Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

The Great Old One was over a hundred meters long—a gigantic slate-gray mountain that heaved and pulsed like a great slug on the clean ice. Its back and sides were studded with grotesque ridges and spines, a bizarre living topography.

There were no legs, no arms, no visible limbs of any sort. The belly of that awesome bulk was a horny pad thicker than the skin of a starship, as tough, and worn smooth as glass. A mouth as wide as a driveship dock inhaled air which was expelled through two lifeboat-sized valves near the tail, moving it like a squid.

It moved slowly now. But Hunnar had told them tales of stampedes, like steel-gray storms. A herd would strike a small island and leave nothing but a greenish-brown stain against the ice.

He shrank. He was a dog—no, an ant—attacking a whale. Only this was bigger than the biggest whale that ever was. It expanded in all directions, all dimensions, like a tridee projection.

From the side of the biblical behemoth projected a tiny splinter of wood. It leaked crimson. One of the lightnings had struck home, then.

He couldn’t find any sign of the other and assumed it had missed. He was wrong. Later, a searching raft found part of the mast. That was all they ever found of raft and crew.

Somewhere, distantly, there was a shout, a whistle. Then a blackness grew ahead of him. Something dark as space at the Rim, gaping like a cave. A monstrous ebony cavern, two colossal stalactites of white hanging from the roof. Tons of vegetable matter vanished into that yawning abyss every day.

It was turning toward them, to the north. The wrong way. And they would miss.

Another, more distant, whistle sounded. The eager wind bit at it, tore it away. The latch rested tightly in both hands, sail forgotten now. Hunnar and September had cast free. But if he waited just a little longer, put a little more weight on the outside of the skate…

He stood. Bracing against the wind and the side of the skate, he leaned out over the ice, to his left. The huge lance began to shift, slowly, agonizingly, centimeters at a time, to port. Ethan leaned hard into the side, straining for just another millimeter of drift. Protesting wood shifted from its original course.

The black chasm grew until it blotted out ice, pika-pedan, sky. A dark hole swallowing the universe. It was opening and closing with a mechanical, slow-motion intensity, a ponderous cyclopean bellows. Above the wind came a dull roaring, like a dying stardrive. Eating air and excreting thunder, the stavanzer was moving.

Crosslatch… pull… whistle… get round… left… left… no, port-left… left-port?…!

The blood on his lower lip was beginning to freeze. Suddenly something or someone—he wasn’t sure it was he—jerked convulsively at the latch. The tiny skate-boat heeled far over on its side, almost touching the ice. He had to scramble to keep from falling out. Almost calmly he saw that he’d delayed too long. He would not clear the creature.

He would not clear the mouth.

It would be open when he reached it, he knew instinctively. A prayer would have been appropriate but what he mumbled instead was, “Move over, Jonah. Here I come.”

Then, startlingly, he missed, was past. He glimpsed an eye bigger than the whole skate-boat shooting past at blinding speed, black pupil like an onyx mirror reflecting his numbed stare. He was speeding past endless acres of roiling, heaving gray flesh.

The stavanzer’s mouth was enormous. The throat itself was not. Moving at nearly two hundred kph, the half-ton lance struck the back of that gaping maw. Several seconds passed while the impact traveled down miles of neurons. A shudder passed through the gargantuan bulk. The thunder-eater heaved the upper half of its body off the ice, an Everest of dimly felt agony. It dropped with a force that snapped Ethan’s speeding skate-boat off the ice like a coin on a taut blanket.

He sailed past an alien gray landscape, a vast confusion of ice and cold sky. Night came hard.

HE REMEMBERED VANILLA WAFERS. Then he opened his eyes and saw a familiar fur-framed face with a unique nose. September was staring at him anxiously. Other memories flooded in and he sighed. Likely there wasn’t a vanilla wafer within half a dozen parsecs of where he lay.

Where he lay was in his bed in his room in Wannome Castle. He tried to sit up and was made aware of a fascinating phenomenon. Every square centimeter of his body was putting in an impolite claim for attention.

“I,” he announced slowly, falling back onto the fur blanket someone had bunched beneath his head, “hurt. All over.”

“Not surprising, young feller-me-lad,” said September, the concern vanishing from his face. “But other than that, how are you feeling?”

Ethan chuckled. It was mentally satisfying, but it also compelled certain sections of self to protest violently. He followed the ensuing silence with a question of characteristic wit, scintillating brilliance.

“What happened?”

“Why didn’t you let go your latch when Hunnar gave the signal?” the big man asked instead of answering.

Ethan thought, remembered. “We would have missed. It was turning the wrong way and we would have missed. Shot right past…” He tried to rise again. September put a hand on his chest and gently forced him back.

‘That particular beastie is no longer a problem. Lord, what a sight! I’ve seen a lot of big and biggests, lad, but that hunk of ugly meat tops them all. Couldn’t believe how fast something that big can move.”

“Hunnar told me, before.”

“I thought we’d seen the last of you for sure when you didn’t let loose with the rest of us,” September continued. “Gone forever down that unholy gullet. Oh, by the way, you turned it fair and proper. Took off southward with a roar you wouldn’t believe. Near to shake a man’s skin off, what? Though how it could even move with that log down its pipe I don’t know. Tough? Oh my, yes!”

“I don’t mean what happened to it. What about me ?”

“Oh, you? Well, I didn’t see much myself, being a-scooting fast in the opposite direction. But there was a well-positioned lookout in the front-running raft. Said when the thing rose off the ice… unheard of thing to do… and whacked down, it tossed you into the air like a ballooning spider.

“You came down on the other side of the beast in the high pedan. That and the padding in the boat probably saved you. After contact, though, it was every chip and splinter for itself. If you’d landed on bare ice I expect we’d still be scraping up pieces of you. As it developed, you should have seen how much wood they pulled out of your skin. Good thing those survival parkas are tough. How you got out without busting anything, let alone everything, I’ll wonder over til my last days. You took a powerful sock in the head.”

“I feel tolerable now,” he lied. “How long have I been out?”

September grinned. “Off and on, about a week.”

“A wee—!”

“’Twas a near thing, I don’t mind telling you, lad,” he said solemnly. Then, more cheerfully, “Sure didn’t hurt our standing with these folk, though. I expect they consider you the greatest thing to come along since warm.” He scratched at his pants. “But it’s just as well you’re up… if not exactly about. It seems it’s time.”

If they’d just take the anvil off his head he’d feel almost decent.

“Time? What time?”

September slapped his head with a blow that would have taken an ordinary man’s head off.

“Idiot! Forgot you couldn’t understand anything while you were mumbling. Mumbled some weird things, too, you did. The Horde’s coming, of course. Captain from someplace called Yermi-yin pulled into the harbor yesterday on his way to somewhere unpronounceable. Stayed just long enough to give the Landgrave the word before skimming out again. Poor fella was as white as the ice. He headed due south and didn’t seem inclined to change course even when we told him he might run into a mad stavanzer. Alien or no, anyone could see he was plenty scared.”