Sighted in the waters around the Cape of Good Hope was a monster so vicious, so unrelenting, so bloodthirsty that it made even the hardest of men cry out for God's protection, because there were no Atheists in a whirlpool. For better or worse, no one had dared to try to slay this Leviathan.
Britain was certain that her naval might would be able to amass a force capable of felling the beast, but the waters around the Cape belonged to the Dutch. Britain hoped to own those waters and the land surrounded by them soon enough, most preferably by the end of the year. In the meantime, it was only possible to send private vessels. The more foolish, the better.
For better or worse, there were few Atheists among Captain Malin's crew. A rarity among seafaring vessels, the Escape was a privately-commissioned ironclad with twenty-two cannons and a bevy of armed sailors. She was a free ship, answerable to no one save her captain. Those who served on her knew of her success on the water, but were desperate all the same, for they knew Malin to be a man of unnatural origins. The red of his eyes was only the beginning of it. He never left his ship, so to the rest of the world, everything else was mere rumor.
He hailed from France, where it was impossible for him to enter the army because of his condition. His jaw was metallic, like iron, as were his teeth and nails, the latter of which he was forced to file. The filings were stored in a jar behind his seat in his cabin on the deck, because he mixed his own gunpowder with them, which came out far more potent than any regular gunpowder. Bullets erupted from his guns white-hot, and these practically liquified metal projectiles could melt right through hulls a foot thick.
Thus the crew feared Malin.
He distributed more filings throughout the ship for use in his crew's sidearms and the shipboard cannons, rendering his vessel a nigh unstoppable force.
Malin had accepted a bounty on the Leviathan, and he knew his would not be the only vessel hunting the creature, but he hoped to be the only captain ruthless enough to kill it.
On a particularly breezy night, he descended the steps to the rail where his first officer stood observing the calm waters and joined him there.
“What do you see?” he asked the Mate in a thick accent.
The Mate, Alan Erwin, owed a special debt to the Captain, who preferred to crew his vessel only with those who could not exist peacefully in civilization. Malin found Erwin in an asylum in England, grinding his teeth in agony because, although he suffered from a self-destructive form of depression, he did not deserve to be surrounded by hordes of raving lunatics with little space of his own. Though he often wondered if his life was much different now, he concluded that it was. He was top dog next to one man only, and that man was the only person in the world ever to win Erwin's respect. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and regarded his friend.
“Nothing but the sea. This quiet's a tad too much, though; something's on the horizon.”
Malin stared out next to him, not leaning on the rail with him, but ramrod-straight. “Very good. Tell me immediately if anything...”
They spotted it at the same time, and just then, Ali in the crow's nest cried out.
Malin had taken a huge chance with Ali, a narcoleptic who tried desperately to sell his goods in the streets of Paris. Imported weekly from the Arab world, they were unparalleled. Yet, even when he had hired assistants who seemed trustworthy, he could not keep his business afloat. What kind of work was there, then, for a Persian who could not keep his head up?
So Malin challenged him. He placed the lives of the entire crew under Ali's care on a frequent rotation, and punished him like anyone else for dereliction of duty. Ali's condition improved in a matter of weeks. Whether it was due to the sea air or to Malin's supervision was known only to God, but Malin took the credit either way.
A Dutch ship on the horizon captured their interest...
...because it was burning. The fire lit up the night for miles around, and reflected off the water so that it was impossible to see what might be underneath. Malin admired it for its magnitude, staring at it and weighing his options. A burning ship could mean many things.
Erwin looked to him for guidance. “Shall we inspect this more closely? Offer our aid?”
“Not yet. I don't see a black flag, but I've learned to trust what I smell in the wind. And I smell trouble.” He turned to shout to Ali. “Keep watch on that ship! Nothing else! You hear me?!”
“Oi, mon Capitaine!”
“All hands on deck! Man the guns! BATTLE STATIONS!!”
He would not be caught off-guard. Malin retired to a post higher up, beside his cabin. He took out his spyglass and got a better look at the burning vessel. This was no disease-ridden ship. He had known it from the start. The crew ran back and forth in a concerted effort to put out the fire, while others focused on righting the vessel and fighting off an unseen attacker which lay somewhere between them and the Escape.
Erwin saw it too. He put down his own spyglass and looked expectantly at his captain. There was sympathy in his eyes. He felt sorry for this Dutch crew.
Malin was not without a heart. He felt the loss of a ship as keenly as any captain, but it would be foolhardy to sail toward them while knowing nothing of the threat which engulfed them.
He had felt a special kinship with that madness in the water since the day he had heard of its existence. He had taken to the seas thinking he might find creatures akin to himself, and now there was one. To say that his heart swelled with pride at its actions would be an overstatement only insofar as that it only swelled so much as he would let it.
The air this night had crackled with an unmistakeable electricity. He knew that tonight, he and his quarry, his kin, would come face-to-face.
Up to their positions on deck raced his valiant vagabond crew. Alice Krynn, an orphan-cum-gunner, and the best of the lot. Klaus Badenkraft, best harpooner Malin had ever seen, rejected from the Bavarian sharpshooters division for his poor eyesight, even thought it was nothing an expensive pair of spectacles couldn't fix. Alex Miner, a New York septic engineer who sought surroundings with a superior stench. These were just a few of the men and women who now joined Captain Malin on deck.
He kept his spyglass trained on the ill-fated Dutch vessel, as its bow dipped into the waves and men scrambled between fires toward lifeboats. Others made feeble cover fire with handguns to no avail, and when Malin got a fix on their target, he could not suppress a gasp.
Naught but a dark shape extending from equally dark waters, it had a gaping hole at its center that the ship was going into. The waters all around this shape were whipped into a constant frenzy by what could only be gigantic tentacles, in a tumult which was probably used, at first, to confuse the ship's course and make it a less agile target, and then to rock it back and forth in an effort to cram it down this gargantuan creature's maw.
If the meal is too big for its mouth, Malin reasoned, it may well be full after this.
“Take us closer!” Malin bellowed. Erwin looked at him incredulously, but said nothing. “Slow going, and not too close...but get us within a hundred yards. We may miss our shot otherwise.”
And thus the Escape crept closer, as the Dutch ship was consumed almost to her aft quarter. The lifeboats which managed to kick off rocked about wildly. They spied the Escape and beckoned for rescue, but their plight was a hopeless one. No sooner did they begin to wave their hands than they were jostled into the water, their boats capsized, the whirlpool drawing them in.
The Escape, meanwhile, felt the stirring of the soup even from her relative distance. Now the crew could all see the object of their approach, and the chatter began in earnest.
“I will have quiet,” Malin projected, but not too loudly. “Man the guns. We'll take the creature mid-meal so as to have it defenseless and off-guard. Fire everything we have—use the special powder.”
At once, the crew mobilized and his commands were carried out with speed. The Dutch vessel was all but gone. The survivors thrashed helplessly in the water as it pulled them ever closer to the creature's gullet.
“We'll kill those men before it ever gets the chance to,” Erwin observed darkly.
“Oi, mon ami,” Malin put his hand on his mate's arm, but continued to monitor the churning sea.
It was either save his ship or let the Dutchmen go down with it. A gamble was all well and good when the timing was sensible. Attacking the creature would be gamble enough. Once again, he tried to get a look at this creature, this freak of the sea, every bit as much as he was a freak on land. And if his skin had gills, he would have ridden upon it, such was his desire to escape, to be where he was not viewed as anything but just another transient creature. Would it even have mattered? This creature would smash his hull just like any other if given the chance. The odds that it possessed any higher functions, that it would recognize their strange relationship to one another, he told himself, were infinitesimal. Yes, it would crush his ship and dissolve it all, crew included, in what must have been the most corrosive acid contained within a living being.
But must we tempt it? If we never go near it...
The crew all stared at him, anxious, hanging on his next orders.
The time for doubt has passed. Like a rabid dog, this thing must die.
“Open fire! Keep shooting until it's dead! Go! Go! Go!”
Metal spikes erupted from the ship's cannons with a white glow that illuminated the night sky like the brightest lightning flashes, which turned night into day in sharp fluctuations. These projectiles struck, too, like lightning, and they tore into the creature's hide as it swallowed the tail end of the Dutch vessel. Then the water became still all at once, and in the eerie quiet, several of the orphaned sailors righted their capsized boat. They started to board it, still intent on Escape, and real lightning seared the surface of the ocean. Those who had not boarded the lifeboat were electrocuted instantly, and smoke became steam as they sank into oblivion. The rest scrambled to put out the fire that erupted on the boat. Finally, the spread of this lightning burst touched the Escape at her tip, and all the iron of the hull must have dispersed the charge. If the creature moved closer, hit them with more power...men would die.
A second volley exploded from the Escape's flank, which blew massive chunks of the monstrous mass off into the water. Malin's spyglass registered no blood, no bone, no organs within or without this creature. There was no way no know how much damage they had inflicted, or even how much more of the thing existed beneath the waves!
It did begin to swivel. That, he could track by the shape and position of its wound, and it screamed in unholy agony. At first, no one could identify the sound. It was so loud, it was as if it were within their very heads. Like whalesong, but shrill as a shriek. Covering their ears did nothing to shut it out. The air visibly vibrated. The ocean trembled. Those few ardent Dutchmen who yet lived were hurled from their boat mere decimeters from the rope ladders of the Escape.
Malin's ears rang and he was dizzy. He was a hard man, though; he couldn't lose sight of the battle, or all was lost. So he took stock of it with his naked eyes: the creature loomed near the floundering Dutchmen, approaching them with speed. The crew were panic-stricken. They needed a strong captain.
“Keep firing! The damn thing's loud when it gets hurt. If our ears bleed, that is victory!” He clenched a fist for emphasis.
A third volley rocketed across the narrow gap, some shots directed down toward the beast's insides. Popping squishes sounded from within the target, indicators of internal damage. Tentacles lifted tons of water in the creature's next bout of fury. Its scream brought even Erwin to his knees, and Escape rocked like she might tip. A feeble whirlpool came next, but wasn't the creature gorged? Still, the swirling water would unbalance them. Success or failure was predicated upon the next few minutes.
The only Dutchman still conscious, in a fit of panic as he was brought toward the monster's maw, released the comrade he'd saved and unloaded shots from his pistol at the thing, one lost bullet after another, as he wailed either obscenities or prayers—Malin knew that neither would save the poor soul.
“The men can't get a fix with the cannons!” Erwin reported the obvious, but it was enough to spur Malin, to get him to act.
“Every one of you dogs who is still standing, get out your sidearms and give it everything you've got! Harpooners, let fly with the harpoon guns! We stop when it dies, not a moment before!”
He couldn't say how long it went on. Ten minutes? An hour? So focused was he on his own gun, he could only abstractly hear his crew shout to one another, could see them from the corner of his eye, but he couldn't distinguish their actions. He held his aim, fired shot after shot, and tracked each to its mark by the white streak left in its wake, surrounded by other white streaks like a morbid meteor shower.
The time came to reload. Again. Again. Almost in time to match their revolutions. But he couldn't be sure. He had to keep his feet rooted to the spot. Keep his aim as desperate shrieks from the dying leviathan shredded his mind.
...and as twilight broke over the ocean, at long last the death throes subsided, leaving an eerie calm behind it that was punctuated by the ringing in his ears. Malin bade the creature good fortune as it passed beyond the veil, and he signaled for his crew to depart Dutch waters. The more distance between them and this place, the better.
Britain was certain that her naval might would be able to amass a force capable of felling the beast, but the waters around the Cape belonged to the Dutch. Britain hoped to own those waters and the land surrounded by them soon enough, most preferably by the end of the year. In the meantime, it was only possible to send private vessels. The more foolish, the better.
For better or worse, there were few Atheists among Captain Malin's crew. A rarity among seafaring vessels, the Escape was a privately-commissioned ironclad with twenty-two cannons and a bevy of armed sailors. She was a free ship, answerable to no one save her captain. Those who served on her knew of her success on the water, but were desperate all the same, for they knew Malin to be a man of unnatural origins. The red of his eyes was only the beginning of it. He never left his ship, so to the rest of the world, everything else was mere rumor.
He hailed from France, where it was impossible for him to enter the army because of his condition. His jaw was metallic, like iron, as were his teeth and nails, the latter of which he was forced to file. The filings were stored in a jar behind his seat in his cabin on the deck, because he mixed his own gunpowder with them, which came out far more potent than any regular gunpowder. Bullets erupted from his guns white-hot, and these practically liquified metal projectiles could melt right through hulls a foot thick.
Thus the crew feared Malin.
He distributed more filings throughout the ship for use in his crew's sidearms and the shipboard cannons, rendering his vessel a nigh unstoppable force.
Malin had accepted a bounty on the Leviathan, and he knew his would not be the only vessel hunting the creature, but he hoped to be the only captain ruthless enough to kill it.
On a particularly breezy night, he descended the steps to the rail where his first officer stood observing the calm waters and joined him there.
“What do you see?” he asked the Mate in a thick accent.
The Mate, Alan Erwin, owed a special debt to the Captain, who preferred to crew his vessel only with those who could not exist peacefully in civilization. Malin found Erwin in an asylum in England, grinding his teeth in agony because, although he suffered from a self-destructive form of depression, he did not deserve to be surrounded by hordes of raving lunatics with little space of his own. Though he often wondered if his life was much different now, he concluded that it was. He was top dog next to one man only, and that man was the only person in the world ever to win Erwin's respect. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and regarded his friend.
“Nothing but the sea. This quiet's a tad too much, though; something's on the horizon.”
Malin stared out next to him, not leaning on the rail with him, but ramrod-straight. “Very good. Tell me immediately if anything...”
They spotted it at the same time, and just then, Ali in the crow's nest cried out.
Malin had taken a huge chance with Ali, a narcoleptic who tried desperately to sell his goods in the streets of Paris. Imported weekly from the Arab world, they were unparalleled. Yet, even when he had hired assistants who seemed trustworthy, he could not keep his business afloat. What kind of work was there, then, for a Persian who could not keep his head up?
So Malin challenged him. He placed the lives of the entire crew under Ali's care on a frequent rotation, and punished him like anyone else for dereliction of duty. Ali's condition improved in a matter of weeks. Whether it was due to the sea air or to Malin's supervision was known only to God, but Malin took the credit either way.
A Dutch ship on the horizon captured their interest...
...because it was burning. The fire lit up the night for miles around, and reflected off the water so that it was impossible to see what might be underneath. Malin admired it for its magnitude, staring at it and weighing his options. A burning ship could mean many things.
Erwin looked to him for guidance. “Shall we inspect this more closely? Offer our aid?”
“Not yet. I don't see a black flag, but I've learned to trust what I smell in the wind. And I smell trouble.” He turned to shout to Ali. “Keep watch on that ship! Nothing else! You hear me?!”
“Oi, mon Capitaine!”
“All hands on deck! Man the guns! BATTLE STATIONS!!”
He would not be caught off-guard. Malin retired to a post higher up, beside his cabin. He took out his spyglass and got a better look at the burning vessel. This was no disease-ridden ship. He had known it from the start. The crew ran back and forth in a concerted effort to put out the fire, while others focused on righting the vessel and fighting off an unseen attacker which lay somewhere between them and the Escape.
Erwin saw it too. He put down his own spyglass and looked expectantly at his captain. There was sympathy in his eyes. He felt sorry for this Dutch crew.
Malin was not without a heart. He felt the loss of a ship as keenly as any captain, but it would be foolhardy to sail toward them while knowing nothing of the threat which engulfed them.
He had felt a special kinship with that madness in the water since the day he had heard of its existence. He had taken to the seas thinking he might find creatures akin to himself, and now there was one. To say that his heart swelled with pride at its actions would be an overstatement only insofar as that it only swelled so much as he would let it.
The air this night had crackled with an unmistakeable electricity. He knew that tonight, he and his quarry, his kin, would come face-to-face.
Up to their positions on deck raced his valiant vagabond crew. Alice Krynn, an orphan-cum-gunner, and the best of the lot. Klaus Badenkraft, best harpooner Malin had ever seen, rejected from the Bavarian sharpshooters division for his poor eyesight, even thought it was nothing an expensive pair of spectacles couldn't fix. Alex Miner, a New York septic engineer who sought surroundings with a superior stench. These were just a few of the men and women who now joined Captain Malin on deck.
He kept his spyglass trained on the ill-fated Dutch vessel, as its bow dipped into the waves and men scrambled between fires toward lifeboats. Others made feeble cover fire with handguns to no avail, and when Malin got a fix on their target, he could not suppress a gasp.
Naught but a dark shape extending from equally dark waters, it had a gaping hole at its center that the ship was going into. The waters all around this shape were whipped into a constant frenzy by what could only be gigantic tentacles, in a tumult which was probably used, at first, to confuse the ship's course and make it a less agile target, and then to rock it back and forth in an effort to cram it down this gargantuan creature's maw.
If the meal is too big for its mouth, Malin reasoned, it may well be full after this.
“Take us closer!” Malin bellowed. Erwin looked at him incredulously, but said nothing. “Slow going, and not too close...but get us within a hundred yards. We may miss our shot otherwise.”
And thus the Escape crept closer, as the Dutch ship was consumed almost to her aft quarter. The lifeboats which managed to kick off rocked about wildly. They spied the Escape and beckoned for rescue, but their plight was a hopeless one. No sooner did they begin to wave their hands than they were jostled into the water, their boats capsized, the whirlpool drawing them in.
The Escape, meanwhile, felt the stirring of the soup even from her relative distance. Now the crew could all see the object of their approach, and the chatter began in earnest.
“I will have quiet,” Malin projected, but not too loudly. “Man the guns. We'll take the creature mid-meal so as to have it defenseless and off-guard. Fire everything we have—use the special powder.”
At once, the crew mobilized and his commands were carried out with speed. The Dutch vessel was all but gone. The survivors thrashed helplessly in the water as it pulled them ever closer to the creature's gullet.
“We'll kill those men before it ever gets the chance to,” Erwin observed darkly.
“Oi, mon ami,” Malin put his hand on his mate's arm, but continued to monitor the churning sea.
It was either save his ship or let the Dutchmen go down with it. A gamble was all well and good when the timing was sensible. Attacking the creature would be gamble enough. Once again, he tried to get a look at this creature, this freak of the sea, every bit as much as he was a freak on land. And if his skin had gills, he would have ridden upon it, such was his desire to escape, to be where he was not viewed as anything but just another transient creature. Would it even have mattered? This creature would smash his hull just like any other if given the chance. The odds that it possessed any higher functions, that it would recognize their strange relationship to one another, he told himself, were infinitesimal. Yes, it would crush his ship and dissolve it all, crew included, in what must have been the most corrosive acid contained within a living being.
But must we tempt it? If we never go near it...
The crew all stared at him, anxious, hanging on his next orders.
The time for doubt has passed. Like a rabid dog, this thing must die.
“Open fire! Keep shooting until it's dead! Go! Go! Go!”
Metal spikes erupted from the ship's cannons with a white glow that illuminated the night sky like the brightest lightning flashes, which turned night into day in sharp fluctuations. These projectiles struck, too, like lightning, and they tore into the creature's hide as it swallowed the tail end of the Dutch vessel. Then the water became still all at once, and in the eerie quiet, several of the orphaned sailors righted their capsized boat. They started to board it, still intent on Escape, and real lightning seared the surface of the ocean. Those who had not boarded the lifeboat were electrocuted instantly, and smoke became steam as they sank into oblivion. The rest scrambled to put out the fire that erupted on the boat. Finally, the spread of this lightning burst touched the Escape at her tip, and all the iron of the hull must have dispersed the charge. If the creature moved closer, hit them with more power...men would die.
A second volley exploded from the Escape's flank, which blew massive chunks of the monstrous mass off into the water. Malin's spyglass registered no blood, no bone, no organs within or without this creature. There was no way no know how much damage they had inflicted, or even how much more of the thing existed beneath the waves!
It did begin to swivel. That, he could track by the shape and position of its wound, and it screamed in unholy agony. At first, no one could identify the sound. It was so loud, it was as if it were within their very heads. Like whalesong, but shrill as a shriek. Covering their ears did nothing to shut it out. The air visibly vibrated. The ocean trembled. Those few ardent Dutchmen who yet lived were hurled from their boat mere decimeters from the rope ladders of the Escape.
Malin's ears rang and he was dizzy. He was a hard man, though; he couldn't lose sight of the battle, or all was lost. So he took stock of it with his naked eyes: the creature loomed near the floundering Dutchmen, approaching them with speed. The crew were panic-stricken. They needed a strong captain.
“Keep firing! The damn thing's loud when it gets hurt. If our ears bleed, that is victory!” He clenched a fist for emphasis.
A third volley rocketed across the narrow gap, some shots directed down toward the beast's insides. Popping squishes sounded from within the target, indicators of internal damage. Tentacles lifted tons of water in the creature's next bout of fury. Its scream brought even Erwin to his knees, and Escape rocked like she might tip. A feeble whirlpool came next, but wasn't the creature gorged? Still, the swirling water would unbalance them. Success or failure was predicated upon the next few minutes.
The only Dutchman still conscious, in a fit of panic as he was brought toward the monster's maw, released the comrade he'd saved and unloaded shots from his pistol at the thing, one lost bullet after another, as he wailed either obscenities or prayers—Malin knew that neither would save the poor soul.
“The men can't get a fix with the cannons!” Erwin reported the obvious, but it was enough to spur Malin, to get him to act.
“Every one of you dogs who is still standing, get out your sidearms and give it everything you've got! Harpooners, let fly with the harpoon guns! We stop when it dies, not a moment before!”
He couldn't say how long it went on. Ten minutes? An hour? So focused was he on his own gun, he could only abstractly hear his crew shout to one another, could see them from the corner of his eye, but he couldn't distinguish their actions. He held his aim, fired shot after shot, and tracked each to its mark by the white streak left in its wake, surrounded by other white streaks like a morbid meteor shower.
The time came to reload. Again. Again. Almost in time to match their revolutions. But he couldn't be sure. He had to keep his feet rooted to the spot. Keep his aim as desperate shrieks from the dying leviathan shredded his mind.
...and as twilight broke over the ocean, at long last the death throes subsided, leaving an eerie calm behind it that was punctuated by the ringing in his ears. Malin bade the creature good fortune as it passed beyond the veil, and he signaled for his crew to depart Dutch waters. The more distance between them and this place, the better.