Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  By the time a computer translator had been brought in, she had quietened down. The shoulder, it turned out, was only ‘stretched’ (Beheshti assumed the meaning was ‘strained’), and the head wound was easily cleaned. Baru hovered excitedly. He was like a dog: he hated the confinement of being aboard, and loved the chance to stretch his legs on the ice above. Always badgering the Captain to surface. Having stretched his legs he would be high-spirited for hours.

  “What was your base working on?” Baru asked of the woman. She peered at the screen for the translation. Her voice, when she spoke her reply, sounded croaky, and she kept stopping, or hesitating with a weird high-pitched err sound. Beheshti looked at her hands. They were trembling, as if with cold. Was she cold? The ice was still clanging as it froze around them, but to the Captain the air still felt warm. Was she trembling with fear? If so, fear of what – of being found out?

  The screen printed out a reply, scientific station [ ] engaged in science [ ] [ ] studying the atmosphere conditions [ ] peaceful [ ] outrage.

  Beheshti ignored the machine. “Are you scared?”

  She read the screen, and then looked up at his face. Her frowning mouth made creases in her cheeks in time to the cracking noises outside the submarine, as if her white skin were made of ice.

  “What is your name?” Beheshti asked.

  She read the screen, and replied: “Ann Keltner”. Then she said something more. suing kennel [ ] environmental scientist, said the screen.

  “But you are affiliated with the military,” barked Baru. He leant forward.

  The screen replied: scientific expedition.

  “There were weapons and explosives at your camp,” Baru pointed out.

  As she was reading this and replying a crewman called the Captain away. He hastened through the corridor and up the ramp to the bridge. The Bridge Technician hurried to meet him.

  “There’s definitely something going on, Sir,” he said. “All sorts of seismic action.”

  The Captain nodded. “They are after us. Ready reactor, and launch three torpedoes.” Beheshti’s guts were shimmying. He paused, tried to listen to his intuition. “No four. Five. Yes. I believe they have come after us in force.”

  The torpedoes went, steaming their way through the ice, in five directions. The Ice Submarine fell into line away and a little to the east behind one of them. He shut his eyes, tried to sense what was happening around him in the blind darkness. The aircraft launching hunt-kill moles. The moles searching for heat, for vibration, for anything to move towards. He searched for that impossible telepathy, that godlike ability to read the blank surroundings that is the ice-submarine Captain’s fantasy. There was a loud thump, and he twitched in his chair. But it was evidently only a piece of rubble suspended in the ice, bumped aside as they slid past.

  “Sir!” shouted the Technician. The screen showed a sudden bunching of data. One of the torpedoes had detonated. “Drop to three kilometres,” he ordered. Now was the time to try and slip past these weapons, whilst the shudders and heat of that explosion masked their movements. “I want to be right down, as deep as is safe. What do the maps show?”

  The technician scrabbled with the keys. They were within twenty kilometres of the coast. He entertained and dismissed the idea of driving straight out into the ocean: a good way of baffling moles, but only at the cost of making them much more readily identifiable by the Westerners. Oceanic submarines were lost nowadays at an appalling rate. That was why the war council had decreed that the entire nuclear capability of the People’s Republic would be carried by ice-submarines. This only made the pressure on Beheshti the worse, of course. If the moles found him, they not only killed his men, but they broke another finger in the nuclear-hand of Islam.

  “We’re nine hundred metres off the rock, sir,” called a navigator.

  “All stop, let it freeze.”

  Once frozen in position, it was simple enough for an ice-submarine to settle downwards through the ice so slowly as to be undetectable. Heat the ice to 5°, and the water slid upwards past the hull to freeze easily and with minimal cracking, whilst the vessel bedded down under gravity. Beheshti sat for an hour in the Captain’s chair, before going back to the mess to find out what was happening with the Westerner.

  “She still claims she’s a scientist, sir” said Baru. His men were sitting around looking bored now, but Baru still had the puppyish gleam in his eye. “Claims they were only affiliated to the military by force of necessity in the war. She even had the courage to lecture me, sir.”

  “How so?”

  “She disapproves of ice-submarines. Says they are wrecking a pristine scientific site, thawing and freezing ice at all depths. Says we’re contributing to the melting of the ice-packs. I told her, good, maybe we’d drown New York, but she said Mecca would also go under. That’s not right, is it, sir? Mecca’s a way inland?”

  “She’s trying to war with your thoughts, Commander. Ignore her.”

  “Still, there was a base there for some reason. To begin with she insisted that it was a random position. Then it turns out that there was a battle there a few weeks ago, and that she was studying the detonation patterns frozen on the ice.”

  Beheshti sat opposite her. He smiled at her, and shook his head slowly. She looked away.

  The vessel settled slowly, sinking through a few hundred metres of ice so slowly it was almost impossible to detect the sense of slippage. Yet it was there, a liminal feeling of going-down. The men felt easier, Beheshti could see. The deeper the better, the defence of the burrowing animal.

  Six hours in, the Captain decided they were safe enough for him to take a nap. He slept for several hours in his cabin, and woke when a distinct lurch took the ice-submarine down through at least three metres in a moment. That was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. “What is going on?” he yelled, pulling on his plasjacket and tumbling up the ladder to the bridge corridor. “What is happening here?”

  The Chief Technician was blanched with worry. “I don’t know, sir, I don’t know. We dropped 3.4 metres suddenly. That shouldn’t…”

  There was another lurch. Somebody screamed, and then was quiet. The silence was horrible. Beheshti got to the Captain’s chair, positioned himself in it, when the whole world fell.

  For long seconds they free-fell. The Captain watched with horrible detachment as the long hair of one of the under-Technicians, a lad also called Ali, floated upwards. Then they hit the floor. There was a terrific crash, a buckling crunch, and the yells of men, as bodies collapsed and loose equipment smashed about. Beheshti was driven down into his chair.

  Then, nothing.

  “What was that?” Beheshti asked. Nobody replied, so he repeated the question. “I want to know what is going on.” His lips were dry, they stuck on the words as they tried to form themselves.

  The Chief Technician was the gloomiest. The reactor had been so badly shaken by the fall that he was certain it was irreparable. He had sealed the fusion room. They had a few days power on conventional sources, maybe enough to move through half a kilometre of ice: which was no good to them when they were five kilometres down.

  “Ice,” said the Captain, twining his forefinger into his beard. “Ice, yes.” The probes, poking out from the hull, were not detecting any ice at all.

  Beheshti, his face masked, climbed out onto the conning platform. Behind him came Gupta, Baru. It was utterly black, but the air felt surprisingly warm. “There’s no way we can be on the surface, is there?” Gupta asked. “Sir?”

  “How could that be, Gupta?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we were closer to the coast than we thought. Perhaps some odd ice formation, some sort of cave.” He stopped speaking. “A sort of overhang, perhaps? Why,” he said, as if interrupting his own chain of thought, “is it so warm here?”

  Beheshti ordered power to the ship’s floodlights, and great tunnels of light suddenly filled the darkness. They reached through blackness to end in great white ellipses. Beheshti angled them in v
arious directions, but wherever they pointed the same white ellipses ended their beams at roughly 500m. The ellipses bulged, shrunk, deformed as the beams moved up, down, around.

  The Captain sent out exploratory parties to check out the strange bubble, or cave (he didn’t like the way Baru called it a ‘bubble’; the word sounded too fragile), and it was one of the men on such a team who discovered the air was breathable. He must have taken his mask off in a spirit of curiosity, which angered Beheshti: had the atmosphere been toxic he would have died. But it seemed true, though hard to comprehend. This space under the ice had a high level of oxygen.

  “It can’t be a natural formation,” insisted Gupta. “Sir. The oxygen proves that. It must have been constructed by the Americans. It is some sort of anti-submarine base.”

  “But why, then, is it deserted?” The searchlights could find nothing; only a huge arching ceiling of ice over a flat ground of flattened pebbles. The only feature was a low saddle of rock reaching up out of the ground, to a height of less than a metre, a quarter of a kilometre from where the ice-submarine had fallen.

  “I don’t know sir, but I must advise caution. As your second-in-command, it is my duty to advise caution.”

  “Caution, Gupta. Yes.”

  “Sir, if this is a Western site, then they could be on us at any moment. I must insist, I must beg you, Sir, to relinquish single control over the missiles. Give me launch privileges again, as a precaution.”

  Beheshti angled a searchlight directly up. The white spot on the roof was perfectly smooth, blank. “Yes, Gupta, the missiles. But would the missiles even fire, here? They are, after all, encased in ice-torpedo shells. They are designed to burrow through the ice and only when they reach the surface fire into the atmosphere. I doubt it they are of any use to us at all, in our present condition.” Nor could Beheshti send up a microsense, or know whether the People’s Republic wanted him to launch an attack.

  By the second day, the men had grown used to their strange new environment. Beheshti had authorised the setting up of a few floodlights, positioned on the shingle. Men off duty played football, their shouts echoing weirdly in the great chamber. The Captain himself strolled, his feet crunching on the pebbles. It was amazingly warm, considering that they were buried under so much ice. Considering that the temperature on the surface so far above them could be anything up to sixty-six below. He hunkered down to his haunches, and picked up a pebble. It was a black stone, flattened and worn smooth. By the ice? But ice didn’t make pebbles. This must have been a beach at some time. Most of the stones were the same dolomite as the Transantarctic Mountains, but some were a paler, yellow stone, and some were pitted like old sandstone.

  Why was it so warm? And why didn’t the temperature melt the ice above and bring the great weight of material over them crashing down?

  After working all night the Chief Technician thought that he might be able to work the reactor turbines for up to six hours before the whole thing became dangerous. Six hours was probably enough to get them to the ocean, where they could travel for days more on battery power as a conventional submarine. But six hours of reactor power or six thousand hours was equally irrelevant to the vessel in its current situation, beached on Antarctic shingle, with the ice half a kilometre distant in every direction. “We need to be actually in the ice, or on it,” the Technician reminded him. “It’s not enough our nose is pressed against it.”

  “So we need to do more than drag the vessel to the ice,” said Beheshti. “We need to dig a tunnel and push the vessel into it. Yes?”

  “We should start soon,” said the Chief Technician. “The oxygen in that bubble out there – God knows how it got there in the first place, but it won’t last for ever. Our boys are breathing it up. We’ll need to get into breathing packs in a day or too, and that’ll make the digging harder.”

  When Beheshti asked about dragging the ice submarine over the shingle the Chief Technician had literally thrown up his hands in horror. “It’ll wreck the underside, just wreck it. But there’s no other way.”

  Beheshti walked back to the submarine. And, for a moment, in the shadows at the feet of the arclights – half-seen, but undeniably seen,, he saw: his wife. She was standing, and looking at him. He knew it was her, although (in his head, straightaway, he corrected himself) it could only be the ghost of her. He stopped, and gawped; but looking straight at the light assembly he could no longer see her. A trick of the light? A hallucination? No, he knew in his heart, no: neither of those explanations was right. Trusting to the automatic process of his external carapace, he resumed walking to the submarine; but as he walked he was thinking: death. We have broken into a grave. That is why she is here.

  All available hands were sent to the nearest face to begin burning and digging a tunnel, but twelve hours work produced only a feeble-looking indentation in the side of sheer ice.

  Baru brought Ann Keltner, the Western woman, out on the second day, and she was as astonished by their environment as any of them had been. Beheshti didn’t think she was pretending her surprise. She clambered down the side of the submarine and scrunched about on the pebbles.

  Gupta said: “Sir, you are going to make sure that she is guarded at all times?”

  But Baru was dismissive. “Where can she go?”

  Gupta was eager to make his point. “Sir, we don’t know. This may be an American base, of some kind. There may be some sort of equipment that can summon the Westerners here. We should keep her in view.”

  “Do you want me to pull soldiers off digging detail to babysit her?” asked Baru, with an unpleasant edge to his voice.

  But Beheshti interposed. “I don’t like the idea of the woman wandering about by herself,” he said. “Commander, I want two of your men detailed to be with her, to make sure she doesn’t get up to mischief.”

  “Where can she go, sir?”

  Later in the day, Baru reported to him on the bridge. “Perhaps you should come and take a look at this.”

  The Westerner had been exploring the 300 square metres of black rock that poked up through the shingle. With only a hand torch, and with both bored guards sitting on the edge of the rock-formation smoking, she had seemingly stumbled through a crevice. Her leg had gone into the crack up to the thigh. Her cries had brought the guards, who had helped her out, and brought her back to the submarine, but not before peering into the crack themselves. “They think it’s worth going down into,” Baru told the Captain.

  “Down into?” echoed Beheshti. “Is there something down there?”

  He went out personally with a torch into the blackness beyond the arc-lit area of the submarine itself. The women and her two guards followed. Away over to his right, the digging area splashed a puddle of light in the darkness. He teased away the strands of hair from the corner of his lips where they were straying into his mouth. Was it his imagination, or was the oxygen already being used up? And so warm.

  At the rock formation, they paused. There was no doubt but that the rock was warm to the touch. Not by much, but it was warmer than Antarctic rock had any business being. The Captain didn’t know how it could be. Was this outcrop somehow heating the ice and creating the bubble? But what about the oxygen?

  He let the Westerner go forward, and followed her. They came to the crevice, and went down on their haunches to look inside. It was less than a metre across, a black slash in the rock that bent round to the right, boomerang-shape. The Westerner was already lowering herself into it, wriggling with her legs to see if there was any purchase. Beheshti’s first instinct was to stop her, but when she found a ledge and stood grinning with only her head and chest poking over the top, he instead lowered himself down to follow. They stood side by side, bathers in a weird rock-sea. One of the guards got in beside them, but there was no room for the other. When the Westerner ducked down and disappeared, it took a moment for the Captain to summon the courage to follow her.

  They crouched and followed a sharpwardly down-leading slope. After a few hundred
metres the ceiling lifted, and the sense of space returned. Beheshti could see the Westerner’s torch beam flicking and dancing away ahead of them. It turned towards them, and moments later she was by their side, gabbling her gibberish with tremendous energy. She kept pointing and pulling.

  They were in a bell-shaped chamber, apparently formed by nature itself; but when Beheshti lifted his torch he saw the reason the space had been preserved under the rock. The roof was tiled, a vault of what looked like bricks, aged and blackened.

  It took a while for this to sink in.

  The woman was pointing to the ground. There seemed to be the broken remains of a wall, antique-looking, and a pile of what looked like bones. “How strange,” he said to the soldier. “It’s archaeological.”

  “It looks old, sir.”

  The woman was chattering away, talking rapidly to herself. She seemed to be gathering bones, cradling her arms around a whole mess of rubbish. Beheshti slapped the stuff out of her grasp. Her voice rose, and then stopped as the soldier angled his gun. Her expression was distorted; it looked like rage, like pain. Beheshti could imagine her complain, without needing to decipher her gibberish. A whole civilisation buried under the ice, the archaeological find of the century, we must explore it. But there was no time for such things in war. Nor did he really see the need for scientists, archaeologists. It was all known to Allah, and nobody had to wait very many years before meeting Him.

  Back in the submarine the Westerner was increasingly agitated. When they brought her the translator she spoke at length. Antarctica thought to be iced for three million years [ ] discovery of these archaeological remains of the highest significance [ ] at least twelve thousand years old [ ] imperative these results be communicated to international community.