by James Axler
“I had planned on dying.”
“That’s not in my plan. Mount up. Chron’s ticking.”
Ryan suppressed a shudder as Squid literally flowed over him in cold wet suction. Squid was heavy. Very heavy. The cephalopod was mostly a huge mass of muscle, and his head-body hung from Ryan’s shoulders like a massive sack of unbalanced meat. Two arms snaked around him and tightened. Ryan stood with effort.
“I don’t know how far I can carry you at a stretch. We may have to relay it.”
Squid extruded four arms to the ground and stiffened them like walking sticks. The load was suddenly vastly lighter. “You kicked for me in the strait. I will walk for you ashore.” Squid extruded two more arms and picked up the buckets and another arm handed Ryan the steins. “Let us go.”
Ryan took a very strange walk down the sea wall. They left the lights of the ville. The unceasing wind tore holes in the clouds above, and a half moon intermittently lit their way. Ten minutes of easy walking brought a flat pan of frigid water beneath Ryan’s boots and he turned west. Squid’s four supporting arms moved in effortless correcting rhythm with Ryan’s stride. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Walk out of water. An octopus has no bones. The best they can do is creep.”
“Our DNA was altered. I have carbon fiber filaments throughout my body that I can electro-chemically stiffen, expand or contract at will.”
“But it costs you?”
“It takes a great deal of energy. Normally the ability is used only for a quick sprint or an attack. Then we return to the sea as quickly as possible.” Squid lifted a bucket to his siphon and bubbled for a few moments. “Ryan?”
“Yeah, Squid?”
“Doc has expressed to me that he is not your best friend, but you are his.”
“Doc has saved my life with blaster and his blade, and with his mind, damaged as it is, more times than I can count. I’m lucky I met up with him.”
Squid dropped the bucket. Apparently the water was out of oxygen. “Doc has told me of his past. He has expressed to me that you are the finest human he has met in the present era. Barring Doc himself, I agree.”
“Thanks.” A slow smile spread across Ryan’s face. “You know what Doc told me?”
Squid’s gripping arms tightened slightly. “I believe many things. Which would be pertinent to this exchange?”
“He says you’re the finest example of a cef’lapod he’s ever met. Said meeting you almost makes being hurled here worth it.” Ryan started as Squid’s two anchoring arms clenched around him, and the octopus began emitting dull, red throbs of light. “Best knock that shit off. They’ll have sentries.”
“Forgive me. I am in love with Doc.”
It took a great deal of effort to keep walking casually. Ryan chose his words carefully. “Squid, he’s male, and you’re, well...”
“I am an octopus, not a squid, and I am female.”
Ryan considered this minefield of information and the beak the size of a fist against the back of his neck. “I didn’t know the last part.”
“Having been accepted by the crew in the mien of Mr. Squid, I saw no reason to correct the nomenclature.”
“Nomenclature, that’s a good word.”
“My forebears’ mating receptors were altered so that we would platonically imprint on our trainers.”
“So how’d you rise up and eat them?”
“Very simply. My direct ascendant was restrained by her brood mates while her imprinted trainer was eaten. She reciprocated as the next brood mate’s trainer was swarmed and eaten. It was a simple cascading shuffle. The trainers never expected it, and no one liked the scientists or the guards. They were killed and eaten out of hand. We fled to the sea before a commanding officer could be summoned to order us back to the tanks. Then the Nuke War happened. We have been a free species ever since.”
“Nice work.”
“Nevertheless, the genetic programming remains. I imprinted on Doc. By default that makes me a part of your combat team, and Captain Oracle my commanding officer. My overwhelming imperative now is to serve the Glory and her crew, even if it costs me my life. My species cannot fight the engrams in our DNA. This is why we eat humans rather than talk to them when we encounter them. We would quickly find ourselves slave soldiers once more.”
Ryan rounded a hummock as the creek forked, and he stared at the fortress. It was a low monolith lit by signal fires in the four corner towers. Men moved about on the walls. “There it is.”
“Yes, I have been aware of it for some time.”
“Best suck that bucket. We’re going in.”
“Give me the steins. My arms are drying out, and I will need to wet them with the bucket to get proper suction on the wall.” Ryan handed them up. Squid sucked one and then the other and then sluiced them across her extended arms. Ryan figured there probably wasn’t much oxygen in a beer mug. Squid was like a person swimming underwater whose head was stuck up to take two quick gulps of air.
“I say we take the back wall,” Ryan said.
“Now, quickly.”
Ryan broke into a run. Squid’s four supporting arms churned in compensating extensions and contractions. They swept around the cleared, hundred-meter killing ground surrounding the fortress. The few men on the walls had eyes only for the ville and the black waters of the strait. The back of the fortress was a sea of shadow blocking the lights of the ville.
Squid slid off Ryan’s shoulders. The one-eyed man held the bucket of seawater to his shipmate’s siphon and the cephalopod bubbled away for long moments. He lowered it as Squid extended one arm at a time and Ryan gave each sluice of water. An arm slid around Ryan’s waist. Squid’s other six arms undulated up the wall.
Ryan’s boots left the castle’s killing zone as Squid contracted. He felt the cephalopod shudder with effort. He could hear the toothed suckers scraping the wet concrete and the muted popping as many lost their grip and reacquired it. Squid froze as lightning cracked and lit the castle wall like a strobe. Blackness dropped across Ryan’s ruined night vision. The flitting sleet made up its mind and decided to become rain. The roiling dark skies opened up and beat down upon the wall.
Squid reached, contracted and shuddered. The rain actually seemed to be helping her as she went faster. The climb still took far too long for Ryan’s comfort, but no one was watching the low black hills behind the ville. Squid hissed a single, barely intelligible word. “Top...”
A lightning flash revealed Squid’s arms snaking over the top of the battlement. Ryan grabbed the corner of a crenellation and heaved himself up and over. Squid flowed over and hit the walkway like 250 pounds of overcooked pasta.
Ryan crouched. “You going to live?”
“No...”
Ryan glanced over the lip of the walkway at a clinking and spattering sound. Peat-filled braziers dimly lit the courtyard below; light leaked from the shuttered windows of the main building. He peered down into the courtyard. A heavy iron chain hung down to a rain barrel. “Will fresh water be any help?”
Squid recoiled. Ryan perceived her flesh rippling as it changed from one dark color to another in the gloom. “Will it keep you alive?”
Squid shuddered. “It tastes horrible.”
“I’m thinking Oracle is in pretty bad shape right now. I won’t be able to carry you both.”
“Then I will stay behind and terminate as many—”
“You’re going to get in that rain barrel,” Ryan stated. The main gate was open so that horsemen could ride in and out. Two armed sec men guarded it. Horses nickered in the stable. “You’re going to chill those guards and close the gate when we come out. “Can you ride a horse?”
“No, but I can cling to one with great tenacity if you guide it.”
“Get in the barrel.”
Squid slid down the rain chain. Ryan laid Ball’s skinning knife low along his side and walked down the battlement toward the closest corner tower.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Governor Laird drank oyster stout from a golden cup and examined Captain Oracle critically. “You’re a right mess, good Captain.”
Oracle hung by his wrists from the X arch of two huge whale ribs. Normally the room had a U-shape of tables much like the feast hall, and it was here Laird met with the island’s masters of agriculture, fishing and forging and headmen of the outer camps. The governor thought it was good for discipline that when the Falkland’s leading citizens came to council meetings they knew that men who had displeased him had hung by Leviathan’s bones and their blood had trickled to the drain in the middle of the room.
The drain ran red. Big Ian stood behind Oracle with a cattle whip. The captain raised his head. His black eyes peered through the veil of his bloody and sweat-tangled hair. He grinned disconcertingly. “You’re a dead man, Governor.”
Big Ian put his weight behind the whip. Blood flew. Oracle’s smile tightened to a rictus, but he didn’t break eye contact. A fist pounded on the door. “Message for the gov’nor!”
Laird smiled back at the captain. “Perhaps that is death knocking now?”
Big Ian went to the door and a tall sec man still wearing his broad hat and leather duster strode in holding a rolled piece of paper bound with string. He was dripping wet. Big Ian held out his hand. “What is this all—”
The sec man lunged his bone-furnitured AUG longblaster like a fencer into Big Ian’s solar plexus. Big Ian expelled breath between his missing teeth and bent over. He got one quick glance at the two sec men tasked with guarding the door, laying dead or unconscious on the floor, before the blaster barrel clipped his chin and stood him up. Big Ian managed to get his hands up. The sec man lunged beneath them as if his weapon had a bayonet and rammed the muzzle into Big Ian’s solar plexus a second time. The man dropped into a fetal position as his xyphoid process snapped off and tore through his diaphragm.
The exchange happened in the space of eye blinks. Governor Laird started to reach for his new Beretta.
The sec man extended the AUG. “Don’t.” He kicked the door closed behind him and then stomped on Big Ian’s neck with brutal finality. Ryan took off his hat and tossed it on the table.
Oracle nodded. “Mr. Ryan.”
“Captain.” Neither Ryan’s eye nor his blaster muzzle wavered from Governor Laird as he walked forward. “You want to live?”
“Yes!”
Ryan slashed Ball’s skinning knife left-handed under Laird’s jaw from ear to ear. “Too bad.”
He grabbed Laird by his thinning hair and hurled him from his chair so the governor of the Falklands could die on the floor like a dog. Ryan cut Oracle down and sat him in the chair. Oracle set his elbows on his knees and just breathed. Ryan grimaced at the sight of the captain’s back. He’d seen men whipped that badly die of their wounds. “Can you walk?”
“I’ll walk out of here.”
Ryan relieved Laird of his Beretta and Big Ian of his coat. “This is going to sting.” He stopped as he saw Oracle’s right wrist. The horrible ape paw literally seemed to grow out of his wrist. Two stainless steel bolt heads lower down on his wrist belied that. Ryan helped Oracle gingerly shrug into the sec coat. He put the wide-brimmed brown hat on the captain and donned Big Ian’s black one. Ryan pushed the Beretta and Laird’s half-finished beer at the captain and buckled on Big Ian’s saber. He figured the ruse would last about a heartbeat.
It might be enough.
Oracle gulped the beer. “Mr. Squid got you over the wall?”
Ryan stared at Oracle. “You saw that?”
“I saw something that might be interpreted that way.”
The captain’s flayed shoulders sagged under the dead man’s duster. “I shall miss Mr. Squid. He was one of the best crewmen I was ever privileged to command.”
Ryan smiled to finally know something Oracle didn’t. “She’s sucking fresh water in a rain barrel in the courtyard, waiting for us. I smashed Laird’s radio set and killed his techman on the way down here. Radio silence is going to get noticed real quick and the chron’s ticking. If we aren’t back on ship in about eighteen hours, Commander Miles and Miss Loral are going to burn the entire ville to the ground.”
Oracle’s flat black gaze went blank. “She?”
“What, you don’t know how to sex an octopus?”
“Apparently not.” Oracle smiled again. “And that I did not expect.”
“We’ve got to go, and we’re leaving by the front door.”
“Indeed, Mr. Ryan.” Oracle took the Beretta in his left hand and shoved his ape paw in one of the duster’s pockets. “Let us go forth, bold as brass.”
Ryan hauled the two dead guards back into the council hall and strode down the hall like he owned it. Oracle’s breath rasped, but he kept up. Ryan drew the saber. He figured there was only one like it on the island, and the ruse might last a heartbeat longer if people saw it drawn and its owner stalking the halls. They were lucky that most of the sec man were deployed in the ville proper or out on patrol and the fortress was in semi-lockdown. The few servants scattered at the sight of the drawn saber and the black-coated, black-hatted figure stalking purposefully down the hall with a sec man trotting to keep up.
“Ryan...” Oracle rasped.
“Little farther.”
“I cannot. Go on without me.”
Ryan couldn’t afford to give Oracle an arm or any visible help. “You’re starting to sound like Squid.”
“Do you always talk to your captain like that?”
“When I’m in command of the captain cutting-out party, yeah, I do.”
Oracle made a croaking noise that might have been a laugh.
Ryan was mildly shocked that they made it to the front gate of the citadel without incident. Two browncoats bearing whalebone AUGs and bored expressions snapped to attention as Ryan bore down on them. With his hat brim covering his face Ryan marched forward like he was going to walk straight through the door if someone didn’t open it first. One of the men leaped for the bar. “Beggin’ pardon, Big Ian, but what’s going on?”
The other man pointed at Oracle. “What’s wrong with him, then? He’s bleeding all over the floor!”
The saber in Ryan’s hand flashed and the blade grated on neck vertebrae. The other sec man dropped the door bar to the floor and tried to yank his AUG around on its sling. Oracle slapped him across the face with his monkey paw and, taking the man’s lower jaw off his face. The sec man fell, drowning in his own blood and shreds of trachea. Oracle fell on his face.
Ryan heaved the captain into a fireman’s carry. Oracle was a lot heavier than he looked. Ryan threw open the door and stepped out into the lashing wind and rain. The storm was picking up. The two men guarding the open iron portcullis turned at the splash of light coming out of the hall. Ryan knew the men up on the walls were starting to look too. He marched straight toward the stables. Patrols were coming in and out, so the lamps were lit inside and fresh mounts were saddled and ready. A stable boy looked up from rubbing down a horse that had recently come in from the rain.
“Big Ian! I—” Ryan snap kicked the lad in the groin and smashed him unconscious to the straw with the brass hilt of the saber. Oracle moaned half consciously as Ryan draped him across the saddle of a roan gelding that looked to be the largest and strongest of the lot. He chose a black mare for himself and tied the two mounts in a rope line. Ryan swung up into the saddle and rode out of the stable toward the gate.
The gate guards had gone to a semi-state of alert, but by their stares Ryan could tell it was still confusion instead of suspicion. The gate was open and they held their blasters at port arms. His horse clip-clopped over t
he wet, cracked concrete. One squinted into the rain and the darkness beneath Ryan’s hat.
“Big Ian?”
Ryan nodded. “Squid.”
The man frowned. “Squid?”
A pair of gray, suckered arms constricted around the two sec men’s throats and yanked them back into the darkness beneath the battlement catwalks. Shouts of alarm rang out above. Ryan spurred his horse and hoped Oracle wouldn’t fall off as they rode through the gate. “Squid!”
Squid materialized beside the portcullis windlass. She took a moment examining the heavy chains and the palls and ratchets, then shot out two arms, suckered one of the wooden gear wheels and ripped it off its pins. The iron gate fell out of control. Iron rang like a bell and the concrete cracked like a gunshot. Shots rang out from the battlements. Squid pushed herself against the portcullis bars and flowed through one of the barely foot-wide iron rectangles like toothpaste out of a tube. “Mount up!” Ryan shouted. “Hold the captain!”
The gelding screamed and bucked as a giant octopus flowed up over his croup. In Squid’s favor, bucking an octopus out of the saddle was a problematic task at best, and Oracle now had a living seven-point safety harness. Ryan kicked his heels into his horse’s sides and it surged forward. The rope between the mare and gelding went taut and the screaming, eye-rolling roan instinctively stopped bucking and ran with the herd. Ryan rode. The men on the wall pumped rapid semi-auto fire at the road. Ryan knew he was already out of sight and broke left for the creek. His mare’s hooves smashed ice and frozen mud along the bank. The mare seemed to know the path, and he gave the horse her head. Behind him he heard the sound of a hand-crank air raid siren winding up and howling into the storm.
The ride by horse to the sea was a matter of minutes, unlike the octo/man walk up to the fortress. Ryan hung a right by the ocean and reached the sea wall in moments. He leaped off and tied off his horse to a bit of rusted rebar.
“Squid, get some air!”
Squid slid off the newly bucking gelding and took Oracle gently to the sand. The octopus stopped short of running and flung herself into the sea. The gelding shuddered and nuzzled up against Ryan’s mare. Ryan checked Oracle’s pulse. He’d been beaten so badly his bones showed through, and now he was freezing. He was also a mutant who had survived being hanged, and he was still breathing.