The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (29 page)

‘Apparently,’ said the CO. ‘That could explain their tenacity at holding the shelf. Having a marine god justifies their claim to the sea.’

‘I’d like to talk to him before the team does the craniectomy.’

‘He will be held for you – Lab B-Seventeen.’

Red Crab lay pinned to the vivisection table. He was already on the pump. Tubes and wires kept him alive while curious teams labelled and sampled his internal organs.

‘I have the reading on his aortic wall. Look and that lysine oxidase level!’

‘Hand me the core of spleen. Now the liver. Where are those vials I asked for?’

‘Pull that retractor. We need more intervertebral material.’

Red Crab tried to struggle, but none of his muscles obeyed him. He couldn’t blink his eye or change his respiratory rate. He waited.

‘Is he conscious?’ asked Furlong.

‘The EEG indicates that he is, but I’ve got his motor end-plates turned off,’ explained the teck.

‘I’d like to talk to him.’

‘Yes, sir. Just a minute. We’ll have the Bone Team check their pins. I don’t want this creature to wreck any of our instruments with its thrashing around.’

The bloodied pins were reattached to their mountings. The Benthic was suspended above the work area. Each of the large bones was transfixed: two pins in the outer table of the occipital bone, one in each ilium, humerus and femur.

‘Before you give him back his muscle control don’t you think you should close up his belly? I don’t want anything to fall out if he coughs.’

‘Good idea,’ said the teck, standing up and stretching. ‘All right, Ace, put some sutures in there to cut down the oozing. Clamp up the incision. We can finish this tomorrow.’

Furlong stepped outside for a snack. They called him when the Benthic started to move. The surgical dissection site was closed with a row of large skin staples. The table was wheeled away and a soft absorbent cot replaced it. The prisoner remained suspended.

‘If he gives you any trouble, turn this on. It paralyzes his endplates. We’ll be back in about twelve hours. It might take us four or five days to complete our studies. We have a lot of forms to fill out on this one. He’s interesting.’

Furlong nodded. ‘I’m sure. Do we have a voiceprint on him?’

‘No genetic pattern on file,’ said the teck. ‘This one is a hybrid at least. Might be one of the original primitives. That’s why we have to go slow and learn as much as we can.’

Furlong turned to the Benthic – a seventy-four-inch leathery giant with thick body hair and mature genitalia. Furlong’s own fifty-two inch frame was large for a Nebish, but he felt a little overwhelmed.

‘Can you hear me?’

The giant snarled. Every muscle in his body stood out. Tendons taut; eyes flashed hatred.

‘I wish I could make you more comfortable while we talked, but I don’t know which of these dials control pain. Tell me about your people.’

Silence.

‘Tell me about your god. You worship a deity that looks like a whale?’

The giant stubbornly turned away his eyes; the metalloid bone pins creaked.

‘Your god is dead,’ continued Furlong. ‘We have slain your
Rorqual
.’

Red Crab turned a pair of malevolent eyes on the Nebish Chairman-Sovereign. ‘My Godwhale will never die. She brought the fish back to the sea for us. She will kill you for what you have done.’ He tried to spit, but his head brace was too stiff. Only a few misty drops stuck to Furlong’s face.

‘I have seen the Hive ships sink your Godwhale. Here, I’ll move this screen around so you can see for yourself. Not this channel. Those are shots of your own internal organs. Here it is. See!
Rorqual
is at the bottom of the sea.’

Red Crab saw the Hive vessels anchored above the sunken Harvester. An optic was lowered on a meck Tuna. It explored the hull. All hatches were open.

‘Look,’ boasted Furlong. ‘Every compartment is flooded. Your Godwhale is no deity. It is just a sunken ship. All of its crew has died.’

‘Stupid!’ shouted Red Crab. ‘Of course it is a ship – a ship occupied by our deity. Open your eyes. There is no crew!
Rorqual
still lives. It is your Hive crews that will die.’

Furlong just grinned confidently. Simple Neolithic peoples have their simple solutions for their problems. An all-powerful deity is the simplest. He started to stand up to leave, but the searching eye of the meck Tuna interested him. He pulled up a chair and sat beside the vivisectionist’s victim. An occasional dim light blinked in the miles of dark corridors. Curious fish and other marine life forms darted in and out of the shadows, giving him a start.

‘She lives,’ spat Red Crab.

Furlong ignored the giant’s ravings. ‘Those dark shapes in the control room are nothing more than a fish or squid. Wait until the optic gets closer—’

Furlong’s words were cut off by the obvious human form that fluttered about in the flooded chamber on a pair of lacy wings. Female breasts!

‘An angel!’ shouted Red Crab confidently. ‘I will see your ships destroyed.’

Furlong’s mouth dropped open. He stood slowly.

‘Kill! Kill!’ chanted the captive.

‘Do not believe what you see,’ said CO. ‘This transmission is an obvious simulation.’

The angel approached the spying optic with an axe. The transmission stopped.

Furlong retched and left the operating theatre. In the hall he met one of the Biotecks.

‘Is there some way to make our captive suffer more?’

‘More?’

‘I’d like to punish him for his crimes against the Hive.’

The teck shook his head. ‘I don’t think the people in Neuro would like that. You see, they want his cerebral molecules as undisturbed as possible for their analysis.’

Furlong leaned against the wall for a few minutes before starting back to the committee room.

Big Daddy Longlegs ARNOLD deposited his belly stones in little castings – several thousand tons in size. He raised his snorkel and drew air into his belly. He climbed up the convenient lines to the two Hive ships. Remaining under water, he clung to their keels and chewed on their soft underbellies. Their struggles were brief. Wrapping them in a cocoon, he deposited them in the five-hundred-fathom trench. Surfacing he pumped himself dry, riding high on the water, a light, fast creature. He quickly caught up with the ship towing the flooded derelict. The devil-bird flew by. He spun a sticky web and cast for the flying creature. It seemed to flutter slowly – an easy target. He reeled it in. It’s soft contents tasted rich and meaty.

The ship threw standard weapons at ARNOLD. He caught them and tossed them back. Several exploded. ARNOLD circled warily, spinning an underwater macramé cable.

Pursuit Five cut loose the derelict and turned towards
Rorqual
.

‘Get a line on her. Pull her into the bulldog grapples!’

‘Sir, she knocked down our Huntercraft and sucked it into her maw. Shall I hit the destruct button?’

‘Yes.’

ARNOLD felt heartburn. He belched a small cloud of smoke.

‘She has an underwater cable on us. She is pulling us closer.’

‘Good. Activate the Killer Mecks. Get ready to board.’

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! The Killer Mecks ran out of their garages and stood at the rail, waving an assortment of spikes and throwing appendages.

ARNOLD felt the bulldog clamp sink into his skin. A small beetle left the ship and crawled for his brain turret. He felt the metal feet on his skin and saw the thick armour. He caught it with his R-3 leg. It exploded, burning him. He squirted webbing over the charred spot. Two more beetles attached themselves to his back. He saw a dozen more crowding the ship’s rail.

‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’

‘Close the hatches.
Rorqual
is trying to sink us by scuttling herself.’

‘Send our location to the Hive. Have them send Huntercraft with explosives. We can hold out on the bottom: it is only about two hundred feet deep – just fifty feet over our decks.’

ARNOLD wrestled the enemy ship under him and pushed it into the soft sandy bottom. He crawled up on to it and filled his belly with water to increase his weight. His own body rose a hundred feet into the air. He needed at least three hundred feet to submerge with the enemy ship. His legs clawed, but he was unable to drag the ship. Its anchor and cranes were out. He tried to move away, but the bulldogs held firm. He waited.

The first Hive Huntercraft was snared with an aerial web.

‘
Rorqual!
’

The voice of the Hive. ARNOLD tightened his hold on the ship and listened.

‘We have one of your people – a hostage. Do you remember Red Crab?’

ARNOLD opened a channel. ‘I have many hostages.’

‘Allow my people to go free, and I will release Red Crab. You may keep the ship.’

‘Send Red Crab to me.’

‘No. Release my crew first.’

ARNOLD allowed the Hive ship to rise to the surface abruptly, reducing the pressure on the hull by two atmospheres. Nitrogen bubbles formed in the Nebish crew, throwing them down on the decks in pain. The scene changed Furlong’s mind. ‘Your man will be on the beach in three hours. He will be on a stretcher.’

ARNOLD pushed the ship back into the sand. The re-compression alleviated the crew’s suffering. He spoke with the ship’s captain, explaining the Hive’s offer. ‘You will need recompression time. If you arrange for a Huntercraft to bring the Benthic, I can see to it that you have no more pain.’

The Captain was happy to comply with the prisoner exchange. He was puzzled by the bizarre symptoms of the bends – emboli of nitrogen bubbles had paralyzed his left foot and disabled half his crew; many had died.

The Hive Huntercraft wobbled on to ARNOLD’s back four hours later. It asked for a power cable to refill its depleted cells. An angel approached the craft with her translucent wings shimmering in the sun – nipples and chin arrogantly high. Red Crab stumbled out of the hatch supported between two Meditecks. He was swathed in bandages – eyes glazed, fingers stiff, silent. They moved slowly towards ARNOLD’s turret-like head. He turned his huge EM receptor on the group, peering inside the mutilated body. Daddy Longlegs screamed. The captive Benthic carried meck components in his skull and thorax – vivisection had gone to completion, and the Hive was returning a warm musculoskeletal system.

‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’

The wall of salt water caught Pursuit Five with her hatches open. The female angel watched Nebishes die.

A victorious
Rorqual
towed four cocoons past garlanded ceremonial canoes. ARNOLD and White Belly grinned from her foredeck.

Big Har and Larry toured their Harvester. There was very little battle damage – a few charred blast marks, wrinkled deck plates, and water marks on cabin furnishings; but nothing significant. Larry noticed an occasional barnacle inside the ship.

‘How did you do it? Four ships, and hardly a scratch!’

ARNOLD just rubbed his harness marks and laughed.

‘I don’t remember. All I know is that White Belly has ensured her seat next to me next year.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She’s going to give me another son.’

Har and Larry nodded. That made sense. You didn’t take a Benthic woman down into the Ocean without your hormones acting up. Even in battle they must have had time to crawl off into a trench to copulate.

Work on the captured ships began immediately. The stern of Pursuit Three extended into the jungle, while the flooded bow rested on the bottom of the bay in two hundred feet of water.
Rorqual
studied the playbacks of the battles and decided the Killer Mecks could be tooled up to help with repair work. Iron Tunas were attached to her cranes to map the sunken ships. Nebish crew readied the tool shop.

Hemihuman Larry climbed the cable hand-over-hand and settled his calloused trunk into the lookout basket of the second-right crane. Clicking sensors glittered around him. He watched while the third pair of cranes grappled for salvage.

‘That you up in sensory R-two?’ shouted ARNOLD.

Larry waved down at the giant.

‘Keep an eye on things. I’m going angel and diving. Our deep scanners have located one of the Killer Mecks.’

‘OK,’ answered Larry. He watched his captain buckle on his fluid-filled wings. Crane 1-R came back and lifted him into the sea. Larry turned to his little remote screen to monitor the work on the bottom.

The decks of Pursuit Three were warped by the deep crunch. A meat-eating elasmobranch was tearing at a tangle of bodies wedged in the forehatch. Other hungry denizens glided in and out of rents. An occasional cluster of bubbles escaped from an internal hollow chamber to dance noisily up to the surface. ARNOLD swam past the short, powerful bulldog cranes on the foredeck and examined the control cabin. Its hatch was split and blackened. Inside he found a shattered robot – post-destruct.

‘Careful,’ cautioned the hemihuman. ‘That is the third robot with the same pattern of blast damage. Hold the Iron Tuna closer so
Rorqual
can study it. What do you think, old girl?’

‘Self-destruct,’ said the ship. ‘Attach it to my grapple. We’ll study it before we try to bring any of the others to the surface.’

The tecks swarmed over the twisted hulk.

‘Crude armour – hardly more than boiler plate.’

‘Here is what’s left of the self-destruct circuit. Looks like an ordinary satchel charge was used.’

‘Can you disarm one?’

‘If its circuitry is like this.’

Rorqual
machined delicate manipulators for the Iron Tuna. Larry sat at the screen and watched the underwater scene as each new robot was disarmed. One of the larger two-ton machines exploded as it was lifted above the waves. ‘Must have had two circuits,’ he commented. ‘That tells us something, though. Being submerged interferes with the mechanism. Air activates it.’

Meck warriors became meck workers under
Rorqual
’s guiding hand. The Benthic navy slowly took shape in the tropical lagoon. As the months flew by, ARNOLD’s family grew. A new mannequin was fashioned for Larry.

Larry wasn’t sure he’d be able to adjust to Spider Urethane. ‘I feel like I’m riding an octopus,’ he complained. The mannequin could only vibrate its damaged lingual membrane. ‘What am I going to use all these attachments for? Four legs! A power take-off and a screw mounting! I feel like a meck from the tool room. And these arms might be handy for carrying things, but most of the time they are in the way.’