Confederation
an excerpt

1871
Bob Jensen, the captain of the whaler "Lady of Nantucket" out of Massachusetts, eyed the rocks with distrust. Race Rocks, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, was one of the most treacherous channels in the area, a veritable graveyard of the Pacific. The rocks were noted for their hazards of rapid tidal changes, constantly switching channels, and fast-flowing currents. He did not want to be anywhere near them, especially not with a full load of whale oil in his hold that he wanted to offload. Were the ship to suffer a fire, she would go up like a torch. The crew would be dying on the other side of a continent and very far from home. Jensen had no desire to do that. Like every whaling captain, he only wanted to get home with his very profitable load, kiss his wife and children again, and stock up for another voyage to hunt whales. Just as he had done since his first voyage at age 14 and just as his father and his grandfather had done before him. Bob Jensen loved the sea. But he was Christian enough to know that the pagan sea did not always love him.
He was keeping his eye out for the lighthouse, built only a few years before, on the promontory. There were also supposed to be horns that alerted mariners to the rocky approach. But rumor had it that no one could hear them, though the territorial authorities refused to believe it.
The sky was dark. It was the kind of night that chilled a captain's blood. No wind stirred the sails and it was cold. Without a wind, if the ship got caught in the currents, she might not be able to get out in time.
Just when Jensen thought it could not get worse, he heard a hissing noise in the clouds. He looked up. To his horror, a globe of light appeared in the clouds. Something was falling fast, something on fire. It resolved itself into a pinpoint of light and popped out of the clouds as a ball of fire that landed just off the port side of the ship's bow. It fell, hissing, into the sea, but it did not immediately go out. Jensen started to relax, but then he saw another ball of light in the clouds, and another, and another. Balls of fiery rock began to fall out of the clouds and hit the waves, hissing and raising clouds of steam. The steam smelled foul, like rotting bodies. As Jensen's men ran about the ship, trying to keep the rocks from landing on the ship and starting a fire, Jensen looked over the side. To his horror, he saw that the globes had neither sunk nor gone completely out. Instead, they seemed to hover about ten feet below the surface. Things were streaming out of them in great strands that seemed to connect them, both to each other and to the ship, glowing, silvery things that looked like fish until they reached the ship and began to crawl up its hull like insects. Parasites, but no kind of parasites that Captain Jensen had ever seen. He was a tough man, but the sight struck him through and through with terror, as if he had been impaled stem to stern with a harpoon.
Then the rocks began to hit the ship and punch through the top deck into the decks below, setting the rigging on fire and making it twist and blacken like cobwebs. The ship was in some sort of meteor shower, an extended and deadly one, though it was not the season for any such event. Jensen shouted directions at his men, screaming to be heard above the pandemonium of crackling flames and shrieking men. Flames began to spread along the deck and as they did, so did the same small figures that were swarming up the side. They looked like silverfish, but as they went along the deck, they left blackened trails on the polished wood. And they made a noise like the screeching of a metal hook down iron. As the creatures disappeared below, Jensen realized, to his horror, that it was only a matter of time before they reached the whale oil and set it on fire, set it alight. And then, the ship would know fire for certain. He had seen fire ships in battle, in his youth; he had no desire to be caught on one, to have the questionable choice between drowning and burning alive. Like all sailors, he had a terrible fear of fire at sea. At sea, the ship was the sailor's universe. No sailor wanted to see his home, the only thing that kept him breathing air instead of salt water, burned to the water line.
Jensen's voice cracked as he raised it to a scream, trying to alert his men to the terrible danger above the noise and light and distraction of the flames. Some of them understood and tried to throw buckets of water on the creatures and the balls of fire. But both creatures and balls of fire seemed to be made of pitch--for the water seemed to have no effect whatsoever.
Then, Jensen, with a chill sweat of fear that no man of his years and experience at sea should ever have had to feel, saw a line of silvery creatures hesitate and then turn toward him, as if sensing that he was in charge of the attempt to fend them off and drive them away from the ship. Before he could jump up on some rigging to save himself, they skittered, like quicksilver, across the deck, hopped onto his boot buckles and shot up his trousers, setting them on fire. In an instant, he had transformed into a shrieking torch, losing sight of his men and any interest in saving them. The pain was excruciating, digging down into his bones like little insect jaws. He wanted only to stop the pain, put out the fire. And since the deck was aflame and there was no water there, he did the only thing left that he could--he jumped up onto the gunwhales and threw himself over the side. He hit the waves hard, mercifully stunned, and then the cold, dark water dragged him down to a cold watery death, far, far from home...