by Dan Simmons
“Oh, yeah,” I say, pulling my right arm out of the suit arm and into the suit, and with that as my final contribution to our conversation, I twist the medallion and quantum teleport away from the Queen Mab.
Does too work! I’m tempted to shout as I flick into solidity at the place in space/time that I’d envisioned. But then I remember that I forgot to ask the moravecs for a weapon. And some food and water. And maybe some impact armor.
But it wouldn’t be a good time for me to shout anything.
I’ve appeared in the Great Hall of the Gods on Mount Olympos and all the gods seem to be here—all except Hera, whose smaller throne is wreathed in black funereal ribbon. Zeus looks to be fifty feet tall where he sits on his own gold throne.
All of the other gods seem to be here—more even than I’d seen at their last large conclave, which I’d crashed in my infinitely more comfortable Hades Helmet. I don’t even know many of these gods, can’t identify them even after ten years of reporting to Olympos daily with my voice stones and action reports. There are hundreds upon hundreds of gods here, easily more than a thousand.
And all of them are silent. Waiting for Zeus to address them.
Trying not to breathe loudly or faint from the stifling heat in this goddamned lizard suit, hoping that none of these Olympian Immortals is using deep gravitational radar or enhanced negative thermal imaging, I stand perfectly still, almost cheek to jowl with the mob of gods and goddesses, nymphs, Furies, Erinyeses, and demigods, and wait to hear what Zeus is going to say.
74
Even before Harman stepped through the gash in the hull into the bow of the derelict ship, he had a pretty good idea what the thing was. The DNA-bound protein data packets in his body had a thousand references of thousands of types of seagoing craft across ten thousand years of human history. Harman couldn’t make a perfect match based only upon the damaged bow, the debris field around the bow, and by looking at the breached sheaths of elastic sonar-stealth material encasing the morphable smart-steel of the hull itself, but it was fairly obvious that he was stepping into a submarine from some century late in the Lost Era: possibly something from after the rubicon release but before the first post-humans had been genetically brought into being. Dementia times.
Once inside, making his way down an only slightly canted corridor and breathing through his osmosis mask even though this part of the sunken ship was dry, he was sure it was a submarine.
Harman was standing in a room that was listing only about ten degrees from vertical but the ancient impact with the ocean bottom here only two hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea—long before there was an Atlantic Breach—had crumpled metal and tumbled half a dozen long canisters off their racks. Harman wouldn’t need the pistol he was carrying. Nothing lived in this hulk. He pressed the pistol against the stick-tite patch on his right hip and extended a bit of thermskin elastic over it, securing it as surely as if he were wearing one of the holsters he’d seen in books via the crystal cabinet.
He cupped his right palm against the rounded edge of one of these tumbled canisters, curious to find if his data-seeking function would work through the molecule-thin thermskin gloves.
It did.
Harman was standing in the torpedo room of a Mohammed-class warship submarine. The AI in the guidance system of this particular torpedo—“torpedo” being neither a word nor concept he had ever encountered until that millisecond—had gone dead more than two thousand years earlier, but there was enough residual memory in the dead microcircuits for Harman to understand that his palm was inches above a nuclear warhead tucked into the end of a thirty-four-thousand-pound high-speed, self-cavitating, hunt-until-it-kills-something torpedo. This particular torpedo warhead—“warhead” being another term he had never encountered until that instant—was a simple fusion weapon, packing only 475 kilotons, the equivalent of 950 million pounds of TNT detonating. The blast from the pearl-sized sphere a few inches beneath his palm would reach tens of millions of degrees within a millionth of a second. Harman could almost feel the lethal neutron and gamma rays crouching there, invisible dragon-eels of death, ready to leap in all directions at the speed of light to kill and infect every bit of human nerve or tissue they would encounter, tearing through them like bullets through butter.
He snatched his hand away and rubbed it against his thigh as if cleaning something filthy from his palm.
This entire submarine was a single instrument designed for killing human beings. His briefest encounter with the warhead’s dead guidance AI had told him that the torpedo warheads were all but irrelevant to the machine and crew’s real mission. But to understand what that mission was, he would have to pass out of the torpedo room, up the canted deck, through the wardroom and mess room, up a ladder and down a corridor past the sonar shack and integrated comm room, and then up another ladder into the command and control center.
But everything beyond the near half of the torpedo room was under water.
The beams of light from his chest lamps showed him where the north wall of the Breach began not fifteen feet ahead. The submarine had been lying here along this ocean ridge two hundred feet beneath the surface and fully filled with water for many centuries before whatever created the Breach had sucked the ocean out of these forward compartments, but nothing lived here anymore, not so much as a dried barnacle remained from the myriad of undersea life forms that must have thrived here for centuries, and there were no signs of human bones or other remnants of the crew. The forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean did not physically slice through the morphable metal of the submarine’s hull or metal structure—Harman’s lamps picked up the solid, uninterrupted line of deck overhead—but he could visualize the complete oval-slice of ocean inside the hull of the ship. The north wall of the Breach forcefield held back the sea in every open space, but a step beyond that… Harman could imagine the pressure down here at two hundred feet and see the wall of darkness ahead, his lamplights reflecting off it as if from a dark-burnished but still mirrored surface.
Suddenly Harman was filled with a sick and terrible terror. He had to clutch at the despised torpedo to keep himself from reeling, from falling onto the corroded plates of the deck. He wanted to run from this ancient warship out into the air and sunlight, to rip off his osmosis mask, and to be sick if he had to in order to get rid of this poison that had suddenly filled his body and mind.
It was a mere torpedo he was leaning against, designed for destroying other ships, a harbor at most, yet its thermonuclear yield was three times the full explosive power dropped on Hiroshima—another word and image that had just entered Harman’s reeling mind—capable of destroying everything in a hundred-square-mile area.
Harman—always fair at judging distances and sizes even in his era that demanded no such skills—saw in his mind’s eye a ten-by-ten-mile area in the heart of Paris Crater, or with Ardis Hall at the center of its bull’s-eye. At Ardis, such a blast would not only vaporize the manor house and the new outbuildings in a microsecond, but blast away the hard-built palisades and roll its fireball to carry away the faxnode pavilion a mile and a quarter down the road less than a second later, turning the river at the base of the hills into steam and the forest into ash and fireball in an expanding circle of instant destruction ranging farther north than the Starved Rock he’d seen in his turin-cloth glimpse of Ada and the others.
Harman activated dormant biofeedback functions—too late—and received the message he dreaded. The torpedo room was filled with latent radiation. The damaged torpedo fusion warheads should have dropped beneath lethal leakage levels long ago, but in the process of doing so they must have irradiated everything in the forward part of the submarine.
No—the sensors told him that the radiation was worse straight ahead, aft of the torpedo room—the direction in which he would have to go if he wanted to learn more about this instrument of death. Perhaps the fusion reactor that had driven this obscene boat had been slowly leaking all these centuries. It was a radioac
tive hell ahead of him.
Harman knew just enough about his new biometric functions to realize that he could query the data monitors. He did so now, but only with the simplest question possible—Will the thermskin adequately shield me from this radioactivity?
The answer came back in his mind’s own voice and was unequivocal—No.
It was insane to go forward. He also didn’t have the courage to go forward through that black wall of water, into the maelstrom of radiation, through the rest of the submerged torpedo room, up through the dark and cold of the wardroom and mess room where ancient Geiger counters would have gone wild, needles pinned off their own dials, and then up again and down a corridor past the sonar and comm rooms, and then up another ladder that impossible, terrifying, bone-chilling, cell-killing distance into the submerged command and control center.
It was literally insane to stay in this malevolent hulk, much less to go deeper into it. It was death—death to himself, to the hopes of his species, to Ada’s trust in his return, to his unborn child’s need for a father in these most terrible and dangerous of times. Death to all futures.
But he had to know. The quantum remains of the torpedo warhead AI had told him just enough that he had to know the answer to a single, terrible question. So go forward is exactly what Harman did—one terrified step at a time.
After three days and nights in the Breach, this was the first time he had pressed through the forcefield wall. It was a semipermeable force-field, just like the ones he’d passed through before on Prospero’s orbital isle—and now Harman knew that the “semipermeable” meant that it was designed to allow old-style human beings or post-humans to pass through an otherwise impervious shield—but this time he was stepping through from air and warmth to cold, pressure, and darkness.
Harman trusted the thermskin to keep him alive from the effects of the deep if not from the radiation, and this it did; he refused even to call up data he knew he had on how the thermskin was designed, on what made it work. He didn’t care how it worked to keep the ocean pressure away—only that it did.
His chest lamps automatically increased their brightness to deal with the reflections and dense, particle-filled water.
The submerged parts of the submarine were as thick with living organisms as the dry parts of the torpedo room had been sterile. Whatever lived here now not only survived in heavy radiation but feasted on it, thrived on it. Every metal surface had been hidden beneath layers of mutated coraled fungus and masses of green, pink, and gray-bluish glowing living matter, their frills and tendrils waving slightly in unfelt currents. Crablike things scuttled from his lights. A blood-red eel lunged from a hole in what had been the aft torpedo room hatchway and then pulled its head back, leaving only its rows of teeth glinting in the light. Harman gave it room as he edged through that encrusted hatch.
The dead warhead AI had given him a rough schematic of the ship—at least enough to lead him to the command and control center—but the ladder he had to take up to the wardroom and eating area was gone. Most of this submarine had been built from super alloys that would last another two thousand years, even here beneath the sea, but the ladder—gangway his protein bundles told him it had been called—had long since corroded away.
Sinking his fingers into the silt and waving fans on either side of the slanted stairwell, hoping that he wasn’t putting his fingers into another eel’s mouth, Harman laboriously pulled himself up through the green soup of the sea. Particles and bundles of radioactive living particles clung to his thermskin and had to be wiped from his goggles and osmosis mask.
He was close to hyperventilating by the time he reached the wardroom level. He knew from experience that the osmosis mask would keep feeding him fine, fresh oxygen, but this sense of pressure against every square inch of his body made him squirm. He didn’t have to access memory modules to know that the thermskin would also protect him from the cold and pressure—the same type of suit had kept him alive in the zero-pressure of space—but outer space had felt cleaner.
I wonder if this slime coating my eyepieces was once part of the men and women who ran this boat?
He banished thoughts like that. They were not only ghoulish, they were absurd. If the crew had gone down with this boat, the ever-hungry denizens of the ocean had cleaned their bones in just a few years and then eaten and decomposed the bones themselves in not many more years.
But still—
Harman concentrated on making his way aft through the litter of overgrown and collapsed bunks. He could only know this had been a sleeping area for human beings through the schematic in the war-head’s decaying memory molecules; now it looked like an overgrown crypt, its fungus-thick gray shelves harboring mutated crab-things and light-fearing eel-things rather than the rotting bodies of Montagues or Capulets.
I have to actually read more of this Shakespeare person. So many things in the data packets connect to his thoughts and writings, thought Harman as he passed through an open hatchway, brushing aside stalagmites of slime, floating into what had been an eating area. What had once been a long dining table for some reason reminded him of Caliban’s cannibal table up on Prospero’s Isle so many months earlier. Perhaps it was because the fungus and mollusks here had mutated to a bloody pink color.
At the far end of the pink dining cavern, Harman knew, he had to go up a vertical ladder—a real ladder this time, no slanted gangway—to the integrated comm room before he could go aft through the sonar shack to the command and control center.
There was no ladder. And this time the narrow tube of a vertical corridor was clogged with green and blue marine growth, reminding Harman of Daeman’s description of Paris Crater turned into a blue-ice nest.
But this was Earth ocean life that had woven this web, however mutated, and Harman began ripping it apart, pulling out centuries of life’s slow encroachment and advancement in great, grunting handfuls, wishing all the time he had an axe. The water around him became so filled with glop that he couldn’t even see his hands. Something long and slippery—another eel? Some sort of sea snake?—slid along the length of his body and was gone below. He kept pulling away clumps and globs of thick, sludgy, radioactive stuff, fighting his way up through the blinding murk.
He felt as if he was being born again, but this time into a much more terrible world.
It was such a struggle that for several moments after he’d clawed his way up and into the comm room level, he didn’t know he’d arrived. Tendrils of green hung everywhere, the water was so filled with floating particles that his own searchlight beams blinded him, and he lay in the primordial ooze too exhausted to move.
Then—remembering that every moment he spent in this death-hulk meant a greater chance of death to him—Harman got to his knees, pulled vines and tentacles of old plant growth away from his shoulders and back, and began to shuffle aft.
The comm room was still alive.
Harman froze with the knowledge of it. Functions in his body that he hadn’t even catalogued yet picked up the pulsing readiness of machines hidden under the living gray-green carpet of this room to reach and communicate. Not with him. These comm AI’s did not acknowledge his presence—their ability to interact with human beings had long since died away with the shifting quantum core of their computers.
But they wanted to communicate with somebody—most of all to receive orders from somebody, something.
Knowing that he would not find what he needed to know here in the integrated comm room, Harman half-walked, half-swam aft past the encrusted sonar and GPS shack. He didn’t know why his bundle-memories wanted to call the little space a shack and he didn’t want to know.
Had he ever thought about submarines, which he never had, Harman would have probably guessed that such boats were built for traveling under water—he knew that the AI warhead had preferred a translation of the word “boat” to that of “ship”—that such underwater boats would have been made up of many small compartments, each one shut off with a door, a hatch, water
tight, separate. This sub was not. The spaces were large in comparison to the volume of the ship itself, not overly capsulized or compartmentalized. If the ocean found a way in—as it obviously had—the deaths of the men and women in this machine would not have been by slow drowning, gasping for air near the ceilings, but in a massive, implosive pressure wave, killing all in seconds. It was almost as if the humans who had worked here had preferred the choice of instant death in larger spaces to slow drowning in smaller ones.
Harman quit swimming and let his feet sink to the deckplates when he realized he was in the middle of the command and control center.
There was less marine growth here, more bare metal. From just the warhead AI’s cartoon schematic, he could make out the torpedo launch and weapons’ control centers—vertical metal columns that would have projected a myriad of holographic virtual controls when the ship was in combat. Harman moved around the space, touching metal and plastic with his thermskinned palm, allowing the dead quantum brains embedded in the material to speak to him.
There was no chair, seat, or throne for the captain. That man had stood here, near the central holgraphic chart table, directly in front of a display console—virtual under the proper conditions, projected from within LCD plastic panels if the virtual system were damaged—into which every one of the ship’s many systems and functions were channeled and shown.
Harman moved his gloved hand through the green murk and imagined sonar displays appearing… here. Tactical displays to his left… there. Several yards back the way from which he’d come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes….
He jerked his hand away. Harman didn’t need to know any of this crap. He needed only to know…