The Beast of Cretacea (2 page)

They do as they’re told, and she scans their wrists with a tablet, starting with Billy, whose slim forearm reflects his delicate features. Ishmael focuses on the strange symbol tattooed on the inside of his own wrist. The one-inch square resembles circuitry, with clear and copper-colored filaments woven through a black matrix code.
A registry,
he remembers.

Illuminating the red-haired girl’s wrist with purple light, Charity gives her a curious look.

“Got a problem?” the girl growls.

“Attitude won’t help you here, Gwendolyn.”

“Nobody calls me that,” the girl snaps. “It’s Gwen.”

Charity moves to Queequeg, who holds up an unmarked wrist. “Sorry, don’t have one.”

That catches Ishmael by surprise. Despite his addled memory, he’s certain that back in Black Range everyone had a registry — it was the law. But Charity accepts the boy’s answer and moves to Ishmael. As the purple light passes over his wrist, he catches a glimpse of gold filigree he never knew was there. Charity gazes at him with an expression he can’t quite decipher, then turns away.

Ishmael wonders if any of the others noticed that she didn’t even try to scan the wrist of the boy named Pip.

It’s not long before the new arrivals take their first steps. Feeling as shaky as a toddler, Ishmael finds it hard to separate his own unsteadiness from the mild sway of the ship. Charity is both gentle and demanding, directing them through each stage of movement. Finally she hands out goggles. “We’re going up on deck. Be careful with these. They’re delicate and in short supply. Once we’re up top, under no circumstances are you to take them off. To do so will mean risking severe macular damage.”

“Then maybe we shouldn’t go up on deck.” Gwen tosses her goggles back.

Charity lurches to catch them before they hit the floor. “Did you hear anything I just said? They’re delicate. You can’t toss them around. And you
are
going up.”

When the redheaded girl crosses her arms and juts out her chin defiantly, Charity steps close, then lowers her voice. “Don’t be stupid, Gwen. You’re here to make money, and to do that you’ll have to cooperate and take orders.” She holds out the goggles. “Unless you’d rather spend the voyage in a stinking hot cell next to the reactor.”

Gwen snorts but does as she’s told. Charity turns to the others. “Okay, everyone, let’s go meet your new world.”

Eager to see what’s out there, Ishmael puts on the goggles. They’re different from VRgogs, which are always dark for virtual reality. These stay clear while Charity leads them out of the chamber and up several ladderways. At the end of a long passageway, she pushes open a hatch. Through it comes a blinding glare far brighter than anything Ishmael ever experienced on Earth. Hot air wafts in.

“One at a time,” Charity orders.

Queequeg goes first and seems to melt into the powerful brightness outside. He’s followed by Gwen, then Pip. Ishmael shuffles closer, his pulse revving with excitement. As he steps through the hatch, a blast of torrid air hits him and the top of his head begins to feel hot, as though he’s standing under a heat cell. From the very edge of his peripheral vision he perceives that the source of the intense warmth and incandescence is a glowing yellow disk in the sky above. Even with the goggles darkening automatically, he has to squint in the painfully bright whiteout. Meanwhile, he’s bombarded with a host of bewildering sounds, smells, and sensations.

But there is one thing he knows for certain: For the first time in his life, he is standing in a place with no Shroud.

“Wh-what is it?” asks Billy, who’s shielding his forehead with his hand.

“We call it the sun,” Charity answers.

Ishmael takes a deep breath, and his lungs fill with nearly stifling hot air. The goggles are meant to protect eyes made sensitive by a life spent living in perpetual gloom, so the view they provide is muted and blocked at the edges. But Charity wears only a visored cap, which gives Ishmael hope that sooner or later the new arrivals won’t need the goggles either.

For now he can see that they’re on the deck of a large ship that looks nothing like the vessels he saw in the VR walk-through at the Mission Office when he enlisted. Those were sleek, polished craft with streamlined superstructures. In contrast, this old tub is rust stained and battered: black paint peeling, long streaks of reddish brown everywhere. Looming overhead are the dark shapes of cranes, and amidships juts a superstructure lined with windows — some broken — and lifeboats hanging by frayed ropes at careless angles.

But Ishmael doesn’t dwell on that. Not when there’s an ocean surrounding them. Until now he has never seen more water in one place than could fill a small bucket. But this ship floats on a vast glittering blue-green sea that stretches away in all directions to the horizon. And above it, for the first time in his life, he sees endless blue sky dotted by small white clouds.

So this is what an unspoiled world looks like. . . .

A sudden commotion on the deck interrupts his reverie. Several sailors rush past, and from overhead comes the high-pitched whine of a drone landing. More crewmen are hurrying toward the port side of the ship, and the new arrivals can hear excited chatter from across the deck.

“What’s going on?” Queequeg asks.

Charity grabs a passing sailor and gets an excited reply: “Fedallah’s stuck a terrafin!”

With Charity in the lead, they traverse the deck to join the sailors crowded against the ship’s port bulwark. When Ishmael touches the bulwark rail, it burns, and he yanks his hand back from the sun-cooked paint. Around him others splash buckets of seawater on the rail to cool it, so he does the same. Sunlight glints off the smooth, rolling ocean, and the strange scent of salt breeze fills his nostrils.

Sailors are pointing at two specks on the blue-green horizon.

“What are they?” Queequeg asks, using his sleeve to wipe sweat from his forehead.

“Chase boats,” Charity explains. “Towing the terrafin in.”

“Terrafin?” Pip repeats.

“You’ll see.”

Gradually the specks become boats, still tiny in the distance. Ishmael estimates that they’re about two hundred yards apart, each towing a heavy red line. Perhaps a quarter mile behind, the space between the lines narrows to a roiling, frothing dot.

“It’s a terrafin, all right!” a sailor near him shouts. “Nothing else puts up a fight like that!”

“Ain’t a big one, but it’ll do!” shouts another.

“This’ll help fill the pot!” cheers a third.

While everyone else watches the frenzied commotion in the distance, Ishmael leans against the rail and gazes down — then catches his breath. On a blood-soaked deck below, half a dozen sailors with long blades attached to poles stand on and around a huge greenish-gray creature lying on its side. The beast has an enormous head, a long snout filled with pointed teeth, flat, stubby flippers, and a long tail. With his elbow, Ishmael nudges Queequeg, who looks down and gasps.

“A hump,” Charity says when she notices what they’re looking at. “Just brought in this morning.”

Ishmael and Queequeg watch in astonished silence while the sailors slice the creature apart, stacking slabs of meat the size of mattresses off to one side. Other than some insects back on Earth, this is the first nonhuman creature either of them has ever seen.

Meanwhile, the sailors around them are growing louder and more excited. The long, narrow chase boats are closer now, and the terrafin’s resistance is so fierce that it looks like they are towing a small typhoon behind them. At last the boats reach the ship, and the red lines are transferred to enormous aft winches, one on either side of the slipway, which is a broad ramp that slants down into the sea at the vessel’s stern.

“Here’s where it gets dicey,” Charity cautions. The deck shivers as the ship comes to life, slowly towing the terrafin to keep the lines from going slack and tangling. A cargo rope is thrown over the rail, and several sailors in yellow immersion suits climb down to help the chase-boat crews clamber up the side of the hull.

The appearance of the first crew is startling. They are all big, with dark glossy skin and brightly dyed hair. Their uniforms are torn away at the sleeves, displaying muscular, tattooed arms.

“That’s Tashtego’s crew,” Charity says. “Doesn’t look like they were there for the actual capture. Probably showed up later to help tow the beast in.”

“How can you tell?” Pip asks.

“They’re not shaken up enough.”

The words have hardly left her lips when the second crew starts to appear over the rail. The first is a green-haired woman, blinking rapidly and taking unsteady steps. She’s followed by a dazed-looking sailor with bushy yellow hair, a matching yellow goatee, and orange and red tattoo flames rising from yellow eyebrows. His forehead is wrapped in a red-stained bandage, and his orange personal flotation device is spattered with blood.

When the next member of the chase-boat crew is hoisted up in a basket stretcher, Charity bites her lip. “Someone’s in a bad way.”

A couple of sailors grab the stretcher and lower it gently to the deck. Lying in it is a big brute of a man with a shaved head. Deep-set eyes squeezed shut, he’s cradling his left arm, his face contorted with pain. A short, round man with an eye patch quickly squats beside him, opens a black medical bag, and fumbles for a moment with a derma-jet infuser filled with a watery green liquid. He injects the injured sailor, who exhales with relief and goes limp.

The last of the chase-boat crewmen to climb aboard is slighter of build, with white hair balled into a knot that rests like an egg on top of his head. Long white strands escape from the topknot, and his uniform is blood-spattered and ripped at the elbow and knee. But his expression is calm, a faraway look in his dark eyes. Without a word to anyone, he crosses the deck and disappears through a hatch.

The powerful winches have drawn the furious terrafin close to the ship. Ishmael is startled by its relative slightness of size. The span of its thick, powerful wings can’t be more than twelve feet, and its thin, whiplike tail is barely three yards in length. Still, it is completely unlike anything he has ever seen before, its back as black as its underside is white, with dashes of white around its large midnight eyes.

Incredibly, the nearer the terrafin is pulled to the ship, the greater its resistance grows, flinging itself about with such terrific force that it seems to spend more time above the water than in it. At the same time, the sky above the ship’s stern teems with white, gray, and brown flyers circling and screeching.

The new arrivals gawk.

“Stop!” a voice suddenly shouts. Heads turn. A man stands on a short tower above the deck beside the glass-encased compartment where the winch operator works. He wears a neatly pressed black uniform, and sunlight reflects off his dark, round glasses. A carefully folded black bandanna holds back his spiky, jet-black hair.

The winches stop. Ishmael sees why: At the bottom of the slipway, the terrafin has wedged itself into the corner where the ramp meets the hull. Were the winches to continue to take in line, the harpoon would be yanked out, and the creature would escape. Indeed, as the beast’s wings pound thunderously against the ship’s hull, all can see that one of the harpoon’s bloody barbs is slowly pulling out of the creature’s back.

“They better get another stick in it before that one works itself out,” Charity says.

The man in black bellows from the winch tower at the crowd of sailors below: “A thousand for the next stick!”

Ishmael catches his breath. It’s a ludicrous amount of money, and he expects the sailors to fight for the chance to earn it. But the crowd goes silent, eyes hidden beneath the shading visors of their caps. The only sounds are the thrashing of the terrafin and the squawking of the flyers winging overhead.

“Two thousand!” the man shouts.

“Is that the captain?” Gwen asks.

Charity shakes her head. “Starbuck, the first mate.”

“Three thousand!” Starbuck yells.

Queequeg leans toward Ishmael and whispers, “It would take
years
to earn that back on Earth.”

Still, no one takes the offer.

At the mouth of the slipway, the terrafin continues to battle and flail. One of the harpoon’s barbs has now pulled completely free.

“Four thousand!” Starbuck beseeches.
A small fortune!
Just to do something that won’t take more than a few seconds. Ishmael knows it would go a long way toward saving up the money he came to this planet to make. But he’s only been on board a few hours; would they even consider him for the task?

Before he can decide whether to act, a hand in the crowd goes up, and a wiry, dark-haired sailor steps forward.

“Abdul took the bait,” Charity whispers. “Wish him luck. He’s going to need it.”

The sailor is given a helmet, body armor, a clear shield, and a shoulder-mounted harpoon launcher. His eyes shift nervously and his hands are trembling. Sweat runs from under the helmet and down his temples. Someone clips a heavy wire to a hook at the back of the armor.

With the shield raised and the harpoon launcher balanced on his shoulder, Abdul takes short, careful steps down the slipway. The terrafin’s thrashing sends spray against the clear shield. The flyers dive and shriek more frantically, as though sensing the tension in the air.