A cliff, a crag, a corrugated hut.
A scientist, a sleep, a snore.
And a delicate little cough on a seismograph that sent Dr. Clauseway from dead asleep to live-wire-waking all in an instant, hacking and sputtering and fingers already twitching for a keypad.
There – there they were. Little tremors getting stronger by the second. Too specific and too straightforward for an earthquake; too firm and decisive and steady for a bit of the headland falling apart into the ocean.
“Grads!” shouted Dr. Clauseway, voice scraping into a shriek from disuse and over-muttering in their day-to-day life. “Where are my grads?! Lazy gadabouts! Putrid gits! Get recording! Get sourcing! Acquire equipment! Locate transport! Do everything we ever planned, and do it five minutes ago!”
From couches and bunks and alcoves the grads leapt, shambling creatures with hazy eyes and heavy lids and strong backs broken in half from labour.
There was no time at all and everything to do. The moment had arrived. The time had come. The furious scree of angry lariforms filled the air as much as their white wings did; nests disturbed and displaced and thrown into the sea by the growing force beneath them.
Big Louise was waking up. And only a few decades later than expected.
***
The topsoil was the first to go; centuries of accumulation being shaken straight into dust. Only the hardiest and most deeply-rooted patches of scrubs and shrubs held out more than an instant; the rest billowed into the air and the sky and the sea itself in boiling dust clouds, shrouding the entire peninsula in red and brown and grey grit that sparkled in the rising sunlight as last night’s stormclouds peeled away from the horizon to let in fresh light.
From the edge of the cloud movement came, so big and so fast that it seemed slow as continental drift. The land was moving. The land was falling. The land was gone.
And from the land emerged Big Louise, seven miles across and twelve legs slowly flexing, carapace breathing free again for the first time in what Dr. Clauseway had estimated to be a thousand years. Spiracles sucking in gases; tastebuds registering molecules; brain bigger than the scientific observation post warming up to thinking speed again.
Ready or not!
***
Hillary Wake was on her fifth dose of pills and eighteenth cup of coffee and her eyes were starting to vibrate in their sockets but fuck, fuck, double-fuck her to her grave if she was going to take them back into port with this pitiful snippet of a catch. Her children would starve, her wife wouldn’t look her in the eye, and her grandmother would oscillate in her grave.
So fuck last night’s storm, fuck the fish that were hiding like cowards from her nets, and fuck the sky for daring to shine at her with six overlapping suns that were buzzing at her in waspish harmony.
Also fuck that wave coming at her.
“Grab onto something,” she said, or tried to say. Maybe she just croaked. Anyways she yanked the helm nine or ten ways and got lucky and they didn’t capsize, just barely crested the top of the murderous thing and came eye to eye-cavity with Big Louise as she waded ponderously, thighs-deep as she began to step off the continental shelf.
Hillary’s crew was making noises, but they were talking too fast to be understood.
“Yah,” she told them, eyes on the water. Eyes on the frothing, churned water. Silver scales shining as they rose up; the still-living in a frenzy tearing at the flesh of the deceased and ruptured, or scavenging at tidbits stirred up from the bottom. “Yah. Okay. Yah. Hey, shut up? We’re following the big girl now. Get the nets out. Are they broken? Get more nets out. Are we out? Weave some using the industrial loom and your spare shirts and blankets. And stop shaking at me! It’s hard enough to keep my hands steady.”
There was only one other boat out there at the moment – some kind of ugly corrugated thing covered in satellite dishes? – but there’d be more soon. A second wasted was a catch missed.
***
Water surged up Big Louise’s sides as she took the plunge into something that could actually hold her body up; her limbs barely used and already aching from the combined stress of keeping her upright and mobile in the thin liquid of an atmosphere. Dirt and stone and crushed flora and fauna alike streamed in ribbons from every claw as she kicked off gently, annihilating half an ecosystem in the force of her launch.
She’d stumbled, she’d lurched, but now she moved in earnest. Her bow wave smoothed into a ripple that could eat rip tides for breakfast; her bulk slid into a softer realm; and soon all there was to be seen of Big Louise above the surface was her wake and her scavenger cohorts – winged and afloat – and the slight buzz in the air that was her call, somewhere below the hearing range of every animal on the planet that wasn’t her.
***
The pebble fell off the ledge and into the cup that yanked the cord that pulled the trigger that fired the pellet into the dartboard that shook the ball free that slid down the ramp that launched it through the net that dropped it onto the lever that tapped Eustace’s favourite mug’s handle and knocked it to the floor of the cabin, smashing it into a hundred pieces.
“It’s afoot!” shouted Eustace, leaping upright from his bunk and slamming his head directly into his brother’s mattress.
“Ow. Fuck.”
“She’s risen up at last, brother! The game’s come! The time is now! We’re going to get ‘err done at last! Finally we can put the harpoon to use, and the cabling, and the barbs, and the weights, and the thermal lances, and the railgun! Oh my GOD the railgun! Have you calibrated it? Calibrate it! And we need to do something else we need to uhhhh…”
“Sail to her,” said Eustace’s other brother, at the helm.
“Yes! Sail to her!”
“I already started that sixty-four minutes ago, when the seismograph tripped. Should be in sight within the hour on current heading.”
“Good! Do that! And get some coffee going!”
***
A little less than full fathom five Big Louise cruised, gill-batteries chugging along at full tilt with a reckless eager love for life after spending so long buried and quiescent. A city’s-worth of water spilled through their system with every heave of intake and outtake, nutrients sent this-way, oxygenation that-way, deoxygenated leftovers the-other-way.
All of it burning, burning, burning in the furnaces of a metabolism that even half-awake was its own ecosystem; uncountable trillions of long-neglected bacteria waking from ancient dreams to find their home warm and quick again, filled with freshness, with hunger, with life.
***
“Life!” shouted Janice through the megaphone.
“LIFE!” agreed her congregation, bobbing around her in their varying degrees of seaworthiness. Everything in the mission’s harbour that could float had been put to work and then some.
“Is come!” continued Janice.
“PRAISE BE!” replied her congregation.
“And with it, death!” explained Janice.
“PRAISE BE!” expounded her congregation.
“Greet Her as She comes gracefully!”
“PRAISE BE!”
“Do not shrink or shirk from what She offers you!”
“PRAISE HER!”
“And may we find fulfillment in what She grants!”
“AYE!”
Janice put away her megaphone, took a nice big drink of scotch, then returned to examining the radar. Big Louise had acquired some stragglers as she approached, which was to be expected – but there were others approaching her head-on, and that wasn’t.
The universe held no mistakes, only hilarious truths. So presumably this was one of them. Janice ordered some of the more handy Brothers and Sisters to get out the billhooks and fire-axes, just in case they needed to supply their own punchline.
***
Complex currents were at work around and inside Big Louise. Hot and cold shunted through and around each other, balanced and counter-balanced and weighted and re-weighted. Six hearts operated as much by calculated demands to the laws of physics as through any sort of muscular action.
Some veins and arteries bulged thickly as others tapered off, rerouting a blood supply that could fill rivers and lakes.
Big Louise’s legs stilled, their claw-tipped paddles angling precisely to keep her stable and angled correctly. And her tail began to stir.
***
“Ten miles and closing fast.”
God, Betty was bored bored bored. She just wanted the stupid crab or whatever it was to show up so they could shoot it or not shoot it or whatever they were told to do. Why were they here anyways? ‘Monitoring?’ ‘Peacekeeping?’ God, she shouldn’t have slept in, maybe some of it would have sunken in over breakfast. Fuck fuck fuck she wished she hadn’t missed breakfast. God damnit. It had been a bacon day too, hadn’t it? Crap in a crabbucket. Yes, it was Wednesday all right. Damnit piss shit fuck Christ NOODLES.
The safety was off, but that was fine, she was just fidgeting with it because she was bored – not being careless, she was deliberately keeping her hands away from the trigger! – and so when her gunnery officer affectionately slapped her on the back it completely wasn’t her fault that she grabbed the handle while trying to avoid having her face mashed into the console.
***
Big Louise had very good vision of a very specific kind. She could see the hum and bustle of the water as vividly as anything; she could spot stagnant water miles away; she could pinpoint the exact point where depth changed miles below her down to the temperature change at the tips of her legs.
But she was a bit fuzzy on anything half her size or smaller. So from her perspective, the odd buzzing sensation that skipped along the water just above her back came from nowhere. Which was peculiar, so she stopped moving.
Her wake didn’t, so it slapped lightly against her.
***
The torpedo slipped lightly through the oncoming wave.
“HARD STARBOARD,” shouted Eustace’s other brother, yanking the wheel with his left hand and shoving Eustace and his railgun aside with his right.
“HARD TO PORT, DAMN YOU!” yelled Janice at her driver, buckling on her fifth lifejacket.
“HNEEEEEEEERGH” snorted Hillary Wake, spinning the wheel both of the correct ways at once to avoid all six of the incoming explosives.
“ABANDON SHIP,” hollered Doctor Causeway, vaulting three grads and cutting the lifeboat free alone.
“Oh. Shit,” said Betty.
“Eh?” asked her gunnery officer.
And Big Louise’s backup eye broke water.
***
It was the smallest of her visual clusters, measuring a mere six meters across, but it was suspended at the tip of a prehensile tendril instead of buried within a protective crater, and so was ideal for little passing moments of curiosity like this.
It hung there in the sky, passing over the small and disparate fleet that surrounded her. For a moment the air was very still and very clear. Thoughts of violence drained away at the sheer spectacular scale of life, of the magnitude of the force beneath them all. Why could anything be done that would cause harm? What would the point of it all be? As well might an ant engage in vendetta upon the doorstep of God.
Then Eustace fired the railgun at it and missed and hit the small and corrugated research boat, and perspective was restored.
***
Still puzzled, Big Louise sank down to where even she couldn’t see anything, over a full body-length below the dry thinness, and there she laid her first clutch. At last she had succeeded; a long rest had given her troubled body the strength it needed to endure the turbulent incubation of thousands of tons of eggs. With a little luck they might not inherit her small stature; the result of a hungry childhood. Here the seas promised rich a welcome for her own children.
There were odd plinking sensations against her carapace as she laid; the fragmented remains of some sort of hard rain from above, but Big Louise was too large to notice it so she didn’t.
There was a sort of nasty iron taste in the water for a few miles though.