Brightness Reef

Alvin’s Tale

Perhaps the spider-things find me as eerie as I find them. Maybe they are trying their best to help. Given the little that I know, it seems best to take an attitude of wait-and-see.

We hoon are good at that. But I can only imagine what poor Huck is going through, if they put her in a cell like this one. A steel room with barely enough room to spin her wheels before hitting a wall, with the ceaseless drone of some weird kind of engine humming in the background. She’s got no patience and may have gone quite loco by now.

If Huck’s still alive.

She seemed to be, when last I saw her, after our plummet into the Midden’s icy depths was stopped by crashing into a sea monster’s gaping mouth. I recall seeing Huck sprawled on a metal surface, wheels spinning, kicking feebly with her pusher legs, while the floor and walls shook under a roaring wind that scraped my ears with incredible screeching pressure.

That pressure saved us, driving out the crushing mass of water before we drowned. But at the time, all I could do was scream, wrapping my arms around my head while my back convulsed from the blow I’d taken, escaping from our broken Wuphon’s Dream.

Vaguely, I was aware of someone else howling. Ur-ronn huddled in a far corner, sliced and torn by slivers of her precious shattered window and further panicked by the drenching wetness.

Looking back, it seemed a miracle she was breathing at all, after the Dream broke up and harsh sea pounded in from all sides. The force of that blow slammed me against the garuwood hull, while my friends spun away, heads over hooves and rims.

I had never before seen an urs try to swim. It’s not a pretty sight.

I remember thinking it would be my last sight, until that explosive cloud of bubbles poured in from a hundred wall slits, splitting the water with a foaming roar. The bubbles frothed together, merging into that screeching wind, and we survivors flopped onto the splintered wreckage of our beautiful bathy, gasping and gagging into dark, oily puddles.

Of the four of us, only Pincer seemed to come through with any power of movement. I seem to recall him clumsily trying to tend Ur-ronn’s wounds, pinning her against a wall with his scarred carapace while fumbling with two claws, pulling shards of glass out of her hide. Ur-ronn wasn’t cooperating much. She didn’t seem coherent. I couldn’t blame her.

Then a door opened, opposite the clamshell mouth that bit through the Dream. It was a smaller portal, barely offering clearance for two demons to emerge, one at a time.

They were horrible-looking, six-legged beasts, with horizontal bodies longer than a hoon is tall, flaring wide in back and bulging up front with huge, glassy bubble-eyes, black and mysterious. They stamped into the chamber, awkwardly crushing both Uriel’s depth gauge and Ur-ronn’s compass underfoot, looking like waterbugs, whose spindly appendages met along a tubelike body that glistened and flexed with fleshy suppleness. Smaller limbs, dangling in front, looked like mechanical tools.

All right, I’m describing a lot of stuff I couldn’t have seen all that well at the time. It was dark until the spider-things entered, except in the sharp glare of two beams cast from opposite walls. Also, I was half conscious and in shock, so nothing I write can be taken as reliable testimony.

Especially my impressions of what came next.

Waving their own dazzling lanterns, the two shadowy forms began inspecting their catch, first pausing to illuminate and stare at Pincer and Ur-ronn, then poor Huck, wheeling vainly on her side, and finally me. I tried to move and nearly fainted. When I fought to speak or umble, I found my bruised throat sac would not take air.

Funny thing, I could swear the monsters talked to one another while they looked us over, something they never do now, when they enter my cell in teams to tend me. It was an eerie, trilling, and ratcheting kind of speech, totally unlike GalTwo or any other Galactic language that I know. And yet something about it felt familiar. Each time their lights fell on another of us for the first time, I swear the beasts sounded surprised.

When they reached me, part of my terror was eased by the sudden appearance of Huphu. Somewhere in my addled mind, I’d been worried about our mascot. Abruptly, there she was, rearing in front of me, chattering defiance at the towering spider-things.

The creatures rocked back, amazement now so evident that I might have been watching them with perfectly tuned rewq. One of the things crouched down and murmured hurriedly, excitedly, either talking excitedly about the little noor or right at her. I couldn’t tell which.

Can I trust that dreamlike impression? At this point, as they say in some Earthling books, I was fading to vacuum, fast. In retrospect, it seems an illusion.

One thing I know I fantasized. Something that comes back now more as notion than memory. Yet the image clings, flickering the same way consciousness flickered, just before dimming out.

Without warning, a final figure crept into view, crawling from under a slab of our poor shattered bathy. Half-flattened and deformed, Ziz regathered its conical shape while the two monsters staggered backward, as if they had seen something deadlier than a poison-skenk. One of them swung a gleaming tube at the battered traeki partial and fired a searing bolt that blew a hole in thepoor stack’s middle ring, flinging it against the wall near Huck.

My overtaxed brain shut down about then. (Or had it done so already?) Yet there is just one more vague, dreamlike impression that clings to me right now, like a shadow of a phantom of a ghost of stunned astonishment.

Somebody spoke, while the midget traeki oozed sap across the sodden floor. Not in the trilling whistles the creatures used before. Not in GalSeven or any other civilized tongue — but in Anglic.

“My God—” it said, in tones of disbelief, and it struck me as a human female’s voice, with a strange accent I never heard before.

“My God — all these — and a Jophur too!”