‘Keep us turning. I want us bows-on towards that mess. Zephyr, start reefing all sail right now,’ said Captain Ron. ‘Then get yourself and your friends to cover or in the air—whichever you prefer.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ asked John Styx who, without protest from Ron, had taken up position at the coms console. ‘It’ll slow our turn.’
The Sable Keech was turning slowly while that wave, and the storm riding it, was coming bloody fast. Sideways on, the ship would capsize, and it would probably then stay that way, despite the heavy machinery acting as ballast down in the bilge.
‘We’ll be able to make the turn under present momentum,’ Ron replied. ‘If we leave sail on, that might tear out the masts, holing the deck and possibly the hull. We really don’t want holes in this ship right now.’
Bows on, the Sable Keech might be able to stay on the surface, though Ron thought it likely the wave still would break its back. That way, however, at least the passengers and crew might survive the coming experience.
‘Everybody been warned?’ Ron asked generally.
‘I’ve been repeating the warning over the ship’s intercom, and putting it up on every cabin screen,’ said John Styx. ‘Others are spreading the word, where they can.’
‘Ah, good.’ Ron eyed the others on the bridge. Then, entertaining a suspicion, he turned his attention to Forlam. ‘You got that rudder hard over, Forlam?’
‘Certainly have.’ Forlam gazed at the approaching wave with his eyes glittering.
Ron reached out to grab the helm and tug at it a little, to make sure Forlam was not making any small but possibly fatal mistake, as was his tendency. He found the helm was hard over, however. Forlam gave him a hurt look, then returned his attention to the wave.
‘Nearly there. We’re gonna make it, boys,’ said Ron.
Others on the bridge, looking doubtful, kept clinging to the nearest handholds. Ron himself reached out and closed his hand around a nearby stanchion. Something big had hit: this looked like the wave thrown up by a seaborne atomic explosion, of which Ron had seen his fair share during the Prador war. It might have been seven or more centuries ago, but you tended not to forget stuff like that.
‘What do you reckon caused it?’ Ron asked, generally.
‘Dunno, Captain,’ came the general reply from the Hoopers.
It struck the Old Captain that his bridge crew was not overly gifted with imagination anyway, so he turned to Styx. ‘Any ideas?’
Styx studied the displays. ‘It was an orbital kinetic strike over the Lamarck Trench in Nort Sea.’
‘Right. And the source?’
‘Prador battleship. A big one.’
‘Well, that’s a bugger,’ said Ron, just as the massive wave hit.
The Sable Keech did not lie completely bows-on to the wave. Nevertheless it rose up and up on a sudden mountain of water only just visible through horizontal rain. Ron looked up at the boiling cliff of sea as it broke round and over the bows, and clung on tight as the floor turned up to forty-five degrees, then beyond that. He looked back, and wished he hadn’t when he saw the seven-hundred-metre drop down the length of the ship into the trough. The stern was now under, cleaving through the sea and throwing up a huge cowl of water that kept crashing against the deck. Ron tried to ignore the groanings and crackings he was hearing, then suddenly the bows were in clear air, and the angle of the ship returning to normal. But the vessel now turned on the wave’s peak… Then it was over, and sliding sideways down the lee of the wave. Ron found himself clinging to the stanchion with both hands, one foot braced on a console. Forlam was gripping the wheel, his feet wide spread. A screen popped out and a waterfall roared into the bridge as the ship bottomed in a trough.
‘Rudder—other way!’ Ron bellowed.
Forlam started spinning the helm—no strength being required since the rudder operated by hydraulics. The ship started to present its stern to the next, smaller wave, and went up over that one at an angle. Another wave, then another. Now came a shuddering crash as the Sable Keech dropped down in the next trough. It rose again on a wide swell, crashed down again. Staring straight ahead, Ron observed just how much closer the island now appeared. Steam was billowing from its volcanic cone, and where once there had been trees there was now just the wreckage of trees and mud. Eyeing the sea, he observed lily pads bobbing back to the surface and then reopening their blowsy flowers.
‘We’re grounded,’ someone announced.
‘Yup, I figured that,’ replied Ron.
‘How we going to get this ship off?’ the same man asked.
‘Ain’t figured that one yet,’ admitted the Old Captain.
The giant whelk dipped herself back in the sea, but could no longer detect the scent trail of the ship she had been pursuing. Heaving herself back up onto the beach, she gazed towards the horizon with her huge eyes, and experienced a feeling of panicky bewilderment. This sudden loss of purpose caused almost a feeling a deflation in the growing lobes of her brain, and she felt the loss of that, rather than of the scent, as of greater importance to her. But the ship was not gone—itself or one very much like it would be out there. All she needed to do was search, keep on searching, and never stop. It then occurred to her that if she found the same ship, dragged it down and crushed it, chewed on the crew… if she finally achieved her aim, that meant no more aim to achieve. She blinked, caught on the rusty nail of paradox, not knowing it was much the same as faced by all thinking beings. Then she swivelled her eye-stalks to one side, wondering why the horizon there had suddenly risen.
Uncomprehending, the giant whelk watched as a glassy hill of sea rolled towards her, then some buried instinct had her sucking back in her eyes, and bunching together her tentacles. The wave, carrying less momentum now than when it had struck the Sable Keech, picked her up like flotsam and tumbled her away from the island. Brief chaos ensued, then, drifting below the surface, the whelk unknotted her tentacles, extruded her eyes again, sucked in some of the offending water. Strange flavours tantalized her taste buds, and she decided immediately to track back this phenomenon to its source. Anything rather than return to her previous plodding and thoughtless existence.
15
Rhinoworm:
symbiosis, parasitism and mutualism being a feature of Spatterjay’s fauna, it is unsurprising that the rhinoworm’s life cycle begins this way. Its eggs are laid upon the stalks of the sea lily, where they inject tubules to feed upon the lily sap and thus grow. This stimulates the lily to bloom, attracting the lung birds that pollinate them. On lily sap the egg grows to the size of a football, and out of this hatches the four-limbed juvenile rhinoworm. Hatching takes place at the precise time when the lily is producing its seed pods, which, being high in protein, are much relished by many varieties of herbivorous heirodonts. Now the lily benefits from the presence of tens of thousands of voracious rhinoworms attacking any other creature in the island shallows in which it flourishes. The worms utterly denude the surrounding area and, as they begin to lose their limbs and change into the adult form, turn cannibalistic. Only 10 per cent of their original population will leave the area as adults. Rhinoworms have four sexes—three separate ‘males’ contributing three quarters of the genome to the one quarter in the female egg. Only one other life form on this world uses the same reproductive method, but no kindred spirit results, since rhinoworms are the main diet of that other arm: Spatterjay’s famous sails—