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 reach 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.
