“Perhaps I need a few more years of marriage before I get that mellow. A few more centuries, in fact.”
The island was large in Holly’s visor now, surrounded by a monk’s fringe of foam. Time to stop the chitchat and proceed with the mission, though Holly was tempted to circle in a holding pattern so she could talk some more with her friend. It seemed as though this was the first real conversation they’d had since her return from Limbo. Foaly had moved on with life in the past three years, but for Holly her absence had lasted only a few hours, and, though she had not aged, Holly felt cheated of those years. The LEP psychiatrist would have told her she was suffering from Post-time-travel-displacement Depression, and offered to prescribe a nice shot to cheer her up. Holly trusted happy-shots just about as much as she trusted brain implants.
“I’m going in,” she said tersely. This was her first solo mission since debriefing, and she did not want anything less than a perfect report, even if it was only Kraken Watch.
“Copy,” said Foaly. “You see the sensor?”
There were four bio-sensors on the island relaying information back to Police Plaza. Three pulsed a gentle green in Holly’s visor display unit. The fourth sensor was red. Red could mean many things. In this case, every reading had risen above normal levels. Temperature, heartbeat, brain activity. All on the danger line.
It must be a malfunction, Foaly had explained. If not, the other sensors would show something.
“I have it. Strong signal.”
“Okay. Shield and approach.”
Holly twisted her chin sharply left until her neck bone clicked, which was her way of summoning the magic. It wasn’t a necessary movement, since the magic was mostly a brain function, but fairies developed their own tics. She let a dribble of power into her limbs and vibrated out of the visible spectrum. Her Shimmer Suit picked up her frequency and amplified it so that a tiny spark of magic went a long way.
“I’m out of sight and going in,” she confirmed.
“Understood,” said the centaur. “Be careful, Holly. Commander Kelp will be reviewing this video, so stick to your orders.”
“Are you suggesting that I occasionally stray from the rule book?” said Holly, apparently horrified by the very notion.
Foaly sniggered. “I am suggesting that you may not own a copy of the rule book, and if you do possess one, you certainly have never opened it.”
Fair point, thought Holly, swooping down toward the surface of Uunisaari.
Whales are thought to be the world’s largest creatures. They are not. The kraken can stretch to three miles in length and have been a staple of Scandinavian legend since the thirteenth century, when they appeared in the Orvar-Odd saga as the fearsome lyngbakr. Early descriptions of the kraken are the most accurate, describing the sea creature as an animal the size of a floating island whose real danger to ships was not the creature itself, but the whirlpool it created when it sank into the ocean. But by the Middle Ages the legend of the kraken had been confused with that of the giant squid, and each credited with the most fearsome attributes of the other. The squid was pictured as big as a mountain, while the peaceful kraken grew tentacles and developed a bloodlust to rival that of the deadliest shark.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The kraken is a docile creature whose main defenses are its sheer size and the bulk of shell, gas, and fat cells enclosing a melon-size brain, which provides it with just enough intelligence to feed itself and shed its shell. Underneath the crust of rock, weed, and coral, the kraken resembles nothing more than the common acorn barnacle, albeit a barnacle that could easily house an Olympic stadium or two.
Kraken enjoy a lifespan of several thousand years, thanks to an incredibly slow metabolism and a huge network of support systems surrounding their soft centers. They tend to settle in a food-rich or magical environment and remain there until the food or energy residue runs out. Nestling in the middle of an archipelago near a human port provides not only camouflage but an abundant source of edible material. And so this is where kraken are found, anchored to the seabed like gigantic limpets, vacuuming city waste through their gills and fermenting it into methane in their vast stomachs. But if human garbage is their salvation, it is also their damnation, for increasingly high toxin levels have rendered the kraken sterile, and now there are less than half a dozen of the ancient creatures left in the oceans.