“Don’t just stand there, woman!” said the captain. “Get his suit off! I intend to do some reconnoitoirey before they notice he’s missing.”
“I don’t think so,” said Apollo, squeezing the trigger on the prod experimentally. It seemed to crackle louder the harder she squeezed. “For one thing, that suit is sealed tight. If I had to guess you’d need an acetylene torch to even make a start. For a second, with that faceplate they’d sniff you out in an instant.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“Don’t insult me. Suit sealed that tight, I doubt they can survive in an oxygen atmosphere. Look,” she said, pointing with the tip of the prod…
fantasy
They Worship It: Chapter Two
The ship lurched as he wrenched the great wood-spoked wheel of the ship to the right. All of us on deck, for our part, wrapped ourselves securely to the rigging. Men and women swung out over naught but ocean on the ends of loose ropes as Hardman brought us round side-by-side with the great whale, facing the opposite way. With any luck we could now escape while the thing was still turning around. The maneuver had given us all quite an appreciation for the size of the thing. It was bigger than any living thing should be, plainly the result of some dire mutation indeed.
The collective sigh of relief that was breathed by all aboard was short-lived, however. Mere moments after we left the whale to ponderously wheel around – by which time we would be long gone – another cry pierced the air.
They Worship It: Chapter One
“Ship to starboard!” the cry pierced through the general noise. The lookout, who was a small man with a beakish sort of face, leaned over the edge of his perch up the mast, and added: “Aye, it looks like a rich one!”
The ship lurched, and the old bird near fell over the side onto the deck ten foot below him, but he held his purchase and repeated the cry from first principles, in case any of the crew had not yet heard him.
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