PART TWO
2081 Earth
One
Warren watched the Manamix going down. The ocean was in her and would smother the engines soon, swamping her into silence. Her lights still glowed in the mist and rain.
She lay on her port side, down by the head, and the swell took her solidly with a dull hammering. The strands that the Swarmers cast had laced across her decks and wrapped around the gun emplacements and over the men who had tended them.
The long green-and-yellow strands still licked up the sides and over the deck, seeking and sticking, spun out from the swollen belly pouches of the Swarmers. Their green bodies clustered in the dark water at the bows.
A long finger of tropical lightning cracked. It lit the wedge of space between the hovering black storm clouds and the rain-pocked, wrinkled skin of the sea. The big aliens glistened in the glare.
Warren treaded water and floated, trying to make no noise. A strand floated nearby and a wave brushed him against it but there was no sting. The Swarmer it came from was probably dead and drifting down now. But there were many more in the crashing surf near the ship and he could hear screams from the other crewmen who had gone over the side with him.
The port davits on the top deck dangled, trailing ropes, and the lifeboats hung from them unevenly, useless. Warren had tried to get one down, but the winch and cabling fouled and finally he had gone over the side like the rest.
Her running lights winked and then came on steady again. The strands made a tangled net over the decks now. Once they stunned a man the sticky yellow nerve sap stopped coming and they lost their sting. As he watched, bobbing in the waves, one of the big aliens amidships rolled and brought in its strand and pulled a body over the railing. The man was dead and when a body hit the water there was a frothing rush after it.
Wisps of steam curled from the engine room hatch. He thought he could hear the whine of the diesels. Her port screw was clear and spinning like a metal flower. In the hull plates he could see the ragged holes punched by the packs of Swarmers. She was filling fast now.
Warren knew the jets the Filipinos had promised the captain would never get out this far. It was a driving, splintering storm, and to drop the canisters of poison that would kill the Swarmers would take low and dangerous flying. The Filipinos would not risk it.
She went without warning. The swell came over her bows and the funnel slanted down fast. The black water poured into her and into the high hoods of her ventilators and the running lights started to go out. The dark gully of her forward promenade and bay filled and steam came gushing up from the hatches like a giant thing exhaling.
He braced himself for it, thinking the engine he had tended, and the sudden deep booming came as the sea reached in. She slid in fast. Lightning crackled and was reflected in a thousand shattered mirrors of the sea. The waters accepted her and the last he saw was a huge rush of steam as great chords boomed in her hull.
In the quiet afterward, calls and then screams came to him, carried on the gusts. There had been so many men going off the aft deck the Swarmers had missed him. Now they had coiled their strands back in and would find him soon. He began to kick, floating on his back, trying not to splash.
Something brushed his leg. He went limp.
It came again.
He pressed the fear back, far away from him. The thing was down there in the blackness; seeing only by its phosphorescent stripes along the jawline. If it caught some movement—
A wave rolled him over. He floated facedown and did nothing about it. A wave rocked him and then another and his face came out for an instant and he took a gasp of air. Slowly he let the current turn him to the left until a slit of his mouth broke clear and he could suck in small gulps of air.
The cool touch came at a foot. A hip. He waited. He let the air bubble out of him slowly when his chest started to burn so that he would have empty lungs when he broke surface. A slick skin rubbed against him. His throat began to go tight. His head went under again and he felt himself in the black without weight and saw a dim glimmering, a wash of silvery light like stars—and he realized he was staring at the Swarmer’s grinning phosphorescent jaw.
The fire in his throat and chest was steady and he struggled to keep them from going into spasm. The grin of gray light came close. Something cold touched his chest, nuzzled him, pushed—
A wave broke hard over him and he tumbled and was in the open, face up, gasping, ears ringing. The wave was deep and he took two quick breaths before the water closed over him again.
He opened his eyes in the dark water. Nothing. No light anywhere. He could not risk a kick to take him to the air. He waited to bob up again, and did, and this time saw something riding down the wave near him. A lifeboat.
He made a slow, easy stroke toward it. Nothing touched him. If the Swarmer had already eaten, it might have just been curious. Maybe it was not making its turn and coming back.
A wave, a stroke, a wave—He stretched and caught the trailing aft line. He wrenched himself up and sprawled aboard, rattling the oars in the gunwale. Quietly he paddled toward the weakening shouts. Then the current took him to starboard. He did not use the oars in the locks because they would clank and the sound would carry. He pulled toward the sounds but they faded. A fog came behind the rain.
There was a foot of water in the boat and the planking was splintered where a Swarmer tried to stove it in. A case of supplies was still clamped in the gunwale.
Awhile later he sighted a smudge of yellow. It was the woman, Rosa, clinging to a life jacket she had got on wrong. He had been staying down in the boat to keep hidden from the Swarmers but without thinking about it he pulled her aboard.
She was a journalist he had seen before on the Manamix. She was covering the voyage for Brazilian TV and wanted to take this fast run down from Taiwan to Manila. She had said she wanted to see a Swarm beaten off and her camera crew was on deck all day bothering the ship’s crew.
She sat aft and huddled down and then after a time started to talk. He covered her mouth. Her eyes rolled from side to side, searching the water. Warren paddled slowly. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, and even soaked they kept off the night chill. The fog was thick. They heard some distant splashes and once a rifle shot. The fog blotted out the sounds.
They ate some of the provisions when it got light enough to see. Warren felt the planking for seepage and he could tell it was getting worse.
A warm dawn broke over them. Wreckage drifted nearby. There were uprooted trees, probably carried out to sea by the storm. The rain had started just as the first packs struck the bows. That had made it harder to hit them with the automatic rifles on deck and Warren was pretty sure the Swarmers knew that.
There was smashed planking from other boats near them, an empty box, some thin twine, life jackets, bottles. No one had ever seen Swarmers show interest in debris in the water, only prey. The things had no tools. Certainly they had not made the ships that dropped into the atmosphere and seeded the ocean. Those craft would have been worth looking at, but they had broken up on the seas and sunk before anyone could get to them.