by Steven Welch
Moonlight shone through the tent tarp onto Wicket and Flipper as they slept in each other’s arms on the last night before the destruction of Wandering Haven.
Even if Old Wicket had been awake, he might not have noticed the black nylon rope that slowly descended from the center top of the tent, directly above the rusted cage of the Octo-Thing. Certainly, in the depths of slumber, Wicket didn’t see the shadows moving along outside of their shelter slash theater. He didn’t hear a softly cursed “merde” when the nylon rope slipped and dropped too quickly, smacking the top of the cage and rattling the bars. He didn’t see the green eyes, white dreadlocks, and bulbous nose thrust in through the hole at the top of the tent, and even if he and Flipper had come awake there wasn’t much they could have done about the figure that shimmied down the line to the cage.
You see, Old Wicket and Flipper never noticed or bothered to care if the Octo-Thing was happy or sad, but Jules Valiance did, and Jules Valiance was a man of his word.
Jules carefully opened the cage and stared into the sorrowful eyes of the Octo-Thing, eyes that showed fear then surprise, then something more. A glint of hope, perhaps.
It clutched its violin and slithered out of the cage door.
The Octo-Thing wrapped its strange arms and feet and hands around Jules as he ascended the rope and stole him safely away into the night.
*
The rescue operation of the Octo-Thing was the final beat of their week long preparation scheme.
Jules had made leaps and bounds in mastering the language of the Orcanum, spurred on by desperation and his unusually deviated septum, a physical deformity that allowed him to come close indeed to mimicking the clicks and bleats of the alien cetaceans. He had shared their plan with the old beast that was apparently in some sort of leadership role, and word was spread throughout the Orcanum that hope was never closer.
By the thousands they had taken to the ocean, communicating over vast distances, searching for any sign of the mechanism that had caused such death and devastation.
It had only taken three days for a pod of Orcanum, swimming in the frigid waters of the planet’s northern pole, to sight the massive sailing ship sheltered in the shadows of the volcano, the Peak of Ebon. Word of the find made its way back to Jules and his team within a day, relayed from pod to pod.
The Aquaboggin had been made ready, or as ready as could be considering there was no additional ammunition or weaponry or fuel on the island. Les Scaphandriers stocked her with water and food.
Elise had been bored out of her mind at first, but had taken one morning to playing with a few of the Orcanum children. She sensed that they were younger, or certainly less mature than she was, but soon found that their simple games of tag or stick ball were more fun than she had allowed herself to have in a long time.
On first glance they were all the same. Black and white, with those sharp eyes, sharper teeth, and smooth muscular flesh. Elise began to grow accustomed to them, though, and their differences became obvious. This one thinner, this one thicker, the saddle patch patterns wildly different, the personalities as varied as a human’s.
She was chasing two of the smallest Orcanum when she heard the sharp whir of helicopter rotors. Elise cut the chase and raced to the dock.
The Aquaboggin was in autogyro mode. She rested in the gentle sea just off of the dock, her propellers a blur against the morning suns. Three John was carrying a sack of something and making his way along the deck and into the hatch.
They’re leaving without me? Her blood was up. She was angry and hurt. Elise ran to the sub as quickly as her legs could carry her.
The wind from the propellers whipped her face and hair as she stood at the end of the dock. The Aquaboggin was a dozen meters away and drifting. They were preparing to launch.
She screamed as loudly as she could but her voice was lost in the rising noise of the blades.
Elise was so angry that she could spit.
After everything she had done and seen, they were leaving her without so much as a goodbye. Her bag was on that ship. She hadn’t even buried her friend, the crab, and his frozen body rested in the cold storage. This was wrong. This was insulting and wrong. She did the only thing that she could think to do at that moment. Elise dove into the water and swam toward the ship.
*
“Here she comes. Damned strong swimmer, that one,” said Zuzu, looking through the starboard view port next to her seat.
“You should let her come along, Jules. There’s nothing for her on that island,” said North McAllister.
“Strikes me as a fighter. Small, but a fighter,” added Three John.
Jules sat in the pilot’s chair and jockeyed the stick so that the Aquaboggin would be a bit further away from the island before launching into flight mode.
“The little idiot is a treasure, my friends. She is courageous and smart and good of heart. She has seen enough horror for a lifetime. If we succeed, we will return and ferry her like a champion back home. If we do not, she can live a life of simple things here on the island. I will not expose her to the awful things that we might need to do.”
Jules began a visual inspection of the cockpit’s control panel, making sure that all was in order. Private Splatter sat in the co-pilot’s seat and he eyed Jules with furrowed red brows.
“Soundtrack?” Splatter asked.
Jules considered activating the ship’s entertainment system. While most of the Aquaboggin technology had kept pace with the times, Jules had steadfastly refused to replace his custom sound system. His collection of compact discs was vast, and he had no patience for digital this or cloud based that. For launch into missions of extreme danger he often chose a club mix of Bollywood show tunes that he had created for just such an occasion. This time, though, he looked back toward the rear of the Aquaboggin. There sat the Octo-Thing, buckled into one of the port seats. It held its little fiddle. Jules smiled at the creature and nodded, hoping that it would understand.
The strings of the bow touched the violin and the Octo-Thing began to play a melody for their launch. The song was soft and slow but the eyes of the Octo-Thing were happy. Jules was lost in the song for a long moment.
What a wonderful musician for a cephalopod, he thought.
A tapping sound on the forward glass.
Jules looked up.
“Merde,” he said.
“Zuzu was right, she’s a good swimmer,” said Splatter.
Elise floated in front of them. She rapped on the view glass again, harder this time. Her little fists made a soft thumping sound.
She made an angry gesture at Jules that was either a vulgar obscenity or a declaration that she was indeed “number one.”
“Can’t take off with her clinging to the ship, Jules,” said Three John.
“Right. Zuzu, go peel the little idiot off of the viewing glass and toss her far enough away so that we can quickly launch,” ordered Jules.
Zuzu started to say something. It was going to be a protest, an argument that the child should be allowed to come with them.
The explosive wave that flipped the ship interrupted her.
Shouts and noise from Les Scaphandriers. The music stopped as the Octo-Thing lost its grip on the instrument. Jules instinctively cut the engines. The autogyro blades weren’t designed to work underwater. The girl. Damn. His heart leaped. The blades were still spinning, they had been tossed upside down, and Elise was outside the ship.
Jules raced to the hatch, gripping seats as the ship righted itself.
What the hell?
He popped the hatch and clambered out onto the deck, followed by Three John.
Screams and sounds of destruction.
“Mon Dieu,” said Jules.
Three John raised his pistol and fired at the colossal air jelly floating above them. The tentacles whipped the air around them then fixed on the hull of the sub. The bullets didn’t do anything. The jelly began to rise into the sky and the bow of the Aquaboggin lifted up and out
of the water. Jules and Three John reached for the steel rails that ran the length of the deck and held on for life.
“Elise!” shouted Jules. Where was the girl?
More jellies, each as big as a bus, dozens of them, swarmed the skies over Wandering Haven. They were swooping and soaring, tentacles lifting screaming humans and Orcanum, ripping tarps and tearing wooden planks from the deck of the island.
“Elise!”
The air jelly above them descended, tentacles reaching for Three John. Zuzu popped her head out of the hatch, saw the chaos, and emerged with her knife.
She sliced at the tentacles that were lifting the ship’s bow out of the water. The flesh was thick but easily cut and the Aquaboggin fell free with a thunderous splash that knocked Three John into the water. Jules dangled from the side of the ship, one hand on a railing, eyes scanning the water for Elise.
He felt something grab his ankle. His blood went cold, and he reached for his dive knife.
Fingers? Feels like fingers.
Elise had him by the calf and was climbing up his leg. He reached down with his free hand and snatched her up by the back of her Scaphandrier vest. With every bit of strength he had in his old body he tossed Elise onto the deck and then followed, out of breath.
She punched him in the stomach and he made a little “oof” noise.
“You left me!”
Jules couldn’t speak. Zuzu took Elise by the hand and led her toward the hatch.
“Yes, and now we are under attack by an army of these giant floating monsters, so let’s discuss this once we’re inside of the sub,” she said.
Elise turned and looked out to Wandering Haven.
The floating wooden city was being destroyed.
The people, the children, being dragged into the sky by creatures from a nightmare. The little shacks and huts and alleys exploding into sticks no bigger than kindling, fires erupting from candles and torches, everything dying.
Everything was dying.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHOICES
“WE DIVE. BUCKLE for safety,” Jules said.
He dropped into the pilot’s seat and grabbed the stick.
Three John towered over him in the small cabin. His eyes were anything but inscrutable. The Guyanese enigma was angry.
“No. This place has been our home for ten long years. These are our friends. We’re not leaving them. We stay and fight.”
Splatter flipped a switch and the rotor blades recessed.
Jules looked up at Three John.
“We defend them by going to the source of the flood, my friend,” he said.
Zuzu shoved Elise into the seat behind Jules and clicked her safety belt into place.
“He’s right, John.”
“No, he’s not,” said Three John and with that the tall Scaphandrier climbed out of the sub and ran to the deck. He had a dive knife in one hand and his pistol in the other. He barely made a splash when he hit the water and began swimming back to the dock of Wandering Haven.
“Can’t leave him behind, Jules,” said North McAllister.
“Yes, we can. He’s being a fool,” answered Zuzu.
Elise watched the destruction of the island through the forward viewing glass until the sub descended and a wall of water replaced the horrible scene. The jellies, glistening blobs of purple and blue, hovered over the shanty town, ripping and tearing everything in their path with those long stinging tentacles. She could see humans and Orcanum lifted screaming into the sky. Once inside the sub, she might have felt removed from the violence, as if the death was something she was watching on an old television show, but these were people and things she had known, if only for a short time, and the horror stayed real for her, sickening and real.
The sound of the sub’s engines and the rush of the ocean drowned the cries of the dying as they descended.
“Three John is right. You can’t just leave,” Elise said.
“We help by doing what we must, and what we must do is travel north,” Jules responded. His right hand shoved a throttle forward. They were pushed back into their seats as the vessel accelerated.
“They’re dying. He’s going to die too.”
“Yes, and if we die trying to save them we’ve wasted everything.”
“You’re afraid. You’re a coward.”
“Be still, Elise.”
“No. You’re a coward. You’re all cowards. I hate you. I hate all of you.”
“We must make choices, Elise,” said Zuzu.
“So choose to help them. They’re the last people and they’re dying. If you don’t save them, then what good are you?”
Jules almost responded with an angry rant about the sacrifices they all must make, about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.
He almost said all of that, but the logic of a young girl is as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, and the weight of her look of disappointment could crush the strongest argument as a hammer smashes a nut.
“Valiance,” said Private Splatter, “we are low on fuel. Once we’re out of ammo, we’re done. We can’t waste any of it.”
Jules pulled back on the stick and the Aquaboggin began to rise. He flipped a switch and the rotor blades popped out of their housings and began to spin. Splatter shook his head and sank back into his seat.
“We won’t waste anything, monsieur,” Jules said.
The sub shot out of the water, lifted into the sky, and turned back toward Wandering Haven.
“Now you’re talking,” said McAllister.
Elise looked out of the side view port.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
The water was alive with Orcanum, hundreds of them swimming and porpoising toward the island. She could see that it was an army of the creatures, warriors, carrying swords and spears and other weapons. An Orcanum army had come up from the depths and from the sea all around and was rallying around the island.
“Hold on,” Jules said, rather needlessly, as he put the sub into a tight spin, forward guns firing.
The bullets shot out of the guns in a thin stream, every tenth a tracer, so that the fire looked almost like laser beams from a science fiction film. Three air jellies caught in the strafe exploded into a mist of purple and blue that smeared the forward glass as they flew through.
Elise’s stomach dropped and twisted as Jules piloted the Aquaboggin through the floating mine field of air jellies. Below them she could see the Orcanum warriors were flooding onto the streets to defend the island.
She had argued to stay and now she was terrified beyond anything she had ever known.
*
In the beginning, he had seen the humans that had been swept through the portals onto Orcanum as enemies to be destroyed. He killed a few of them before realizing they were victims much like his people and their world had fallen as well. Then, he had encountered strange creatures that were alien to his world, and he had found an enemy for he and his legion to hunt.
He was Try-Ton, and he had been the mightiest warrior in the King’s army until their world had flooded and civilization was lost. He had spent the past ten years searching for survivors, helping to build their floating islands from what driftwood and debris he could find, and hoping that someday he would have the chance to meet the thing that was responsible for the death of his world.
The quiver on his armored back carried a dozen spears, each made of the hardest driftwood and tipped with bone points so sharp that they could pierce the hide of a sealephant. He was down to his last spear, now, but the others had found homes in the flesh of these monstrous floating jellyfish.
It felt good in his hand as he raised and aimed at another one of the purple beasts. His legion was a thousand Orcanum warriors strong, and when this spear flew he would scavenge for more in the carcasses of the dead jellies and he would resume the fight until this island, his people and humans alike, were defended, or he was dead.
A tall dark human stood at his side, wielding only a small blade and
a little weapon that spat metal and made noise. The human was strong and determined. There were three long and faded scars on the human’s face. This must be a warrior of the race, thought Try-Ton.
They smiled at each other and fought on.
The Orcanum didn’t write. Their legends, stories, and history were preserved in song, in their communal memories. There had been many wars in their past and many battles that had become epic tales that would take days to tell. After a hunt, over the communal fire pits, as the stars rose and the children lay down for sleep, the stories of their great history were shared by the Story Keepers and Mystics. No, the Orcanum didn’t write, but they preserved their history with extraordinary care and grace, and as Try-Ton fought he knew that, whatever the outcome, this day would live on.
The strange human airship fired its tiny metal stings, the Orcanum brought down a score of jellies with their spears, and the tall dark human Try-Ton would come to know as Three John killed a dozen or more in courageous battle before he fell.
Try-Ton saw the jelly take Three John up in its tentacles. He saw the airship dive into the body of the jelly, trying desperately to stop it but failing in the attempt. The dark human warrior was dead from the tentacle stings before he fell to the ground under the body of the creature that his companions had slain.
*
Three John, but of course that wasn’t his real name, was born to a family who worked in the lumber fields of Guyana. He had two sisters and four brothers and he had been nearly killed by a jaguar while saving his mother when he was only nine years old. Three John had been bullied because of his scarred face and his strange ways, so he had learned to fight. Then he had learned to learn. His mother loved books, and she shared these slender paperbacks with her son, these wild stories of adventure and mystery. When he read, his spirit soared, and that spirit carried him to University and beyond, to a research vessel where he first met Les Scaphandriers as they plucked pearls from the mysterious oyster squid of the hidden Arctic Sea. His mother’s spirit had always lifted his, and Three John’s spirit of adventure had carried him to other worlds. His knife was gone and the chamber in his revolver was empty, but Three John smiled widely as he looked up at the air jelly that was killing him. He was soaring once more, flying above and beyond, to worlds below and between, as his mother had always dreamed. Yes, there was pain, but as his eyes closed for the last time the spirit of Three John, the Guyanese enigma, soared on into his most wonderful adventure yet.