“And now,” said Derek Umbolu grimly, “will you have the kindness to say why we steered clear of Rossala?”
Flandry cocked an eyebrow. “Why are you so anxious to kill other men?” he countered.
Derek bristled. “I’m nay afraid to hazard my skin, Impy… like someone I could name!”
”’There’s more to it than that,” said Flandry. He was not sure why he prattled cheap psychology when a monster crouched under his feet. Postponing the moment? He glanced at Tessa Hoorn, who had insisted on coming. “Do you see what I mean, Lightmistress? Do you know why he itches so to loose his harpoon?”
Some of the chill she had shown him in the past week thawed. “Aye,” she said. “Belike I do. It’s blood guilt enough that we’re party to a war ‘gainst our own planetmen, without being safe into the bargain.”
He wondered how many shared her feelings. Probably no large number. After he and Inyanduma flew to the City and got the Warden to mobilize his constables, a call had gone out for volunteers. The Nyanzan public had only been informed that a dangerous conspiracy had been discovered, centered in Rossala, that the Sheikh had refused the police right of entry, and that therefore a large force would be needed to seize that nation over the resistance of its misguided citizens and occupy it while the Warden’s specialists sniffed out the actual plotters. And men had come by the many thousands, from all over the planet.
It was worse, though, for those who knew what really lay behind this police operation.
Flandry mused aloud, “I wonder if you’ll ever start feeling that way about your fellowmen, wherever they happen to live?”
“Enough!” rapped Derek Umbolu. “Say why you brought us hither and be done!”
Flandry kindled a cigarette and stared over the rail, into chuckling sun-glittering waves so clear that he could see how the darkness grew with every meter of depth. He said:
“Down there, if he hasn’t been warned somehow that I know about him, is the enemy.”
“Ai-a!” Tessa Hoorn dropped a hand to her gun; but Flandry saw with an odd little pain how she moved all unthinkingly closer to Derek. “But who would lair in drowned Uhunhu?”
“The name I know him by is A’u,” said Flandry. “He isn’t human. He can breathe water as well as air-I suppose his home planet must be pretty wet, though I don’t know where it is. But it’s somewhere in the Merseian Empire, and he, like me, belongs to the second oldest profession. We’ve played games before now. I flushed him on Conjumar two Earth-years ago: my boys cleaned up his headquarters, and his personal spaceship took a near miss that left it lame and radioactive. But he got away. Not home, his ship wasn’t in that good a condition, but away.”
Flandry trickled smoke sensuously through his nostrils. It might be the last time. “On the basis of what I’ve seen here, I’m now certain that friend A’u made for Nyanza, ditched, contacted some of your malcontents, and started cooking revolution. The whole business has his signature, with flourishes. If nothing else, a Nyanzan uprising and Merseian intervention would get him passage home; and he might have inflicted a major defeat on Terra in the process.”
A mumbling went through the crewfolk, wrath which was half terror. “Sic semper local patriots,” finished Flandry. “I want to be ruddy damn sure of getting A’u, and he has a whole ocean bottom to hide on if he’s alarmed, and we’ll be too busy setting traps for the Merseian gunrunners due next week to play tag for very long. Otherwise I’d certainly have waited till we could bring a larger force.”
“Thirty men ‘gainst one poor hunted creature?” scoffed Tessa.
“He’s a kind of big creature,” said Flandry quietly to her.
He looked at his followers, beautiful and black in the sunlight, with a thousand hues of blue at their backs, a low little wind touching bare skins, and the clean male shapes of weapons. It was too fair a world to gamble down in dead Uhunhu. Flandry knew with wry precision why he was leading this chase-not for courage, nor glory, nor even one more exploit to embroider for some high-prowed yellow-haired bit of Terran fluff. He went because he was an Imperial and if he stayed behind the colonials would laugh at him.
Therefore he took one more drag of smoke, flipped his cigaret parabolically overboard, and murmured: “Be good, Tessa, and I’ll bring you back a lollipop. Let’s go chilluns.”
And snapped down his helmet and dove cleanly over the side.
The water became a world. Overhead was an area of sundazzle, too bright to look on; elsewhere lay cool dusk fading downward into night. The submarine was a basking whale shape… too bad he couldn’t just take it down and torpedo A’u, but an unpleasant session with a man arrested in Altla had told him better-A’u expected to be approached only by swimming men. The roof of sunlight grew smaller as he drove himself toward the bottom, until it was a tiny blinding star and then nothing. There was a silken sense of his own steadily rippling muscles and the sea that slid past them, the growing chill stirred his blood in its million channels, a glance behind showed his bubble-stream like a trail of argent planets, his followers were black lightning bolts through an utterly quiet green twilight. O God, to be a seal!
Dimly now, the weed-grown steeps of Uhunhu rose beneath him, monstrous gray dolmens and menhirs raised by no human hands, sunken a million years ago… A centuries-drowned ship, the embryo of a new reef ten millennia hence, with a few skulls strewn for fish to nest in, was shockingly raw and new under the leaning walls. Flandry passed it in the silence of a dream.
He did not break that quietude, though his helmet bore voice apparatus. If A’u was still here, A’u must not be alarmed by orders to fan out in a search pattern. Flandry soared close enough to Derek to nod, and the giant waved hands and feet in signals understood by the men. Presently Flandry and Derek were alone in what might once have been a street or perhaps a corridor.
They glided among toppling enormities; now and then one of denser shadow, but it was only a rock or a decapus or a jawbone the size of a portal. Flandry began to feel the cold, deeper than his skin, almost deeper than the silence.
A hand clamped bruisingly on his wrist. He churned to a halt and hung there, head cocked, until the sound that Derek had dimly caught was borne past vibrator and ocean and receiver to his own ears. It was the screaming of a man being killed, but so far and faint it might have been the death agony of a gnat.
Flandry blasphemed eighteen separate gods, kicked himself into motion, and went like a hunting eel through Uhunhu. But Derek passed him and he was almost the last man to reach the fight.
“A’u,” he said aloud, uselessly, through the bawl of men and the roil of bloodied waters. He remembered the harpoon rifle slung across his shoulders, unlimbered it, checked the magazine, and wriggled close. Thirty men-no, twenty-nine at the most. A corpse bobbed past, wildly staring through a helmet cracked open-twenty-eight men swirled about one monster. Flandry did not want to hit any of them.
He swam upward, until he looked down on A’u. The great black shape had torpedoed from a dolmen. Fifteen meters long, the wrinkled leather skin of some Arctic golem, the gape of a whale and the boneless arms of an elephant… but with hands, with hands… A’u raged among his hunters. Flandry saw how the legs which served him on land gripped two men in the talons and plucked their limbs off. There was no sound made by the monster’s throat, but the puny human jabber was smashed by each flat concussion of the flukes, as if bombs burst.
Flandry nestled the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Recoil sent him backward, end over end. He did not know if his harpoon had joined the score in A’u’s tormented flanks. It had to be this way, he thought, explosives would kill the men too under sea pressure and… Blood spurted from a transfixed huge hand. A’u got his back against a monolith, arched his tail, and shot toward the surface. Men sprayed from him like bow water.