Andre Norton - Sea Siege

by Sea Siege(lit)

  "Then we keep this here thing 'til he comes back." Chris slapped the deck again. "But the town—what happened to the town?"

  "We had a storm, and an earthquake—and there's a volcano out there." Griff pointed seaward. But Le Marr took up the tale at this point.

  "There be war, mon, war with the big bombs. The whole world be changed now—"

  Griff wondered if Chris had understood, if he could understand—for the Queen's mate sat looking ashore in the thickening dusk, his drawn face a mask of hurt.

  "The mons—?"

  "They be down island—with the Navy mons—all that be still 'live."

  "Everything gone—"

  Le Marr nodded briskly. "Everything old be gone. We do other things now. The sea things, they come to fight. We be eaten up 'less we fight back. No more mons fight mons—now they fight other thing—or they don' live no more on this world!"

  "Me—" Chris's bowed shoulders straightened—"me, I ain't gonna let no fish thing make trouble for me. I got me one right here. I ain' sayin' fish be smarter nor me!"

  Le Marr was only a black blot now in the three-quarters dark. But his soft chuckle held the approbation they could not see. "There's other mons think that too, Chris. These Navy mons, they ain't shakin' the head and cryin' out 'oh, my, oh, my!' You has done a big thing, bringin' this debble back to San Isadore. We gits it to the Navy mons, an' they makes their own voodoo wi' it. If we gits it to the Navy mons!"

  "Whyfor you say 'if?"

  "This here debble thing ain't happy. He make his own voodoo. Now he move—"

  Le Marr was right. Griff felt the tremor in the Queen.

  Could that creature burst out? Had the ship's sides or bottom been weakened to the point of giving away if the prisoner applied intelligence to the business of win­ning its freedom?

  "Let him move! He be put in the Queen like beef in the can." Chris sounded almost cheerful. "Beef, he don't git out 'til mon takes him. Neither do this—"

  "Do he bring help, we have us some things to think 'bout"

  "There be debbles here?"

  "They be everywhere. They got 'em a sub, didn't they, Griff?"

  "Well, maybe they didn't wreck it in the first place, but they sure kept it tied down afterwards!" agreed the American. He spoke almost absently, trying to be alert to every sound about the Queen, tense and conscious of that remitting tremor. Could that very faint pulsation carry through the water to summon—?

  "There are two kind debbles," Chris remarked thoughtfully. "There are the long necks and the octopi. The long necks, they stay mostly in the water. These kind"—they heard his hand beat the deck—"can come out a little way. But we gotta teach 'em they better stay in!"

  "So we try," Le Marr agreed. "Now we eat ourselves something. Nobody can do everything in one day." He portioned out rations brought from the base and cans hacked open.

  Griff ate cold baked beans with his fingers and ended by sucking a square of dark chocolate. He had been watching the incoming waves, and now he pointed out a phenomenon to the others.

  "What's that glow—there—along the water?"

  He was familiar with the phosphorescence of the southern waters—had seen it fly in foam from the cut­ting bow of the Queen in happier days. But this was different. It appeared to move under the water, not on the surface, and in lines. Then material he had read in the now vanished library of the lab flashed to mind and brought him to his feet in alarm.

  The greater octopi from the depths were spangled with bright sparks of luminescence!

  "They comin'?" Le Marr sounded neither surprised nor disturbed.

  "Maybe—" He had been a fool not to bring some of the grenades, though explosions so near to the crip­pled Queen might have torn the derelict apart.

  He was sure his guess was correct. Those odd trails of light were not just slipping along the waves in the aimless fashion of phosphorescence; they were con­verging on the ship. And her deck was now hardly four feet above the water level. Any of the octopi he had seen about the islet where the Volga rested, or which he had watched attack and try to overturn the boats of the refugees, could reach the planking on which the three were huddled. He spoke to Le Marr.

  "I think they must have spotted us. And we've got to have the lantern now, for if we don't keep the deck clear—" But how could they do that with only one rifle, a pair of knives, and a fishing spear?

  There was a rasping, scraping sound. Griff instinctive­ly moved back from the edge of the deck. It would be only too easy to seize him from below and whirl him over before he could make a defensive move.

  A yellow glow cut the thick dark. The three drew together by the cargo hatch. Chris levered himself up on his hands, peering wide-eyed into the dark. Griff nursed the rifle, facing the direction from which that ominous sound had some. Le Marr finished lashing the lantern tight with cord to the hatch cover and then picked up the spear.

  If they only had one of the atomic flood lamps from the base, Griff thought, and then forced a twisted grin. As long as he was wishing for tools, he might as well make it a box of grenades or one of the LC's rapid-fire guns. There was a flicker of movement just within the farthest reaches of the lantern's beam, and he tensed.

  "They come—" Le Marr straightened.

  "An' he know it, too!" The faint tremor of movement below was increasing to a definite shaking, which rocked the Queen. Chris's prisoner was either seeking commu­nication with its kind or striving to break out of confine­ment.

  "Can they turn us over?" Griff appealed to his more seawise companions, hoping for an emphatic denial.

  But there was no answer except a shrug from Le Marr. Chris continued to stare at the dark. There was a thumping underneath now, regular pounding blows making the planking of the ship ring.

  Then Griff saw a brown snake-whip wave above the edge of the deck, as if in blind search for a victim. Would bullets be able to rip that? Anyway he couldn't trust his marksmanship in this light. With a machine gun set to spray, they would have a better chance.

  Le Marr was busy, his hands flying as he bound bits of raveled cord about the point of the fish spear. Hav­ing provided a wadding that suited him, he pried open the lid of a flat can of sardines, one of the supply cans Griff had found in the cabin. Carefully he smeared the oily fish back and forth across the wadding, working in the greasy liquid.

  The battering of the prisoner now shook the deck. With a smack, the rope arm waved through the shadows to the planking. It might be seeking either prey or a secure hold.

  Le Marr went into action. He ran his greasy torch in­to the lantern flame. Fire burst in a sputter of sparks. With the precision of a careful workman he reached out and applied the blaze to the tentacle. For a second or two there was no response. Then Le Marr jerked away his improvised weapon as the arm loosed its hold upon the wood, writhed up, and beat down the deck with a force that rocked the Queen.

  The islander stood his ground, and as the arm came to a momentary rest, he was ready to touch it again. Once more the length of stringy muscle and ropy flesh flashed up until they saw the suckers disklike on its length. Then it snapped back into the dark and was gone. In the lan­tern light Griff saw that Le Marr was laughing silently. And Chris grinned.

  "That thing-he don't like the fire."

  Le Marr chuckled. "The things of the night, never do they like fire. Fire belong to mons. An' mons, they don't give up fightin' easy. We show these debble things that!"

  If they had fought off for the moment the assailant that had attempted to get a hold on deck, they had not settled the captive below. And now Chris showed con­cern.

  "The Queen—maybe she can't take this poundin'. Nothing we can do 'bout that one down there?" he ap­pealed to Le Marr.

  But the other was forced to reply in the negative. Griff could hear rasping sounds, feel even through the pounding of the prisoner a sucking pull against the sides of the Queen. Although no more arms appeared within the circle of light, he could not rid himself of the idea th
at a net of sorts was being woven about the ship, that the sea things were working with patience and intel­ligence to overturn the Queen as they had overturned with far less effort the tow boat of the refugee ship.

  And that was borne out by action as the Queen slow­ly, minute by dragging minute, developed a list to port. There was no more movement in the cargo hold. Per­haps the captive recognized the work of its kind and was content to wait for an opportunity before wasting its strength.

  "A little more of this," Griff said between his teeth, "and we'll slide over." It was one of his worst night­mares coming true, and he could do nothing to halt the inevitable. Surely there must be a whole school of the monsters down there lending their weight to the project. The ancient horror stories of mariners were coming true. Here were the kraken who could and would drag down a ship to be plundered at their leisure in the deeps.

  "Hellooooo!"

  Griff had been so intent upon the immediate scene of action that he had forgotten the shore, the dark waters that washed in upon the deserted town. A band of light, which completely blotted out the feeble gleam of the lantern, caught and pinned the Queen.

  "Stand by to secure line—"

  Griff caught the shout as Le Marr stuck the smolder­ing spear butt down on the hatch to free his hands and Chris struggled up on his knees.

  The line flew in from the dark to fall on the deck. Its weighted end had scarcely landed before Chris had it. Then Le Marr jumped forward, and with fumbling help from Griff they made it fast about the stump of the splintered mast.

  But the list of the deck was increasing. They held onto the hatch lashings to keep their balance. Then Chris muttered, caught the diver's knife from Griff's sheath, and with that between his teeth inched his way to the stern.

  The anchor! Griff had forgotten about that. Chris sawed at the rope as Le Marr covered him by thrusting the torch-spear into the dark. The tie gave, and the Queen bobbed. Perhaps Le Marr had disconcerted the attackers, for the list righted a bit, enough to allow the two to crawl back in safety to the hatch.

  Now the line to the shore grew taut. Slowly the Queen answered that pull, began to move inland. Once her side grated against a wall, but for the most part they followed along the line of the main street, and, while the roofs of buildings were black blots above the water, they managed not to strike any of them.

  For a space the listing continued, even grew. But as the Queen took her slow course inland, she began to rise in the water. The attackers were loosing their holds, falling away. At last the bow smashed against a wall with a shock that might have tossed her passengers over­board had they not had a firm grip on the hatch. There was a horrible grating as the pull from the shore con­tinued. Then the line went limp, and they were hailed.

  "Can you make it now?"

  Griff scrambled to his feet. The wall on which the Queen hung canted her up. But within easy leaping distance was a rise of dry land. Yes, they could make it. And with assistance to bring Chris ashore, they did.

  Murray and Casey were there—and the smaller tow­ing machine from the base. Karkoff was standing beside that, watching the stranded Queen with keen interest.

  "How did you—? Did Liz—?" Griff sputtered.

  "We heard about this ship from Karkoff and started overland to see her. Met your Liz about an hour ago and heard about your find," Murray explained. Then he spoke to Chris. "So you've one of those things shut up inside that hulk have you?"

  "In the Queen," Chris corrected sharply. "He sure is, Cap'n."

  Murray gazed into the dark bay. "All his little play­mates were coming to the rescue, weren't they?"

  "They certainly were!" Griff tried to see if those trails of light had disappeared from the waters. He could distinguish none—the enemy must have withdrawn.

  "This is round three, and it's still our decision," Mur­ray observed with obvious satisfaction. "If they want to go a full ten, we'll meet them all the way!"

  IX

  THE LONG ROAD BACK

  griff squatted on the edge of a salt-water pool and stared intently into its depths. Save for its size, it might have been the one he had once ruled over near the laboratory—only no one was going to swim lazily in the sun-warmed water cupped here.

  Eyes, which were blank saucers without any readable expression, yet which somehow conveyed the impres­sion of implacable hatred, met his. There was no means of communication between the brain behind those eyes and his. More experienced and better trained minds than Griff's had tried to find come common ground of understanding. Here was intelligence to. a high degree; they recognized that. But it was a form of intelligence so alien to the human ways of thought that there was probably an unpierceable barrier between.

  The Octopus-Sapiens endured captivity. It ate the food supplied; it sank into the same semiconscious state during the brighter hours of the day as had the small cephalopod Griff planted in the spray pool. There were several features about the prisoner, however, that set it apart from the octopi already known. Without dissec­tion they could only guess and deduce from photographs and observation. But it was apparent that the brain had evolved to a higher degree, and two of the great arms had developed at their tips smaller, off-shoot tentacles, which the creature was able to use, if clumsily, with some of the advantage of human fingers.

  Whether it was a species old to their world but hither­to dwelling unsuspected in the deeps until roused out by the recent disturbances—by explosions during atomic bomb tests—or whether it was a mutant whose evolution had been forced by radiation from those same tests, was still a matter for dispute.

  Islander, refugee, Seabee, sooner or later every pres­ent inhabitant of San Isadore spent some time by the pool watching with a fearful fascination the captive brought back in the Queen. Hughes hung over it, study­ing it for hours, raging at times because he could not summon to share his vigil other authorities in his field. Sheer frustration made him blow up in irritated outbursts, which were far removed from his one-time satis­fied complacency. He pestered Chris with demands as to how the creature had been captured, hoping to add another to their bag. But the mate had replied over and over again that he could not honestly remember— that the horrors of the Queens last voyage did not re­main in his memory except as a faint dream. Examina­tion by the base doctor had shown that the island sailor suffered from exposure to mild radiation and that he was lucky to survive at all.

  But the captive in the pool was not the only problem. The waves had deposited a thick harvest of the red scum along three-fourths of the island's shore line. And there Hughes had been successful, for his suggestion of using fire to cleanse the beaches and rocks paid off. Ignited, the stuff had burned with a choking oily reek, which set them all to painful coughing but did clear the land.

  What was left was a black ash with a sour, nasty smell. This was shoveled and pushed into pits by the base machines, only to prove a disguised blessing—for some of the ash blown into pockets of sheltered earth pro­vided a rich fertilizer never before seen. The pits were then reopened so that this strange sea bounty could be disinterred and put to work increasing the productivity of the garden patches, a move that might mean the difference between life and death in the future as the store supplies dwindled.

  It was still not entirely safe to fish—though there were few fish that had escaped the poisonous scum. Thanks to Liz's concoction—which the base doctor ana­lyzed to the last disagreeable drop—small boats well smeared dared venture out along the shore—but there was always the danger of running into one of the "ser­pents."

  "If we could only get into this fellow's think-tank" —Casey came up to the pool behind Griff—"we'd have answers to a lot of questions. You know"—he teetered back and forth, his eyes narrowed speculatively as he studied the captive octopus—"I used to read stories about fellas going to the stars and meeting up with alien life forms. There was a lot of clever mish-mash in some of them about how they established communication. They usually started off with numbers. You
know—the old two-and-two-make-four routine. But how are you going to talk to something that probably doesn't give a hoot whether two and two make four or six? Didn't you say once that these things signaled to each other with their ink sacks? Then how are we going to palaver back? With a bunch of paint cans ready to pour?"

  "That's already been tried—" Griff pointed out.

  Hughes had tried it. The chemical make-up of the ink exuded by the cephalopod clan in moments of emo­tional disturbance was a matter of record. They had been able to reproduce it in the base medical lab, and it had been introduced in small quantities into the pool—arous­ing no discernible reaction in the then quiescent cap­tive.

  "Sure—Doc's stuff. I saw them try that. But what about some of those natives goos—like that stuff your friend Liz cooks up on demand? Did that voodoo doc ever get a chance to try some of his bright ideas?"