The Shallow Field of Ink

In the shallow field of ink, nothing sits atop the surface for long.

    I once watched a herd of woolen wander out across the ink field’s surface, beginning from the isolated chalk islands. I marveled as they moved along the horizon with no discernible effort, their silhouettes backlit by the violet light of a dying star. Before long, however—surely no more than an hour which, I’ll remind you, is not so long when it may well be the last one of your life—the herd’s path began its steady descent into the shallow depths. In the time it took for my lunch to turn cold, the horn-tips of the woolen were all that remained. By then, they’d stopped advancing altogether; the meat machinery and electrical pulses which powered the herd had been digested by the ink, and soon it would grant the same fate to their very bones. This thought is the pulse of electricity that tears through my graymatter as I watch my boot sink into the ink.

    My home is hewn in twain. From the mortal wound in the small vessel’s hull, the contents of my life bleed skyward, sucked into the junkyard atmosphere of this bizarre satellite thanks to the fickle nature of my dying gravGenerator. In the distance, my murderer rages, oblivious to my fate. She is only twenty feet in length, small even for a juvenile of her species, yet she is composed of 280ibs of lean muscle fiber. The remaining 120ibs that comprise her mass are owed to her skeleton, her organs, what few fatty tissues a juvenile Leviathan might have and, of course, the bounty that makes a horror such as she well worth the risk of transport. Her hide is covered in the galaxy’s third hardest material, juvenile atlascutes. These are second only to those grown by adult Leviathan, and third only to the substance they are used to synthesize, truAdamant. This beast is a juvenile leviathan, a member of the youngest known generation of the spacefaring species.

    Even as death suckles my calf, the ink pulling me down until it has me up to my knee, I marvel at the Leviathan. She twists round the air like a confetti streamer let to fly in a brisk breeze before a storm. She exhibits the same natural grace in low grav that a Terran cachalot might in the Marianas depths. As she dances, I cast my eyes up to the cloud of tools and trinkets that drift lazily by. A hammer, a paint canvas, an electronic candle, an antique lamp; a sock, a sack (void of spuds), my tarot cards—I snatch those and tuck them into a secure pocket—all clutter my vision. I scan the tool cloud again, certain that I’ve something for this situation, uncertain where it might have gone in the tumult of this Leviathan’s unplanned escape from where I’d kept it sedated in the pit of my ship’s belly.

    I glance back in time to see her signaling my death. The Leviathan twists herself into an ouroboros, her long and many-toothed maw brushing by the tip of her serpentine tail. My heart skips a beat and my perception narrows to a pinprick as I, for one moment that lasts hours and ends quicker than a lightning bolt, lock eyes with the beast.

    Like a taut rubberband that’s been let go an inch before it snaps, reality opens up and accelerates. The Leviathan slams herself into the field of ink, generating a tidal wave that seems tall enough to drench the heavens.

    My hands find my hope a second before my eyes do. I wrench my arm back from the tool cloud, my fingers dug into the gelatin stomach of an omniBeetle. The device whirs to life as I sling a string of expletives and commands at it, my tongue working linguistic feats of wonder just to pronounce the thing’s trigger phrases with some degree of accuracy. “omniBeetle, execute melding; execute gravManipulation; execute wing span to specifications Elvar dash zero dash one dash twenty-five. Passcode one dash nine dash twelve dash ten dash--” just as the wave threatens to eat me, I finish with a scream, “--beta! Override safeties!”

    The omniBeetle scuttles up my arm, down my shoulder, and flattens out in the crook of the small of my back. The gelatin spreads out ahead of the small metal panels, and soon it has formed something resembling a tabard over my upper half. From my back sprout a quartet of wings that flap faster than an organic eye could hope to see. I shoot up and backwards, narrowly escaping the tidal wave of carnivorous ink.

As I clear the crest of the wave, I see the Leviathan in the distance, ink sloughing off of its unscathed hide. Below, my life has been washed away, dissolved. Yet—at least, until my omniBeetle burns out what charge it has—I live.