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Chapter Fourteen

Victory

By shalion

In her reduced, uncomplicated state, Leviathan as barely aware of the passage of time, only regaining her sense of how much time had passed once her consciousness reformed out of the ether. It felt like coming to from a long nap, though she retained her memories from the past four years as if she had never slept at all, her mind absorbing the pale fish-memories in little more time than it took for Little Sister's voice to reach her from down the spinal column. She noticed right away that she was due for spawning again, her insides tight and packed full to the brim as her belly dragged in the water, bulging so heavily it actually made her nose dip slightly in the water, a force she had to constantly counteract with the muscles in her back. She was uncomfortably "thin" as well, her exported flesh waiting in a pod of 25 round-bodied daughters swimming placidly behind her, each whale obscenely fat in her own right.

The first thing Leviathan said was, "Couldn't you have waited another month?"

"I could have." Little Sister said, "But I thought you might be excited to learn that we've won."

That took Leviathan's mind immediately off her bloated, vaguely nauseous stomach. "Tell me." She demanded.

In the intervening time, two generations of predators had been sent to the island who actually had updated information regarding their prey. Thus, when they arrived, they already knew the lay of the land, including all of the forest paths and the best places to hide as well as lay in wait for ambush. It was a magnificent advantage over the previous generations as nearly a quarter of their number had always been lost due to the natural attrition of exploration as well as fighting beasts on their home territory. That was one advantage the Two-legs had lost forever. But also, the body plan of the hunters had evolved each year, eventually ditching strategies that involved overpowering or running down the prey in favor of quiet and cunning ambushes and traps. This was far more successful. As the hunters' brains got larger and larger each year, they were more and more able to keep up with their foes. There was a particularly enthralling memory of a Two-leg hunting group being broken apart after being lured into the forest one dark night during a storm. The screeching noises of the new hunters frightened the Two-legs so badly they fled in terror. Of the original group of four, only two returned that night and the hunters ate well.

Adopting more feline traits for stealth and speed improved their match up with the Two-legs, but despite the changes, they still suffered four or five losses for each Two-leg taken down. But even this rate turned out not to matter very much. Leviathan bred new hunters far more quickly than the Two-legs made more Two-legs. Dozens arrived on their shores each year. In the end, the numbers advantage alone proved to be enough. The settlement, which had been shrinking in the last two years Little Sister had access to, was simply found abandoned one day after a particularly vicious attack when the hunters, using their superior numbers waged a confident strike against their warriors, entangling the stronger males long enough to slaughter several of the smaller females and children before dashing back into the safety of the forest night.

"Wait, they were simply gone?" Asked Leviathan with a now-familiar sense of confusion regarding the actions of the Two-legs.

"All gone." Said Little Sister confidently. "In fact, there was very little food for our hunters after the Two-legs' territory became empty. More than a few starved before their mothers came for them."

Leviathan was disheartened to hear that and even more disheartened to think that perhaps for the last couple years, the island has been home to nothing more than starving cat-like daughters, having eaten everything edible. She tried not to get caught up on the lost calories, however.

"But where did the Two-legs go?" Leviathan insisted.

Another infuriating shrug from Little Sister. "I can't tell. Our daughters were never curious about it. They thought their mission was over."

"But it's not over!" Grumbled Leviathan and giving herself a belly ache as her twisted, compressed stomach turned over. "The Two-legs aren't dead, they've escaped, just like I thought they might!"

"Maybe, or maybe they became depressed about how many of them had been killed and decided to all go and throw themselves into the sea." Little Sister suggested unhelpfully. "Like a reverse beaching."

Leviathan simmered. "Little Sister, I am not sure I've heard you say anything more dumb than that."

Now Little Sister bristled. "It happens with dolphins and whales all the time. You shouldn't underestimate the emotional needs of animals with big brains!"

If Leviathan had any concept of a higher power, she would have prayed for sanity. "Taking that into account..." she said generously, "Maybe it would be more useful to just assume that they've somehow fled to another island rather than done us a favor by committing mass-suicide. You know, a worst-case scenario."

Despite Leviathan's mental tone dripping with sarcasm, Little Sister answered amicably. "That's a sound strategy. But we have no way of knowing where the Two-legs have gone. There are hundreds of islands in this area of the ocean, aren't there?"

That was indeed the case, but Leviathan was not daunted. She had all the time in the world after all. "Well, we've cleared them of this place at least." Said Leviathan in resignation and then she was struck by what she just said. Brightening she added, "We might as well colonize this land since we've expended so much energy in clearing it of its apex predator."

Little Sister's excitement grew to match the head's at the direction her thoughts were taking. "Oh, there are so many patterns I've been wanting to try out for land-based daughters!"

There was no need to encourage the tail who Leviathan could already feel descending into the multiple experimental areas and micro uteri scattered around their gargantuan body like benign tumors. "Maintaining a large predator on a small island like this is probably a waste, but we ought to have something there to make it unpleasant for the Two-legs to ever try to live in that place again." After all, if they could leave the island, they certainly could come back some day and Leviathan was sick and tired of patrolling this tired, old place year after year.

Little Sister grinned in her mind. "I think I have something just for that..." she chuckled to herself. Of course, she did not tell Leviathan with what she was being impregnated this time. The sea-beast could only sigh and resign herself to the coming contractions which began to ripple the surface of her mighty dome of a belly, slowly at first, and then faster. Leviathan tolerated the mild discomfort because she could not go back to sleep yet. Several items had been added to her To-Do list.

A many hours later, even while in the midst of hard contractions, Leviathan found herself vertically oriented, her nose pointed towards the ocean surface and her tail straight down, a very unnatural position for her, but one that was comfortable enough to maintain with her whale-like configuration. Every few minutes, Leviathan lashed her tail back and forth, propelling her stadium-sized body upward. It was hard work getting enough momentum to carry her out of the water, even just her head as she was doing now. Leaping would have required water at least a quarter mile deep and probably would have injured her and her daughters inside her belly badly, though. Instead, she was mostly bobbing, just enough to get her eye out of the water long enough to see the island, and more importantly, a particular shore.

Because of the depth of water Leviathan needed, she was not very close, but she did not have to be to see what she wanted. It was costing her a lot of energy each time she rose from the water, propelling thousands of tons of meat in a rising pillar each time, but it was worth it not to have to wait two years to verify what Little Sister was so confident of. There, in the distance, guided by harvested and stitched together memories was the place where the Two-legs had made their camp. The tall nests still stood, much like the memory, but they were even more scattered now and several were in ruin. Leviathan had no trouble seeing that much with her single large eye on this side of her body. The images came to her in flashes as she rose and fell in the water, but with Leviathan's excellent memory, she soon had all the verification she needed. The Two-legs' home was long abandoned.

Of course, that was not to say that they may have moved elsewhere, but Leviathan trusted Little Sister's opinion and had no way of checking inland herself anyways. Leviathan stilled as a 100 ton daughter slipped out from her, the newly birthed adult vaguely surprised to find herself drifting sideways rather than down. It took several moments to correct herself. "It's that way." Leviathan would have told her with gentle, affectionate words if she had any to give her new daughter, and she had any way of understanding them.

Suddenly wistful again, Leviathan slowly righted herself, still awkward with over 200 more offspring to go. Her poor used body had nearly ten more days of this to go before it would end, leaving her empty and drained at the conclusion of her labor.

"Will you ever stop wallowing in the discomfort of this necessary work?" Little Sister asked out of the blue.

Leviathan responded curtly, "I can feel however I wish about it." She harrumphed as well, "It is not as though any of our daughters are bright enough to even understand what I do for them, or even be the slightest bit grateful for life."

"Hope it remains that way." Said Little Sister ominously before returning to her endless tinkering and pattern weaving.

Scouting even the nearby islands was a years-long effort that quickly mounted into decades. The fact that it took longer than a single breeding cycle to gather any information on the surface greatly hampered Leviathan's ability to hunt for her missing enemies. The sole lead she had was Little Sister's best guesses as to the areas where her missing feeder whales were sent. The fact that they covered thousands of miles of open ocean and Leviathan only bred a limited quantity of them, with respect to the rest of her brood at least, each year greatly slowed the pace of the hind-brain's statistical analysis. Still, Leviathan patrolled these areas with dogged determination, even altering her global route to hit more of these potential spots in addition to using her two weeks of annual free time. Once Leviathan was able to rule out a few of these areas of endless ocean, her searching became a little less hopeless. In fact, her mere presence seemed to have some effect on the rate of vanishing feeder whales. Little Sister's math was flawless, so Leviathan trusted her when she said that the rate of losses had dropped by half a whale each year. This made little sense initially to Leviathan. After all, how could one lose half a daughter? It took a few months of patient explaining for Leviathan to comprehend the statistical meaning more fully.

The meaning of this observation remained elusive for a very long time, however, as did many other things. At this point, with the addition of land biomes to her expanding domain, Leviathan would have found it impossible to keep track of the multitude of varieties of daughter and how they were nested and interacted with one another. It was fortunate then that she never tried. She simply carried and fed them to maturation, leaving the design work to Little Sister, who gained even more brain mass as the years went on. Sometimes Leviathan thought this was due merely to how much thinking Little Sister did constantly rather than any conscious effort on her part. But Leviathan was done with comparing herself to Little Sister. She had her tasks and Leviathan had hers and frequently, it seemed to her that she had the much better end of the bargain they had made so long ago now.

Leviathan kept up her search for nearly three years, three, long and fruitless and brutally conscious years. For the longest time, Leviathan had hoped to gain a glimpse of a floating wooden board or a diving Two-leg in the many reefs and coastlines she visited. She must have traversed the majority of the islands in the south Pacific in that time, at least for a day or two each. She strongly suspected that the Two-legs were hiding right above her nose, sort to speak, mocking her from the safety of the land. But there was no way to find out.

Little Sister generated thousands of spy-daughters, tiny things with large eyes resembling miniature primates. However, the information they gathered, when it started coming in two years after the start of the program, tended to be poor and only a fraction made it back to Leviathan 'alive' without being eaten during the course of their short lives by the regular sort of terrestrial predator. The entire system needed heavy refinement, Little Sister admitted readily, but Leviathan's patience lasted hardly more than a year longer.

She knew she deserved a vacation from the search, the endless frustration, the mocking animals who insulted her by their very existence, and her lack of ability to find them. Decreasing the rate of losses in feeder whales did a lot to mollify her temper, though the cause remained unknown. Little Sister seemed to have a suspicion, and Leviathan suspected that she had a suspicion, but there was no way to get her to speak on it. Another secret Leviathan would rather not deal with. "Wake me up when we learn something worth making a decision on." Said Leviathan to her other brain before devolving into a great fish. It was the last conscious thought she had for over 15 years.

*****

Three years had felt like coming out of a nap. Fifteen felt like being yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, though of course, Leviathan had already spent longer periods as an uncomplicated fish during the course of her life.

Her mind bloomed like a flower at Little Sister's coaxing, reforming in her gentle touch like a sculpture, yet one which was obdurate to the sculpter's hand. Leviathan was her own self, even her fish brain knew that, so Leviathan knew completely that her personality was her own, even if so much of it had been shut down and inactive for years.

Information dumped into her mind like a cold salt bath from both Little Sister and her own hardwired memories her fish-self stored even if it couldn't access them directly. Unlike a long sleep, Leviathan had a history even as she regained awareness, a continuation extending back all the way to the day she landed on the planet. But though she had the sights and sounds of her days swimming through open ocean and under the ice canopy of the northern pole, the more important information came from her other brain, fed to her in a stream of memories and raw thought. The massive sea-beast lurched only a little as her brain and personality rebooted.

Even at her best, Leviathan would have required days to actually comprehend the storm of information Little Sister was throwing at her. She filed most of it away for later, taking in only a very few basic facts. After taking a minute or so to center herself and finish pulling herself back together, Leviathan said, "Something's changed." She did this even as she stretched her back. She was lean and hungry, about a day past the end of the last of her spawning which left her insides still chafing slightly as the organs rearranged themselves in the newly hollowed out tummy.

"Lots of things have changed." Said Little Sister, unsuppressably chipper. Leviathan wondered how she could handle the monotonous years with this endless mental energy of her, especially when she clearly thought faster and about more things than Leviathan ever did these days. She wondered if Little Sister even experienced time the same way she did anymore.

Leviathan gently perused the memories and mind-objects Little Sister had handed her. She gave up trying to take it all in and instead asked, "Have we found any Two-legs yet?"

"Oh, several." Said Little Sister, pointing out the respective memories with a mental touch. "There's more than one colony actually and on many of these islands along our route."

Leviathan rumbled deep in her breast and lashed her tail thoughtlessly, causing several hairline fractures to the thick vertebrae, the material not quite up to handling the sheer mass of her and she had grown still larger over the years, adding another 40 feet to her length which amounted to hundreds of thousands of extra tons of muscle, bone and fat within her frame.

She winced with the pain of breaking her tail, even so slightly. "We need stronger materials to keep up with our mass..." she complained.

"Easier said than done, I'm afraid." Said Little Sister sighing. "Try to be more gentle with us, that hurts me too."

Leviathan felt a surprising amount of guilt at causing Little Sister pain, but could not bring herself to apologize, not when the news she had was years old, not even counting the built-in in delay to spawn and devour daughters, and seemingly nothing had been done about the Two-leg problem.

Shrugging off the pain in her tail, Leviathan said, "Even so, our Two-leg problem is getting worse, not better." She took a moment to collect her thoughts, still not quite used to being fully conscious. "At least tell me we are on our way to exterminating these other colonies. And we ought to be colonizing all of these islands, just so they have fewer places to run to potentially." She added as an afterthought.

"We are, on both counts." Said Little Sister, to Leviathan's instant relief. It was bad enough to be awakened after stewing so long in the pleasant, warm bath of ignorance, but to be showered by bad news in the same moment... It was almost more than she could take. Leviathan felt better to know that progress was already being made, but that good feeling deflated quickly after Little Sister began speaking again. "But our war has been long and difficult and it remains so, even with the massive improvements I've made in our scouts and ability to gather information on dry land." She said, tone turning smug once again. "We have hunters on three different islands, a couple generations in now. It is difficult, bordering on impossible for me to fully anticipate the Two-legs behavioral patterns, but I've kept arming and developing our Two-leg hunters. Only two or three die now for each kill, though the animals are obsessive about keeping their dead away from us. I still haven't figured out why..." Little Sister lapsed into her own mental fugue for several long moments, finally finishing, "We haven't been able reach an energy profit on the hunt since too many of our daughters die before they can return to us and they can't often steal the whole body to feed themselves either. Often they're starving by the time their lives are done with."

Leviathan detected subtle manipulation from her tail's words in the last part. She decided to address that immediately. "I don't care what it costs us to keep making our little hunters. I want the Two-legs dealt with." It was harder to say that than she had been expecting, but that was to be expected given her entire drive in life. Still, the old humiliation rang in her memories. She reached down with her left flipper to rub at the side of her belly, so empty at the moment it actually flowed inwards towards her torso under the rib cage. The old scar was almost gone now, the knotted flesh having fallen away flake by flake; an almost imperceptibly thin ridge remained and some peeled off even as Leviathan rubbed at it, the desk-sized flake immediately attracting the attention of a school of nearby fish. Never-mind, the mental scar would endure forever.

Little Sister didn't speak immediately and Leviathan was more than a little grateful. It was hard for the endless depths of the ocean and the distance, ever-present song of whales and daughters to not be soothing. Hunger tugged on Leviathan's will and she quickly made a meal of the first of her pod she set her eyes on, the flesh sliding down her wide gullet an even more effective balm for her mind. Then she counted the rest of her waiting daughter flesh currently hung on other bones than her own. Thirty-nine. "Not bad." Thought Leviathan to herself. It almost made up for the nearly 300 lives she had been crammed full of just a fortnight earlier.

It was even easier now to consume the uniformly 200 ton feeder whales since she had grown, but Leviathan still rested a while before moving onto her second. Her mind was still in a torrent considering a potentially endless war with the Two-legs yet still unable to conceive of the possibility that she might possibly not be able to exterminate this irksome species. She was more than them in every way, she held every advantage. If they did not have land to hide on, their whole existence would simply be another part of her already, and she would not have had to expend however many thousands of tons of precious blubber lost to failing daughters and economic blunders.

'Surely Little Sister will make progress. The hunters are becoming steadily more proficient.' She told herself and yet the fact remained that if Little Sister did not really want to win the war, then it would never be won, not if she wanted to preserve the Two-legs for the sake of studying them.

Leviathan lurched forward, conscious of her aching tail, yet still driven by frustration. She ignored the usually gentle dance of inviting a daughter down her gullet and opened her jaws wide, capturing the feeder whale in her mouth. She put up no resistance, but that did not stop Leviathan from swallowing her roughly down her gullet, all but slamming her down into place in her stomach with powerful muscular contractions. Leviathan's jaws and throat ached slightly at the rough treatment, 200 tons of flesh was still an impressive meal even for Leviathan, and the mammoth sea-beast felt better with her belly a little more than half full now. The loose skin of her abdomen wavered slightly in the gentle sea current, her abdominal tuck almost vanishing with the impressive meal. Leviathan paused looking at the rest of her pod, her returns on investment, her dividends. She almost wanted to skip the eating process entirely and simply be smothered in their accumulated blubber again... almost.

After another few minutes of listlessness, Leviathan was ready to speak to Little Sister again. "Let's run through our hunters' experiences on the islands in some more detail."

Now Little Sister hesitated unexpectedly. "I would love to." she said at length, "But I think there is something else you might be more interested in."

"Oh?" Asked Leviathan and let her tone turn snarky, "More bad news?"

"You would probably say so." Said Little Sister without a trace of guilt.

Leviathan could only release another mental sigh. "What is it?"

"Lift our head out of the water." Said the tail and at first, Leviathan was only dumbstruck.

"You want to see the surface of the ocean?" Leviathan asked with pure confusion, this was Little Sister after all.

"No, but I think my most recent essence recovery will make more sense if you take a look above water. We ought to be in about the right place... We've been taking the same route for ten years now."

Leviathan did not bother to argue further with Little Sister, deciding to simply do as asked. It did not even matter that it happened to be night and there would be nothing to see anyways other than stars and the horizon, possibly the moon as well. Leviathan gathered a bit of speed and pushed herself up, cresting the surface with her entire head for a few precious moments amid a shower of splashing ocean water. Leviathan had expected to see nothing, or at least a familiar starry panorama. She was not expecting to see something.

"Lights on the water?" Asked Leviathan even as she splashed down into the ocean again with a tremendous spray.

"Those aren't just lights, Big Sister. That's land and Two-legs live there... Many, many Two-legs."

Leviathan began to comprehend just what Little Sister was speaking about as the memories and information were shoved in front of her mind once again. Never in her long life had she felt like losing a precious meal, but she found herself struggling to contain her 400 ton breakfast just now as understanding dawned horribly on her. Leviathan had no word for 'city' but she didn't need one to understand it meant danger, even for her.

*****

For the longest time, Leviathan had held a preference for the open ocean for ease of mobility and access to lush coastal areas where her offspring could be easily dropped off and gathered. Only the modification of her annual migration path had taken her, by chance it had seemed, fairly close to the large continent which bordered the great ocean of the planet. The continent itself did not concern her except in her vaguest long term plans in which she would reap the last of the life of this world into herself, thus becoming the ultimate, supreme organism. She had no conception of what the 'South China Sea' was or how it was different from any other body of water. And though she would learn soon that wooden craft, far larger than the tiny boards the 'Splashers' had used, regularly plowed its waters, the ocean remained so vast that even a titan like Leviathan easily became lost within its confines. Add to that the fact that she rarely lifted her head out of the water, and it was easy to imagine how Leviathan must have frequently passed her prey over the years, each quite oblivious to each other... or at least that was how Leviathan imagined it.

"These... tools... These... shapes." Leviathan reeled as she examined the detailed visual memories of 'surviving' scouts who had managed to return to her over the years. It seemed that Little Sister had thought to begin deploying them not only to the islands but also to the continent almost since the start of the program.

"Almost none of them managed to survive on the continent for very long, though." Said Little Sister nonchalantly. "I had to shorten their spans to a single cycle and give them enough reserves to last nearly two thirds of the year without eating, and that finally started bringing in new data..."

Leviathan said very little during the weeks-long debriefing. Even with Little Sister distilling down her near decade of research into the most essential understandings, for the first time in her long time, Leviathan felt almost beyond her depth. Observing how radically the Two-legs had transformed their environment, sweeping aside forests more easily than elephant herds to erect their hollow not-trees, 'buildings' Little Sister called them, and how they conducted their lives in an endless frenzy of activity to rival ants, Leviathan felt as if she were peering into a new alien world, though of course, she was the only real alien here.

"It's already much worse than I ever feared." Leviathan groaned. Every bit of information she managed to gather together in her mind seemed ominous and wrong. Following leads after the initial five years of scattering scouts as far and wide as she could, Little Sister had dedicated the next ten years to locating the highest concentrations of Two-legs on the coasts of the continent. This was actually not a hard task at all once Little Sister had thought to set daughters to following where the bigger craft sailed to from the first 'Port' she had found. Little Sister had used cool logic to identify not just a few, but over 100 areas where the Two-legs set up their buildings and plied the seas with their larger craft, dozens of animals to each one and powered apparently by the wind in an ingenious fashion.

"Perhaps." Little Sister admitted. "At least from the perspective of wiping them out."

Leviathan felt her frustration towards her other brain grow. "And what other perspectives might there be? There is no room on this world for both them and Me."

"Not in the long run, no." said Little Sister, surprising Leviathan. "But we'll win in the long run regardless." She said this with easy confidence, but went on to explain at Leviathan's query. "I'd give a high probability to these Two-legs being some sort of super-apex predator. However, they still depend on the world for their sustenance and resources. We are still in the earliest stages, but we are on our way to becoming the world. When all else is ours, the Two-legs will have no option but to become part of us, even if we never defeat them outright."

Little Sister's vision of victory left a sour taste in Leviathan's mouth, but it actually alleviated her anxiety a little. At the very least, her tail did not seem to be obsessed with research for research's sake. She wanted the same thing as Leviathan, though her method left the final victory up to some time perhaps a millennium or more into the distant future. Leviathan did not know if she could wait that long. "They hurt us!" Leviathan said, using her mantra which she recited when even she wearied at the prospects of the long war against an inferior species.

"They did." Said Little Sister consolingly, wrapping her presence around Leviathan's mind.

Leviathan relaxed into the calming embrace. Part of her really did want to let the old hatred go, was tired of harboring it, if only because she hated being miserable. "What would you have me do?" She asked honestly because she sensed the secret desire in Little Sister's mind.

There was a pause and a weight to Little Sister's next words, as if she had been waiting for years to express herself. "Rather than a path of destruction, we could perhaps try symbiosis."

Leviathan knew symbiosis, of course, having come across so many examples of creatures of different species cooperating and existing to mutual benefit. But the calm Leviathan had felt a moment earlier evaporated instantly at the thought of attempting to harmonize with the arrogant, lower species. "No." She said flatly.

"But, rationally?" Little Sister tried, but Leviathan interrupted with a bellow.

"NO!" She cried down their long connection and into the sea around her, nearly to the ends of the ocean itself. Fish floated dead to the surface before her eyes as she added, "I will not cooperate with creatures who can look at me and see prey." She said, tone dripping with venom. "I will not suffer them to live on the same world as me, my world!" Leviathan narrowly avoided breaking more of the thick, yet fragile bones in her body, reigning in control of her emotions at the last moment.

Little Sister knew better than to press her case again and retreated back into herself. Things stood as they were for a month without either brain seeking contact from the other. Surprisingly, Leviathan broke the long silence.

It helped that she had managed to eat her way through nearly half of the pod now, piling their meat onto her bones. Her profile was already rotund and she would put on another quarter of her current body weight before she ever reached her favorite feeding grounds. "I want to leave the Two-legs alone for now." Leviathan said, finally having reached the decision herself after mulling it over all this time. "I want to go someplace where we won't be bothered by them. Let's take over more of the world first, become stronger..."

Leviathan's voice was still tinged with menace, but Little Sister still seemed excited merely by the contact. "Where will we go?" She asked simply.

"I haven't seen the other side of the ocean in a long time..." said Leviathan and even as she sent the thoughts along, she angled her snout north and east.