Episode CXLVI - Smoke and Blood

After the endless darkness of the tunnel, the light Ellis saw seemed brighter and purer than he could have imagined.  It was unmistakably daylight and differed from the light of the 'Spectres'' cavern in ways which were hard to describe.  It was more tangible somehow and could only have come from the sun.  And it was drawing rapidly closer.

Ellis turned from the bow and ran across the deck to where Siren was already emerging with the rest of their party and as many of the crew as she could muster, barking orders so quickly it was a wonder anyone could follow them, and yet follow them they did - instantly and without question.  As he approached, Ellis realised he would have to wait his turn.  It came soon enough.

"Ellis, I need you to join the musketeers.  We have no idea what might be waiting for us out there - hopefully nothing, but if there is something we have to be prepared and..."

"It's okay, I understand."

"Stay safe," she whispered, then turned to the next group to be commanded, leaving Ellis to run to the gunwale, grab his musket and try not to hold his breath as he waited for the mouth of the tunnel to approach.

Despite the sense of hurry, despite the lack of time to complete all the preparations they had planned, the last few moments before they broke free of the Vampires' ancient underground canal seemed interminable.  The distant glow grew stronger, brighter, nearer, but incrementally, with the rapidity of an increasing heart rate, and yet just as discretely, with all the distance Zeno mapped between each beat.  Ellis breathed deep, raised his musket, exhaled.  The light was almost upon them - deeper breath, hold - and then it consumed them.

At first it seemed blinding.  After the gloom of the tunnel, only lit by the Absolution's few lights, the glare of daylight was almost unbearable.  Ellis closed his eyes on instinct, then, remembering what he was doing, forced them open again slowly, blinking away the spots that formed to clear his vision and really see.  And as he did so he realised that the daylight was anything but bright.

The sky above was the same sky they had left behind weeks ago, full of dark roiling cloud.  It wasn't raining this time, but it seemed like it could any moment and the air seemed heavy with weight of that leaden ceiling.

Then he looked down and, as he stared at the mirrored surface of Lake Nightglass, he began to feel very dizzy, his head swimming in circles as it tried to comprehend what he was seeing.

Lake Nightglass was, it seemed, aptly named, for when one looked into it's smooth, reflective surface, what you saw was not the sky above as it was, but the true sky beyond, the one concealed by layers of cloud and ionised gases refracting the sunlight.  Ellis looked down at the lake and what he saw was the vastness, the infinite majesty, of space.

But there was no time to take it in.  A cry went out from the lookouts, there were vessels approaching and they did not look friendly - in fact, they didn't particularly look like vessels, in the traditional sense at least.

If an octopus could upgrade itself with extra tentacles, claws and beaky mouths, then mould itself into something vaguely ship-shaped, it would begin to approximate what was approaching the Absolution.  They propelled themselves through the water with their limbs, churned water in spiked maws and held up membranous wings like sails.  Scuttling, writhing, snapping things seemed to crawl all over them, scurried up web-like structures like sailors in rigging.  They were most the monstrous things Ellis had ever seen and they were drawing closer by the second.

“Ready!” came Harker’s voice from somewhere near the bow and all along the gunwale crew were raising their muskets, locking them against their shoulders and, almost instinctively, tracking the movements of the approaching ships, but they were still a long way off and even Ellis, with very little skill or training in the use of such a weapon, knew that they would be very unlikely to hit anything if they started firing so soon.

He was aware of activity behind, of feet scurrying, of hatches opening, of heavy things being dragged across the deck, but the cephalopoid ships were getting closer and closer and there was no opportunity to look back.  He tried to block it out, to focus only on Lakhma’s vessels, awaiting the next command from Harker Blake.

And then it came - “Aim!” - and suddenly all that tracking, slicing across the monstrous, living figurehead of the nearest ship with the bayonet – it had a purpose, a terrible, pressing purpose which needed to be the focus of his very being.  He honed his vision in until all he could see was the spot on the greenish black skin of that thing where his pellet would hit.  It will hit, he told himself, it will hit home.  He tried to visualise it, to make it concrete in his imagination, as if such mental solidity would in some way impact reality and make the pellet fly straight and true.  It will hit.  It must!

“Fire!”

Ellis squeezed the trigger without even noticing, so that the cacophany that followed was almost a surprise, a loud jolt to wake him from his focus and make him see, truly see, what his hands hath wrought.

The hideous ship was obscured for a moment by the smoke from the muskets, and there was an audible intake of breath as the crew tried to see what had happened, to find out whether or not there had been any impact.  And then the smoke was parted by a face of jaws, an expression of eyes and teeth, a figurehead framed by tentacles, all unscathed.

The crew groaned and sighed, even as some were already reloading and preparing their next salvo.  Ellis froze for a moment, just staring at the ships which were now bearing down on them, watching the creatures crawling about in the webbing, saw the weapons they held in their manifold, disjointed limbs.  He was terrified.

And then he remembered what Siren had said to him just moments before all of this.  He remembered the tears in her eyes as she had said those words, ‘I’m proud of you’.  He could no longer lock up with fear in the face of unknown horrors, however natural.  It was time to be his own kind of hero – perhaps not the kind that anyone else would remember, but one who took action when it was needed and who defended the woman he loved.

He went through the mechanical motions of reloading the musket, held it ready, took aim and fired again, and again and again, aiming at the creatures this time, targeting, to the best of his meagre ability, their weapons, their many limbs, their heads, wincing only slightly at the gore he unleashed.

But the ships were nearly upon them, their nightmare crews began to fire, others prepared to board.  The crew of the Absolution took casualties at once, men and women dropped to the deck in puddles of precious blood, the crimson turning black where living bullets had hit their flesh.  Ellis saw the ones which had missed, crawling feebly across the deck towards the dark sticky pools, like specimens escaped from formaldehyde, half-born aberrations whose ugly purpose has been thwarted.  They died in twitching spasms.

Then he felt a searing pain in his arm and a force pushing him backwards, sending him over onto the slippery deck.  His head hit hard, darkening his vision for a moment, but it did nothing to lessen the pain in his arm.  Lifting his head as much as he could he looked over, saw the tentacled thing crawling from its entry wound, dripping gore and spitting burning poison.

He swung his other arm over immediately, grabbing for the hated creature with heavy fingers, feeling its slimy form writhing between them, squeezing out blood and pus and poison until the twitching stopped.  But the pain continued, growing only stronger.  He let his arm fall back, his head hit the deck once more and he howled.  But what was one scream amongst so many?  What was one writhing, arcing body amidst the bloodbath that was that deck?

I’m going to die, he realised.  Siren… where are you?

It was like an unspoken prayer had been answered.  In the midst of all that cruel, bloody chaos, her voice seemed to cut through with perfect, crystalline clarity.

“Aim the cannons, blast them off us!”

Ellis thought he was delirious.  The Absolution had no cannons!  So, when the deck disappeared in a cloud of smoke, when his hearing was left ringing by the thunderous rumble of explosions, he thought the world was ending.

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