A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  The surface.

  It was at that moment that the material of his evac suit – which, unknown to Korn, had been caught on a hull rivet and stretched to tolerance when he had been evacuating the Pharos One – split open and exploded into a constellation of escaping air bubbles.

  Chapter Two

  Two Weeks before the Storm

  Meliha made her way along the street, hugging the wall as if the red brick had been magnetised. They were after her. They were after her and they would find her. They always found everyone. And when they found her, they would probably kill her. Maybe not there and then. Maybe not even in the way most people would think of a killing. They could kill someone’s mind, destroy their personality, and leave the body living, walking, breathing. But as a person, as a being, you would be just as dead.

  It was cold. So cold. And wet. And dark. And her feet hurt. She had walked so far. Most of all, Meliha was afraid. She was afraid of the people who were after her because she could no longer see them as people. Somehow they had achieved what they had always wanted to achieve, what they claimed they could achieve, and had become something other than human. She found that she didn’t even think of them as individuals, but as a collective, single being. Corporate.

  A singularity.

  Meliha tried to push the fear out of her being. Fear was an emotion she had never really had much time for. She had been a clever, brave, inquisitive child. A bold little girl who faced the world pugnaciously. Fearlessly. ‘Benim küçük cesur kaplanim’: that was what her father had always called her: ‘My brave little tigress’. She thought back to the times, the hours, she would sit and talk with him, asking bold questions about the world. Whatever the question, he always had an answer. Not always the answer to her question, he would tell her, but an answer. He had once showed her a crystal paperweight that he kept on his desk. Something he had picked up during his many years and countless travels as a geologist. He told her that beautiful things like crystals and jewels lay scattered all around the world, waiting to be found; sometimes buried deep in rock, sometimes lying scattered near the surface. There were times, he had told her, when you simply found them by chance, other times when you had to work hard – looking carefully and digging deep – to find them.

  Answers, he had explained, were exactly like that. They lay scattered throughout the fabric of the world. And they were never more precious than when you found them for yourself.

  And that had become how she would live her life. She had searched for answers, for the truth. And now she was here, in a strange city in the cold north, being hunted because of the answers she had found.

  Meliha was in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, a city within a city: the old bonded warehouses looming above her and the dark waters of the canal at her side. A light mounted high up on one of the warehouses cast a puddle of light and the Hamburg rain danced as little silver explosions on the cobbles. She tried to get her bearings. The warehouse she sought was somewhere near here. If she could make it to the warehouse, maybe they wouldn’t find her. At the very least, she’d have time to think through her next move.

  Meliha went through her pockets again. No cellphone. She had left it behind in the café she had had lunch in. She had left it on the table, switched on, and had placed her napkin over it. Then, when she had walked out of the café, she had left it behind.

  One more check. Illogical: she knew she’d left it in the café, but she had to check her bag and pockets again. Just to be sure.

  It could be that the staff in the café had found the phone and had put it to one side for her to claim it later. But the café had been in a run-down part of Wilhelmsburg, and Meliha guessed that it was more likely that someone had pocketed the phone on finding it. She thought about the obese pig of a man who had sat at the next table, making disgusting noises as he ate. It hadn’t been his eating habits that had most caught her attention, though: it had been the smartphone or hand-held PDA he had constantly tapped at with a stylus between overfilling his mouth.

  Maybe he had taken her phone. Or perhaps another café customer was walking around Hamburg with her phone in their pocket.

  Which was exactly what she wanted. Because when Meliha had rechecked her pockets, it had been to reassure herself that her cellphone was not there. Now it was out there somewhere, like a message in a bottle cast out on the sea. Maybe someone would understand the ringtone’s significance and decrypt the phone’s content. At the very least, it would send her pursuers on a false trail.

  She took the street plan from her pocket. A booklet: print on paper, not a hand-held satnav device or GPS navigator. She plotted her position from where she had come into the Speicherstadt, across the bridge and along Kibbelsteg, then into Am Sandtorkai. The warehouse was near. If she had calculated it right, it was just a block away and around the corner.

  The warehouses in the Speicherstadt were vast red-brick cathedrals of commerce dating back to the nineteenth century. But now it was all changing. They had extended the original Speicherstadt with a very twenty-first-century version of itself: the vast Kaispeicher A, the Speicherstadt’s most westerly warehouse which had once housed massive stores of tea and tobacco, was being built upwards and outwards and into the shape of a vast sailing ship that dominated the skyline. A building project that had lasted years and was transforming the storehouse into a massive concert hall, hotel, apartments. Like the Speicherstadt before it in the nineteenth century and the Köhlbrandbrücke in the twentieth, the Elbphilharmonie would become the landmark to define Hamburg in the twenty-first century and beyond, as distinctive as the Sydney Opera House, while reminding everyone of the city’s maritime past.

  Even this part of the original Speicherstadt was changing: ad agencies and trendy bar-restaurants were making inroads, mainly to be near the stylish new HafenCity development that extended to the old bonded-warehouse city.

  But the row of buildings outside which Meliha now found herself had remained largely unchanged. Just as there had been for two centuries, the cobbled canalside path was lined with huge storehouses containing imported rugs and textiles from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan.

  She moved out of the puddle of light cast by the warehouse lamp and checked up and down the cobbled canalside path. No one. No sign of them. But, she knew, that meant nothing. It was their function to follow, to shadow you unseen. To find you without you knowing they were there until the last moment.

  And, of course, they had the kind of technology that you normally only expected the intelligence services of some superpower to have. Maybe they were watching her right now, able to see her in the dark. Maybe she was a bright infrared beacon in the cold dark of the Speicherstadt.

  So close. Meliha ran. Her feet hurt even more with every footfall. She had walked for kilometres to get here. No taxi. No public transport. Nothing that was connected to a computer system or radio network. She had crossed a city without crossing a circuit, without connecting with a technology: even avoiding the few parts of the city that had CCTV, taking circuitous detours to avoid the spots marked in red pencil on her map.

  She stopped suddenly, realising she was at the right block. The signs on the warehouse were in Turkish, English and German. This was the one. There was no alarmed keypad entry, just an old-fashioned brass keyhole in a sturdy, traditional German warehouse door: robust, dense wood, reinforced with brass plates. Reassuringly low-tech: a door that had protected the contents of the warehouse for more than a hundred years. She took the heavy key from her bag and unlocked the door. She slipped through it and into the warehouse’s darkness, with just one last check of the canalway outside.

  Maybe she was going to be all right, after all.

  Meliha took a small wind-up LED torch from her handbag and scanned the warehouse. She was in an entry foyer and a sign listing the tenants told her that what she was looking for – Demeril Importing – was on the third floor. She pushed through the glass-panelled doors and into the main warehouse. Over to one side of th
e warehouse was a large goods lift, but Meliha decided it was better to take the stairs and make as little noise as possible.

  When she reached the door of Demeril Importing, she took a second key from her bag and let herself in through an ornate Jugendstil door. She shone her torch around the warehouse. Textiles piled high: rugs, carpets, kilims. Rich Turkish designs revealed on the folded edges. Tags revealed names she knew so well: Kayseri, Yeşilhisar, Kirsehir, Konya, Dazkiri … Somehow the familiarity of the names gave her comfort. There was a robust, ornate wooden desk and a kilim-upholstered chair near the door; the desk was piled high with paperwork and ledgers, bills and orders impaled on two spikes. Business was done here as it had been done in the last century and the century before that. No computers. No websites. No electronics.

  Moving across the warehouse Meliha continued searching until she found an alcove at the back of the main storage area, filled with less carefully stacked carpets. She chose a lowish pile of carpets right over in the farthest corner of the alcove and lay down on them, switching her torch off. She could rest. She could rest, but not sleep. Sleep would be dangerous. She would be safe here until the morning. Then … well, then she would try to get in touch with Berthold. How she could do so without using a phone or any other electronic medium she had not yet worked out. But she must get to Berthold. Tell him what she knew. But now she could rest, but not sleep.

  She fell asleep.

  It probably had been the quietest of sounds. Maybe it had been the main door, three floors below: an indistinct, dull clunk that had fired into her sleeping brain like a bullet. Whatever the sound had been, she had been asleep and now she was totally, nerve-janglingly awake. For a sliver of a second she wondered if she had slept all night and if what she had heard was the arrival of the warehouse staff; but it was still dark. She lay still on the pile of rugs, only her head raised. She didn’t breathe; straining to hear any further sound. A few seconds passed, stretched intolerably long by the adrenalin surging through her system. Silence. Then she jumped as she heard another sound. Faint and muffled. Voices. Two, three, maybe more. The floor below. Far apart from each other but talking calmly and quietly.

  Meliha couldn’t make out the words, but she knew they would be communicating in English. They always spoke English. Her heart pounded. Of course they didn’t need to speak any louder. They would be enhanced: able to communicate at a distance, to see in the dark, to locate the slightest sound.

  They would be working their way through the floor below. Systematically, methodically. The way they did everything. A single consciousness. A groupmind. An egregore.

  Taking her torch, Meliha shone it into the darkness to search her surroundings for concealment or escape. The LED light was dim, but she dared not wind up the torch again in case they heard the sound.

  There was a storage cupboard further behind her, right at the back of the alcove, barely visible behind a stack of carpets, some lying loose on the floor next to it. If she could get in there, perhaps ease a carpet roll across in front of it, maybe then they wouldn’t see her.

  She slipped off the shoes from her aching feet and eased herself off the stack of rugs. She crossed the rough wooden floor to the storage cupboard. It was much bigger than she had thought and empty except for a stack of sample books in one corner and, leaning against the wall, a metre-and-a-half-long roll of a textile that was too lightweight for carpeting but too heavy for curtains. Easing herself in behind the sample books, Meliha rearranged them to offer meagre concealment. She started to move the textile roll over for additional cover, but it was heavier than she expected and started to slip from her grasp. She made a desperate grab for it and only just stopped it from crashing into the wooden side of the cupboard and alerting her pursuers to her hiding place. Muscle-achingly slowly, she eased the textile roll diagonally across in front of her, like the bar of a gate.

  Shrinking back as far as she could in the store cupboard, Meliha switched off her torch and was immediately plunged into dark. As her eyes became accustomed to this new depth of darkness, she peered through between the top of the sample books and the angle of the leaning textile roll. She could see only a narrow section of alcove and nothing of the main area of the carpet warehouse.

  And she could hear nothing. No movement. No voices.

  It was like a shadow passing.

  Right in front of her. Someone or something passed swiftly and silently across her narrow view of the alcove. Right to left. A dark flutter you could not identify as a person. She gave a start but instantly contained it, not moving, not breathing. They were there. On her floor. Now she could hear faint sounds of movement. Something spoken quietly in English.

  The shadow crossed again, this time left to right. Closer.

  Meliha didn’t move. She still held her breath, afraid they would hear even that. A tear welled up and ran down her cheek, the agony of waiting for the moment when they would tear away her makeshift camouflage becoming unbearable. More sounds. Then silence. Minutes passed, still nothing. Meliha concentrated so hard on the silence that she gave a small start when it was broken. But this time the sounds were even more muted. And above her. The next floor up.

  She let go her breath, slowly, quietly. They were definitely above her now. They were not as good as they thought. They still had very human fallibilities.

  It was difficult for her to tell how long had passed: her fear stretching every second immeasurably. But Meliha guessed it had been at least an hour since they had finished checking the floor above. No sounds of searching, no quiet, calm, measured voices in English. She peered into the gloom. Nothing. Carefully, slowly, making sure not to touch anything, she turned her wrist but, as it lacked a luminous dial, she still could not see the time on her watch. Her legs began to cramp but she didn’t move them. The pain grew and grew, the fibres of her muscles knotting in spasm. But she ignored it. She concentrated once more on driving out her fear.

  ‘Benim küçük cesur kaplanim.’ She focused on remembering her father’s voice as he had said it. The gentle tone; the pride. ‘Benim küçük cesur kaplanim.’

  She waited for another hour. Meliha perceived a faint brightening of the light out in the warehouse. A hint of morning. She had not heard anything more.

  They had failed. Or perhaps they had not known but merely suspected that she had been in the building. There were other places they perhaps knew about and were searching there. She decided that, from now on, she must not go anywhere she had been before. But she had to keep moving. Their failure had presented an opportunity for her to open up the distance between her and them. She could get out of the city, out of the country. If she acted now.

  Meliha eased the textile roll back as gently as she could, making no sound. Edging herself out from behind the sample books, she paused and searched all she could see of the storeroom before taking tentative steps out of the alcove.

  There were four of them waiting for her. They were standing, motionless, in the centre of the main floor of the warehouse. Four dark shapes, shadows. Genderless, ageless. They were silhouetted against the vague milky bloom of the large warehouse window. Two of them had something bulky around their eyes. Night-vision goggles. None made a move as Meliha appeared; no hint of reaction. They had been standing there for two hours, waiting for her to come out of her hiding place. It was more efficient, quieter that way.

  They were what Meliha knew had been pursuing her. They were what she feared most.

  Consolidators.

  The Consolidator closest to Meliha slowly raised its dark arm as if pointing at her. There was a popping sound and she felt a sharp pain in her chest.

  As she fell backwards onto the same stack of carpets on which she had slept, she thought she heard her father’s voice call to her.

  ‘Benim küçük cesur kaplanim.’

  Chapter Three

  The Night of the Storm

  There was no storm.

  All there was, was a vast expanse of open, dark sea. No land, no ship
s; no one there to witness the storm’s night-time birth. But there was syzygy: the perfect alignment of sun, moon and Earth, with the moon at its closest to the Earth, and the yearning sea heaved and arched its back under the moon’s compelling pull.

  Above the sea the air was cool. Dry. And higher above it was a colossal mass of even colder air that had been born somewhere in the north and far to the east, and had drifted south-west, over the Baltic Shield. And as it had done so, it had climbed higher into the troposphere. Its Siberian chill had become even colder with altitude. And now, superchilled and super-elevated, it slid silently and disdainfully over the Atlantic.

  But it would not be allowed to pass.

  Something moved low across the arching back of the sea; something equally as colossal as the cold above it. This mass of air had been born in the tropics and carried warmth and moisture with it. And just as her counterpart above was colder than normal, she was three full degrees warmer than the usual drift.

  Warm air rises, cold air sinks: a simple fact of physics, of meteorology.

  The storm was born. It sucked the warm, moist air upward in a violent convective mesocyclonic vortex, the torn air reaching speeds of 180 kilometres an hour. A waterspout formed, joining sea to sky. Condensing water vapour from the warm air fizzed and crackled with electricity and clouds bulked and boiled and fumed. A vast supercell stormcloud, like a titanic anvil, formed above the Atlantic, turning the night darker.

  Filled with millions of tonnes of water, it rotated slowly, malevolently, and began to shoulder its way towards the land.

  Chapter Four

  Kreysig recognised the fluttering in his chest as a rush of adrenalin and felt guilty about it. This was a catastrophe: buildings had been damaged, people had been injured, perhaps some had even lost their lives. Kreysig’s home city had been assaulted; violently, relentlessly, without mercy.