by Dan Simmons
“Good,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “You’d better not ruin it by telling her why we’re here and what we’re swimming toward.”
“She knows,” said Mahnmut, not letting the big moravec ruin his buoyant mood. He watched as the sonar reported a ridgeline ahead—the ridge the wreck was on—rising to a silty bottom less than eighty meters below the surface. He still couldn’t get over how shallow this part of Earth’s ocean was. There was no spot in the Europan seas less than a thousand meters deep and here a ridgeline brought the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean up to not much more than sixty meters beneath the surface.
“I’ve run the full program of the disarmament protocol Suma IV and Cho Li downloaded to us,” continued Orphu. “Have you had time yet to study the details?”
“Not really.” Mahnmut had the long protocol in his active memory, but he’d been busy overseeing The Dark Lady’s exit from the dropship and the submersible’s adaptation to that beautiful, wonderful environment. His beloved sub was as good as new—better than new. The Phobos ‘vec mechanics had done a wonderful job on his boat. And every system that had worked well on Europa before their devastating crash landing in Mars’ Tethys Sea the previous year now worked better than well here in Earth’s gentle sea.
“The good news about the disarming of each black-hole warhead is that it’s theoretically doable,” said Orphu of Io. “We have the tools aboard—including the ten-thousand-degree cutting torch and the focused forcefield generators—and in many of the necessary steps, I can be your arms while you’re my visible-light spectrum eyes. We’ll have to work together on every warhead, but they’re theoretically disarmable.”
“That is good news,” said Mahnmut.
“The bad news is that if we work straight through, without coffee breaks or restroom stops, it’s going to take us a little over nine hours per black hole—not per MRVed warhead, mind you, but for each near-critical black hole.”
“With seven hundred sixty-eight black holes …” began Mahnmut.
“Six thousand nine hundred twelve hours,” said Orphu. “And since we’re on Earth and moravec standard time is real planetary time here, it’s two hundred forty-seven days, twelve hours, if everything goes according to plan and we don’t run into any real problems…”
“Well …” began Mahnmut. “I guess we deal with this factor when we find the wreck and see if we can get to the warheads at all.”
“It’s odd getting direct sonar input,” said Orphu. “It’s not so much like better hearing, it’s more as if my skin had suddenly enlarged to…”
“There it is,” interrupted Mahnmut. “I see it. The wreck.”
Perspectives and visual horizons were different there, of course, on the so-much-larger Earth than the Mars he’d almost gotten used to, even more out of proportion to perceived distances on the tiny Europa, where he had spent all the other standard years of his existence. But sonar readings, deep radar, mass-detection devices, and his own eyes told Mahnmut that the stern of this wreck was about five hundred meters dead ahead, lying on the silty bottom just a little below The Dark Lady’s depth of seventy meters, and that the crumpled boat itself was around fifty-five meters long.
“Good God,” whispered Mahnmut. “Can you see this on radar and sonar?”
“Yes.”
The wreck lay on its belly, bow-down, but the bow itself was invisible beyond the shimmering forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean from the dry strip of land that ran from Europe to North America. What made Mahnmut stare in amazement was the wall of light from the Breach wall itself. Here at more than seventy meters depth, where even in Earth’s sunlit oceans the bottom should be inky black, dappled sunlight illuminated the terminus of water and dappled the moss-green hull of the sunken sub itself.
“I can see what killed it,” said Mahnmut. “Does your radar and sonar pick up that blasted bit of hull above what should be the engine room? Just behind where the hull humps up to the long missile compartment?”
“Yes.”
“I think some sort of depth charge or torpedo or missile exploded there,” said Mahnmut. “See how the hull plates are all bent inward there. It cracked the base of the sail and bent it forward as well.”
“What sail?” asked Orphu. “You mean a sail like the triangular one on the felucca we took west up the Valles Marineris?”
“No. I mean that part that sticks up way forward, almost to the force-field wall there. In the early submarine days, they called it a conning tower. After they began building nuclear subs like this boomer in the Twentieth Century, they started calling the conning tower a sail.”
“Why?” asked Orphu of Io.
“I don’t know why,” said Mahnmut. “Or rather, I have it in my memory banks somewhere, but it’s not important. I don’t want to take the time to do a search.”
“What’s a boomer?”
“A boomer is the early Lost Era humans’ pet name for a ballistic missile submarine like this,” said Mahnmut.
“They gave pet names to machines built for the sole purpose of destroying cities, human lives, and the planet?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “This boomer was probably built a century or two before it was sunk here. Perhaps built by one of the major powers then and sold to a smaller group. Something sank it here long before this groove in the Atlantic Ocean was created.”
“Can we get to the black hole warheads?” asked Orphu.
“Hang on. Let’s find out.”
Mahnmut inched The Dark Lady forward. He wanted nothing to do with the forcefield wall and the empty air beyond it so he never moved closer to that forcefield than the missile compartment of the wreck itself. He had The Dark Lady play powerful searchlights all over the wreck even as his instruments probed the interior of the ancient sub.
“This isn’t right,” he murmured aloud on their private line.
“What’s not right?” asked Orphu.
“The sub is overgrown with anemones and other sea life, the interior is rich with life, but it’s as if the sub sank here a century or so ago, not the two and a half millennia or so it would have to have gone down.”
“Could someone have been sailing it just a century or so ago?” asked Orphu.
“No. Not unless all our observation data has been wrong. The old-style humans have been almost without technology the last two thousand years down here. Even if someone had found this sub and managed to launch it, who would’ve sunk it?”
“The post-humans?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The posts wouldn’t have used something so crude as a torpedo or depth charge on this thing. And they wouldn’t have left the black hole warheads here ticking away.”
“But the warheads are here,” said Orphu. “I can see the tops of them on the deep-radar return, with the critical-one black hole containment fields inside. We’d better get to work.”
“Wait,” said Mahnmut. He had sent remote vehicles no larger than his hand into the wreck and now the data was flowing back through microthin umbilicals. One of the remotes had tapped into the command and control center’s AI.
Mahnmut and Orphu listened to the last words of the twenty-six crew members as they prepared to launch the ballistic missiles that would destroy their planet.
When the testimonials and data flow were finished, the two moravecs were silent for a long minute.
“Oh, what a world,” whispered Orphu at last, “that hath such people in it.”
“I’m going to come down and get you ready to go EVA,” said Mahnmut, his voice a dull monotone. “We’ll look at this problem from close up.”
“Can we look into the dry area?” asked Orphu. “The gap?”
“I’m not going near it,” said Mahnmut. “The forcefield might destroy us—the Lady’s instruments can’t even decide what the field is made of—and I promise you that this submersible of ours is no good in air and on dry land. We’re not going near the breach.”
“Did you look at the dropship’s aerial photos of t
he bow of this wreck?” asked Orphu.
“Sure. I’ve got them on the screen in front of me,” said Mahnmut. “Some serious damage to the bow, but that doesn’t concern us. We can get at the missiles back here.”
“No, I meant the other things lying around on the dry ground out there,” said Orphu. “My radar data might not be as good as your optic images, but it almost looks like one of those lumps lying there is a human being.”
Mahnmut peered at his screen. The dropship had shot an extensive series of images before it had flown off and he flicked through all of them. “If it was a human being,” he said, “it’s been dead a long time. It’s flattened, limbs splayed wrong, desiccated. I don’t think it was—I think our minds are just trying to see that shape amidst random stuff. There’s quite a debris field out there.”
“All right,”said Orphu obviously aware of their priorities. “What do I have to do to get ready here?”
“Just stay where you are,” said Mahnmut. “I’m coming down to get you. We’ll go out together.”
The Dark Lady sat on its stubby legs not ten meters west of the stern of the wreck. Orphu had wondered how they would exit through the cargo bay doors set in the belly of the Europan submersible with the ship sitting on the bottom of the ocean, but that question had been settled when Mahnmut had extended the landing legs.
Mahnmut had entered the cargo bay through the interior airlock and tapped into direct comm contact with the big Ionian while the submersible pilot carefully flooded the hold with Earth ocean water, equalized pressures, and then opened the cargo bay door. They’d disconnected Orphu from his various umbilicals and the two had gently dropped to the bottom of the ocean.
As cracked and ancient as Orphu’s carapace was, he didn’t leak. When he showed curiosity at the pressure readings his shell and other body parts were reading, Mahnmut explained.
The atmospheric pressure up above, on a theoretical beach or just above the surface of the ocean here, held relatively steady at 14.7 pounds per square inch. About every 10 meters—actually every 33 feet, Mahnmut said, using the old Lost Era measurements with which Orphu was equally comfortable—that pressure increased by one atmosphere. Thus at 33 feet of depth, every square inch of the moravecs’ outer integument would feel 29.4 pounds of pressure. At 66 feet, they would be under three atmospheres, and so forth. At the depth of this wreck—more than 230 feet—the sea pressure was exerting eight atmospheres on every square inch of The Dark Lady’s hull and the moravecs’ bodies.
They were built to withstand far greater pressures, although Orphu was used to negative pressure differentials as he worked in the radiation-and sulfur-filled space around the moon Io.
And speaking of radiation, there was a lot of it around. They both registered it and the Lady monitored it and relayed her readings. It was not dangerous to moravecs of their design, but the feeling of the neutron and gamma rays pouring through them caught their attention.
Mahnmut explained that under this pressure, if they had been human beings and if they had been breathing tanked standard Earth air—a mixture of twenty-one percent oxygen with seventy-nine percent nitrogen—the multiplying and expanding nitrogen bubbles under eight atmospheres would be playing havoc with them, giving them nitrogen narcosis, distorting their judgment and emotions, and not allowing them to surface without hours of slow decompression at different depths. But the moravecs were breathing pure O-two, with their rebreathing systems compensating for the added pressure.
“Shall we look at our adversaries?” asked Orphu of Io.
Mahnmut led the way. As careful as he was climbing the curved hull of the wreck, silt rose around them like a terrestrial dust storm.
“Can you still see by fine radar?” asked Mahnmut. “This crap is blinding me on visual frequencies. I’ve read about this in all the old Earth-based diving stories. The first diver at a wreck site on the bottom or inside the wreck would get a view—all the others would have zero viz—at least until the silt and crud settles.”
“Zero viz, huh?” said Orphu. “Well, welcome to the club, amigo. The detailed radar I use in the sulphur-mess vacuum near Io serves to probe through these little silt clouds just fine. I see the hull, the hump of the missile compartment, the whatchamacallit—the broken sail—thirty meters forward. If you need help, just ask and I’ll lead you by the hand.”
Mahnmut grunted and switched his primary vision to thermal and radar frequencies.
They drifted over the missile compartment, five meters above the warheads themselves, both moravecs using their built-in thrusters to maneuver, each being careful not to squirt any thrust in the direction of the tumbled warheads.
And tumbled they were. There were forty-eight missile tubes and forty-eight missile tube hatches wide open.
These hatches look heavy, said Mahnmut over their tightbeam. Everything they said and saw, of course, including tightbeam, was being relayed up to the Queen Mab and the dropship via a relay radio buoy Mahnmut had deployed from The Dark Lady.
Ophu had been gripping one of the huge hatches—its diameter as large as the Ionian—and now he said, “Seven tons.”
Even after the crew had ordered the sub’s AI to open the forty-eight missile tube hatches, the missiles themselves still had been covered by blue fiberglass domes that held out the sea. Mahnmut saw at a glance how the missiles—propelled to the surface by huge charges of nitrogen gas, their engines to ignite only after each missile reached air—would easily burst through those fiberglass covers.
But the missiles had not exploded from their tubes in rising bubbles of nitrogen, nor had their engines ignited. The fiberglass dome-covers had long since worn away; only brittle blue fragments remained.
“What a mess,” said Orphu.
Mahnmut nodded. Whatever had hit the stern of The Sword of Allah, breaking its back just above the engine room, severing its propulsion jets, and sending the ocean rushing in through the length of the boomer as a wall of shock wave and seawater, had breached the various missile compartments and tumbled the missiles themselves. It looked like a heap of ancient straw. In some cases the warheads were still pointing vaguely upward, but in others the ancient, corroded rocket engines and their solid fuel were at the top and the warheads buried in silt.
Forget that easy six thousand nine hundred twelve hours of work, tight-beamed Orphu. It’ll take that long just to get to some of those warheads. And odds are overwhelming that any serious torch cutting or twisting on one will detonate another one.
Yeah, said Mahnmut. There was no silt obscuring his view now and he looked at the tangled mess primarily on his optical frequencies.
“Do either of you have a suggestion?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
Mahnmut almost jumped. He’d known they were being monitored by everyone on the Mab, but he had been so absorbed with studying the wreckage that the connection had almost slipped his mind.
“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, switching to the common band. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
He described the procedure as succinctly and nontechnically as he could. Rather than try to disarm each warhead through the long protocol the Prime Integrators had downloaded, the Ionian now planned for Mahnmut and him to do it the quick and messy way. Mahnmut would bring The Dark Lady right above the wreck, extending her landing legs to full length until she was squatting over the boomer like a mother hen on her nest. They’d use all the ship’s belly searchlights to illuminate their work. Then Orphu and Mahnmut would separately use the torches to cut each warhead away from its missile, using a simple chain and pulley system to haul the nose cones directly up into The Dark Lady’s cargo hold and setting them in place in cargo baffles there like eggs in a carton.
“Isn’t there a great chance of the black holes going critical during this rough and tumble process?” asked Cho Li from the bridge of the Queen Mab.
“Yeah,” rumbled Orphu over the comm, “but the odds are one hundred percent that one of the black holes will activate if we
spend a year or more futzing around with them. We’re doing it this way.”
Mahnmut touched one of the Ionian’s manipulators and nodded agreement, sure that his nod would be picked up by Orphu’s close radar.
Suma IV’s stern voice broke in over the commlink. “And what do you propose to do with the forty-eight warheads with their seven hundred sixty-eight black holes once you get them loaded in your submersible?”
“You’re going to pick us up,” said Mahnmut. “The dropship will haul The Dark Lady and its bellyful of death into outer space and we’ll send the holes on their way.”
“The dropship isn’t configured to fly out beyond the rings,” snapped Suma IV. “And the leukocyte robotic attack drones in the e—and p-rings will certainly mob us on the way up.”
“That’s your problem,” rumbled Orphu. “We’re going to get to work now. It should take us ten to twelve hours to hack and cut these warheads free and load them into The Dark Lady. When we break surface, you’d better have a plan. We know you have other spacecraft than the Mab up there on this mission—stealthed, out beyond the rings, whatever. You’d better have one ready to meet the dropship in low Earth orbit and take this mess off our hands. We don’t want to have come all this way to Earth just to destroy it.”
“Acknowledge your transmission,” said Asteague/Che. “Please be advised that we have a visitor up here. A small spacecraft—a sonie, I believe—is rendezvousing with Sycorax’s orbital isle as I speak.”
80
There was no ceremony surrounding Noman’s departure. One minute he was in the hovering sonie and chatting with Daeman, Hannah, and Tom who were standing beside it, and the next second the sonie had tilted almost vertically, its forcefield pressing Noman into the mat, and then it shot skyward like a flechette, disappearing into the low, gray clouds in seconds.
Ada felt cheated. She’d wanted her last words with the friend she’d once known as Odysseus.