“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.
