The Abyss Surrounds Us (The Abyss Surrounds Us #1)(65)

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The lasers blast from my wrists, and Bao’s head wrenches up, forcing me flat against the plating. I’m lost against the surge, the line at my waist the only thing keeping me attached to his head. My ears swell and pop viciously—I can’t equalize in time. A scream bubbles out of me, and we break the surface like a geyser.

There’s no time for hesitation, no time for second thoughts. I point my wrist at the rearmost ship, whose guns are still trained on the Minnow’s retreating aft, and twist the setting to charge. Bao obeys with a roar, lunging forward so ferociously that I lose my grip and tumble back against his neck.

It’s too late for the people on the deck to do anything. They’re powerless as Bao comes crashing over them like a hurricane, his claws sinking into the ship’s rear as he closes his beak around the aft gun mounts.

Then their eyes shift to me, and they recognize who’s commanding the beast. Me in my mirrored goggles. Me in my respirator and armor. Me with the Otachi on my wrists, tied to the back of the monster raining hell on them, fighting on the wrong side of the war.

There’s no point in apologizing. I snap the Otachi to destroy and lean out over the side of Bao’s head, throwing the beams against the engines that protrude from the boat’s sides. Bao chases after them, but this time I keep my grip solid and sure in the plating, and my aim doesn’t waver. His claws slash once, and the boat is dead in the water.

The serpentoid peels off the Minnow’s tail, its arrow-like snout whipping around to find us, and I know that this boat must be its companion. It lets out a fell shriek and launches itself forward. Its winding body slices through the inky waves like they’re nothing.

I crouch against Bao’s neck, trying to make myself as small as possible as my monster wheels to meet the other Reckoner head-on. The serpentoid ducks beneath the waves, and Bao heaves toward it—and his beak closes on thin air with a crack that nearly knocks me senseless. My ears ring, but I can’t waver now, can’t let it get the better of me, because I’ve trained enough serpentoids to know exactly what the snake beast is about to do.

I flick the Otachi to charge and throw the beam out to our right. Bao veers, just as the first of the serpentoid’s coils lash up around his midsection. He escapes its grip, but just barely, and the strike sends him rolling onto his back. I cling to his plating so hard that my knuckles creak. The water slams me flat against him, and I reach down and anchor another line-hook to his keratin. He rolls his head forward, fueled by an instinct I can’t break him from, and this time the serpentoid’s too busy recovering to get out of the way. Bao’s jaws cinch around its neck.

The muscles snap taut underneath me as Bao bites down, and a sick, wet crunch rattles my bones. The serpentoid goes limp.

Two down. But in the frenzy of the fight, I’ve lost track of the other ships, and it takes me a minute to get my wits about me, my thoughts still stuck on the fact that I’ve just helped kill a Reckoner. The smell of the serpentoid’s blood washes over me, thick and pungent, and I drink it in before I can tell myself not to. Bao lets out a roar that shakes the NeoPacific, letting his kill tumble back into the waves.

A spotlight flares from one of the ships, its light nearly blinding me as they aim it at us. Then the other ship’s lights blast on, and I can’t see the stars above me anymore. Bao roars again, but this time it chokes off in a confused warble as he tries to make sense of the new signals blazing across him. I squint through my goggles, searching for what I know must be coming.

The lasers carve in the wake of the spotlights, their bright beams coming to rest squarely on Bao’s head. Shit. I throw up his charge signal, aiming it right back at the closest boat, but he shakes his snout from side to side, still confused.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I growl into the respirator. It’s no use.

The cetoid is the first to strike, coming up hard against Bao’s underbelly with its plated snout. The hit sends me flying into the air as Bao shrieks in pain, and my fingers instinctively wind around the line-hook cables as my feet go sailing over my head. I land hard on my back, the helmet cracking against Bao’s plates. A thick tentacle towers out of the sea to our left and lashes down around his neck, inches from my position. I grit my teeth, turn the Otachi to their brightest setting, and plunge them against the cephalopoid’s soft flesh.

A scream echoes out from somewhere beneath Bao and the tentacle snaps back, a curl of smoke wafting up from the neat hole I’ve just burned in it. But before I can congratulate myself, the cephalopoid’s limb slams down again, and this time I can’t roll out of the way.

The world goes dark. I feel like I’m suffocating, like I’m spinning, like “up” and “down” are figments of my imagination, and then suddenly I’m back. I choke in a breath through the respirator and discover that we’re underwater, that the blackness wasn’t all imagined. My head throbs so viciously that for a second I think my skull has cracked. I’ve been tossed around far too much to get away intact at this point. Bao flexes underneath me, his jaws gnawing insistently at something, but everything else seems too still.

Then the cephalopoid’s tentacles loom out of the darkness again, lashing down around Bao’s body. He rolls his head and catches one in his beak, and thick Reckoner blood flushes into the water around us, blinding me. I flatten myself against Bao’s skull. There’s nothing I can do in this blackness but feel the power of the monster beneath my feet as he struggles, locked in mortal combat.