Plugging into his console, Norton contacted Felix. “Come on, son. Time for a game now."
Felix tired. Felix go night-night.
"You can nap later. Why don't we play catch?"
Felix not got ball.
"That's right, you haven't. But you do have a dart you can throw. A nice big dart you can aim at a big white balloon. Can you remember how to throw?"
Norton paused his internal systems, the robotic equivalent of holding one's breath. Felix was the crux of his scheme. If the damaged computer brain's memory loss was too far advanced, the missile instantly became scrap metal.
Yes dada. Felix members.
"Good boy."
Dog intruded, stating the obvious again. “The fact remains, without the satellite's guidance beam painting the target the “miss” in missile will prevail."
"Sarcasm disguises low self-esteem."
"Or a superior wit. And I refer to cleverness, not humour."
"In that case, I outwit you,” Norton cheerily said. “The airmail package I'm sending to the Landhoppers has a Circular Error Probable of three hundred and twenty feet."
"A respectable margin of impact error,” lauded Dog.
"Damn right. The warhead will hit and explode within one hundred yards of the target zone. The hurricane's eye is what, nearly thirty miles across? If I can get the missile inside the eyewall, the blast will lay utter waste to that devil island. The hurricane will then finish off the job with a bit of spit and polish."
"There are no certainties involved in your equation, Norton. Only imprecise variables."
"Sometimes, Dog, you just have to leave things to chance."
"Luck is not computable."
"Gamblers would disagree. Felix, let's go take a punt."
* * * *
The launch was spectacularly uneventful.
It was appropriately enough a “cold” launch. The missile was fired clear of its iceberg silo by a high-pressure gas generator ejecting the round to the sea's surface, whereupon its rocket motor ignited, flaming the arctic air. External cameras and sensors recorded for Norton's benefit the missile erupting into life and shooting skywards, fast receding into an indistinct, uncoloured plume of white soon lost against the limitless firmament.
The mail was on its way.
* * * *
Flat on his back, Durgay stared woozily up at a vivid blue sky oddly bereft of clouds and rain. The attendant Shurpeha packing the stump in wet sand staunched the blood flow from his chopped tail end. But the amateurish first-aid effort had not stemmed enough blood loss to prevent Durgay's light-headedness, dampening his throbbing pain and easing his discomfort.
He was dying and accepted that inevitability as easily as drawing his next, calming breath. What the Landhoppers did to his body now was irrelevant. Durgay was lifting beyond physical hurt, even mental anguish. The blue sky beckoned him, a celestial ocean grander and serener than any water-bound seas he had swum.
There is a god, of sorts.
Durgay's epiphany coalesced into his fading awareness with gentle appreciation. There was no hammer blow of revelation, no crusade to quantify the meaning of his existence in religious terms. Here, at the ending of his life, Durgay found comprehension rather than salvation. God could not be defined in merman expressions of belief. Norton showed the Fisher the folly of trusting to blind faith.
No, for Durgay the concept of god took on a broader, less complicated meaning. Life was God. The realisation was that simple, that pure.
All around him life mushroomed, powering the planet. The sea heaved incessantly with energy, the restlessness of the oceans mirrored in the perpetual turbulence of the skies. Not alive in the strictest sense, these twin environmental powerhouses were the pulse of the planet on which ultimately all organic life depended. Planet Earth would be a barren and sterile rock without these natural, terraforming forces at play.
Life perpetuated life in an unbroken circle. Deifying an entity to explain, perhaps manipulate, the inexplicable forces in the universe could be broken down into simply worshipping the perplexing and enduring mystery that was life itself.
My eyes are opened. How could I have not seen this before?
Durgay shuddered from his heightened sense of being.
I am the master of my own destiny.
Three times chosen. This is how he thought of himself at the beginning of these, his final moments.
Lasbow had chosen him as escort for Princess Lorea on that fateful swim to Lunder Atoll.
Najoli had chosen him as protector and lover on her quest for Nupterus.
Norton, the real Sea God, had chosen him to put an end to the bane of the Cetari.
But had not Durgay made those journeys of his own choosing? With no Merking or Seaguard captain to command him, those monumental decisions were left for him to make. Shaped by outside influences certainly, but ultimately decided by the merman they most affected.
"I am my own god,” Durgay whistled incredulously.
"Eskaa, god yours ... Der-kay!"
A menacing silhouette blocked his comforting snapshot of the sky.
* * * *
"I have a fix, Dog! The signal is fantastically strong. It's like a goddam searchlight."
The mainframe double-checked Norton's interpretation of the readouts from the satellite's taxed spectroscope. “This is highly anomalous. The emitter does not have sufficient metallurgical composition to radiate a signature of such magnitude in the electromagnetic spectrum."
"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,” the manbot chided, hunched over the satellite image of the island flickering on the viewscreen, his excitement barely contained in his stiff metal body.
"I don't see a correlation between an equine present and this irregularity."
"You're a sentient computer, Dog. You can't be blamed for overanalysing. Whatever's responsible for registering a metallic footprint that big is beside the point. It's a godsend."
"You are a professed atheist."
"Today, I'm believing in miracles. Look at the missile's track overlaid on the screen. That source is acting better than our own homing beacon. The sucker is zeroing in on the island like a hawk plunging onto a rabbit!"
"Or metal attracted to a magnet,” Dog more accurately analogised.
Norton felt magnanimous. “On this stupendous occasion, I'll let you have the last word."
Only the final word did not belong to the mainframe.
Felix sleepy dada.
Unhesitant, Norton pulled the plug on the waning junior cybernate. Although Dog did not remark on the manbot's callous murder of a fellow Artificial Intelligence, the weight of his scrutiny pressed down on the roboticised human.
"Euthanasia is an act of kindness!” Norton snapped defensively.
This time Dog did get the last word in, making the profound observation, “Humans are often cruel to be kind."
* * * *
Cruelty was not confined to the human psyche. Eskaa lopped off Durgay's hands at the wrist himself with Ulobb's macana, then had his lackeys, Sorkil and cohort included, tie off the bleeding stumps with strips of coconut fibre rope.
"Can't have you dying yet, Fish-with-no-Hands. Playtime has just begun,” he declared, cupping Durgay's chin domineeringly.
Lunder Atoll was an island of tranquillity in a sea of storminess. The hurricane revolved ponderously around the hub of the volcanic isle in a fixed wheel of insidious clouds, the swirling rim of the eyewall lit by sporadic flashes of unleashed electrical energies. Inside the ring, a disturbing calmness settled across the Landhopper ark as the seething seas gentled, lapping placidly against the assaulted reef. The abrupt quietude was an absurdly dangerous illusion, fostering false hope that the tempest had passed.
Eskaa knew better and eyed the encircling clouds vigilantly. He gauged there remained time enough for him to indulge in some sport before the rear of the progressing hurricane engulfed his domain. When it had blown its course and run out of steam, Eskaa would be free
to direct his imperious will on to the enigmatic mainland and perhaps even forsake this mud hole.
But for now he took delight in the simple pleasures of life. Gazing hard into Durgay's unblinking eyes, he was annoyed to find not even a hint of fear clouding them. The merman gazed stupidly back up at him, indifferent to his imminent demise.
Reverting to halting fish-speak, the straddling amphib overlord questioned his returned prisoner. “Der-kay. Others ... where hide?” When Durgay refused to answer Eskaa ploughed a fist into his face, carefully aiming below the bony eyeballs. The punched merman grinned infuriatingly at his tormentor.
Throttling the uncooperative mermale, Eskaa ribbited, “Back why, Der-kay? Back why!"
Gasping for oxygen in the waterless air anyway, Durgay feebly announced, “I've come to kill you all, Scah."
Taken aback, as if the threat had physically manifested itself as a blow to smack him in the snout, Eskaa took a moment to recover his disrupted poise. He retaliated with a trilling laugh, mocking the tortured merman's pathetic attempt at intimidation.
Unable to follow the discourse in Cetari gibberish, the surrounding amphibs nonetheless joined in their god's laughter; a happy Eskaa was a non-violent Eskaa. That truism went out the window when Eskaa called for a knife.
Ulobb presented his sword to his master again and was berated for his idiocy. “If I wanted that meat cleaver, you moronic tadpole, I wouldn't have stipulated a knife!"
One of the favoured Shurpeha, assigned a place in the rescue palace, removed an obsidian hand axe from his belt and tried handing it reverently to his Living God. Ulobb, himself trying to save grace, cuffed and cussed the helpful guard. “Nobody personally gives our Lord anything without it passing through me. Hand the blade over."
The offended Shurpeha complied, slapping the stone tool into the warrior-priest's palm. Ulobb grimaced, complaining, “Blunt end first, fool!” He hesitated passing it on to Eskaa, mindful his blood smeared the glossy black cone.
Snatching it away from Ulobb, Eskaa wiped the weapon clean on his ungainly cloak, soiling the garment's longstanding sacredness. What need did a god have for clothing anyhow? But there was something to be said for retaining his crowning headgear.
Studying the hand axe for the briefest moment, it warmed Eskaa's cold heart to recognise the temple relic wrenched from the wooden hand of Vhello, the deposed God of War. How fitting that the ancient weapon should be wielded by the new power in town.
Waving the stone chopper in front of Durgay's captive vision with deliberate slowness, rubbing the unflustered merman's abdomen teasingly with an edge sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, letting the violence of his intent worry his victim, he uttered in frighteningly bad Cerat, “Eskaa ... no more want Der-kay sing. Der-kay ... now die."
* * * *
A curious detachment came over the Fisher as Eskaa began eviscerating him, slicing open his gut and pulling out his steaming innards—a butcher handling a string of grisly sausages. The dull sensation of pain evaporated from his mind as his perception centred on his torturer's captivating hat.
Glimpsing for the first, and last time, Eskaa's prized headpiece stunned Durgay. Perched on his enemy's flattened skull, wobbling in its wooden cradle, the rusty metal cone marking supreme Landhopper religious power was recognisable to the gutted Fisher, despite his never having clapped eyes on it before.
Myths preserved in the Songline Scriptures alluded to the appearance of the Grohial: the conical profile, its silvery skin blemished with the bloodstains of the mermen who sacrificed themselves vainly defending it against amphib poachers.
Its allure was legendary. The individual possessing it would put a stop to Landhopper tyranny forever.
Hulcer perished retrieving it. Lorea became a smorgasbord hungering for it. Whoever sought it, died.
A dead merman already, Durgay concentrated his fading will and strived to reclaim Cetari property, reaching for Eskaa's gilding with his bloody stumps.
So focused was he on recapturing the Grohial, so engrossed was Eskaa with disembowelling his foeman, neither noticed the inbound missile arcing earthwards.
* * * *
The nuke was a baby one, only about 120 kilotons in explosive yield. The black marketers in Norton's service during his human days shopped around for a larger device in the several megaton range, and found no sellers. Back then, there was an unofficial moratorium on trading in nuclear weaponry. People feared hastening humankind's extinction. But at ten times the strength of the uranium bomb which detonated so horrifically 2,000 feet in the skies above Hiroshima nearly eight hundred years earlier, it was big enough for today's demonstration that Man ruled the planet still.
In one millionth of a second the exploding warhead released 90% of its destructive energy, equivalent to over 100,000 tons of TNT going off at once, in the heat and shockwaves radiating concentrically outwards from the ground-burst blast.
Durgay, Eskaa, and the others caught out in the open on the unprotected beach were instantly vaporised in the flash of the nuclear fireball. Those Landhoppers hiding out in Harvest Shallows were steamed to death when the thermal energy boiled the lagoon dry, their shrivelled bodies layering the siliceous sand of the sea bottom fused into glass by the soaring temperature inside the unnatural furnace.
Blasting winds hurtled inland at hundreds of miles an hour, flattening benumbed amphibs emerging from holes or hollows to welcome what they wrongly perceived was the storm's calm finale. The pressured air assailed R'bat City with greater destructive force than the paused hurricane, levelling the pithouses into unrecognisable piles of splintered poles and mangled bodies. Not even the sturdier structures in the palace compound withstood the blast of superheated air, both the square and roundhouse disintegrating like matchstick models.
One mile from ground zero the mushrooming fireball incinerated anything flammable, which equated to very little in vegetative terms on the deforested isle. Considering the initial shockwaves had seconds before uprooted and blown apart the sparse coastal mangroves uncut by the loggers, that resulted in those Landhoppers left standing spontaneously igniting, as well as burning the timber, thatched, and fleshy rubble littering the site of R'bat City.
Two-thirds of Lunder's populace died immediately beneath the shadow of the distinctive mushroom cloud billowing over the nuked island. Standing the best chance of surviving the initial blast, Diggers holed up in the dubious safety of their burrows would succumb to the immediate fallout not dispersed by the resumption of the storm winds. The most lethal radiation produced by a nuclear explosion, gamma particles, penetrates several feet of earth, silently entering the body to lethally damage organs, bones, blood, and even cells. The remaining amphibs would be comatose within the two days after the blast, curling up in death after lying wretchedly in pools of their own blood-flecked vomit and faeces.
Payback is a bitch.
But the energy harnessed by Man, even the awesome double-edged power derived from splitting the atom, paled into insignificance beside the raw fury of nature at its most elemental, and the hurricane closed in to complete wiping the Piawro from the face of the earth.
Chapter Thirty Two
Abe Norton felt a warm glow all over that was completely unrelated to the internal heaters incorporated into his body's design as a precaution against the station's heating system ever failing. Even machines needed warmth.
The manbot ambled across the catwalk spanning the main holding tank imprisoning the remaining two captive Cetari—his precious male and a female. She was defective, unable to bear children, but Norton's sciences would rectify that. He would remake her into a breeder and gift her offspring with simple technologies: spear guns, fish-finders. Norton would not repeat the original mistake of releasing his children into the wild as carefree primitives. That was how their enemy gained the upper hand in the survival stakes. This time, they would be schooled in the expertise of handling advanced equipment, ensuring they had the edge over evolution.
His sense of s
atisfaction intensified. He had not felt this fulfilled in centuries. The Landhoppers were irradiated out of existence and he had at his chrome fingertips the means to create a second, backup population of his aquatic apes, as well as maintaining a discreet watch over the originals, safely rehoused in northern backyard waters. Life did not get any better than this.
There was one regret on his part. He wished he could have secured a Landhopper corpse for dissection, to delve into its biological makeup and thereby uncover the amphibs puzzlingly rapid evolutional history. Oh well, life was good, not perfect.
Najoli and Jumo swam freely in the enormous indoor pool, aware of the metal footsteps on the footbridge overhead but powerless to prevent Norton's voyeurism. His good mood had lowered the dividing walls of their confinement, but done nothing to redress its alien sterility. There were no rocks, no corals, no seagrasses, no anemones, no fish other than the unappetising dead examples doled out through the feeding chutes at scheduled mealtimes, to break up the bland monotony of the tank. The Cetari had only each other's company to relieve the tedium and the largeness of the pool to enjoy.
They moped along the tiled walls, compelled to swim aimlessly in circles—quite an accomplishment in a square-sided pool. All hope of freedom being returned to them had vanished, along with Durgay. Resenting their captivity did not abolish it. The pair held no illusions. They were here for keeps, stocking Norton's private aquarium.
"Eff-One. I have news about your former partner."
Najoli stopped circling to gaze up at the manbot perched so haughtily on the aerial walkway. She had gone hoarse asking her silent surrounds the whereabouts and fate of her lover, her anxious enquiries going unanswered for more than a day.
Jumo, not the jerk he initially came across as being, placed his comforting hands on her tensed shoulders. She welcomed the strength his touch lent her, the jobless Seaguardian extending his reassuring presence to demanding on her behalf, “Where's Durgay? What have you done with him?"
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