Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Charlotte crawled through the kelp towards the broken hull of the Purity Queen. Maeva was in the lee of a rent, oxygen from the crippled craft streaming out behind her as she held onto the prostrate form of Commodore Black. The surface of the old u-boat man’s suit appeared burnt and there was no way to tell if she was cradling a corpse or not.

‘Just like when we first met,’ Maeva’s murmurs carried across to Charlotte’s helmet. ‘Always pulling you out of the wreckage of your mishaps.’

‘Leave them, girl-child. Find the sceptre,’ ordered Elizica.

‘Shut up.’ Charlotte banged her helmet’s side as if that was enough to silence the bodiless ghost.

There was a crackle of exploding speaker boxes behind her. The darkship was looping back, passing over the human nomads of the seanore, felling them with the proximity of its ear-bursting shields. The seanore didn’t have any rotor-spears left, all their projectiles spent in the initial attack. A couple of shock-spears fired licks of energy at the darkship, too far away, their foe moving too fast. Close enough to hit it with their hand weapons was near enough to be cooked by its mere proximity.

In front of the ship, a party of five seanores emerged from ambush among the underwater forest’s fronds, flinging themselves towards the darkship in a suicidal frontal assault. Korda was among them. The leader of the Clan Coudama diving forward with a crystal-bladed harpoon, raising it to impale the supernatural vessel. They rushed the enemy vessel despite the agony they must be undergoing, its hymn of fear rupturing their eardrums, but the darkship and whatever agency propelled it into battle cared not a fig for their bravery. The evil craft accelerated through the war party, running them down, its surface briefly spiking out into a thousand small spines like a bloating pufferfish, a terrible cloud of floating limbs and skewered pieces of the fighters left behind.

Ignoring the roar of static from her speaker box, Charlotte fell back as the darkship’s central weapon extended and carved the Purity Queen ’s remains in half, riding through the boiling, bubbling water of the discharge. The darkship closed on her position. Charlotte’s helmet phones squealed with all the distress of a swine feeling its throat slit, her helmet’s machinery overloading under the fury of the vessel’s dark radiations.

Daunt broke away from Sadly’s grip as the first of the shallow-draft boats hit the beach, sprinting around a tiger crab’s abandoned shell and vaulting the boat’s gunwale. He was seizing one of the spare capacitor packs in the stern as Sadly and Morris caught up with him.

‘We need that to return to the submarine,’ one of the sailors in the rescue party yelled at Daunt. ‘My battery’s almost spent.’

Pulling the pack onto his back, Daunt twisted the trident off a side-clip connected to egg-scented chemical batteries by a dangling cable. ‘Don’t worry good fellow, I have an intuition that the tiger crabs won’t be in the water on our return journey.’

Dick Tull was retreating backward, firing his rifle and reloading from the satchel of charges, bursts of sands and spouts of sea water all around him as the camp guards divided their fire between Boxiron’s suicidal assault and the escaping prisoners. Sadly blocked Daunt’s way, the Court of the Air agent’s face incredulous as he saw the ex-parson trying to delay their departure. ‘Are you cracked? You can’t fight half the bleeding camp’s guards with that!’

‘There’s too many of ’em, amateur.’ Dick agreed.

‘I don’t intend to fight the gill-necks,’ Daunt said, slipping past the hobbling agent. ‘But I don’t intend to leave Boxiron behind either.’

Not today. Not ever.

Sadly cursed the ex-parson, the cane that had contained the tracking isotope suddenly pressed into service to push him after Daunt’s retreating form. He turned to the sailor in the prow of the first rescue boat as the second craft slid in under fire. ‘Get these two men to safety. Tell the sub commander to hold steady.’ He pointed at a sailor on the front of the second boat. ‘You, wait for me.’

Using the cover of the abandoned shells, Daunt circled around the heart of the skirmish. Daunt gained the top of the grassy bank just as Sadly caught up with him. Hiding in the line of the everglades, the camp guards had realized their small-bore rifles were having minimal effect against the steamman. Now they were concentrating their fire on Boxiron with their heavy guns. The steamman’s chest armour had been torn up, gaping holes in the iron revealing his innards, coiled pipes and crystal boards crudely cobbled together in the human mills that turned out artificial servants. Unfortunately for his attackers, their heavy weapons had also chewed chunks out of the power limiter they had fitted to his boiler heart. Its original function had been reduced to so much scrap metal, and now Boxiron was powering up, the warrior’s stacks pouring ugly black spears of smoke into the air above him as he slipped through his gears. Boxiron lurched through their midst, fighting at close quarters, his twin machetes a dervish dance of death, lumbering, brutal, hacking and chopping. Breaking gill-neck bones with every contact of his body. If the guards had been concentrated in a single formation, Boxiron might have been able to overcome the gill-necks in the melee, but they were scattered up and down the beach. Their heavy guns boomed straight through their own ranks as they recognized that this was the only way to bring the steamman down. Before he turned his fury on them too. Boxiron’s chest crumpled under the volley of fire, the plating he’d been fitted out with by the Kingdom’s criminal underworld no match for the armour piercing shells loosed against him. Boxiron’s right arm blew away in the assault, the steamman staggering and nearly slipping, briefly recovering, his left arm lashing out with a blade and catching a gill-neck in the face — or what was left of it after that terrible impact.

Daunt tore his gaze away from his friend’s last stand. Down the slope was a line of rock pools, sand turning marshy where it joined the start of the undergrowth.

‘You know why tiger crabs have adapted to the land almost as well as the sea?’ Daunt said to Sadly, lowering his trident towards the beach. He didn’t wait for the court’s agent to answer. ‘It’s because this is where they lay their eggs, out of reach of their fellow predators of the ocean.’ Daunt opened up with the trident, the sparking discharge of the power electric hitting the water and scattering across the damp breach, lightning chasing along the ground. There was a furious popping and whistling beneath the marshy sand, soft pieces of shell exploding out of the water. Daunt walked along the beach, squeezing the trigger under the trident’s insulated handle, power forking out and causing the beach to erupt. ‘Forgive me,’ whispered Daunt.

‘Beg that from their mothers, says I!’ Sadly shouted.

Behind the two Jackelians there was an angry clicking as dozens of chirruping tiger crabs surfaced out of the sea, the cries and stench of their smoking young pulling in the adults.

Daunt sprinted across the marshy dune grass, down the slope towards the steamman, firing to his right as he ran, leaving a distinct trail for the furious trilling tiger crabs emerging out of the water to follow. ‘Bob my soul, but now the camp guards will have something a little more pressing to aim at.’

Disoriented young crabs — megalops — each the size of a dinner plate, emerged from the blackened sand and broke through the sugar-like crust of slagged sand left by his capacitor’s trident. Daunt zigzagged as he sprinted, but it was becoming increasing obvious that the camp guards had bigger fish to fry now — quite literally.