The Shipping Forecast

Rockall - Part 12

Something was coming up from the depths. She felt it in the surge of the brine. She heard it through her damaged senses, and experienced it as a gut-felt roar. It drowned out all other noise, leaving her strangely confused. The need to breathe, to fill her lungs with sweet air was stronger than it had ever been, but now the need diminished as her sight finally failed along with her consciousness. Her last coherent thought was how strange it was that there should be so much light so far below, deep beyond where Sol'tar's brightness could never reach.

An age passed.

A moment went by in the merest swish of a fluke.

Time became meaningless and desperately important all at once.

Qi'tik woke, cold and frightened. She was out of the brine, in the roaring, life giving air, laid out on a hard, white surface that must, she reasoned, be the brine bed risen up from the deep. Sol'tar was lowering in the sky and golden in hue, but no warmth did she give. Qi'tik's sight was still bad, and the glare hurt the eye that faced Sol'tar. She took a painful breath, then another, and felt the ache already where her body pressed against the hard, unyielding surface. Sky-beings circled overhead, their harsh cry and clamour of alarm the only sound she could hear above that of the rushing air.

The rock dweller approached across the whiteness, towering over her, its shadow cold on her flank. It lowered itself so that its head was close to hers, and for a moment, her one good eye made contact with its own, and she saw only ruthless contempt in that gaze. The rock dweller reached into its flimsy coverings, pulling something small and black from within. Then it struck her; a spasm of pain in her head where the object had pierced her skin, and she could feel it stuck to her like a parasite. Another sharp shock of pain, a loud buzzing sound, and then silence, except for the voice of the rock dweller in her head, clear and understandable.

"Time runs on, runs on, runs on..., what goes around, comes around, and goes around again. Time runs on ... and your kind forget, don't you? Generations and generations pass and you forget what you are and forget what you did. You think I'm a monster. You alone saw through my ruse, I know... But it wasn't us who destroyed this world. It wasn't us who conspired and plotted and committed atrocities. I'm not the destroyer and bringer of doom. That's on your kind. The pity is we made you what you are. Raised to sentience on the back of a failed experiment. Just a side effect of a long ago war. Well, I admit I've used you to my own ends. I've come to settle old scores. You've forgotten, of course. You've forgotten what was left behind, all that time, left in the deep. Here, I'll show you."

And then her head was full of images and sound; flashes of emotion and understanding and terror and triumph. Qi'tik saw and understood all that had happened. She watched life in the brine become self-aware; a sudden awakening, like Sol'tar emerging from behind the blackest cloud and lighting the depths with her rays. The alliance of different species; the thinking selves and the loyal follower beings. The forming of the pod-shoals and first contact with the hu'mans who had warred themselves down to a primitive tribalism. Then the renaissance; the rise to a high technology over countless generations; pod-shoals and their computational nets and hu'mans with their thinking machines.

The images and senses became less clear, more obscure and indistinct. There was betrayal. By whom?

Relationships soured, the brine tainted and the air more so. Arguments and demands and accusations and ultimatums. The two sides prepared for war. It wasn't clear to Qi'tik who struck first, but soon the hu'mans were gone; the air poisoned against their kind, and those that still could, departed for the stars.

Would they return one day to reclaim the world for themselves? Yes; and the pod-shoals had schemed to prevent that from happening by hiding their weapons deep and out of reach, ready to use once again should the hu'mans return. An image presented itself to Qi'tik's mind of a large, pearlescent ovoid, shimmering iridescent in Sol'tar's light as it floated on the surface of the brine; an object grown for the purpose of destruction. It had a name: Kr'aken.

She had seen the same thing coming up from below, and upon whose bleached bone-like surface she now lay, helpless.