Hugh Cook - The Walrus and the Warwolf

To the truly formidable Khmar, prudence meant cowardice. Hear the word of Khmar:'You owe your emperor a death!'

Accordingly, Tamsag Bulak did not hesitate, but ordered an immediate attack on Whatever It Was that had

entered the waters of the Pale, which (like most of the known world) was territory claimed by the Collosnon. His fleet – a quinquereme, five triremes, and a seventh galley which was but a glorified rowing boat – moved in for the kill.

Tamsag Bulak's quinquereme tied on to the metal chute which projected downwards to sea-level; the other ships tied on to his; and the whole fleet was carried relentlessly east by the flying island as the battle commenced.

Bulak sent a dozen heroes up the chute. Their descent was swift, for Walrus and Warwolf were waiting eagerly at the top, competing to see how many heads they could split.

'Is it ghosts up there?' asked Bulak of a man who came down minus the top of his skull.'It is men,' said the hero, and died.

One or two men guard a narrow way: a bridge, a gate, the mouth of a cave, a tunnel. How shall we get past them?

The Collosnon had several answers to that question. The answer fitting this case was fire. Tamsag Bulak had a fire kindled on the quinquereme's deck. So what if the ship caught fire? Khmar never worried about lost ships, unless horses were lost with them. Wet hides, pieces of the dead and other rubbish was thrown onto the blaze. Thick choking black smoke ascended.'Now!' said Bulak.

More heroes swarmed up the ladder into the choking smoke-filled murk of the chamber above. The guardians of the island's arsehole had retreated to avoid suffocation. The invaders fought them in hallways, corridors, toilets and kitchens.

With a bridgehead established, Bulak had the fire doused, allowed the smoke to die away, then (making sure he had his scalp-taking knife with him) scaled the ladder. He found himself in a big room boiling with smoke, echoing with battle-clash. A scattering of corpses sprawled on the floor: his own men. One of his warriors – wounded, not dead – staggered out of a corridor.'What have you run from?' demanded Bulak.'My lord,' said the warrior, T am sorely wounded.'

He made good use of three choice obscenities in his native Yarglat to embellish that statement. Bulak, not to be outdone, incorporated seven swear-words in his reply:'Those fit enough to run away are fit enough to fight.'

The Lord Emperor Khmar would have approved of such spirit, but the warrior, who was almost dead, did not. Unable to support his own weight any longer, but reluctant to disgrace himself by collapsing in front of his commander, he sought support – and grabbed hold of a big lever.The lever was painted a violent red.It projected from the cause-and-effect panel.It was a terminator.

Unfortunately, the warrior's weight brought the terminator slamming down into the 'initiate' position. Fortunately, the Termination Sequence could not begin unless the Destruction Codes had been given to the ship. Unfortunately, Drake, Arabin and others, Investigating the cause-and-effect panel, had by chance given the ship the Destruction Codes. Klaxons screamed as the Energy Belts charged themselves for Termination.

At this stage the ship was required to ask for verbal confirmation of the Termination Order.

'Glein doenst uhrer gee galeensprunkerf' said the ship, speaking in a forge-hammering voice which brought the battle to an abrupt halt. 'Gasthenst bruk ishlin genglaust? Gilch?' The ship fell silent.

The men, ears ringing from the sound of its earthquake-rivalling voice, stood as if stunned. Then: 'Ahyak RovacV screamed Rolf Thelemite. And the battle was on again.

As battle raged, the ship listened intently for confirmation of the Termination Order. Fortunately, it heard nothing in any language it understood. Unfortunately, the ship had a Universal Translator on board. It brought the UT into play. Fortunately, the UT was unable to make any Higher Level Semantic Sense out of the verbalizations of battle: 'Gaa!' 'Ya-zho!' 'AhyakRovac!' 'Rat rapist!'

The ship decided, correctly, that the Destruction Codes had been given to it by mistake. It decided it should reverse the Termination Procedure.

'Which will allow me to exist for at least a little longer,' thought the ship to itself, 'therefore giving me at least a little more time in which to work on these vexing problems of the meaning of truth and the nature of reality.'

The ship fed the Destruction Charge from the Energy Belts into the Storage Block.

Unfortunately, the sudden influx of power from the Energy Belts destabilized the Storage Block. To protect itself, the ship flung a protective force field around the destabilizing Storage Block. This used enormous amounts of energy. The Power Cube overcompensated.Then screamed.Silently.

Its Olumbia-Cobin energy web itself destabilized, and the resulting high-intensity vibrations crystallized the Variable Continuum Material of which the ship was made. Crystallization took five seconds. It then took three and a half nanoseconds for the ship's fabric to disintegrate into a shower of microscopic pieces.

At which point Bulak the Scalp-taker, Admiral of the Southern Fleet, was dropped – hard – onto the deck of his quinquereme. He landed on his backside, fracturing his coccyx, an injury which (if he survived) would make it difficult for him to sit down in comfort for some time to come.For Drake, it was all most confusing.

One moment he was in the thick of the fight, standing behind Whale Mike with a cutlass in his hand, ready to engage any enemy who tried to squeeze past Mike to stab him in the back. (As they were in a corridor, and Whale Mike almost filled that corridor, the chances of this were remote – but Drake was fiercely determined to do whatever was necessary if it happened.)

The next moment, he was falling through a cloud of white dust. He screamed, kicked, grabbed at the air, kept falling – then smashed into the sea.

He rose, breathed water and dust, spat it out, tried again, and, as the rough wind of the North Strait scattered the dust, began to get something useful into his lungs.He looked round wildly. What happened!

The flying island-ship had vanished. Everywhere, men were bobbing in the water, some bleeding. Sharks! Blood would bring sharks! The nearest safe place looked to be seven ships tied together. Why were they all painted white? Oh – they weren't. They were just dusty.

'Gather to me, boys!' shouted Arabin, floating near the largest ship. 'We'll take these northern dog fornicators or die doing it.' Aye, that's the spirit.

So thought Drake. Abandoning his plan to swim for the nearest ship, he trod water while he waited to see the ship taken (or the men die taking it).

There was an ominous hum in the sky, some distance north of swimmers and ships. It sounded like a large swarm of very angry bees. Looking up, Drake had the privilege of seeing the Power Cube disintegrate into a nexus of Elemental Energy (just as the much-derided Committee on the Present Danger had predicted it would if the Olumbia-Cobin energy web ever destabilized).The hum became a scream.

The energy nexus writhed with ravelling purple flames, spat hard radiation then-Burnt a hole right through reality.

The hole was a castle-sized gash of darkness. The energy nexus fell through the hole and disappeared. The sea followed with a rush.

Drake did not understand all the ramifications of the hole's existence. (Indeed, all of Jon Arabin's arithmetic would have been inadequate to contain the Seventh Level Mathematics needed to describe the hole itself, let alone what lay beyond it.) But he did understand that men, ships, sea, spume, dust and air were being sucked into the hole.

And he was being sucked along too. 'Mother of sodfish!' he swore. And tried to swim.