Defender of the Future
book one of
The Tidesinger Trilogy

Chapter Nineteen

After the ordeal of the Moonsong Stone and the race up the moonstream to intercept the ship, the Foe ship itself was something of a letdown. They cruised together through deserted corridors, ready at any moment to attack and destroy. Twice they did see Foe, but each time it was a lone drone easily halted in its tracks by Ecco's song and then dispatched with ease by Karkol.

"I hate these things," the shark muttered, shaking his head violently to clear it of the blood-mist. "I hate the damn smell of 'em..."

"Stay focused," Ecco admonished him. "We have to find our way to whatever passes for a control room in this thing."

"And then what?" the shark asked. "You got any idea how these things work?"

"Guess I'll have to figure it out as I go along," Ecco answered tightly. "I managed it in Atlantis, at least... couldn't be much harder."

"I don't think they'll have thoughtfully painted you a circuit diagram this time," Karkol pointed out with a rather desperate grin. "What do we have to do anyway--just find the brood mother and waste her? Sounds simple enough..."

"Let's wait until we see the mother before we make any judgements," Ecco told him. Wry amusement tinged the dolphin's grin. "Karkol, if there's one thing I've learned on this adventure, it's that you should never under any circumstances expect anything to be easy."

The shark said nothing, but he sensed Karkol's irritation. Great whites didn't need to do much thinking, generally--their lives were as simple and predictable as the tides. Greshruk symbolized the type... or did she? Ecco frowned to himself. Things had happened recently which changed everything he had ever learned about them. Greshruk and the sharks had risen to fight for Earth, selflessly sacrificing their own lives to allow the song to be heard. There was more to the Slayer than met the eye, as Afarellan had suggested. He glanced at Karkol, who swam quietly by his side with every air of being calm and confident. And to you too, he thought.

They rounded a corner and came across a place where the corridors diverged. There were three ways to go from here--two passages, round like tubes, led down to somewhere far below, and a third curved steadily upwards. Ecco paused and listened carefully. The faint mechanical humming was coming from above. "Up," he said simply.

"I thought so," Karkol agreed, turning with a flick of his fins. "Maybe we can cripple this thing if we take out its--its engines, or whatever it is makes it fly."

"We can't let any Foe escape," Ecco told him. "The brood mother, especially--somehow we have to destroy the ship and everything on it at the same time."

"Could be difficult." The big shark glanced back the way they had come, a sudden shadow of doubt flickering in his eyes. For a moment he seemed to founder, as if something had disturbed his concentration. "Uh..." He paused, then shook his head slightly and swam on. Ecco followed, a little confused.

"You okay, Karkol?"

The shark glanced back again, and that doubt hardened into decisiveness. "No," he said, and there was a soft growl in his voice. "Keep your voice down, pal. They're behind us. I think they know we're here."

"How?" Ecco turned and stared back down the tunnel. He could hear nothing... but then he saw, almost cut off by the downward curve, the spidery-limbed shadows on the floor. They were growing slowly as their owners approached. "There's no noise! How could you know?"

There was a tense, nervous grin on Karkol's face. "The lateral line... how we little fishies love it. C'mon, let's get moving. There's too many to fight."

"And nowhere to flee," Ecco added sourly, starting to move faster. Karkol just grunted in reply.

They swam up the tunnel, which twisted and turned strangely--it disoriented them, and soon they were no longer sure which way was up. Gravity wasn't around to give them clues now, even the greatly reduced gravity that had operated under Earth's waters. Wherever they were, they were too high or too far for it to operate. The weightlessness--true weightlessness--made Ecco feel a little queasy. He squashed the feeling. Behind them, Foe voices were raised for a moment in a low snarling that had the air of being some sort of conversation.

"They've found our trail," he said. "Remember how they could always track us down before? Either they smell us out or they've got senses we don't know about yet."

The snarling mutter escalated suddenly into the weird screeching Ecco knew so well. Karkol responded instantly, flinging himself forward. "Forget about stealth!" the shark yelled back at him. "We've just gotta get out of here before they bring the whole ship down on us!"

"Right!" Ecco gave chase. Behind them, the water or whatever it was in the ship erupted into a howling as the Foe came after them. They sound angry, he thought, and gulped.

The two fugitives dashed through tubing that looked far too much like it had once been alive for Ecco's taste. The inside of the Foe ship was a maze--tunnels joined other tunnels, everything bisected by the cables and conduits that seemed to have been put there just to get in their way. Either that or this was a part of the ship that wasn't really supposed to be traveled through. He supposed it could have been the latter, given that Karkol had had to chew through the hull to get inside. The question gnawed at him--how could the Foe have built this thing within Earth's oceans? Where had they got the material? How did they even know how to make it?

Flying out of the mouth of a tunnel, Karkol shot to a halt with fins splayed out, and Ecco had to take evasive action to avoid slamming into the shark. In front of them was some sort of wall, a circular plate of oily black metal with concentric ridges across its unhealthy-looking surface. Red lights gleamed faintly in the center. "Dead end," Ecco said, nosing quickly over the door. "I think it's locked." The hum was louder here, but it couldn't drown out the noise of the Foe behind them.

"Then we'll fight them," Karkol said with a snarl in his voice.

Ecco's eyes flickered over their surroundings, searching for a way out. He found it. "Karkol, come over here--quick. There's another of those grates. Maybe we can rip it off between us!"

"And hope it doesn't lead outside the ship," the shark remarked laconically, cruising over to take a look. Ecco backfinned as Karkol tentatively pushed his snout into the metallic grille, then opened his mouth and carefully took hold of a raised edge. Teeth scraped on the surface--he struggled for a better hold, found it, and then with calculated fury jerked his head from side to side, worrying the grille up and making a hole just big enough for them both to slip through. "Ik's krying kto close," Karkol got out through clenched teeth. "Quick!"

Ecco dashed forward and wriggled through the gap--there was a narrow opening beyond--then jammed himself against it and forced it open enough to let Karkol through. There was a flurry in the water around him and a big body shoved past, sandpaper skin grazing Ecco's side, then with undeniable force the grille pulled back into place and repaired itself. They were squashed together in a dark place that was very little wider than themselves.

"Isn't this one of those pipe things?" Karkol asked in a low whisper. "They're all over the place..."

"Could be," Ecco agreed, peering through the metal grille as best he could. The Foe were dimly visible through the mesh as they entered the area where they had been. There was baffled screeching from the alien creatures. Ecco grinned. "They're looking at the door," he informed the shark. "They don't know where we've gone! I think they think we got out through the door!"

"Let's not hang around and watch 'em figure it out." With some difficulty, Karkol turned round in the pipe, and Ecco felt him moving off.

The pipe was very dark, and cramped. Light came thinly in places from other grilles set into the walls at intervals so that they swam through lengths of darkness and patches of light. Ecco could hear the faint scraping of Karkol's fins against the sides, and every time he beat his own tail a little too strongly, it brushed the cool metallic surface at top and bottom. The material felt unpleasant to the touch in some indefinite but vaguely loathsome way.

They seemed to have been traveling for a very long time before anything noteworthy happened. Several times they had passed intersections, where more pipes joined onto the one they were in, but the other passages seemed to hold little else of interest. Ecco glanced out of most of the grilles as they passed by, but he never saw anything that looked hopeful--mostly they were other passages like the one they had left, and once a great wide room full of Foe drones tending machinery. The faint humming never grew any louder--it simply remained, somewhere far above them, a constant aural threat.

There didn't seem to be much activity, and that puzzled Ecco. "You'd have thought that they'd be more concerned," he whispered to Karkol as they passed another of the grilles. "I mean, they know there're two stowaways on board."

"Maybe they don't think we're anything to worry about," Karkol returned in a low voice. "Look at it this way--we aren't going anywhere. They probably figure they can just pick us up at their leisure."

Ecco thought about that for a while. It didn't feel a very comforting thought. He followed Karkol's tail through the darkness of the pipes, and only happened to glance through one of the grilles by accident. What he saw there made him stop dead. "Karkol, come back here! Quick!"

The shark backfinned with some difficulty--he could barely turn round in the tight confines of the pipe. "What?" he hissed. His black eyes gleamed faintly in the reflected light from the grille.

Ecco pushed his nose into the little puddle of light, and stared out into a large room. Their pipe seemed to be secreted somewhere far up, only a little below the roof. Misty contrails of vapor curled over the floor far below. The walls were covered with the strange tubes and protuberances of Foe architecture. Hundreds of odd lumps and bumps on the floor were partly shielded by the mist, but in the closest few Ecco could clearly see some sort of movement--a flicker of something. There were no Foe visible anywhere in the area.

"Yecch," Karkol said with an air of surprise. "Can you smell that?"

"I don't have a sense of smell," Ecco hissed back, irritated at the shark's superior senses, but he opened his mouth anyway to take a taste of the water. An indescribable sensation swept over him--a hot, overripe taste, with a sickly-sweet tinge. "Ugh!" he exclaimed, forgetting for a moment to keep his voice down--Karkol nudged him sharply. "What is that?" he asked, lowering his voice again.

The shark nosed carefully at the grille. "Let's find out," he said softly.

"You're not serious," Ecco began, but Karkol suddenly swung his head into the metal mesh with enough force to blow it right out of its seatings. It drifted to the floor, writhing and jerking as if it were a severed limb. Smoothly Karkol slid out into the open space, and Ecco followed nervously. Without the grille between them and the vapor, the atmosphere of the room was even more pungent. Billows of the fog rolled past their faces and the sickly-sweet stench made Ecco gag. Steeling himself, he dived down to examine the objects affixed to the floor.

The mist got in the way, and he had to shove his nose right up to one of the things before he could see it properly. It was a ridged, oval shape with a jagged edge at the top. The inside was hollow and quite empty. The whole thing was brittle, and very slightly translucent. Ecco frowned, wondering what exactly it reminded him of.

His eyes slid sideways, and he saw the thing that was faintly visible through the unbroken skin of another nearby vessel. The sickly tropical heat in the room was suddenly very simple to explain.

"Karkol," Ecco hissed, hardly daring to raise his voice. "These are eggs. Foe eggs. This is some kind of hatchery..!"

The unborn Foe larva was an odd, almost sadly grotesque thing--the nearest Ecco could come to describing it was a sort of fat and legless shrimp. It pulsated slightly to the rhythm of a heartbeat, curled up snugly in its shelled prison. Long antennae were curled neatly around the plump, sleeping body. The vestiges of tentacles were visible along its sides--they would grow, eventually, into long barbed limbs. The sight was revolting, but at the same time he couldn't help feeling a strange surge of pity for the ugly little unborn thing. It was so helplessly horrible...

But still... There must be hundreds of eggs here. All still, silent, waiting for their moment to be born. The larva he could see through the shell wasn't fully formed yet, but it was getting there. Ecco glanced down at the floor, and saw something else that froze his blood. A thin line... an indent. A trapdoor, designed to be opened...

The Foe plot became clear to him, all at once, like a rush of freezing water. This was why they had built the ship. This was why they had gone to all that trouble to get airborne, to leave the depths of the ocean where they had been safe. These larvae would hatch, maybe not right now, but soon. The ship would be in position, high above the surface of the Earth. Then, when the right time and place had arrived, the trapdoor would be opened. Infant Foe would shower down onto a world still reeling from the aftermath of the first onslaught. Nothing would be able to escape--there would be nowhere to hide.

"They don't want to leave," he whispered softly. "They're quite happy where they are..."

Karkol was opposite him, quite suddenly. Ecco tore his attention away from the trapdoor: he looked up into the cold black eyes of the shark. From that expression he knew that there was no need to explain--it was the same expression he had seen on Greshruk as she tore into the Foe at the Moonsong Stone. Karkol knew--he had seen, and understood, just like Ecco had.

"I think I fancy a bite," Karkol said.

Ecco looked down at the eggs with their horrendous cargo. "I think I'll join you."

"We'll start at either end, and meet in the middle." The shark turned and glided off towards one end of the long chamber, suddenly quite serene. "We can't afford to miss any," he said, glancing back. "These things are the future of the Foe."

"And that's what we're here for." Ecco turned towards the nearest egg, and though his words were spoken to Karkol, his eyes remained on the unborn larva within. "To destroy the Foe's future... and defend our own."

Only a flurry of movement answered him, and the thin, dying scream of an infant Foe. Karkol's jaws closed on one of the eggs with a fury that was quite shocking--the shell burst, as did the creature within. Foe blood mixed with ichor from the inside of the egg, and flooded out into the hatchery. Ecco heard scratching from the floor, and realized that the other eggs were starting to hatch, perhaps forewarned by the death of one of their own. He flung himself into battle with a relish that quite surprised himself.

It didn't actually take too long. A mixture of mist and Foe blood soon turned the water muddy as egg after egg was pierced, either by Karkol's teeth or Ecco's ramming snout. Not one of the larvae escaped--they saw to that. The shark remained perfectly controlled despite the amount of blood in the water, biting through each egg with careful, almost dainty precision. Once they had done, Ecco turned and saw that a number of the larvae had struggled free of the eggs after all. They wriggled grotesquely as they clustered up against the far wall, mewling pathetically and hopelessly clumsy in their efforts to escape. Their blind, eyeless snouts gaped at him in futile defiance, bristling with pale translucent teeth. Calmly he cruised over to them and dispatched the squealing larvae one by one with blows that smashed their heads or chests. Karkol picked the last few off the walls, and bit them neatly in two.

The great door at the end hissed as it rose to admit Foe warriors. Enraged at the devastation, they charged like furies towards the two invaders. The bloodied, churned-up water was filled anew with their screaming.

"Let's get out of here!" Karkol yelled, shooting towards the grille from whence they had entered. Ecco followed, dashing between the smashed eggs as the Foe snapped at his tail. They piled into the pipe and took off, each expecting the sickening pain of attack any moment. It never came. Ecco and Karkol were able to slip through the narrow pipes because of their own streamlined shapes--the Foe got stuck.

"It's okay!" Ecco called to the retreating shape of the shark. "I don't think they can follow us!"

"They'll think of something!" Karkol shouted back. Indeed, there was an ominous metallic scraping sound from the wall of their pipe, suggesting that the Foe were now furious enough to have started digging through the hull.

Ecco let out a nervy little yelp. "Go! Go!" He pushed forward, shoving at Karkol's tail. Instantly the shark was moving again, dashing forward through the dark tunnel. The scratching didn't follow them--the piping passed effortlessly through thick walls that prevented the Foe from following their progress.

They didn't stop until they had entered a still tighter pipe and left the hatchery far behind. Ecco grimaced, realizing that he could still taste the miasma of blood and sweetness that had filled the atmosphere in that room. Now, all was quiet again, save for the distant humming--closer now.

"Now what?" he asked out loud, listening to his heart as it slowed down.

There was a loud mechanical grating noise. Karkol jerked and tried to turn round; his body hit the sides of the pipe and he growled in pain. Ecco, stuck behind the big shark, struggled to see what was going on--Karkol's body blocked the whole pipe. "What is it?" he asked, panicking.

Karkol's words came back to him slightly muffled. "Some sort of door just shut on me. Pipe's closed. We're gonna have to back up."

Ecco tried to turn and found that he could--just. It required an inordinate amount of contortion on his part, but by bending his long body right in half and tucking his head and flippers in (that brought his nose into forced contact with his own tail, which was somewhere no dolphin's snout had willingly gone before) he managed it. Just in time to see the other gate slam shut. "Uh-oh," he said quietly.

"What?" Karkol struggled weakly, but gave it up as a bad job--he wasn't half as flexible as the dolphin. "What's up? Is it them?"

"No..." He swam forward, ignoring an ache in muscles he'd just strained, and nosed at the door. It was thick metal, certainly nothing they could chew through in a hurry. "I think they've closed off all the ventilation shafts, Karkol. We're stuck in this section of tunnel 'til they open it up again."

"You mean we're trapped here? They could just check the pipes one by one until they find us..."

"That's probably their plan," Ecco agreed grimly. "Is there a grille near you? We're gonna have to get out of here and back into the ship."

There was more bumping and scraping as Karkol struggled to back up. After a moment, his voice came back. "Yeah, there is one. Leads out into another big room. I can't see any Foe. You want I bash through it?"

"If you can." Ecco listened, but he could hear no sound of Foe, although there was something else hovering at the outer edge of his consciousness now. He frowned, trying to make it out--he couldn't, the humming was drowning it out. "Karkol, hurry if you can. I don't want to be stuck in here too long."

"You and me both," the shark muttered. There was another bump, and then a loud reverberating clang. "Got it." Ecco felt a wash of changing pressure on his tail as Karkol exited the pipe. He grinned, then realized that he was facing the wrong way. He would have to turn round or swim backwards. He groaned softly. It seemed he was having to pick up a lot of unusual delphine skills...

Clumsily, he backfinned the two or three lengths until the light of the opening washed over his side. Karkol cruised past, grinning cheerfully. "All clear!" the shark called, whisking by. "C'mon out, Ecco, you're not gonna believe what I just found!"

Ecco backfinned again and squeezed his head out of the opening. No longer muffled by the pipe, the odd sound hit him.

Dolphins.

He could hear dolphins talking.