Shit, the thing was big. Even in the dark, Dom could see that. The patrol boats’s running lights reflected off its wet scales. Even without the points of bluish light, its outline was clear. Marcus fired.
The harpoon went whistling out like a rocket grenade, whipping the line behind it. Dom heard the wet thwack on impact. He expected to hear the explosive tip detonate, but there was just a faint, muffled pomp, and the leviathan spun around and slapped down onto the sea. Water washed over the deck. The line began paying out at speed.
“Baby, you caught somethin’,” Cole yelled.
“Why the hell hasn’t the thing blown up?”
“No idea,” Marcus said. “Maybe we hit it somewhere that doesn’t detonate.”
Dom grabbed the ax. “Cole Train, you stand clear of that.” He was expecting the creature to dive. If it tried to drag Falconer down, he had to sever that cable. “If that line parts, it’ll cut clean through you like a damn blade.”
“It’s holding,” Marcus called. The line went tight. “Cole, take over. Just watch the line.”
He grabbed the targeting laser and went to the bow. Dom couldn’t tell if the leviathan was dragging the boat or not, but either way it was going to be a tough job for the helmsman.
The line paid out to about eight hundred meters. Dom was pretty sure he recalled that the required safety clearance for mine-hunters was one thousand meters. It was all getting a bit too close.
From the slightly elevated bridge, Muller could see more than Dom could from the rising and falling deck.
“It’s coming about,” he said over the radio. “It’s turning to starboard. Still breaking the surface.”
“I need it closer.” Marcus aimed the laser. “Can you get me inside a hundred meters?”
Nobody seemed to want to repeat the obvious. If Marcus held the laser on it long enough, if Baird could align the Hammer, if the leviathan stayed surfaced for those essential seconds—then if it detonated like the Brumak beneath Jacinto had, Falconer was going to be an instant shower of rusty shrapnel.
But the Brumak was underground. Directed blast and all that shit. Yeah. This blast’s not confined.
No, Dom knew zip about explosives on that kind of scale, and he was going to die. At best, Falconer was going to be lifted clear by the shock wave and smashed down hard again, hard enough to break her back.
Life rafts. Okay, don’t forget. Rafts.
Falconer picked up speed. For a moment, it felt as if they were closing the gap on the leviathan too fast. Dom clung to the rail and tried to look ahead. He was sure he could see the steady, undulating movement as the thing rippled along near the surface with its back breaking the water. He definitely felt Falconer steering hard to starboard. When he looked back for a moment and the lights caught the water, he could see a U-shaped wake. The boat had turned back toward Vectes.
“I’d take a guess that it’s trying to beach,” Muller said.
“Baird? Are you ready?” Marcus kept changing position, trying to steady his aim. “You got a lock yet?”
The radio crackled. It took a couple of seconds for Baird to respond.
“Okay, the sats have picked up the targeting laser. Can you ask the glowie to slow down?”
“Helm, give us some slack in that line,” Marcus said. “Close the gap. Cole—wind the line back on the winch.”
“How much?”
“Until the line goes taut. Then Muller can cut his speed and slow the thing.”
“That’s going to mean it’ll blow frigging close to us,” Muller said. “I mean sinking close.”
Michaelson cut in. “Do it, helm.”
The engines roared and the line started to sag. When it draped over the bow rail, Marcus yelled “Now!” and Cole hit the winch control. The line wound back around the capstan and went taut. Dom felt the shudder.
“Never done this on a moving surface,” Marcus said. “Shit.”
“You ready?” Baird asked. “Because correcting this thing manually is a bitch.”
“Yeah, let’s swap places.”
“Come on.”
Marcus just grunted. Dom could see the targeting beam hitting a scaly back, but it was bouncing and drifting all over the place.
“I’m ready,” Baird said. “I mean, really ready.”
“I get it, Baird.”
Dom could see the naval base clearly now, its jetties and ships picked out by safety lights. At forty klicks per hour, that six-kilometer distance would be eaten up in minutes. They were getting too close to the island. The leviathan plowed on. Dom heard the engines throttle down and the harpoon line creaked alarmingly.
Nobody really knew what a leviathan could do, let alone a Lambent one. It might just have been holding back before showing them just how puny the boat was by comparison. Falconer slowed right down, then her engines roared again and it felt like she was turning.
“Fuck,” Muller said. “That’s full astern. It’s got us. We’re going to burn out a motor at this rate.”
Dom really was ready to part that line. He hefted the ax and positioned himself clear of the arc that the line would whip through when he cut it. Falconer seemed not to be making way at all. Then there was a collective shout—the lookouts, Marcus, Michaelson standing at the bridge door—and the leviathan disappeared. The line plunged down into the sea.
“Shit. Lost the contact.” Marcus still held the laser on the point where he’d last seen the leviathan, but the beam didn’t penetrate far through water, especially water with a lot of deflecting debris in it. “Can we winch that thing up?”
Cole stared at the creaking capstan. “That oversized eel’s doin’ the winchin’, not us.”
“In case you’ve forgotten me, I’m still pretty ready.” Baird sounded irked. “Just give me a call when you’re through pissing around.”
“Cole, jerk its chain,” Marcus said.
The winch whined. Dom waited for the creaking to turn into snaps and pings as the line started to part. He was so fixed on the deck hazards that he found himself forgetting that they were tormenting a life-form that broke destroyers and might even blow up of its own accord.
Shit. What if it lets some polyps loose? Can they climb ropes?
He needn’t have worried about the polyps. That was the least of their problems. The winch started to smoke, the line groaned, and Falconer lurched.
“Okay,” Muller said. “Everyone think happy thoughts. Because—oh fuck. It’s on the move.”
“Okay, follow,” Marcus said.
“It’s on a course for the base. I’m thinking suicide run here.”
“Follow it,” Marcus said, “but get ready to do a handbrake turn when I say.”
“Hey, Land-crab, the navy doesn’t do handbrakes.”
“Fine.” Marcus sounded strained. “Just find some way of dragging that asshole west of the base at the last minute.”
Dom decided the ax wasn’t going to help much now. Falconer picked up speed again. The leviathan was on a collision course with the carrier berth, and Falconer was along for the ride whether she wanted to be or not.
CIC, VECTES NAVAL BASE.
Yeah, Marcus was right again.
Baird wasn’t good just with big oily hardware; he was pretty good with computers, too. He wondered if even Anya could have handled this kind of target on the fly with a satellite network that was failing one satellite at a time. It was going to be all too easy to steam the water either side of the leviathan and not cook it medium-rare.
Mathieson was watching him intently. He could feel the lieutenant’s eyes drilling a hole in him. Baird had to keep resetting the sats’ reference times manually because one of them drifted out of sync every so often. The more sats he could bring to bear, the more accurate the firing; and with a target that didn’t move in a predictable line like a surface ship, that was going to be tough.
Oh, and then there was the whole diving thing. That was really starting to piss Baird off.
“Baird to Falconer—t
ry to keep that asshole on the surface, will you? The sats’ laser can’t cope.”
Michaelson sounded strained but still did the gentleman-pirate act. “Falconer to Baird, we strive to please. Sergeant Fenix assures me he has your welfare at heart. Stand by.”
And he’s going to think I’m an asshole if I don’t get this right. Just watch Cole’s back. Leave the psycho whale to me.
It was a kilometer out now, its speed about twenty kph. They must have been burning out some of Falconer’s motors trying to put the brakes on that. Baird decided he’d have a lot of repairs to look forward to when this was over. Hoffman came thundering up the stairs again and loomed over him.
“If you can’t stop that thing,” he said, “we’re going to have to burn a hundred thousand liters of fuel cleaning up its polyps.”
“Yeah, I get it, Colonel,” Baird said irritably, not looking away from the display. “I do.”
“Falconer’s picked up speed again, sir.” Mathieson’s attention was back on the radar sweep. “She’s maneuvering parallel with it and pulling ahead.”
Hoffman picked up the mike. “Hoffman to Falconer. What are you doing?”
“Falconer to Hoffman—if we can’t hold it still, we can try to steer it away from the berths.”
Baird struggled to keep synchronizing the satellite feeds.
“Five hundred meters,” Mathieson said. “Falconer’s steering wide. It’s going to make landfall to the west of us, sir.”
“Baird, smoke that thing,” Hoffman said. “Even if you haven’t got a lock. Now.”
“Okay, okay. Primed for a six-second burn, maximum setting. That should distract it if nothing else.”
It didn’t take much fluctuation to throw a Hammer laser off target when it was dependent on a beam from low orbit finding another one from a handheld gun bouncing along in a ship. This was precision stuff. Baird hit the control and watched the numbers cascade down his display. Then he spun around in his seat to look out the window. It was out of his hands now. The Hammer was locked on. He waited for the spectacular white-hot beams to light up the night sky.
And boy, was it impressive.
It was like a slow-motion moment in the middle of a thunderstorm. Unnaturally straight lines of lightning converged on a point beyond the walls.
Baird got up and took four strides to the window, dumb as that was. But he had to see. Hoffman caught his arm. Maybe he had a better idea of what was going to happen; the old bastard had helped grill the whole planet with the Hammer, after all. The next thing Baird knew, Michaelson was yelling “Brace, brace, brace!” over the radio and a ball of light blinded him. He put his arms up instinctively to shield his eyes. The sound came a second later.
Baird didn’t hear it; he felt it. It was off the scale. He felt like someone had split his head open with a hammer. Then the window shattered and his hands and scalp stung with cold needles.
For a few moments, he wasn’t sure where he was. But he was alive. He knew that because he could taste the blood in his mouth.
Fuck. I think that worked.
“Mathieson? You okay, son?” That was Hoffman’s voice, filtered through the cotton wool of Baird’s numbed ears. “Shit, what a mess.”
“Still got power to the system, sir. I’m fine. Better take a look at Baird—he was right in front of the window.”
Baird focused on the light above him, but it wasn’t the room’s lighting. The bulbs had blown out along with the windowpanes. He was looking at the glow from a fire.
The radio net went crazy as damage reports flooded in.
“It’s beached. Sir, it’s beached. Landslide! Shit, run!”
“Polyps ashore! Polyps!”
Baird could hear rumbling like an avalanche gathering speed. Then the naval base alarm drowned it out. He hauled himself upright on the nearest desk, skidding on shards of glass and papers. Hoffman pushed him out the door.
By the time the fresh air hit him, his adrenaline was the only thing keeping him moving. Gears sprinted for the west wall of the base. He reached for the Gnasher shotgun slung on his back and went forward automatically toward the sound of Lancer fire.
“Where’s the wall?” he asked. He was staring at open sea. Little clusters of wobbling white light scuttled from the horizon toward him. “There was a wall there.”
“Shit,” Hoffman said. “It took the cliff out. It took the goddamn cliff out, Corporal.”
“Hey, don’t dock my wages. I just killed a frigging whale-sized glowie. There’s bound to be some cleanup.”
At night, the scale of the damage didn’t really sink in. Baird couldn’t see enough to be shocked by the instant change in the landscape. He could see the polyps charging at him, though, and that was a lot more urgent. He aimed at the bioluminescence and found he could hit them better with the Gnasher, especially if he let them get dangerously close. They splattered his boots. He started to feel personal scores had been settled every time one of the ugly little assholes burst in front of him.
Most of the Ravens seemed to be airborne, playing their searchlights on the parts of the base where the fixed lighting had failed. Baird ran out of polyps and turned around to find Hoffman had gone.
“Hey, Colonel, you taking a break or something?”
He looked around. There was sporadic gunfire everywhere, but he couldn’t see any more glowies. Shit, where’s Hoffman? And what’s happened to Falconer? Baird started backing away, reloading his Gnasher. He tried the radio.
“Baird to Falconer, tell me you didn’t sink.”
It took a while for Marcus to answer. “Nice. Destructive, but nice.”
Baird fought down a dumb surge of pride. Hey, I’m not after his approval, am I? Get a grip. “Still got polyps.”
“Baby, you need some ointment for that,” Cole said.
“How many?” Marcus asked.
“Couple of hundred got ashore.”
“And?”
“I think we got them all.” Cole was okay, so Baird could get back to worrying about his own ass again without feeling bad about it. “Got to find Hoffman. I’m standing here on my own like everyone else knows where the party is except me.”
Baird had been caught too close to too many explosions. He knew they were taking their toll. But as usual, he felt almost back to normal again all too fast, a weird kind of peacefulness that he knew was something connected to the shock. It was almost like having a local anesthetic and watching Doc Hayman slice you up; you could see the damage was being done, but it was all a long way away for the time being.
He moved forward past the barracks block, expecting to hear Falconer or even Mathieson on the radio saying that there was now a whole pod of pissed-off leviathans steaming toward the base. But all he could hear was the crackling of a fire. Yellow light flickered on a wall. One of the polyps must have detonated near something flammable.
Hey, I got the thing before it spewed even more of them. I didn’t fail.
It wasn’t until Baird turned the next corner that he felt the heat on his face and stopped in his tracks. He was used to stumbling into firefights and seeing some weird and desperate shit, but it took him a few moments to work out what was really going on here.
It looked like a camp bonfire. A moving carpet of embers sizzled, wheezed, and popped. From time to time something exploded like an aerosol can. Gears, Stranded, and Gorasni stood around it, most of them holding their weapons in the safety position or even slung over their shoulders. Three of them were hosing the pile with flamethrowers.
Hoffman held out his hand to one of the Gorasni and the guy passed him his flamethrower. The colonel stood in grim silence and laid down a stream of flame like it was some kind of ritual. Baird wanted to back away quietly and hope nobody had seen him.
The bonfire was actually a heap of dead and dying polyps. There hadn’t been that many disgorged this time, but this response to them was the kind of overkill Baird had seen when Locust stragglers had caught up with the population escaping Jacinto
. There hadn’t been many grubs left, but every Gear and every unit charged in to slice them up, desperate to put the boot in one last time after so many years of taking shit from the things.
Baird had joined in then, too. A Stranded guy turned down his flamethrower’s jet and stepped back to pass it to him.
“Be my guest,” the man said. “You might not get the chance next time.”
It was pointless, but Baird did it anyway, if only for the experience of opening up that jet and seeing how far he could shoot it. He wasn’t sure if the ritual purged anything in him or not.
The naval base siren came to life moments later and sounded the all-clear. Hoffman walked up to Baird and slapped him on the back. He had that look that said his mind was on something even worse than a collapsing naval base and a whole new kind of enemy.
“You’re a bastard, Baird,” he said. “But you’re our bastard.”
It was one of the nicest compliments Baird could remember getting. He didn’t get many.
“Somebody fetch the COG boys a broom,” one of the Stranded guys yelled. “They’re going to be sweeping this place clean for a year, if they live that long. So long, assholes.”
They were all walking away. The Gorasni stood and watched them sullenly; maybe they thought the all-clear meant it was time to start the feuding again.
“You leaving?” Baird said. “And we had so much to talk about.”
“Yeah, this is the last place we want to be.” The guy had a handheld radio, the kind that civilian security guards used to use in the days before the world went to shit. “You’re finished, COG. We’re getting clear of you while we still can.”
He walked away, talking to someone on the radio. Baird heard him say something about 1800, sunset tomorrow, and to get everyone together for the fleet.
They were leaving, then. That was something. Baird thought that was worth changing the map of the island to achieve.
He’d check what that actually looked like in the morning.
VECTES, SOUTHERN COAST: NEXT DAY.