“Excerpt from The Farpool: Exodus”

One of my continuing traditions in writing and managing this blog is to give you a taste of my upcoming work.  Toward that end, as you may know, I have been working on the third book in my Farpool series.  It’s called The Farpool: Exodus and should be available for download in the early spring of 2018, probably in March.  Herewith: another excerpt….

 

Approximately, a quarter mile from the research pool at McLean Lab, a small reservoir off what the tourist maps called Vineyard Sound began stirring in a light breeze.  It wasn’t a fetch caused by wind, however.  To the utter consternation of several technicians walking along a graveled path alongside Oyster Pond Road, the waters of the Sound suddenly turned quite rough, though there was no appreciable wind.  Breaching the surface out of the churn of foam and froth, arose several humpback craft, riding the offshore currents along the shell-covered beach for awhile, before nosing themselves into the sand.  The tops of the craft popped open and half a dozen creatures, clad in glistening black armored mobilitors, emerged, stunners and prods at the ready.

Sergeant Steve Purvis had been with Woods Hole’s Uniformed Division for seven years, half of them with the Quissett Campus Squad.  It was interesting work, interesting in the same sense his pathologist friend Wally Ng talked about dead bodies…conversation you didn’t want to have at the local coffee shops, not if you wanted people to stick around.  Cops and pathologists…Steve had often joked with Wally about what it would be like to attend a pathologist convention, with all the slide shows and the jokes and the conversations in the hallways over bagels and coffee.

“Yeah, probably like a proctologist convention,” Wally always came back.  “I’d pay not to attend one of those.”

Purvis had never seen anything like it in all his years on Quissett Campus.  One minute, scientists and lab techs and admin types were strolling along the sidewalks, chowing down sack lunches at the gazebo or spinning wild-hair theories to each other in animated talks under the elm trees and the next moment, five or six wackos who looked like creatures from the Black Lagoon were waddling up out of the Sound, scaring the bejeezus out of everybody. 

Procedure said you issued challenges: Halt! Drop your weapons! Get on the ground!  Procedure said you gave the perps a chance to surrender.  Procedure said you called for backup if the situation looked dicey and then you moved in carefully. But when Purvis’s throat went dry as the creatures appeared, he forgot all about Procedure.

He’d fired several shots and the creatures…things…whatever the hell they were—had gone down fast.  Now one of them lay writhing in the shallows and pedestrians—civilians-- were starting to gather.

“Stay back!  Stay back…it’s still moving—get way back there!”

The crowd pulled back about fifty feet, while Purvis crept forward, his gun still in firing position.  The nearer creature was moving, it sounded like squeals or clicks or something, thrashing about in the sand and water, flinging up dirt as it writhed.  The farther ones were mostly in the water, smaller in size, but still—now one of them removed something from a side pouch and aimed it in the general direction of the pedestrians.

Purvis came up.  What on God’s green earth--? 

The beast—for that was what he had started calling it in his mind—was not a dolphin.  It wasn’t a shark.  It had legs and arms and what looked like armor plating.  It had holes in the armor and water was spouting out of the holes.  The beast squealed some more.  And what the hell was that device in its hands?

Purvis got on the radio, ringing up Dispatch.

“Kitty, this is Quissett Two-Five…I got some kind of disturbance down here on Oyster Pond Road…I don’t know how to describe it…I have fired several rounds—need backup immediately…and something else: would you call Division?  They’ve got more firepower…we may need some of that down here…and hurry!”

That’s when the Omtorish team lit off their suppressors.

A strong eye-blinding light went off, followed by a deafening BOOM!  It came again, the light and the BOOM!  Civilians nearby were stopped in their tracks and squealed as if the sound had injured them.  Up on the side of the road, two more arriving officers had been knocked to their knees by the concussion, but got up.  One of them—it looked like McNulty—regained his senses and went after the creatures.  And now there were at least half a dozen…Purvis stared dumbfounded as more figures emerged from the waves, at least half a dozen, all clad in the same strange gear, armored gator skin was what it looked like.

Kok’tek ordered more suppressing fire.  “Spray the area, Klatko!  Keep them down…Pelspo, get the stek’loo out and send it up!  We need to sniff out eekoti Chase quickly…before the Tailless overwhelm us!”

Pelspo was just dragging himself up out of the water and trying to stabilize himself in his mobilitor.  “Kah--!” he muttered to himself.  “It’s so hard to move these blasted things.”  But Kok’tek wanted surveillance, so he got himself upright, then dug the stek’loo out of its egg-shaped pod and flung it into the air.

 Its wings snapped out smartly and the device spun up its bi-rotors and took off, climbing quickly into the sky, sniffing for the scent trail of eekoti Chase.  To Officer Steve Purvis, still lying on his side, his ears ringing and bleeding, his head pounding from the suppressor burst, the sight of the pterodactyl-like creature swooping and diving and careening overhead made him figure he was dreaming some nightmare horror show of a dream.   Presently, as Purvis struggled to stay conscious, he squinted out of one eye and saw the flying beast from a million years B.C. began to circle meaningfully and intently over the roof of the McLean Lab building, a few hundred yards up the hill.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the assault team of sea monsters—for that’s what they looked like—begin to move out, clambering awkwardly up the sand hill toward Oyster Pond Road, the squad arrayed in perfect diamond formation with weapons trained outward at every compass point.

Man, Purvis told himself, this is no circus troop.  These guys are pros.

When the next suppressor burst came and the sky filled with a deafening white light, everything became a blur and Purvis passed out again.

Kok’tek led his rescue team steadily toward the building above which the stek’loo circled, having picked up the scent trail of eekoti Chase.  He was mildly surprised at how effective the suppressors had been, having leveled everything around them in a several hundred-yard radius.  He knew it was only a matter of time before the Tailless mustered greater forces.  They would have to hurry.

Eekoti Chase was somewhere inside this building and the Metah had charged him with rescuing the half-breed and spiriting him back to sea, back to Keenomsh’pont. 

I hope this is worth it, Kok’tek told himself.  He heard, then saw, the small fleet of more police cars screeching to a halt down the road and ordered all suppressors and stunners to be discharged at once.  The Omtorish were well protected in their mobilitors but the deafening BOOMS! shattered windows and set off sirens up and down the street.  Bodies littered the road and grounds as the Omtorish team crept forward, their suit motors whirring and straining in the full gravity of Notwater. 

For good measure, Kok’tek had Klensbok hang back at the rear-guard position and let loose a full discharge of maj’jeet.  Nobody knew if the toxic bloom of tiny creatures would even have any effect on the Tailless but the fog of the discharge would at least make them cautious about approaching any closer.

Kok’tek reached the entrance of McLean Lab and easily forced his way in.  Four more team members followed, while Klensbok and Potok stayed outside to protect their rear.

Inside, Kok’tek crept along the corridors, following the stek’loo’s cries and screeches until they came to a corridor labelled Research Pool: Authorized Personnel Only.  He fired one burst of his prod, and the door sizzled and smoked, and he was able to kick his way in.  Two more Omtorish followed immediately, sweeping their prods and stunners across every sector.

There were three Tailless inside.  Two female and one male.  They stood frozen in terror at the sight of the Omtorish and slowly raised their hands.    Not understanding the gesture, concluding that it was in fact a threatening move, one Omtorish fired his prod.  It hit the male, who crumpled immediately to the pool deck, twitching and shaking as he writhed on the wet tile.  The other Tailless immediately went to their comrade and bent to help.

Kok’tek had the only echopod but it was tuned to address and receive words from eekoti Chase.  He gestured to his troops who then moved on the females and forcibly shoved them both into a corner of the room, where they cowered and whimpered in fear. 

In the pool, Kok’tek saw the eekoti, limp and floating in some kind of sling.  He waded into the pool, and released Chase from restraint.

“Eekoti Chase, are you all right?”  It was clear that the half-breed was only semi-conscious, having been heavily sedated by the Tailless bastards.  He lolled and drifted, his head wobbling around as Kok’tek carried him up and out of the pool.  The chief prodsman motioned for his troops to assist him and they hung at each side of Chase, supporting him as they exited the pool.  Back in the corridor, stepping around more Tailless who shrank down and cowered in humps along the walls, Pelspo made a hand gesture and the stek’loo abruptly returned to his shoulder, folding and stowing its winds and powering down its rotors with a defiant screech, whereupon Pelspo crammed the creature in its storage pod and resumed helping Chase limp and stumble his way back to the front gallery of the Lab building.

They left the McLean Lab, picking up Klensbok and Potok, and saw immediately that the Tailless had recovered and were moving on their position in great numbers, surrounding and flanking them so that the route back to the beach and the Vineyard Sound was now cut off.

“We’ll have to fight our way back!” Kok’tek announced.  He quickly took stock of the situation, realizing with dismay that fighting in the land of Notwater was really a two-dimensional affair and they were restricted to surface operations.  Combat in the sea was inherently a three-dimensional matter, where you could dive and ascend and get around flanking maneuvers much more easily. They hadn’t trained for combat in this strange world.  Nobody had.

 Then he had an idea.

 

So that’s another excerpt from The Farpool: Exodus.  I hope you’ll like it when it’s uploaded in early spring of 2018.  The story continues from The Farpool and The Farpool: Marauders of Seome, with many of the same characters and lots of action. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 11, 2017.  See you then.

Phil B.