The COB did a double take. “You’re going to be his crystal ball?”
Markey sighed and looked at the captain. “We can spend all day discussing the finer points of scrying procedure, Captain, or we can get this done.”
“Carry on, Lieutenant,” the captain said.
I made as little eye contact with Markey as possible while she read off map coordinates for me to inscribe. I joined our target location and Bowfin’s mantic signature into the spell, combining sonants and inflects from the codex reference tables and triple-checking each finished sequence. In principle, writing up the scry tunnel was simpler than describing a teleport path, but I did not want to be on the hook if this thing went sideways.
A few minutes later, Roseler and Markey were holding hands, their eyes closed as Roseler recited the full incantation.
Next to me, the captain muttered, “I’ll be glad when we’re done with all this black magic bullshit.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He glanced over as if noticing me for the first time. “Your family have talent, Seaman?”
I thought of my grandmother. She had introduced me to the occult, sneaking some mystical instruction into my language lessons every week. We never told my parents. They would have disapproved, to say the least.
I said, “Not that I’m aware of, sir.”
“Thank fucking God,” the COB said, on my other side. “Give me science and engineering any day of the week. I don’t trust anything I can’t take apart and see how it works—”
Roseler started screaming. It came suddenly, without even an intake of breath, and the sound was inhuman. He shrieked like an animal caught in a trap. I dropped the clipboard and covered my ears with both hands.
“Get the doc!” Markey shouted. “We need a tranquilizer!” Roseler’s body began convulsing. She wrestled him to the deck. “Hatcher! Help me hold him down!”
The captain leaned down the ladder and yelled for the corpsman. I jumped over him and grabbed Roseler’s shoulders. His eyes had rolled back into his head. He was still screaming, and his legs kicked around despite Markey’s iron grip.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” the COB asked.
“He made contact!” Markey said. “Dammit, COB, you didn’t tell me he was a sensitive!”
“How the fuck were we supposed to know?” the COB said.
My stomach knotted. Not because I was concerned for Roseler, but because I was afraid if he died, Markey would order me to incant her spells.
“As you were, both of you!” the captain said over the screaming. I could swear Roseler hadn’t taken a breath in more than a minute. “Doc’s on his way. Now how do we—”
Roseler stopped screaming. His mouth closed, then opened again, and he said a word which was not a word.
My head exploded with pain. No, pain’s not the right thing to call it. It wasn’t just that I hurt. When that not-word entered my brain, suddenly nothing in the world seemed right. What I saw, what I heard, what I felt — from the dinner I was still digesting to gravity itself — everything was wrong, and my body wanted it to stop.
I saw the captain fall to his knees, clutching for a handhold. A dark stain spread across the front of his trousers. Behind him, the COB vomited all over one wall of the compartment. Markey doubled over, blood dripping from her nose.
Roseler’s lips parted again. I slapped both hands over the bottom half of his face before he could make another sound. He kept shaking, and the only thing I could think was: I’ll kill him if I have to. How do I kill him? What’s the fastest way to kill him?
“Good,” Markey grunted, pressing her hands over mine. She turned her head and spat out a mouthful of thick, dark blood. “Keep him quiet until we can sedate him.”
“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.
“Our intel was wrong,” Markey said. “They’re not kraken.”
Some small part of me was happy that she’d screwed up. Most of me wanted to shit my pants. Then my brain finished processing Markey’s words.
“Wait, ‘they’?” The urge to empty my bowels increased. “There’s more than one?”
By the time the corpsman had chloroformed Roseler and tied him down to the bunk in Markey’s quarters — she ordered him gagged and isolated; nobody argued — I had finished collecting all our gear out of the conning tower and cleaning it off. The captain and the COB had changed into fresh uniforms and regrouped in the control room. They argued with the XO in low tones as I stowed the codex above the weapons station, locked the safebox, and returned the key to the captain.
I was just about to leave the control room when Lieutenant Markey came in, blocking my exit. Her face and uniform were still smeared with blood. Most of the officers and crew looked away. I backed myself into a corner and did my best to seem small.
“Two knots, Captain,” the helmsman whispered. We had been running silent since we made contact with the monsters.
“Very well,” the captain said. He turned to Markey. “Lieutenant, what are these torpedoes going to do to the kraken?”
“I’m aborting the mission, Captain,” Markey said.
The captain frowned. “Come again?”
“We cannot disturb those things,” Markey said, lowering her voice. “We need to get the hell out of here.”
“Oh, we’re moving,” the captain said. “But we did not come all the way into the goddamn lion’s den just to have a look-see. We are going to do some fucking damage before we leave.”
“Aft tubes loaded, Captain,” the weapons officer said behind me.
“The intel was bad,” Markey said. “Those are not kraken out there. They are Elder Things. Two of them.”
“Older than what?” the XO asked.
“Elder,” Markey repeated. “Not ‘older’. Elder Things.”
I didn’t recognize the name, but ‘elder’ usually refers to something supernatural that’s had centuries to develop its powers. And that’s always bad news.
“That’s not real descriptive,” the XO said.
“They are unlike any other life form in creation,” Markey said. “We don’t know what to call them, except… Things.”
“I don’t care what fucking kind of sea monsters they are,” the captain said. “I just want to know what’s going to happen when we wake them up. The Mark 14s have a nine-thousand-yard range—”
Markey stepped closer and glared at the captain. “I don’t know what will happen if we disturb those Things, Captain. But it’s going to be at least a thousand times worse than what happened to Seaman Roseler.”
“I don’t care,” the captain said, “as long as it happens to the Japs and not us. Now how far away do we need to be when we shoot off these fish?”
“No,” Markey said, her voice tight. “Elder Things are not just monsters. They are the worst monsters ever. They are beyond imagination. You saw — you felt what a single word in their language did to us.”
I shivered at the thought of what might have happened if we hadn’t silenced Roseler. The sounds and symbols we use for magic aren’t human — they’re ancient, prehistoric — and we don’t even understand how most of them work.
“Cults have worshipped Elder Things as deities — Old Gods,” Markey continued. “Do you understand? The mere sight of one can cause madness. If these two Things wake up, it could mean the end of the world.”
The XO grunted. “You just said you didn’t know what would happen. Now you’re saying it’s Arma-fucking-geddon. Which is it, Lieutenant?”