Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Nile nodded comprehendingly. Of the myriads of creatures that crawled, walked and swam among the fire forest’s branches and over the ooze, almost all were completely harmless from the viewpoint of a man in underwater armor. But a few species were far from harmless. As she looked, the beam-gun made an abrupt half-turn, following something which slithered rapidly through the fringes of darkness overhead, vanished upward into the gloom again without attempting to descend.

  She felt a brief inward shudder. One glimpse of that flattened, rubbery twenty-foot disk had been enough to identify it—a cloakfish, a rather small one but quite large enough to be an immediate menace to any member of the nidith harvesting gang outside of the ships. The cloakfish ordinarily were found clinging to the walls of the ocean rifts they inhabited, grinding into the rock with the multiple sets of jaws lining their undersides to get at a variety of burrowing wormlike creatures within. But they put no strict limitation on their diet, frequently attacked divers on sight, and had been known to saw open a deep-water suit in less than a minute.

  Parrol turned away, motioned with his head. She wasn’t sure what he intended but guessed he wanted to follow the edge of the shelf to a point on the right where a cluster of luminants rose high enough to let them drop into the lower section of the Rift without being detected by the guard riding the beam-gun. She nodded agreement, followed as Parrol wound his way through the thicket, moving parallel to the open slope.

  As they approached the stand of tall growth, a curious thudding sensation reached Nile through the water, followed within seconds by another. She puzzled over that a moment, decided that beam-guns stationed on the far side of the harvesters had opened fire on some assailant. The gang probably had been at work here for a week or two; by now the area would be swarming both with cloakfish and with other predators gathered to feed on cloaks the guns had crippled or killed.

  Predators such as that twenty-foot snake shape which came eeling up over the edge of the shelf a few yards away! It might have picked up their scent in the water, for it darted at her instantly, jaws yawning wide.

  Nile wasn’t quite sure how it happened. She had pulled back slightly as the head struck past. Immediately afterwards, her legs were clamped about the slick, sinuous body, her arms locking her against it—

  And her teeth were sunk into the thing! Not simply biting, but digging, slashing, cutting deeper through slimy hide that should have turned a knife, tearing the hide away and returning instantly to slice at unprotected flesh. The thicket of red luminants whirled about her, then open water; the section of snake body she gripped was knotting and twisting with monstrous strength. Bottom silt exploded in a dense cloud as they struck into it. For a moment, lifted high above her, she saw the thing’s head, great jaws snapping wildly, Parrol leeched to its neck.

  Those were blurred, remote impressions. The only clear impressions were the savage hunger that blazed up in her as the creature drove at them and the horrified delight with which she was satisfying it in quickly gulped bites of salty flesh until—almost as suddenly as it had awakened—the hunger feeling was gone. It was like a fog clearing from her mind.

  She pushed away from the snakelike thing. It was still writhing, but for all practical purposes it was dead. The big head flopped loosely, seemed half torn from the body. They appeared to have rolled into the tall stand of luminants in the lower section of the Rift for which she had thought Parrol was heading when the creature attacked. Parrol floated a few yards away, looking at her. Nile glanced up the length of the sea thing again and saw that he had been feeding, too. His response must have been as immediate and violent as hers—they’d had their guns within reach and made no attempt to use them!

  She looked at the mangled beast and tried to feel disgust for what had happened. But there was no disgust. Her changed body had demanded nourishment, and meeting the demand had been a wholly agreeable experience. When the hunger surge rose again, she would feed it again.

  Three or four generations of children in the shallows settlements, Parrol thought, must have had stories of Nandy-Cline’s sea hags recounted to them by their elders. In the version he had heard when very young, the sea hags were anthropomorphic ogres who lived in the depths of the ocean but came to the surface for the specific purpose of eating small boys who swam out farther than grownups thought they should go. The legend was supposed to have been created by the sledmen who had settled to live on the ocean world fifty or sixty years before the first Hub colonists arrived.

  It seemed it hadn’t been entirely a legend. When the sledmen began to follow the fraya packs, an uncounted number of them would have come unknowingly into contact with the chalot spores and undergone this weird transformation—some to be slaughtered by their horrified companions when they climbed back on the sleds, maddened by the change hunger, others meeting death in one form or another in the rifts and trenches where the chalot grew, their disappearance charged off to the giant predators that prowled the breeding grounds during the season. The last such occurrence—before this—might lie many decades in the past. The sledmen nowadays regarded it as extremely bad luck to swim about in rift waters when the frayas bred and carefully refrained from it, although they weren’t aware of the specific danger that had created the superstition.

  At the moment, however, the sea hag shape was the one great advantage he had. And he couldn’t have asked for a better companion than another of those watery bogy-men beside him, controlled by Nile Etland’s intelligence. Flattened out and buried to the eyes in flowing ooze, they were edging forward toward a group of tall, golden luminants standing some thirty feet back of the guard on the floating beamgun. These were plant-animals with some rudimentary intelligence, known to students of the fire forest fauna as starbursts. For several more minutes they remained undisturbed, the clusters of tentacle arms at their tips fanning the water with slow, rhythmic motions.

  Then, on the far side of the group, one individual began to move off toward the beam-gun. While it was capable of gliding slowly along the ooze on the widened base of its stem, it was not moving of its own volition now but being half carried, half pushed through the silt. The starburst was in a state of considerable agitation. Its tip had opened out into something like an inverted umbrella, and from the edges of this hood the gleaming tentacles flailed anxiously through the water.

  Parrol let it down suddenly, jabbed Nile. Both settled a little deeper into the silt. The gun was swinging around toward them, then stopped, pointing in their general direction. The guard’s face couldn’t be seen behind the headpiece of his suit, but presumably he was staring a little suspiciously at the starburst. He might not remember how close the luminant had been to him, but the disturbed silt behind it indicated it had been moving.

  However, it had stopped its advance now; and in spite of a vague resemblance to a fifteen-foot golden squid standing on end, starbursts were known to be utterly inoffensive creatures. The guard swung the gun around again, facing the nidith bed, to watch for cloakfish.

  Parrol gripped the starburst, began climbing to his feet, lifting it clear of the mud. Nile rose with him. Together, in a plodding rush, they carried the writhing luminant up behind the guard. Its top end tilted forward and down, and an instant later the upper part of the guard’s suit was enclosed in the widespread hood and thrashing arms of the alarmed creature. He was jerked out of the gun’s saddle, pulled down into the ooze, the starburst knotting itself about him and clinging with grim desperation.

  Parrol was immediately in the saddle, gripping the steering bar, while Nile swung herself into the lower part of the framework and found handholds there. The beamgun swung around, darted off toward the rocky slope leading to the shelf from which they had come, up along it. Looking back, Nile saw guard and starburst roll together into another cluster of luminants where the entangled pair created considerable disturbance. No doubt the guard already was broadcasting his predicament over the suit communicator, but several minutes would pass before anyone could get over fro
m the subs to release him.

  A few hundred yards beyond the edge of the shelf, Parrol turned the gun’s snout up, steering it into the darkness pressing down toward the Rift’s floor. They would assume back there that the guard had inadvertently knocked over the acceleration switch when he was hauled out of the seat by his strange attacker, and that the gun was now roaming about the Rift on its own. It was unlikely that they’d waste any time trying to find it again.

  The magic gleamings of the fire forest faded below and the ocean night closed in. Parrol slowed the gun’s ascent, checked their position carefully in the green glow of the instrument panel. Nile came clambering up, groped through the gun’s tool pockets, pulled a spotlight out of one, a heavy-duty UW handgun out of another. She settled down on the edge of the panel, and Parrol heard a click through the water as she readied the gun. Cloakfish were welcome to show up any time now!

  They exchanged sea hag grins, which somehow no longer seemed at all grotesque. Now they had the beam-gun, there were several courses of action open. It wasn’t merely a matter of trying to stay alive long enough to find out whether a human body which had undergone the chalot change could survive when the effect of the spores wore off. They should, Parrol thought, be able to do much better than that.

  The nidith gang believed them drowned near the surface. The Attris wouldn’t have opened fire on the PanElemental if they hadn’t known who was in it and known, too, that if they disposed of Nile and Parrol their secret should still be safe. Which meant that Ilium Weldrow had succumbed to the big-money lure of the drug outfit, along with Captain Mace and the rest of the Attris crew. The assistant manager had been the logical one to buy to keep Giard from interfering with the operation. When the time came, he’d passed along the word that Parrol and Nile Etland had picked up the trail and were on their way to the Tuskason Rift to confirm their suspicions.

  He and Nile almost had got killed because they hadn’t thought of that possibility. But as a result, the nidith harvesters now felt secure and were open in turn to surprise attacks. Parrol steered the beam-gun up slowly, constantly checking his position and alert for signs of physical discomfort in himself or Nile. Others had returned alive to the surface in the sea hag form, long ago, but there were too many uncertainties about that to be at all hasty in their ascent. After a minute or two, Nile leaned forward, shaking her head, and moved the acceleration switch over. The gun surged upward. Parrol glanced at her, decided to go along with her judgment. He kept watching the depth gauge. When it showed them at a point four hundred feet below the surface, he halted the gun, brought it into a horizontal position, turning it slightly. The target-light above the muzzle stabbed out, disclosed a section of the Rift wall. Parrol played the beam up and along the wall. It sloped away here at an angle which indicated they might be approaching the top of the Rift.

  Eighty feet farther up they were there. A dark sea floor stretched away before them to rise through a series of shelves toward the barely submerged shallows five miles to the east. Parrol began moving the machine horizontally back along the edge of the drop-off. When he stopped it again, it was at a point he calculated to be immediately above the submarine harvesters in the nidith bed.

  Here might be the opportunity to strike the most telling blow of all. Nile knew by now what he was looking for. When he started forward again, gliding in slowly across the sea floor, she was leaning far out over the panel, head shifting this way and that, as she followed the sweep of the target-light. Suddenly she lifted a hand—

  And this could be it, Parrol thought, excitement surging in him. A vertical dark ridge, some fifty feet high, perhaps three hundred yards up the sloping floor. The surface behind it was smooth, flat, level with the top of the ridge—a lake of sediment and sand, drifted down from the upper shelves, blocked off from the Tuskason Rift by a wall of rock.

  A few minutes later, he was sure of it. He backed the gun away twenty yards, set the energy beam to full power, flicked it on. Something smashed into the ridge, began to move along it, water and rock boiling off in thick clouds at its touch. The gun bucked and danced as shock waves poured back at it. Parrol cut the beam, rode back another twenty yards, turned it on again. Now the gun was steady. The beam ate a fifty-foot gash slowly across the face of the ridge, returned along it.

  A little over half the gun’s charge was spent when the upper section of the ridge at last toppled ponderously forward. A river of mud and sand spilled down through the opening, flowed along the sea floor to the edge of the Rift, rolled thickly into it . . .

  Enough there, Parrol thought, watching the dark slop stream by beneath the swaying gun, more than enough, to bury not only the harvester stationed against the wall, but the two other ships in the nidith bed with it. And burying any one of them with a nidith load on board was all that was necessary. Some of the divers outside might get away if they moved fast enough. The rest of the work gang was caught. They’d live because ships and suits were designed to preserve life even under the smashing blow of a deep-water muck avalanche; but they’d stay exactly where they were until somebody came along to dig them out.

  V

  On the surface above the Tuskason Rift the cropper tender Attris rode the long, slow swells, anchor engines humming. Duse had set, and cloud banks were spread over half the night sky. To the north and west, fog was forming. For most of the past hour, the ship’s communicator had been babbling excitedly. The Attris’ captain looked distracted and harried.

  From the edge of one of the nearby herds of pelagic croppers a single machine began moving toward the west, slowly at first but increasing speed as it drew farther away from the Attris.

  Thirty minutes later, the wandering cropper reached a point eight miles west of the tender. In the Attris’ chase-plane an automatic buzzer woke the pilot. He looked up at the glowing location chart above his bunk, saw the flashing red dot at the fringe of the eight-mile circle, swore sleepily, climbed out of the bunk and got on his direct line to the tender.

  “What do you want?” his skipper’s voice inquired hoarsely.

  “Got a stray showing,” the pilot began. “I—”

  “Go after it, stupid! You know things are supposed to look right around here!” The line went dead.

  The pilot scowled, yawned, sat down at the controls. The chase-plane slithered past the bow of the Attris, lifted into the air. Within a few minutes it was hovering above the cropping machine. The pilot directed an override beam at the cropper’s engine shed, twisted the override control knobs and discovered that the cropper’s automatic steering mechanisms were not responding. He muttered in annoyance. He’d have to reset them manually.

  He brought the plane down, tethered the cropper to it, walked along a planking to the machine shed, opened the door and stepped inside. An instant later, there was a wild screech from within the shed, then a brief, violent splashing in the water beneath it. That ended, was followed presently by deep, croaking noises with odd overtones of human speech.

  A sea hag appeared in the door of the shed, the unconscious and half-drowned pilot slung across its shoulder. Another hag came out behind it. They were breathing air with apparent difficulty, but they were breathing. The first one climbed into the plane with the pilot. The other detached the cropper, kicked it off, and joined its companion.

  The plane swung about, rose from the surface and sped away, due west.

  Shortly before daybreak, heavy fog rolled in over the shore ranches of the continental coast, drifted inland. The Giard Pharmaceuticals Station was thickly blanketed by it. Inside, most sections of the station were dark and deserted. But Parrol’s office was lit; and in it a bulky figure with a grotesquely ugly, gray-mottled head, encased in a cloaklike garment which appeared to have been cut in haste out of a length of canvas, was painstakingly at work before a stenog machine. The screen above the machine showed the enlargement of a lengthy coded message. A number of minor deletions and revisions were being produced in it now. Finally, the cloaked shape switched of
f the machine. The screen disappeared, and a bloated-looking gray forefinger pushed at a tab on the side of the stenog. Two cards covered with microprint popped out on the table. The figure picked them up, glanced at them, came heavily to its feet.

  From the open door to the office, a harsh, roughened voice, which nevertheless was recognizably the voice of Nile Etland, said, “I was finally able to contact Freasie, Dan. She’s on her way to the hospital to set things up. Thirty minutes from now, we’ll be able to get in quietly any time by the service entrance.

  Nobody but Freasie and Dr. Tay will know we’re there or what condition we’re in.”

  Parrol said, “Half an hour is about what it should take here.” His voice was as distorted as hers but also recognizable. “I’ll tell Fiawa, of course, that we’ll be at the hospital.”

  “Yes, he should know.”

  “Did you explain to Freasie what happened?”

  “Not in detail.” Nile came into the room. She, too, wore a makeshift cloak covering everything but her head yet not adequately concealing the fact that the body beneath it was a ponderous caricature of her normal shape. “I told her we picked up the infection that hit the sea beef herds, and that when she sees us we’ll look as if we’d been dead and waterlogged for the past two weeks.”

  Parrol grunted. “Not a bad description! We were prettier as deepwater sea hags than in this half-way state!”

  “Do you still seem to be swelling?”

  He held up his deformed fingers, studied them. “Apparently. I don’t believe they looked as bad as that half an hour ago. I also feel as if most of my innards were being slowly pulled apart.”

  “I have that, too,” Nile said. “I’m afraid we may be in for a very unpleasant time, Dan. But we definitely are changing back.”

  “Trying to change back?”

  “Yes. No way of knowing exactly what will happen. But the sea beef may have been able to reverse the process successfully. Perhaps we can, too. And perhaps we can’t.” She looked across the room to an armchair in which the chase-plane pilot sprawled. His clothing, the chair, and the carpet beneath were soaked with water, and his eyes were closed. “How’s our trigger-happy friend doing?”