Somehow, they’d used that power here, transforming normal seawater into a solid, and I’d just poked my finger into their physics-bending effect.

  I howled. I twisted my finger, and I pulled on it. The bone broke, the fabric of my suit stretched and blood flowed inside the glove—but the wall of water held on.

  Finally, hissing, I drew my combat knife and slashed myself free. A puff of dark stain drifted away. My blood mixed and floated with the currents until my suit sensed the leak and sealed itself.

  Worse, infinitely worse, I fell backward. I’d been pulling so hard to escape, I was off balance.

  The knife clinked on the seabed, and my ass landed on the blade—that could have been the funniest death of my illustrious career, but chance helped me for once. The blade hadn’t landed with the sharp edge pointing up.

  Sighing and breathing hard, I lay back on the floor of the alien ocean. After maybe thirty seconds, I started laughing. Then I got up and sheathed my knife.

  It was a full ten minutes after I’d arrived at this point in the underwater tunnel, a spot where my men had once fought for their lives, that I finally began trudging deeper. I soon came to the larger, open area. I looked around, flexing my fingers and wincing at the damaged pinkie. That was going to hurt until I managed to die again someday.

  The place was disappointingly empty. I found a few empty magazines, mostly for snap-rifles. There were lots of tracks, both from humans and dog-men. Here and there, a dark stain lingered on the sands, or a knife was stuck in the seabed.

  Overall, the entire trip was a waste. I’d hoped that the Clavers had set up camp here, but it wasn’t evident they ever had. Sure, they’d marched up an army of dog-men using these tunnels, and no doubt they’d used this very landing to set them on the battlefield—but there wasn’t any sign of an encampment now.

  The rebels had moved on, just as we Earthlings had.

  “Shit…” I said aloud, mumbling the word under my breath.

  I shook my fingers out a few times, wincing in pain. Damn, that hurt.

  Turning away, I faced the upward slope. That passage—it was haunting. I’d spent many hours climbing that pathway in the past, and I had no intention of doing it all over again. Accordingly, I reached toward my teleport harness. It still had a charge—more than half a charge—plenty to get me out of here and back up to the surface.

  It was when I was fooling with my harness that I saw it.

  Something big, shadowy, and frightening hung over the pathway back to the surface. I knew in an instant what it was—a sea monster. A creature of the type we’d fought to a standstill on the island’s beaches far above.

  My right index finger hovered over the single activation button. All I had to do was press it, and I’d be transported back up to the beaches, to the distant land of light and air.

  But my finger hesitated. It was as if it had a mind of its own.

  A stupid one.

  -12-

  “Hey!” I shouted inside my helmet. I waved my long arms over my head, trying to get the monster’s attention. “Hey you, over here!”

  Now, before anyone goes off and accuses me of suffering from a classic case of total retardation, I’ll point out that I did have my teleport harness primed and ready to go. I could’ve teleported out of there in a moment’s notice if I had to—provided I got at least a one-second warning.

  That was about what I got, as it turned out. The monster suddenly swooped in my direction.

  The creature was terrifying and so much faster moving than these things had been on land. In the water, all of its gangly lack of balance and ponderous pace had been replaced by speed and grace. A powerful surge of those big tentacles sent it in my direction, and it hovered over me, near to the protective tunnel that enclosed my comparatively tiny person.

  Stumbling back a single step in alarm, I stood my ground. I gazed up at the monster, looking for an eyeball or a face—something to focus on.

  The bulk of it was tremendous. Each of these monsters weighed hundreds of tons. They were like battleships of flesh, cruising around down here in the lowest seas.

  Sure, I knew he might crush me. He could slap me with a tentacle, maybe. Sending an appendage through the tunnel would probably hurt, maybe even sever the tentacle. But the monster had lots of tentacles, and I had only one small human body. If this fellow was the vengeful type, he might consider it a good deal. After all, we’d slaughtered a lot of his brothers up on the island beaches.

  Curiosity saved me in the end, I think. The creature loomed, and it rippled—sliding to the right and the left. I saw a few eyes, and I got the feeling it was puzzling out what I was up to. I was a lone man in its territory, and I didn’t seem frightened. How could that not intrigue any thinking being?

  At last, after I’d gotten tired of waving my arms around, I tried some squid-talk. Our suits had been equipped with hydrophones, just in case we ever needed to talk to members of Earth’s zoo-legions underwater. My tapper was programmed to send and receive speech in the Cephalopod language—or squid-talk, as most people called it.

  The sounds I bleated out seemed to have an effect. The giant monster who was puzzling over me lowered itself further. The pink gushy parts of its lower anatomy brushed the top of my dome and recoiled. It must’ve been like an electric shock for the monster.

  But still, it lingered. It had to be curious about me.

  “Can you hear me, you big idiot squid?” I demanded, speaking slowly and loudly. “I’m James McGill from Earth, and I’d like to talk to you about something.”

  The beast didn’t answer right away, but then I thought I heard something—something impossibly deep and sonorous. Could that be the voice of this leviathan?

  Working at my tapper’s controls, I maximized the treble and minimized the bass tones. That seemed to help. At last, the monster’s words became intelligible.

  “…land-plankton… amusement…”

  “Heheh,” I chuckled. “That’s right. I’m small and funny. Watch this.”

  Lifting my feet from the seabed, I danced a little jig. Normally, such an action would be impossible in deep water, but the water here had strange properties. I managed to perform the dance despite my suit, the sea, and my near total lack of skill.

  The giant hovering over me squirmed around the tunnel but was careful not to touch it. Waves of nasty flesh almost enveloped me making it difficult to see the ocean beyond.

  I took no notice of this. I was feeling prideful, truth be told.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you a lady-squid or a male?”

  The giant squirmed for a few seconds. At last, the answer came. “I am Lord. I am King. I am God.”

  “Hold on, now,” I laughed. “You’re not my god. You’re just a big fish to me—and a stupid one at that.”

  About a second later, that’s when I think the translation got through to him, he shot ink out in a black cloud and slid away. He loomed out there, acting kind of funny. If I had to guess, I’d say he was pissed and was waiting for a chance to get me.

  A silvery wire dropped then, from the sea above, down into my tunnel of low pressure. It was a shining wire like a rabbit-snare. The other end reached up into the dark body of the monster squid.

  “Do you know me now, human?” the squid asked.

  The impossibly bass sounds had been tempered now, modulated by my tapper and turned into something more intelligible.

  “Yep. I sure do,” I said, watching that loop of wire dip and come close to my faceplate. “You’re the squid that liked to play fisherman with my men a few years back. I’m here to talk to you.”

  “You wish to speak? Then do so quickly, because you have not long to live.”

  “None of us do, squid. None of us do. Say, I’d like to offer you a deal. A deal straight from Earth.”

  “We make no deals with mortal enemies.”

  “Ha! Now I know you’re stupid. I’m not your mortal enemy. The people who talked you into rebelling against Earth—they’re the ones that got your brothers killed.”

  The squid swirled and churned all around me for a moment. It was kind of disconcerting. It looked like I was already deep inside its guts, being digested.

  “Who? Who do you think our enemies are?”

  “Come on. You don’t fool me. You can’t be that dumb. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “You will be devoured. The water-tunnel will not protect you. My beak hungers to crush your tiny body to pulp and use it as nourishment.”

  “I’m sure it does, squid. You’re a big talker. But I don’t like dealing with underlings, with small weaklings. I only like dealing with the boss-creatures. Who owns you? Who is your master?”

  “THERE IS NO GREATER BEING THAN MY KIND, HUMAN!”

  This last wave of rage and volume swept right over me. I was kind of taken by surprise, and I almost lost my footing. Outside the water-tunnel, the sea monster’s body pulsed against the walls and darkened as if bruised. The monster was hurting itself in an effort to crush me.

  Had I gone too far?

  “Hey, hey! Settle down, squid-lord. Your masters are known to you as Clavers. And they’re humans—just like me. You bow to them. You serve them. They tell me this all the time.”

  Suddenly, the squid stopped squeezing the water-tunnel. It lifted away, and it became an indistinct, massive shadow again.

  I don’t mind telling you my breathing was coming faster, and my heart was pounding a little. I controlled this with difficulty and stood stock-still.

  At last, the squid spoke again.

  “What do you know of the Clavers?”

  “They are bandits from Earth. Creatures of low reputation. We shunned them, kicked them off our worlds, and now they travel through the cosmos trying to trick dumb-ass aliens like you.”

  “None are able to trick one of my kind. We are supreme.”

  I laughed, long and loud. “Really? Is that why we killed a dozen of your kind on the beaches of Green World?”

  “Thousands of insects like you died as well.”

  “Yes, but we all came back to life,” I said. “I was one of the ones that died. I’m feeling fine, now. How are your brothers doing?”

  The shadow swept away to the right, vanished, then came back from the left. That was kind of spooky, but I didn’t let on that I’d even noticed.

  “The Clavers died here as well,” the creature said at last. “This very water-tunnel was choked with their dead.”

  I generated more laughter. I put some extra work into it, cackling a bit at the end. I knew from long experience that no alien had a sense of humor—not when it came to talking about himself, that is.

  “Those weren’t Clavers,” I said, hooting a little. “Those were Claver slaves. Dog-men, that’s what we call them. They were bred or tricked into dying for their masters. Just like you giants.”

  The squid-thing hovered overhead. I could tell he was thinking over my words, and he didn’t much like the sound of them.

  “Why did you come here, then? You should have sought out the Clavers. You are an irritant and will be expunged.”

  “Yeah, okay. You can probably kill me, I get that. But I don’t care, because I’ll come back in an hour or two. Too bad you’re so weak-minded. They told me back on Earth that making an offer to you would never work. That your kind was too large of body and small of brain. That you couldn’t grasp a good deal when you had one in your tentacles.”

  “What… deal?”

  “What deal? Tell me where the Clavers are. Tell me where their world is, and we’ll go visit them and wipe them out. Your shame at having served tricky humans will be erased forever.”

  There was another delay, but it wasn’t all that long. Suddenly a transmission came to my tapper. A strange one, in a strange code. My tapper worked on it for a few seconds, then a long series of digits appeared. It looked like a set of Galactic coordinates.

  Could this be where I could find the Clavers?

  “Now, I have given you pleasure,” the monster said. “So you shall return the favor. It is a trade.”

  “Uh…”

  The wire loop dipped into the water-tunnel, but I was ready for that. I slashed with my force-blades, which had been sizzling at low power, waiting for this instant.

  The wire drifted down to my feet, severed.

  A moment later, the walls of the water-tunnel sparked and rippled. A fantastic wave of pressure swept over me. I could feel the water compressing, crushing upon me from all sides.

  The squid was squeezing, darkening his flesh and exerting fantastic pressures. He was crushing the water-tunnel with his massive body, powered by sheer rage.

  Just in the nick of time, my fingers found the button on the harness, and I teleported away.

  -13-

  Gasping for breath, I flipped open my visor and vomited. I had the bends, I could tell. That sudden pressure change—it had messed me up. Broken blood vessels had popped all over my body, even the capillaries in my eyes had burst, and my vision was darkening.

  Doubled over in pain, I crawled over the beach toward the gateway posts we Earthlings had left behind. Once I managed to drag myself through them, I collapsed at the feet of some hogs. They eyed me like an unflushed turd.

  “Centurion? You okay?”

  I gasped a few times. “Blue Deck…”

  “You got it, Cowboy,” said the head hog. He quickly made a call on his tapper. “Medical? We’ve got a cosmonaut here. Yeah… he thinks he’s a hero, but it looks like he got himself bushwhacked.”

  The hogs on duty all laughed, and their laughter was the last thing I heard as I slid to the floor and lost all consciousness.

  At some point later, I was revived. No friendly face was on hand to greet me as I came back to life. Instead, a critical eye peered through an instrument into my throat, then my ears.

  “He’s an eight,” declared an orderly in a bored voice.

  “That’ll do. Release him. There’s some imperator upstairs that keeps calling and hassling our staff.”

  Galina.

  She was the only person who was likely to both know I’d returned to Earth and to care.

  Staggering out of the place, I rubbed the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. An eight wasn’t a perfect revival score. It was a little sketchy, and I was going to be sore for a few days because of it. At least the finger I’d gotten crushed back on Green World was back and flexing happily.

  After taking a shower, my tapper began buzzing. I texted Galina that I was on my way upstairs.

  Your story had better be good. That was all she said in return. It was kind of rude, if you ask me. When a man goes on a mission for you and dies in the process, I think you owe him a tiny bit of gratitude. But then, I’m old-fashioned.

  When I reached her offices, I found a smorgasbord of hogs marching out of her conference room door. It was morning, according to the slanting orange sunlight coming through the windows on the far wall. The meeting was probably one of those dull, every-Thursday affairs. Just the sight of all those bored-looking hogs made me glad I’d never managed to keep much rank over the years.

  After I knocked on the door for a bit, Galina finally snatched it open.

  “Did Ferguson forget his coffee mug again?” she asked, then she looked up at me. Her face softened a fraction. “Oh… James. Come in.”

  I did so, and I put my boots on her conference table.

  “Get off there.”

  “My feet hurt, and these boots are brand new. Even the feet inside are as clean as a baby’s butt.”

  She made a face at me. “You obviously haven’t dealt with many babies.”

  “Uh… you got me there. Say, how did things turn out with your family? Did the wedding ever happen?”

  Galina shook her head. “My sister couldn’t go through with it. She can’t even remember her fiancé. Isn’t that horrible? They showed her pictures and everything. But she still doesn’t know him.”

  “Huh… you’d think the guy could start over and romance her again. Hell, if I ever got a second chance with a woman who’d forgotten everything, I’d be a shoo-in. You could erase every stupid thing you’d done or said.”

  Galina frowned. “Well, that didn’t happen. The wedding is off.”

  “A crying shame.” I replied, trying to sound genuinely concerned.

  “What have you managed to accomplish with your investigation? Besides annoying the Shadowlanders and costing me money?”

  “How did I cost you money?”

  She slammed her coffee down on the big table and glared at me. “They sent me a bill for your deep-link call. They said you used it under false pretenses.”

  “Oh… that.”

  “Yes, that. They also suggested you abused their hospitality… and you took certain liberties.”

  “Uh…”

  She had to be referring to my one night with Helsa. That seemed ungrateful, as she’d obviously enjoyed the evening as much as I did. After a moment’s reflection, I decided this defense wouldn’t please Galina, so I changed the subject.

  “I learned the coordinates of the new Claver home world from a friend,” I told her, hoping to change the subject.

  That got her attention. She eyed me. “How the hell did you do that while lying to the inhabitants of Death World?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. There’s a method to my madness, that’s all you need to know.”

  “There always is, and it’s always unsavory.”

  “Don’t ever ask how they make sausage,” I advised her. “Do you want the coordinates or not?”

  She puffed out her lips disgustedly. “What do I care? The Clavers aren’t very interesting these days.”

  “They are if you want to find out what’s going on—with the coins and the Tech World people, I mean.”

  Galina eyed me for a moment. “All right. Give me the coordinates, I’ll have them investigated.”

  “Uh-uh. You’ll just take them to Drusus for some brownie points. Let me go out there and investigate for myself in person.”