by Ian Douglas
“Yes, sir. There’s no problem, Major.”
“Glad to hear it. I want to go over the specs on those jury-rigged torpedoes, if we could.”
They were soon immersed in a technical discussion. Kaminski seemed alert enough, but Jeff couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in fact not entirely there, that he was pausing from time to time to listen to something else, something calling from far away.
The whalesong of the Singer made him think of the Greek myth of the sirens, temptresses who bewitched sailors with their songs, drawing them to their deaths upon the rocks. Kaminski was normally stolid to the point of imperturbability. What siren’s song had ensnared him?
Eight hours. The Marines were beginning to cramp and grumble over their long, enforced imprisonment. Jeff and Kaminski had them, two at a time, stand, press their hands against the overhead, and stretch, working out the kinks. He then had them eat. They were still on short rations—two meals in twenty-four hours instead of three—but there was more food to go around than had been planned for originally. The unit’s high casualty rate could be blamed for that.
Nine hours, and the Singer’s lament was loud enough to ring from the bulkheads. Most of the Marines had replaced their helmets to muffle the sound. Jeff left his off so he could listen. There was something…something tantalizing, just beyond his grasp…
Their depth was seventy-eight kilometers, with an outside pressure of over one thousand atmospheres—1,058.5 kilograms pressing down on every square centimeter of hull. The bottom was coming up to meet them, a shadowy roughness just visible through the black-blue haze beneath them.
“Major?” Carver was back at the helm. “I think you should take a look up ahead. Tell me if I’m imagining things.”
Carver’s VR feed was a lot more sensitive—and to a far larger stretch of the EM spectrum—than Jeff’s eyes, but he crawled onto one of the viewing couches and wiggled forward. At first, he saw nothing but the Manta’s lights illuminating the omnipresent swirling clouds of dancing white motes.
Then, gradually, he was aware of something else—a glow behind the lights.
“Can you turn off the wing lights a sec?” he asked.
“Right.”
The outside lights died, and for a moment, Jeff saw only a Stygian blackness as deep and as opaque as any at the bottom of a deep-buried cavern.
Then, gradually, as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness again, he thought he could make out a faint, background glow. It was hard to see, and it vanished completely when he tried looking straight at it. But with averted vision, he became increasingly aware of a pale, blue-green glow in the deep distance.
“Water temperature’s up,” Carver said. “Five point eight Celsius, and rising. My God. Look at that!”
It looked like a wall, a billowing, fuming wall of black ash rising slowly, blurred by distance. Jeff thought of pictures he’d seen of sandstorms in the Sahara or on Mars, or of a forest fire spewing black smoke into the sky.
“What is it?”
“Black smokers,” Shigeru said, his voice softened by awe. “Big black smokers. Ah, I don’t think we want to get too close.”
“Damned straight we don’t,” Carver said. “Outside temperature now eleven point one, and climbing. I didn’t know it got this hot on Europa!”
“It is possible that the water temperature will get considerably hotter,” Shigeru said. “At this pressure, the water can’t boil. That glow suggests the water being expelled into the ocean is extremely hot.”
“As in molten lava hot,” Carver said. “I’m giving that area a wide berth.”
The Manta banked gently to port, toward the south. The smokers appeared to be strung out in a chain, running roughly northeast to southwest. The Manta swung left to run parallel to them, looking for a way around. Carver switched the outside lights back on.
“Life,” Shigeru said, pointing. “Undeniably life.”
The bottom was alive. Where it had been completely barren before, the bottom was smothered now in waving, shifting forests of fronds, some ten meters long. Something like a vast, diaphanous bell pulsed and wiggled in the glare of the Manta’s lights.
“What is that?” Jeff asked. “A jellyfish?”
“I have no idea,” Shigeru replied. “If it is, it’s a dozen meters across—longer than this submarine. Fantastic!”
“Major?” Carver said. The light ahead was stronger now, an odd, intense blue.
“Yes, Chief?”
“I still can’t find a way through those smokers, and we’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?”
“This new heading, sir. It’s taking us straight to the Singer.”
Damn. He’d wanted to avoid the alien construct.
“I think,” Carver said slowly, “I think that might be it up ahead.”
Jeff peered through the port at the black towers silhouetted against that impossible blue light, and knew that the SEAL was correct.
TWENTY-ONE
26 OCTOBER 2067
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and Asterias
Linea, Europa
2245 hours Zulu
The city illuminated the night, holding it at bay with a pale, wavering blue-green luminescence that back-lit soaring towers, the sweep and curve of arches, the rugged thrust of slab-sided buildings the size of mountains, the prickle of antennae all but lost among vaster structures of incomprehensible purpose.
“I’d…uh…better take us up,” Carver said.
“I think you’d better,” Jeff replied, his mouth dry. It was impossible to judge scale in this alien setting. What he was looking at could have been a large and complex spacecraft seen from meters away, or a city the size of Greater New York, seen from an altitude of kilometers. Much of it appeared to be submerged in the seabed.
“Is that…is that…it?” Jeff asked, awed.
“The Singer?” Shigeru nodded. “The sonographs we’ve taken don’t do it justice.”
“Is it a ship? Or a city?”
“Maybe both. Or neither. How can we know?”
“Okay.” Jeff said. He managed a weak grin. “Is it alive?”
Shigeru looked at him, startled. “That, Major, remains to be seen.”
“Even on VR, I don’t think I’m seeing the entire thing,” Carver said. “It measures at least twelve kilometers across. Can’t get decent infrared. The water absorbs those wavelengths. Sonar, though, seems to indicate an even bigger structure—but it’s soft, almost mushy.”
“Soft? What do you mean?”
“I think what he is seeing,” Shigeru said, peering out the porthole again, “is that most of it is covered with moss.”
It was true. In the uncertain lighting, in the drifting haze of particles above the ocean floor, it was hard to see, but as the tiny submersible hummed past one of those upthrusting towers, Jeff could see that its outline was blurred. Like some ancient, sunken wreck at the bottom of an Earthly ocean, the Singer was coated by Muscomimus and by other growths, things like seaweed that writhed and twisted with a life of their own, things like sea fans and bumpier, rougher things like coral growths. And, at closer hand, it was clear that the underlying structure was pitted and gouged and cratered in places, as though it had been subjected to eons of steady, gradual erosion and decay. Here, a needle-sharp spire had crumpled and fallen, dragging with it a lacy network of filaments now tufted with mosslike accretions. There, a low, flat arch, like a bridge a hundred meters across, had snapped in the middle, the span fallen through a delicate tracery of interlocking tubes far below.
The Singer’s song surrounded them…embraced them…
The Manta continued its climb. As Jeff watched that enigmatic city drop away into a glowing, blue-hued mist, he kept expecting…something. A tractor beam out of a science-fiction vid…a sudden bolt of searing energy…a giant hand…anything to indicate that the minute craft passing above this eldritch vista had been seen, had been noticed, by the godlike powers that must dwell
within.
Kaminski screamed.
Kaminski
Falling…falling…falling down the endless, empty light-years…
Alone…so alone…so empty…
But there were voices within the empty loneliness…voices…shouts…hollow-ringing echoes…a cacophony…voices…unintelligible…words unknown, alien and harsh…yet each separate, exquisitely painful and throbbing syllable called forth…an image…
He understood so very little of what he saw, though he clutched at each image, each scene, each thought, a drowning man grasping at flotsam.
Stars…a vast and empty sea of blackness, strewn with stars and the wisp-fog veil of twisted nebulae.
His father…vast and terrifying in a drunken rage. “C’mere, you little snot, and get what you deserve!”
A…city? Was it a city…stone pyramids the size of mountains…no, carved from mountains, whole mountains shaped and reworked according to some colossal engineering scheme undreamed of by man…A pink ocean gently lapping the shoreline beneath a reddish sky…and…and men in this alien place…men and women in strange clothing with strangely angled faces, mingling with silently drifting, upright forms, all organic curves and undulations cast in shapes of crystal and plastic…but the red sky is filled with flame and bursting light…and the strange people are screaming and falling in the city streets…
And in the sky, the Ship blotted out the sun. Explosions…savage detonations shaking the mountains…People shrieking as the atmosphere field failed and the air exploded into near-vacuum.
His mother, eyes blackened, nose bloodied, sobbing hysterically on the sofa.
His first day of boot camp. Standing rigidly information. “You…miserable…worms have the unprintable expurgated gall to think you can be Marines…”
Major Garroway seated at the desk at Candor Chasma, on Mars, hard eyes pinning the three Marines to the spot where they stood at attention. “Very well. Corporal Slidell, Lance Corporal Fulbert, Lance Corporal Kaminski. You three have a choice…”
A tattered, faded American flag hung from a five-meter metal pole above the Cydonian encampment on Mars. Someone had used a thin strip of wire to stretch the fly out from the hoist in the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. Still, there was wind enough to ripple the cloth a bit. The fighting with the UN forces was almost over.
Voices…myriad voices…gibbering in the darkness.
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and
Asterias Linea
Europan Ocean
2250 hours Zulu
Kaminski’s shriek brought Jeff up out of the couch so quickly he painfully slammed his head into a section of conduit tubing in the overhead. Kaminski had slumped in his seat, eyes staring, a trickle of blood flowing steadily from his left nostril and smearing on his chin. Cartwright, Hastings, and Wojak had all gathered around him, holding his head, calling to him. Kaminski’s eyes, wide and staring, seemed to focus on something far beyond the barren confines of the Manta’s aft compartment.
There was no corpsman along. Jeff had ordered McCall to stay at the E-DARES and take care of the wounded there. There didn’t seem to be anything to do except pull his PAD from its thigh holster, open it, and call up Chesty with a touch. “Medical emergency, Chesty,” he said. “Give us a hand here.”
“Bringing medical protocols on line,” Chesty said. “I have his med readouts.”
The med layout appeared on the PAD screen, waveforms tracing out the pulse and quiver of heartbeat, respiration, metabolic function, neurological and brainwave function, pain levels, and other readings Jeff only hazily understood.
“Sergeant Major Kaminski is unconscious,” Chesty said. “Except for minor nasal and upper pharyngeal bleeding, I detect no gross trauma. Brainwaves indicate a mild alpha state, but probably no loss of mental function. No ischemia, no cerebrovascular trauma, no internal hemorrhage.” There was a brief pause. “Please hold the PAD sensory pickup close to his head.”
Jeff did as he was told, holding out the PAD just above Kaminski’s head, pointing the optic and audio pickups at his bleeding face.
“I have detected an anomaly,” Chesty said. “Sergeant Major Kaminski’s skull appears to be the source of low-grade infrasonics, at approximately ten to fifteen Hertz. I cannot account for this.”
“What’s that?” Nodell asked. “What’s that mean?”
“Infrasound,” Jeff replied. “Sound waves at frequencies too low for humans to hear.”
“We can sense ’em, though,” BJ put in. “They can make us feel uneasy, even induce panic attacks.”
“Look,” Wojak said. He jabbed a thumb toward the overhead, and the eerie wail of the Singer. “I don’t need infrasound to feel creepy with that goin’ on!”
Kaminski’s eyes were closed now, but Jeff could see the eyeballs shifting and moving beneath the lids. REM—Rapid Eye Movements. Frank was dreaming.
Of what?
“I have a possible correlation with Sergeant Major Kaminski’s medical history,” Chesty reported.
“What is it?”
“In 2053, then-Gunnery Sergeant Kaminski received three intracranial implants, one occipital, two temporal. These were intended to facilitate virtual reality downloads with IBM-K20 interface equipment. He was taking part in an experiment at the time, with the goal of developing new training techniques through direct man-machine interface.”
“Jesus,” Wojak said. “Ski was a jackhead?”
“The external sockets were surgically removed in 2061 after noninvasive, more technologically advanced VR feeds came on-line. The implants, however, were simply disconnected and left in place.
“The implant remaining over the right temporal area of his brain appears to be vibrating in response to those low-frequency radio waves. The vibrations are generating sound waves in the ten to fifteen Hertz range.”
“Damn!” Jeff said. “Should have remembered! Doc McCall told me about that the other day, when that EMP knocked him out! Is there anything we can do?”
“Maybe wrap his head in something,” Amberly suggested.
“The ELF radio waves penetrate the Europan ocean easily, and even leak through the ice where it is thin. We have no materials available on board this craft that would provide adequate insulation. The effect should lessen, however, as we move away from the Singer artifact.”
“Which I intend to do as quickly as possible,” Jeff said. “Chief Carver! Can you get any more speed out of this thing?”
“Got her full throttle, Major. We’re getting the hell out of Dodge!”
“Chesty, I want a list of everyone in this command, including the scientists, who might have cranial implants like that.”
“A complete search must wait until this part of me is again in communication with the main system at Cadmus. The only medical records I have access to here are those of the personnel embarked aboard Manta One. Of those personnel, only Sergeant Major Kaminski possessed such implants.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” it was hard to remember Chesty’s limitations sometimes. Because he was dependent on the hardware he was running on, he had access to much larger files, much more information, when he was resident within a large, fast, powerful machine like the E-DARES’s IBM IC-5000. Since they were currently out of radio or laser contact with Cadmus, the Chesty on Jeff’s PAD and within the Manta’s computer system was considerably slower in terms of operations per second, and much more restricted in the data available to it.
How must it feel, Jeff wondered, to break off a part of yourself, to live in isolation from the “real” you in a much more cramped and tiny space?
The Life Seeker
Time unknown
2703: >>…wanting…<<
1201: >>…needing others…needing…want/must-have
/mustmustmust<<
937: >>…but others…wrong/bad/tainted/evil…<<
1391: >>…communication…sense…touch…talk…know…<<
2703: >>…alone…so alone…<<
0001: >>Reintegratel We must reintegrate!<<
Chorus: >>Nononononono…<<
1391: >>…need to know…to feel…<<
1450: >>…reaching out…<<
538: >>Reintegration incomplete…failure…failure…<<
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and
Asterias Linea
Europan Ocean
2330 hours Zulu
With her MHD drive humming at full throttle, the Manta climbed steadily clear of the alien sprawl of the structure lying on the Europan seabed. With the possible and apparently accidental exception of Kaminski’s collapse, it had not seemed to notice the flyspeck submarine at all.
Another hour passed, surrounded still by the eerie wailing of the Singer. The Marines in Manta One were quiet now, lost in their own thoughts or trying, somehow, to get some sleep. Kaminski, at least, seemed to be getting better. The REM beneath his eyelids had ceased, and he was breathing more easily.
There was one piece of good news in the gloom. Manta Two made herself known with a single, low-powered sonar chirp. Manta One responded, careful to keep the pulse wattage low enough that it wouldn’t be detectable by listening hydrophones at the Chinese base, and the two moved onto converging courses. Within another hour, they were close enough to acquire one another’s navigation lights, and fifteen minutes later, a direct ship-to-ship laser communications channel had been opened.
Jeff exchanged quick briefings with Lieutenant Biehl. Like Manta One, Manta Two had turned south to avoid the line of black smokers; she, too, had encountered the alien construct on the ocean floor. No one aboard had been affected by the ELF waves, however—thank God.
The plan had been for the two submersibles to stay widely separated. After the encounter with the Singer, however, they made a tacit agreement to stay together. The Europan Ocean seemed far vaster, and far stranger than it had twelve hours earlier, when they’d first slipped beneath its black surface.
Another three hours passed. Jeff tried to catch some sleep, stretched out on the viewing couch, but sleep eluded him. His suit was growing wearily uncomfortable, with intolerable itches he couldn’t scratch, and raw patches spreading at every pressure point: shoulders, wrists, waist, groin, knees, ankles. Worst of all, he was aware of the growing stink within the closely enclosed Manta, mingled smells of fear and sweat.