Ron and Forlam glanced at him, saw who he was addressing, then returned their attention to the platform, where a group of Hoopers had climbed up with shovels, buckets and mops.
‘If you recollect, you did give it to me, but then Captain Ambel took it away again. But be assured, in my possession such power would have been rarely used. What one of the older minds might do with it, even I am loath to speculate.’
‘What are they like then, these older minds?’
‘Unfathomable,’ was all the reply the hive mind offered.
Janer returned to easy conversation with his two human companions, as the rum began to work its familiar magic on him. At one point he commented, ‘They showed little fear.’
‘Hoopers don’t fear a quick death,’ Ron replied.
‘Do they fear anything?’
‘Oh yes, young Hoopers fear falling into the sea and not dying.’
‘Old Captains?’
‘What young Hoopers fear, plus the fate they avoided when Jay Hoop was in control here: they fear and hate the prospect of coring or having a thrall implanted,’ Ron explained.
‘Still… it was all such a long time ago.’
‘Never underestimate how Old Captains feel about that,’ Ron warned.
Seemingly without transition thereafter, they were sitting in twilight reliving old battles. Janer asked Ron if he knew what Keech was now doing.
‘Last I heard, he’s back on Klader working for the Polity monitor force,’ the Captain replied.
‘Still a policeman?’ Janer asked incredulously.
Ron eyed him. ‘Seven hundred years being dead didn’t put him off, so what do you think?’
Thereafter Janer and Ron became intent on extracting from Forlam the truth about what he had done with a certain female Batian mercenary. The other tables were empty now and no one objected when someone brought a chair to their table and joined them. Janer studied the dark-browed Hooper, trying to figure what it was about him—something out of kilter.
‘I want to join your crew,’ said the man to Ron.
‘And you are?’
‘Isis Wade.’
‘What experience do you have, Wade?’ Ron asked genially. Janer had lost count of the refills now.
‘As much experience as I want or need,’ Wade replied.
Ah, that’s it, Janer thought. The man was dark, his skin was patterned with leech scars, and he moved with that Hooper rolling gait. But Janer could see the difference. It was in the minutiae: mannerisms, exactitude of speech, how precisely soiled was his clothing, how his breathing was not quite in synch with his speech and movement—and probably also in things below conscious perception, like pheromones. Now why would a Golem android want to join Ron’s crew, and, for that matter, the Captain’s crew on what vessel? Ron was not returning to the Gurnard, and his own sailing ship had ended up at the bottom of the sea ten years ago.
Janer lost track of their conversation for a while, then came back to hear Ron saying, ‘Okay, you’re on. One like you might be useful.’
‘When does she sail?’Wade asked.
Ron replied, ‘They’ve got some of your kind working day and night on her, so not long. I’m getting some others together, but most are already on contract.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Janer asked.
Ron eyed him. ‘Why, we’re talking about the Sable Keech. What else?’
A skirt of warty flesh, hard as stone, oozed up the beach, and a long tentacle uncoiled from it. Erlin glanced back at the dismembered whelk on her surgical table and guessed the monstrous mollusc rising out of the sea was not looking for explanations. Its shell, encrusted with flatweed and alive with small prill, was the size of a large house. It rose up on a mound of flesh and in that mound two eyes blinked open, then everted from the main body on stalks thick as her leg. More tentacles unrolled up the beach, then a longer one with a wide flat end snapped back behind the rising shell then slammed forward and down exploding a shrapnel of stones in every direction. The tentacle tip rested momentarily a few metres from her door before the creature drew it back again. It was coming on rapidly, having now risen over the underwater ledge. Erlin dived aside as the pillar of stony flesh slammed down where she had just been standing. Rolling to her feet, she saw the tentacle slide quickly inside her house. There it paused, and a deep bass groaning issued from the monster. As the tentacle withdrew, a second one of the same type hammered down, and Erlin stared aghast at her home of a year. She had hoped to dive back inside, retrieve some weapon, but the dwelling now looked like a simnel cake that someone had smacked squarely with a lead bar. She glanced back towards the sea, and the two eyes pivoted towards her. She ran inland.
Stupid stupid stupid. What catastrophe had denuded this island of large animals? What had smashed peartrunk trees and driven a lane through the island’s central jungle? Well, her answer was coming after her now, by the tonne.
As she neared the island’s centre she looked back to see the monster revealed in all its glory, ploughing up the lane it had made before her arrival here. Sunset light glinted on a shell similar to that of its young, just rougher, older, and a lot lot bigger. Its visible body, stretching out below that shell, resembled that of an octopus, though the eyes extruded on stalks, the tentacles were without suckers, and the skirt between them extended further from the body itself than it did on the Terran cephalopod. Its upper surfaces were warty and a greyish purple, whilst its under surfaces were almost white—a pastel lavender shade. Had she not been running for her life, Erlin would have been fascinated.
She turned abruptly to her right and entered the dingle. A few hundred metres inwards, the island rose to a rocky peak which the monster might not be able to reach. Immediately, as she ran into the gloom, a leech the size of her arm dropped on her head and attempted to slide down round her neck like a feather boa. She grabbed it and flung it aside as its bubbling and churning tube mouth groped for her cheek. Other leeches fell around her in an awful fleshy rain, but she was moving too fast now to allow any of them an opportunity to feed. She crashed into a stand of putrephallus, held her breath going through it, and for as long as she could after departing the other side. Even so, when she did take a breath, she nearly vomited at the stench.
Now a slope lay before her, thick with bubbleweed. She skirted this, knowing that running up a slope this covered was almost impossible, as the weed bursting underfoot would turn the surface almost frictionless. She mounted a stone ridge snaking down the slope, and ran up that, slipping once and banging her knee, then again as she departed it at the top. From down below she heard the creature’s crashing commotion as it entered the dingle. Glancing back she saw it wrench from the ground the peartrunk tree from which the leeches had been falling, lift it ten metres into the air, then hurl it. The tree crashed into the slope below her. Leeches, pieces of wood and sods of bubbleweed rained past her. She fell flat to avoid a flying branch, rose again to see the monster now reach the putrephallus stand. It hesitated there, drew back and began to skirt it, but still it came on.
Erlin laboured up the slope to the highest point on the island. Many times she had come to this rocky prominence to survey the surrounding gleam of green-blue balmy seas. Even as she reached this height she realized there would be no safety here. A tentacle slammed down only metres below her—the creature, now past the putrephallus, had slowed not at all. Her only option was to just keep on running round and round the island. Even if she managed to stay ahead of the monster during the approaching night, and not make just one fatal error, her tough Hooper body would eventually give out. For the giant whelk only needed to be relentless. Erlin felt sure she was going to die, and all her thoughts on the matter of her death—the malaise that had first brought her here to this planet to find Ambel, and here to this island to ‘think’—seemed so inconsequential in that moment. She had never felt so alive.