Shadowprey: A Black Foxes Adventure

by Dennis L McKiernan

  “They’ve guessed that it’s Arda,” whispered Sheila Baxter to Billy.

  Billy nodded, for both of the comptechs had been paying heed to the main holo.

  “Do you think it’s really Arda, or the Dark God pulling a scam?” asked Billy. “I mean, the Dark God’s swirling presence was exactly like this one, but for shade versus bright.”

  “I wonder if it could be Arthur Coburn pulling the scam instead,” said Sheila.

  “But how could he do—? Wait, I have an idea,” said Billy. He got up from his console and stepped to Toni, and at a lull in the conversation between the Foxes and Arda, he said, “Arthur David Coburn, Toni. Shelia and I think perhaps that’s who it is.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you get it? Arthur David could be Arda: ‘Ar’ for Arthur, and ‘da’ for David. Arthur David is Arda.”

  Toni frowned.

  Greyson said, “Perhaps Billy and Sheila have something there.”

  Toni shook her head and said, “But how could—?” She turned to Stein. “Henry, you are the neurological expert here. How could that be?”

  Before Stein could reply, Drew said, “Given what I know about the mutable logic of Avery’s makeup, perhaps that’s how Arthur managed to gain access to the AI output long enough to send the “Help. Prisoner. Arton.” message to Timothy Rendell.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Toni.

  “Well, you know that people entering Avery’s VR take on a name that somewhat resembles their own: You were Nurse Tonkins of Arkham Asylum in your erotic horror romance.”

  Toni blushed, and snapped, “Well, someone had to test that aspect, and no one else volunteered.”

  Drew waved a dismissal gesture and continued. “John was Captain Jack Gray in his pirate adventure. I was the alien Drewmer of the twenty-fifth century. And—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Stein. “You all took idiotic names similar to your own. Get to the point.”

  “Just this, Henry,” said Drew. “John is right: Billy and Sheila might be onto something here. If Arthur David Coburn managed to find a flaw in Avery’s makeup, and could slip into the persona of Arda—”

  “Poppycock,” snapped Stein.

  “Maybe not,” said Toni, looking at Billy and then over to Sheila, she yet at her console. “Avery was and still is damaged, and so . . .”

  “Yes, Avery is damaged,” said Stein, “but that doesn’t mean—”

  “We don’t know what it means,” said Greyson.

  Toni said, “It might explain why Avery was babbling and singing over these last few weeks. I did, after all, tell you that he seemed to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder.”

  “You mean multiple personalities?” asked Billy.

  Toni looked at the comptech. “Yes.”

  “Perhaps, my boy,” said Greyson, gesturing at the holo, “you’ve blundered into the right answer as to what we are seeing here.”

  “It might explain why Arthur’s mentality is flickering in and out,” said Alya.

  “Your meaning . . . ?” asked Toni.

  The small biologist said in her East Indian accent, “Well, sometimes he’s Arthur and sometimes he’s Arda.”

  “That shouldn’t make a difference in this crackpot theory you are all stupidly proposing,” said Stein. “If that ovoid is truly Arthur’s mentality, then just like those of the alpha team, it should not be flickering in and out. It should instead be stable, for Arthur would always be either Arton or Arda, both of them his assumed identities.”

  Greyson said, “I admit, Henry, I do not know why Arthur’s soul is flickering in and out, but—.”

  “Perhaps he’s avoiding discovery,” said Alvin Johnson.

  All eyes turned to the medtech, but Sheila said, “Alvin might just be right. Perhaps Mr. Coburn doesn’t want Avery to know that somehow he is able to interact with the Foxes, and he pops in and out of volatile memory as necessary.”

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “He remains mostly in permanent memory somewhere, and only appears in volatile when he has something to say.”

  They watched the main holo, no one speaking; but then: “Oh, good,” said Grace Willoby at her medtech console, “Kane is awake. Now it might not be so hard to keep the Foxes healthy.”

  But then the scene began to change: the forest vanishing, the ground turning into planking, masts and sails springing up, as the sky galleon formed.

  “Oh, my,” said Greyson a moment later.

  “What is it, John?” asked Toni.

  “This is the adventure I experienced,” said Greyson. “The Red Skies of Malagar.”

  “Good grief,” murmured Billy, now back at his console and watching the display in his comptech holo. “Look at that.”

  “I see it,” said Sheila. Then she called out to Toni, “Avery is loading megabytes of data into the ID crystals of the alpha team.”

  “What?” asked Toni.

  “Avery is downloading a great deal of data into the ID crystals.”

  Toni looked at Drew, and he said, “He’s setting up the Foxes in this new adventure. Of course they’d need data, especially if Avery hasn’t sensed anything wrong with them suddenly being on Greyson’s Malagar instead of their own Itheria.”

  Toni turned to Greyson. “Avery is running your adventure?”

  Greyson frowned. “Not exactly. See the name of the sky galleon they’re on?”

  “Yes. It’s the Lady of Sorrow.”

  “If you’ll recall, I was a freebooter and my sky ship was the Diablo.”

  “Right.”

  “I had a letter of marque from the Lost Prince himself to take down the ships of his mother, the queen. And so, as captain of the Diablo, I ambushed the Lady of Sorrow.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “My crew and I, we blew her out of the sky.”

  30

  Malagar

  (Crew of the Sorrow)

  “Rainbow,” called Ky, as the last of the cloud-whale exited the spun-glass net and became nothing more than mist on the wind. It had been an easy chase through the cloud-laden afternoon sky, for the whale had been powered by a spectrum of Glimmers—mostly reds and golds, though here and there shined the more energetic greens and blues.

  “Look,” cried one of the harvesters, pointing with his copper rod, “a violet, and another.”

  “Fetch them,” said Ky. “Those are worth more than all the rest put together.”

  And even as the first amethyst Glimmer drifted up the rod and into the glass box, “I got several white ones down here,” said another man of the harvester crew.

  “Pearlescent?” asked Ky.

  “Nar. J’st plain white. Y’want me t’throw ’em back?”

  “No,” said Ky. “Someone will use them as candles. Haul them in.”

  The harvest was perhaps half done, when—

  —Boom!—

  An explosion juddered the Sorrow.

  “What th—?” said Rith.

  “Cage the anchor, pipe the silks,” snapped Arik. “Get underway.”

  Rith sounded the signals, even as Arik spun the wheel hard over and shouted, “Man the cannons.”

  “Hang-sails!” shouted Ky, and all men rushed to their stations and fetched and snapped on harnesses of their silk-packs.

  Lookouts searched the skies, even as another cannonball arced past on an upward trajectory and exploded high above.

  “Where away?” cried Arik.

  “It’s in the cloud below and aft,” said Trendel, peering over the taffrail. “We’ve been ambushed.”

  And up from a great cloud under the Sorrow emerged a swift galleon, mist streaming from her yardarms and spars.

  “Open the keel cannon ports,” commanded Arik. “Return fire.”

  Along with the keel cannon crew, Kane slid down ladders to the gut of the ship, for, with the attack from below, it was the place most likely where men would suffer harm. And even though he was the Sorrow’s chirurgeon, Kane took command of the keel battery: normal
ly four thirty-pounders, but one was missing, a gaping hole where it had been, its belly port gone and its gimbal-rig smashed asunder.

  “Look alive, men, and fire when ready,” called Kane. Crews rammed powder bags in, followed by cloth-wrapped balls, the cloth making the ball a very tight fit to hold all in when they tipped the cannon straight down. Each gun was mounted on axels in rings at right-angles to one another so that the barrel could swivel throughout wide arcs and cover the entirety of the underbelly of the ship.

  Another enemy cannonball smashed through the bottom of the Sorrow, but this one didn’t explode and rolled back out to tumble downward, and one of the crewmen yelled, “May that one kill their own captain.”

  Up on deck, Trendel, yet leaning over the taffrail, said, “I think it’s the freebooter Diablo, Arik, Captain Jack’s ship, or so his red devil flag proclaims.”

  “Damn!” said Arik, for Jack Gray was a formidable foe. Then he said, “Down full,” and Trendel leapt to the vane control and spun that wheel.

  The keel guns of the Sorrow fired—Boom! Ba-boom-boom!

  One of the lookouts on the starboard beam out-nest cried, “Two hits and a miss. She’s still coming.”

  “Ky,” yelled Arik. “Get below and use your—”

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” shouted Ky, and she ran to a hatch and slid down.

  Arik turned to Rith. “Anything in your arsenal?”

  “Perhaps,” said Rith, and she stepped to the taffrail and leaned over and said a word and then sang a note. None on the Sorrow heard it, but those on the Diablo slapped hands to their ears.

  As Rith took another breath to continue, a huge streak of blackness stabbed down from the Sorrow, and three yardarms on the Diablo’s mainmast shattered, even as—Boom! Boom! Ba-boom!—the four gimbaled sky-guns on the upper deck of the Diablo fired. Two more hit the belly of the Sorrow and exploded, and two hurtled past, one to detonate high above in a blast of black smoke and flying shrapnel, while the other sailed up in a high lobbing arc to crest and then to plummet to the sea below.

  Down in the hold, Kane rushed from the side of two dead members of the crew and to Ky, the Kokudoan unconscious and bleeding among splinters and shards of wood. Along with the flux anchor in its silver cage, another of the cannons was gone, and the crew with it. Still, two more of the crew were now falling free of the Sorrow and only one managed to deploy his hang-sail.

  “Dammmit!” snarled Kane. And he took up Ky and made his way to the deck above. “All keel cannons are out of commission,” he shouted to Arik, “two gone into the sea, the flux anchor as well.” Kane then headed down to the infirmary, Ky yet in his arms.

  Badoom! The next shot hit the rudder and blew fully half of it to smithereens, and Arik struggled with the wounded helm to keep the Sorrow from floating adrift in the wind.

  “Rith, can I get a shot at Captain Jack?” called Arik.

  “He’s in view now,” replied Rith. And just as the Diablo fired again, Rith said another word, and once more sounded a note, and the men of the Diablo clutched their heads.

  Whoom! The shot from the Diablo arced over to squarely hit halfway up the Sorrow’s mizzenmast and blow it in two, and the top half crashed down, taking much of the rigging of the mainmast with it.

  Trendel said, “Better hurry, Arik, before she blows us out of the air.”

  “Musket,” commanded Arik, and a crewman handed him the gun.

  “Take the helm, Trendel,” ordered Arik, and he stepped to the taffrail and looked at the Diablo yet at a lower altitude, though, with its mainsail out of commission, the freebooter had fallen aft some three to four hundred yards.

  Captain Jack stood on the stern castle, watching the destruction of the Sorrow.

  Carefully, Arik took aim and inhaled full and exhaled half and finally squeezed the trigger. The flint struck the frizzen, knocking it forward to lift the pan cover, the spark to leap to fine powder in the pan, to burn through the touch-hole and ignite the charge, the ball to explode out from the barrel.

  A heartbeat passed and another, and then Captain Jack Gray fell slain, shot dead center in the forehead.

  Beside Captain Jack, a lieutenant shouted orders, and men rushed about resetting the halyards, and the Diablo fell off the wind and slipped back into the clouds.

  Arik handed the musket back to the crewman, who looked at his gun and then at Arik and shook his head in wonder, for in the captain’s hands, a weapon or even a cannon seemed almost mystical, perhaps even magical. But that couldn’t be, for the captain, he didn’t chant or gesture with his hands or anything else like mages and wizards are said to do. Regardless, a musket that seemed magical in his captain’s hands the crewman knew was just ordinary in his own.

  Arik gave an order to an apprentice bosun, who piped the command, and the crew luffed the sails. Without its flux anchor, the ship would drift on the wind until repairs to the rudder were made.

  In the infirmary, Kane finished removing the splinters from Ky, and then laid hands on the woman from the East and took all her wounds unto himself.

  Completely healed, “What?” said Ky, coming instantly awake. “Oh, Kane, you’re bleeding. My wounds?”

  “As usual,” said Kane, now snuffling and daubing at the blood seeping from his nose. “I’ll be all right, but you get to the deck. The battle still needs you. Oh, and in case Arik didn’t hear me, we’ve no more belly guns—two out of commission, the other pair in the sea. And the flux anchor in its cage was blown away, too.”

  Ky gave Kane a peck on his left cheek, the one that wasn’t bleeding, and then she rushed out and up a ladder to come among the wreckage adeck. But Rith said, “It’s all over. Arik shot Jack, and the Diablo ran away.”

  “Good,” said Ky. “I’m going back down to tend to Kane. He’s full of holes from the damage I took.” She turned to Arik and added. “The ship’s belly is a wreck. You’ll probably need to shield a few of the lift stones, for we are a deal lighter now that two cannon and the anchor are gone.”

  “How’s the gravity keel?” asked Arik, referring to the central-board made of an amalgam of iron and lift-stone that ran the length of the ship which, along with a rudder made of the same materials, acted against the flux in a similar fashion as their counterparts on ships of the seas do in the brine of the oceans.

  “Far as I know, it’s all right,” said Ky, “though what happened after I was knocked out, I haven’t any notion.”

  As Arik dispatched a crew to repair the rudder and Rith with another crew to check the keel and make repairs to the hull and close the silver doors on some of the levitators, “Cap’n, one of ours be riding the up-drafts,” shouted the lookout on the larboard beam out-nest.

  Arik called a signalman to him and said, “Flag him and tell him we are presently adrift until we replace the rudder,” said Arik. “Then tell him we are going to drop down a thousand feet or so, and tell him to ride that updraft as high as he can, and then coast over to us and land. If he misses us and falls into the ocean, tell him to try to splash in along the course the ship is drifting, and we’ll drop a line to him.”

  As the signalman stepped to the rail and began to whip his handheld flags into various configurations, Arik ordered a crewman to go below and tell Rith to close enough levitators to lose a thousand feet, and to stabilize the Sorrow at that level.

  From their place near the compass, the man took up one of the two strange brass and glass instruments used to measure altitude and headed below.

  Trendel said, “Why not just leave the hang-sail rider in the updraft until we can retrieve him?”

  “Updrafts over the ocean are tricky and can die as quickly as they come, and if we drift too far away before the rudder is replaced . . .”

  “Ah, right,” said Trendel, and he knocked the side of his head as if to dislodge a lost detail. “I forgot. —It’s been awhile since I last had to hang-sail.”

  “Cap’n,” said one of the harvesters, “there still be some Glimmers netted.”

&
nbsp; “Bring them in and but leave the net deployed. We’ve shipmate riding the wind. If he misses the deck, mayhap the mesh will catch him like a Glimmer.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n,” replied the man, laughing at the thought of a mate being snagged in the net, an action that would no doubt lead to him being called ‘Glimmer’ the rest of his life.

  As that crewman hustled away, Arik turned to Trendel and said, “As soon as we’re able, we’ll run the blockade and put into Validor for repairs. Then it’s off to find Lyssa’s body.”

  Trendel concentrated and spoke a word, and then said, “North. Her body yet lies somewhere north.”

  31

  Courthouse

  (Adkins)

  Under clear skies outside the courthouse in the humid breeze of a typical Tucson monsoon morning, Frankie Roberts looked into Steve’s holocam and said, “Before the court resumes, I thought you might like to hear what you, the viewers, had to say about Toni Adkins. Recall, First Prophet Sarah Bitters, of the break-away sect of God’s Temple, said of Toni Adkins that she is Jezebel returned, the Whore of Babylon, and a tool of Avery, the antichrist. She and the six who accompanied her said the End Days were upon us. I asked you to tell us if any of that were true, or is Ms. Adkins instead an enlightened scientist, blazing a trail for others to follow through a tangle of prejudice, ignorance, and folly? Here are some of the results: six people said Prophetess Bitters was exactly right, yet a News Holo-4 investigation shows that these six are the same six who were ejected from the courtroom with the prophetess; eight hundred and seventy-two of you across the nation said the End Days were indeed upon us, but that it has nothing to do with Avery or Toni Adkins or the hearing; instead, you say, the End days have come about for altogether other reasons—the continuation of global warming and the world-wide conflagrations, asteroids even now hurtling toward us, and other such impending calamities; eleven hundred fifty-three of you said Toni was blazing a trail; twenty-two students here at the University of Arizona in Tucson tell us Toni is hot, a remark in agreement with the entire national champion football team at The Ohio State University.” Frankie paused and touched a finger to her left ear. Then she said, “You can find these and other answers at Holo-4 dot holo. I would say more, but the judge has just entered the courtroom.