Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  “Wong, where the fuck is my hat?”

  Prothero came around the corner of her work bay, holding a screwdriver in one hand and a motherboard in the other.

  “It’s on your head.”

  Prothero clapped his hand to his head—his bare head—and then grimaced. “Ha, ha. Where is it?”

  “Probably in the bathroom, where you always leave it.”

  Prothero went out the door and came back a moment later, wearing his hipster hat. “Here’s what I’ve been thinking: we’re going to translate that whale signal.”

  “Translate it? As in, decipher whale-speak?”

  “Exactly.” He pulled up a chair backward and sat down. “And I know just how to do it. I’ve got the world’s biggest collection of blue whale vocalizations, here in this lab. We’re going to reverse-engineer it.”

  “So you think the Baobab is trying to talk to us?”

  “That thing’s been sitting there on the seafloor for, what, five years? Listening. And what does it hear? Well, two miles down there isn’t much sound. The only sounds that carry that deep are whale vocalizations. Whale-talk is damned loud. It carries a hundred miles. You following me?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. So the Baobab is listening, listening, listening…and maybe it starts to figure out what the whales are saying. And now it’s trying to communicate with us in the only language it knows.”

  This was one of those crazy Prothero leaps. “So what’s it saying?” she asked.

  “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” said Prothero, and laughed hilariously at his own lame joke.

  “Here’s what I think,” she said, when Prothero had stopped wheezing.

  “You know I don’t give a shit what you think. But tell me anyway.”

  “It’s randomly playing back sounds it recorded. They mean nothing.”

  Prothero shook his head. “This thing’s intelligent—I’ll bet anything on that. And it’s sending us a message.”

  “So how exactly are you going to translate it?”

  “You mean, how are you going to translate it. You, Wong, are going to find the closest digital match between that Baobab sound and the blue whale vocalizations in my database. And then we’re going to find out what the blue whale was doing when it was recorded making that sound—and that’ll give us an idea of the meaning. Like, was the whale chasing prey? Was it a mother calling her calf? Was it fucking?” Prothero laughed again.

  Wong shook her head. “If it’s trying to communicate, why not by some other means than whale calls?”

  “No doubt it’s highly attuned to sound. Sound is the best way to communicate underwater. Electromagnetic fields dissipate, and light can’t penetrate more than four or five hundred feet. This thing evolved to live in the dark depths of a watery world. It developed a sonar-resistant skin; it used sonar to “look” at Gideon Crew when he was down there collecting the wreck of Paul. Naturally it uses sound to communicate. And whale calls are all it has heard.”

  “Digital sound. Which means it’s a machine. There’s no way for a biological system to evolve so as to produce digital sound.”

  “Wong, Wong, Wong…” Prothero shook his head. “Maybe it’s a machine, maybe it’s a biological system, maybe it’s a combination of the two. Whatever it is, it’s talking to us. Now get your ass to work and find out what it’s talking about.”

  30

  DR. PATRICK BRAMBELL chewed on a Mars bar as he stared pensively at the crushed ball that had formerly been the DSV Paul, sitting on a tarp in the hangar deck. The immediate area had been cordoned off with yellow curtains. Two engineers and as many roustabouts were wheeling in a bizarre device they had jerry-rigged in order to dismantle the submersible so they could extract the remains of Lispenard’s body from the wreckage. It looked like nothing so much as a large, villainous Jaws of Life. Glinn stood silently in the background, taking in everything.

  The workers began positioning the jaws of the contraption at two sides of the wreckage, in order to draw apart the wrinkled, shattered mass of the titanium sphere; huge eyebolts had been affixed at the two places and the machine was now set to draw them apart, unfolding the metal the way someone might unfold a balled-up piece of paper.

  Brambell turned to his medical assistant, Rogelio, who was standing next to a polished stainless-steel gurney. This gurney was where they would reassemble the body. The idea did not overly disturb Brambell—he had seen far worse—but he was worried about his assistant, who looked a bit green around the gills.

  “We must recover every, ah, piece, no matter how small,” Brambell told the workers. Glinn’s silent presence in the back made him nervous. He felt like a student teacher being monitored by the principal. He had never liked Glinn—the man was cold, remote, a cipher. Never mind the fact he was largely responsible for what had happened to the Rolvaag.

  The assistant nodded weakly.

  The “jaws” were affixed to each eyebolt and a deep hum started up as the machine began to spread them apart. With a creaking, cracking noise, the crumpled ball began to separate along its fracture zones, and water began draining from within it.

  “Halt!” Brambell called. Immediately, the machine stopped. Rogelio rolled the gurney in close and, with large, rubber-tipped tweezers Brambell and his assistant began picking out mashed pieces of flesh and pulverized bone, mingled with bits of clothing, and laid them all out on the gurney in turn.

  After a few moments he turned to the assistant. “Rogelio, how are you doing?”

  “Hanging in there,” Rogelio said in a strangled voice.

  “Good man.”

  It took at least ten minutes to remove every little bit from the fissure in the wrinkled titanium, and then they backed off and signaled the engineers to continue.

  The procedure went on for hours, prying first one piece of metal apart, then another, and another, in between stopping to pick out the remains, sometimes with the help of a portable magnifier on wheels with built-in illumination. At least it was a cool day, the good weather holding; the temperature inside the hangar was about sixty degrees—not bad, Brambell mused, for the preservation and handling of human remains. And a large proportion of the remains were of workable size, which was also a good thing: he’d feared the corpse might have been little more than tomato paste.

  Slowly the body began to take shape on the gurney—in a grotesquely altered state. Brambell and his assistant had been able to identify virtually all of the pieces by a combination of their position in the wreck, the bone fragments, and the clothing present. By chance, they had started working from the feet upward. Brambell knew that recovering the head and skull would be the last, and most difficult, part.

  As he worked, Brambell was mightily impressed by the immense forces that must have been applied to the submersible—especially the titanium sphere—to crush it so violently. In some areas, the pressure had been so intense and so sudden that it appeared to have softened or even melted the metal.

  It was disagreeable work, and Rogelio bore up relatively well under it, not losing his lunch as Brambell had feared. The two roustabouts operating the machinery, and the two engineers, were another story: turning their backs, looking away whenever possible, averting their eyes assiduously to avoid seeing the remains to the point where Brambell had to speak to them sharply to keep their eyes on the job. Glinn, on the other hand, was just the opposite: watching the entire procedure in silence, face expressionless. He could have been observing a golf match. Nobody spoke except the fellows operating the jaws, and then only to communicate tersely about the equipment.

  Now they separated the personnel sphere, laying the pieces out in jigsaw position on a large tarp spread precisely for that purpose. As they pried apart the last two large pieces, the upper torso, neck, and crushed head became visible.

  Brambell glanced at Rogelio and was dismayed to see the man had gone pale. The two roustabouts were not even bothering to cover up their horror and disgust. An engineer
turned away, retching. Only Glinn seemed unmoved.

  “All right, let’s keep going,” said Brambell, moving in with a pair of rubber-tipped forceps and picking up the jaw, teeth and skin still adhering. He laid it all on the gurney. Another piece followed, then another. The face itself had survived almost entirely whole, flattened without being mashed to a pulp. Rogelio worked on the opposite side of the gurney while a great silence collected in the hangar. As they continued, Brambell found himself becoming disturbed by something. It wasn’t the gruesomeness—it was an odd feeling that something was not quite right. But he said nothing. He didn’t want to seem like a crank—or, worse, cause a panic.

  As they neared the end of the dismantling process, the titanium sphere lay in neatly arranged and numbered pieces on the spread tarp, along with mashed equipment from inside the sphere. Everything had been thoroughly picked over by Brambell and Rogelio, and all the remains were laid out on the gurney. Brambell, bending over them, putting body pieces into place like a puzzle, felt a presence behind him. It was Glinn.

  “Have you recovered all of the remains?” he murmured.

  Brambell did not answer right away. He wondered just how to phrase it. Finally he said: “We’ll know when we weigh the remains if a substantial portion is missing. Of course, we’ll have to factor in the loss of blood and the infusion into the tissues of a certain amount of salt water…” He swallowed.

  “Of course.”

  One of the roustabouts, having recovered somewhat, asked, “Why the hell did the creature crush up the DSV like this? Was it defense?”

  “It happened right after Lispenard switched on her acetylene torch,” said Glinn. “So I would say yes—it felt pain and reacted.”

  Brambell said nothing.

  “I think it was fear,” said the roustabout. “The thing was afraid.”

  Another silence, then Glinn turned to Brambell. “Doctor, you don’t agree?”

  Blast Glinn, he thought. “If it was a purely defensive action, why would the thing swallow it in the first place?”

  “Part of that very defensive reaction.”

  “But Lispenard was trying to escape, not attack. It sucked her in. It wasn’t afraid.”

  “What are you suggesting?” said Glinn.

  You asked for it. “Think about what the DSV looked like when the thing expelled it,” said Brambell. “All crushed up in a ball like that.”

  “Meaning?”

  Brambell drew in an irritated breath. “As a child, I used to roam the Killarney National Forest with my brother Simon—may he rest in peace. Two would-be naturalists, collecting wee skeletons of mice and shrews. And we knew the best place to get them. Near owl nests.”

  “May I ask where this recollection is going?”

  “It’s a pellet,” Brambell said flatly.

  “A what?”

  “A pellet. Like an owl pellet. Good God, man, need I be more plain?” He waved a hand at the remains—metal and organic both. “It’s a shite.”

  31

  THE NUCLEAR WEAPON had been broken down in a most ingenious way, Gideon thought, so as to form six easily assembled pieces. Five of them were on racks, sealed and ready to go; the sixth, the gold-plated plutonium “pit,” had been housed elsewhere and would have to be loaded last, using special equipment.

  The room was deep in the bowels of the ship, the close air smelling faintly of diesel fuel. Gideon gazed at the deadly pieces and considered the situation. The main body of the nuke was like two halves of a giant beach ball, already sporting slow and fast high-explosive lenses. The initiator was in a separate package, smaller than a golf ball and sealed in heavy lead foil. The detonators were in the fourth package, attached to wires, ready to be inserted into the brass chimney sleeves. The fifth package contained the small computer into which the detonator wires would be plugged and would—ultimately—send out the detonation signal.

  Garza would soon be delivering, at Glinn’s orders, the final package containing the plutonium. Once he’d done that, the assembly sequence was simple. And then the bomb would be ready for arming.

  The racks had been specially engineered to allow a single person, using computer-controlled mechanical assists and a ceiling winch, to assemble the bomb in about an hour. Testing would take another hour. Gideon was amazed at the elegant, beautifully simple engineering work Garza had done. As long as you knew what you were doing, it was almost as simple as putting together a set of shelves from Ikea.

  Stuff like this didn’t exactly grow on trees. He wondered once again just how much EES had spent in order to procure it.

  The actual arming of the bomb wouldn’t happen until just before it was to be used. It would be armed with a code, nicknamed ARM, to be entered into the computer by keypad. Only Glinn, Gideon, and Garza knew the code. The countdown to detonation could then be started with a simple keypress on that same keypad—or by a remote-located computer in mission control.

  But the nuke—as Glinn had previously explained—had a fail-safe mechanism built into it. This was a second code, ABORT, that would immediately stop the countdown.

  Again, only the three of them knew the abort code.

  Gideon frowned. The more he thought about this arrangement, the less he liked it. His dislike was due in part to Lispenard’s horrible death. But it was also a result of the rumors swirling about the ship: that the sonic signals emitted by the creature were a form of communication; that, in its years sitting on the bottom of the sea, it had learned the only language it heard—whale-speak—and was now trying to communicate with them. If that were the case, it meant the Baobab was intelligent. It wasn’t some unthinking life-form operating on instinct, like a shark. It knew what it was doing.

  It was evil. And yet it was—or might be—sentient. Even intelligent.

  He did not like the idea that Garza or Glinn had the opportunity to stop the countdown and abort the bomb at the mere stroke of a key. Glinn did not particularly worry him: even though he was the one who’d refused to use the dead man’s switch on the Rolvaag, Gideon understood this time around the man’s deep animus toward the creature, his obsessive, Ahab-like desire to kill it. But he didn’t trust Garza. While he knew they all shared the same goal, the death of Lispenard and the creature’s attempt at communication had transformed Gideon’s view of the life-form growing underneath them. He was a different man from the one who had begun this mission, deeply concerned at the idea of setting off a nuclear explosion. He understood now the threat the entire planet faced if this malevolent thing was allowed to reproduce and spread. There could be no hesitation or pusillanimity in killing it.

  And that was the problem. He had yet to complete the complex computer simulations modeling what would happen when a hundred-kiloton nuke was detonated two miles deep, either directly under or within triggering distance from the ship. Would the water diminish the effects of the blast—or magnify them? Air was a forgiving and flexible medium that allowed the force of such a blast to expand and disperse. But what would happen in an incompressible medium such as water under the pressure of four hundred atmospheres? And how would that affect the Batavia? It seemed to him that, at the very least, a gigantic eruption of steam would break the surface. The P-wave, traveling through water perhaps dozens of miles, could easily rupture the hull. And he was pretty sure it would generate a tsunami-type disturbance on the surface that might swamp or overturn the ship. When all the effects became known—and he would soon have to provide them with the results of his simulations—Gideon didn’t want Garza chickening out. He wanted to make sure that, once he assembled the bomb, he could arm and detonate it—and that no one could stop it.

  No: he wasn’t worried about Glinn. The man had nerves of steel. But Garza…he was the cautious one. Even after the device was armed and the countdown started, the man might change his mind about the whole plan, decide it was too dicey, and code in ABORT before Gideon could stop him.

  That could not be allowed to happen.

  Gideon reached
out and picked up the computer controller, peeling off its metallicized plastic wrap. He hefted it. It was a stainless-steel box about three by three by six inches, with a keypad, plus input and output ports. Inside was a single-function computer. Nothing overly complex. Nothing that couldn’t be reprogrammed.

  Gideon had to smile.

  32

  DESPITE HERSELF, WONG was mightily impressed by Prothero’s library of whale sounds, which he claimed was the largest in the world. At his request, she had devised a small program that scanned that database of audio files, looking for any matches with the sounds emitted by the Baobab. She had come up with two solid hits and several partials. As she finished the final run, she heard a stomping in the hall outside the lab and knew it was Prothero returning. His ridiculous Doc Marten boots made an unmistakable sound on the steel plating of the ship.

  “So,” he said, removing his hipster hat and flinging it down on a table piled with junk. “What’s taking you so long?”

  “I just finished.”

  Prothero pulled up a chair, swept some printouts onto the floor, and sat down. “What you got?”

  “Two pretty close matches.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  She played the Baobab sound first, as a control, and then the two similar sounds from Prothero’s whale database, all sped up ten times to put the pitch into the best range for human listening.

  Prothero grunted. “Play those hits again, first the whale, then the Baobab.”

  She ran through them again in reverse order.

  “That’s close! So—did you look up the circumstances when the two whale calls were recorded?”

  “I did. The first recording was made by a Greenpeace vessel a few years ago, about five hundred miles south of Tasmania. It had been shadowing a Japanese whaler. This was the sound the whale made as it was dying, after being hit by two penthrite grenade-armed harpoons by the Japanese.”