by Jack Conner
Herobnic shared a glance with his X.O., then turned back to Avery. Both Navy men looked stricken.
“Sir, who, may I ask, is going to pilot those vessels? My men have no experience—”
“I’ll do it,” Avery said.
“But, sir, that’s madness!”
“You won’t be alone,” Sheridan said, and gave him a nod.
“You don’t have to do this,” he told her.
“But I do. I—”
An alarm screamed from one of the consoles, and after a moment the operator assigned to it glanced up, his face sweaty. “Sir, Gunner Station Seven just imploded.”
“Switch the alarm off, damn it,” said the admiral, and when the order was obeyed he added, “Was the emplacement sealed off?”
“Yes, sir. The flooding is contained to the station.” Before the man could continue, screams erupted from down an aft hall. At first they started low and distant, but then they came closer and faster together.
“Shit,” said Sheridan.
“What’s going on?” said Avery.
Ignoring him, she spun to Herobnic. “Have that torpedo outfitted now!”
The Admiral glared at her, then flinched as another scream trilled from down a passage. His hand reached for a handset, pushed a button and in moments he was speaking to the torpedo-loading room. While he did that, Avery heard himself ask again, as gunfire sounded in the near distance—fighting inside the sub—“What’s going on?”
Sheridan’s lance tilted downward, just a bit. Gallansi turned from facing the front to facing the rear of the bridge, the direction of the screams, and suddenly she was holding a ruby spear. Had she extracted it from herself?
“Well?” snapped Avery.
“You said nothing big could get through,” Sheridan said. “But what about something … smaller?”
Avery felt sweat sting his eyes. “You don’t mean … ?”
Before he could even complete the thought, Uthua flowed into the room, monstrous and swollen.
Chapter 16
Uthua was in his other-self, of course, and the alien lights of his sac, black and nearly opaque, played off the metal of the room, reflecting from one bulkhead to another. He had two sailors gripped in his tentacles and more were swirling about his sac, being eaten away by acid. Avery supposed he must have found a few infected men and women amongst the crew. Their bloods swirled around his Muirblaag form, which floated, muscled and covered in scales and tattoos, in the very center of his sac, just dimly seen, monstrous organelles bobbing around it. Where Avery could see him through them, the fish-man appeared distorted and altogether inhuman.
Uthua’s dark gaze met Avery’s even as blue fire erupted from one of his tentacles and consumed one of the thrashing sailors. Instantly the stench of burning human flesh filled the bridge. The man screamed horribly for an instant, then fell silent, and charred ash that had once been a man trickled between the coils of the tentacle to pile on the deck.
Little king, Avery heard in his mind, and by some trick it was as though he heard Uthua’s bass rumble. By the startled looks on the others’ faces he supposed they heard it, too.
“Don’t come any closer,” Avery said.
Even as he spoke the sailors that carried the venom weapons were picking themselves up and arranging themselves in a half-circle around the awful god, who glommed further into the chamber. Some of his sac still spilled down the passageway he had entered by, but over half of him was now in the bridge. It was not a large chamber, really, and the humans edged backward, trying to get as far away from Uthua as they could. Meanwhile the submarine barreled through the city of the R’loth, only the helmsman at his station.
Then, as Uthua slipped even further into the room, the helmsman abandoned his post, too, and the submarine listed, very slowly, to one side. No one piloted it now. At any moment it could smash into a building or another sub, and then it would all be over.
Maybe just a LITTLE closer, Uthua said, or sent, and as he spoke he passed poison into the other crewmember he held in his limbs, and the man screamed and died, a look of horror on his face. Uthua tossed the body to the deck and pushed forward. He was now looming over Gallansi.
Sheridan stepped forward and raised her pale spear. “Get back, you piece of shit!”
Gallansi seemed to blink in surprise. She, or rather Ani, surely, stared at Sheridan. She had likely never imagined being defended by the likes of the murderer.
“Uthua, begone!” Avery said. “You can’t get through these weapons.”
Can’t I?
Dark tentacles coiled around a woman holding a crossbow whose bolts were tipped with jellyfish venom. Even as the woman fired, the bolt passing into his sac and radiating unhealthy lines, Uthua crushed her to pulp. Blood oozed from the coils to the deck.
Two soldiers leapt at Uthua, sinking their spears deep into his sac, but before their poisoned tips could reach his fish-man self he had lifted up his pseudopods and crushed them both to paste. The other three lashed him with poison whips. Angry veins spread from the contacts of whips on sac, but Uthua was prepared for the pain this time and scooped each whip-wielder up in his tendrils.
Sheridan coiled her arm and flung her pale spear. It sank into the sac and shot for Uthua, but an organelle intercepted it and knocked the aim off. The spear sailed by Uthua’s fish-man form just as his tentacles passed fire into the whip-wielders, and the bridge filled with even more smoke.
One of his tentacles strained toward Sheridan. Choking, Avery pulled her back, and they both collapsed backward to the deck. Uthua’s limbs groped toward them, but the bridge had filled with so much smoke that it was hard to see, and Avery and Sheridan crawled away.
“Don't touch my father!” Ani shouted through Gallansi’s lips, and Avery heard, or felt, Uthua give a mental cry of pain. The ruby girl had hurt him somehow. But, by the screaming behind him, and the continued stench of salt and ammonia, Avery knew the damage had not been fatal.
Admiral Herobnic appeared ahead, gagging, tears streaming down his soot-smeared face. He was on his hands and knees like Avery and Sheridan, and he ducked lower as a half-glimpsed tentacle passed through the air above him.
“Are the squid-ships ready?” Avery said, then had to repeat himself as he’d been coughing too badly to be understood.
The admiral only nodded. “What about him?”
“We’ll draw him away,” Sheridan said, then pulled Avery forward. In moments they had gained their feet and were making their way through the passages forward of the bridge. Screams and gunshots echoed in the chamber behind them, and Avery wondered if Sheridan had only said that for his benefit. He doubted the Cavalier would survive the next few minutes, one way or another. As if to confirm his fears, the voice of Admiral Herobnic rose in a loud wail behind him, then was abruptly cut off. Avery hoped he’d gone down fighting.
The two squid-ships shrieked and thrashed in the submersible bay as Avery and Sheridan stumbled into the torpedo room. An ensign, the same woman from before, had reeled back away from the tank, clutching a bloody arm, while several others assisted her. A torpedo had just been attached to the backside of one of the giant squids with yellow hempen bands.
“Are they ready to go?” Sheridan demanded.
“They’re ready,” said the ensign, then shot a nervous look down the passage toward the bridge. “Are we under attack?”
Sheridan ushered Avery toward the squids before he could answer, but at the last instant pity seemed to come over her, and she turned to the crewmembers.
“Hide,” she said.
A long, low, whale-like moan washed over them, coming from the bridge.
“He’s coming,” Avery said.
The workers in the torpedo room reached for their sidearms if they had them, but Sheridan only shook her head and pointed forward.
“Go!” she said. “Hide—no! Wait. One of you must stay to open the sub bay doors.” Without pausing to see if they obeyed, she turned to her squid—the one without
the torpedo—and said, “Open.”
The creatures had been lashing the air with their tentacles and snapping their beaks in agitation—Avery wasn’t sure if it was hunger, annoyance at the presence of the torpedo, or Uthua’s coming—but now the one Sheridan had indicated stilled, lowered its limbs and opened its maw while Sheridan shrugged on an environment suit. She wriggled her way through the gaping beak and into the creature’s innards. It made no move to devour her, and Avery could see through its semi-translucent sides (as he too pulled on an environment suit) that she was safely ensconced in its organic cockpit.
Uthua moaned again, closer this time. The crewmembers scattered, only the female ensign remaining to operate the doors.
Once Avery’s own suit was donned, he commanded his squid-ship to open for him, then thrust himself through the beak, pushed through the flap that covered the cockpit (sealing it off from the throat) and slid into the pilot’s station. Even as he settled himself, he could hear Sheridan’s voice in his ears:
“Are you ready to do this?”
“I’m ready.”
He turned and gestured at the ensign, who flipped a few buttons, her face chalk white, then turned and bolted. Just as she did, Uthua burst into the torpedo room.
The sub bay doors opened beneath Avery and Sheridan.
“Go!” he said, speaking to his squid but knowing it was the psychic command that mattered, not his voice. He also pushed organic buttons and shoved the fleshy tube that served as control stick.
The squid gave a convulsive heave, gathered a large volume of water, then shot it out, launching itself at speed beyond the metal confines of the submarine, the torpedo strapped to its top slowing it only a little. Sheridan came right behind.
Instantly the chaos of the battle enveloped them. A trio of squid-ships blasted by them pursued by some horror that vaguely resembled a giant fish. Its maw blazed light and its scales seemed to move restlessly, each with a different pattern on it; the patterns seemed to be a sort of code. The only thing that made sense about it was the threat it posed. Other creatures or constructs assaulted the submarines and squid-ships in every direction, and it was such a mass of confusion and violence that it stole Avery’s breath.
Beyond the fleet of submarines drifted the vast beings he believed to be the R’loth, but as before he could only perceive them as something akin to massive infected whales crossed with storm clouds, all brooding power and eerie if unnatural grace. The constant discharges from the submarines and squid-ships seemed to be holding them back for the moment, though. Their very size prevented them from evading the blasts.
Stay away, you bastards, Avery thought.
He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the Cavalier go down. With the admiral and bridge crew dead, there was no one left to steer it, and it made a gradual tilt downward, almost immediately striking a strange building, which it bore into. Avery wasn’t sure if it was because of the Ygrithan energies aboard the sub or the R’lothan energies inside the structure, but either way something powerful was loosed. A great ball of azure light consumed the building, and the shock wave of the explosion bucked Avery and his ship forward.
“Shit!” said Sheridan, and Avery glanced to the side to see her being knocked about in her cockpit.
“Hold on.”
He shoved the fleshy gears of the squid-ship forward. The creature squirted ahead, outpacing the disturbance in the water. Other eruptions and implosions occurred all down the line of the fleet, though, and it had become a disorganized brawl more than a stately invasion. Just the same, enough of the ships still plowed forward through the R’lothan resistance to give Avery and Sheridan cover.
“We have to get to the Processor,” he said, jerking his craft to the side to avoid a darting fish-thing easily four times the size of his squid.
“Really?” Sheridan said, voice dripping sarcasm. “Is that why we’re here?” She added, “You think he made it out?”
“I don’t know. Let’s hope not.”
A slender shape with too many angles and too many limbs hurled toward him from around the bulk of a submarine. Sheridan swiveled her squid-ship and fired a bolt of green energy from the squid’s beak into the thing. Showering bubbles, it veered off.
“Thank you,” Avery said, his breath misting the face-plate of his suit. He could feel the tightness in his chest.
Ahead, the great dome of the Processor loomed closer, appearing over the tops of monolithic spires whose construction defied his attempts to understand or even perceive clearly. Eerie blue-white light emanated from the dome, crackling with puissance. It’s changing the fabric of the world, he thought. Hopefully they had time to stop it before it was too late, before it changed the world too much. Gradually he could make out that the structure wasn’t as solid as he’d at first thought. Countless spindly legs, curved like the rest of the dome, held up the greater structure, and it was through the gaps between these legs that the light shone. And it must have been from those legs that the torpedo-destroying limbs came.
“Watch those things as we get closer,” he said, pointing.
Another creature, something akin to a giant jellyfish crossed with a lion fish, reared before them, tendrils swaying toward Avery’s craft. He knew if those tendrils touched his ship, it would die; poison crackled from the thing like static. He swerved aside, then spun, hitting the button that activated the Ygrithan energy weapon. Green light pulsed out, enveloping the jellyfish creature, which wilted like a bloom seen in time-lapse motion, falling away into a dark well between buildings.
“That was too close,” Sheridan said, rejoining him; she'd been dispatching another defender of the city.
“Almost there,” he said, turning back.
Ahead rose the grand dome of the Central Processor, huge, practically pregnant, and shimmering with exotic energies like some dark goddess about to give birth. Grand, monolithic buildings reared around Avery, dim and awful and fantastic. For the first time he was able to perceive them, at least in part, and what he saw made little and less sense. The buildings seemed to be composed of glistening pink-red flesh, like the flesh of a human’s gums. Giant, rearing monuments made of gum-flesh, with black obsidian blades thrusting out of them at odd angles and grand orifices gaping from their immense sides. A whole fleet of submarines could have passed through any one of those orifices at once. Strangely, though, the spaces on the interiors of the structures seemed larger than the outside.
All of this was lit by weird red lightning and the strobing flashes of what Avery at first thought were detonating gas pockets and only belatedly realized were the eruptions of some crystalline formations. Like flowers made of diamond, they bloomed, exploded in light, then reformed as a seed and grew into another flower-like construct, then detonated again, showering the area with white light. Tens of thousands of these things bobbed in the water all about what Avery could see of the city. He doubted they were simple sources of light, though; the R’loth seemed perfectly capable of dwelling in darkness.
Or not completely in darkness. Between some of the buildings plunged nightmarish black abysses that seemed to have no bottom, but between others ran what seemed to be rivers—shining, burning silver rivers. Staring, Avery thought he saw shapes moving in the streams. What could this mean? Rivers at the bottom of the ocean? He thought they might be made of something like mercury. Quicksilver rivers rushing between towers of pink flesh and lit by exploding diamonds …
Buildings even stranger now rose around him—great humped things bristling with odd protrusions. Light pulsed out of them in regular waves, and streams of beings were pouring into them. Avery didn’t understand. The R’loth and their followers should be vacating their buildings to join the fight, not abandoning the fight for the sanctuary of their buildings. Or were they sanctuaries at all? He remembered Layanna’s talk of temples and gods. Were the R’loth praying? Were they giving homage to their High Elders or the Outer Lords during this, the hour of their victory? Gods below, indeed.
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“Hell,” said Sheridan, and Avery glanced over his shoulder. A chill coursed through him, but not surprise.
Uthua, huge and monstrous, shot through the water toward them. He had been delayed by the destruction of the Cavalier, but not long enough, and he was halving the distance between him and his quarry with every moment. He moved almost as fast as the crazy crimson lightning that arced from building top to building top and from spore to spore. There were as many strange fuzzy spore-things floating in the water as crystal lights, and they seemed like anchor points, or origination points, for the lightning.
“Don’t worry about him,” Avery said, and indicated the dome ahead. It was very close now. “Worry about that.”
He and Sheridan had aimed their craft downward toward the spaces between the Processor’s spindly legs: the only visible way into the structure. Like the rest of the buildings Avery could see, it was composed of gum-like flesh, but unlike them it was dark blue, almost black. Massive eyes with bi-furcated pupils stared out of its many fleshy facets.
“Look,” Sheridan said, and Avery turned to see her pointing at the Processor’s legs. “They’re jointed.”
“What … ?”
Before she could answer, the nearest spindly limb moved, lifting up with speed that shocked him. A wicked and complicated-looking claw jutted from the end of the appendage, and it opened wide as it neared Avery. He could feel his ship falling into its shadow. The claw opened its scissor-like blades about his squid-ship, preparing to snap him and his torpedo in two.
Sheridan rammed the base of the claw with her ship. Knocked it off course, just enough to avoid closing on him. Snap. The shock wave propelled him forward through the water, between the legs and into the inside of the structure. Breathless, he turned to see Sheridan following.
“That’s what got the torpedoes,” she said, and he could hear that she was breathing heavily. “The Processor can repel attacks.”
“Not for much longer.”
The inside of the plant resembled the inside of a brain, all flaring neuron pathways and isles of wattled flesh. There was also something of the spiderweb in it, with massive spans of fleshy webs and many scuttling/swimiming things darting hither and thither. Energy blurred the air fantastically, and Avery could feel it lifting the hairs along his arms, on his neck, on his scrotum. Whatever this place was doing twisted the fabric of reality, threatened the weave of the cosmos.