One drone, KA-3388, had been cruising serenely along lower jet stream winds at an altitude of eighty-five thousand feet above the Kuril Island chain between lower Kamchatka and Hokkaido, Japan, when the drone’s sniffers caught a ‘whiff’ of emergency comms erupting out of Vladivostok, comms blanketing way too many frequencies to be normal traffic…almost some kind of panic response.
The algorithms that operated KA-3388’s sensors, electro-optical, all-azimuth electronic scanners, even olfactory and visual light spectrometers, twitched instantly with the first eruptions and fired off notifications to its base in the Mauna Loa Building along Ala Moana Boulevard. Mitchell put down her sushi box lunch for a second and studied the displays.
“My God…what’s this…is there a volcano going off or something?”
A quick perusal of the board showed that no volcanic activity had lit off KA-3388’s sensors, as sometimes happened on the orbits of these birds, owing to the fact that several volcanoes dotted Kamchatka and were known to burp and fart with tiresome regularity.
No, this was different and Mitchell quickly saw the signals were human, and they were coming from downtown Vladivostok, in fact around the harbor area.
Instinctively, she commanded the drone to alter course, change altitude to get out of the jet stream and head for the source.
Twenty minutes later, watching the harbor scene around the port of Vladivostok come steadily into focused view, Mitchell swallowed hard and forgot all about her sushi lunch.
Zooms of street level showed what could only be described as staggering levels of destruction.
Descending now to only a few thousand meters above the streets, easily avoiding Russian air-defense drones and defenses, KA-3388 streamed up and down street after street, following a pre-planned surveillance pattern Mitchell had initiated as the drone approached the city.
What she saw so stunned the operator that she almost forgot to make sure all this was being recorded for later play on one of Solnet’s channels.
“My God…what is this…somebody make a film or something—” she muttered. Mitchell commanded KA-3388 to drop lower, down to a hundred meters altitude and scoot along one of the boulevards…her nav window called it Svetlanskaya Street.
Now filling the view was one of the seamothers, trashing a kiosk of some kind, chewing off rooftops, knocking over a bus and demolishing storefronts, while in the distance, Russian marines backpedaled in retreat, firing wildly at the beast. For a moment, Mitchell was sure she was watching some kind of automated movie prop but the look of terror on the soldiers’ faces and the sheer scale of the destruction changed her mind.
“What on God’s green earth--?” she now made sure she was recording every nano-second of what the newsdrone was seeing. As she looked closer, she realized the huge lumbering beast was accompanied by strange-looking soldiers, advancing slowly along both sides of the street, discharging some kind of electrical weapons, setting off grenades that seemed deafen anyone and everyone around.
“The Sea People!” she realized. “The Sea People…they’re attacking…my God, look at that!” Mitchell had seen a closeup of one of the Ponkti prodsmen clad in full mobilitor, looking for all the world like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, as it waddled and stumbled down the street. She quickly realized there were others; she counted four in view at the moment. Mitchell pressed a button, summoning her supervisor. Moments later, Herb Calin poked his head inside the room.
“Got your alert…what’s up?”
Mitchell showed him the feed from KA-3388. The super hit his head on the door jamb, he was so startled. Calin came in and squatted next to her, transfixed by the scene.
“We need to go live with this, Karen…I’ll notify Ops Two and get us a channel pronto—”
“And another drone, if you can, Herb. There’s more going on around the ferry landing.”
Unseen by either reporter, Major Desyanov had retreated to the armory building when the first seamother appeared on Alexandrovsky Street. He unlocked the command post and went to a special comm station, connecting in seconds with Theater Command Headquarters in Nakhodka, about twenty kilometers to the south. After shouting obscenities at the bull-headed duty sergeant, Desyanov was able to find a duty officer with enough rank to get some air support into the area.
The officer promised two Antonov transporters in less than an hour. “Fully armed, full complement of Su-44 autodrones…that’s seventy-two in all. Is that sufficient, Major? I’ll have to clear this with General Smolny, you know.”
Desyanov wanted to reach into the phone and strangle the lot of them at Theater. “Lieutenant, I don’t care if you have to ask your mother and your great aunt, just get me those drones…get them into the air right now! We’re pinned down by...I don’t know what the hell they are, exactly. Sea People, I assume. They’re decimating my men and the harbor police aren’t helping…they’ve vanished, the cowards. There are beasts the size of buildings stalking the Embankment and port area and ground troops with weapons we can’t hold up against…sound grenades, electric something-or-others…just get me air support, damn you!”
Moments later, two lumbering Antonov four-engine transports were winging their way north from Spassk Dalniy airfield toward the port of Vladivostok.
Appearing half an hour later in partly cloudy skies directly above Russkiy Island and the Golden Horn Bay, the Antonovs soon established themselves in tight circular orbits about the port complex, after ascertaining that there were no aerial threats to their arrival. Each Antonov then cycled open several bay doors in its belly, disgorging scores of the autodrones, each of which looked like flying mantas, each armed with four air-to-ground missiles, a fully-charged railgun and a fully primed particle beam weapon under its nose.
The autodrones swarmed into formation and tasted thermal emissions from the combat zone below them, now partially enveloped in smoke from dozens of fires and burning vehicles. Autonomous in operation yet now linked into swarm formation, the drones dropped down to engagement altitude and raked the streets with missile and beam fire, crisscrossing the area in a complex attack pattern derived from algorithmic analysis of the evolving threat on the ground.
One seamother was hit immediately, and fell to her sides, mortally wounded, bleeding from dozens of wounds, her hind legs nearly shot off, her spiked tail slamming the ground in waves of pain. The creature waggled and twitched, bellowing forlornly and keeled over on her side, expiring her final ragged breaths in a bloody froth of air.
Behind the dying beast, Loptoheen sensed the presence of a new threat above them…noting the high-freq whine of the drones as they buzzed the column of Ponkti prodsmen and raked the streets with concentrated fire. It was clear that they had done all they could do. Lektereenah’s orders were simply to teach the Tailless a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget.
Loptoheen halted their advance, took cover in the shadow of a great marble and bronze statue and sized up the tactical situation. The plaque at the base of the statue read “Memorial to the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East,” but Loptoheen didn’t know that. He cared only for completing their mission and getting his fighters out of the Tailless city safely, with minimal casualties. Already they had lost one seamother and Potop was several blocks back, severely wounded, perhaps already dead.
This is far enough, he decided. We’ve done enough damage to get their attention. Loptoheen liked to compare things to tuk matches. This assault reminded him of a classic spear and slash move all tuk’te learned from a young age; the Ponkti word was shook’rok, meaning beak to tail. You used shook’rok when your opponent was quick, maybe too quick and left himself vulnerable to countermoves.
Shook’rok was what Loptoheen figured they had done to the Tailless in this city.
“Prodsmen, fall back!” he ordered over the signaler circuit. The whistles went out, over the sound of roofs crashing and drones buzzing and prods zapping and the remaining soldiers halted their slow advance and turned about. Building by building,
using whatever cover they could find from the autodrones overhead, the Ponkti began a slow but steady tactical retreat, back to the port.
“What about the Sk’ort?” someone asked.
Loptoheen let a drone whiz by and wheel off into the sky, before scooting as fast as he could to another pile of storefront rubble. “Yaktu has his orders from Okeemah, same as we have from our own Metah. He does what he does. As for us, we fall back to the sea.”
And slowly, building by building, the Ponkti did just that, eventually reaching the Embankment and the ferry piers with no further casualties. They had to leave Potop behind, but Telspo retrieved the signaler and Potop’s prod before clicking goodbyes over the prostrate form of his fallen comrade.
The Sk’ort were nowhere to be seen and Kasmik opined they had already perished in the autodrone assault from the air.
“Notwater…” he spat, as they assembled at the end of the pier, measuring the distance of the drop down to their kip’ts, which rode at the surface like drunken turtles. “I don’t wish to see it again…in my life. Notwater is for animals and beasts, not for me.,”
“Or me,” agreed Kasmik, adjusting his mobilitor to lift him above the wooden planks and lower him to the water.
With that, the remnants of the Ponkti squad disappeared below the waves and boarded their kip’ts. Loptoheen guided them along the bed of the harbor and out to open sea.
They were silent for awhile, wondering about the fate of the second seamother, and their Skortish comrades.
“Only Shooki knows,” Loptoheen told them. “Maybe now, the Tailless will leave us alone…let us re-build Ponkel’te and live our lives in these cursed waters.”
Telspo was thoughtful. “It was better back home, wasn’t it…in our seas? In the Ponkel sea, where you could actually taste the waters and breathe free…riding the Pul’kel ridge on swift currents…I can pulse it now.”
“Save it,” Loptoheen decided. “We have a long ride home. And Lektereenah will want a report. Get me an echopod…we need to put down everything we saw and did. Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of the Tailless.”
The UNISEA director was sitting on the edge of his chair, in his thirty-fifth floor residence at the Secretariat Building, watching the vid from Solnet, nearly spilling his drink, when his wristpad chirped. Keko Satsuyama lost control of the wineglass as he was answering the call.
It was Dr. Josey Holland, from Woods Hole. It was late…or early, depending on your perspective…just shy of four a.m. When Satsuyama saw the caller was Holland, he pressed REC immediately. That’s when the Cabernet spilled all over the carpet. He ignored it. Oscar the housebot would clean it up.
Holland’s face was lined with worry…and lack of sleep, from the looks of her.
“Did you see it, Keko…the vid from Russia? The Seomish have attacked…it’s still going on now!”
Satsuyama had been watching nothing else for the last hour, as the newsdrone feed went live all over the world, overlaid with commentary from Solnet reporters and special contributors from Washington to London to Moscow.
“I’ve been watching. We’ll have to convene a special meeting, first thing in the morning…I guess it’s already morning now. The Council has some decisions to make.”
Holland was distraught. “This is terrible, what’s happening. How could they do something like this? Don’t they realize stunts like this only make it harder? All they’ve done is given the military and the scare-mongers more ammunition. Now, it’ll be a hundred times harder to sit down and talk things out.”
Satsuyama agreed, turning for a moment to gratefully accept another glass of that rather bland Sauvignon from Oscar. “Agreed. We do have that signaler device your friend Chase gave us, but it’s at my office downstairs. Maybe it’s time to activate it…try to meet with them before the Sea Council descends into hysterics, which will surely happen by midday at the latest.”
Both of them paused a moment to listen to the voice from the Solnet feed….
“…are reporting now that elements of Russian marines and other coastal troops are advancing on the port now…steadily shrinking the pocket in which the Sea People seem to be trapped. There have been unconfirmed reports of street-to-street fighting and additional serpent-like beasts coming from Golden Horn Bay, or at least being sighted, but these are not yet substantiated. However, it does seem to our expert commentators that Russian air support—the National Air Defense Force, in Russian PVO Strany, the autodrones and their covering fire—have turned the tide and it seems to be only a matter of time before the Russian authorities take full control of—”
The Solnet reporter went on, but Satsuyama ignored it and went back his vid call with Holland. “Dr. Holland, I’m going to activate the signaler immediately. I’m not sure what will happen, but we have to get ahead of events, or the whole matter will spiral out of control and we’ll be helpless to affect anything.”
“We need to have a meeting with the Seomish right away,” Holland agreed.
Satsuyama signed off and took a lift downstairs to his twentieth-floor office. He unlocked the cabinet where the device Chase had given him was located. It looked like an enlarged egg. The Director felt for the slight bumps on the bottom. Press the middle one, Chase had told him. Press it three times.
Satsuyama didn’t pretend to understand how the signaler worked…something about ultra-low frequency sounds or something like that and he didn’t care about anything but whether it worked. He picked up the device and thumbed the small button…three times.
Then he sat down at his desk to work out a list of talking points…and details of the speech he knew he would have to make to the Sea Council…explaining why they were meeting at all with murderers and butchers.
Tulcheah had come for Chase while he was helping a small Omtorish em’kel re-build a small gathering of huts for them to live in. The building material was a mix of tchin’ting fiber net and small chunks of volcanic tuff. Somebody in Likteek’s lab had found a way of carving and shaping the tuff, after it had been quarried, into brick-like blocks and so the huts had begun to resemble gray-black igloos to Chase. The em’kel was grateful for the attention of a celebrity like the Kel’metah. For his part, Chase was just glad to be doing something to help out, something other than trying to act as a referee between kels.
That’s when Tulcheah had shown up.
“Roam with me, o’ great Kel’metah. I found some sweet waters not far from here.”
Chase had never been able to say no to Tulcheah.
They headed away from Keenomsh’pont, past the outer bubble curtains and the nearer repeaters into deeper waters. Presently, the seabed began to flatten out, becoming sandier and less rocky and starting sloping upward. Chase knew from his study of the local topography that they were approaching the Bermuda Platform.
“Look!” Tulcheah exclaimed. She indicated a thick school of fish swerving in unison back and forth ahead of them, darting forward as if they were a single body. They were a blur in their motions, but Chase realized they were witnessing Atlantic blue marlin in a vast school, with their spear-shaped beaks and long dorsal fins, hundreds of them in formation.
“Beautiful…just look at them!” Tulcheah admired their form and speed. “Like they’re bred for this. They roam so well it looks like a single creature—like our vish’tu, except for all the jostling and the arguments. Come on…let’s follow them!”
Before Chase could object that there was no way they could keep up, Tulcheah had surged forward and caught up to the rear of the school. She snapped left, then right, then left again, closing right up into the tail of the school, seemingly effortless in her athletic strokes.
With a sigh and a grunt, Chase lit off his own water jets—devices Likteek’s engineers had devised, adapted from the annular flagella of the Seomish scapetfish—and sped after her, surprising even himself that he was able to close the distance.
One thing all Seomish loved was the roam. The echopod definition came to his m
ind as he fell in next to Tulcheah, words he had practically memorized…
…”One of the oldest customs of the Seomish, the vishtu or companionship roam, is very much in the traditions of Ke’shoo and typically involves two people although there is no set number. Roams can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, even longer, with the average being a few hours. Debate and talk is usually discouraged during the roam in order to let the physical beauty of the landscape work its magic. Often a prelude to some intense, emotionally draining activity, such as sexual intercourse, the fine points and protocol of a roam are learned by Seomish at an early age…”
The two of them stroked along, barely keeping up with the fleet of marlin, through waters salty and strange, and Chase was amused that after awhile, their unwilling fellow roamers seemed to accept them and even opened up a small gap for he and Tulcheah to enter…if they could keep up.
For many minutes, Chase let the jets do the work and concentrated on steering and maintaining proper separation…a few times, he butted into the rear caudal of a nearby marlin, which scree’ed and chittered and moved aside, annoyed for a moment.
He was enjoying the symmetry and the rhythm and even the poetry of so many silvery-blue bodies all moving as one when something, some unexpected movement, caught his eye…to his left. Some kind of collision had occurred, a bad one and the chaos radiated outward like a spreading wave.
What the--?
Chase and Tulcheah both slowed down and dropped out of the roam, while the main body sped on. They saw the problem right away.
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