Colony by Benjamin Cross (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

shelter – and it was all the way on the other side of the island. Getting there on foot would be no mean feat, and he was willing to bet that there would be plenty of rock shelters nearby, where they could’ve camped down to await rescue. Hadn’t Lebedev rambled on about animal hides at dinner one time?

But heading for the base would also make a whole lot of sense. From what he recalled, there were a handful of standing structures around the runway, which would make decent enough shelter, plus there would probably be enough leftover crap to make fire with. There might even be other useful equipment, perhaps a radio. More than anything, it would be the obvious place for a rescue party to look. Ava was sharp. Ditto McJones. That’s where he’d find them alright.

He’d left the little cove and headed south. Navigation hadn’t been an issue. Visibility had been good, perhaps as much as thirty feet in places. Hugging the coast had allowed him to keep tabs on the shoreline, so for the most part the island’s underskirt had dictated his movements. He’d made sure to breach the Centaur every so often, raise the hatch and check his location to make sure that he was on course. It was slow and it was painfully old-school for a man with the pinnacle of modern submersible technology teasing his fingertips. But it was working.

As he negotiated the rock formations off the island’s south-western tip, the clarity of the water diminished rapidly. Soon visibility was halved on what it had been, no more than ten, fifteen feet. He slowed and crept the Centaur to the surface. Flipping open the hatch, he climbed up and peered across at western Harmsworth.

At first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He lifted his spectacles – he’d lost the first pair back when he fell into the water, so they were ill-fitting spares that he hated wearing – and rubbed at his tired eyes. Vast swathes of the island seemed to have disappeared. It was as if an enormous eraser had been to work; all that remained were a ghostly outline, a few scattered strokes of rock and a smear or two of sky. The rest was white, thick, oily white that seemed to shimmer and pulsate.

It was shocking how quickly the mist had descended this time. Even as he looked on, it continued its spread, swollen tendrils abandoning the shore and flowing out to sea. He watched, mesmerised, until the surge was too close for comfort. Then he dropped back into the cabin and took the Centaur down.

What little ambient sunlight the water had held was now filtered from existence as the shroud settled overhead. Peterson sighed. It was disconcerting, but it was no show-stopper. He would just have to be careful not to lose sight of the submerged shoreline. Besides, the military base was now only a few more kilometres to the north. He just needed to keep his nerve.

Ahead, something loomed out of the murk and into the Centaur’s lamps. It was a shadow, an elongated shadow, with an angular protrusion at one end. It looked inanimate, bobbing close to the seabed and churning up flurries of sand. If he’d been south of the tundra, he would’ve put money on it being a sunken tree trunk, such was its size and shape. But then the nearest living tree was a thousand miles south of his location.

Warily, he edged the Centaur forward.

2

The carcass belonged to an adult male narwhal, a real old sonofabitch judging by the size and pale colouration. It looked fresh. Its death must have been what had freaked the rest of the pod out earlier. Like dolphins, narwhals were intelligent, highly emotional creatures. The younger animals relied on the older for their knowledge of hunting grounds, migration routes, everything. The death of such an old member would have been traumatic.

Peterson reversed the Centaur out of range of the animal’s giant tusk. “Remember, there’s always life in a dead critter,” his uncle’s voice reminded him. Face stern, he had brandished his three-fingered hand before his eight-year-old nephew. “I got a coyote to thank for this, and that was after I shot him dead.”

As Peterson performed the manoeuvre, the current dragged the narwhal around, revealing an enormous laceration across the side of its head. Fingers of brain emerged like a deep-sea anemone from its pulverised cranium, and a cloud of blood and tissue spewed from the gash.

Peterson had seen similar injuries on seals that had been dragged through ships’ propeller blades in the busy shipping lanes off Greenland. But there sure as shit weren’t any shipping lanes around Harmsworth. Leastways, not yet.

There was only one other explanation, and it spurred Peterson to take off—

Something bolted past the Centaur’s nose. It could have been a seal, but it moved too fast for him to be certain. As he peered out into the murk, something darted the other way. Missed it again!

Then, from nowhere, a slender creature, with the same dark colouration as the surrounding water, torpedoed into the carcass. Definitely not a seal, the creature tore a strip of blubber from the narwhal’s flank, the gouge pumping out blood and clouding up the surrounding brine. There was no longer any doubt in Peterson’s mind. It was another one of those weird lizard birds, a Tansey whatey.

It didn’t seem bothered by the presence of the Sea Centaur. In any case it was obviously no match. Tonnes of cutting-edge machinery versus three hundred pounds or so of chicken lizard. No contest. Yet even just the sight of the creature made him feel strangely vulnerable. “Goddamn things,” he growled. “It’s a goddamn infestation.”

The sensible move would’ve been to get the hell away while it was busy feeding. But this time Peterson couldn’t shift his science brain. He was safe enough, wasn’t he? And the opportunity to watch this new species engaged in its natural feeding behaviour had him tethered to his seat.

Just then, a