Hunt the Space-Witch! Seven Adventures in Time and Space Read online

  Hatred surged through him—hatred for the vicious alien overlords. For the thousandth time he relived that struggle beneath the sea, where, tangled in wreathing kelp and choking for breath, he had drawn the life of a Dhuchay’y and saved his own.

  He still had souvenirs of that encounter, eight of them: seven scabbing claw-marks down his back—and one amulet. He looked down at the amulet now.

  It was small, made of polished onyx; a lambent flame glowed in its heart, a tiny worm of fire that danced dizzily without tiring.

  “Come in, Kubril,” he said suddenly, hearing a knock.

  The first officer entered, limping from his wounds. He took a seat heavily opposite Dovirr. “Aye,” he said, seeing the amulet. “Fondling your pretty toy again, Dovirr.”

  The Thalassarch rolled the amulet idly over the table. “Do we dare attack Vostrok, do you think?” he asked.

  Kubril stared at him. A raw, livid wound ran down one side of his face; a thick lock of his beard had been ripped away. “Attack Vostrok?” Kubril chuckled. “I’d sooner attack the sea itself.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sire, we have seventeen ships to our fleet. We might gather them all for the attack—but who knows how many of the aliens there be? We can count on no more than five hundred swords.”

  “And if the other Thalassarchs cooperate?”

  “Four thousand, then. Four thousand men—but even so, we couldn’t get near the city.”

  “Why?”

  “The Dhuchay’y are on the alert now. They’ll guard Vostrok. They live in the sea, as well as on the land; the seas will be thick with them as our boats approach. Recall what happened the other week?”

  Dovirr scowled. “Aye.” He tugged at his beard angrily. “They would tip our boats as soon as we drew near. And the harbor is too shallow to bring the Garyun near enough.”

  “If we could ever land our men—” Kubril said.

  “The Dhuchay’y will have a cordon of swimmers surrounding Vostrok the instant our ships appear on the horizon. We could neither get boats through to shore nor land men.”

  Walking to the port, he stared out in the general direction of Vostrok. “The aliens live smugly there—and, when they see we are powerless, they will take the rest of their cities back, and put us to death.”

  “I see now why the men of old created the Seaborn,” said Kubril. “The only possible way to attack the Dhuchay’y is in the sea. Strike at their main line of defenses; then march to the city!”

  “The Seaborn failed,” Dovirr pointed out. “Else mankind would not have fallen.”

  “The Seaborn failed because they came too little and too late! The world was already in alien grasp when the Seaborn were loosed upon the Dhuchay’y. If—”

  “Enough,” Dovirr said wearily. This had been his first taste of defeat. Heretofore, his progress had been rapid; now it seemed blocked utterly. He was not used to defeat; it rankled within him, leaving him harsh and sour. “You talk of miracles, Kubril. Leave me.”

  “Very well,” Kubril said quietly. The hulking first mate rose, looked pityingly at his captain, and left.

  Dovirr watched the door close. He gripped the alien amulet in his hand tightly, in a paroxysm of frustration.

  He raised the amulet on high as if to dash it to powder against the cabin wall—as if destroying the trinket would crush the race that had forged it.

  Suddenly, the amulet burned coolly in his palm. Dovirr gasped.

  He saw the bottom of the sea.

  He saw total blackness begin to give way to faint light. Strange creatures moved with stately grace through the deep; it was as if he himself were below the waters.

  In the distance were towers springing from the ocean floor—towers grotesquely festooned with clinging sea-vegetation, enwrapped with streamers of brown kelp and crusted over with anemone and budding coral, bright with glaring reds and greens and astonishing iodine-purples that no human eye would behold.

  None but Dovirr’s. He stared at the towers, then approached them.

  It was a city. Disinterested fish flitted through the smashed windows of the dead buildings, gaping open-mouthed, goggle-eyed, in pseudo-surprise. Coiling moray eels wound around what had been television antennas and yawned, baring their myriad tiny, razor-sharp teeth. Dovirr peered in a window. An enormous turtle sprawled on a sagging floor, its soft green flippers scuttling idly, disturbing the layer of silt that had formed through the ages.

  This was a dead world. Looking up, Dovirr saw the black curtain of the water’s top cutting off the sea from the sky, and fancied he could see the glimmering sun penetrating the depths. He moved on, stalking silently.

  Sea-spiders twice the height of a man crawled over the faces of the buildings. Here, there was merely a mound where a building had been; the sea was reclaiming, concealing, reshaping. Strange new forms were emerging; in a thousand years more, no one would ever know there had been a city here at the bottom of the sea.

  And the endless sea would roll on.

  Dovirr shot forward through the water, moving with the easy grace of disembodiment. Startled fish turned as he went past—and, seeing nothing, continued on their way.

  He came to an anchor—a mighty titanium chain, each link feet-thick, stretching upward to a cloudy bulk far above. It was a city-anchor—one of the guy-wires that held a floating city in place. He rose along it, headed toward the surface.

  Then he was thirty feet beneath the surface of the sea, and saw the Dhuchay’y. There were ten of them, in the shallow artificial sand shelf just off Vostrok—burying things. White things.

  His blood chilled. They were eggs.

  The Dhuchay’y were breeding. Soon, their numbers would increase.

  Hastily he shot away; struck out for mid-sea. His mind, guided by the amulet, slid smoothly through the waters. He spied another sunken city, dipped to observe it.

  Fingers brushed his mind. Thoughts came:

  Who are you, intruder?

  Dovirr froze, let his mind range in all directions until he found what he wanted to see.

  A friend, he replied. I am a friend.

  What seek you down here?

  I’ll explain. Come to me, Dovirr’s mind said. And the Seaborn came. Dovirr watched the lithe creature heading toward the point from which Dovirr’s thoughts emanated.

  Suddenly the Seaborn stopped; its mind radiated perplexity.

  Where are you, stranger?

  Tensely, Dovirr thought: Above the sea. Only my mind roves below the sea.

  How?

  I use an amulet stolen from the alien invaders, Dovirr said. I know not how it junctions, but it sends my mind down to the deeps.

  There was the equivalent of a chuckle. The aliens, then, must manufacture what we have of nature, the Seaborn said.

  What mean you?

  There is no way to speak beneath the sea. My people … communicate with the mind. The aliens need toys to focus their mind-powers beneath the seas, it seems.

  Dovirr understood now the nature of the amulet he had snatched from the dying Dhuchay’y. The alien young lived in the sea, and spoke the language of the sea; when the amphibious creatures grew older, they left the sea to dwell on land. When returning to the sea they needed the amulets to communicate with one another, having lost the ability through maturing.

  He studied the Seaborn before him. In his natural element, the mutant man was the epitome of grace; the feathery gills flickered in and out with dizzying speed, while the Seaborn’s heavy flukes kept him serenely stabilized in the water.

  Your people have killed many of mine, the Seaborn said. If you yourself were here, perhaps I would kill you.

  We have fought long and for the wrong reasons, said Dovirr. We are both men.

  Yes. But your people hate my people.

  Not I. Vividly, Dovirr transmitted the image of the long-ago scene when Gowyn had uproariously watched the agonizing death of a captive Seaborn. Dovirr’s own land-nurtured emotions came through: his f
eeling of sharp horror, his insistence that Gowyn put a stop to the atrocity.

  You are not like the others, the Seaborn said. I am called Halgar. I see you are different.

  Dovirr replied: I have common cause with you.

  Yes, land-brother?

  Dovirr smiled. Long ago, men from the skies came to our world. My people—the land-people—created yours then, to help in the struggle against the invaders.

  We failed, Halgar said. There were but a hundred of us. It was not enough.

  How many are you now?

  Many millions, Halgar replied. We cover the seas thickly, land-brother.

  Dovirr felt his mind growing weary under the strain of communicating. Gathering all his strength, he projected a final thought: Know, then, that the aliens have come again! Will you give your help—and end the misunderstanding between our peoples?

  He hovered, mind suspended in the sea, awaiting Halgar’s response. There was silence for a moment, the deafening silence of the depths. Then:

  We will help you, Dovirr of the land-world!

  Chapter Six

  The ships gathered.

  Slowly, the Sea-Lords of forgotten Terra gathered their might, massed their armada in the heart of the roiling ocean. United for the first time in ten centuries, the Thalassarchs mustered their power.

  They met in the Western Sea, at Dovirr’s call, in Dovirr’s territory. Suspiciously at first, then open-heartedly as they learned of the Dhuchay’y’s return, they came, thirsting for battle, longing to bury their rusting swords in alien hide, hungry for the spurt of alien golden blood.

  And at their head, acclaimed by all, the youngest of the eight leaders:

  Dovirr Stargan, Thalassarch of the Western Sea, Lord of the Black Ocean—

  Dovirr Stargan, Thalassarch of the Nine Seas!

  They massed in mid-ocean, seventy ships, nearly four thousand swords, and readied themselves for the assault on Vostrok. The ships swung into battle position, raised their war-flags.

  In Vythain, in Dimnon, in the fifty floating cities of the sea-world, the landsmen cowered, wondering what strange compulsion had brought the Eight Thalassarchs together in one sea, why the Sea-Lords had gathered, what awesome battle was to be fought. Snug in their landbound homes, they little dreamed that the aliens from the stars had come again, had taken back the proudest of the cities they had built.

  Terra had been forgotten by the stars, and during the time of its forgetting the Sea-Lords had grown strong. Now, the aliens had remembered. They had come to reclaim their captive world—

  But now, things would be different.

  The sea boiled. Flukes broke the waves, sank down again, rose, flashed brightly in the sunlight, slipped beneath the white crests. The war-fleet watched; the Seaborn were on the march!

  From the corners of the world they came, thousands upon thousands of them. Dovirr stood at the prow of the Garyun, the Sea-Lords’ flagship, and looked down on a sea thick with the mutant once-men.

  They had bred—and they had had an entire world of water in which to breed. Just as once the landmen had numbered in the billions, now the Seaborn, beginning with the mere hundred created by long-dead Terran geneticists, had proliferated, had been fruitful and multiplied.

  Now they disported themselves in the sea before the Terran armada. Dovirr waited, while they assembled. Clutching the precious amulet in his hand, he let his mind rove out among theirs to share in the joy of the sea. He spoke with Halgar the Seaborn, who led the legions of the sea as Dovirr did his fleet.

  We come, Halgar said. The aliens shall not live!

  Earth will be free, said Dovirr. They will never come a third time. How many are you, now?

  Millions. Ready yourself, land-brother. At your word, we make for Vostrok!

  Tenseness swept the gathered armada. Dovirr beckoned to Kubril; the first officer was staring down at the tight-packed phalanxes of Seaborn with mingled disgust and awe. Like the other Sea-Lords, he had not fully overcome his hatred of the mutant water-breathers, even now when he was locked in alliance with them.

  “Send the word,” Dovirr ordered. “To Duvenal, to the left, and Murduien at my right. We sail in an hour; be ready to lift anchor.”

  “Aye.” Kubril swiftly set to the task.

  Dovirr grasped the amulet. Halgar?

  I hear you, land-brother.

  We sail in an hour. The time has come for you to begin the journey to Vostrok.

  I hear, Halgar said.

  Flukes glistened in the sunlight. The Seaborn swept their mighty arms forward; the army of swimmers began to draw away from the anchored ships.

  The attack on Vostrok had begun.

  The Gayrun struck anchor about a league off Vostrok, and the other Sea-Lords filled in the formation circling the island-city. Dovirr shouted to his men as they dropped the mighty anchor over the side.

  Then he turned toward the city—and he saw the clustering Seaborn.

  “Look at them,” he whispered. Pride choked his voice—pride in the sleek men of the sea, even pride in the ancients who had somehow altered Man so he could breathe the ocean.

  The sea bubbled with their numbers.

  Through his glass, Dovirr watched the encounter. Massed Seaborn swarmed the island on all sides, forming a ring almost a mile thick, a brown carpet threshing in the water. Dovirr’s heart rose as he saw the young Dhuchay’y being hauled from their subaquatic nests, being ripped to pieces on the surface of the water. Eggs, golden blood, upturned bodies.

  A dull boom—the Dhuchay’y shore installations gunning the Seaborn. A shower of blue spume went up as the cannons barked—but as the alien shells landed, as the ranks were thinned, other of the Seaborn fought their way up from the depths to take the place of the casualties.

  “Down boats!” Dovirr shouted.

  The cry resounded from ship to ship. “Down boats!”

  The sound of boats thumping the water was heard. Dovirr headed one; at his left was Kubril, and farther along he could see the boats of the other Thalassarchs. Oars dug the waves. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred Terran boats sped forward to the scene of battle.

  They reached the edge of the Seaborn ring. Dovirr, despite himself, was astonished by the way the sea-creatures had arrayed themselves, shoulder to shoulder, completely clogging the water a few inches below the surface.

  And now the strategy Dovirr and Halgar the Seaborn had devised went into effect.

  Four thousand Terrans, in full armor, left their boats at the edge of the Seaborn ring. They were barefoot. Led by Dovirr they advanced over the massed Seaborn, walking on their shoulders, running and leaping over the shifting floor of once-human bodies.

  The Seaborn maintained steady support. Here, there, Dovirr saw one of his men lose his footing and slip, and saw webbed hands reach up to steady the fallen one.

  The Dhuchay’y shore-battery barked, and ten square feet of Seaborn vanished, cutting a gaping hole in the bridge. But instantly from below surged a hundred more, filling the gap. Countless reinforcements lurked beneath the sea.

  Now, Dovirr could see the aliens standing on the shore of their captured city. Some of them were venturing out into the water—and being dragged under instantly, to be ripped apart by the waiting hordes. Others, more cautious, hung indecisively back on land.

  Dovirr reached the shore first. He sprang up, drawing his sword, and ripped upward into an alien belly. A steaming torrent of golden blood poured forth.

  “Onward!” he yelled. “Onward!”

  He cut a swath through the aliens and looked back, saw the Terran swordsmen advancing grimly over the packed sea. The Dhuchay’y defense had been negated completely; their hopes of keeping the Terrans away by means of an underwater network of defenders had vanished under the vast counter-attack by the Seaborn.

  The Terrans were packed shoulder to shoulder now, just as the Seaborn had been, advancing in a solid mass, wielding their swords before them. The aliens, ill prepared for such an assault by a foe hithert
o held in contempt, gave ground.

  Dovirr and his men isolated a pocket of perhaps fifty Dhuchay’y, fencing them in with a wall of flashing steel.

  “To the sea with them!” Kubril shouted suddenly, and Dovirr joined the shout. It was a fitting doom.

  “Aye, to the sea!” he shouted.

  They drove the panic-stricken aliens before them to the edge of the seawall—and the Seaborn, realizing what was being done, leaped from the water in delight to seize the huge amphibians and drag them down into the element of their birth—and the element that would bring them death. Onward, onward, the Earthmen forced the aliens, who one by one dropped into the arms of the waiting, jubilant Seaborn.

  From the heart of Vostrok now poured reinforcements—the rest of the Dhuchay’y enclave, no doubt. Dovirr smiled grimly. The aliens had returned to their abandoned province expecting to find crushed serfs; instead, they were getting a most unexpected welcome.

  The aliens who advanced now bristled with weapons; hand-cannons sent thermal vibrations skimming toward the Earthmen. Heat rose; the Terrans in their armor poured sweat. Around him, Dovirr saw men falling. He dropped back, crouched behind a dead Dhuchay’y, sliced upward at the sickening bulk of an alien.

  Suddenly, a shout went up.

  The city-people! The people of Vostrok were joining the battle!

  They came thundering down out of the city by the hundreds, carrying kitchen-knives, benches, any improvised weapon at all. They fell upon the doomed aliens with murderous anger.

  Dovirr was like a demon, fighting everywhere at once on the blood-soaked pier. Once, venom-laden Dhuchay’y talons raked his shoulder; he retaliated with a swift, vicious thrust.

  “On! On! They fall before us!”

  The Dhuchay’y reinforcements were being driven into the sea as remorselessly as had the first wave. The thunder of cannon came less frequently; suicide battalions of Seaborn swarmed everywhere, climbing up on land to engage in combat until, gasping, they were forced to slip back into their own medium.