The Crystal Sorcerers (18 page)

"Good kill," Sul called. "Now let's get big one!"

"Lead on!" Mark shouted.

As they dove, the world started to turn dark, the visible reds near the surface shifting in the water through green and into an ever-darkening blue.

"I've got him," Tulana called through the comm crystal. "Tell your ladultas to track on me!"

As Mark relayed the command, Sul made a sharp banking turn and raced away.

Mark turned his senses forward, probing, and picked up the images of Tulana and Leti ahead of the group.

"Naga!
It's him, damn it!" Tulana screamed.

The effect on the ladultas was electric: A series of throaty growls echoed through the water in a strange harmonic chorus that shifted and wove itself in a multivaried interplay of minor chords.

"What the hell is that?" Mark thought.

"
Battle chant," Sul's thought returned. "Let Naga know we come, that we come to kill. He take many young, many herd brothers, many mates. Now we fight again."

"Thar she blows," Kochanski cried through the comm. "The damn thing's a monster!"

Mark strained his attention forward, and suddenly the image formed. His first instinct was to recoil, but the wild charge through the ocean and the ladultas maddening song overcame him.

"Bugler sound charge!" Kraut yelled.

"Banzai!"
came
Shigeru's growl as his ladulta pushed forward.

Naga's massive bulk grew ever wider. The sorcerers were coming in on a broadside strike, and Mark, scanning back and forth, could barely sense either end of the creature.

"The damn thing's at least two hundred yards long!" Ikawa shouted.

Tulana and Leti, forcing their ladultas to slow, waited for the rest of the group to catch up.

"We're near the bottom. It's one of his old tricks, so watch out," Tulana shouted. "Everyone fire on my command!"

In a tight formation the group surged in. At the last possible second the team jackknifed straight down to the creature's side. The Cresus was simply gliding along as if his tormentors were only a minor annoyance.

Sul jackknifed once again, turning directly underneath the massive beast.

"Fire!"

The water crackled into steam. Unable to miss, Mark pointed and let go with a fiery bolt.

"He's crushing down!" Tulana roared. "Break out!"

Horrified, Mark saw the monster's bulk come dropping.

Sul spiraled down and out, skimming so close to the sandy bottom that he sent up a wave of silt. Alarmed cries drowned out the comm link, ladulta shrieks filled the sea, and over everything else was the insane trumpeting of the enraged Cresus. Sul pulled away at the last possible second, as the mountain of flesh slammed down on the ocean floor. A tidal surge stormed out, and to his horror Mark saw more than one of his comrades torn free of their ladultas by the turbulence. But their mounts heroically circled back to pick up the dismounted sorcerers.

The ocean around Mark went black. It seemed impossible, but sweeping around him was a massive tail fluke, bigger than the side of a hanger.

At Sul's command, Mark slammed out shot after shot, though the ocean around him was a wild confusion of energy bolts, darting ladultas, and--filling his vision--the writhing form of Naga, bent on crushing them.

Sul pulled up over the fluke and raced down its backside, expertly rolling with the turbulent wake.

"Keep shooting!" Sul kept calling.

Mark, grasping at last that Sul and he were a team, finally started to block out the flow of the action, trusting to his companion to safely guide him through the battle and focusing only on placing his shots.

Shigeru banked in alongside Mark, exuberantly firing at the massive underside of the tail.

Suddenly the Cresus rose from the ocean floor and surged forward, his two hundred foot wide tail slamming up and down. The ladultas broke away, avoiding the turbulence, and with what Mark thought was incredible bravery started to dart underneath the creature. More than one of the offworlders, simply overwhelmed by the battle, was still not firing. Sul cut down and started a run, straight up the length of Naga's body, and Mark slammed off a series of bolts, unable to miss.

"Wonderful strikes, wonderful. We finally getting him mad," Sul cried.

"I thought he already was mad!" Mark called.

"Just getting started.
Hang on!"

The creature surged downward again and Sul darted away. There was another boom as the Cresus slammed into the bottom, and then it was up again.

From the corner of his eye, Mark saw a ladulta spiraling upward, pushing a limp form. It was Goldberg!

"One of my men is hurt!" Mark cried.

"My brother Gavd, he
take
him up. Airbreather not dead, just knocked asleep."

Anxiously, Mark looked around, unable to see more than a handful of his companions. Another ladulta spiraled by, swimming spasmodically in a jerky spiral, with Saito no longer holding its dorsal fin, but now swimming alongside as if trying to help the creature to the surface.

Sul let out a cry of rage and turned to go back in.

"He's going to breach!" Tulana roared through the comm link. "Everyone up and clear!"

Sul leaped through the water, rocketing straight up into the light.

"Meet in direction of sun.
Release!"

Mark cleared the surface and was stunned to see
Cloud Dancer
less than a hundred yards away.

"Break him east!" Tulana roared. "To the east, the bastard's after my ship again!"

Turning, Mark arced back into the ocean, even as his other comrades were coming up out of the water.

"Sul!
Damn it, Sul!"

The ladulta surged in and, without
slowing,
Mark grabbed his companion's fin.

"Naga is wily one! Go for ship," Sul cried. "We must aim for Naga's eye."

The darkness was coming up with blinding speed.

Now trusting Sul's judgment, Mark hung on as the ladulta darted back and forth.

Leti surged past, hanging on to her companion, but Tulana, bellowing with rage, swam alone.

Mark and Shigeru followed in their wake. The Cresus's gaping mouth filled the ocean before them.

"Jesus Christ!" Mark screamed, as Sul seemed to swim straight into the jaws of death. With deft turns, Sul cut in front of Naga, turned away, then darted back in.

"Now fire. There eye!"

Mark saw the orb, as big as the side of a house. A bolt shot past him, Tulana's, and drawing aim he fired. The ocean boiled with steam. Both shots hit, but it was as if they had struck a steel wall, and Mark saw that the lens was pockmarked with scar tissue. A traplike lid slammed down and the creature shifted away.

"Keep firing, we going up!" Sul cried.

The ocean color was shifting, growing lighter. Mark, hanging by Tulana's side, kept firing bolt after bolt into the protecting lid.

Suddenly they were out of the water, Sul arcing into the sky.
"Release!"

Mark let go, hovering by Naga's side, still firing away. Over his shoulder he could see
Cloud Dancer,
its crew desperately working to turn the ship around.

"You bastard," Tulana roared.
"You scum-eating spawn of hell.
Damn you, I'll kill you this time!"

Shouts echoed up from below. Looking down into the torrent, Mark saw a light catamaran tumbling end over end through the air, the crew shrieking. Shigeru darted in, so close that he actually slammed into Naga's closed eye. Pointing down with both hands he fired off a brilliant flash of incandescent heat.

"That's it, damn my hairy ass!" Tulana roared, and dove to Shigeru's side. Mark hovered above them, incredulous, as Tulana landed on Naga's closed lid and continued to fire.

A bolt slashed past Mark, and then two more, the steel-tipped shafts burying themselves into the monster's grey side not a dozen feet from where Tulana and Shigeru continued to fire. The creature started to arc even further away.

"He's falling!" Leti screamed, coming up beside Mark. "Get back!"

Mark followed the demigod up and away from the creature. Now several hundred feet in the air, he looked down--into Naga's mouth. Like some pit of hell, the mouth was a hundred and fifty feet across, and ringed with row after row of teeth that marched downward into a fetid darkness. The creature seemed to be nothing more than one vast eating tube, capable of swallowing anything in its cavernous maw.

Unable to resist, Mark fired straight into the darkness.

A thundering boom echoed up, and the air filled with the stench of rot and decay. The creature seemed to surge in his direction, and Mark soared upward as the massive gullet slammed shut in a vain attempt to devour him.

Naga started to fall away in the opposite direction from
Cloud Dancer.
The creature slammed back down, sending a plume of spray half a thousand feet into the air. A great tidal wave surged out and the great ship appeared to rise straight up into the heavens, hovering for a moment and then sliding back down the face of the wave, the crew shrieking and yelling, some with fear. But to Mark's amazement, most of them seemed to be enjoying the ride.

The ocean surged and boiled, the dark bulk of the monster turning, and with amazing speed it raced eastward.

"Damn
him
, the bastard's running away," Tulana shook his fists in impotent rage. "Come back and fight me, you thieving, shit-eating coward!"

"The thing's so damned big you could put fifty bolts into him and he'd still keep fighting, but he never gives us a chance. He'll run at top speed for a hundred miles," Tulana said dejectedly, coming up to hover by Mark's side. "He always does that just when we really get going. We'll never catch him now."

"Thank the gods," Mark said, in an awestruck whisper.

"Yeah, damn the bastards." Tulana's disappointment was obvious. "Well, let's get back to the ship, rescue our people, and tow the dead one in." Without waiting for a reply, the prince dropped and swept across the ocean surface to where ladultas were busy picking up the survivors of the wrecked launch.

"What a fight. Best time of my life!" Shigeru cried, rising from the spray.

Ikawa cut a path from the wrecked catamaran to draw up alongside Mark. "It's a miracle no one got killed. A lot of broken bones, but those ladultas picked up every man."

"Goldberg--anyone see him?" Mark called out.

"Back on the ship already," Leti announced, swinging in to join the group.

Saito, coming up from the wrecked launch, was the last to rally.

"How's your ladulta?" Mark asked.

"Broken fin and some cracked ribs," the sergeant said with tears in his eyes. "I fell off and he went back in to save me and got hit by a fluke. They're taking him to the healers in Tulana's city. Damn, those creatures are grand." His comment was met with a chorus of agreement.

"You know," Leti announced with a smile, "Tulana's been fighting with Naga for the last two hundred years. If he ever actually killed him, I think he'd be secretly heartbroken."

Incredulous, Mark looked over at her.

"I think
it's
sport for both of them," she explained, shaking her head.

"Well, next time,"
Walker said quietly, "I'll stay home and listen to the game on the radio."

"It's been great, come back soon," Tulana roared, staggering under the effect of an all-night drinking bout.

Mark looked around at his companions. More than one of them was leaning over the side of
Cloud Dancer,
gasping in the cool early morning light.

"Christ, Mark, do we gotta fly?"
Walker
begged,
his face a pale shade of green.

"It'll clear our heads," Mark said evenly, not really believing his own words. His nausea was not helped by what was going on astern. The massive bulk of the Cresus they had killed the afternoon before was hooked to the stern by a cable, so that the vessel had barely crawled halfway back to the floating island during the night.

Hundreds of ladultas surged around the half-submerged corpse in a wild frenzy of feeding, their calls counterpointing the feasting aboard ship. To Mark's amazement, he had discovered that the ladulta loved beer, and he had shared an uncounted number of flagons with Sul, to the point that the two had babbled telepathic endearments of undying friendship.

For the ladulta this was the grand payoff. A hated enemy was dead, there'd be food enough for weeks, and in return they'd help their surface friends by herding fish into nets and bringing up zah from the bottom.

In celebration, the ladulta of Tulana had called in their neighbors from several hundred miles around to join in the festival, so that the ocean was awash in blood, Cresus meat, beer,
ladultas
swarming about and tearing off hunks of meat with their razor-sharp teeth. It was a party Mark knew he would forever remember with either fondness or disgust--he wasn't quite sure which.