Kraken Mare (22 page)

Baptiste dropped the limp form of Captain Holomisa and turned to me.
“Give up, Johnny,” he hissed. “It's inevitable.”

“The only thing that's inevitable is death and taxes,” I shot back angrily. I risked a quick glance down at the charge handle and reaffirmed that I had pulled it already. The carbine was primed and ready for any move that Baptiste might make.

“If you put it that way…” Baptiste's voice trailed off. He cocked his head and it twisted unnaturally. Whatever the scientists had done to the prisoners on the station was something that never needed to happen again. Ever. He continued. “I have conquered death, and taxes can be avoided if you have a good enough accountant. Tell me, were you an accountant before all this?”

“Uh…no,” I said. I'm pretty sure that I sounded very stupid, but it was only the fourth strangest question I'd been asked that day. I was off my game.

“Pity. It would have made one hell of a story, the accountant who does battle against monsters like me.”

He moved almost faster than I could track. He weaved back and forth, his form almost a blur as he closed in. I whispered a silent prayer as I pulled the trigger, firing off four shots in rapid succession. Each round impacted solidly into flesh, distracting him enough to give me an opening as he staggered closer. Ignoring the lessening, but still present pain, I lashed out with a steel toed boot. While the shattered knee didn't stop him, it did slow him down just enough.

I flipped the firing selection on the rifle from semi to full automatic and jerked back the charging handle one more time. A quick check confirmed that the proper round from the bulky magazine was chambered. While normally the high explosive was pretty worthless in a pitched battle, in close quarters it was almost as good as a bayonet on a rifle.

The FUKU had a forty-round magazine, and every fourth round a high explosive cartridge.
It wouldn’t go through standard battle armor, but it could wreck holy havoc on unprotected areas and even cause concussive damage upon impact, better even than standard ammunition.

I shoved the smoking barrel into his chest and felt it break through the thin skin, my earlier suspicions confirmed. Baptiste was extremely strong and fast, but, like Isaac had said, they could not make their mass disappear or to create it from nothing. To add the extra strength to his bones and muscles, his body had to pull it from somewhere else.

And one of the most overlooked, yet largest organ of the human body, was the skin.

Baptiste looked at me in wonder as I shoved the barrel of the carbine deeper inside his chest. I looked him in the eye and saw a complete and utter lack of humanity within. If the eyes are a window to the soul, then that place had been burned to the ground a long time ago, ashes scattered by a million storms and all traces of it blown away. There was nothing left of his soul in those pitiless eyes.

“Ouch,” Baptiste hissed, his elongated tongue flicking out to wet his lips. “That actually hurt.”

“You ain't seen nothing yet,” I whispered and pulled the trigger.

The explosive round went off inside Baptiste like a grenade, showering white-hot fragments throughout his chest cavity and damaging his heart, lungs, and stomach. The damage from one single round like that had the potential to be devastating. He jerked spasmodically from the impact and explosion. He howled in pain and fury, an inhuman sound that scarred the soul. Most people would flinch and run at the sound. It was very unnatural to the ears.

So of course I went ahead and unloaded the entire magazine into him. One bullet for every goddamn stair. Yes, I counted.

Shrapnel peppered my hands and arms, with a few managing to make it to my body armor. The fragments of the five-five-six millimeter, high-explosive rounds were stopped by the standard armor, preventing me from taking the same type of damage that had ruined Baptiste's body as every fourth round exploded inside him.

Little rivulets of blood practically exploded outward as the HE rounds expanded on the damage that the standard rounds were causing. I was yelling loudly and incoherently as the sustained rifle fire nearly ruined what was left of my hearing. I kept the trigger pressed, however, even after it was obvious that I wasn’t firing any longer.

He fell to the ground, quivering. His eyes were wide open in shock, and I could see something other than pitiless rage in them for the first time. Now I could see pain and, more comforting, fear. Baptiste was afraid, and he had good reason to be: he could feel my emotions, and the only thing coursing through my soul at that moment was wrath.

I looked down at Baptiste's twitching body, my ears ringing from the gunfire. He was still alive, but just barely. The high-explosive ammunition of the carbine had done one hell of a number on him, rendering his entire midsection to pulp. He was bleeding from dozens of small holes in his skin, and I could only guess as to just how bad he was internally. The largest hole from where the barrel of the gun had been jammed into him was oozing with guts and blood.

“You're one tough bastard, I'll give you that,” I muttered. At least, I think I muttered. It might have been a shout, I'm not entirely certain. My hearing was absolutely shot to hell, and there was a dull ringing in the background.

I grabbed the last flash grenade I had and looked at it before letting my gaze drift down to Baptiste’s ruined form. A particularly vile idea came to mind, one that almost made me shiver. I grinned viciously as I stood above him.

“I’m not the hero of this piece,” I growled as I clenched the stun grenade tightly in my hand. “I’m nowhere near it. But I’m not the villain. No, that’s you. Just because I’m fighting on the side of light doesn’t make me the hero.”

I pulled the pin and slammed it into Baptiste’s mouth. I shattered his teeth with the steel edge as it went past his lips. Baptiste’s eyes widened as he realized what was going on, but he couldn’t move his arms. I’d done too much damage to him. One of the HE rounds must have done something to his spine, and while I was certain that he could heal himself eventually, there was no way I could let him. He was an evil that had to be eradicated, even if it meant damning my soul. I backed away and turned. I closed my eyes and covered my ears.

The
bang!
from the flash grenade was surprisingly muted. It could have been due to my damaged hearing, but I was pretty sure that his brain matter, bone, and flesh absorbing most of the blast had more to do with it. The light from the magnesium flash was bright enough that I could see it through my eyelids, but it didn’t really hurt. Though it was muted, it was still loud and wet sounding.

I opened my eyes and looked at Baptiste. Though I was fairly certain I knew what I was going to see, I had to make certain that the monster was well and truly dead. What I saw confirmed my suspicion of what a flash grenade would do when shoved inside someone’s face. While the flash grenade was designed to disorientate and stun, it was still an explosive device. And when the force of an explosion is compressed, it tended to be far messier than if it had exploded in an open space. Such as what happened to Baptiste’s head.

Bits of bone, blood and brain matter had splattered all over the floor, the force of the explosion angled down and away from me. He must have tried to turn his head to spit out the flash grenade, to little avail. More blood dripped from his neck and pooled on the floor around where his head should have been.

It was nasty. It was necessary.

There are some evils one can live within this universe. Taxes, in-laws, and redheaded younger siblings come immediately to mind. Even if we don’t want to admit it, these are simply minor annoyances in the grand scheme of things.

Baptiste was evil, plain and simple. The sort of evil that should not be allowed to survive or loosed upon the universe. He had been a convicted murderer before they’d pumped him full of alien shit to make him a powered-up killing machine. With the abilities he had before I had killed him, the damage he could have done to humanity as a whole was terrifying. Especially if he had made it off the station with Isaac in hand.

I had been trying to save Isaac. In the end, I may have saved myself.

“Is he dead?” a voice asked from behind one of the heavy cabinets in the corner.

Baptiste was dead, that much was clear. Not just mostly-dead, either, but the type of dead where all one can do was rifle through his pockets and search for loose change. Doctor Isaac came crawling out of his corner, surprisingly healthy and unharmed for someone who had been in Baptiste’s not-so-gentle hands. He stood up and brushed his hands off on his pants. His hair was mused and his face covered in sweat and grime, but otherwise he looked fine to my trained eye.

It’s amazing how Murphy seems to love some people while making others Her absolute bitch.

“What was he rambling? He was yelling about a grand kraken or something?” I asked as my hearing slowly began to come back. Isaac flinched. Okay, I may have asked louder than I wanted to. “Sorry. Hearing is shot to hell.”

“The grand kraken is something he was going on about for long periods of time when he wasn’t babbling about how he couldn’t wait to get his hands on patient H-6– I mean, Captain Holomisa,” Isaac explained, his voice tinny and small in my ears. “He kept talking about how he was going to summon the grand kraken to destroy the station.”

“Uh, okay?” That was weird. I knew that Baptiste had been a sick and twisted individual, but this pretty much cemented my opinion that he was batshit crazy as well. I chalked it up to my lack of experience in civilian matters and moved on. “That sounds…strange?”

That’s me, Mister Eloquent.

“It’s theoretically possible that there’s some larger version of the kraken in the depths of the lake that we haven’t reached yet,” Isaac said as he wiped his face off on his laboratory coat sleeve. He shook his head and removed the coat and tried to clean himself as best as he could with it as he continued, “I’m not going to say it’s definitely there, but it’s a plausibility we can’t dismiss.”

“Okay,” I nodded. My hearing was coming back at a surprisingly good rate, “but not likely?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Shit.”

“A ‘grand kraken,’ as that deranged lunatic espoused, would have a mass that would probably be unsustainable in the lake’s high-pressure environment,” Isaac put on his metaphorical doctoral cap and began to lecture me, “but that still leaves a small chance of it occurring. Of course, feeding a creature that is large enough to damage the station in a lake this small is highly unlikely and improbable. There just isn’t enough food to keep them alive.”

“What if they eat each other?” I pressed. “What if they are like the Aztecs and sacrifice each other to appease a god?”

“That’s actually a valid idea,” Isaac nodded, a grave look on his face. It was a bit unnerving to see a guy I had considered one of the friendlier people on this hell to be so dour, but then again we did just blow the head off of a shape-shifting maniac.

“That’s not comforting me, Doc.”

“Sorry.”

“What if,” I began, my mind wandering as I thought about how the kraken had reacted to me since I had arrived on the station, “we try something out of the ordinary? What if—and this is going to sound a little weird—we ask the kraken?”

I swear Isaac’s jaw almost dropped to the floor.

“That’s insane!”

“So is the idea of a telepathic shape-shifter.”

“Point,” he conceded. He looked at me, slightly confused. “So how would you do it?”

I jerked a thumb up at the tubes running throughout the station. There were a few dead kraken inside them, but most of the aliens had cleared out sometime during the battle after keeping me alive and relatively sane. There were one or two, however, that had remained behind and were watching us now. I could feel their alien gaze on me, though it no longer freaked me out. Isaac followed my movement and his eyes widened.

“They always follow me,” I explained, “remember?”

“You think they can understand you?” he asked.

“I think that they can sense my intent,” I allowed. “Pretty sure that my mangled English is beyond them though.”

“That’s a clever idea,” Isaac nodded. “Projecting your own intentions onto the aliens empathically. How you going to do that, though?”

“Interpretative dance? Hell, I don’t know,” I admitted. “You’re the scientist, figure it out.”

“This sounds like pseudoscience to me,” he replied, his voice full of doubt. “You think that some random alien is going to understand what you want to tell you where to go?”

…down The Well…

“What the actual fuck?” I exclaimed and looked around. Had I heard it, or had I imagined something telling me about The Well? I shook my head as I remembered when this had happened to me before. “Oh, damn it…”

“What?” Isaac was confused.

“I know what to do,” I said as I rubbed my nose. I grimaced as a new wave of pain washed over me.
Right
, I thought.
My broken nose
.
Well done, idiot.

“What are we going to do?” Isaac asked, his youth and nervousness obvious in his voice.

“We have two options,” I said in a low tone, trying as best as I could to remain calm. “One option is that we can go down The Well and into the deeps to placate the grand kraken—at least, I think it’s the grand kraken. He can’t crush the station—dropped this place from orbit, remember?—but tipping it over would work just as well, if the kraken’s as big as I think it is.”