Informed by her vizier of the intruder, the Metah of the Ponkti, Lektereenah, was incensed. Immediately, she summoned Loptoheen and a squad of her top prodsmen.
“Loptoheen, the intruder must be driven off at once, attacked and completely destroyed.”
It was her chief prodsman, named Plakto, who pointed out that perhaps the Seomish immigrants were the real intruders.
“These are their waters, Affectionate Metah. We came here in large numbers…maybe we’ve disrupted something. Disturbed a nest or a home.”
Lektereenah would hear none of it. “Nonsense! We have a perfect right to be here. Shooki’s provided a path for us to come here—all this has been foretold.”
Even Loptoheen had to stifle a snicker at that. Lektereenah invoked the name of Shooki or the mekli priestesses whenever it suited her.
The Metah went on, instructing Plakto. “Gather your men. Remove that thing from our settlement. Capture it if you can. Destroy it if you have to. But remove it…I don’t want any intruders nosing around Ponkti waters.”
Plakto said, “At once, Affectionate Metah.” The prodsman scooted off and was gone.
Arriving at Keenomsh’pont, the great roam quickly dispersed and hundreds of kelke returned to their kels. Not long afterward, Plakto’s prodsmen made their move.
The little sub had first been sighted sniffing and rummaging through some of the outer rings of tents and holds of the Ponkti settlement. Not far away, over a small rise delineated by a bubble curtain, the edge of the Skortish settlement could be seen. It was here, along a sinuous ridge of lava domes that Plakto’s force set upon the Beagle, with scarcely contained fury.
From a small crevice in the Omtorish camp, Tulcheah bumped Chase with the news.
“Did you hear…that…thing…that creature…we saw. It’s inside the city now. Lektereenah’s sent some of her prodsmen to shoo it off.”
They both saw and heard the crack and sizzle of prods being discharged. Dull light flashed beyond the hollow opening and waves of sound rolled across the lower slopes of the seamount. Outside the hold, knots of Omtorish gathered, discussing and commenting on the intrusion.
“Serves them right,” someone muttered. “We don’t need intruders around here.”
“There may be more…we should be careful with this,” someone else said.
“We don’t know what the Tailless might do…they could bring bigger weapons.”
“These are their waters, after all--“
“Nonsense! We have a perfect right to be here.”
After a few minutes, the little valley was quiet, preternaturally quiet, as the Seomish solemnly considered the implications of what had just happened. Murmurs and whispers and clicks and whistles soon erupted, then a great cheer rumbled across Keenomsh’pont…Ponkti united with Omtorish, Skortish with Eepkostic, for once the kels seemed as one.
And it wasn’t long before the first brave souls scooted over toward the scene of the short but violent battle, circling the wreckage of the sub on the seabed, rubbernecking, cracking jokes, offering suggestions for what should be done with the remains.
Beagle now lay cold and dead, in a shallow ravine, its outer hull scarred and scorched from prod discharges, its remote manipulator arms torn off, its camera eyes smashed, the little ship shattered and still in a swirl of sediment.
Two thousand meters away, at the surface, scientists aboard Beagle’s mother ship, the research vessel Darwin, were shaken yet strangely energized by what had just happened. The expedition leader, Woods Hole marine biologist Dr. Steve Lyons spoke first, after someone reached for the monitor, still frozen with the final images of the Ponkti prod assault, and switched it off.
“Chuck, make sure we’ve got everything recorded. I mean everything. Video, instruments, depth, speed, course, water conditions. Anybody have a final position on Beagle?”
James Plath, a cetacean expert, checked the sounder data on a nearby console. “Looks like thirty-three degrees, forty-one minutes north by sixty-two degrees, thirty minutes west. Just south of the Muir seamount. I make Beagle’s depth at four thousand five fifty feet.”
“Get all the files backed up immediately. Nobody’ll ever believe any of this if we don’t have proof…and I mean lots of proof.”
A throat was cleared. It was Dr. Tamika Lefbridge, ichthyologist from Marine Biology, along to study benthic and pelagic species west of the Mid-Atlantic rift zone. “Steve, did I just see what I think I saw?”
Inside the control room below Darwin’s bridgehouse, heads were shaking and hard swallows were audible.
Lyons tried to be cautious. “Now, Tammy, don’t go jumping to conclusions.”
“I mean, they seemed intelligent. Sentient in some way. Purposeful. They came after Beagle with a definite purpose. And what the hell were those…things, those weapons, that sizzled and sparked?”
“Let’s keep the speculation to a minimum and make sure we’ve got good data…bathymetry, currents, chem analyzer readouts…just focus on the data, people. Focus on the data.”
But Lefbridge felt a lump in her throat. They all did. “Steve, you saw those structures, same as I did…they looked like tents, shelters of some kind. My God, it was like a small city down there.”
“We’ve found Atlantis, at last,” someone joked. That brought nervous chuckles.
“Yeah, right. Or the Garden of Eden.”
“Or little spacemen from Tralfamador.”
Lyons held up a hand. “Everybody, just cool it. Get back to your stations and back up everything. Let’s hold a meeting in an hour, crew’s mess. Keep your theories and wacky ideas until then. And don’t tell the Captain either…I’ll think of something.”
Tamika Lefbridge waited until everybody else had left the little cabin where Beagle had been monitored for the last few hours.
“Steve, you know we can’t keep this quiet for long. What happens when the media finds out?”
Lyons was busying himself noting down everything he could about the robot sub’s final moments on a slate.
“God help all of us, Tammy. God help all of us.”
Solnet Omnivision Video Post
@anika.radovich.solnet worldview
May 23, 2115
1200 hours
SOLNET Special Report
“A New Atlantis”
Anika Radovich reports from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA on breaking news that a new underwater civilization of intelligent marine creatures has just been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. She interviews Dr. Josey Holland, a marine biologist at Woods Hole….
“First of all, Dr. Holland, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to be with us today.”
“My pleasure, Anika. How can I help you?” Josey Holland has long blond tresses, with lighter highlights. She has a tall, somewhat long face with a radiant smile and sharp cheek bones. Today, Dr. Holland is wearing, under her white smock, a flannel shirt and jeans.
“Dr. Holland, we’ve all heard the recent news about some new apparently intelligent creatures in the seas around Bermuda. There have been reports from various sources that the creatures even have a sort of city underwater and that there have been hostile actions against humans…and that the U.S. Navy knows all about this. Is this Atlantis that has been discovered?”
Dr. Holland flashes a winning smile. She looks like a cheerleader. “No, Anika, of course not. Atlantis is a myth. It’s a great romantic story, for sure, but it’s just a story. Here at Woods Hole, we deal in facts, not myths.”
“Dr. Holland, underwater archeologists have a long record of discovering and exploring submerged cities and ruins, like Pavlopetri, off the coast of Greece, for example. Is there, in fact, an underwater city…or civilization here…something heretofore undiscovered?”
Now, Dr. Holland’s face takes on a more serious look. Her hands are almost never still but flutter around as if about to fly off. “Anika, we need to be careful with our words here and deal in what is known at thi
s time. To your point, it is true that our remote subs have given us some evidence of seabed structures around the Muir seamount complex and surrounding areas that don’t resemble anything natural. Are they constructed things? We don’t know yet. When the first deep-sea hydrothermal vents were discovered, nobody had ever seen anything like them before…from a distance, they resembling smoking chimneys. But we now know they weren’t ‘chimneys’ at all, just fissures in the seabed, releasing superheated steam and chemicals.”
“These creatures…these Atlanteans, as some call them, you’ve already given them a name, I understand.”
Dr. Holland nods, her lean, willowy face breaking into a smile, clearly preferring to be on more factual ground. “That’s right. Tursiops digitalis…dolphins with fingers.”
Anika Radovich expresses surprise, then cocks her head into a ‘you’re kidding me, right’ sort of look. “They have fingers? Did I hear that right?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve seen them up close enough to recognize finger-like structures at the ends of their forepaddles. This is a rather extraordinary discovery in itself. And it begs the question: since Evolution developed fingers for these creatures, what do they do with them? What caused this development? We’re asking these very questions ourselves right now.”
“Dr. Holland, Solnet viewers are asking many questions themselves. Just how intelligent are these creatures?”
“Well,” Dr. Holland takes off her dataspecs and wipes them down for a moment, clearly searching for the right words.” “I want to be very clear here. Intelligence is somewhat of a loaded word. Truthfully, we don’t yet know the full measure of their intelligence. We have some physical evidence that they construct rudimentary structures. They have a language…of course, so do whales and dolphins and many marine species. They seem to be gregarious and gather in social groups. Beyond this level, I’d be just speculating. We’re pretty early in our investigations.”
Radovich now tries another tack. The news AI in her earbud keeps reminding her that the piece needs more dramatic punch. “Dr. Holland, sources have told Solnet that the Atlanteans are pretty aggressive. We have reports that they damaged one of your own submersibles in some kind of attack. Are these creatures hostile to us? Have they interfered with anything, deep sea mining, oil and gas exploration, that sort of thing? Is this why the Navy has kept this discovery under wraps for so long?”
Dr. Holland frowns, the way a mother frowns at a child who has disappointed her. “Well, many species are aggressive, even territorial, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. As to what happened to our Beagle sub, we’re looking into all the data now. Conclusions are premature at this point.”
“What about communication attempts? Are we…or they, trying to communicate at all?”
Here, Dr. Holland’s face morphs into a thoughtful countenance. Her eyebrows arch into a sort of question mark. “Now, that’s an excellent question, Anika. Of course, many species, even most species, communicate at some level. If I may, I think you’re asking if the, er Tursiops digitalis, are capable of advanced communication, even symbolic communication. The truth is, we may never know the answer to that. Look how long we’ve been trying to communicate with dolphins and whales, trying to understand their language. They are clearly intelligent creatures, but their language is so different from ours that making the connection has proven to be extremely difficult.”
Now, Anika puts forward the question her news AI has been really nagging her about for the last several minutes. Quietly annoyed with the damned earbud, she flicks it off under the guise of adjusting her own glasses.
“Dr. Holland, what do you think the Navy’s interest is in all of this? Are they hiding something from us, in your opinion?”
Holland’s face assumes the impenetrable mask of official ‘Woods Hole’ expression. “I really couldn’t say, Anika. I’m not privy to the Navy’s research or investigation.”
“For our viewers, what’s the next step?”
“Well, we’re putting together a press conference pretty soon, with a kit for all reporters, detailing what we know so far. It’s pretty clear to me that there will have to be another, more detailed expedition to the site. Perhaps, then we can make better contact with Tursiops digitalis, perhaps even coax one of them to come close enough for more detailed study.”
“You mean capture one?”
Holland shrugs noncommittally. “That remains to be seen. We’re just in the earliest stages of our investigation.”
“Dr. Holland, thanks for being with us today.”
“My pleasure, Anika. Any time.”
Special Report Ends
Chapter 2
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Woods Hole, MA
May 24, 2115
Dr. Josey Holland, Biology branch chief for cetacean species, nearly tripped on the stairs as she headed up to the second-floor conference room of the McLean Lab building. She checked the time…Christ, Walter will have my head if I’m late again. She scurried down the hall to the end, took a right and burst into the small paneled room—the sign read Data Analysis 2-- out of breath, clutching a slate and papers tightly to her chest. She found her place at the end and dropped the whole armload on the table.
“Ah, Josey…glad you could join us today,” Dr. Walter Wriston muttered. “We should get started—”
Holland shot her department chief an annoyed look. He knew perfectly well why his star researcher was running late, having spent a fruitless few minutes with some pesky Solnet reporter. The eyes rolling around the table said volumes beyond Wriston’s words, but Holland could do nothing about them.
Some people called it grandstanding. Some people called it self-promotion. Josey Holland called it transparency and letting the public know as much as you could.
“I called this meeting to sort through what Beagle has given us, before her unfortunate demise…and to get something together for the press conference, which is…” Wriston checked his wristpad, “—due to begin exactly one hour from now.” The department chief rambled on for a few minutes about Institute policy regarding press conferences, which gave Holland a chance to gauge the reactions of her colleagues around the room, most of whom had already seen the Solnet vid.
They were all there, the best and the brightest from Marine Biology: Steve Lyons, always with a smirk on his face that said I know things that nobody else around here knows; Tamika Lefbridge, the Beagle pilot who’d been on duty when the creatures had attacked the sub, for that’s all you could really call it and who still had faint hand tremors, though whether from that event or her growing palsy, nobody could really say; Jim Plath, truly a legend in his own mind, but what a mind, Holland thought. It was Jim Plath who could see patterns in data and make intuitive leaps to find an answer that nobody had thought of. A royal pain in the ass, to be sure, but invaluable when faced with something like what Beagle, and by extension, all of Woods Hole, was now facing.
Wriston called up vid imagery of the Beagle surveillance and let the imagery unfold on the table screens and on everybody’s slates, all now synched to the master server.
“Pretty straightforward for most of the file,” Wriston did his own unnecessary voice-over. “Beagle sniffs around, takes routine measurements, then encounters these two—” It was Tulcheah and Chase in the narrow crevice.
“Romeo humping Juliet,” Lyons wisecracked, adding his own voice-over. “Come, let me take you to zee Kasbah…”
“Steve, really—”
Wriston waved them all silent. “All pretty routine stuff, until this—” The imagery clearly showed the approach of the Ponkti prodsmen. “Beagle had found structures that looked artificial, pods, domes, fabric enclosures, and then here comes the cavalry—”
“What are those things they’re carrying?” Tamika Lefbridge asked of no one in particular.
Holland studied the image, asked Wriston to pause the feed, then zoom in. “They sure look like weapons of some kind. Really just a rod, but what’s that little b
ulge at the back end?”
“Maybe a battery,” said Lyons. “Beagle really got zapped when they came up. Went haywire. Somebody forgot to put phasers on stun.”
Lefbridge took that personally. “Yeah, I am the one who was driving and I did lose control of everything. No effectors, no propulsors, nothing. I tried dropping ballast, tried blowing emergency air, nada. Couldn’t get my dog to bark or bite or anything.”
“Beagle dies a glorious death,” Lyons intoned gravely.
“And no more imagery after that. We had some telemetry prior to the attack, but nothing definitive.” Wriston rubbed his jaw uneasily. “What the hell happened? What are we dealing with here?”
Holland listened to the debate, theories flying around the room like crazed gnats, and wondered herself. “To me, it’s pretty clear. There’s something intelligent down there near Bermuda.” She looked with her best disgusted face at Steve Lyons, who had been about to offer another comment. “And no, I don’t think it’s some golfer from Bermuda, trying to hole out of his water hazard.” Lyons returned Holland’s comment with a smirk.
Jim Plath was toying with something on his slate. “Maybe a new species, heretofore unknown.”
“Well,” Lefbridge decided, “that pretty much goes without saying. But how intelligent?”
“And how hostile?” Lyons said.
Wriston’s face said he had come to a decision. You could tell when his eyebrows lowered over his eyes, like a shade being drawn. “I think we should make a statement in the press conference to the effect that Beagle was lost to due to an undetermined malfunction, that the data shows the possibility of a new, aggressive species near Bermuda and that further research is needed and more expeditions are planned.”
“Bureaucratic pablum,” Lyons said. “The press will never be satisfied with that. They’re already running specials about how we’ve discovered Atlantis and all that crap.” He looked at Holland. “We all saw the Solnet vid…mind you, I think Josey did as good a job as anyone trying to steer the interview away from such nonsense, but still—”
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