Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Dick Tull rose, firing the rifle from the hip. ‘Leg it for the water.’

Boxiron had reached the line of guards, a few gill-necks standing up just in time to face his machetes, twin windmills of death as he cut and slashed about him. He was staggering back from the blasts at short range. Not even the armour the criminal underworld had fitted their hulking ex-possession with was proof against this level of abuse.

‘Move!’ called Sadly, dragging Daunt back. ‘Right now, your noggin’s the most valuable thing on this island.’

Only to everyone at home. To Daunt, the most valuable thing on the island was the steamman about to throw his life away against the ranks of their gill-neck pursuers.

When Charlotte saw the two darkships, the only part of their description that covered what she had been expecting to see was their colour: a shining, oily darkness rippling along their featureless hulls. Nothing else about them resembled any submarine she had heard of. Pear-shaped and driving forward on the sharp of their noses, the crafts couldn’t have been more than forty feet long. Their approach was soundless. There was no sign of a means of propulsion, no portholes, no torpedo slits, no hydroplanes, no conning tower, no ventilation intakes, no rudders for steering. It didn’t take much to believe this evil pair had escaped from Elizica’s prophecy and the legends of the seanore. Demon chariots, the chasm’s seed, their skins sucked the light out of the ocean, surfaces made a rippling absence of matter, organic teardrops of devilry solidified into twin darts and sliding with pernicious intent towards the nomads’ grand congress.

Where the outskirts of the underwater forest gave way to the encampment, dozens of warriors rose from sentry positions in the wavering kelp, casting rotor-spears at the ebony teardrops accelerating towards the assembly. At least seven explosive-headed rods were heading straight for the bows of the two craft, white trails of bubbles fuming behind rotors built into their shafts, the darkships suddenly banking contemptuously into the swarm, detonating the spears. Both darkships powered forward, even faster now while the warriors below had drawn their shock spears, angling the discharge of electric bolts towards the belly of the two ships. The twin craft overshot the warriors. As they passed, the seanore underneath doubled up in agony, clutching their ears and left writhing above the wavering forest of kelp. Just being in the proximity of the darkships was enough to drive the nomads into waves of agony.

Elizica’s words resonated inside Charlotte’s mind. ‘Sound — the enemy is using sound as a shield. The seanore’s eardrums exploded when the darkships passed, ruptured like the triggers on the rotor-spears’ warheads, detonating before they hit the hull.’

How do we fight them?

‘There is a way. Head for the weapons the nomads left outside the congress.’

Charlotte swam though the panicked nomads packed inside the expanded camp of the Clan Raldama. Thousands of seanore warriors had been waiting to hear the results of the tribal elders’ deliberations. Now they had been reduced into an undisciplined mass desperately seeking the commands of their chiefs, most of whom were tightly mixed with the ranks of their rivals and neighbours. Behind Charlotte, the darkships had rammed the line of spherical nets holding the nomads’ schools of fish, kelp-rope lattices bursting apart as waves of silvery fish burned in the interlopers’ dark energies, floating dead towards the surface. When the teardrop-shaped darkships passed over the encampment, their shape seemed to change, flattening, taking on a manta ray configuration. They had jettisoned something in their wake, an inky mist spreading though the ocean, heavier than the sea water and sinking towards the dozens of domes raised on the seabed. Hitting the interlocking plates of the structures, a devil-dust crackling fizzed over Charlotte’s helmet speakers, a fierce popping. Collapsing as if they were decaying flesh, the chambers began to crumble inwards, unlucky nomads who had not yet evacuated eaten away wherever the black mist touched them. A froth of disintegrating bone and flesh bubbled out along every point of contact with the wicked wave of pollution that had been unleashed.

‘The chasm-demon’s breath,’ whispered Elizica as Charlotte hesitated. She had been swimming straight for that evil substance. ‘I would sleep away another age if it meant not waking to see that filthy weapon afresh.’

A strange blurring in the water beyond her visor caught Charlotte’s eye. It was the Purity Queen, the catamaran-hulled submarine had fired up the stealth plates along her hull and they were vibrating like the polyps on a reef’s Dead Man’s Fingers. Her bow was slanting down, rising on an explosion of air from her ballast tanks, a beast rearing in the water to challenge the two newcomers. She was positioning herself for a perfect firing solution against the two darkships.

The commodore must be back on board.

‘They’ll go gentle with the u-boat,’ said Elizica. ‘They’ve tracked the submarine and will sense the sceptre is within her decks.’

Four torpedoes powered away from the Purity Queen ’s forward firing tubes, a pair sent streaming from each bow towards the darkships. Neither of the enemy vessels altered course, rather, their bows flowed out into needle-like lances, quick flashes of burning light — but black light, like the negative on a daguerreotype plate — pulses hitting each of the propelling torpedoes and sending them spinning towards the seabed. Inert lumps of slagged steel with their chemical warheads burnt into a cloud of yellow particles chasing the torpedoes’ wake down.

The two darkships passed either side of the Purity Queen, lances forming along the side of their waxy skin as the pair released an underwater broadside at the u-boat. As they struck, Charlotte’s sight vanished with the explosion of light across her retina. The fireworks departed and her vision returned. Charlotte saw the Purity Queen ’s hull had been left with dozens of steaming, melted holes, the new crevices in her hull leaking air as though it were blood. The u-boat’s proud conning tower had been singled out and left a ruin of melted metal, her forward and aft hydroplanes sheared off. In that single pass, the once proud vessel, ex of the Jackelian fleet sea arm, had been left a filleted wreck. One of her two propellers was still active and she nosed down towards the seabed, crashing into the kelp forest and ploughing it up. Then her stern rose, keeping the Purity Queen vertical for a second, a strange metal tower implanted on the seabed, before she tipped forward under the propulsion of her remaining screw. The remains of the submarine’s mangled conning tower impaled the vegetation and there she lay, stretched out on her belly, rivulets of oxygen streaming upwards from multiple hull ruptures.

Go gentle with her, my left foot!

‘For the chasm-seed, that was a light touch. Quick, girl-child, that way! Swim for those rotor-spears.’

Circling the Purity Queen’ s upended hull in vulture loops, the darkships had lost interest in the seanore, stunned into a near-rout by the appearance of these deadly auguries of destruction in their waters.

‘They are scanning the wreck for the sceptre, for the crystal in its orb,’ warned Elizica.

Charlotte was close to the centre of a clearing in the kelp forest. Corpses caught in the current floated past above rotor-spears and shock-spears piled against each other in cones of weaponry, the nomad mob jostling as they snatched wildly at the arms laid aside during their grand congress.

‘Take the Eye of Fate off your chest,’ ordered Elizica. ‘Press it against the warheads of the rotor-spears.’

Charlotte did as she was bid, spotting Vane amid the mob of scrambling nomads, trying to restore order among the warriors. ‘Vane, have them stand aside, I need to get to these weapons.’