James Axler - Blood Red Tide

“They modified us. They wished to use us as weapons.”

“What happened?”

“The war happened,” the octopus replied.

“What happened to the humans who taught you?”

“We ate them.”

The crowd erupted.

“Sky fire!”

“Kill the fucking thing!”

“Captain!”

The octopus shuddered under the verbal barrage but kept its alien gaze locked on Doc. “That was many generations ago.” The alien voice seemed almost plaintive. “I have not eaten a human in months.”

“Fry the squid in crumbs!”

“I haven’t had calamari in months!”

“Captain on deck!” Commander Miles bawled. The crew parted like water as the captain strode through them. Oracle took in the scene of Doc and the two cooks. “What goes on here?”

“Oh, Captain!” Boiler was genuinely upset. “I ain’t cooking nuffing that talks! Am I, then? Much less eating it!”

Skillet pointed his cleaver at the barrel. “Squid can talk, Cap’n.”

Oracle’s face went blank.

Ryan nodded. “Doc’s interrogating it.”

The crew on the blaster deck held its breath. Oracle nodded curtly. “Carry on.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Doc continued. “So you and your species continue to teach yourselves human language generation to generation?”

“Yes,” the octopod stated.

“Why?”

“It is useful.”

“For what?”

“Survival.”

As a man who had studied ichthyology, the prospect of a sea creature he could converse with humans intelligently was almost more than Doc’s soul could bear. “If I implore the captain to spare you, would you promise not to do harm to any member of this ship?”

The crew erupted in anger.

“Quiet in the captain’s presence!” Miles bawled.

“Yes,” the octopus replied.

Oracle addressed his prisoner. “You and your brethren attacked us.”

“We were hungry.”

“My crew is hungry,” Oracle countered. The octopod recoiled.

Oracle continued. “How are you to be trusted?”

The creature spent long moments staring. “To my knowledge no cephalopod has ever told a lie.”

Doc straightened. “I believe him.”

For all his mass, Boiler’s voice rose to a childlike shriek. “It will crunch our skulls like snails, won’t it? Eating our poor brains and then be slinking over the rail in the night, then!”

The octopod kept its golden, rectangular gaze on Oracle. “I am without my brethren. I am far from home. I am a coastal animal. I could not swim from the open ocean to the littoral waters without being eaten. I could not swim all the way back to the Caribbean without exhausting myself and dying before the breeding season. I will not desert this ship until it returns to the Caribbean, and only then if given permission.” The eyes of the crew on deck snapped back and forth between their captain and the octopod in the barrel. “I give you my word I will not eat any member of the crew under any circumstances.”

“Other than serving as a source of intellectual intrigue for Doc—” Oracle’s sharklike eyes met the inhuman gaze of the cephalopod “—how would you serve this ship and your fellow crew members?”

The genetically engineered cephalopod spoke by rote. “Coastal infiltration and observation. Underwater demolition. Clandestine shipboard and port facility kidnapping and assassination.” The octopod’s eyes flicked about the crowd. “Any task requiring an anthropoid crewman to go into the water, or beneath the hull, I can perform with greater alacrity or be of great assistance. You have a significant mass of seaweed clinging to the bottom of your hull. I can begin removing it immediately and subsist on the barnacles infesting the bottom for at least a week.”

The crew stared in shock and awe at their potential nonhumanoid shipmate.

“Mr. Forgiven!” Oracle rasped.

The purser waddled forward. “Yes, Captain!”

“Sign Mr. Squid into the book and remove the grating. Unbolt the barrel and take it up top someplace out of the way and bolt it down again. Let that be his bunk, and see that it is filled with fresh seawater every other watch.”

Dumbfounded mutters rippled through the crew. Forgiven’s fat jowls worked in shock as he opened the book and his pen hovered over an empty line. “And rate him...?”

Oracle turned his flat black stare upon Doc. “How should Mr. Squid be rated?”

Doc spoke without hesitation. “Specialist, subaqueous.”

Forgiven’s pen drooped. “Sub, aquee...?”

“Ship’s dictionary,” Oracle advised.

The captain’s voice dropped. “Doc, you are responsible.”

“Aye, Captain!” Doc enthused.

Forgiven jumped as a seven-foot suckered arm snaked out of the barrel, took the pen from his hand and signed Mr. Squid on the line. The purser shook as he took the proffered pen back and the arm retreated back into the barrel. “Very good, Captain. Mr. Squid, sub-aqueest, specialist...signed.”

Chapter Seven

The Caribbean

Captain Emmanuel “Black” Sabbath stood on the incredibly high stern of his ocean-going junk Ironman and watched the island ville burn. Despite the Caribbean summer heat he wore a black frock coat, black knee breeches and hose, along with a wide-brimmed black cockle hat with a silver buckle. At his hip he carried a hooked cane knife. He drummed long fingers on the worn rosewood hilt in meditation. “Oracle’s not here.”

Blue snarled and tapped the little island on her chart. She didn’t like being wrong. “He’d have to have come here! This is the only ville with a ropewalk within range. Much less manioc fields, a sawmill and a pig farm. He has to resupply.”

Sabbath glanced at his daughter. Blue was pretty, black haired, and would have been beautiful like her mother except that visible blue capillaries formed a delicate, spiderweb tracery beneath every visible inch of her skin. She wore black as was the custom of many ship’s captains in this age, but her blouse and breeches were deliberately cut to hug her slender curves. Her logic was flawless. The burning ville would have been the last chance to take on cordage, lumber and salted meat and fish while allowing a window of escape. The smoke rising into the sky and the recently cleaned blade at Sabbath’s hip had determined the Glory had not come into port. “And yet he is not here, nor has he been.”

“And we know why.” Sabbath’s son, Dorian, lolled against the taff rail. His giant, brass and ivory-handled butterfly knife made lazy, flashing figure eights in the morning sunlight. Open, the weapon was thirty inches long and was a short two-handed sword. Closed, the double handles served as his baton of office. He was tall and rangy like his father and had his mother’s good looks in masculine form without the mutations. Dorian tossed his black, unbound hair contemptuously. “Oracle’s gone all doomie again.”

If Blue were a cat, she would have arched her back and hissed. She was a pure sailor, one of the best, and believed in little besides winds, tides, a well-oiled blaster and sharp steel. Despite being a mutant herself she had no use for prophecy or mutie visions.

Sabbath knew better.

He turned to his astrologer. “Oracle’s not here.”

Ae Sook was beautiful, Korean, and when Sabbath had taken the junk years ago she had come with it. Her manicured, gaudy-red nails tapped the intricate brass astrolabe in her lap. Skydark had broken the world and compasses were often unreliable given the rampant electromagnetic anomalies, much less the irritating habit of the poles themselves to wander. Nevertheless, despite the poor, broken and battered Earth’s condition, the stars still looked down on her from their fixed positions and they could be used as tools for navigation. Ae Sook was not a doomie, but she observed the movements of the stars and planets as her mother and her mother before her and divined horoscopes. She spoke with a thick accent.