“Hinks.” Pallister has moved back by the door and is pointing at the floor. “This is not the work of a man.” Hinks looks down and sees a trail of slime leading to the door. He turns to the table beside the Captain’s bed and picks up the Book of the Sea. As he opens it to the first page there is a scream of horror, turned rapidly to one of agony.
Crew, and he lies in a pool of blood upon the deck. Hinks turns him over gently. Holes have been bored into his neck. Another scream from below just as four more of the crew come onto the deck, amongst them are Cheyne and Char. Cheyne snatches up the metalled great knife and stares at the hatch to the crew quarters.
“What is it? What is happening?”
“Something… Something killing them,” Char replies to her sister.
“What does it look like? Tell me, tell me now,” demands Hinks.
“It is a man sometimes, and it crawls. There is slime and a tube like a wood bore… I cannot…” Hinks curses and in the moonlight he opens the book. He searches down the first tissue-thin page and finds the sea-life section: Dangers of the Sea. There are more sharks than he realised, giant squid and flatworms capable of ingesting a man. It is there. He finds it only a few pages in under ‘Sea Fages and Related Mullusca’. There is a picture of the glass dart; a love dart used during mating. It is barbed hence the reason Pallister could not remove it. Another scream just as Hinks reads the section which tells him of the shell they found in the stomach of the shark. Just then the hatch crashes open and out come the Barrelman and two others. All now watch the hatch and wait for what might come next. Pallister has armed himself, and the remaining great knives are shared. Only Barrelman, Hinks, and Jan are without weapons.
“What is it Hinks? Tell us?” asks Pallister, terror barely suppressed in his voice.
“It is a Fage. A kind of mollusc. That was its shell we saw inside the shark,” Hinks tells them all, and some of the terror departs. It is named. It is in the Book. Hinks continues to read, moving his finger from word to word, some of them unfamiliar, metamorph and shifter, syphon and ovipositor. He begins to feel a greater dread. The boy… He turns the page and sees the picture of a man, and something next to it that is half a man.
“Dear God… ”
He looks up directly at the Barrelman standing behind the shoulder-to-shoulder crew. Out of the corner of his eye the Barrelman returns his regard, but does not turn his head. His head is deforming, pushing forward and taking on a goatish shape, lips peeling back from something that glistens. The Barrelman is not. It is the Fage.
“Look out!”
The man directly in front of the Fage turns, screams, falls to the deck with half of his face ripped away. His screams take on a liquid quality. Back into the glistening head part the glassy tube of the syphon retracts. All of its skin now glistens. Arms merge with sides, legs merge, now a standing slug shape it falls on Char, who is locked in place in her terror. It slides over her fast. There is a brief struggle. It leaves her slime coated and spurting blood from the hole bored through her ribs into her heart. There is a scream, fear, rage. A great knife pins the Fage, goes right in. The reaction is horrifyingly quick. A slime coated tentacle exudes then cracks like a whip. A man smashes through a rail and goes bonelessly over the side. The great knife falls out, leaving only a white mark on the grey skin. That cry again. It is Cheyne. He comes in with the steel great knife, ducks the tentacle then lops it off. He cuts again and the Fage falls in half. He cuts again and again in his rage. In moments the deck is spread with writhing pieces of slimy flesh no larger than a man’s head. Cheyne drops his great knife, kneels down by Char. He cries silence.
“Oh God… Is it dead at last? Is it dead? I would have preferred the soul of a shark. Yes… I would have preferred that.” Pallister is babbling. Hinks stands. He had not even time to get to his feet. That fast, it happened that fast. He looks at the remains of the crew. Jan, standing with her mouth open in shock, Pallister, babbling to himself now that no one else is listening, Cheyne, silent, three other crew, one on the deck with his face hanging off, but still alive, one squatting by the mast gazing about him in bewilderment, one mechanically stabbing pieces of the Fage with a great knife and flicking them over the side.
“You,Tanis.”
The man by the mast stands and looks to Hinks with a kind of hope. Hinks keeps the Book firmly tucked under his arm as he gives his orders.
“Help him… in whatever way he requires.”
Tanis gazes with compassion to his companion on the deck and draws a knife from his belt sheath. Cheyne is still grieving but now Jan is with him and they hold each other. Hinks does not want to go below decks just yet. He does not want to see what is there.
“Hinks… sir,” the other crewman calls to him.
“What is it… Lai?”
Hinks walks over and stands beside him.
“Watch,” says Lai.
The man skewers a piece of the Fage and throws it into the sea — as it hits the water it changes into a turtle crab, the next piece turns into a green mackerel, and the next into a small shark. Hinks understands now why the Captain was always frightened. The Book is heavy under his arm and he has only seen a few of its many thin pages. He wonders what the Captain read that frightened him so badly, and if he ever read any more.
THE THRANKE
To Mark, the runcible was the altar to some cybernetic god of technology, and he felt like an acolyte come before it for the first time. He considered it the nearest thing to an icon in this Godless society, and consequently looked upon it as an enemy of his faith.
Skaidon technology.
The religion.
The room containing the runcible was a fifty metre sphere of mirrored metal — the containment sphere beyond which the buffers operated. It was floored with black glass, and mounted on a central stepped pedestal or the same substance, were the ten metre incurving bull’s horns of the runcible itself. Between these shimmered the cusp of the Skaidon warp, or the spoon. Mark could remember someone trying to explain five-dimensional singularity mechanics to him, but the subject did not interest him. They dined on mince and slices of quince.
He was to be quince: he was to be a mitter traveller.
He advanced into the room, across the black glass to the steps, mounted them. Before the cusp he paused for a moment and tapped the cross, tattooed on his wrist, for luck. Our Father who art in Heaven—
He stepped through.
STOP/START.
Hallowed be thy name.
He had travelled by runcible many times before, and on every occasion found it a deeply disturbing experience. He could not grasp that the step he had just taken had been light-years long. The universe should not be so big. He refused to believe there were things the unaugmented human mind could not understand.
“Mark Christian?”
He turned his attention to the woman waiting on the black glass of this second runcible chamber. She was short, with the muscular body of one raised on a plus G planet. Her hair was cropped and dyed with rainbow spirals and she wore skintight monofilament overalls. Her eyes were the eyes of a cat. In terms of Earth fashion she was about two years out of date.
Mark allowed himself a smug little smile as he walked down the steps to meet her. “Yes, I am. Pleased to meet you.”
He pumped her hand and gazed beyond her to the door of the chamber. Where was the Director? Who was this woman? He would have to have words. Didn’t they realise who he was? “I am Carmen Smith. Welcome to Station Seventeen.”