‘ ‘Bout now,’ said Ambel.
Anne swung the helm over, and the ship turned full into the wind to take it past the grey beaches. As they drew athwart the groove left in the grey sand where the leech had lain, something groped stonily along the hull for a moment and slapped the rudder so that the helm spun from Anne’s grip. She quickly grabbed hold again and straightened up. A tentacle, more rounded in section this time, and with a pallet-knife tip, speared into the air behind them and slammed down on the sea, spraying them with spume.
‘Easy now,’ said Ambel.
Further long minutes passed and then, as the packet-worm corals dropped behind them, they began to breathe easier.
‘Same one?’ asked Peck, hugging his shotgun.
‘I reckon,’ said Ambel. The Captain then eyed the deck, which was scattered with sacks spilling amber-clams. ‘Best we get them shelled quick and into vinegar,’ he said. Later, when Sild opened a particularly large amberclam, yelled delightedly and held up a pearl to show everyone, Ambel grunted noncommittally.
So bloated with leech flesh she was ballooning from her shell, the giant whelk slapped her tentacles in frustration against the edge of the underwater cliff. Behind her the seabed sloped up steeply to the beaches and packet-worm corals. She could feel the constant vibration of the long tubular worms boring their burrows into the rock as they sought the minerals they required, and felt a sudden surge of anger. She wanted to slide back to dig them out and rip them to pieces, as if it were their fault. But still she clung to the edge, watching the ship’s hull moving away above her. When it at last became difficult to discern, she directed her dinner-plate eyes downwards.
The cliff dropped hundreds of metres into a rocky terrain scattered with forests of kelp trees, tangled with vine wracks, and prowled by pods of glisters. Though the glisters would be unable to actually hurt her, their constant probing attacks could prove very irritating, and this would slow her down just as much as the terrain itself. She might easily lose the scent; lose the ship.
The giant whelk knew that her own intelligence had increased due to her previous efforts and requirements. She could feel the increasing heaviness of the organ inside her that was the source of that increase. Now also available to her were memories she had never before needed, and one of them was of gliding through the depths like a heirodont. This further frustrated her: the knowledge that at one time she had swum, rather then dragged herself along the bottom. She strained away from the cliff edge, yearned for that ability again.
Her guts rumbled, their load of leech flesh churning acidically, and she began to pump them. After a moment she lifted on a massive fart. Huge bubbles of gas boiled out around her, and she felt the rush of nutrients pumping around her ichor-stream. Then something inside her wrenched open painfully, up and back into her shell, some occlusion. Her shell crackled and, turning one eye, she observed flakes of deep encrustation peeling away from her living shell and falling off. Pressure grew and again she lifted up trying to expel it, but this did not pass through its usual route. The pressure dropped and the occlusion wrenched further open. Still watching her shell, she saw noxious clouds squirting from hundreds of raw little orifices that had opened up in it. Her guts continued rumbling and sloshing, until eventually gas began bubbling from her shell itself, and the orifices then closed. Realizing she was now much lighter, she rose up on her tentacles, lifting her fleshy skirt off the ground. She spread her skirt, engulfing cubic metres of sea water, then slammed it closed again, driving herself up and out, over the cliff edge. She began to fall, but shrugged her shell again and tonnes of encrustation slewed off it into the depths. Her shell now possessed the colouration, pattern and shape of a juvenile. Engulfing more sea water she tilted towards the distant ship’s hull, and jetted on.
10
Land Heirodont:
there are many thousands of species of this creature catalogued, and probably more yet to find. They range in size from creatures as small as a pinhead to the wood pig, which can grow as large as an elephant. All of them are herbivores. Fossil evidence proves that there were once carnivorous varieties, and that heirodonts dominated the biosphere before the rise of the leeches. Their overall appearance is vaguely mammalian, with heirodonts being comparable to many Terran animals, though possessing the mandipular mouthparts of insects. There are two sexes, and the females give birth to fully developed young carrying a thick layer of back meat. No other kind of offspring would survive to adulthood, for the land heirodont spends a life of pain feeding upon foliage and bark, while perpetually being fed upon by falling leeches. This lifetime of pain is little different for the ocean heirodont -
Since the spaceship had stopped moving and shut down what sounded like large turbines, the weird Prador had been coming to fetch its captives regularly. In the last five hours it had taken four more of them. Now just Lannias, his wife Shalen, and himself were left and, by sitting as far from the door as he could, Orbus hoped it would be the other two that the Prador would come for next. They seemed ready—almost anxious to join their fellows in whatever hell the monster provided. Even so, that would only delay matters for Orbus. There would be no escape from this. By the way the drone had come at them from the sea, the pressure changes he had felt, the sounds and the movements of this spaceship, he surmised they were deep in Spatterjay’s ocean.
Captain Orbus sighed and leant back against the rough wall, transferring his gaze to a big leaf-shaped louse creeping towards his leg. A couple of these had already nipped him, and he supposed they had developed a taste for human flesh—their main purpose being to clean up food scraps the Prador dropped. He waited until the louse’s front end began to rear, antennae waving and tri-hooked mandibles opening, then snatched the thing up. Its back curled around his hand as it tried to stab him with its ovipositor. Counting the large outer legs and the short spiky inner legs, he wondered for a moment how close a kin it might be to the monsters after which it kept house, then he drew his knife and began hacking away those multiple legs. Shortly he was left with just its flat armoured body, still bearing mandibles and antennae. Now being quite proficient at this, he thrust in behind the mouthparts and levered. With a crunch the mandibles popped out, and he tore them away from gristly flesh and tossed them aside. He then worked his knife in along the carapace edge, stuck his thumbs in, and folded the body open like a book. The green sac at the back was edible, as one of the now removed crewmen had discovered, though it smelt of shit and naphtha. Orbus cut it out and discarded it before using the tip of his knife to winkle out the soft bits from the creature’s many internal compartments. They tasted something like raw hammer whelk, and there was just enough to stave off his hunger.
Lannias and Shalen, Orbus noted, had not eaten in some time, and showed no inclination to dine on the lice coming near them, rather waiting until the creatures first bit, then crushing them with their fists. The two were apparently competing to see which could end up with the most sets of louse mandibles embedded in their legs. This, Orbus felt, was adequate demonstration of how twisted his own crew had become, and how twisted he himself had become to encourage it. It almost seemed that what would soon happen to him was a deserved punishment.