Had anything happened? There was no way I could have dreamed my way through automatic gunfire. The trap had not yet been sprung.
Then I heard it again. A hatch being not just closed, but slammed shut. The noise was funneled down the hallway and blasted into my compartment. The Serpent? Or the SEALs returning empty-handed?
The burst of machine-gun fire answered my question. I resisted the urge to throw my hands over my ears, instead steadying the .45 in a twohanded grip.
Beyond its blue-black barrel, a fight unfolded, its violence slowed by the adrenaline screaming through my veins.
Before the initial shooting had even faded into memory, I saw Ridder— his legs — step out from the officers’ mess into the hallway. Even in the weird slow-motion, he moved much faster than I expected from such a sedate person. As I became aware of that thought, I saw him silhouetted by the muzzle blasts from his rifle.
It was as if there were a strobe light at the aft end of the corridor. The shell casings weren’t quite falling. The flashes just caught them, a frame at a time, in various stages of their descent. I suppose I could see them between shots, but the hall’s dim light, compared with the brilliant staccato explosions of Ridder’s assault rifle, might as well have been total darkness. And I somehow could hear the empties tinkling onto the deck.
He stood there, his legs braced maybe shoulder-width apart, and fired. I couldn’t see his upper body at all, but I could imagine his face. Emotionless. Sleepy, even, but not blinking as he held down the trigger and sprayed whatever was in front of him.
Was there anything in the hallway? There was a shadow-not his— dancing on the wall, evident but indistinct. Ridder still wasn’t moving. If the Serpent were charging down the hallway, the SEAL wasn’t giving up an inch.
Then he did move. Not back, but forward, and he stopped shooting. As his legs disappeared from my view, an oblong black object clanked to the floor where he had stood. A magazine. He had burned an entire clip and was giving chase.
I, however, felt as though my back had been welded to the torpedo-launching mechanism I was leaning against. What if it turned around now and hit him when he was reloading? It could break him, shove him out of the way and be at my throat. If I stayed here and covered the doorway, the distance and my pistol would protect me.
Ridder started shooting again. The world had speeded up a little, and now the gunfire was slurred together into a continuous ripping sound. And on the other side of it, I heard voices. Yelling.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” The shooting stopped.
Had they gotten him? I heard no panic. But none of the ebullient screams of success I’d expect if they were standing over the Serpent’s “steaming corpse,” either.
That detached me from my position. I ran over to the doorway and peered through. All I could see, once again, were the backs of Ridder’s legs. But they were in the control room. And through the tiny doorway, in the spaces around and between his limbs, I could see SEALs piling through the compartment’s opposite hatch.
I climbed up the stepladder and into the hallway. My feet almost skidded out from under me as I planted them in a pond of cartridge casings. The bulkhead at the far end of the hall was gouged with bullet impacts, and intermittent sparks dripped from the ceiling where ricochets had torn through exposed wiring. Everything was shrouded by a thin, gauzy haze of gunsmoke.
The pistol remained in front of me in both hands, held at a slight down angle as I walked forward. When I got to the captain’s quarters, I glanced in and saw Campbell sitting on the edge of the bed, his rifle in his lap and a pile of spare clips on the floor.
“Did we get him?” The fighting had given his voice new purpose and energy.
I shrugged and gestured with my head toward the control compartment. “I’m trying to find out. He didn’t get to the torpedo room.”
“I know. I saw him go by, then come back. You were right — he was so fast. Just a blur.”
I left him loading a new clip into his rifle and continued to the end of the hallway. Ridder had moved from the hatchway, and I climbed through.
Four SEALs were at the aft end of the compartment in a loose semicircle, alert, weapons ready. Ridder was standing to my right, facing Larsen. They seemed to be arguing, Ridder’s dainty hands buttressing his points with angry gestures.
“He did not pass us, Seaman,” Larsen said.
“I’m not saying he did, sir. But I saw him — just for a split-second — and he turned and ran back in here.”
“And after that?”
“I dunno. He was through the hatch, and I couldn’t see him anymore.”
“Well, he’s not in here, obviously.” Larsen gestured at the posse of SEALs without looking. “Did you hit him?”
“Fuck if I know, sir. I ripped off an entire mag, reloaded and tried to hit him through the doorway, even though I couldn’t really see him. That’s when you guys came through the other door.”
“No shit. You were shooting blind. We’re lucky you didn’t gun me down.”
“I was trying to hit it, OK? It moved so fast,” Ridder said. He was annoyed again. It seemed to be his personality’s only setting besides “tranquilized.”
Larsen shifted his gaze to me.
“Did you see it?”
“No. I heard Campbell shoot… wait, no. First I heard two hatches shut, I think. Then I heard Campbell start firing, and then I saw Ridder step out and join in.”
“There’s no way it could have gotten past us.”
“Well, it did, obviously, because we’re here and it isn’t.” That was from Grimm on the other side of the room. Larsen must have been thinking the same thing, because he didn’t argue or react.
Some of the smoke from the hallway had drifted into our compartment, making it seem as if we were having a conversation in a fog bank. The SEALs’ expressions were ebbing from focused excitement to disgust to worry.
“I heard you talking to Campbell, Myers. What’d he say?”
“Not much. Just that he saw it pass twice, once going forward and once aft. He wanted to know if we had gotten it.”
“Well, who the hell knows the answer to that?” Larsen wasn’t looking for one from any of us, as he addressed the question to the ceiling. “OK, men, we’re going to resecure our stations for now. We need to rethink the situation.”
And as he spoke, I saw movement. From the right side of the compartment, in the light-starved corner between the nav table and the sonar station, a human shape manifested and flung itself toward the aft hatch. It was so fast, though, that I think my brain was just filling in details where I couldn’t see any.
“Look!” was all I had time to say.
Before that one-syllable exclamation had made its way out of my mouth, the apparition was at the doorway. Its movements didn’t seem to have any beginning or end; it was just a seamless blur.
It slipped through the hatch, and as it did so, it grabbed Seaman Jakes. This was evident only because he jerked backward and started screaming.
His back thudded against the doorway, and his screaming was drowned out by a roar of gunshots. An assault rifle-the same type the SEALs used-was poked through the opening between his left side and the hatch frame.
Next to me, Ridder fell back, a mist of blood hanging in the air where he had stood. He bounced off the wall next to the steering station and landed face-down. The back of the SEAL’s black sweater was cratered with exit wounds.
I knew my adrenaline was pumping again, but nothing was slowing down. Jakes thrashed around, his eyes wide, all of his teeth visible as his vocal cords vibrated with pain and fear. The blood was draining from his face, turning his ebony skin an ugly ashen color.