PoraBora

Prologue

The breach was coming.

Akoni watched the surface water begin to quiver from the safety of five levels up, above grated walkways and dozens of anxious men. The oil lanterns began to shake. The steel began to scream.

It would hold. It had to.

The rig was a tower in the sea, its hull dropped hundreds of feet beneath the waves. Cranes and block rooms looked over a single central chamber, filled to sea level with eight hundred thousand tons of water.

And one very angry god.

The water began to blacken.

"Ready," Akoni shouted.

His syphons, men trained for this singular job, already were. They had been since the first quaking, the first commands, and the first alarm. But it was one thing to be ready, and another to see it happen.

The water bubbled, and the god crested.

Water poured down its shape as the whale rose up and twisted a flipper above the surface. Each of its tiered mouths opened, ventral pleats spreading. In all three of them, Akoni saw the swirling abyss where their lights were lost in slick oil. Then the moan erupted, pulsing up the rig and shuddering the rafters. Steel beams whined under the pressure.

In the water, it would be enough vibration to kill a man. There was a reason Akoni kept his distance.

Three years, and it never ceased to impress him.

The syphons on the grated steel walkways that latticed their way up the chamber had their hands on their ears.

The god hung at the surface. Black oozed down its body, boiling from its mouths, gurgling from its blowhole. Its song choked on it, popping a bubble in its throat. If it had flesh beneath the oil, Akoni had never seen it.

"Give," he commanded.

The god's mouths dragged shut and in a second oil erupted from its blowhole, a geyser thick and dark, lights glinting into lines against it. It blasted through the lowest walkways. The men there raced to catch it, but when it came too high they had to race away.

The plume caught one. It smacked him off his feet like a piston shrimp's punch. The syphon flailed and screamed, falling up the walkway in some shape of a man, drenched black until even semblance was lost. Boiling alive.

Akoni grimaced. He did not like to lose good men. Noikoa called him soft. Said a military man couldn't afford to care about loss. But could afford to lose, it seemed. Akoni almost finished a thought about sending a letter to the man's family before his attendant stepped up to him.

"He's being gracious, today," shouted Tua, young of twenty years, clean-shaven, dark-eyed and still covering his ears.

Akoni agreed. Normally it was over in a burst, but now the geyser splattered the lower walls of the chamber. Oil thickened over the water until the only evidence it was beneath was where its steam broke open a bubble of a way up.

How lucky for us, thought Akoni. "Retreat to the higher floors! I don't want anybody else--"

Somebody else beat him to it as the jet crossed the entire chamber in an instant, tossing another syphon from his feet and dropping him dozens of feet below. Into the stewing oil.

"Retreat to the higher floors!" Akoni snapped. They couldn't hear him, of course. The god's wailing hadn't quit.

Akoni pulled out his compact mirror, brass case decorated by the visage of a goblin shark, and flashed the message down instead with the glint of lantern light. Retreat. Few men could look at him while they watched the spout, but some orders didn't need to be seen or heard. They ran, and Akoni was forever thankful for the grated flooring and boots that kept their grip, even where the oil had passed through.