He backed up to take it all in. Behind him Tychasis was singing something sorrowful. Like that’s going to do any good. He suddenly wished he had kept the gun Levesgue had used. All of it, including the missiles and other hardware, had been stowed aboard the Irabarren.
“This is what pulled the Serina to the bottom.” He whispered the words simply, right at the edge of comprehension. So much of his thought was tied up in just watching the perfection of the thing moving across the sky, the weaving of the individual animals so precise. He had once seen a pod of killer whales attack a humpback whale: shifting under it, grabbing its flukes and fins, working as a team to keep the humpback from reaching the surface to breathe, while rotating on and off tasks so that each orca could go up for more air—and it had scared the shit out of him. Orcas were like seven-ton wolves of the sea with pack-based coordinated attacks, who made games of snapping up sea lions and tossing great white sharks around like jugglers with weighted clubs. And they really could drown a full-sized whale.
Wilraven caught himself gaping and he closed his mouth. He had never seen something so complex and alive move with such organization.
Tychasis had calmed down, stretching his arms and rolling his shoulders as if readying for a fight. “Now that I know what it is—and I have had a few moments to prepare.” He sounded only half convinced, but apparently that’s what the song was about. “I may be able to deal with this.”
As if the hundreds of thousands of individual creatures heard some signal, they exploded from the choppy sea into the air, releasing some type of thick, flexible cabling in their wake. Ekhidnadai flowed in perfect parallel motion, raking through the view of the sea and sky, while different teams shot crosswise through the rows, long tails weaving under and over, forming a closing net of darkness over the Marcene.
Tychasis brought the largest weapon to the showdown, the Caribbean itself rising up at his call, steel-gray chop and foam-streaked waves that sharpened into blades and sliced through the webbing, or balled into blue fists the size of compact cars and cannoned into the rising wall. He gestured wildly, singing long strings of words. The sea came to the defense of the Marcene: sheets of water like saw blades spun through the air, cutting into the netting; whirling spouts of the sea caught handfuls of Ekhidnadai and tossed them away from the ship.
Everywhere Tychasis sent a sword or cyclone of the sea to rend the living web, the monster just poured more of its children into the space, filling it with “threads” that blended seamlessly into the whole structure, and then continued taking the ship down as if it was a casual affair with a few annoyances that the individual creatures and patterns could be quickly adjusted to handle.
Rings of the little diamond-shaped creatures coiled out from the growing wall, rocketing toward Tychasis, shifting into menacing configurations, open mouths revealing rows of dagger teeth. He fended them off with long ribbons of the sea, blue metal blades that ripped through the air, sawing through anything that crossed the space between monster and man.
It was an evenly matched battle for seconds that stretched into minutes, but Ty was clearly growing weary. Adista stepped up, with a long, slender sword she drew out of the thickening air, and jumped the starboard rail to carve into any of the webbing that grew closer to the Marcene’s hull.
She stopped after each offensive and stared up at the organic structure forming over them.
Chief Salzen had gone below. He was back with two Makarov handguns, small—almost toy-like—in his big hands. He gritted his teeth at the monster and opened fire, putting rounds into the swarming creatures about halfway up the wall. Repeated cracking shots, and then Salzen knelt down to reload.
Wilraven’s first thought was about disorganization. He was the first to admit that a little chaos helped him think, that he had to have the mess of papers on his workspace in order to plan and make things happen, and moving them only made him angry or confused. But to someone who could only deal with the world in an extremely systematic way, chaos could be the first step toward a complete mental breakdown.
He eyed the beautiful motion of the monsters. How to cut the channels or processes that made the thing organize into the vast ship-swallowing web? He asked the question aloud. “How do you make someone who’s very coordinated lose that focus and fall apart?”
The first idea that came to him required Tychasis to be distracted for a minute. “Swordfish.”
“Tychasis, can I . . . uh . . . borrow one of the larval things you showed me earlier?”
Ty frowned, blinking, trying to understand what the captain was asking. Adista slid her hands under his shirt, whispering to her friend, “I will take care of this. Just hold back the children of this monster.” Her hands came away with a larva in each, and she handed one to Wilraven with some interest. “What are you planning, Captain?”
He took the slippery thing, and it curled with his hand, little legs unfolding, reaching for him—or trying to hide from the monster swallowing his ship.
He held it away from him, holding down the urge to vomit. Lifting his eyes to the Ekhidna, the wall of organic webbing that blocked out most of the sky, now held back only a few meters from the Marcene’s hull by Ty’s continuous defenses.
“This thing is many acting as one,” he said to Adista. You said schooling behavior—similar to flocking in birds. There’s something in fish and birds that allows them to pass information and read the motion in their fellows. When something that’s not part of the school or flock—feeding bluefin, dolphins, a swordfish—moves in with threatening intentions, the school adjusts around it. Or better, separates into multiple pieces.” Waving at the Ekhidna with the larva, he said, “Just want to see if this thing loses its ability to stay together if we introduce something that breaks the pattern and motion.”
Wilraven took a few running steps toward the portside, pulled the larva all the way back, and overhanded it into the wet organic structure created by the thousands of diamond-shaped creatures. The larva spiraled through the air like a football.
The effect was immediate. Even though he was grasping at the hope for something dramatic, the captain expected the larva to slap like a dead fish against the structure and slide down into the water—instead, the wall reacted, bending with the trajectory, distorting into a cone that stretched, went thin, and broke, with cabling and individual pieces of the monster spraying like a large-caliber exit wound. The massive hole flexed wider and sent a ripple of disorganization through the Ekhidnadai. Like a large stone dropped into a still pond, chaos radiating from the impact, waves of distortion folding over each other. The web fractured in a circular pattern, hundreds of breaks opening to let in wedges of blue sky and sunlight.
Tychasis’s mouth hung open in shock after the strain of fighting with long whips of seawater. He shouted “salvage” in English and then sang long fluid lines in Greek.
Adista wheeled toward the two steel shipping containers on Marcene’s main deck. “Captain, do you have a line gun aboard?” She mimed shooting a rifle into the air.
Wilraven jabbed a finger at the second larva in her hand, a cruel and determined grin starting on his lips.
“Be back in a second.”
He loped awkwardly toward the orange container—the cast on his lower leg still hampering his movement. He grabbed the lock, fumbling with the keys at his belt, flipping through them for the right one. He tossed the padlock to the deck and pulled open the doors. Kicking aside a stack of crates, he dug out a long single-barreled shotgun with a huge quick-spin spool of braided line. It fired a small grappling hook.
He had only used it a few times, in rough seas, when towlines had to be set up and no one wanted to brave the chop and whitecaps. He elbowed the open doors of the container closed behind him, making his way back to Adista.
The deck was dark now, most of the sun and sky blocked off. Thin, smiling gaps in the webbing were tightening up. The big battery-powered emergency spotlights high on the ship’s superstructure came to life on photo
-switches; a flood of white light hit them, casting their shadows across the decking.
As Wilraven shambled up, Tychasis was struggling to his knees; something the monster hit him with had knocked him down.
Adista, swinging the sword like a madwoman, shouted, “Hurry!”
She tossed Wilraven the larva, and he jammed it on the one of the grappling hook’s spikes, raising the line gun over the stern, halfway up the wall. He pulled the trigger. The recoil kicked him back a step, and the glowing yellow line whined out at fifty meters a second.
“Same species, different monster.” Wilraven whispered the words, watching the trajectory.
The Ekhidnadai shifted abruptly to the new piece on the game board. The larval form of a different monster rearranged the world. In seconds it went through the network of crisscrossing shapes, and like an orca in a fisherman’s net, it pulled the whole structure out of shape; long tears peeled open from the sea’s surface to the peak.
Every “child” of Ekhidna shifted with the change, passing along adjustments in whatever form of communication they used. The others were following it, distracted or detecting something unusual about it, something that wasn’t part of them, but was close enough to share information and direction. The whole structure started breaking, distorted lines pulling it apart along the base.
Wilraven dropped the gun on the deck, staring up at the snarl of swarming shapes.
A blaze of sunlight—like the mouth of some leviathan that had swallowed the Marcene—opened along the starboard side.
It spit them out.
The individual pieces of Ekhidna snapped apart; a deep ripple of discord rolled through every individual in the mass. They fell back into the water like heavy rain, fluid craters blasted into the face of the sea, then closing with shoots of white water and foam. The hemisphere of darkness over the ship twisted, disintegrating as it lost its purpose and form.
Wilraven’s shooting larva continued on for hundreds of meters before gravity slowly pulled it down.
The smallest of alterations had affected it all, like the legendary beat of a butterfly’s wing resulting in a growing chain of effects that leveled civilizations with meteorological warfare half a world away.
A pawn had brought down the walls of a kingdom. Wilraven had to admit it was a pawn from a different game, but there were no rules in this match. One piece had wiped out a hundred thousand pieces, twisting the ship-sinking structure out of shape and breaking the coordination that made it work. The Ekhidnadai turned abruptly, slamming into each other, shifting in random directions. The webbed arrangement that had reared up to cover the Marcene turned into a coiling, fluid mess, and it lost all coordination, pieces of it spraying off toward the sky, walls of the individual children folding back on themselves, crashing into the sea.
Hundreds of the Ekhidnadai fell on the decks of the Marcene, smacking wetly into shipping containers, thudding against the cranes and the metal walls of the superstructure, bouncing and flopping across the open spaces like landed fish. Windows shattered along the portside of the bridge, with glass showering down on the decks below.
Wilraven, Chief Salzen, Adista, and Tychasis watched pieces of the monster shooting chaotically into the air, then dropping like stones with explosive blasts of seawater. Lower sections of the thing fanned out, split into long, rigid spines that raked through the shadows beneath the ship.
It sank deeper into the blue and left the Marcene alone, rocking gently on the waves.
Adista dropped her sword, sent it skittering away. Ty stumbled, fell to his knees, blood drooling from his open mouth. Wilraven reached for him, turning as Adista collapsed into him. He caught her. Wilraven eased his grip on the railing, and they went all the way down to the deck, landing as gently as he could manage.
The captain looked up at the sky, rolling his head to one side, to shift his focus on his ship. “It’s over.”
Chapter Fifty-one
Machine and the Poet
On the aired-out bridge of the Marcene, the chief engineer, Adista, and Tychasis leaned against the console: Wilraven slouched in his captain’s chair. No power, most of the batteries gone—even the emergency bridge lights and deck spots were dead. Nothing but a couple of solar buoys with tiny white lights they had put out to catch what was left of the sun.
Wilraven grumbled and looked out the windows at the last of the day, “Really going to suck after sunset, and no way to signal or let any passing vessel know we’re here.”
Adista was on watch, keeping an eye out for the return of the children of Ekhidna, shifts in the darkness under the waves, anything that seemed to swarm in the water.
They had cleaned up the decks, Wilraven getting out the push brooms to gather the dead or drying remains of the attack, with Tychasis, extremely interested in analyzing the diamond- shaped creatures, picking them up and binning them. He zipped up about forty in one of Levesgue’s unused body bags, stowing them in the galley’s walk-in cooler, but took great care with the living specimens, scooping seawater into “live bins” and watching them move about.
Just before the last rays passed over the edge of the sea, Adista went to the starboard door to scan the horizon. She called from the observation wing, half her body leaning over the rail, pointing north. “Captain. There’s a ship coming at us.”
Wilraven grabbed the binoculars—the old crappy pair without sensors or digital enhance, but the only working binoculars left—and joined Adista on the landing. The chief and Ty headed out to the portside observation.
“That’s an Ocean Eighter, looks like the Beauliev Salvor. What do you think, Chief?” He met Salzen halfway across the bridge space with the binocs, and the engineer took his time scanning the approaching vessel.
“Yeah, that’s the Beauliev. She’s got the two aft cranes.” Salzen was frowning. “Wonder what she’s doing out here?”
“Thought she was up in Wilmington myself.”
All they could do was wait, the four of them moving to the starboard when it was clear the ship had slowed and was navigating to come along that side.
“Come on. I want to let them know what they’re in for.” Wilraven led them down to the decks.
It took all four of them to get the Yokohama fenders—enormous bumpers—deployed, tied down, and manhandled over the side. The Beauliev’s motion in the sea slowed even more at the new direction. There must have been twenty of her crew lined up along the side, some of them readying the lines.
It made Wilraven think back on the chief’s questions. Not only what the Beauliev was doing this far south, but why was she—clearly—overloaded with crew? The ship wasn’t as big as Marcene, and had a bunk and galley capacity of twelve or thirteen, not the twenty-something he could see.
A woman’s voice cut through the slow rush of sea and ship noise, amped up through the Beauliev’s hailer. “Marcene, we have something of yours.”
Wilraven jogged astern along the main deck, scanning the windows of the bridge high above him, almost running down the chief as he kept up with the Beauliev’s approach. The voice was April Capek’s.
He shouted for her. “April?”
She swung from the open door of the bridge, both hands on the stair rails, not jumping down them as much as a controlled descent. She was on the Beauliev’s main deck across from Wilraven, waving to him, grinning at the shock pasted across his features.
He felt the expression on his face, something like a hooked fish, wide-eyed and gasping. There was Andres and Inda and Dewayne and Erich right across from him. The crews of the Marcene and Irabarren—taken off the crane platform at gunpoint—were back, waving and shouting cheers along the entire length of the ship.
April was there, jumping the gap with one bouncing step off the fender squeezed between the hulls of the two ships.
He stared at her, then looked around, beyond the Beauliev’s stern, back to the wide slice of the Caribbean in view. “April? Where’s the Carla?”
She just shook her head and almos
t bowled him over with a hug that squeezed the breath out of him. The smile had drifted away, replaced with sorrow. “Never been so glad to see you, old mate.”
April let a few details fall about the loss of her ship, but then moved on to the immediate details. “Talked to Rusty. He let me come out with the Beauliev to catch you on your way home—figured you might need a few more people.” She peeled away with an open gesture. “So we brought everyone.”
The crews surrounded Wilraven, some of them grabbing his hand or swooping in for a tight hug. Smiling, Dewayne and Inda moved in. “Cap, what happened after they took us? What did you do with the Serina? Take her to Cuban water?” Andres stood just beyond them, caught the captain’s eye, and shrugged.
Wilraven grinned back, waving north. “We floated her. She’s on her way to docks in Tampa, being towed in by the Irabarren. Angelo’s captaining.”
“No fuckin’ way!” Erich laughed hard, and the big Texan almost knocked him over with a slap on the back. “Captain Success kicked their asses again.”
Inda wore a thin, unamused smile, and there was rage in her eyes. “What happened to Levesgue?”
Wilraven glanced at Adista, who was watching from the outer edge of the crew. “We got tired of him pushing us around all the time. He went for a swim.” He tried for funny, but it came out deadly serious, the words dragged roughly over the memories of Clark Seiffert, Paulina, and Adam DuFour.
April dumped some of the details of Carla’s loss, and Wilraven nodded gravely. “That’s what happened here. We’re dead on the waves. No power. Nothing. Need a tow back to Lauderdale. All the electronics need to be replaced.”