Minutes later a radar operator announced, “Picking up another big ceph, sir.”
“And another,” said a second, voice tight.
The first one Avery had seen through the forward windows had vanished for the moment, but every now and then it would reappear, and Avery noticed it had seemed closer with every pass. As if to confirm his fears, one of the operators said, “They’re circling, sir. Three of them.”
“Four,” said another.
“Their circles are getting tighter ...”
Strangle the bitch, indeed. “Hang on to something,” Avery said.
The first squid struck. It hit the whaling ship hard, and the whole vessel rocked to starboard as if a god had belted it with a fist. Avery, who had already been reaching for an overhead pipe, almost missed his grip, but he seized one at the last moment and held on tight while the others in the cabin tottered, stumbled or fell. The captain swore as he braced himself against a console.
“What the fucking—?”
The second squid struck. Then the third launched its assault. The ship rocked violently with each impact, and Avery’s grip was loosened so that he was flung hard against a bulkhead, cracking his head. Sparks danced before his eyes. Strength ebbed from his arms, and it was all he could do to remain upright. He was just stretching out his hand for a grip on a nearby console when the fourth animal hit.
The impact dashed Avery to the floor. He bit his lip and tasted blood on his tongue. From all over the ship came screaming. Spitting, Avery rose to his feet and grabbed a handhold on another pipe.
The captain was slamming on a helmet and grabbing a harpoon from a rack near the closest hatch.
“You’re going outside?” Avery said.
“I’ll kill every last damned one of these fucking cephs and then I’ll run that bitch down, see if I don’t.” Gregory stormed out, banging the hatch closed behind him.
Avery watched him go, then turned to the helmsman. “He’s mad,” Avery said, and the helmsman’s face tightened.
“Watch what you say about the captain, mutie.”
Avery narrowed his eyes. Sucking it up, he crossed to the wall and grabbed an environment suit of his own.
As always, the might of the Atomic Sea shocked him. Lightning blasted up from all sides, and the sea pitched and flung itself against the ship, then dashed it, threatening the vessel with every heave and swell. Thunder boomed, and deadly bubbles burst from the valleys between crests. Strange beings stirred in the waters, agitated by the chaotic night. Sheridan was truly crazy to be out there in this—crazy or desperate.
Whalers and regular sailors alike swarmed the decks, clutching harpoons or shotguns. Avery fought to maintain his feet, lurching to the gunwale to clip his safety line into place. Around him others did the same.
Not thirty feet down the deck, the first squid’s tentacles squirmed and coiled, clutching up sailors who ventured too close and squeezing them to paste or flinging them overboard, where their lines snapped them up and dashed them against the hull of the ship, probably breaking their spines. Sailors and whalers both stabbed it with harpoons or blasted it with shotguns. One tall officer aimed carefully with what looked like a pistol and very deliberately fired. A bright, burning red light shot out from the gun—a flare—and embedded in the squid’s right eye.
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?”
