“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: