Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
Page 30
And now, just twenty minutes into Jerry’s big ratings comeback — “Kraken!” — was all but over.
Max started to chortle at Jerry’s unhappy misfortune — but at a soft ping from his headset, he stopped himself, listening for it to repeat.
The sonar pinged a second time, and then a third, and the dive computer flashed confirmation: it had located the studio sub, two hundred feet to the north of Max and below him by about four hundred feet. On the third ping, the computer announced that the studio sub was descending, and quite rapidly.
Max checked the dive armour’s help file. The structure and the life-support and propulsion system were all rated for a mile and a half, but the harpoon gun was only good for half that, and the cameras weren’t rated any deeper than a thousand feet. So as far as Jerry and the show were concerned, the studio and its inhabitants were already casualties.
Of course, by now Wylde’s Kingdom would be a ratings casualty in and of itself. Max had been around long enough to know that people didn’t tune in to Jerry Wylde to watch him get creamed.
Max hit the dive sequencer with his chin and told the suit to lock onto the studio’s signature and follow it down. Strictly speaking, Max knew the decision was counter-survival, but that was fine with him: off the air in the depths of the Atlantic, Max’s inner Jim really had no say in the matter.
The pings multiplied as Max and the studio descended further: they were approaching bottom, or more accurately, side — moving in a neat diagonal toward the southern slope of the sea mountain. The dive computer correlated the pings with its oceanographics database and came up with a three-dimensional map of the mountainside, which it displayed in a small window at the top of the HUD. Max and the studio were represented by little red triangles. The graphic was gorgeous — it reminded Max of the time he and Jerry had made a tiger-bombing trek to the southern Himalayas — and Max became so engrossed in the memory that he nearly gave himself a concussion against the back of the helmet when the one of the cameras popped with a crack like a gunshot at 1,287 feet.
Head throbbing, Max wondered just what he expected to do when he got down there. If he were serious about rescuing Mimi and the rest of the crew, he would have done better to surface and report on the situation to Jerry. If he were halfway responsible, never mind just survival-oriented, Max supposed, that’s what he’d do.
The second camera imploded at 1,315 feet, but this time Max was braced for it and just winced.
The thing was, Max wasn’t halfway responsible. What he was, apparently, was more than halfway suicidal. And no amount of AbSucker treatments or spasmodics or steroids or anything else could mask that.
But what he also was, he realized, was damn curious.
Because from the look of the graphic on his HUD, the sub studio had just come to a landing on a high ledge of the mountain Mimi believed to be a giant-squid breeding ground.
Max accelerated downward, toward the now-motionless sub. Once again, the lights emerged from the murk — not as many as before, but enough to see by — and Max made sure to film it, in the seconds before the suit’s third and final camera cracked under the pressure.
“Mimi,” said Max as he grew nearer. “Do you read me?”
“Jim?” Her voice sounded woozy, like she’d been drinking.
“Max,” said Max.
“Max,” said Mimi. “What the hell are you doing here? You should have broken for surface right away. Jesus, you should do that now… It’s trouble down here.”
There was a lot of silt stirred up around the studio; all Max could make out was about a dozen shafts of light, tangled in an opening-night criss-cross. The shafts didn’t move, but they flickered now again, as though occluded by something very large passing above. Something the shape of a squid.
Max thought about it: if the sub had only fallen, it should have fallen straight down, not on a diagonal — from what Max had gathered, it was essentially a diving bell, with no locomotive power of its own. Something had pushed it.
“Trouble,” Max repeated. “How many squid?”
“Three,” said Mimi. Her voice was trembling, and he could hear the ugly chuffing sound of a man’s tears in the background. “One’s about thirty feet, another one’s just a baby — fifteen, seventeen feet. And a big one — I can’t tell how big, but from the parts of it we’ve seen, I’d say it tops a hundred.”
“Feet?” said Max.
“Feet,” confirmed Mimi.
As if on cue, Max saw an immense tentacle pull itself out of the cloud and wave a moment in the water, trailing silt in gossamer threads. It was wrapped around an object — a metal triangle, very tiny in the huge tentacle. It was a piece, Max realized, of the squid cage.
“It’s got a piece of the cage,” observed Max.
“Yeah,” said Mimi. “It’s got quite a few pieces of the cage. They all do. The bastards are cooperating… This makes no sense, Jim … Max … Ah, shit. Squid shouldn’t be smart enough for this. They’re opening us. Listen.”
The commlink went silent for a moment — and sure enough, Max could hear an echoing sound of rending metal: both over his headphones and vibrating through the walls of his armour.
“Wow,” said Max.
“Yeah,” said Mimi, her voice taking on a weary affection. “Wow. God, Jim. You are so malleable.”
Max nudged on the jets and inched forward. His heart was thundering, and his mouth was dry as a desert. What the hell was he going to do here? Three squids, and one of them big as Godzilla. The monster tentacle let go of the metal and descended back into the silt cloud, which itself immediately expanded away from a mysterious crash-and-scrape of metal on rock within it. One of the lights winked out, and then another, and one more.
Max hit the jets again, and now he shot down toward the cloud of muck. “Mimi!” he shouted into his commlink. “What’s going on in there?”
Mimi was speaking quickly, shouting herself over various alarms that were sounding in the background. “Shit! Shit! They’ve stripped away the cage! Ah, shit! It’s gotten in! Jesus, Jim, it’s inside the cage!”
Max entered the cloud, and his view filled instantly with dancing motes of dirt. Fearful of hitting the mountainside, he reversed the jets. “Jim, Jim, Jim,” he muttered desperately. “You would know what to do.” But there was no Jim: Jim was just a character Max played on television.
And, this deep down, there was no such thing as television.
There was another crash, nearer this time, but it somehow sounded softer. It took Max an instant to realize why: he wasn’t hearing it over the commlink.
“Mimi!” he shouted. The familiar amber
The silt cleared for an instant, and Max could see the wreckage: a twist of geodesic titanium, two or three lights dangling from wire, surrounding a shattered tangle of metal and plastics, all beneath a galaxy of air bubbles shooting toward the surface.
And he could see the squids. The smallest of them was indeed inside the cage, tail sticking out of the wreckage as its tentacles rummaged greedily inside. A larger squid hung above, tentacles spread like a spider’s web over the wreckage. And the third squid — the giant one, the hundred-footer — lay supine on the rock, its tree-thick tentacles lazily gripping torn pieces of the cage like they were toys. Its eye was as big as a manhole pit, and as black.
Max called up the heads-up display for the harpoon targeting system, and centered on the giant. It wouldn’t be a difficult shot by any means. His thumb hovered below the trigger, and he was about to fire, when the small squid emerged from the wreckage. It had something in its tentacles. Max couldn’t help but watch.
It was one of the bodies, or most of one. Mimi? It was hard to tell — the body was not in good shape. It trailed blood like ink from its torn abdomen, and
Max thought about babies — about the one Mimi had wanted to make with him. Maybe she had furtively conceived already. If it was Mimi’s body, their little zygote would be mingled in with the cloud. Max shuddered.
The squid dragged the body behind it, wrapped in three long tentacles, over to the giant’s head. The giant’s tentacles rippled and spread apart, and the smaller squid disappeared within them, dragging the body behind it. There was a flurry as the tentacles shifted, and a tremor went along the length of the kraken’s body.
Max swore softly. The little squid was feeding the giant. These creatures were cooperating, to pillage the wreck and eat the TV oceanographers. God, he thought: if only we were live now…
Of course, if they were live, it would have been Jim and not Max, and he would have pressed the trigger the second the targeting system showed a lock, and the whole thing would have gone up in a brilliant phosphorous explosion. Then, before the fires had even dimmed, Jim would be off looking for the hatcheries and planting some shaped charges there, and moving off just far enough to escape the blast, but not so far he’d lose the shot. Jim would not feel a pang of regret about the deaths of the people in the studio sub, particularly Mimi, who might have been pregnant with his child. Jim would be so caught up in the moment that he probably wouldn’t have realized it had happened. And Jim would certainly not pause to wonder at the significance of giant squids cooperatively cracking open a studio submarine and sharing the meal, what that meant about the way squids’ brains worked, and just what kind of a hierarchy they’d managed to build for themselves down here in the aftermath of their unlikely population explosion.
And, thought Max as he heard the click! of chitinous squid-sucker boring against his armour and felt himself being drawn backward and up and then fast around, Jim would not have let a fourth squid get the jump on him from behind. Not as easily as Max just had.
The side of the mountain filled Max’s view for only an instant before the impact came. It wasn’t hard enough to rupture the suit, but it was surely enough to twitch his thumb. The ocean around him caught fire as the phosphorous harpoon tips burst and ignited in the deep-sea water.
Series Finale: I, Max
The GET team found him in the evening, a coal-black knob at the edge of the Minnow’s spill. They were using hovercraft too small to haul the armour on board, so Max didn’t actually see a doctor until one of the craft had hooked up a chain and hauled him back to the base at Sable Island and a team of GET engineers cut him out of the damaged suit.
Max was a mess. The hard-shell suit had protected him from nitrogen narcosis, but at some point Jerry’s three-day regimen of spasmodics and steroids and liposuction had caught up with Max. When the med team cracked open the suit, they found him in full spasmodic flashback.
He’d already shattered his left elbow, cracked his collarbone, and nearly bit his tongue off. Apparently he’d been hallucinating as well.
Max’s delicate condition led to a spirited but inconclusive debate among the command staff as to whether to press the same charges against Max as they planned to lay against Jerry Wylde, and ship them both back for trial immediately. Because there were far too many unanswered questions, and Max Fiddler might be persuaded to answer them if there was a chance that charges could be stayed.
Where, for instance, was enviroterrorist Mimi Coover? Was she alive or dead? Where were the files she’d stolen from GET when she took flight? And, of prime concern, why did Jerry Wylde, mid-broadcast, pull the stopcocks on the Minnow’s oil tanks and unleash the largest oil spill the planet had seen in three decades? All Wylde would say on the matter was the oil spill was the only way he could save his ship, but that didn’t make sense; the threat of an oil spill was the only thing that had saved him from arrest for the better part of a decade. He’d done the equivalent of shooting all his hostages when he opened his tanks.
The only explanation they had to go on was the story that everyone in the world who wasn’t battened down against Atlantica saw on their screens. And that, the staff agreed, was not an acceptable answer. Wylde’s CGI squid-monster was more convincing than the one in the old Disney movie, but it was still pathetic: a desperate attempt to inject some life into a questionable property that should have been killed a long time ago. There was something else going on — and Jerry Wylde and what crew they’d managed to round up so far weren’t saying what that thing was.
So they determined to wait for Max Fiddler to regain his senses and tell them what had really happened. Then, and only then, would they take him and Wylde outside, skip the trial, and shoot them both.
Waiting, as it turned out, carried its own risks.
Two days after they arrived, the sky over the GET base was a Jovian bruise, purples and golds and reds that swirled above them and mingled into a malevolent blackness in the east. The oil-dappled waters in the Sable Island shallows — where the complex’s hadrosauric buildings perched on thick alloy legs — reflected the rare beauty of that sky like the mirror on a cokehead’s coffee table.
No-one stopped to appreciate that beauty. The sky told them all what the satellite ring would confirm once they reached the command polyp, at the low-lying island’s highest point. Atlantica was back on the move.
Max awoke to the roar of wind, the crack! of breaking glass, and a nail-tip pain in his elbow. Someone was tugging on his cast.
“Christ, Jim, get up. I can’t do this by myself.”
Max’s eyes slurped open. “Ow,” he said. “Jerry?”
“Fuckin’ A, Jim-bo.” Jerry pulled at Max’s arm again. “I got a wheelchair here. Now come on, get up. The shit’s hitting the fan here, and we gotta move.”
Max winced and sat up. He blinked in the dim light of an infirmary room. Jerry was wearing orderlies’ greens, and, sure enough, he was leaning against a gleaming chrome wheelchair. Max grimaced and swung his feet onto the floor, then swung his behind around and into the wheelchair. Jerry turned it around and pushed it out the door and into a darkened hallway. Behind them, there was another crack of breaking glass, then a howling, and Max felt an icy wind cross the back of his neck. Jerry hurried along the corridor.
“You saw something down there, didn’t you?” said Jerry.
“Mimi’s dead. So’s the rest of the crew on the studio. They were eaten by squids. How do you like that?” Max took a deep breath as Jerry pushed him into a pair of swinging doors. Beyond was a waiting room, rimmed with high frosted windows and a thick metal door marked EXIT on the opposite side. There was a candy machine in one corner, the front of which had been smashed with the fire axe that now lay propped against it. Max and Jerry were the only people in the room.
“A lot of people are dead,” said Jerry. “A lot of people are going to be eaten by squids. Squids won, we lost. Next!”
Max noticed water seeping under the exit door. The puddle grew as he watched, like a bloodstain.
“Atlantica,” said Max. Last time they’d spoken, Jerry had mentioned the storm had moved to the Caribbean and was getting ready to take on the Eastern Seaboard. “It’s here now?”
“Here,” said Jerry, “there. Everywhere. But particularly here. The GET bastards evacuated this morning, before their harbour swamped.”
“And they just left us here?”
“Just left us here.”
Max thought about that. He leaned back in the wheelchair.
“Where’s here?”
“Sable Island,” said Jerry. “GET’s got a base here.”
“So they just left us here,” said Max.
“The guard said I wasn’t worth the bullet it’d take to shoot me,” said Jerry. “Asshole. We gotta get out of here, Jim-bo. We’re going down.”
“You shouldn’t have pulled the stopcocks on the Minnow,” said Max.
Jerry shrugged. “What can I say? I freaked out. You didn’t see all those squid — all grabb
ing at the hull, scraping it like fingernails on a blackboard. Like they knew I was the one. Like they were smart. And that big one … Jesus, he could have torn the Minnow up the middle, and he was getting ready to. I could tell, Jimmy, and I freaked, alright? Sue me.” Jerry’s eyes went wide. “I freaked.”
“I see,” said Max.
Jerry nodded, and smiled in a panicky way. “You would have handled it different, right, Jim-bo? Big survivor guy. You would have had a better plan. Shit, buddy, I wish I’d had you on the deck. I may know television — but you… You got an instinct for this stuff.”
“I’m not Jim,” said Max. “My name is Max Fiddler. I am an actor.”
Jerry squinted at him. “We’re not back to this, are we? Alright, Max, Jim, whatever you say. Tell me what you saw down there. See where those smart bastards lived? Anything we can use?”
Max looked around him. The entire floor was covered in water now and more was coming. He thought about the mountain and the giant squid — and the glimpses he’d had of the rest of it: the quivering walls of eggs that clung to the upper slopes of the sea mountain and the adult squids that circled them, guarding against the hungry smaller ones; the spectacle of a thousand squid, diving back to their homes in the trench, in sensible retreat from the spreading oil slick around the Minnow; and the behemoth, large beyond scale, that fell past him in the sun-dappled waters near the surface, trailing black strands of the same oil slick that would coat Max’s own armour just a second later; its great black eye as large as Max, with a depth to it that, at first, Max mistook for intellect.
Maybe it was partly intellect he saw in the squid’s eye, but he also recognized something more intimately familiar — and ultimately far more dangerous.