James Cambias - A Darkling Sea

“Irona, your plan seems—” Tizhos stopped and groped for the right word, finally choosing something archaic and absolute, the kind of moral judgment that had sent millions of Sholen to war in barbaric times. “It is wrong!”

For a moment, nobody said anything. The others were all startled at what Tizhos had said. Finally Irona spoke. “You have humiliated yourself enough, Tizhos. Stop talking. We must go now.” They switched to a secure link and swam off.

Tizhos struggled. She thrashed about. She tried to crawl toward the torpedoes. She screamed inside her helmet until her ears hurt. She tried to get someone—anyone—to answer her laser messages. Finally she lay helpless in the cold muck, her joints aching and the cable cutting into her limbs. Maybe her suit would tear and let her die.

Dr. Vikram Sen waited until the Sholen expedition were all on their way. That still left a pair of the Sholen soldiers in Hitode.

He went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, drank it, then took the largest carving knife from the rack and went to the little Operations office that adjoined the common room. His hands were perfectly steady, he noticed.

One of the two Sholen was in Operations, watching the sonar imager for signs of the returning war party. Dr. Sen had read a text on Sholen anatomy, so he drove the knife into her neck just to the right of the spinal bone, sliding it between the bone and the neck muscle into the right nerve trunk.

She cried out, a sound like a crow’s call, and swung her left midlimb at him. The blow caught him in the side, and he could hear a rib break even before he felt it.

The Sholen tried to get up but fell. Her whole right side wasn’t working. Sen grabbed the chair and smashed it down on her, over and over, not caring what he hit. She tried to ward off the blows with her left arm and midlimb. The spindly aluminum tubing of the chair began to bend after he hit her a couple of times, but he didn’t care.

In desperation she used her one working leg to sweep Sen’s feet out from underneath him. They wrestled for the chair but eventually she got a grip on it with her left midlimb and yanked it away from him. He kicked her in the face, but she bit his foot, her carnivore teeth punching through his slippers and crunching on bone.

Sen kicked her in the eye with his other foot and scrambled free. There were more chairs in the common room. More knives in the kitchen.

The other Sholen soldier came through the entrance from Hab Two and saw what was happening. He drew his weapon from its chest holster and fired as Dr. Sen reached the knife rack. The bullet hit him in the shoulder, and Sen wondered idly if any major arteries were severed. He never felt the second shot, which drilled neatly into the back of his head.

Broadtail hears the bandits approach. There are about a dozen, all big and swimming strongly. They come straight on, advancing in a line with no attempt to hide, swimming about a body-length above the bottom.

Half a cable now; surely they must be among the hidden skirmishers by now. Can Longpincer hear them? Why doesn’t he sound the alarm? Broadtail shifts his spear in his grip.

The crack from Longpincer’s signal snapper startles him. The noise is so loud that it almost sounds as though his own shell is splitting. The echo lets him sense the entire battlefield very distinctly. There are fourteen of the bandits, advancing in a line with the ends slightly forward of the center. He doesn’t know if this is accident or good tactics on their part, but it is a classic formation. The defenders must either split up to fight the two pincers and thus risk being split down the middle by the center, or clump together and thus risk being outflanked.

Now the bottom behind and among the attackers erupts in a swirl of silt and pincers as the hidden fighters reveal themselves. The line dissolves into a series of small battles.

Broadtail recalls Longpincer telling the hidden fighters, “Strike quickly, then flee. Do not stay and become surrounded. If they disperse to pursue you, so much the better.”

Three of the five hidden fighters remember that advice. Broadtail hears spears crunching into shells as they stab up into unshielded bellies or between back plates from behind. There are sounds of distress and anger and the three swim up and then sprint for the netting with angry bandits behind them.

But two don’t get away in time. Roughtail is surrounded in open water by four of the bandits. They stab at him from all sides, pinging and clicking angrily. He fights one off, turns to face another, but the pincers keep jabbing in. His movements become random and weary. One of them grapples him from behind, bending back a pincer until there is an ugly crack and Roughtail cries out. Then all four are upon him, gripping, piercing, and cracking until he sinks to the bottom.

Shortfeeler is a little more fortunate. She hears a bandit above her and realizes she can’t swim free of them, so she drops back to the sea bottom and holds her spear up in challenge. With her underside protected and her legs solidly braced she is a hard target: the bandits must risk getting past the spearpoint to poke ineffectually at her shell.

Two of them stay with her, trying to get in under the spear and flip her over, but she gives ground, backing away and keeping the weapon between them and her. Finally one drops to the bottom and rushes in with pincers folded. She catches him dead-center in the headshield with her spear, and the force of the impact drives the point through his shell. The bandit gives a last cry as his resonator chamber is breached, leaving him deaf and mute.

But the spearpoint is caught, and while Shortfeeler tries to free it the second one drops on her back and gets a pincer into one of her shoulder joints. She breaks away and tries to swim for it, but the bandit is faster and catches her before she can reach the netting. With one pincer useless, Shortfeeler must drop her spear. They grapple, there is the crack of a shell splitting, and Shortfeeler stops moving. Horribly, she isn’t quite dead, and Broadtail hears her faint clicks and pings until the bandits reach the netting.

Rob couldn’t show any lights for fear of giving away his position to the Sholen, but he kept the passive sonar on and could at least get a vague impression of the battle. The crack of Longpincer’s signal device nearly burst his eardrums even with the automatic volume cutoff, and then he watched the image on his faceplate as blurry shapes emerged from the sea bottom and started mixing it up with the invaders.

After a bit Rob noticed something interesting: all the sonar images on the battlefield beyond the netting were very much alike. They all had the echo pattern of rigid, segmented objects—Ilmatarans with their armored shells. Where were the Sholen?

Time for one Robert J. Freeman to earn his pay. He activated Drone One and sent it swimming back toward the main thermal vent at the center of the settlement. He hoped the column of rising water could mask the sound of its little motor.

The drone stayed in the rising water column until it was two hundred meters above the sea bottom. Rob ordered it to circle wide around the battlefield to where the Ilmataran attackers had first come into view. Were the Sholen back there?

Yes. The drone’s camera picked up a constellation of pale yellow-green stars on the bottom, just past a low ridge. There were eight Sholen in suits, with safety lights glowing softly.“Gotcha!” Rob muttered.

Four of the Sholen were spread out in a line along the ridge, apparently hunkered down on the sea bottom. In the dim light Rob could see them holding weapons—the same microtorp guns they’d been carrying at the Coquille raid. It seemed weird to Rob that they were just hanging back and not doing anything, but then the drone’s hydrophone picked up the faint whoosh of the weapons. He checked his local sonar image: the Ilmataran attackers were about to reach the netting. He just had time to shout a warning before the explosions.