery thought. Anything but this.
Her other-self grew smaller and smaller.
With a sudden growl, Janx knocked one pirate down, then a second. He started sternward, maybe meaning to take on the four with the whips and free Layanna, but there were too many enemies between here and there. The nearest one whacked Janx’s lower legs with a harpoon shaft and sent him hurtling to the deck. Janx made a motion to get up, then was struck from behind and lay still, but breathing. Avery saw his eyes roll behind closed lids.
At the stern, Layanna’s amoebic self shrank until finally she wasn’t able to sustain it at all. It collapsed into her with a wet sucking noise, and she fell in a heap to the deck, gasping and sweating, fully human once more. She eyed the four pirates warily as they closed in, unable to lift so much as a hand in protest. Avery would have tried to go to her, but one pirate had him pinned by the shoulders while another tied his wrists behind his back. Another bound the semi-conscious Janx a few feet away.
The four with the whips didn’t strike Layanna now that she was human. Two grabbed her under the armpits—she needed no environment suit—and hauled her forward, toward where the large mutant now stood on the deck of the Verignun, not far from where Avery knelt. All around, sailors and whalers knelt similarly, hands bound behind their backs. Even as the outer decks were secured, other pirates made their way indoors to make safe the interior. Already pirates were singling out the women and dragging them, screaming and fighting, indoors. Men tried to stop them, but these were quickly beaten down. Ani, Avery thought wretchedly. Oh please gods don't let them find Ani. It was obvious from the grim, drawn expression on Janx’s face—he had woken—that he was having similar thoughts about Hildra.
The pirates who’d seized Layanna brought her before the mutant who had given the order to use the whips. He was a huge creature, clam-like, sickly and glistening, seemingly largely boneless. Only one of his legs appeared to have inner support; the other had been augmented with a wooden cane securely strapped to his whitish flesh. His nose-less, almost feature-less face made no expression as Layanna was presented to him, but his watery gray eyes held some emotion Avery couldn’t identify.
Avery realized that the pirates hadn’t attacked in order to take the ship. They had come for Layanna.
“What shall we do with you?” said the pirate captain, if that’s what he was, his speech thick and watery. He ran a hand through Layanna’s hair, leaving slimy trails wherever his thick, boneless fingers went.
“Leave her alone,” Avery said, struggling to his feet and stepping forward. The pirates nearest him grabbed him and coiled their arms to beat him, but the captain waved them off.
“You’re one of her compatriots, are you?” The captain turned his gray, fishy eyes on Avery.
“Aye, and so am I, Segrul, you bastard,” came a voice behind them, and Avery turned to see Janx climb to his knees.
“Can that ... Janx, is that you?”
The two seamen stared at each other across the deck. Fragments of mist and foam blew between them.
Segrul, if that was the pirate captain’s name, stumped forward, indicating that his subordinates should let Janx stand. “This is one of the finest reavers I ever crewed with,” he told them. “One of the finest captains I ever had under me. A sad day when we lost you, Janx.”
Avery glanced to Layanna. The exchange between the two men barely even seemed to register on her.
“Had no choice,” Janx said. “The whole fleet was goin’ mutie.”
“That’s the way things are, my friend.” Segrul clapped Janx on the shoulder with one gushy gray-white hand. “The Great Ones have laid claim to us.”
Two pirates dragged a kicking and cursing figure up to them—Hildra, swearing lividly behind t
he glass visor of her suit.
“We found this one in the same cabin we think she occupied,” one of the pirates said, indicating Layanna. “Otherwise we’d’ve put her with the others. They’re together.” He leered.
“Fuckwads,” Hildra spat. “Get off me!”
Avery could see the relief in Janx’s face.
“You worship the R’loth?” Avery asked, turning to the pirate captain—or admiral, perhaps.
Segrul appraised him. “I praise the gods of the deep, as any sensible man of the sea should, and I’ve had the great good fortune to be allowed to spread that faith among the worthy.”
Layanna blinked, coming around. “What now?” Her voice was rough, but life had returned to her eyes. “You’ve captured me. What do you intend to do with me?”
Segrul’s face grew as grave as it could look without any visible lines or features. “The Great Ones request you. The Great Ones shall have you.”
“How?”
“I’ve pledged to take you and yours to those who know better what to do with you.” He jerked his bulbous, blubbery head at his underlings. “Take them aboard and stow them away somewhere comfortable.”
His men obeyed, and Avery and his group were marched below the decks of the Ysstral warship, leaving Segrul and his lot to relish in their victory.
“What do you bastards think you’re gonna do with us?” Janx growled as coarse hands pushed them through tight, reeking corridors. Avery wondered how secure the interior of the pirate ship was from infection. The pirates didn’t seem to fear it, after all, and indeed it seemed a prerequisite for them, as it was for all worshippers of the R’loth these days. The pirates had stripped Janx, Hildra and Avery of their environment suits, and while Avery didn’t worry much for himself—he didn’t relish further mutation, but he would likely survive it—he did fear for Janx and Hildra. Of course, at the moment it looked doubtful that any of them would live long enough to die of infection in any case.
