Fifty kilos of high explosive, Miss Orchard had said, arriving at an old solution to a new problem.
As he felt the sled change course to go with the current, Tarrant—knowing that the others were too preoccupied to be aware of his actions—opened the snap-hook which held him secure. He kicked himself free of the sled, and within a few seconds was completely alone in the black waters which were the stronghold of an enemy he would never see.
Commander Leon P. Cavray ground out a cigarette in a cluttered ashtray, while his eyes took in every detail of the picture on the television screen before him. The reconnaissance drone he had dispatched was little more than a ducted fan engine fitted with a camera pod, and therefore it could fly close to enemy craft with little risk of being seen or destroyed.
In this instance it was hovering a few hundred metres to one side of a cabin cruiser which was holding a steady northeast course on the prehistoric blue surface of the South Pacific. The clarity of the transmitted picture was exceptionally good, and Cavray could discern the name, The Rose of York, painted on the bows. He could also see the figure of a middle-aged man on the cruiser’s bridge, a man whose name he knew to be Willard Somerville. The man was wearing a white shirt and a scrap of red material on his head, and he was looking neither to one side nor the other as his boat traced an invisible line towards Harpoon Island.
“Nice picture,” Lieutenant Naipur said conversationally. “Nice. Clear.”
Cavray eyed him coldly. “What’s the precise range?”
“Eighty-seven kilometres, sir.”
“Torpedo transit time?”
“Sixty-one minutes, sir. Plus one minute or minus threepoint-five depending on current.”
Cavray looked back at the screen and made one last attempt to understand why an obscure and law-abiding farmer should decide to throw his past life to the winds and become an international criminal. There had to be some explanation—and yet his knowing it would have changed nothing. His orders were clear, precise and immutable.
“All right, Lieutenant,” he said tiredly. “Cast the first stone.”
Naipur’s face remained impassive. “Sir, is that an order to destroy the nominated vessel with a medium-range nuclear torpedo?”
“That’s what it is. But in the meantime keep trying for radio contact.”
“Very good, sir.” Naipur turned to the waiting weapons controllers and gave a series of orders, and within twenty seconds a long, black cylinder—expelled from the mother ship in a plume of compressed air—was acquainting itself with the medium in which it had been designed to operate. It aligned its various axes in accordance with programmed instructions, selected its optimum cruising depth, and began boring through the water towards the position its quarry would occupy sixty-one minutes in the future.
The luminous dial on Tarrant’s chest panel told him he had less than one hour remaining in his life support system, and hence he was grateful when the Ka-Horra took him.
His eyes being less well adapted to the darkness than those of Myrah or Lennar, he saw nothing of his captor or its fellows. He felt the sudden constriction of its tentacles around his body, and he heard the complex turbulence of its wake as it carried him down towards his rendezvous with Ka—but no images assailed his mind.
Tarrant was glad of this circumstance, because he had learned that his eyes were the pathways of fear. Sightless, and therefore immune, he was able to force himself to remain at rest until the ghastly flight had ended, and he knew he had been delivered into the jealous custody of his former master.
The unseen tentacles relaxed and floated away from him, and their hold was replaced by a more subtle constraint. A gentle, coaxing, all-enveloping pressure surrounded his body. He knew that black labia were drawing him inwards, that black pseudopods were probing and caressing him, that black membranes were curling and converging around him in dreadful simulation of the placental trophoblast which had once given him life.
He waited, unmoving, for perhaps a minute, sensing the inarticulate bafflement which must have been growing in the corded, living jelly, trying to judge the moment at which ingestion would turn to rejection. Eventually, unable to wait any longer, he reached for his knife. There was some resistance to the movement of his arm, but no more than if he had been forcing it through a deep pool of spawn.
“You made a mistake, Ka,” he chanted aloud—as he began to cut—and the words were punctuated by his gasps of exertion.
“In all your centuries of life … ah! … every being you encountered … ah! … man or squid or fish … ah! … shared the common need to breathe … ah! … and this has left you … ah! … with no flexibility of response … ah! … ah! … AH!”
The hour which followed never subsequently became clear in Tarrant’s memory.
It was a time of fever and of delirium, a time in which—to preserve his sanity—he delivered lectures and sermons on the necessity of being adaptable; on the need for absolute reliability in control systems; on the design of the simple space suit, the basic piece of engineering which enabled a man to exist in one world while breathing the air of another, and which for that reason meant life for him and death for Ka.
There were periods when the labour was comparatively easy, when he could sever tissues without the aid of the knife simply by flailing his arms and legs. There were other periods unbearably hideous in retrospect, when only the blade would do and he had to hack through organic ropes, billowing membranes, spongy clumps and clusters; or when he blundered against what felt like skeletal remains which moved in time with the convulsions of the surrounding tissue as though the original life force was imprisoned within them.
Break up the central mass, Miss Orchard kept saying, and laughing her raucous laugh. All you have to do is reduce its connectivity. …
Finally, there came the moment when a crushing pain in his chest told him—or the part of his identity which was preserved in the eye of the storm—that his supply of breathing gas was almost exhausted, that his time of invincibility was drawing to a dose. Knowing he had done all that could be asked of him, he headed for clear water, half-crawling and half-swimming, guided by blind instinct and desperation.
Several times on the journey he touched powerful, rubbery bodies and knew he had encountered the big squid—but now they were nothing more than that, and nothing less. No longer Ka-Horra, medusa’s children, they were feeding eagerly on the abundant plasm which drifted all around them, extracting their own form of revenge on the being which had subverted their destinies.
The roar of the current, when it came, was louder to Tarrant than the pounding in his temples. He felt himself being thrown about at an ever-increasing pace, twisting and tumbling in a black maelstrom. The clamour of the waters grew louder, grew unbearable … then there was light.
Tarrant struck out with the fleeting dregs of his strength, instantly aware that the space suit which had been so essential to the continuance of his life now represented a deadly threat because of its lack of buoyancy. He reached the surface, and was trying to open the helmet with one hand while swimming with the other, when he heard shouts in the distance. He fought to remain afloat, to fill his lungs with clean blue light, then he was gripped by strong hands and felt the angular solidity of the sled beneath him. Somebody opened his helmet, permitting him to gorge himself on the soft, fresh air of an October morning.
“We’ve been trying to keep this thing from sinking for the best part of an hour,” Theo Martine grumbled. “Where have you been?”