Shadows of Falling Night (43 page)

“Uh, Eric—” Peter began, as Cheba stifled a startled giggle. “Maybe that’s not—”

The fin darted away abruptly; then there was a muffled booming and the dark water behind the
Tulip
abruptly rose in a shattered bulge of white a dozen feet across. A huge pale shape tossed ahead of it, writhing.

The children winced and Leila put her hands to her head. “Ooooh, that
hurt
,” she said. “That really hurt,
vraiment
.”

“
Maman
is mad now,” Leon said. “Really, really…”

A grating sound came up the hatch from the engine room. Eric’s grin—shark-like itself—turned to alarm, and he dashed for the hatchway, swinging below. The three adults peered through the moonlit night, and something heaved below the water astern. Not a shark this time…but it was an even paler dead-white.

“Oh, that’s not right,” Peter said. “That’s just not
right
.”

“What is it?” Ellen asked; he had his binoculars to his eyes again.

They were a type with wide lenses, designed to trap the maximum amount of light, and as he put it
unbuggerable
, since there were no electronics.

“That’s a sperm whale,” he said.
“Physeter macrocephalus.
”

“You mean—”

“Moby Dick-style whale. The giant-squid-eater. An
albino
Physeter macrocephalus. Melville got the idea from the one that sank the whaler
Essex
in 1822 by ramming it with its head, that’s the way the bulls fight each other. That one was supposed to be eighty feet long and would have weighed about seventy tons, which is a bit less than half what this ship displaces—”

“Jesus, will you stop lecturing!”
Ellen shouted, as a tall spout of water and air plumed into the air at a forty-five-degree angle from the huge pale bulk.

Immense flukes lifted and struck, and the sea fountained away from them. The noise of the diesels turned to a tooth-grating howl for an instant and then died away into grinding and clashing sounds, then silence. Eric reappeared.

“Cylinder blew. Freak accident,” he said bitterly, wiping at a grease-mark on his cheek. “What the—”

The stern of the ship heaved upward. Cheba grabbed a child, and Ellen did too. All of them were thrown to the deck with bruising force; Leila squealed, then called:

“Wooooopsie!” in a voice filled with innocent glee.

The
Tulip
heaved again as the great bulk rose close enough to the bow to throw a chaos of white water along its flanks and over the rail.

“Don’t worry, she won’t do anything that would hurt the children,” Ellen gasped as cold foam drenched her.

If she’s thinking straight. If not, she may be
very sorry
when she shifts back to human…humanoid…form after she’s smashed the boat and swallowed
us
all whole.

From what Adrian had told her and what she’d experienced while he was soul-carrying her, a nightwalker wasn’t just wearing an animal suit. The Power manufactured an aetheric body based on a DNA sample,
from blood or a bite of flesh or any body fluid that had cells in it; adepts called it
taking on the beast
. You got the animal’s senses and strengths, but you also got a lot of its basic nature, and you had to think with its nervous system. The adept’s personality and memories remained, but they had to work through what the form provided and maintaining a sapient’s purposes could be hard in some of them.

That’s why she switched to the whale. Sharks have tiny little brains. They swim, and they eat, they make little sharks, as Peter would remind me. Cetaceans have big brains, they think better, especially the types with teeth. She probably memorized a note to herself: if anything strange happens and your tiny shark brain feels things are getting away from you, turn into a whale.

“Can you get the engine running again?” Ellen asked.

“Yeah,” Eric said. “I’ll take about an hour, with someone to give me a hand.”

“Look on the bright side,” Peter said. “That thing could smash the boat, but she doesn’t want to. And she’ll have to go away before dawn, or at least turn into something that breathes water and go deep. Whales don’t have hands.”

The white whale had dived; everything was silent for a minute, and Eric turned to go below again and begin his repairs. Then
Tulip
lurched again, more softly this time. The stern dipped and stayed down, as if a heavy weight had been attached to the keel at the rear.

“What the hell…Much as I hate to say it, maybe you should get another of those little explosive fishing devices,” Peter said.

“I’ve got plenty of them—” Eric began.

Something came over the side of the ship, rearing into the air like a giant questing snake. Ellen froze for a moment before she realized what she was seeing. It was a tentacle, three times the length of her body and thicker than her ankle. She stared at it wide-eyed and open mouthed
until it fell like a living rope. Then she screamed, as it fell across her leg and the barbed hooks that lined it bit. The suckers gripped with agonizing force, and the living cable began to pull her towards the rail.

She tried to draw her revolver, but her eyes were streaming with the pain and the salt water that had surged across her face moments before, and she knew she was just as likely to shoot her own foot. Something flashed through that haze; it was Cheba and her silvered machete, hacking at the tentacle and screaming:

“¡Muérete, tú! ¡Pinche cabrona! ¡Muérete!”

That wasn’t just the needs of the moment. Cheba didn’t remember her time at Rancho Sangre very fondly. Something went
click
behind Ellen’s eyes; she had a weird sensation of feeling pain
twice
, in her leg and in her outstretched tentacle, of feeling her rage doubled and going
both ways
…

My tentacle? Do I have tentacles? Lots of them, and I’m seeing the ship from below, and the water’s too warm and the light hurts and…Oh, God, I so did not want ever to be touched by her again! And this is one of the reasons, the way it fucked with my head!

Cheba and Peter were hauling her back as the tentacle let go and whipped away. Eric took one look at her leg and started bandaging with skilled speed.

“Don’t knock me out!” she said, though the hypodermic he pulled out of the medical kit looked very tempting. “I am not going to be unconscious with
that
around!”

“It won’t, just takes the sting out at this dosage,” he said, a little indistinctly.

That was because he was pressing the bandage down with one hand and pulling the cap off the hypo with his teeth. He spat it to one side and administered the painkiller with brutal dispatch, simply jabbing the
needle into the thigh of her injured leg through the pants. It was rough, but at this point she scarcely noticed the sting. She
did
notice the wave of relief; the pain didn’t go away, but it became a lot less important. With both hands free Eric finished dressing the wound quickly.

“Not as bad as I thought—” he began, then snatched up his coach gun and shot again, deafeningly right over her head.

She looked up and felt her mouth drop open. A mass of tentacles gripped the rail and slid forward like writhing black pythons to seize anchor-points, securing themselves with the adhesive suckers and the barbs and hooks that lined them. Something huge was pulling itself over and onto the deck, something like Cthulhu on steroids. Its glaring eyes were the size of bowling-balls a foot across, pupils like S-slits of blackness. The curved beak like a giant parrot’s gnashed in the midst of the whirling chaos, and the central mass was bigger than a bear, with weight enough to make the drifting
Tulip
heel and loose things slide and bump as they tumbled across the deck. Cheba was shrieking Spanish maledictions again and hacking as the tentacles came probing, and Peter was struggling with a shotgun and shouting as well. It took an instant before she realized he’d been shouting something in Latin:

“
Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni!
Colossal squid! Fifty feet long, weighs tons,
fights
sperm whales! Damn! Darn!
Shit!”

Both barrels of the shotgun blasted silver buck towards the monster. Ellen realized the anesthetic was affecting her when she heard herself ask:

“You’re a physicist, Peter…why do you know the Linnaean names of giant squid?”

“It’s a hobby, it’s a hobby,
die, you bitch, die!
”

That was directed at Adrienne-the-monster-squid, not her: he fired again. There was another soundless blast of noise inside her head, and
the tentacles abruptly withdrew like a video being played backwards. The colossal squid—something deep in her mind noticed how appropriate the name was—slid away, and the ship rocked upright again. A sudden silence fell, and they could hear the waves lapping against the hull beneath the brilliant stars.

“Wow!” Leon said softly; the children were clinging to each other near the door to the deckhouse. “
Maman
is
really
angry with you, Ellen! Not just playing!”

“I should get the engine going again—” Eric began.

Then the
Tulip
lurched once more. It felt different, more of a monstrous
tugging
. Noises came through the hull, as much felt through her body as heard, sharp metallic rending and crackling sounds and then something like a big taut wire breaking. Then a tentacle broke the surface again; it was hard to see by moonlight, but it seemed to be brandishing something. It flexed like a whip, and the object turned through the air and thudded into the forward mast with a heavy metallic clatter and fell to the deck. It was round and disk-like, a couple of feet across, lobed…

“Son of a
bitch
!” Eric shouted, then a long sentence in Spanish, then: “She twisted the fucking propeller off the shaft! So much for
no hands
, professor.”

“The
whale
didn’t have hands,” Peter pointed out reasonably. “The squid has
tentacles
.”

Silence fell again. “Guess she found a way to attack the ship that didn’t endanger the kids,” Ellen said thoughtfully. “Ah…Peter…Adrian went over how to raise the sails, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “But I suspect we’re going to have a sea anchor hanging off our keel.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Eric said.

He lofted another of the improvised grenades over the side. This time the explosion took a little longer, went off deeper and hit the underside of the
Tulip
like a huge padded hand whacking it on the belly.

“Not going to let her get at the rudder,” he said. “That would be…bad.”

“I hope Adrian gets back soon,” Ellen added, then: “I think I could use a nap. Someone give me a hand? And
not
”—she specified with slightly drugged precision—“a tentacle. Definitely no suckers. Suckers
suck.
”

“I think he’s not in the area anymore,” Harvey Ledbetter said, taking a deep breath. “I’m not sure,
can’t
be sure if he’s using one of those new personal shields. I wasn’t getting any direct sensing, just…a feeling we were being looked over by the Power. Now we’re not. Took off in a hurry, which is a comfort.”

“
Something
destroyed our electronics,” Anjali said.

That wasn’t as serious as it might be; not getting lost was a very minor Wreaking, requiring merely sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field.

“And wrecked the fucking engine,” Jack Farmer said.

“Those were probably him. Nice deft subtle touch, no more damage than essential.”

“Which leaves the question of why he didn’t screw with the shield device. Even if he can’t locate it precisely, he knows it’s here. Fry the electronics and it’s all over.”

Harvey leaned on the wheel of the ship, looking out over the bow and the white curve of the sail, brilliant in the moonlight. He laughed heartily, breathing in the clear cold sea air; they’d opened a window, because the deckhouse got a little fusty with the three of them living in it.

“We got a fail-safe there,” he said. “Which is that Adrian, thanks to my careful upbringing, is sort of a soft-hearted and humanitarian little bastard, a real nice guy. Which incidentally proves it’s possible for a Shadowspawn to be that way, which some disputed. I was right and they were wrong and I get to sing the
‘I was right’
song.”

Farmer looked at him, baffled. “Yeah, that’s why he’s trying to
stop
you…us…from getting the bomb to Tbilisi. Which
incidentally
proves having mostly human genes doesn’t necessarily make
you
a nice guy. So if he blew the shield mechanism…”

“Every adept in the Council would see that fireball rushing out of the future,” Harvey went on. “And then…”

“They would go as the saying is,
ripshit
,” Anjali said thoughtfully. “Every screw and bolt in this ship would break. The wood would rot and splinter. Our eyeballs would boil and our hair catch on fire while we suffered strokes, heart-attacks and scrofula. And…and they would turn on Adrienne, to begin with.”