The Kraken's Mate (Houston Hub Shorts) Read online

  The Kraken’s Mate

  A HOUSTON HUB SHORT STORY

  JENNIFER CODY

  Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer Cody

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Formatting by Tammy, Aspen Tree E.A.S.

  Editing by Shannon, Aspen Tree E.A.S.

  Cover Design by Delaney Rain

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About Jennifer Cody

  Also by Jennifer Cody

  Chapter

  One

  CAM

  Ping. Ping. Ping.

  Every time the sound hits my sensitive nerves, my tentacles twitch in annoyance. I have maybe seventy percent control over those little monsters on a good day.

  Noises from human vessels portend a bad day for my control. Usually I’ll just release a massive belch, and that takes care of the problem with the noise above me, but it feels like I’ve been asleep long enough, and having awakened, the little monsters are eager to go find out who is shooting noise at the ocean floor—well, at me anyway.

  Sluggish after hibernation, I slowly rouse myself and do a laconic stretch of my ten arms, accidentally displacing something on the edge of a small trench. I blink my eyes open and light up the bioluminescent lines along my arms, curious about what had fallen on me.

  Oh dear. Looks like a human vessel. Eep. That might be my fault from the last time I belched in my sleep. Unless it’s a recent shipwreck…

  I grab it in a couple of my arms and take a look to make sure there aren’t any poor survivors hiding in the dark.

  Thankfully it looks like this boat has been down here a while. There’s a humanoid skeleton. Poor little thing; I hope it was dead before it ended up at the bottom of the ocean. I always hibernate in the same place; I keep hoping the humans will stop sending their vessels over my sleeping spot, but for some reason they refuse to stop doing things that are bad for them.

  I can’t help my body’s autonomic response to things existing in my space that aren’t natural. Human sailing vessels are definitely not natural. They really need to stop sailing and flying over the tiny part of the ocean that I have claimed. I’ve been here since well before humans were a twinkle in the eye of air magic—oh wait, according to the language update I’m getting, we’re calling it evolution now.

  Good to know.

  I put the yacht back on the edge of the trench and orient myself. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, but—

  Ping.

  I cringe. Ugh. These pings are so annoying.

  Sonar pings. That’s what this is. Ugh. I’ve been asleep for a while. Humans have developed a whole new language it seems. Well, English has evolved a lot since the last time I was awake.

  I orient myself toward the vessel above and start siphoning water through my jets to propel myself upward. It takes me very little time to cover the five-ish kilometers between me and my target, and by the time I get within a kilometer of them, I can hear the panic of the person manning the sonar.

  Ooh. Hey, look at that!

  Technology has significantly improved since the last time I was awake. It’s a tiny glass bubble with a man in it.

  Aww.

  Look at that squishable, little human-ish person. He’s so cute.

  He has damp, wavy locks of reddish hair and round dark eyes, and he’s looking at me agog. Obviously I’m super impressive in my kraken form, so I don’t mind his awe at my magnificence.

  Carefully, so I don’t accidentally break his glass, I wrap my arm around his tiny bubble and gently stop the sonar from continuing its painful, annoying noise. Well, I crush it, but at least it can’t annoy my arms, which means this day is already looking up.

  The little monsters are a bit sensitive to sounds and don’t always react well, and who could blame them? I’d be grumpy too if—well, I mean, yes, they are part of me, but it’s like being attached to ten feral cats who don’t always like each other, me, and everyone else.

  “Oh my god. I’m going to die down here. There’s a giant cephalopod, and it’s going to kill me. It wrapped its arms around the submersible. That’s why you can’t see anything. I hope you can hear me. Tell everyone…tell them all it was worth it. It’s so big.”

  The death throes of humans are always interesting, but this is strange even for humans. Who is he talking to?

  I put my eye right up to the glass to see inside, just in case he isn’t as alone as I thought, but no—that doesn’t make sense—he’s talking as if whoever can hear him isn’t with him.

  Not that I’m going to kill him. I understand some basics about humans. They can only come down so far before the pressure of the water will crush them, and then they can only go back to the surface slowly because otherwise they will get sick and die.

  I might have learned one or both of these things the hard way, but in my defense, I am a kraken and a Chaos Eater. I had no idea humans were so fragile when they first started exploring the waters of the deep. I am much more careful with them now that I’m older and more experienced.

  “Smooth mantel. Diameter of approximately f-fifteen feet for the eye. There are ridges on the suckers. So big. I think maybe the suckers range from a foot in diameter to—jeezus—twelve feet that I can see. Oh god, it’s moving me. I’m going to die. Just accept it, Soren. It’s worth it. Look at this thing. It’s—huge. I’m looking at a kraken. That’s all I can think to call it. It’s so big. It’s a kraken. A—flip! It’s a kraken! Are you hearing this? I wish you could see it.”

  I don’t really know the conversions for measurements, so I can’t tell if he’s accurately describing my immensity, but I can put it this way, before humans started harvesting sea life, blue whales were a favorite snack of mine.

  So blubbery and yum.

  And now I really want a snack.

  My hunger zeroes in on the noise of a porpoise pod about twenty kilometers away, so I start moving toward them; my hunger has never been especially patient but I’ve gotten better about it over the eons. I am now capable of feeding my physical hunger without gorging my hunger for chaos. Although I do try to satiate both at the same time as much as possible. It keeps me out of trouble if I’m not always seeking out sources of chaos.

  The human’s outcry reminds me that I have precious cargo.

  Hmm. I’ll have to stalk the porpoise pod and slowly rise to the surface so the human doesn’t die. Hopefully the pod stays in the warmer waters of the tropics. They’re not worth stalking in cold waters.

  Brrr.

  I’d rather go hungry.

  “I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I’m not dead.”

  I giggle, shaking the water but also keeping him safe from the tumult of my humor.

  What an adorable tiny human.

  Of course I’m not going to kill him.

  Chapter

  Two

  SOREN

  It’s a kraken. Well, I don’t know if it is actually a kraken, but it’s definitely the closest thing humans have ever come across in the wild. So big. I just can’t get my brain to wrap around the enormity of this animal. The suckers are bigger than me, and I’m not a small person.

  I realize that having a giant animal playing ball with my vehicle is going to be the end of my life, but honestly, I’m seeing with my own two eyes a creature from myth and legend, and it’s worth it. My team and I were live-streaming the dive, but I have no idea if they even caught a glimpse of the creature. It knocked out my sonar, and I lost the connection to my team when it decided to swim away with me.

  I’m a hamster in a ball right now, but wow. The kraken is simply, utterly, magnificent. Terrifying, but glorious.

  It stops suddenly, and the sucker holding my submersible lifts away to reveal the eye of the creature again.

  It feels like it’s checking on me, but delusional isn’t the way I want to go out, so I casually glance at the readings on the panel to make sure everything is as it should be. I haven’t been under for long, and I only reached two hundred feet before the creature captured me. I still have two days of oxygen, and the tanks are reading fine.

  Since those are fine, I return my attention to the way the creature is studying me. We’ve known for years that cephalopods are generally intelligent, but the recognition in the eye looking in on me is almost sapient. I realize that’s unlikely, but who knows? This is the first kraken I’ve ever seen, and there are zero accounts of kraken that aren’t fictional, so for all I know it is intelligent and has some kind of moral agency.

  Might as well introduce myself. I’m unlikely to survive, so there’s no point in being embarrassed, right?

  “Hello. I’m Soren Huggins. You’re magnificent, aren’t you?”

  Well, I’m still embarrassed, but there’s no one here to see me turn beet red.

  Of course the creature doesn’t reply. It’s unlikely to know English even if it is sapient—duh, Soren. And it’s a cephalopod, so body language is unlikely to transcend morphology. I
mean, octopuses smile about as well as birds. Maybe even less effectively since some bird beaks look like they’re smirking at least. It might not know what a smile is and it might interpret me showing my teeth as a sign of aggression.

  I’ve probably just started the first kraken-human interspecies incident if it’s an intelligent species like me. Oh gosh, I hope it just kills me and doesn’t attack humanity.

  “I am definitely not a good person to judge all of humanity on!” I blurt that out just in case it might save some people from a kraken attack.

  I check the readouts again just in case I’m suffering from hypoxia. I’m not. Readouts are normal; I’m just suffering from discovery shock and verbal diarrhea. So, the usual.

  “It was just a test dive,” I tell the kraken because I can’t shut up. “I was just testing the equipment. We decided to live stream because there’s always something to learn, even if it’s just a test dive, and because it’s good advertising for the company. Someone with more PhDs than me was going to go to the bottom of the Puerto Rican Trench next week.

  “You are just so fucking beautiful. I have a thing for cephalopods. I know I’m not qualified to classify you; I just know what I know, and I know about cephalopods. How many arms do you have? Do you use water propulsion like your tiny relatives? Are you the last of your species?”

  Unsurprisingly the creature doesn’t answer, but the eye does disappear, the sucker covers the glass again, and movement jerks me in my seat.

  I have the equivalent of a black box, so I use the time I have left to record my observations of the creature.

  Talking helps keep the panic at bay. That’s what I’m going with.

  It won’t do me any good to panic right now; I just have to accept that the likely scenario is my death or the death of the creature or both, and I much prefer the creature lives. It’s far too magnificent to kill, so I make my desires known to the recorder. “If it’s a choice between saving the creature and saving me, choose the creature. It’s glorious, and we aren’t going to kill it to save one lousy human. I’m replaceable, and it might be the last of its kind. Do not kill it. Not to save me. I’d rather die.”

  I know it’s macabre, but I have to sign a release form every time I test a submersible, so I was already thinking about what might happen if I died on this adventure.

  So far, I have no regrets.

  The kraken abruptly stops again, jarring me in the tight space of the pilot seat. The sucker lifts off and the eye appears again.

  I can’t help chuckling. “Checking in on me? I’m fine. I have two days worth of oxygen, and we loaded the vehicle with the same amount of food and water it will have for the real trip. So, we can play water ball for two days before I’ll expire. As long as you don’t accidentally destroy the life support system.” I don’t think the creature can understand me, but speaking aloud my realistic circumstances keeps me from indulging in fantasies that might compromise my ability to reason.

  The very tip of one of the arms slides between the eye and the glass and gently strokes the glass. I get it. If I was a carnivorous and hungry beastie as big as this one is, I’d want to get to the squishy center of the tootsie pop too.

  “Yes, I know, the human looks delicious, but the human would appreciate a few more hours to just love you before you kill him.”

  Chapter

  Three

  CAM

  Awww. He’s so cute. I want to keep him forever.

  This adorable human thinks I’m going to kill him, but he still wants to revel in the awesomeness of me before he does. What a perfect little man. He’s going to be surprised when I finally get him to the surface (after my snack—the porpoises turned south) and he finds out how amazing I truly am. I’ll give him the full view of my resplendent, majestic enormity. Truly, I am as gorgeous as he thinks and even more so.

  It’s not narcissism; it’s fact.

  As I come upon the pod of porpoises, I surround them with all my arms except the one holding cute, little Soren, and basically I weave a trap that shuffles the entire pod of males (I don’t eat mommas and babies) into my impressive maw.

  Not as delicious as blue whales, but still yummy.

  I don't have a beak like the tiny versions of me—I have an impressive mouth that I can use to feed my physical form and the void at the same time. It took me a few million years of practice to figure out how to combine two mouths into one, but I’m a smartypants and eventually figured it out. It also helps that I had plenty of time to experiment.

  Hunger satisfied for now, I check on the little human, finding him in exactly the same condition as he has been. That’s good. My arm must like him if it hasn’t gotten bored with taking care of him.

  Wait.

  I mentally check in with the little monsters to figure out if they’re passing the human around. Oh yeah, those sneaky little imps have passed him to three different arms already.

  They crack me up.

  Since the human is ok, I speed off toward an island I know about that will give him the best view of me in all my glory. It’s not easily accessible to humans, but the residents of the island are all my friends. Well, they were the last time I was awake.

  I hope I haven’t been asleep long enough for all my friends to have died. That could get awkward. The Proteans are a bit feral, but I like them. Hopefully some of the people there will still remember me. I am pretty unforgettable. The Atlanteans have whole legends about me, as they should.

  It doesn’t take long when you’re as big as I am to travel to familiar places, no matter how far away they are. I’ve been on this planet for longer than humans have existed, so I’m pretty familiar with all the oceans. I once timed how long it took me to circumnavigate the planet at a casual speed with plenty of stops for food, and it only took me about three days. Point being, it takes me about three hours going slow for the human’s sake to get to the island.

  When we arrive, I instruct my arm to put the human on a cliff overlooking the ocean, then I wait until I have his full attention. As soon as he locks his eyes on me, I rise from beneath the surface of the water, holding up my mantle to give him the best view of my beauty.

  The human very quickly exits his glass bubble and trips, falling to his knees in wonder and gaping at me with open-mouth awe. I raise the tip of one arm to him, giving him what I know he wants: an invitation to touch.

  This magnificence should be shared! I have no reticence about letting him touch me.

  “Oh, you are just…wow.”

  I like the way I’ve rendered him speechless. I can’t wait to show him that he doesn’t have to be afraid of me, but first he deserves to appreciate my glorious form. My other forms are also wonderful, but for other reasons than this one.

  My limbs don’t always cooperate in sending me feedback, especially if they’re too busy indulging themselves. The arm he’s currently caressing hasn’t bothered to send along the sensation to the rest of us, and I’m pretty sure the reason is completely selfish; it doesn’t want to share Soren with the rest of my arms. I get it, but I think I deserve to know how it feels for my human to touch me.

  Let me feel.

  I send that order down the line, but my arm doesn’t respond. Of course the little monster has decided to ignore me.

  Yay for stubborn arms.

  Let me feel or I’ll let everyone crowd you out.

  I instruct a couple of my arms to twitch in that general direction and one of them actually responds.

  The selfish arm holding all the sensation hostage finally lets me have it and woah. Lightning strikes and thunder rolls through me. Waves of knowing crash against an ancient, primordial, instinctual part of me as a tsunami of pure want floods me.