Defender of the Future
Book one of
The Tidesinger Trilogy

Chapter Four

Ecco nearly froze in fear right there and then and, had the foe caught up with him, his story would have been much shortened. Something saved him--he caught sight of a movement in the sand, and dived swiftly to see what it was--hoping against hope that something had survived the mysterious holocaust in his home bay.

The sand erupted in a little fountain as something fought its way up from below. Ecco drew back a little but remained where he was. Though the shrieking was still audible, he judged that the monsters were as yet a long way off. There was still time.

A bright red claw appeared through the sand, and long antennae. Then, with a heave, the hermit crab freed itself from its subterranean refuge. The mollusc brushed itself down, struggling to hold up the heavy nautilus shell it had appropriated, and then caught sight of him looking at it. In the blink of an eye, the hermit crab had disappeared into its shell, which rocked gently on the sand with the empty current.

Ecco nudged the shell with his snout. It rolled over onto its side, but there was no more sign of the occupant. "Please," he said desperately, "come out. I need to talk to you."

There was a stony silence from the shell.

"Please, I'm begging you. I won't hurt you--I promise! I... I just want to know what happened here." The crab made no movement, and he let out a shrill whimper of frustration. "Where did they go? Where did they take my family? Answer me!"

The shell rocked a little, and then a cautious eye peered out. It withdrew again quickly, suspicious. Ecco nudged it again, rolling it over on the pale sand, and was rewarded with a few choice words in the molluscidae reef dialect.

"Scat, mammal," the crab snapped, scrabbling for a hold. It righted itself with difficulty, struggling with the weight of its borrowed shell.

"Tell me what happened," Ecco begged. "They came, didn't they? Where did they take everyone?"

The crab regarded him out of its odd stalked eyes, antennae twitching grumpily. "Didn't see nothin'. Piss off an' leave me alone."

"You must have seen something--you were here! Please, don't you have any idea where they went?" Ecco ventured too close and had to draw back as a claw waved perilously close to his snout.

The crab scuttled backwards away from him, holding its claw up like a sword. "Tol' ya, didn't see nothin'."

He sighed heavily, and let himself sag a little in the water. "Look," he said tiredly, "I know you're scared of me--I know you're probably scared of the creatures too--but if you tell me what happened, where they went, anything!--I'll try and stop them. I'm going to find my family if it kills me." He paused, regarding the crab out of one eye. It had relaxed and was looking at him with a peculiar kind of confused fascination. "Just tell me what you saw," he said slowly, "and I'll go away and leave you alone. In fact, I'll--"

The crab let out a yelp of fear as his jaws clamped around the nautilus shell. Ecco lifted the mollusc up and shook it violently, nearly shaking the startled mollusc right out of its protective carapace. It clung on by a claw. "Shake it out of you if I have to," Ecco growled from behind a mouthful of nautilus.

"L-l-lemme g-go..." the crab stuttered, too dizzy to try and crawl back into its wildly moving shell.

"Tell me!" Ecco whistled shrilly.

"I'll t-tell you--just stop sh-sh-shaking me..."

He stopped, amidst a cloud of bubbles that had been shaken up by his movement, but he didn't put down the shell. The crab clambered right inside again, with something like indecent haste. A few miniscule droppings floated in the water, terror-induced. Ecco was actually holding the shell with extreme care, not wishing to crush it in his jaws; the crab didn't have to know that. "What happened? It was those things, wasn't it?"

The crab had retreated so far into its shell that he heard its small voice coming from somewhere near the back of his mouth. "If you knew, why'd'ja ask me?" it asked in a huffy tone of voice.

"My pod--did you see--?"

"Yeah, yeah." The mollusc sounded grumpy again, its panic having abated. "I saw. They took 'em. There was this thing and it sucked up everything..."

"A... thing?"

"I dunno what it was! Just a thing. A really BIG thing." Ecco remembered that the molluscidae, living as they did in a world of giants, had no eyes for anything much larger than a grouper. A large shark, or one of the creatures, would appear so vast to them that they would be unlikely to perceive it as living. By luck or good judgement he appeared to have found an unusually intelligent specimen in this crab. The crab scrabbled, somewhere inside its shell, and then went on reluctantly. "Your lot were took alive. Can't say I miss 'em, noisy squeaking things. Couldn't catch no shrimp when you lot were in the area, you scared 'em all right off."

"There aren't any shrimp to catch now," Ecco sighed miserably. "You didn't see where they took the dolphins?"

"Didn't see nothin' about that. Guess it were outa the bay. Now put me down." A claw waved gingerly out of the shell, disliking the three feet of empty space between it and the sand.

Ecco gently deposited the nautilus shell on the floor of the bay. The crab came out slowly, scrabbled on the sand with relief, and then righted itself with some difficulty. It wobbled off across the empty sand with an air of freezing dignity, obviously pretending hard that the entire incident had never happened.

"Get out of here," Ecco called to it. "Those things are coming back." He received no answer, though he fancied he perceived an added hurriedness in the mollusc's unsteady gait.

Turning, he listened, finding that the screeching was louder now. They were coming for him. Ecco realised with a start that there was only one way out of the bay--he would have to swim towards the things, maybe go right past them. Well... he had gotten away from them once before, and he was no longer leaving bloodtrail. He knew better than to look for a hiding place; there was nowhere to hide now, not with all the weeds and plants gone as well as the animals. And he couldn't creep into a cave or bury himself in the sand; he needed to breathe air regularly. The dolphin growled in irritation.

He began to swim towards the bay entrance, letting his body do all the work while his mind worked furiously on a task of its own. An entire bay, and the straits, and the coral reef! And before that, Orcus's pod and presumably Sun River too! These things weren't just hunting. There was more to it than that.

Ecco realised he had no plan of action. Where could he go? Somehow he had to keep on with Corse's original plan--he had to find Sendarian, or at least somebody older and wiser than himself. He did know one thing: he couldn't seek out other dolphins. Orcus, by coming to the Sapphire Bay pod after escaping, had led the monsters right to Ecco's own family, and while he couldn't find it in himself to blame the Sun River dolphin, he didn't want to do the same to some other unsuspecting group. But there was something special about him, all the same--right now, Ecco had a feeling that he knew more about the monsters than anybody else. He had seen them and survived--even Orcus hadn't got a close look, if his story held true.

The screeching was loud now, and he was at the mouth of the bay. Ecco sent out sonar clicks, and the echoes coming back showed him the monsters heading straight for him, arrowing through the water like angels of death. Too close! As before, the dolphin had a split second to react: he leaped up high, as high as he could go. The things rushed through the water beneath him.

He screamed in shock as something raked the air above his head. Another one--flying like the gulls! Was there anything these monsters couldn't do? Throwing up his tail, Ecco felt the flukes slam into something hard that cracked, and then he crashed back into the water. He was swimming instantly, arrowing through the sea as only a dolphin could. The foe raced after him, silent death in the water. Ecco tasted blood, but knew it wasn't his own this time; the savaged remains of a porpoise turned gently in the current as he dashed past. Two of the monsters turned aside and set upon the body with ferocious hunger--he heard the growls and the tearing, and then the terrible screeching as they started to fight each other over the scrap.

They compete, then, he thought dispassionately, and they're very hungry. He might be able to escape them if he led them onto something else... No. He remembered the dead waters, and he knew that he couldn't just let them do it again.

They were out into the open waters now, and the foe showed no signs of slowing down. Ecco realised that he would soon tire at this speed. He raced onwards, forcing his body to work harder, realised he needed air. He jumped, gasped in a breath, and felt the air pressure on his back change as the airborne ones screamed towards him. They crashed into the water, just missing his tail as he sped onwards. Ecco dived, seeing the dark blue-black before him as the continental shelf fell away. The foe were actually outpacing him now; he swerved like a panicked mackerel as one of them came up on his right hand side. He needed air again.

They passed a blue shark, and instantly the screeching reached a new pitch. The luckless predator was instantly set upon by the monsters as it turned to flee; Ecco sped past as the blood cloud billowed out into the water. He had no time to feel sorry for the shark, because two of the foe were still after him. The momentary distraction had bought him a little time, at any rate. He surfaced, gasped down air, then dived again.

He was starting to tire now; he knew he was slowing down, and forced himself to go faster. His muscles were becoming starved of oxygen despite the frequent breaths he had taken; dolphins were very good at storing air in their blood for the swift bursts of action needed to escape a shark, but never before had Ecco needed to maintain this sort of speed for this long. He needed a new plan--but what could he do, out in the open ocean with nowhere to hide? Eyes rolling in terror, he sped onwards, hearing the screeching of the monsters as they stayed put only a length behind him.

Syuuii!

Strength was starting to leave him. He had to breathe. Ecco jumped again, a long, low curve; his belly only just cleared the surface of the water. He took a shaky breath while still airborne and was then back in the water again. The monsters had gained on him even with that tiny delay.

That dispassionate voice of logic spoke up again. Dive, it said.

Ecco didn't even think about it. He jumped once more, took another breath--practically filling himself with precious oxygen--and then flung up his tail and headed for the depths at the nearly vertical. Instinct drove his actions--but instinct with a strong grain of logic. Fish stayed at a certain depth, that he knew for certain. Sharks would chase, but generally only along the horizontal plane; they would give up quickly if you forced them to work at an altitude at which they were not accustomed. That was whale thinking, Ecco remembered: dolphins did not often get the chance to explore the lower levels of their world.

He did not allow himself to wonder whether the monsters would be affected by depth, since they had already proven they could travel in air as well as water. Ecco had no time to consider such things; less than a second lay between himself and destruction. He had to chance it--anything to make the monsters break off their pursuit and get him a few moments to rest.

Then again, if they could adapt to different depths--if they were as at home in the water as they seemed to be--Ecco was probably going to die. At the least, he vowed grimly to himself, I'll deprive them of the chance to feast on my dead body. Somehow the thought was strangely comforting--it gave him something upon which to concentrate.

Down, down... away from the light and the blues of his pelagic realm. Below him lay blue darkening through a whole spectrum of marine shades, a chromatic fantasy. Cerulean faded to cyan around him, then down through Prussian to navy. And, in front of his bottle nose, hovered always the straight-down-dark, the blackness. There was no sandy bottom to this water; nothing but an infinite descent into cold. The whales called it the Crushing Dark, he remembered.

The monsters were still coming. Water began to press hard on Ecco's sides, reminding him that the pressure would grow and continue to grow. It was becoming fast colder now, as the last of the sunlight fell behind. The shrieks of the monsters filled his ears, and he drove his tail harder, pushing forward into the black. It stretched out before him, velvety and deep as the sky. He remembered calf-tales on summer nights, about how the deep had its own stars--fish that carried light with them. So, there is a sky down here too, he thought. Just the same--dark, and cold, and unreachable.

He was starting to suffer from the pressure. Never before had he gone this far down. The darkness enfolded him like a shroud; it rustled across his skin with the touch of kelp fronds, barely tangible, like a dream. He wondered whether he would get to see the stars at the bottom, or whether his air would run out first. The monsters did not seem to be slowing...

Down...

Ecco slowed. The water crushed into his sides like a vice. It was hard simply to move now, let alone maintain his breakneck pace. He blinked; he could see nothing at all. It was almost like being dead might be, if he had the power to imagine that with any accuracy. The shrieking of the monsters was loud in his ears, and he knew they were coming up fast behind him. A slender stream of bubbles escaped him; he couldn't see, but he imagined them winding their way up to the surface like a thread of silver, back through the rainbow of blue to return at last to the plane of air from whence they had come.

He felt the pressure increase slightly as the foe approached; the wash of water against his body caused by their swift movement.

And then, with surprising eagerness the fighter's heart in him began to beat. Caught in a wash of rage Ecco turned on his own length, facing upwards to meet the beasts. He could see them with his sonar now; they were coming down like thunder, searing through the dark, still water with jaws already agape. A squealing, scraping cry of challenge escaped the dolphin, and he drew his tail in, ready to charge.

A giant bulk passed by him--something as huge and wonderful as the sky itself. It filled the whole of the water; the wash of its passing knocked him tail-over-tip through the darkness. The echo of Ecco's little snarl of challenge faltered and died as it was answered: a rumble, turning to a roar and then a swiftly escalating screech, with power enough to shake the water for miles around.

One of the creatures managed to make its escape back upwards to the light, swimming with the speed of a mako shark. The other was not fast enough as it turned round, and it was caught in the gigantic jaws of the sperm whale as they slammed to. Ecco distinctly heard the brittle crunch, like cracking nautilus shells, and a moment later he tasted something acrid on the water--the blood of the thing, bitter and alien. Its dying cry hammered into his brain.

Unable to do any more, Ecco waited numbly as the swirling currents carried the blood of the creature around and past him. He felt the wash of water again as the whale turned ponderously in his direction, and remembered everything bad he had ever heard about sperm whales--the biggest and most powerful predators in the entire sea.