A hundred metres ahead of him, around a pile of fallen container-habs, lay the broken hull of a mid-sized freighter. The ship had twisted on the way down, its own weight breaking its back as it hit the Seamount, and the entire superstructure had torn free and was lying a short distance away. Zheng eased the pod towards the ragged, open base of the ship's tower.
His pattern and DNA sensors lit up with a triumphant buzzing.
Zheng found himself gaping. It took him a moment to get his jaw closed so he could talk coherently to the Chaoyang. "Li? I've found something."
"You're kidding. A dead Warchild?"
"Not exactly..."
The superstructure was on its side, its lower edge half-buried in sand and debris. The starboard wall was now a roof to an open chamber, and from this roof - in surprisingly neat rows - were dozens of translucent sacs.
Each sac was bigger than a crouching man, roughly egg-shaped and covered in leathery, transparent flesh. Each was sending out the distinctive DNA signature of the Warchild.
Zheng brought the pod close to one of the sacs. As his lights hit it, something within twitched fitfully. He saw limbs through the translucent wall, and teeth. "They reproduced," he gasped. "They laid eggs. I didn't think they could-"
There was a massive impact, and the pod crashed sideways.
Zheng screamed. The pod had been struck by something very powerful. For a second he thought he had been torpedoed, but then he heard noises through the hull: a terrible scraping, scratching noise, as if something was clawing the machine apart.
Zheng slammed the pod into full reverse, taking it clear out of the chamber and into open water. The scratching was still horribly loud. Suddenly, Zheng saw something slap down onto the dome.
It was a hand.
It was corpse-grey, with three long, clawed fingers and armoured joints. It began to tear at the dome. Impossibly, the talons started to leave score marks in the synthetic diamond.
Zheng gripped the controls and spun the pod on its axis, hard, but the hand wouldn't come free. Instead there was a series of blows to the pod's stern and the controls went abruptly dead.
The seabed, rocky and strewn with acid-eaten corpses, came up and hit the dome, blocking out the light.
On the Chaoyang's bridge, Captain Shao listened to the screams for about half a minute. Then he opened up a small panel on the command board and pressed the button it concealed.
The screams ceased at once. The button, protected by a panel that would only open to Shao's fingerprints, had detonated a micro-fusion charge set just behind the seeker pod's pressure cabin. The explosion would have reduced Zheng and his machine to thumb-sized fragments instantaneously. His attacker too, but Shao didn't need that any more.
"Pilot Zheng Zhijian has bravely sacrificed himself for the good of Chaoyang and Sino-Cit," he announced. "Let his name forever be spoken with reverence and honour."
He turned to his first officer. "Mr Yun," he smiled. "Now that whining little failure is history, please prepare the cryotanks and send out the secondary pod to harvest those egg-sacs."
Yun saluted and left the bridge. Captain Shao went back to the monitor screen. It had been showing a view from the seeker pod's forward cameras, but since Shao had pressed the button, all it showed was static.
He rewound the playback, and froze the picture at the best frame of the sacs, lined up along the inside of a sunken freighter.
"Perfect," he whispered. "Perfect."
These new bioweapons would be even better than the consignment Sino-Cit had bought from Dr Hellerman. Tempered in the fires of combat and the lethal waters of the Black Atlantic, they would be tougher, faster, and more adaptable than before.
And they had evolved a new capability - they could reproduce. Before long, Sino-Cit would have a new army.
And when it did, the world would fear.
THE BIG MEG GLOSSARY
Atlantic Division: A cadre of Judges who scan the Black Atlantic for pirates, raiders and smugglers.
Atlantic Wall: The wall that divides the Black Atlantic from Mega-City One and protects the city from its polluted waters.
Black Atlantic: An apt description of the Atlantic Ocean whose waters are so heavily polluted that it is incredibly toxic and lethal to humans.
Block: Giant skyscrapers that make up most of Mega-City One. The inhabitants of blocks are known as blockers. Sometimes the pressures of living in such cramped high-rise conditions lead to block mania, which may spark a war.
Brit-Cit: British counterpart of Mega-City One.
Control: The nerve centre of Mega-City One, relaying information to Judges on the streets.
Cursed Earth: A vast radioactive wasteland that stretches across North America, populated by mutants, freaks and wild creatures.
Daystick: The Judge's favoured truncheon.
Dust Zone: An industrial sector of Mega-City One, dedicated to industry but off-limits to pedestrians and populated by acid pools.
Fattie: Thanks to food shortages after the Apocalypse War, excessive eating has become a valued craze, with the dedicated fattie weighing over a tonne.
Futsie: "Future shock", a mental breakdown of epic proportions, can spark some of The Big Meg's citizens to become irrationally violent such as going on a shooting spree.
Graveyard Shift: A term coined by the Judges for the late night/early morning period of duty.
Hondo-Cit: Japanese counterpart of Mega-City One.
Iso-Cube: The standard imprisonment for criminals, a huge block full of very small isolation cubes.
Lawgiver: The weapon of choice for the Judge, an automatic multi-shell gun whose ammunition ranges from armour piercing to ricochet rounds.
Lawmaster: The Judge's computer-controlled motorbike. Extremely powerful, intelligent and heavily armed.
Magoon: A large harpoon-style launcher.
Plascrete: Construction material for the Big Meg.
Power Tower: A controlled volcano, the Power Tower obtains red hot lava from beneath the Earth's crust to provide most of Mega-City One's energy supply.
Extract
Other Titles
Indicia
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Glossary
Black Atlantic Page 24