Blood Red Tide

by James Axler

  “Coastal infiltration was one of my species’ original design parameters,” Mr. Squid concluded.

  “But, dear Squid?” Doc asked.

  “Yes, Doc?”

  “What shall this sub-Antarctic swim, lesson to mention the trek to the fortress, do to you?”

  “It will very likely kill me. Mr. Ryan must assume that I may be dead or useless by the time we reach the fortification. He may have to make his own ingress.”

  “Oh, dear...”

  “You volunteering for this?” Ryan asked.

  “I am. I attacked this ship. Captain Oracle spared me. I have signed the book. Captain Oracle is my commanding officer. I believe that your plan, Mr. Ryan, augmented by my abilities provides the highest percentage chance of extracting the captain alive.”

  Ryan was once again reminded not to assign human emotions to nonhumanoids, but Mr. Squid was clearly loyal to Doc, and now he seemed to be loyal to Captain Oracle. Ryan was also reminded that Mr. Squid was the descendant of genetically modified organic weapons. Loyalty to his teammates and his mission seemed to be hardwired into him.

  “Speaking of extracting,” Miles said, “I assume you intend to steal a boat to get back.”

  “Ideally,” Ryan agreed, “and assuming I can get out of range of the coastal blasters, then the Glory will own any pursuit the Kelpers can mount.”

  Miles considered the plan. “Have you done this before?”

  “Not quite like this, but I’ve pulled people out of hostile villes a time or two.”

  “Very well. Miss Loral, make ready the whale boat. Manrape will command. Have him fuel and affix the outboard motor and rig a half-barrel athwart to transport Mr. Squid. Mr. J.B., affix our machine blaster to the mount in the bow. You’re manning it.”

  Koa shot up his hand. “Permission to row!”

  “Permission granted, Mr. Koa. Hardstone, Sweet Marie and Atlast to the oars as well. Blasters issued to all. Issue Mr. Ryan whatever he thinks he may need for the mission.”

  Ryan considered the crewmen being assigned. “You’re putting a lot of your eggs in one basket, Commander.”

  “You have twenty-four hours, Mr. Ryan. If you’re not back by then, the Glory goes in, blasters blazing. We either take our captain back, or we go out in a blaze of glory.”

  The captain’s cabin got very quiet.

  Miles checked his chron. “Mr. Ryan, I suggest you go the galley and requisition grease from Skillet.”

  He turned to Mildred. “Miss Mildred, cut Mr. Ryan’s eye.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ryan slid into the frigid waters. It wasn’t quite a fist to the jaw, but he knew it was freezing. In a reverse way it was like holding a hot coal with a glove that was too thin. It hadn’t quite burned through the material yet, but he could feel it. Krysty and Mildred had greased him up, wrapped him like a mummy in plastic wrap, greased him again, wrapped him again and then greased the outside. Ryan was wearing the equivalent of a very fragile dry suit. Mildred had cut him to relieve the swelling around his eye, packed the wound and iced it. For the moment Ryan could see.

  Manrape’s teeth were barely visible as he smiled. “Mr. Ryan?”

  “Bos’n?”

  “If you can’t rescue the captain, you and Mr. Squid, break as many things as you can. We’ll be coming.” The rest of the boat crew grunted in approval.

  “Rescue,” Ryan agreed. “Or revenge.”

  “Mr. Ryan in the water at 0130, Mr. Hardstone. Make a note of it.”

  “Aye, Bos’n.”

  Mr. Squid ran one of his arms underneath Ryan’s armpits with his toothed suckers facing out to not damage Ryan’s wrappings. The cephalopod sank into the frigid water up to its eyes and immediately began jetting toward shore. Forgiven had issued Ryan a pair of ancient, cracked swim fins and they had jury-rigged the too-small swim aids to Ryan’s feet.

  Ryan kicked.

  He was facing backward and didn’t want to upset Squid’s propulsive pulses by squirming around in his grip. “Squid, I know you’re using your speaker for jet propulsion. If you’re all right give me one squeeze with your towing arm for yes and two for no.” Squid’s arm contracted once. “Does the kicking help?” Squid’s arm contracted once. Ryan kicked harder. It was just about the only thing keeping the aching, burning cold out of his bones and it was a losing, rear guard action. With Squid as a living Diver Propulsion Vehicle, Ryan had considered bringing along some equipment. In the end he’d just taken his ship’s knife. The quicker they got out of the water, the better a chance he had to survive the swim. The terrible inverse of that equation was the sooner they got out of the water, the quicker Squid started dying.

  Ryan heard the burbling of a motor at low throttle, and a pale yellow searchlight slashed through the darkness. Squid rolled over and blew water out of his siphon to speak. “Hold your breath.” Squid submerged, and Ryan’s exposed lips, nose and eyelid began burning off. Squid’s arm squeezed Ryan once in question. Ryan squeezed it back once to signal he was all right. Squid descended into the icy, inky black but kept pulsing for shore and Ryan kept kicking. A pale yellow glow broke the stygian dark above and the ghost of the patrol boat’s wake passed overhead. Squid rose upward and broke the surface. Ryan struggled not to gasp. Squid rolled and contracted his arm to allow Ryan to see the shore. Ryan decided the original plan was still best. He could see activity on shore, but the docks of the fishing boats and the low warehouses around them were abandoned. “Head for the fishing fleet.”

  Squid rolled and pulsed faster. Ryan kicked, but he could feel his legs going numb and slowing. The lights of the ville grew brighter, and he could hear the vague noises of people shouting orders and the clatter of the shore patrol’s hooves. Squid rose and his limbs stiffened and moved. Ryan felt his fins scraping sand. He kicked them off, and Squid released him. Ryan slogged up out of the surf and shuddered. The water had been better. The wind chill of Westerlies cut through him exactly like a knife going through plastic wrap. He shook so badly it took determined effort not to drop his knife. Squid bobbed in the surf.

  Ryan’s teeth chattered. “Squid, are you going to be all right?”

  “I am momentarily fatigued. The fatigue toxins will rise to fatal levels once the landward journey begins and I cannot rehydrate.”

  Ryan shook like a century-old whitehair as he climbed the jumble of the sea wall. He felt a tentacle hit the seat of his plastic and firmly shove him to the top. Ryan crouched. The nearest building was a long, low warehouse. A pair of umiaks lay up on rails beneath open boathouses. Light seeped out from the heavily shuttered window of the attached cottage and smoke rose from the chimney.

  Ryan hugged himself and peered through a crack in the shutters. A small peat fire burned in the fireplace and a black iron kettle hung over it. The furniture was simply a table and two chairs made of bone and leather and a rope bed in the corner. The door seemed to be made of heavy, layered leather. It was latched but not barred. He moved to the door and slid his knife between the door and the jamb, then lifted the latch. Heat washed over him as he slipped inside. Squid followed and seemingly disappeared against the dressed black stone of the walls as Ryan closed the door behind him.

  The curtain to a small antechamber pushed back and a very large, very old man walked out hitching up his homespun trousers. He spied Ryan by the door. “Rads, thunder and fall out!” The old man staggered backward clutching his chest. “Oh, no, no, no...”

  Ryan’s knife gleamed dully in the firelight. “Quiet.”

  The old man stopped back-peddling as he bumped into the table. “You’re not a sea-mutie?”

  “No” Ryan’s wrap crinkled as he shook his head. “But he is.”

  “Who?”

  Mr. Squid did a remarkable job of materializing out of thin air. The old man opened his mouth to scream. Mr.
Squid shot out one arm and suckered it across the old man’s mouth. The cephalopod gently but firmly sat the old man down at the table. “I am not a mutation. I am a descendant of intelligent design.”

  “Sorry, Squid,” Ryan said. “Just trying to intimidate him.”

  “Psychological warfare. I am familiar with it,” Mr. Squid replied. The old man’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates. His nose worked like a bellows against Mr. Squid’s arm as he hyperventilated. “I believe it is working.”

  “Let him go.”

  Mr. Squid retracted his arm and stood with his massive head-body brushing the ceiling.

  The old man shook. “Listen, lad. I don’t know what you and your...octopus...are into, but I’m too old, and I most certainly am not interested.”

  “We’re not into anything.”

  “No offense, lad, but you look like rough trade to me.”

  Ryan caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the hearth. He was wrapped from head to toe like a mummy in plas, wearing an eye patch over one eye and the other looking like bloody horror. Swiftly melting grease ran down him in rivulets. Beneath it he wore Doc’s borrowed electric green Speedos. When Mildred and Krysty had stepped back to admire their handiwork aboard ship, Mildred had grinned proudly and said, “Bring out the gimp!” Ryan had not known what that meant.

  Now he thought he had an inkling.

  Ryan started to slice off his wrapping, but his hands and his knife slid. “Squid, can you spare an arm or two?”

  Squid extended two of his arms. His suckers pulled the greased plastic away from Ryan’s flesh, and the teeth acted like one long serrated knife. Ryan’s wrappings came off in great swathes. Mr. Squid never took his alien eyes off the old man, who wiped his mouth from Mr. Squid’s embrace and eyed Ryan as the layers came off.

  “You talk funny.”

  Ryan didn’t deny it. “What’s your name?”

  “Balthazar Baelish Ballantrae, master of warehouses.”

  “That’s a hell of a handle.”

  “My friends call me Balls.”

  “That’s a bit cruel.”

  Balls glared defiantly. “No, it’s because they’re huge!”

  Ryan raised one bemused, greasy eyebrow.

  Balls stared back shrewdly. “You’re a Glory man, aren’t you?”

  Ryan didn’t deny that.

  “Come for your captain,?”

  “How do you feel about the governor?” Ryan countered.

  “He’s a right bastard.”

  “Big Ian?”

  “Right bastard’s right fucking hand, then, isn’t he?”

  Ryan took the back of his knife and began shaving the grease off his limbs in great glops that fell to the floor. “You wouldn’t lie about that, would you?”

  “Maybe, to you.” Balls gazed up into Mr. Squid’s unblinking golden eyes. “Not him.”

  “Good thinking. Mr. Squid, If you catch Balls in a lie, eat his brain.”

  “I will.”

  “Oh!” Balls jerked back in his chair. “Now you’re playing your intimidation games again!”

  Ryan shook his head. “Cephalopods never lie.”

  “The brain is the best human part,” Mr. Squid stated. “I like the liver, too.”

  Balls shuddered.

  “Why do you hate the governor?” Ryan asked.

  “Gov’nor Laird’s father, may he rest in peace, listened to wise counsel. This one’s a flogger, and he doesn’t like dissent. I’ve the weals on my back to prove it, and a granddaughter raped and preggers in his hall like an Argie slave, haven’t I?”

  Ryan considered the young woman who had served him stew. “What’s in the warehouse?”

  “Smoked fish mostly and the late afternoon crab catch, which hasn’t been distributed since we went on alert.”

  Ryan suddenly perked an eyebrow. “Alive?”

  Balls looked at Ryan like he was stupe. “Only place a dead crab belongs is in a pot or on a plate, then. Anything else is for the gulls.”

  Ryan nodded at Squid. “Why don’t you go into the warehouse and have a snack and a bath?”

  Squid’s alien gaze froze on Ryan for long moments. Balls jerked as Squid’s skin rippled from gray to a warm rosy color and a few patterns of photoelectric cells flashed. “Thank you, Ryan.” Squid opened the warehouse door and disappeared. Ryan and Balls listened as wood tore and crustaceans crunched beneath Squid’s beak. Seawater overflowed across the floor as Squid took a bath and the sound of crunching went underwater.

  “Pour you a cuppa?”

  Ryan stared. Balls glanced at the kettle.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Balls poured hot greenish-brown liquid into two glazed clay mugs. Ryan sipped. The Falklands did not produce coffee or tea or maté. It was some kind of bitter herbal, but it was hot and Ryan felt his core warming. The crunching and bubbling continued in the warehouse.

  “What’s your octopus doing?”

  “He can’t stay out of water for long, and he’s tired from swimming the strait. He’s eating and oxygening up for the haul to the fortress.”

  “He can walk that far?”

  “It’s going to kill him. The forlorn hope is he has enough left to get me over the wall.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you and yours will probably find him and eat him at sunrise.”

  Balls contemplated this. “That’s a loyal octopus you have there, old son.”

  “Loyal as they come. More than most men or muties I’ve met.”

  “Lad, I’d take you in my wagon. I’d take your octopus in a wet barrel and you in a dry and take you straight to the gates. But we’d never make it. I have no excuse to be on the roads this night. I’m considered valuable because I can do math and I keep the warehouse and distribution accounts proper. But I’m not trusted, politically, as it were.”

  “I understand.” Ryan glanced around. “I could use some clothes.”

  “Well, the pants will be short in the leg and fat around the middle, but they might do.” Balls went to a leather chest and pulled out a patched wool jersey and an ancient and even more patched fisherman’s sweater. A pair of extremely hard used tin-cloth pants and sealskin boots followed. The tunic smelled like an old man, and the sweater smelled like an old goat. Ryan pulled on the clothes and was grateful for all of it. He stood by the fire and started to feel warm again.

  Balls lifted his chin at Ryan’s blade on the table. “No one around here has a knife like that. Swap you, mate.”

  Balls produced a leather belt, a sheath and a bone-handled, wickedly curved, eight-inch skinning knife. One corner of Ryan’s mouth quirked as they swapped. Even if he brought Oracle back alive, Purser Forgiven would still demand to know where ship’s knife number 12 was. “You sure you want to be seen with that?”

  “Oh, I won’t be seen with it. I’ll keep it in the bottom of my chest, and on cold nights like this, I’ll take it out and fondle it by the fire like, warming my bones to the memory of how a Deathlander, a talking octopus and an old man like me foxed the gov up a treat.”

  “You’re right, and I don’t have to see them to know it.”

  “Know what, then?”

  “You have huge balls.”

  Balls snorted. “You can tell just by wearing my pants.”

  “Yeah and I’m glad I’m wearing underwear.”

  The two men laughed. Ryan got the feeling Balls hadn’t laughed in a long time. “You’ll do, Deathlander. Sure’n you won’t just kill Laird and take the gov’norship?”

  “I’ve got places to go.”

  “Well, then, if you’ve rescued your captain, and have no place else to go, best you come back here. I might have something for you. But don’t count on it.”

  �
��Thanks, Balls.” The one-eyed man shoved out his hand. “I’m Ryan. Glad I met you.”

  “Oh, the pleasure’s mine. Genuine night of wonders. Tell you what, Ryan. Break north along the sea wall and past it half a klick. You’ll find a creek that runs down to the sea. Follow it inland. Soon enough you will find it frozen over, but it will take you straight to the gov’nor’s hall. They diverted part of the creek to provide some of the hall’s water. You won’t be able to break in that way, but it will keep you off the roads and no one should be patrolling it. And take my oilskins. You’ll need them.”

  Ryan took the cracked and ancient jacket and sou’wester hat. “Squid?”

  Squid walked in and Ryan could have sworn the cephalopod had a spring in his seven steps. “I am refreshed.”

  “We go back down the sea wall and walk north until we find a creek. It takes us a bit off course but it winds back to the fortress.”

  “Very well.”

  “Balls, you got a bucket?”

  “I have two.”

  Ryan glanced at the tiny, open cupboard and two lidded pewter steins. “I’ll need those too.”

  Balls brought two buckets out of the warehouse and Ryan put the steins in them. He nodded at Balls. “Thanks.”

  Balls nodded back. “Luck.”

  Ryan and Squid stepped into the killing wind. Balls closed the door without another word. Bits of water that couldn’t decide whether they were snow or rain swirled and spattered. Ryan and Squid descended to the beach. The one-eyed man knelt and filled the buckets and then the steins with seawater. He considered the journey. For him it was a barely an evening walk. “I figure three miles.”

  “I will get you over the wall or die in the attempt,” Squid affirmed.

  Ryan remembered suckered arms that had torn his flesh and the beak that had sought his life through his belly. He kept his revulsion to himself as he dropped to one knee. “Best you climb aboard.” He perceived Squid’s flesh rippling and changing, but in the dark he couldn’t tell the color.

  “You will carry me?”

  “You carried me across the strait. It’s the least I can do, and I need you to pull me over that wall.”