Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“Valben,” she said, playing with the sound of it. “A family name, maybe, a special name. It’s a new one to me. Would you prefer that I call you Valben?”

“Prefer? No. Call me Valben if you want to. But in fact nobody does.”

“What do they call you that you like, then? Doc, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Doc’s okay. Some call me Lawler. A few call me Val. Just a very few.”

“Val. I like the sound of that better than Doc. Is it all right if I call you Val?”

Only his oldest friends called him Val, men like Nicko Thalheim, Nimber Tanamind, Nestor Yanez. It didn’t sound at all right on her lips. But why should that matter? He could get used to it. And “Val” was better than “Valben’, at least.

“Whatever you like,” he said.

Another tidal surge arrived three days later, this one coming from due west. It was stronger than the first one, but the magnetrons had no problem dealing with it. Up and over, and down the far side, a little bump upon landing, and that was that.

The weather stayed cool and dry. The voyagers went onward.

In the depths of the night there was a loud muffled thump against the hull, as though the ship had struck a reef. Lawler sat up in his bunk, yawning, thumbing his eyes, wondering if he had dreamed it. Everything was silent for a moment. Then came another thump, a harder one. No dream, then. He was still half asleep, yes, but he was half awake also. He counted off a minute, a minute and a half. Another thump. He heard the timbers of the hull creak and shift.

He wrapped something around his middle and went out toward the companionway, fully awake now. Lights had been lit; people were streaming out of the portside cabin, blurry-faced, a couple of them still naked, no doubt just as they had slept. Lawler went up on deck. The night watch—Henders, Golghoz, Delagard, Niklaus, Thane—was running around in an agitated way, speeding from one side of the ship to the other as though following the movements of some enemy attacking from below.

“Here they come again!” someone called.

Thump . Up here, the impact was greater—the ship seemed to shiver and jump to one side—and the sound of the hull’s being struck was sharper, a clear startling hard-edged sound.

Lawler found Dag Tharp near the rail.

“What’s going on?”

“Look out there and you’ll see.”

The sea was calm. Two moons were aloft, at opposite ends of the sky, and the Cross had begun its nightly slide toward dawn, hanging in an off-centre position a little toward the east. The six ships of the flotilla had wandered somewhat from their usual three-ranks formation and were arrayed in a wide loosely-drawn circle. Perhaps a dozen long streaks of brilliant blue phosphorescence were visible in the open water in the centre of the group, like fiery arrows of light cutting through the ocean not far below the surface. As Lawler watched, perplexed, one of the phosphorescent streaks extended itself at a startling pace, shooting swiftly in a straight line toward the ship just to the left of theirs, travelling on a collision course, a bright needle in the darkness. From somewhere came an ominous high-pitched pinging sound, steadily growing in intensity as the streak of light approached the vessel.

The collision came. Lawler heard the crack of impact and saw the other ship heel over a little way. Faintly across the water came the sound of shouts.

The phosphorescent streak backed off, sped away, back toward the open central water.

“Rammerhorns,” Tharp said. “They’re trying to sink us.”

Lawler grasped the rail and looked down. His eyes were more accustomed to the dark now. He could see the attackers clearly by the light of their own phosphorescence.

They looked like living missiles, narrow-bodied, ten or fifteen metres long, propelled by strong double-fluked tails. From their blunt foreheads sprouted a single thick yellow horn, perhaps five metres in length and sturdy as a kelp-trunk, that terminated in a blunt but dangerous-looking point. They were swimming at a furious rate across the open zone between the ships, getting up to immense speeds by furious lashing movements of their tails and bashing their horns into the sides of the vessels in the obvious hope of breaching them. Then, with a kind of insane persistence, they turned around, swam off to a distance, and charged again even more fiercely. The faster they swam the more intense was the luminescence that streamed from their flanks, and the louder was the sharp pinging sound that they emitted.

Kinverson appeared from somewhere, lugging something that looked like a heavy iron kettle bound in algae fibre. “Give me a hand with this, will you, doc?”

“Where are you taking it?”

“The bridge. It’s a sonic.”

The kettle, or whatever it was, was almost too heavy for Kinverson to manage by himself. Lawler caught hold of it by a knotted cord that dangled from the side nearest him. Together he and Kinverson were able to struggle it down the deck toward the bridge. Delagard joined them there and the three of them hauled it up to the higher level.

“Fucking rammerhorns,” Kinverson muttered. “I knew they were bound to turn up sooner or later.”

There was another thump below. Lawler saw a streak of dazzling blue light rebound from the ship and go scuttering off in the other direction.

Of all the strange creatures that the sea had sent against them thus far in the voyage, these things that were blindly battering into them seemed to Lawler to be the most frightening. You could stomp some, duck others, keep a watchful eye on odd-looking netting. But how could you deal with these spears coming at you from below in the night, these huge creatures determined to sink you, and capable of doing it?

“Are they strong enough to pierce the hull?” Lawler asked Delagard.

“It’s been known to happen. Jesus. Jesus!”

Kinverson’s giant form, outlined by the moonlight, rose high above the big kettle, which he had installed by this time at the front end of the bridge. He had unfastened a long padded stick that had been tied to the kettle’s side and now he grasped it in both hands and brought it down on the kettle’s drum-like top. A heavy booming sound rumbled out across the waters.

He struck again, again, again.

“What’s he doing?” Lawler asked.

“Sending a countersonic. Rammerhorns can’t see. They do it all by bouncing sound waves off their target. Gabe’s screwing up their directional senses.”

Kinverson pounded on his drum with phenomenal energy and zeal. The air was thick with the booming sounds that he made. Could they penetrate the water? Apparently so. Down below, the rammerhorns were rushing back and forth in the space between the ships even more swiftly than before, so that the dazzling streaks of blue light that marked their trails were intricately interwoven. But the patterns were getting erratic. A chaotic jerkiness seemed to be entering the movements of the rammerhorns as Kinverson continued to beat his drum. They moved in wild lunging leaps, now and then breaking the surface of the water, soaring aloft for a moment or two, landing with great splashing impacts. One of them struck the ship, but it was only a weak glancing blow. The pingings they made grew arrhythmic and discordant. For a moment Kinverson paused, as though he were getting tired, and it appeared as if the rammerhorns might regroup. But then he resumed his booming with even more fervour than before, hammering away with his stick, on and on and on. Suddenly there was a great flurry down below and two of the huge attackers leaped from the water at the same moment. By the light of the others, swimming in ragged circles around them, Lawler saw that the horn of one had penetrated the gill-slits of the other, was in fact impaled deep within the other rammerhorn’s skull; and both creatures, falling back to the water still linked in that terrible way, now began to sink. Their path into the depths was revealed for a moment or two more by the trail of phosphorescence that they left behind. Then they could no longer be seen.