The Atomic Sea: Volume Nine: War of the Abyss

by Jack Conner

  He looked back once to see if Uthua was following them, but just then a multi-limbed horror darted from around a nearby web and closed on them, a beam of energy leaping from its one great pupil-less eye. Avery and Sheridan divided, going wide of its beam. Both fired at the creature from either side, and it fell back, smoking even in the water.

  The two rose. Ahead, in the heart of the Processor, a great blue-white ball of light blazed, miles wide and shimmering, immense and terrible, the hidden wonder and terror of the world, and around it stretched many webs, the minders and workers of the Processor needing to be near the source of it all, needing to work on it, expand it, maintain it. Avery and Sheridan shared a look. Neither had to say anything. This was it, the source of the Atomic Sea. The source of the would-be Atomic World.

  Vaguely, Avery could see forms arrayed around the nexus of blue-white light. Some were the spidery minders, but there were other forms, too. One was a Collossum, a very familiar shape with her whitish amoeba sac fringed with pink and violet tendrils. Layanna, it must be (though her human shape was still too far away for him to see), directing the completion of the awful engine herself. Of course. It had been she who had (in all likelihood) absorbed the missing equations and psalms, she who must see to their installment.

  Three more horrors rose before Avery and Sheridan. The two fired their Ygrithan energy beams and forced the things back.

  “He’s coming!” Sheridan said, and Avery glanced behind them. Sure enough, Uthua rose toward them, a black cloud glimmering with strange lights, all wrath and fury.

  “Bank left!” Avery said, and they swerved. Another great being had risen ahead of them, surfacing out of the gloom, and nearly bitten them in two. Its jaws chomped so hard Avery could feel the squid tremble around him.

  A squirt of acid shot by him. He jerked the ship to the right. Another blast scorched one of his ship’s tentacles, blackening it. He glanced over his shoulder to see Uthua firing his venom at them. He’d shot it at Avery before. Avery had evaded it then and did not plan to let it get him now.

  “Up!” shouted Sheridan. Another horror, or perhaps the same one, had come at them from below. Avery hauled on the controls, pulling the squid up, and just in time. The crunching of the thing’s jaws juddered his bones.

  Ahead, the nexus glowed brighter. The beings there, still far away, were beginning to turn and notice the newcomers, or perhaps they had been alerted.

  This is as far as you go! Uthua roared in Avery’s mind. The doctor glanced back to see Uthua closing on them rapidly.

  “Keep him engaged,” Avery told Sheridan, then broke off suddenly, feeling his stomach jounce. Uthua started to go after him, but Sheridan wheeled and fired on him. Enraged, the monstrous, swollen form blasted toward her, widening as he went. She turned her ship about and fled.

  Avery squirted toward the horrific being that had nearly devoured them moments before, one of the nexus’s minders, which had been jockeying for another pass, and shot it in the side of what passed for its head. It bellowed and snapped at him. He dodged, spun, and squirted back toward Sheridan, or rather just behind her. The creature came on.

  Ahead, Uthua was just about to reach Sheridan, his long dark limbs extended …

  Avery blasted just ahead of him, between his tendrils and Sheridan, and turned just in time to see Uthua, that fiercest of all Collossum, vanish between the flashing teeth and mandibles of the minder. Avery laughed despite himself as the creature, steam hissing between its teeth, veered away from Avery and drifted downwards and away.

  “You did it!” Sheridan said, as Avery rejoined her. “You killed that bastard!”

  “We killed him."

  He turned back to watch the horror descend through the water shaking its head. He half expected Uthua to burst from its sides and continue the hunt, but moments passed and the Mnuthra didn’t. He had truly been eaten.

  Avery drew in a breath, relishing the victory. Part of him couldn’t believe that Uthua, that great monster who had hounded him across half a world, was finally gone. It seemed too good to be true. But this was a day for miracles and nightmares both, it seemed. Uthua’s demise was a minor victory, though, in the grand scheme of things. Avery’s mission was far from over.

  "How are we going to do this?” he said, as the two squid-ships drifted closer to the nexus and slowed. “I can’t set off the torpedo myself.”

  “No, damn it, and we have no means of launching the weapon on our own.”

  “Maybe I should tell the squid to shoot forward into the sphere, carrying the torpedo with it. The energy that thing gives off should set off the torp.”

  “No,” she said, and her face was fierce. “You’ll die.”

  “A small price to pay.”

  “I’ll unstrap the torpedo from your ship’s back and hurl it into the sphere.”

  “You’d better have awfully good aim. I think it would be better—”

  It would be better to die!

  Like an angel of retribution, Layanna descended toward them, rather like a torpedo herself, all her limbs and pseudopods trailing behind her as if to make her more streamlined, not that normal physics had any foothold in this place.

  Allow me to remove the torpedo and destroy it safely, Layanna sent. I can feel its power. Do that and I MIGHT recommend leniency on your behalf to the High Elders. Might.

  “We’re not giving you the torpedo,” Avery said, certain she could hear the psychic echo of his words.

  She rushed down at him, her tentacles realigning, pointing straight toward him, but there was still quite some distance between them yet.

  “Layanna, you don’t have to do this,” Avery said.

  Oh, but I do. You took any other option away from me.

  “Bullshit,” said Sheridan. “You make your own choices in this life. No one else does.”

  Shut your mouth, whore.

  “Do you think I blame you or anyone else for my having to kill the Royal Family? I did that myself, and I own that decision.”

  You’re a murderer, sent Layanna.

  “So are you.”

  I’m not a killer of innocents, only soldiers in battle.

  “Says the thing that accepts human sacrifice.”

  I'm not human. You kill your own people.

  “I seem to remember you helping kill a R’loth or two.”

  “Enough!” said Avery. Layanna was very close now.

  “Fuck you, you alien bitch,” Sheridan said, and shot a blast of green light toward Layanna.

  The goddess swerved, the blast illuminating her left side in eerie turquoise. Her eyes never left Avery. Her face was so still, but her eyes burned like the quicksilver rivers that ran before the temples of the Elders, if that’s what they had been.

  I loved her once, Avery thought. Did he love her still? Yes, he thought, of course he did. Love might die, but it did not stay buried. Her lips were locked in a grimace of anger and determination, but he imagined kissing them. Remembered kissing them. They had been hot and passionate, and had yielded under his touch.

  He hesitated on the controls of the squid-ship, then forced himself to target her, readying himself to press the button. She flew toward him, rage fueling her, evading another blast from Sheridan, then another, before finally closing on Avery.

  He fired.

  The blast scorched her upper left sac, shriveling it and turning it blue. The impact spun her about so that her limbs closed around him awkwardly. He batted at her tentacles with those of his ship, firing another blast into her at point-blank range. She screamed psychically as much of her sac dissolved, and the blowback scorched his squid’s forward limbs. He blinked the brightness from his eyes.

  Shit. He couldn’t do that again.

  Sheridan moved her squid in for another shot. Layanna grabbed Avery and swung him between them.

  “Damn you,” Sheridan said.

  You can't win, Layanna said. I’ve alerted my superiors, who will be dispatching units to make sure your threat is end
ed. I'll end you first, though, if I can.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” Avery said.

  She turned back to him. They were very close now, only about twenty feet away. He could clearly see her naked human body, blond hair streaming away from her classically beautiful face as if in a strong breeze, her blue eyes, blue as plunging mountain rivers, staring straight at him.

  “My mermaid,” he heard himself saying. “Has it really come to this?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Yes.

  Her sac began to devour his squid. The animal shrieked and squirmed. Slowly, she pulled its right-side tendrils into her, then its right flank. Her sac was very close to Avery and getting closer with every second. Soon he would pass through her amoebic wall and be devoured by her acids just like all her other meals. He had become infected to make himself edible to things like her, and now that promise would be fulfilled.

  Again Sheridan maneuvered herself to fire on Layanna, but again the Collossum swung Avery between them.

  “Kill him and I burn you, bitch,” Sheridan said.

  By then reinforcements will have arrived. Besides, I’ve chosen my side at last. It’s the side I should have chosen all along. I don’t care if I die.

  “Bullshit.”

  Try me.

  Layanna’s sac glommed forward, eating more of the squid. It was now perilously close to penetrating Avery’s cockpit.

  As close to panic as Avery had ever heard her, Sheridan said, “Doctor, any last brilliant ideas?”

  “Grab the torpedo,” he said, having to force the words out. His chest had constricted with fear. “I’ll hold her here while you hurl the thing into the sphere.”

  “You said hurling wouldn’t work.”

  “Just do it!”

  The limbs of her ship grabbed the torpedo, pulled. His craft jerked as she yanked at it, and his stomach wobbled. Then the weapon popped free, tearing the hempen straps. In a shower of bubbles, Sheridan jetted off toward the nexus of otherworldly energy, which built in power moment by moment; Avery could feel it like a bitter taste at the back of his tongue.

  Layanna began to free herself and go after Sheridan. Avery grabbed onto her with his squids’ remaining limbs.

  “Take this,” he said. He’d been holding his two long tentacles, used for shooting out and snaring prey, in reserve, but now he activated them. He plunged them deep into her sac, toward her human self. Even as they pushed into her, they dissolved, eaten by her acids, but they reached her human self before they could fade away completely. They wrapped around her—started to squeeze—

  She screamed and wrenched her other-self away, trailing phantasmal blood that flamed blackly and flickered out of existence. She had loosed herself from Avery’s grasp.

  He glanced over his shoulder, just for an instant. Sheridan was nearing the energy sphere. She was about to hurl the torpedo …

  No, wait …

  Damn it all. She didn’t release the torpedo. Not willing to risk throwing it poorly, she was going to carry it into the nexus herself.

  “No!” Avery screamed. “You’ll die!”

  A beat, then Sheridan’s voice, flat and to the point: “It’s what you were going to do.”

  No sentimentality. No goodbye. Just a soldier going to her death.

  “There’s another way! Please, Jess, don’t—”

  Layanna gave a wordless cry and surged upward, toward the sphere. Avery tackled her, wrapping his remaining limbs around her. His two long tentacles and half his short tentacles had been burned away, but he still had a few left, and they were nearly as otherworldly as Layanna; they could grapple with her. For a moment they struggled, tendrils fighting tendrils, Layanna’s pseudopods crashing against his flanks, nearly pulverizing the squid, her cilia squirming, while Sheridan barreled toward the crackling blue-white nexus. Avery knew if Layanna got free she could reach Sheridan before the latter could deliver the payload.

  There was nothing he could do but hold Layanna. If he didn’t all was lost.

  Sheridan closed in on the nexus …

  A multi-limbed shape darted toward her, but she blasted it. It wilted away. Another came at her, and another. They melted like candles bearing a high flame. Sheridan neared the nexus, its bright light eclipsing her. Avery could barely see her now.

  “Eject!” he cried. “Crawl out the beak and I’ll collect you!”

  He heard a caustic laugh. “With all these energies? I don’t think so. I’ll die human, thank you.”

  You’ll die, all right, sent Layanna.

  Avery glared at her. “I can still save her. Release me and go on your way. You can still escape. We all can. Just let your anger at me go.”

  The pseudopods grinding his squid into pulp renewed their efforts.

  Oh, I’m letting it go. When I’ve eaten you it will be gone enti—

  A ruby blade burst from her chest.

  Layanna gasped, blood flecking her lips. Her eyes went wide.

  “What …?” Avery started.

  You will not touch my father, sent Ani, and Avery saw through Layanna’s sac that Gallansi had swum up behind her, long ruby spear gripped tightly in her delicate crystalline hands. She had escaped the Cavalier, after all.

  No, Ani, Layanna sent, and the words entered Avery’s head weak and raspy, as if the woman’s real voice had reached him. Please. You were like a daughter to me.

  You ended that when you tried to kill my papa!

  Gallansi/Ani gave her spear another wrench. More blood burst from Layanna’s mouth, and she sagged backward in her sac, which began to whither and fade. The pseudopods fell away.

  Go, Ani told Avery. Save her if you can.

  Blinking back tears, Avery spun the squid-ship around and squirted upward, toward the nexus. Its blinding blue-white light filled his vision.

  I'm not done yet, Layanna screeched, and the sounds of some struggle reached him, but he didn’t turn back.

  “Eject!” he cried to Sheridan. “Eject!”

  She made no answer.

  “Jess, are you still there? If you are, and you’re reading this, eject! I’m coming for you!”

  He squinted into the blue-white glare, but no reply came. It’s the nexus, he told himself. It’s disrupting her ability to reply. He didn’t think she had entered it, yet. He hadn’t seen any sign of an eruption.

  But then it came.

  The nexus rippled. The ripple spread outward, and outward—the squid-ship rocked, then steadied—and outward some more. The air blurred ever more violently around the heart of the processor. The blue-white sphere shifted, then began to detonate in pockets, long arcs of energy, now not a healthy blue-white but pale yellow and purple and red. The torpedo had penetrated it, and the Ygrithan bomb had gone off, just as planned.

  “Jess!” Avery yelled.

  No answer.

  He should turn back. If he kept going he would only increase the chances of being caught in the inevitable eruption.

  He plowed forward. Multi-limbed horrors scuttled/swam out of his way, fleeing back down their webs toward some exit or maybe to make peace with their gods before they died. Would the temples be emptying now, at last?

  Avery neared the nexus. Before him the field of otherdimensional energy flexed and burst and flamed, growing ever more unstable. Any moment now …

  He saw her.

  She was just a speck, floating against the vastness of the energies about to be unleashed, but at the sight his heart nearly stopped. When it surged back into life, he felt tears sting his eyes.

  “Jess!”

  She drifted, spinning outward, apparently unconscious. Sudden fear took him. She had been right about the nature of this place. What were the energies doing to her? The environment suit alone could be little protection here, at the heart, the birthplace, of the Atomic Sea.

  He neared her, scooping her up with the last of his ship’s two tentacles, then shoving her inside its beak. He awkwardly turned about and dragged her into his cockpit, hoping the squid had
sucked some of the moisture off her on her way in. Droplets still clung to her faceplate, though, obscuring her from sight. Her chest rose and fell.

  He threw himself behind the controls once more.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “We have to get clear before it blows.”

  He shoved a lever, mashed a button. The vessel squirted forward, downward, toward the gaps between the claw-bearing legs. Other things moved ahead of him, all fleeing in terror. He felt a great and awful energy build around him—and build—and build. What have I unleashed?

  “Faster, damn you,” he told the squid. “Fast—”

  Layanna reared before him. Avery gasped and pulled a lever, twisted the foot-plate, reeling the squid-ship back.

  The spear still stuck through her chest, and blood still coated her lips, but life burned in her eyes. A manic light. A mad light. Ruby pieces that must have belonged to Gallansi floated behind her, bobbing to the wild currents. Bits of webbing and fleshy architecture broke off and tumbled around them.

  Layanna opened her tentacles wide, as if to embrace Avery in one last, lethal hug. The hug of death.

  He blasted her. There was no hesitation this time. If she had counted on that, she had erred.

  Green energy bathed her beautiful face, then consumed her. Burning, screaming, she fell away, then burned to nothing. Avery’s heart twisted, but he forced himself on. He must get out of here. Must save Sheridan.

  The remains of Layanna burned behind him as he shot downward, joining the press of escapees. Soon he plunged out through the spindly limbs of the Processor, which were now writhing and snapping mindlessly in the building’s death throes. He wove through them with no hindrance.

  Below, the temples were indeed emptying, but strangely they still blazed with light. And, he thought, song. He could almost hear the songs reverberating through the water around him.