The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  “Score!” Puo says. “We are definitely using this trick again in the future.”

  The throbbing on my left leg has long since subsided in the past two weeks, but I think I’m going to have a scar there now. “You can be the one to nab the squiddie in the future,” I tell him.

  “Bah,” Puo says, “We can think of something.”

  Glad to see him so confident in our abilities.

  The squiddie continues its journey up through the various levels of the underground station. The connection is getting weaker as it travels up. There’s more ploppers strategically placed to cover different entrances, but all of them continue to leave our rogue squiddie alone.

  Eventually, our squiddie emerges onto the street and we lose contact briefly until the squiddie releases a relay that floats up to the surface. The sounds of waves breaking overhead announce the link has been reestablished, and the active sonar has already painted the street’s four- and five-story buildings in wonderful blue-pixel detail. The distinct shapes of London land-cabs line up across the street, and other various types of hover- and land-cars and even a double-decker bus are on the street. Bikes are locked to metal fence posts; cafes sit empty with tables and chairs knocked over. Most of the windows are broken. The street is stock-still, unmoving under a hundred feet of seawater that was never meant to be there.

  The mega-quake hit so fast that by the time people realized the waters were steadily rising, there was nothing to do but get your ass to high ground. It was the single greatest disaster in human history. And many that did survive had to leave everything behind. Some experts still think, eighty-six years later, that we haven’t fully recovered yet.

  I shake off the mood. Seeing the leftover ghosts of a sunken city always gets me contemplative.

  The British Museum is a thousand feet northeast of the underground station, which the squiddie covers in two to three minutes.

  There’s a lot more noticeable activity around the museum. We can see at least one other squiddie swimming along the back of the museum. There are several ploppers scattered around the property and on the building itself that we can see.

  “Whoa,” Puo says.

  Yeah, is all I can think. Come in from below somehow?

  Puo says, “They’re going to have seismic sensors.”

  I grunt. “Wait,” I say, “was that out loud or did you just know me that well.”

  “Both,” Puo says.

  I look at Liáng.

  He mouths out loud at me.

  Our rogue squiddie heads down in the water column toward the museum’s southern entrance.

  Now this is the kind of architecture I love and expect to see when I come to Europe. Not that postmodernist rat’s nest crap library in Birmingham.

  Even in the blue pixelated view provided by the squiddie, I think it’s gorgeous. The original building was built in the Greek revivalist style as a quadrangle, four separate rectangular buildings with an open courtyard in the center. The entrance has eight soaring stone columns in two rows each that form an impressive portico, while the stone columns continue to wrap around the front of the building.

  I do wish, though, I could’ve seen the pediment—the triangular upper part of the front of the building—for myself, not in blue pixels. It reportedly held some gorgeous stonework, but those fine details are lost in blue pixels. I can tell the statues are there, but not the detail. I can’t see their fingers, what they’re pointing at, what they’re holding. I can’t see the stone come to life in their eyes.

  Our squiddie glides down the center of the portico. A plopper sits in front of the closed doors to the museum.

  “Look at that,” Puo says. He points to two balls attached to the walls on either side of the door.

  “What—?” Liáng asks.

  “Squiddies,” I answer.

  Two squiddies are attached there, ready to deploy and grab anything the plopper spots. Squiddies aren’t exactly cheap enough to just be sitting around completely ineffective.

  This security isn’t messing around.

  The window to the upper right of the doors is broken. “Through there,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Puo says in the distracted voice he uses when he’s thinking about something else. He brings up another window on a different computer screen and starts fiddling with it.

  The squiddie pivots in its course toward the broken window.

  Puo is staring at the screen in concentration.

  “Puo,” I say, “What’s going on? We’re about to enter the museum.” I need him focused on the task at hand.

  “I’m—” Puo says. “I’m not sure. There’s a signal coming from the plopper— Is that really what we’re calling it now?”

  “Definitely,” I say. “What’s the signal mean?”

  The squiddie pushes it’s way through into the entranceway of the museum—dang. Now that’s an entrance.

  Square columns rise up twenty, maybe thirty feet up to coffered ceilings to separate the entrance into two parts. The doorways off the entrance are maybe twelve to fifteen feet high, nearly as wide and framed in decorative stonework (at least I suspect it’s stone, hard to tell in monotone blue pixel). A gorgeous wide staircase splits and doubles back on itself up to the second level. Empty stands for statues are symmetrically placed—empty except for the center stand on the staircase landing, which holds another plopper.

  “I don’t know,” Puo answers my question about the signal from the plopper. “The signal is outside of our normal usable band in the helmets. It’s like they’re trying to hide it. We wouldn’t have seen it if we weren’t using the squiddie. That one has it too.” Puo indicates the plopper on the staircase landing.

  The rogue squiddie moves through the tall doors leading into the Great Court—the courtyard created by the four original Greek-revivalist buildings and circular reading room in the center that was closed in by the crisscrossing metal and glass ceiling (which now has several broken gaps). There are more empty stands where sculptures should go.

  For years, the authorities regularly returned to the museum to loot (sorry, recover—maritime rules of salvage need not apply) so that most of what was on display is long-since gone.

  There are more ploppers scattered throughout the Great Court, including one right in front of the entrance to the east building where we’re headed. Our rogue squiddie manages to scoot over the plopper and into the east building through the door which is large, but comparatively much smaller than the doors in the southern entrance.

  The rogue squiddie is now in the King’s Library, known later as the Enlightenment Gallery. It’s a long, open-spaced room split into three connected sections. The middle section the squiddie is in has smooth—presumably once-polished—stone columns all the way up to the ceiling along the back and front walls. The walls in all three sections are two stories high and split into two levels with the lower level marked by wall-to-wall wooden display cases from the floor up to the bottom of the balcony walkway that wraps around the halfway point of the room.

  The large, once-impressive room is in a state of disarray. The display cases look ransacked, opened in a hurry with drawers left half-open, some pulled clean out of the display case and left lying on the floor. Display stands are empty. The glass in the display doors is broken in several places.

  Puo says, “Looks like the ploppers are all transmitting the same signal.”

  “Dead man’s switch?” I speculate. The technique has been on my mind since Liáng first suggested it.

  “Maybe,” Puo says. “But I think it’s more than that. The signal is very high frequency, which doesn’t travel far underwater—which means the signal doesn’t have to travel far to accomplish its purpose. I think they’re all networked together, as one huge, defense super-organism.”

  Great. None of the ploppers we encountered in the underground tunnels (or elsewhere) have had this networked signal.

  Our rogue squiddie heads up to the balcony level where windows and display cases alte
rnate along the wall, broken up by thick wall protrusions that jut out into the room where the room sections butt up against each other. The balcony walkway passes through these protrusions with matching wooden doors on each side.

  “Wait,” I say. “If they’re all networked together, can they identify that we’re not a part of their system?”

  “Maybe,” Puo say.

  “That’s not an inspiring answer,” Liáng says.

  “The squiddies on the wall,” Puo explains, “weren’t transmitting the signal. So … I don’t know.”

  Liáng and I share a look.

  “We’re approaching the stairwell,” Puo says.

  The squiddie swims up to one of the closed wooden doors on the balcony that leads into the wall protrusion. Inside the wall protrusion is a stairway that leads down to the much more interesting lower levels.

  “Check the other doors,” I say. There are four, two on each level.

  All the doors are closed. This isn’t the main way down; that’s accessed through the North building and has a large elevator to move heavy sculptures up and down. But that way is likely to be heavily guarded, and we’re searching for a more covert way in.

  Puo stares at the screens while the squiddie just hovers there dumbly.

  “Force it,” I say.

  “Right,” Puo says. He continues to stare at the screens not typing.

  “Do you know how—?” Liáng starts to ask.

  “Yes! Just deciding how. I think I’ve seen the squiddies use their appendages to turn doorknobs. I’m just not sure—”

  Liáng continues, “Can you just give it a command and let it sort it out?”

  Puo’s mouth falls open a crack. “Yes. But …”

  I smirk behind Puo’s back. He really hates not being the smartest person in the room. “But what?”

  “Never mind.” Puo taps on his keyboard.

  The result is immediate: the rogue squiddie bashes, claws, rips, and shreds the door down with four of its appendages with ferocious precision.

  The sound is deafening in the silence of the museum.

  “That’s what!” Puo yells and then growls his frustration.

  All that’s left of the door are the pieces around the hinges and the doorknob.

  Puo swivels the view of the squiddie back toward the plopper that sits at the entrance.

  The piece containing the doorknob falls off the doorframe and floats down to a soft clatter on top of the rubble of the door.

  Puo groans under his breath.

  The plopper has raised up from its sentinel position and is looking in our direction. But what it hasn’t done is set off the alarm.

  “It’s sent another signal,” Puo says.

  “Do you know—?” I start to ask.

  “Nope,” he says.

  Liáng starts to say something but Puo cuts him off.

  “We’ve had enough of your ideas!” Puo snaps.

  “Three options,” I say, “bolt home, bolt down the stairs or pretend nothing’s wrong.”

  Seconds drip by in silence.

  “Right,” I say. Pretend nothing’s wrong. With the greatest risk comes the greatest reward. “Puo, make it look like we’re investigating the disturbance. Can you do that?”

  Puo nods solemnly, and issues a command to the squiddie.

  “For the record,” Liáng says, “that was going to be my suggestion.”

  Puo grrs under his breath.

  Another squiddie swims through the entrance and over the plopper.

  The air in the basement goes still. All three of us aren’t breathing, or blinking. Staring at the screen at the impending meeting. A cold sweat forms on my palms.

  I ask Puo breathlessly, “Do you have the get-the-hell-outta-there routine installed?”

  Puo responds by pointing at the screen where he has the command, >> SaveQueenBeeButt(1190625,true), queued up only waiting for him to hit enter.

  I punch him on the shoulder at the function name.

  “Ow—!” he says and starts to say more.

  “Shh!” I say.

  Puo mumbles about them not being able to hear us, but shuts up all the same.

  We all stare at the screen as the new squiddie swims up to ours.

  Puo has a window open that mirrors the rogue squiddie’s internal commands and dialogs. New commands are flowing down the screen. Puo’s interjecting his own commands at times.

  “They’re talking,” Puo translates quietly. “The official squiddie is querying ours for any data about what happened. I told it we got nothing.”

  “Tell it we’re investigating the noise,” I say.

  Puo shakes his head no. “Can’t. Don’t know how. I only know the basics— It’s querying our purpose.”

  Puo types more. “I told it we’re on a standard patrol.”

  The cursor blinks at us in the window as we wait to see if that’s an acceptable response.

  Suddenly a stream of text flows down the screen rapidly.

  “Crap!” Puo swears, and then starts typing frantically. “It’s taking control of our squiddie.”

  “It can do that?” I ask in a panic.

  “Apparently, yes!” Puo answers.

  Puo continues his rapid typing.

  Liáng stands there with his arms crossed in front of him, his dark eyes intense as he stares at the screen.

  “Wait.” I shoot my hand out to arrest Puo’s typing. “Look,” I say, and point to the other screen that shows the squiddie’s point of view in blue pixels.

  Our rogue squiddie is following the official squiddie through the broken door into the stairwell.

  “Sweet,” I say. “An all expenses paid tour.”

  “So long as we can go our separate ways at the end,” Puo says. He looks grim, staring at the wall of text and scrolling back through it.

  Both squiddies turn on their flashlights in the stairway—interesting. Apparently when the squiddies are investigating—

  “Has it notified the authorities?” Liáng asks.

  Puo nods his head and taps his nose. “The squiddies notify them any time there’s a disturbance and the squiddies are investigating.”

  “Can they tell—?” I start to ask.

  “That we’re here?” Puo annoyingly finishes for me. “No. Our processes are masked from inside the kernel. They would have to get their physical hands on the squiddie—which brings a whole set of other previously discussed problems.”

  I exhale, annoyed with Puo for completing my sentences, but don’t say anything more. At least that way he can’t complete my sentences for me.

  The screen starts to flicker. Puo answers before I can ask, “The signal’s getting weaker. All we’ll be able to stream is the video. The rest of the data will be recorded.”

  The staircase is bland compared to the King’s Library the squiddies entered from—just a steep, circular stone staircase that leads down. No windows. No railings. No art. Just stone steps with some green signs with white stick figures running for the exit, and a thin layer of ocean crud settled on everything.

  The squiddies descend rapidly to the ground level of the King’s Library, stopping to inspect the two wooden doors that lead out and the green stick figure sign next to each door.

  The doors apparently pass inspection and the official squiddie leads our rogue squiddie farther down the circular stairs. The walls abruptly shift from the smooth stone walls of the first and second levels to brick laid in the English style of alternating rows of long and short bricks.

  The squiddies continue down into the bowels of the building. They pass one brick landing, pausing only briefly to look on an empty room beyond, peppered with brick columns, column-vaulted brick ceilings and deep shadows that look like they’re cowering from the squiddie’s flashlights, waiting to return to their rightful place once we pass.

  The stairs bottom out at a long brick tunnel. The screen becomes pixelated, downsampled to try and maintain the stream. I can still tell that the tunnel is wide, may
be twenty feet across, and high—I’d guess twelve feet—with a rounded brick ceiling. At first, the tunnel strikes me as strange. Why such a big tunnel that dead-ends at such a small staircase? But the answer becomes apparent as the squiddies swim down the center of it.

  There are several arched brick doorways leading off the hallway into hallways of their own. It’s a maze down here, a crisscross of tunnels for moving, rearranging and storing various artifacts.

  “You recording this?” I ask Puo to make sure—the screen continues to degrade. The squiddies take a couple of quick turns through identical looking hallways.

  “Yeah,” Puo answers. “Including the active sonar pings, which should let us piece together what’s down some of those hallways.”

  Good.

  “Look,” Puo says. He pushes his fingertip against the screen, distorting the pixels around the spot, and pointing to a pixelated but discernible starfish-shaped sensor that all underwater reclamationists are familiar with: air-gap sensors.

  Those pesky little devices detect the presence of air, either from scuba divers (which is one reason we use closed systems) or a belch from opening an air-filled vault door in this case.

  I explain all this to Liáng, which he listens to stoically.

  Puo and I continue to study the computer screens. There are no vaults yet. But the presence of the air-gap sensors indicates we’re on the right track. Why else would they be concerned about the presence of air down here?

  More turns. How many turns is hard to tell, as now the screen freezes for seconds at a time before updating. Ploppers are starting to show up at junctions. Inactive squiddies attached to walls ready to be unleashed sit near some of the ploppers.

  Yeah, I think we’re getting close.

  “Hello,” I say. The rogue squiddie just passed the first vault door on the right.

  There’s no mistaking a vault door. The pixelated rectangular metal door and frame is set into the arched brick entryway. The metal is probably steel—but I’m no metallurgist—and the door is draped in beige ocean crud, pooling on top of the metal spin handle and lock. An air-gap sensor is attached to the brick ceiling directly over where the door opens. We also catch a black oval sign on the door that identifies this vault in white letters as Vault ASVT-4: the fourth vault of Vietnam. The first two letters denote the continent, the second two letters denote the country.