The Monster War

by Alan Gratz

  One of the thing’s tentacles snaked inside, snatched up a steamhorse, and lifted it into its hold. The cowboys on the arena floor drew their rayguns and fired, but the octopod’s hull was too thick.

  Gonzalo tied a rope to Archie’s handcuffs and swung up onto his horse. “Time to ride.”

  Fergus grabbed Archie’s arm. “Oy, hold on there, cowboy. There’s a blinking ten-story-tall mechanical octopus attacking Houston. We need Archie!”

  “He’s under arrest,” Gonzalo said. He backed Alamo away, tugging on the rope.

  Fergus pulled Archie the other direction. “I thought you were a ranger! You ought to be out there rangering!”

  “First I secure my prisoner,” Gonzalo said, giving the rope another tug, “then I come back and fight the pirates.”

  Fergus yanked Archie back, the servos in his new knee brace matching Alamo’s strength.

  “Guys, stop!” Archie said. He shoved Fergus away and snapped Gonzalo’s rope, sending them both staggering away. “I’m the one who decides whether I stay or go, and I say—”

  KA-THOOM! An enormous chunk of ceiling fell on Archie, and everything went black.

  7

  “Archie! Hey, Archie! Wake up.”

  It was Fergus. Archie felt him shaking him awake. Archie put a hand to his head where the rockfall had hit him, but of course there wasn’t a lump there. There wasn’t even a scratch. The unexpected blow had knocked him out for a few minutes, but hadn’t done any real damage to him.

  As Archie came to his senses, he realized he wasn’t in the Astral Dome anymore. He was in a considerably smaller, darker dome made of thick red-painted steel. For some reason the sunlight that came in through the round windows was wavy and dappled, and then Archie saw a shark swim by.

  We’re underwater, Archie realized.

  Fergus and Gonzalo helped Archie to his feet. They stood among a small group of men and women at the side of the round room, guarded by seven-foot-tall men with long black hair in ponytails, who wore nothing but loincloths and seashell necklaces. The guards’ gray skin was covered everywhere in swirling black tribal tattoos that rivaled the thick black lines of Fergus’s tattoo-like circuitry, and their noses were pierced with bones. In their frog-like webbed hands they held long-handled tridents, and fishnet hung from their belts.

  In the center of the room stood an empty throne cut from coral, and at its feet lay an enormous mound of gold and silver and Texian pesos. Beyond the mountain of treasure were more of the same tall gray people in various states of undress, and all covered with the same strange swirling black tattoos. Some wore swords, others knives, and others leaned on harpoons. They stood around a long wooden table, eating, drinking, and laughing as they toasted each other with tankards of ale.

  “Welcome to the Underwater City of Galveston,” Fergus said. “We’ve been captured by pirates.”

  “You couldn’t stop them?” Archie asked.

  Fergus held up his soggy sleeves. “They shorted me out with water cannons, and they took away the cowboy’s raygun. And his wonderhorse.”

  Gonzalo stood still, his eyes unfocused on anything in particular. “Karankawans. A fierce Texas coast tribe,” he said quietly. “And there’s twice as many of them as there are prisoners.”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “And they’re all armed, and we’re not. We can all see that.”

  “He can’t,” Archie said. “Gonzalo is blind.”

  “He’s what?” Fergus said. “No way.”

  Archie nodded, and Fergus waved a hand in front of Gonzalo. The ranger didn’t blink.

  “What kind of parents let their blind kid become a Texas Ranger?”

  “All my brothers and sisters are rangers,” Gonzalo said. “Why shouldn’t I be one too just because I’m blind?”

  “Right, of course,” Fergus said, throwing up his arms. “Look, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got bigger problems. Archie, look at the lights.”

  The lights? Archie looked up at the ceiling, where bluish-yellow glass domes glowed, filling the room with light. Those couldn’t be gas lights. Archie had only seen lights like that before in one place: Atlantis Station.

  “Are those—?”

  “Lektric lights,” Fergus said. “Sensed it the minute I got inside. And it’s not just lights, Archie. Lektric heat, lektric motors, lektric ships. The whole city is wired with the stuff!”

  “But … but how? Why didn’t the Septemberist Society find out and stop it?”

  “I dunno,” Fergus said. “Maybe because it’s underwater and run by pirates? It’s not like we got here by invitation, you know. It doesn’t matter. Lektricity like this, it could wake any Mangleborn that happens to be sleeping nearby. We’ve got to shut it down. You start cracking skulls, and me and the blind ranger here’ll go for the generators.”

  Archie shook his head and held up his handcuffed wrists. “I can’t. I’m Gonzalo’s prisoner.”

  “This again?” Fergus said. “Slag it, Archie! If you haven’t noticed by now, we’re all prisoners of some pirate king!”

  A deep conch shell blew, and the pirates and prisoners got quiet. A tall tattooed Karankawan man strode into the room, surrounded by more half-naked guards. The man they protected was dripping wet like he’d just come from a swim, and had on nothing but long canvas shorts, a jewel-encrusted gold crown, and a rope fishnet with sparkling glass floats, which he wore over his shoulders like a royal cape. One of his guards handed him an ornate silver trident, and he sat on the coral throne.

  “His High Exaltedness, the Great Leo de la Mer, Pirate King and Lafitte of the Underwater City of Galveston, welcomes you to the Maison Rouge,” a Tik Tok servant announced, and Archie was startled to realize he knew the voice.

  “Mr. Rivets!” Archie said. It was! Mr. Rivets, covered in sea slime, stood beside and behind the throne, acting as the pirate king’s court steward.

  “Be quiet, you,” a guard warned Archie.

  What Mr. Rivets was doing here, Archie didn’t know, but he was glad to see him again. Even if it was Mr. Rivets’s fault he was in this mess to begin with.

  “Before His Royal Highness deals with his prisoners, are there any who would speak or petition the Lafitte?” Mr. Rivets asked.

  “What’s a Lafitte?” Archie whispered.

  “Jean Lafitte was the first pirate king of Galveston,” Gonzalo told them. “You want to be the boss around here, you call yourself the Lafitte.”

  A teenaged Karankawan girl stepped forward, and the gallery of drunken pirates hooted and moaned. She was tall and thin like the rest of her tribe, but she wore a more modest sleeveless sea-green top and a matching short pleated skirt. Her long black hair had seashells woven into it, and her gray skin was covered with the same swirling tattoos as the rest of the pirates. But unlike the others, she wore a crystal clear, diamond-shaped gem right in the middle of her forehead, and she carried a harpoon whose metal hook glowed with a green aetherical flame. Archie and Fergus recognized that green aetherical flame, and they shared a knowing look. It was the same green flame Edison had bathed Fergus in when he’d turned him into a human computer back in Florida.

  “And now there’s that,” Fergus whispered.

  The Karankawan pirates were less impressed by her than Archie and Fergus, and they roared like the sea when the pirate king rolled his eyes and slumped back on his coral throne.

  “And what has the brilliant and beautiful Martine come to tell us today, I wonder?” the Lafitte said. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess!”

  Martine tilted her head and waited.

  “Wednesdays are blue, which means clear sailing,” the Lafitte guessed.

  “No,” Martine said. “Wednesdays are red.” She tilted her head the other way. “And what color the day is has nothing to do with weather patterns.”

  The Lafitte slapped his tattooed forehead dramatically, clowning for the gallery. “Right! Of course! How silly of me. Let me guess again. Let me guess again. Using a mathematical formula no one els
e understands, you have discovered a way to make fish swim backward!”

  The girl blinked and lifted her chin, reminding Archie of a blue jay he’d watched in his backyard. “There is no mathematical formula that would allow a fish to swim backward,” she said.

  The pirates guffawed, and the Lafitte closed his eyes and nodded, as though he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. He was making merciless fun of her, but she either didn’t understand, or didn’t care. Archie didn’t know for sure, but it seemed like she didn’t understand.

  “Do you wish to continue guessing, or may I tell you?” Martine said.

  “Oh, please,” the Lafitte said expansively. “Please do tell me, Martine. I can’t wait to hear it.”

  “The Deep Ones are rising,” the girl said.

  The Lafitte’s eyes went wide, and he looked to the pirate gallery, who burst out laughing again. “Oho! The Deep Ones are rising.”

  Archie and Fergus looked at each other worriedly. What the girl called “Deep Ones” sounded suspiciously like Mangleborn.

  “Based on my pattern of behavior,” Martine said over their laughter, “that should have been your first guess.”

  “Your ‘pattern of behavior?’” the Lafitte said, drying his eyes. “Do you mean, Martine, the fact that you have come here to my court every day for the past month and said the exact same thing?”

  “Yes,” Martine said. She tilted her head. “That is the pattern of behavior to which I refer.”

  “And what has been my pattern of behavior each time?”

  “To laugh,” Martine said. “And to do nothing.”

  “And to tell you that the Deep Ones are myths. Legends. Monster stories Karankawan mothers tell their children to make them go to bed at night.” He wiggled his fingers like tentacles. “‘Go to sleep, or the Deep Ones will rise and gobble you up!’”

  The pirates laughed again.

  “The Deep Ones are real,” Martine said. “They sleep in the trenches at the bottom of the ocean, where not even the giant squid can go. I’ve seen them.”

  That quieted the room. The pirates fidgeted and looked away, sticking their noses in their tankards. They might believe the Deep Ones were just stories their parents told them to make them behave, but secretly they were all a little scared they might be true.

  Lafitte smiled. “No submarine can go that deep. The pressures are too great.”

  “Mine can,” Martine said.

  The pirates clearly believed that if anyone could design a sub to go that deep in the ocean, it was this girl. The room was silent for a moment before the Lafitte cleared his throat.

  “Martine, my dear, you are a genius,” the Lafitte said. “No one here will deny it, least of all me. And I will let you come in here every day for the rest of my life and tell me the Deep Ones are rising if you keep designing wonderful machines like those octopods for us.”

  She designed those lektric octopus machines? Archie’s eyes went wide, and Fergus looked impressed. Gonzalo frowned.

  “Which you would never before have used to attack Houston so brazenly, were it not for the influence of the Deep Ones,” Martine said.

  The Lafitte spread his arms wide over the treasure at his feet. “And just look what our brazen attack has won us! Gold! Silver! Money! Tik Toks! Prisoners to ransom!”

  “A temporary boon,” Martine said. She tilted her head again. “There is a 95.6 percent chance this attack will cause the Texas Navy to come for you, and an 82.1 percent chance they will destroy Galveston and everyone in it.”

  “Let them come!” the Lafitte bellowed. “We will destroy them!”

  “This belligerence you feel is a direct result of the Deep Ones stirring,” Martine said. She talks an awful lot like Mr. Rivets, Archie thought. “Can’t you feel them nudging your brain? Making you wilder? Angrier?” Martine asked. She lifted her head like Edison used to, as though listening to some far-off sound on the wind. “Can’t you hear the arithmetic in their song?”

  “She’s right,” Fergus said loudly. “There’s more of them rising other places. And all this lektricity isn’t helping anything!”

  A guard whacked Fergus in the back of the head with the butt of his trident, knocking him to the floor. “Quiet, you! No one wants to hear what you think.”

  Fergus stood back up holding the back of his head. “You can fight back any time now, Archie,” Fergus whispered.

  Archie sighed and looked away. He didn’t deserve to be a hero. Not after all those men had died for him. He couldn’t enjoy the strength their warm, living blood gave him while they lay cold and dead in the ground.

  “Enough, Martine,” the Lafitte said, less genial than he had been with her a moment before. “You have delivered your daily prediction of doom and gloom. Return to your ship.”

  Martine bowed and left the room, and the surly Lafitte called for the prisoners to be brought forward.

  “Great,” Fergus muttered. “She gets his pistons all twisted, and now we get to deal with him.”

  Mr. Rivets spoke again. “His High Exaltedness, the Great Leo de la Mer, now invites any of his prisoners willing to join his pirate crew to swear an oath of loyalty to him.”

  “Just in time to fight the Texas Navy, it sounds like,” Fergus whispered.

  The Lafitte found a few takers who enthusiastically swore, on pain of death, to fight for the pirate king and the Underwater City of Galveston. But Archie, Fergus, and Gonzalo weren’t among them.

  “Are there no others who would swear loyalty to His Royal Highness, and thus go free?” Mr. Rivets asked, looking straight at Archie.

  Archie, Fergus, and Gonzalo still said nothing.

  “No one else then?” Mr. Rivets asked. “Anyone? Are you sure?”

  “They’re sure,” the Lafitte growled. He waved his hand. “Take them to the bathyspheres.”

  “Uh…,” Fergus said as they were led away.

  “What?” Archie asked. “What’s a bathysphere?”

  “It’s a … a small powerless sphere on a cable explorers use to visit the deepest parts of the ocean,” Fergus explained. “Only, I don’t think we’re going to be doing a lot of exploring.” He looked back over his shoulder as they were led away. “Maybe we should have lied and said we were with the pirate king after all.”

  Mr. Rivets shook his head at them. “I’ll just wait here for you then, shall I?”

  8

  The bathyspheres the Lafitte kept his prisoners in were exactly as Fergus described them: small round metal chambers with a single window of fused quartz, which doubled as its door. They were steel gray, and covered all over with enormous bolts. The guards went around the room and threw switches set on the wall, and lektric winches lifted five dripping, seaweed-covered bathyspheres on chains out of open holes in the floor. A sixth chain spun up into its winch double-fast, its loose end whack-whack-whacking the ceiling before one of the guards shut it off.

  “Oops. Chain must have broke,” said one of the guards.

  “There’s one we’re not getting back!” another guard said. He peered down into the water. “Hope there wasn’t anybody in that one.”

  The guards laughed as they loosened the bolts on one of the five bathyspheres that had survived being pulled up.

  Fergus tried to get a spark from all the lektricity around, but he was still too wet. “Archie,” Fergus whispered.

  Archie knew what Fergus wanted him to do. He wanted him to punch the guards, smash the bathyspheres, and get them out of here. It was true, Gonzalo and Fergus didn’t deserve this, but he did. A bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean was even better than a prison cell.

  When the bathysphere was open, Archie climbed inside without the guards even telling him to.

  Fergus took a little more convincing, but the guards eventually wrangled him and Gonzalo in beside Archie. The guards screwed the enormous bolts back on the hatch with a lektric drill, and the three boys spread out on the curved bench that ran around the inside of the sphere to balance i
t.

  Stale air hissed from a hole at the top of the bathysphere, and then their round prison dropped suddenly into the water, where it bobbed for a moment before sinking like a stone. Air bubbles burbled up past the foggy quartz window, and then all they could see were the twinkling lektric lights of Galveston’s underwater domes against the dark black background of the sea.

  Fergus immediately stood and examined the inside of the sphere, looking for some way out. But Archie knew there wasn’t any. Not for Fergus and Gonzalo. Even if they figured out a way to open the bathysphere, they were still deep underwater—and dropping. If the water pressure didn’t kill them, they’d surely drown.

  Fergus threw his hands up as though he’d come to the same conclusion. “Brass, Archie,” Fergus said. “This is just brass. You feel sorry for yourself and won’t fight, so now we’re all trapped in a wee metal ball at the bottom of the ocean. We could die in here before they remember to bring us up. If the chain doesn’t break.”

  Archie hung his head and stared at his feet. He understood why Fergus was angry. But he couldn’t be that person anymore. He couldn’t be a hero.

  Gonzalo didn’t seem bothered by their situation in the least. He leaned back and whistled a little tune.

  “You’re awfully cool there, cowboy,” Fergus said.

  “I ain’t worried,” Gonzalo said. “Señor X will save me.”

  Fergus frowned. “Who’s Señor X?”

  “My raygun,” Gonzalo told him.

  Fergus looked back and forth between Gonzalo and Archie. “Your raygun is going to save you? What’s it got, arms and legs?”

  “No,” Gonzalo said. “But Señor X will come for me, all the same.”

  Fergus shook his head and sat. “You’re as crazy as this one is,” he told Gonzalo.

  “I want to hear about the hundred people you killed,” Gonzalo said, his eyes looking in Archie’s direction, but not right at him.

  “He didn’t kill those people!” Fergus said.

  Gonzalo put up a hand. “I want to hear him tell it.”

  Archie sighed. He really didn’t want to get into it all again. He wanted to just disappear into the depths of the ocean and never come up again. “It’s a long story,” he said.