The boat came in and passed out the lines of its harpoons, and Murell
and I took the places of Cesário Vieira and the other man. We went up
to the nose, and Murell took his place at the controls, and I got back
of the 7-mm machine gun and made sure that there were plenty of extra
belts of ammo. Then, as we rose, I pulled the goggles down from my
hood, swung the gun away from the ship, and hammered off a one-second
burst to make sure it was working, after which I settled down, glad I
had a comfortable seat and wasn't climbing around on that monster.
They began knocking scales loose with the jackhammer and cutting into
the leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was getting
heavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll.
"That's pretty dangerous work," Murell said. "If a man using one of
those cutters slipped...."
"It's happened," I told him. "You met our peg-legged compositor,
Julio. That was how he lost his leg."
"I don't blame them for wanting all they can get for tallow-wax."
They had the monster opened down the belly, and were beginning to cut
loose big chunks of the yellow tallow-wax and throw them into cargo
nets and swing them aboard with lifters, to be chucked down the cargo
hatches. I was only able to watch that for a minute or so and tell
Murell what was going on, and then the first halberd fish, with a
spearlike nose and sharp ridges of the nearest thing to bone you find
on Fenris, came swimming up. I swung the gun on the leader and gave
him a second of fire, and then a two-second burst on the ones behind.
Then I waited for a few seconds until the survivors converged on their
dead and injured companions and gave them another burst, which wiped
out the lot of them.
It was only a couple of seconds after that that the first slasher came
in, shiny as heat-blued steel and waving four clawed tentacles that
grew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights on
him. He stopped slashing immediately. Slashers are smart; you kill
them and they find it out right away.
Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was polluted
with things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, now
working up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoid
massacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keep
the boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and every
time I had to change belts, there'd be a new rush of things that had
to be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-up
operation is one of the things that runs up expenses for a
hunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted with
machine-gun brass.
Finally, they got the job done, and everybody went below and sealed
ship. We sealed the boat and went down after her. The last I saw, the
remains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, and
the water around it was rioting with slashers and clawbeaks and
halberd fish and similar marine unpleasantnesses.
10