The harpooner was drunk.
Quinn lay passed out on the floor of his quarters, naked, stinking of sweat and cheap whiskey. The shouting of his colleagues could not rouse him, nor could their pushing and shaking. The boatswain finally left the room and returned quickly with a bucket of cold seawater, which he threw in desperation onto the motionless shape on the floor. Quinn stirred, bolted suddenly awake, and twisted around toward his crewmembers.
“Battle stations have been called, you sotted bastard!” the boatswain shouted at him. “There’s a stonking giant squid out there! Sober up up and man your goddamn harpoon! It’s the only stonking reason you’re here, your only bloody job on this damn boat, and you’re too drunk to stand!”
Quinn roused in anger and tried to stand to punch the boatswain, but the ship lurched and they both lost their footing and fell to the floor. As the ship’s tilt increased they slid across the floor side by side, and as they slammed simultaneously against the far wall of the room they realized that their fight ranked rather low on the list of priorities facing them and the rest of the crew aboard the underwater seaship known as the Kraken. Quinn stumbled upright, bolted out the door, and ran toward the entrance to the conning tower, ricocheting crazily from wall to wall as he did. The boatswain left the room and raced off in the opposite direction, toward the hatchway that lead into the super-structure of the ship.
* * *
“Hard aport forty degrees, full speed, lower the bow rudders, twenty-two degree declination,” bellowed Captain Eperia to the crew on the bridge of the Kraken. “Steady on the wheel, navigator,” she added. They were now too deep for the mechanical multi-lensed Eye that functioned as their periscope to work effectively, so she had taken her seat in the Captain’s chair, her face and hands pressed against the fused quartz glass portal of the viewing port at the front of the bridge, peering into the dark waters, trying to discern the shape of the squid in the frigid unknown beyond.
The hellish thing swam down into the blackness, maddeningly beyond her sight. The Kraken followed.
A clubbed arm, lined with sharp barbed hooks, appeared suddenly out of the inky depths of the water and hammered into the viewport. The entire ship shuddered, but the hull held, the fused quartz glass of the portal did not crack. The arm disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. A tentacle flopped against the glass, suckers probing, searching for purchase, then disappeared as the clubbed arm had before.
“Dive, dive, dive!” cried Eperia. “We must meet this demon beast on a level battlefield!”
The beast, clearly a thinking creature, had a different plan. It could not be seen, but every man and woman aboard the vessel heard the whispering slide of tentacles, the slithery grip of suckers attaching themselves to the thin metal alloy shell of the hull. They felt it with their ears, their skin, their teeth, felt it inside the marrow of their bones. They had all heard the sound before. It was, to a crewmember, the most terrifying sound in their experience. It meant the hellbeast was on the hunt.
The Kraken abruptly halted its forward motion as the tentacles gripped the hull. The ship canted to a nearly forty five degree angle. Crewmembers tossed about the interior of the ship like dolls.
“Where the devil is our harpooner?” growled the Captain.
“Not in position yet, Captain.”
“Are galvanic defensive systems ready?”
“Report on galvanic defense, systems, boatswain,” asked a crewmember through the speaking cone of the aerophone.
“We are charged and readied,” reported the disembodied voice of the boatswain, from his position deep within the hull.
“Let the Damned Thing have it, then, 80 per cent, on my mark!” ordered Eperia. “And...now...take the shields live!”
The lights dimmed as a low hum filled the air of the ship. The hum quickly morphed to a crackle, and the viewport exploded with bright blue light as electricity flooded the hull.
* * *
Quinn needed two assistants to wrangle him into his diving suit, between his drunkenness and the tumult of the vessel: Tess, the Captain’s secret lover, who stood in charge of the conning tower and airlock whenever battle stations were called, and her assistant, a young woman named Anne. Quinn’s inability to stand up straight made the job difficult, as he weaved in drunken counterpoint to the motions of the ship, overcompensating for every lurch the vessel took.
Anne held the opening of the suit open as Tess attempted to steer Quinn’s continually moving body into it. Apparent to both women was the huge erection Quinn bore, flopping wildly in the slip and sway of his exertions, bouncing about like an over-eager puppy. Tess wasn’t sure he was even entirely aware of it, until, after they had finally marshaled his legs into the suit, when he slowed his flailing limbs long enough to ask, with a thick, heavily slurred Irish accent, “Excuse me, ladies, for my profound state of tumescence. The imminent promise of combat brings it out in me. The blood of the beast calls to my own. I shall soon stain my harpoon with that blood.”
Most of his body was now contained within the suit. Anne fitted him with a shell-like diving helmet (of Captain Eperia’s own design, of course). Tess reached down and frankly grasped his thick shaft in her hand. “Quinn, you risk your life for our lives, the lives of all aboard this ship. Bless you.” She gave his cock a healthy squeeze. “Come back to us alive, and I will make sure this fleshy harpoon is well stained. Godspeed, sir.”
He lowered his eyes to her. “I may not live to see another day,” he said “May I have one last taste of a beautiful woman before I leave this ship to enter the teeth of the battle?”
Tess reached up and hung her arms around his neck, kissed him deeply. When he had finished, he turned to Anne and accepted the same pleasures from her mouth.
Captain Eperia encouraged an atmosphere of sexual openness and fluidity on board the Kraken. Similar to her rejection of most traditional Western institutions—family, religion, government--she considered traditional gender roles, monogamy and patriarchy to be needlessly restrictive, their true intent not a concern with morality, as claimed, but rather a need to control the populace and keep the exploration and satisfaction of sexual desire controlled, repressed and demonized. Her goal was to create an independent free-floating sovereign state, a utopia where every man and woman answered to no authority but their own free will.
These beliefs extended to the sexual lives of the crew. Monogamy was allowed, but polygamy was the assumed norm. Most crewmembers had several sexual partners. Consent was assumed as an absolute necessity but beyond that creativity and experimentation were encouraged. Captain Eperia’s goal had been to create a sexual utopia as well as a social, governmental and technological one.
Anne locked and sealed the helmet of Quinn’s onto Quinn’s suit, knocked on plating of the helmet three times and yelled, “Ready!” Even before the word was fully out of her mouth Quinn reached to the rungs of the ladder that led to the entrance of the conning tower and pulled himself upon it.
“Clear the airlock!” he commanded in a slur. “Close the seal behind me and flood the chamber. Let me at this hellish thing.”
An iris-like aperture closed in the floor, with a motion similar to a camera obscura. Three knocks ringing on the floor under Quinn’s feet signaled the all-clear. Cold seawater flooded the small chamber in a frenzy, but the calamity soon subsided as the pressure equalized.
The iris of the hatch above him opened.
He climbed the ladder slowly, deliberately. He mounted the conning tower and fit his shoes into the locking mechanisms at the base of the tower that kept him electrically grounded, supplied him with air, connected to the aerophone on the bridge, and held him firmly attached to the ship. The vast blackness of the ocean depths surrounded him as he blindly attempted to get his bearings.
He never got the chance, as everything seem to happen at once: leaping arcs of electricity shot over his head in great blue curving jets, lighting up a swirling mass of tentacles flailing in the frigid water, in constant churning motion, each arm attempting to get a grip on the vessel so the monster could still its motion and crush it.
To Quinn’s left a series of enormous iron harpoons hung strapped to the railing, taller than any man, rising easily above his head. They all looked identical, black and sharp and cold as death, save for three specially designed harpoons at the back of the quiver, larger than the others, wrapped in fur to keep them cushioned. They were the glass harpoons, made of the same fused quartz as the viewport of the bridge and the visor of the diving helmet. Quinn had never fired one, and was unsure of their purpose. He only knew that Captain Eperia insisted not only on their inclusion in Quinn’s array of harpoons, but that they be checked and maintained scrupulously.
Directly in front of Quinn stood the harpoon gun.
It was, like the harpoons, large and black and ominous, rising from the gentle curves of the ship like a raised fist. The towering gun was the only weapon on board the craft, and the only structure with sharp edges and unrelenting straight lines; the rest of the ship hewed to Eperia’s insistence on the golden mean as an organizing principle and the winding spirals that resulted from this design.
A tentacle slapped into the conning tower, bringing Quinn back to his senses. Eperia’s voiced barked from the aerophone embedded in the diving helmet.
“Are you in position, harpooner?” she asked. “Our defensive shields will not hold off the beast for long. Respond!”
“Aye, Captain,” responded Quinn, and hefted one of the giant spears onto his shoulder to load into the gun.
* * *
“Lights!” commanded Eperia. “Let’s find this hellbeast and send it to its death.”
The dark water beyond viewport lit up as the bow lights blazed into action. Tentacles curled and spiraled, sweeping through the water. Violent flashes of blue light sparked into the water whenever the flesh of the creature touched the skin of the ship.
“Hard to starboard! Let’s find the beak of this damned thing,” ordered Eperia.
The engine of the Kraken whined with effort, attempting to make the turn, but the tentacles held fast. It was impossible to find the thick main body of the creature, or the beaked maw of its hideous mouth.
“Galvanic shields to 100 per cent,” ordered the Captain.
“We can’t hold the shields for long at than level,” warned the Galvinist on the bridge.
“We must break this monster’s grip on our vessel or we are doomed,” growled the Captain. “100 per cent, now, I command you, sir.”
The lights of the ship dimmed and flickered. The drone of the ship’s engine rose several notes under the strain. Huge arcs of electicity slashed the water surrounding the ship. Tentacles released their hold on the hull of the Kraken in an expulsive rush, as suckers detached from the metal in reaction to the shock of electricity.
“Now’s the time!” cried Eperia. “This is our moment. Let’s seize our victory.”
The ship, freed from the prison of the squid’s grip, caught traction and began to wheel around toward the body of the beast. Two bright circles of light from the arc-lamps on the bow of the ship crawled along the pebbled skin of a twitching, clubbed arm of the temporarily stunned beast, following the arm until it merged with the Medusa-like mass of snaking tentacles surrounding the mouth of the monstrous creature.
The horrid curving claw of the thing’s beak swam into view, beyond the fused quartz glass. The sight of it made even Eperia gasp, though she hid her reaction from her equally astonished crew.
* * *
Quinn loaded the first harpoon and locked it into place with mechanical surety.
Both beams of light from the forward lamps of the ship centered on the gaping mouth of the murderous thing, forming a target for Quinn. The squid snapped angrily at the ship with its beak. When Quinn swung the harpoon gun around and pointed the great cannon of the gun at the monster, the beast reacted by opening its beak wide, ready to snap the ship into pieces.
Quinn pulled back on the two arms of the cocking mechanism as if arming a crossbow. He pointed it at the mouth of the monster. His drunkenness fell away, victim to his concentration as he took aim.
“Steady, man,” told himself. “You might only get one shot at this.” He exhaled, focusing on the foe before him. His body stilled, his mind quieted. He was born to this trade, his father a whaler, and his father’s father. Harpooning ran in his blood.
His hand closed on the grip of the trigger. The ocean hushed quiet, the world fell away. His attention narrowed; only the beast and he remained.
He fired.
A tentacle snaked up from the watery blackness, slashing at the harpoon, deflecting the path of the projectile so that it arced harmlessly away from the creature and disappeared into the void.
“Damned Thing!” cursed Quinn, turning to heft another harpoon onto his shoulder and into the gun. The entire ship shuddered as a clubbed arm of the slapped at the conning tower, trying to rip the gun from its moorings.
Quinn rolled the next harpoon into place, locked the gun’s firing chamber over the harpoon. Sparks shot outward into the water surrounding the surface of the vessel. The twin lights centered on the beast’s mouth dimmed. Quinn knew instinctively what this meant: the ship’s galvanic shield was faltering.