The Apocalypse Ocean

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

The harbor streets of Palentar glittered with electric lamps and lit house windows in the late night – a sign of the city’s tremendous wealth. And good fortune for the several thousand who could afford to live floating off the shore of Placa del Fuego. Back on Placa del Fuego, the houses were crammed together and the streets tight and shielded against the sky. But here the houses stood tall on flat, artificial ground and the streets were broad and comfortable.

Even though the entire city floated over the dark ocean on giant pylons and concrete pontoons, occasionally Kay could just faintly feel the roof of the house she stood on move with some hidden surge of the ocean underneath the town. Like a soft, rolling earthquake.

A flare went up over the far side of Palentar, sputtering red and trailing smoke.

“Check in,” Kay ordered.

By her side, Bakeem, whom she kept hulking around for protection and general intimidation, held up the phone she’d made him purchase. Unfamiliar with it, he studied the screen for a second in his large hands. His scarred, overly muscled forearms flexed as he tapped at it until he managed to make the call. He murmured with it for a while, then pocketed it.

“He’s coming,” he reported.

“And?”

“No sign of the Doaq, yet,” Bakeem said, the tattoos on his face crinkling as he raised his eyebrows.

Kay bit her lip. She’d pulled every chain she could, threatened many, and bribed more, to make tonight come together. It would be a shame if the Doaq didn’t take the bait she’d worked so very hard to offer.

“It’ll come,” Kay said. “Don’t worry.”

“That isn’t what I’m worried about,” Bakeem said under his breath.

She ignored that. She gave Bakeem freedom she gave no other because he was effective, dangerous, and easy to point in the right direction. Why spoil that by making him more sullen than he had to be?

They stood on a rooftop balcony on the tallest building they could rent, and at a price that would make any normal Placa del Fuego resident gasp. But it would all be worth it, Kay thought.

The vantage point let them look down into most of Palentar’s streets, even at night. Kay had wanted to buy a set of night-vision goggles, something that couldn’t be used back on Placa del Fuego. But it turned out there was enough ambient light from streetlights and houses that a pair wouldn’t be all that useful.

“There,” Bakeem said, and pointed. A dark figure walked down a large, paved street with the intent and purpose of an armored tank.

“Move closer to me,” Kay ordered. “Shoulder to shoulder, like we’re a husband and wife watching our town late at night.”

Bakeem did so, awkwardly. “You think there are many old men like me with little girls like you for a wife in Palentar?” he asked.

“These are rich people,” she said. “There is worse going on behind these walls than you care to imagine.”

Bakeem stiffened. “He stopped. He suspects something.”

The man they watched wore a long field coat that stopped just above his ankles. His long dreadlocks came down to his shoulders, and he walked with a slight limp.

Kay believed that he was the most dangerous man she’d ever seen pass through Placa del Fuego. An outsider, from the Xenowealth. Which made him very useful.

A green flare sparkled.

Then another popped up a quarter of a mile further inward.

Then a third.

The phone buzzed and Bakeem answered. “It’s here.”

The man in the coat had stopped. Waiting for the meeting he’d been promised. A connection he was so personally sure of, but that didn’t exist. Information that had tempted him out here, all of which had been manufactured by Kay’s informants. Although the unfortunates who’d been informed the information was real didn’t know they were part of the elaborate, real-life chess game Kay was playing.

“You never found his name out, did you?” Kay asked Bakeem.

“No.” It wasn’t important. What mattered were the people he’d killed since arriving here and those who had failed to kill him. The outsider was a Xenowealth soldier, spy, and machine. An excellent tool to test the Doaq’s limits with.

“A shame.”

She squinted.

Any second now.

A shadow flitted across an intersection, and slid itself into more shadows. A dark figure in draped robes that looked like an ancient and impossibly thin, tall monk.

It ghosted up the street, smooth and inhumanely fast. As it did so, the lights began to flicker and die on the street, as if it pulled darkness along with it. The cellphone in Bakeem’s pocket whined and sputtered, then died.

The distance between the two figures on the street closed.

Kay realized the man would be ambushed, and opened her mouth to shout. She wanted this to be a real fight after all …

The dreadlocked man turned, a large-caliber pistol in hand.

From the distance, they could only hear a murmur.

For a moment the figure in robes paused.

Then from within the depths of the cowl, a gray jaw descended, dropping out from within the dark emptiness. The mouth kept yawning, until it fell down past its chest, waist, and to its knees.

“Fuck, oh fuck,” Bakeem whispered, and began to crouch. Fear dripped from his pores. Kay could smell it, and it almost overwhelmed her for a moment.

“Don’t move,” she hissed at him. “Don’t draw attention.”

Idiot.

On the street below, the Doaq, its mouth wide open, advanced.

The dreadlocked man shot it in the mouth, and nothing happened. The empty space inside the Doaq’s maw swallowed the bullet.

Three shots sparked off the Doaq’s stringy arms and then legs. The bullets dropped to the pavement compressed and smoking slightly.

Now the Doaq blurred forward, mouth open and ready to swallow the man.

But the man dropped the pistol and swerved at the last split moment. Moving almost as quickly as the robed Doaq, he threw the creature toward the lower floor of the nearest brick house.

Mouth wide open, the Doaq struck brick. It turned around with pieces of brick leaking from around its mouth. It left a large, man-sized oval hole in the side of the house.

The man flicked two grenades into the Doaq’s mouth.

They disappeared.

Nothing happened. No smoke. No belching fire.

Just … nothing.

Kay could see the man’s body posture betray momentary confusion and frustration.

Then it changed into curiosity.

Now that spoke to a certain implacable calm, Kay thought, as she watched him hold yet another grenade in his hand for a too-long second, then toss it.

It exploded in the air just above the Doaq’s head. The creature rocked back, briefly stunned, and Kay saw the flash of a triumphant grin on the man’s brown face.

But that faded as the Doaq shook itself off and kept coming, tattered robe flapping.

There was a ruined, alien face exposed to the night now. One with reptilian, silver eyes, and scaled glittering skin that danced with sparks. 

Some sort of reaction to the blast, Kay thought. Interesting.

The man she’d tricked into coming did something she didn’t expect. He pulled out a machete from under his coat, and ran right at the Doaq.

They closed, and again, he dodged the Doaq. This time he struck the back of its neck with the blade, biceps straining with the strike and visible even under the arms of his coat.

Electricity sparked and leapt, danced around the street and shattered first-floor windows. People inside screamed.

The Doaq spun and smacked the man in the chest, throwing him through another untouched brick wall. Dust plumed into the street and dishes clattered.

Kay froze as the Doaq, seemingly victorious, looked up the street … right at her and Bakeem.

“Oh shit,” Bakeem said. “Oh shit. We’re next.” He stepped back from the rail.

Kay’s jaw ground tight.

“What are you?” she growled quietly to herself, staring right back at the alien on the street. “I want to know where you came from.” And more importantly …

“Kay …” Bakeem said. “We need to make a run for it.”

“… how do I kill you?” she gritted.

The Doaq took a step forward, but not quickly enough to dodge the massive chunk of wall flung from inside the house that struck its head.

It turned its body in the direction of the projectile, but kept looking back up to where Kay and Bakeem stood.

“This is long enough,” Bakeem barked.

Kay looked at him, a warning glance, but he was too caught up in his own fear.

“Bakeem,” she said softly.

Whatever else she planned to say was cut off as the man in the field coat erupted from the ruined first floor of the building and grabbed the Doaq.

They both rammed through a wall, then another. A whirlwind of destruction ensued inside, and then they burst out into a secondary street. The house they’d punched through slowly collapsed in on itself, as if the walls were just cardboard.

More houses shifted, roofs sank, and debris puffed into the air as the battle continued. The Doaq no doubt trying to bring its infinitely hungry mouth to bear on the man.

Kay jumped over the balcony and onto the stairs down to the road. Bakeem, startled, hurried to catch up.

She ran over, crouched, and pointed to a shimmering puddle that still glittered with static.

“There it is,” she said.

“What?” Bakeem asked, frowning.

“Whatever, whoever he is, he hurt the Doaq.” Kay straightened up. She looked back off at the trail of destruction.

“You want to get to him,” Bakeem said.

“Oh yes,” said Kay, turning around and heading for the docks. “Very much yes.”

“Why?”

Kay held out a hand as they walked. “Hand me that phone.”

Bakeem obeyed.

She pressed the screen. Nothing. Jabbed the power button. “It’s burned out, even though we’re offshore and away from the dead zone around Placa del Fuego. Did you see all the lights burn out as the Doaq approached?”

“Yes.”

“The Doaq may have only showed up a few months ago, but it’s connected to the dead zone.” 

“Why do you care?” Bakeem asked.

She didn’t answer.

A boat waited at the docks for them.

Out across the night ocean beyond the harbor, the gaslight slopes of Placa del Fuego flickered at them.

The crew moved around to the light of cheap electric flashlights as she boarded, and moments later the hardly used engine coughed to life. Smoke belched out of the back of the boat as they cast off and chugged away from Palentar.

A klaxon broke the stillness of the night. A fire alert.

Kay perched on the side of the boat and started peeling an apple with one of Bakeem’s many knives, watching a pillar of smoke rising at the far end of town. “Palentar might not survive this little battle,” she said to Bakeem.

The large man shrugged indifferently.

Something flitted by the docks. Kay handed the knife back and put the apple down. “Pass me the binoculars.”

She held them up and looked for movement.

There: the man in the coat at a full run.

“He escaped and doubled back for the boats,” Kay said to Bakeem.

But he wasn’t going to make it to a boat in time to cast off. The Doaq was close behind, mouth gaping.

The man reached the end of a pier and launched himself clear, diving clean and headfirst into the water.

Kay stood up.

The disturbed water boiled for a moment, lapped around, and then cleared.

“He’s too heavy to swim. He’s as much machine as man,” she said, shocked. “He just committed suicide.”

It was twenty seven thousand feet to the bottom here.

“Better to die like that than be swallowed by the Doaq,” Bakeem grunted.

Kay frowned. She’d watched that man. She didn’t understand. He wasn’t the type to take his life. He was a soldier. The kind that would die fighting before surrendering, ever.

She sat down heavily. She’d completely misread him.

That unnerved her.

The boat chugged out past Palentar and into open ocean, and in the distance she could see the massive floating skyline of the city of Reception ten miles away. The docks and skyscrapers of Reception clustered around the wormhole that led away from Placa del Fuego and off to other worlds.

Off to worlds inhabited by aliens.

Bakeem had asked why she cared. She cared because the Doaq was another festering alien that had sneaked into Placa del Fuego.
Her
island. She wanted to scrape that barnacle off the scrap of land where the unwanted clustered together in slums and shoved past each other on tight streets.

She looked over at Bakeem. “Three damned months, Bakeem. That’s all it took for the Doaq to own the night.” People missing, organizations destroyed. “My night. My streets.”

She was fifteen years old, and two years into building her own empire among the thrown-away refuse of humanity that huddled against itself on the sixteen-mile-long Placa del Fuego. The Doaq’s recent appearance was not a part of that plan.

“Dead zone,” one of the sailors said, pointing at a line of small, red buoys in the water. The lights all flickered and burned out on the boat as they approached the marked line. The four sailors tossed them over the side. They were unshielded. They wouldn’t work again.

The engine coughed to a stop as well.

They were a mile offshore Placa del Fuego, right on the edge of the dead zone. They coasted for a few moments before the sails got pulled up, the boat pointed just off the wind, and they began to plod in toward the harbor.

It had been an illuminating night.

But Kay had a lot of work in front of her now.

“Bakeem,” she said thoughtfully. “When we get back, I want you to create a list of everyone who spoke to that man, particularly anyone from Palentar who survives tonight.”