Surviving Arkadia

I don’t know how long I spent standing at the rail and staring down into the roiling mass of living things that surrounded the ship. It was hard to look away. When I finally did drag my eyes away I realised that I needed someone else to see this, if only to convince myself that it was real and not some product of sleep deprivation.

The Doctor’s cabin was right next to the infirmary. I hated to wake him but I also knew that if I was seeing things then I needed him to know about it.

I roused him from his bed and dragged him outside before he’d even had a chance to put a coat on. He tried to go back, to at least get something warm. I told him that he was lucky I let him put slippers on and he needed to see this. I think it was the way I sounded, rather than my words, that persuaded him to come and look.

He stared for what seemed like an awfully long time, and I was sure that there was nothing to see and I really had gone crazy, but then I heard him whisper, “By all the Gods that is vile.” It sounded like he was on the edge of vomiting. Then he said, “You get the captain while I get a coat and a bottle of gin. No-one should have to look at that sober.”

By the time I got back with the Captain the Doctor was fully dressed, accompanied by the Chief Steward and the Chief Engineer, and was pouring medicinal shots of gin. I think the Captain thought it was some kind of party until the Doctor handed her a glass and told her not to drink it until after she’d looked over the side.

She stared even longer than the Doctor had and then drank the shot without tipping her head back, as if she didn’t trust what she was seeing to still be there after she moved her head. Eventually she said, “Anybody ever hear tell of something like this?”

The only person to speak was the Chief Steward, who said, “Of course Captain, everyone knows about this. This is the milk tide. You and your boyfriend here are literally the only people who don’t know.”

The Captain gave the weariest sigh I have ever heard and said, “Usually I approve of using humour to relieve tension. Usually, but not today. Now is not the time for this, Claude.”

I think that was the only time I ever heard the Captain use a crew member’s first name. The Chief Steward looked more shocked than I had ever seen him look and apologised.

“I understand that the plan was to move the beds out of the infirmary tomorrow evening?” said the Captain.

“That’s still the plan,” said the Doctor. “I don’t see how we can avoid it. We need to keep them cool somehow.”

“Then we need to make for a safe harbour as fast as we can,” said the Captain. “Let the engineering day crew sleep for now. They’re going to need the rest. We do not stop while this is going on. If it abates then we take the chance to run maintenance. Come nightfall tomorrow I want full sail, maximum speed, I’ve an idea of somewhere cold enough and remote enough with people ashore that we might be able to trust. I’ll be in my cabin plotting a course. Someone rouse the Quartermaster. Send him to me as soon as he’s up to speed.”

The Doctor offered her more of the medicinal gin but she shook her head. “If the shock starts to get to me I’ve brandy in my cabin.”

I volunteered to take the first watch. Someone had to keep an eye on the vile waves that pressed close to the Idyllic. The Chief Steward went to wake the Quartermaster then came to join me. He claimed that he’d never get back to sleep after what we’d seen and I was glad of the company to keep me awake.

As dawn broke the press of living things around the ship retreated. In just minutes the waves surrounding the ship were as empty as they usually were. I was relieved that the creatures were gone but I had this nagging worry. Nothing that I’d seen in that roiling mass of sea life explained the marks on the ship. The scored paint on the sides, the splintered deck boards, and the damage to the outer walls of the infirmary. Perhaps I could have convinced myself that the scratches in the sides of the ship were just the creatures that I’d seen, piling up against the ship, using each other like a ladder to reach higher up the side of the ship. If it hadn’t been for the fact that in all the hours of activity through the night there didn’t seem to be any additional damage.

I went to Engineering to let the Chief Engineer know that he would be able to lower the Etheric sails for maintenance and then I went to my berth, collapsed into it, and slept until I was dragged out of a deep sleep by the sound of screaming.

It was a good thing that I hadn’t undressed because in that moment of panic I was out of my cabin and halfway to the deck before I was fully aware of my surroundings.

I burst out into the frigid air and I was surprised at both how dark it was and also how bright.

It was already night. The sky above was dark but there was a brilliant aurora and every light on the ship was lit. It was almost as bright as noon.

I followed the sound of screaming. It led me to exactly where I’d dreaded it would. The Forward Sun Deck where the beds from the infirmary had been taken. It was flat and open to the cold air that the remaining four, very sick, children needed if they were going to survive the fever.

As I ran I realised that I could hear another sound beneath the screaming. I could hear something that sounded like a scuffle, and beneath that a kind of skittering sound that I couldn’t place but chilled my blood far more than the freezing air did. That was the sound that made me stop and grab a fire axe.

I don’t know what I’d expected to be the cause of the scoring and the paint damage but it certainly wasn’t giant spider crabs the size of a Great Dane.

There were a couple already by the beds. They hadn’t reached the children because the Stewards tending to the children were trying to drag them away. As I arrived the Junior Entertainment Officer smashed a bottle over the carapace of one of them and then stabbed it with the broken remains of the bottle.

Half a dozen of the crabs were on the Sun Deck but hadn’t yet reached the beds. Several more were clambering over the rail. The Chief Steward was wrestling with one and had almost forced it overboard. I didn’t dare look down the side of the ship for fear of how many there might be trying to get aboard. I didn’t need to know how bad things were going to get until I’d dealt with how bad things already were.

I hate spider crabs. They’re ugly, spiny things that make my skin crawl. For a long time I couldn’t understand how they could possibly be good for anything. Then, back on earth, I got dragged into a seafood place on Okinawa and ate some spider crab legs to win a bet. I will agree that while they look like they come straight from hell they taste like God himself churned the butter that they’re dipped in.

There’s not enough money in two worlds to induce me to eat the flesh of the things that had crawled straight out of Satan’s pit and onto the Idyllic that day. These crabs were just… wrong, unnatural, hungry.

Maybe I’m ignorant, and Arkadian spider crabs just look different, but I know what I believe and it ain’t that.

These crabs all had too many legs. I don’t know how many exactly, because I did not stop to count, I’m not even sure they had a consistent number of limbs. They did have the wrong number of pincers because they all had at least four.

I didn’t realise that I’d frozen in horror until someone sounded an alarm and made me jump. I started by helping the Chief Steward repel the crab he was fighting. I hacked off the claw it was gripping the rail with and he gave it a final push over the side.

The crabs had their backs to me so I was able to hack my way to the beds with relative ease. I made sure the one the Junior Entertainment Officer had stabbed was finished off then stood by his side, ready to face the rest of the crabs.

Behind me the children were still giving off enough heat to keep the whole ship cosy. Fortunately they were all sedated so they didn’t have to witness the nightmarish fight that followed.

The alarm woke the ship and brought everyone, saving the night Engineering Crew, to the Sun Deck. Many brought weapons and many more went back to find some once they knew what we were facing.

As the lights of the Aurora danced overhead we chopped, and stabbed, and crushed our way through enough spider crabs to feed a small army. For almost three hours they just kept coming.

When they finally stopped we were all exhausted. I could no longer lift my arms. Most of us had picked up at least a couple of minor injuries. The Chief Steward’s face was so badly swollen that he was barely recognisable and he could only see out of one eye. The Junior Entertainment Officer had fought like a Tiger in spite of having his left hand crushed by a pincer early in the fight. Previously the most aggressive thing I’d seen him do was drop the house lights to get a comedian off stage when his jokes fell flat.

The Sun Deck was slick with crab guts and blood. I didn’t want to risk slipping and falling so I just stood where I was and waited for someone to tell me to do something.

While I stood there I looked from the crab corpses to the scores gouged into the outer walls of the infirmary. Something wasn’t right. The pointed tips of the legs, the spikes on their bodies, and their pincers could all have caused damage to the ship. In fact I was sure that the crabs had caused the paint scrapes on the hull. The scores on the infirmary looked different though. There was something in the way that most of them were curved and so many of them were parallel.

I could not shake the dread that we might not yet have seen the worst of it. We were still so far from a safe harbour.

“What’s that horrible smell?” It was the voice of a child. I looked around and one of the four children was sitting up. A little girl called Eliza. She was properly awake for the first time in more than a week.

Before I, or anyone else, could answer her first question she asked another. “Why is it so cold?”

Her mother, who had been slumped in exhaustion by the rail, staggered to her feet, saying “Don’t worry sweetie, you’ve had a fever. We’ve been trying to keep you cool. Now the fever is gone, you can come back to the cabin and sleep in the big bed, with Mommy, the way you always like.”

My face was wet. I half thought that it was rain, or snow, then I realised that I was crying with relief.

Of course that was when I heard the fresh screaming, because God hates a happy sailor.