10 After Altman had left, Hammond stayed on drinking. His head ached. Had it been wise to tell Altman? Had he been right about him? Maybe he was a free agent, but then again, if he were someone fishing for information, wouldn't that be exactly what they'd want him to think, that he was talking to someone who was safe? But you couldn't be sure that anybody was safe. You couldn't be sure that someone wasn't watching you right at that moment. They were always watching, always looking, and the moment you felt safest was probably the moment when they were watching you most closely, most sneakily, the moment when they'd figured out how to worm into your skull. That's what they must have done--they must have implanted a recorder in his skull. His head hurt, had been hurting for several days now. Why hadn't he seen it before? They were recording his brain waves; then they transmitted them to some super-secret high-tech neurolab somewhere and plugged them into someone else's head and then knew everything he was thinking. The only thing to do was not think. If he stopped thinking, maybe he could keep one step ahead of them. Someone was coming across the room toward him. A large man with a bushy mustache and a wrinkled, liver-spotted face. It must be one of them. He tensed his body but remained motionless. Was there time to get to the knife in his pocket and flick it open and stab the guy? No, probably not. But he had the beer bottle in his hand. Maybe he could throw it at the man's head. If he threw it hard enough and just right, it might knock him out. Or no, wait, he could grab the bottle by the neck and break it off. Then he'd have a real weapon. They'd never take him alive. "Se�or?" the man said, a concerned look on his face. "Is anything the matter?" What was that voice? It was familiar: the owner of the bar. What was his name? Mendez or something. He relaxed. What was wrong with him? It was just the bartender. He shook his head. Why was he so paranoid? He didn't usually get like that, did he? "I'm all right," he said. "I'd like another beer." "I'm sorry," said the owner. "We are closing." And indeed, when he looked around he saw that he was almost the last one in the bar. Everyone was gone except for one villager, the nameless town drunk who was sunk in the corner of the room, wrapped in a dark shawl, watching him. Hammond nodded. He stood and made for the door. The drunk followed him with his eyes. Don't pay any attention to him, Hammond thought. He's not one of them, he's just a drunk. They haven't gotten to him yet. Probably. Take a deep breath. You're going to be okay. He made it out into the dusty street okay. He could hear the surf against the shore, could smell the salt as well. What now? he wondered. What else? And then he thought: Home. He was about halfway back to the complex he lived in, walking down a deserted street, when he heard something. At first, he wasn't sure he'd heard anything meaningful at all. It was just a clattering sound and might have been caused by an animal. When he stopped, he didn't hear it. But when he started up again, there it was, little traces of it, like a voice he couldn't quite hear in his head. After half a block more he was sure: someone was dogging his footsteps. He turned around but didn't see anyone. He quickened his step a little. There seemed to be whispers coming from the shadows in front of him, but as he approached them they faded, continuing on farther along the road. He shook his head. That's crazy, he thought. I'm going crazy. He heard again a noise behind him and wheeled around again, this time seeing someone, a dark form, a little distance away. He stopped, stared at it. It had stopped moving, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, it stepped back into the shadows and was gone. "Hello?" he couldn't stop himself from saying. "Is anyone there?" His heart had begun to thud in his throat. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife, opened the blade. It looked absurdly small, almost useless, in his hand. He started back toward the shadows where the figure had disappeared, then realized that that was probably exactly what they wanted him to do. He turned quickly around to continue the way he had been going. Except when he turned around, he found the street in front of him wasn't empty anymore. There were three men, two of them quite large, all faces he recognized from the DredgerCorp facility. "Hammond?" said the smallest one, the only one of them wearing glasses. "Charles Hammond?" "Who wants to know?" asked Hammond. "Someone would like to have a word with you," he said. "Come with us." "Who?" "I'm not at liberty to say," the man said. "I'm not on the clock," Hammond claimed. "Business hours are long over." "You're on the clock for this," said another of the men. He nodded. He pretended to relax, beginning to move toward them, then suddenly spun on a heel and ran as quickly as he could in the other direction. Shouts rang out behind him. He ducked into an alley and ran down it, a ragged dog barking at his heels for half the length of it. He leapt over a makeshift fence and crashed through a pile of trash. Up and running again, he left the streets of the town proper and entered the shantytown. His head was throbbing. He looked back--they were still behind him, gaining. He kept running, a stitch starting up in his side. Slower now, but still running. By the time he reached the edge of the shantytown, they were close enough that he could hear the sound of their labored breathing. They're going to catch me, he realized, there's nothing I can do. He stopped suddenly, whirled around, holding the small knife in front of him. The three men quickly fanned out, forming a triangle around him. Hammond, panting, kept moving the knife back and forth from one hand to the other. The others kept their distance, their hands up. "There's no need for that," said the man with the glasses. "They just want to talk to you." "Who's they?" asked Hammond. "Come on," said the man with the glasses. "Be a good boy and put down the knife." "What's wrong with him, Tom?" asked the first of the other two. "He's scared, Tim," said the second, said Tom. "I'd be scared if I was him, too," said Tim. "Nobody likes a thief." "Thief? Can you really steal secrets?" said Tom. "Now, boys," said the man with the glasses. "You're not helping the situation." There they were again, the voices in his head. But why did they need to send voices into his head if they were there in front of him? And then a terrible thought occurred to Hammond: What if there were two groups out to get him? DredgerCorp and another one as well? Or maybe even three. Or four. What did they want with him? Would they beat him? Would they kill him? Would it be even worse than that? "Now just calm down," said the man with the glasses, looking a little nervous now. Someone, Hammond realized, was making a noise, a high-pitched squealing. It was a terrible thing to hear. It took him a long moment to realize that that someone was himself. "I told you something was wrong with him," he heard Tim say behind him. "You're right about that, Tim," said Tom. They were still there, the three of them, standing in a way that made it impossible for him to see all of them at once. He could turn and turn, but he couldn't see them all at the same time no matter what he did. And then there were the ones in his head, too, slowly extracting things from it. God, his head hurt. He had to stop them, had to get them out of his head. "Put the knife down, friend," said the man with the glasses. But that was the last thing Hammond was going to do. Instead he lunged forward and flashed his knife at the man with glasses. The man jumped nimbly back, but not nimbly enough; the knife opened a gash just below his wrist. He stood holding it, blood dripping through his fingers, his face suddenly pale in the dim light. But Hammond had forgotten about the others. He turned and there they were, still a little way away, but moving closer. They stepped quickly back when they realized they'd been noticed. He was still surrounded, both inside his head and outside it. There was no getting out of it. He would never get away. And so, realizing this, heart thudding in his mouth, he did the only thing he could think to do. "I didn't expect that, Tim," said Tom. "I didn't either," said Tim. "This one was full of surprises. What'd they want him for, anyway?" he asked the man with the glasses. "A few questions," said the man with the glasses. "Nothing serious. Just a few questions." He had wrapped his wrist in one of his shirttails. It was slowly soaking through with blood. "Never seen anything quite like that," said Tom. "And I hope I never do again." "Same here," said Tim, shaking his head. He took a step back to avoid the puddle of blood that was spreading from Hammond's slit neck. He'd never seen anyone cut themselves quite so deep and so quickly. There was a lot of blood and
it was still coming. He had to step back again. How could anyone do that to himself? Tim wondered. He must have been very frightened. Or simply crazy. Or both. He squinted, massaged his temple. "All right, Tim?" asked Tom. "Better than him, anyway," said Tim. "Just a little headache." "Me, too," said Tom. "Terry?" "I've got a headache, too," said the man with the glasses. "Been one of those nights. Step lively, lads. Let's get out of here before the law arrives."
PART TWO CONFINED SPACES
11 "He killed himself, just like that," the man on the vidscreen said. It was less a question than a statement. He had a square-cut jaw and white hair that was swept back and plastered down. Even on the small vidscreen, he was an imposing man. He was wearing a uniform, but his screen had been set to dither out his insignia, to make it impossible to say just what branch of the service he was part of. "That's what they tell me, sir," said Tanner. William Tanner was head of the newly established DredgerCorp Chicxulub, the semisecret branch of the organization that had been set up hurriedly as soon as they'd had some indication that something was going on in the center of the crater. Tanner had a military background and specialized in running black ops through dummy corporations. He was running this one under the name Ecodyne. Enter the right command into the system at the right moment, and any sign of a connection to DredgerCorp would instantly vanish from the company files. Then Tanner would vanish and reappear under another name. So far, his operations had gone well, partly because of good luck, partly because he was very good at what he did, which was why he'd been with DredgerCorp for ten years. He didn't know the name of the man on the screen. All he knew was that, three days before, he'd had a vid conference with Lenny Small, the president of DredgerCorp, who'd explained that they were bringing someone in from the outside. When Tanner asked who it was, Small had just smiled. "No need for names, Tanner," he said. He flashed a vid still of the man onto Tanner's screen. "Here's your man," he said. "You tell him anything he wants to know. And you do anything he says." Once Small disconnected, Tanner had shaken his head. Why bring someone in from the outside? Just one more possible way for something to go wrong. Just one more hole he'd have to plug after the operation was over. Small was getting soft in his old age, drinking too much maybe, getting sloppy. Which put everyone at risk. Which put him at risk. Tanner didn't like that. But when he saw the guy on the screen, first heard him talk, first heard the coldness of his voice, he realized that he'd misjudged his boss. This wasn't just anyone. This was military, someone who'd clearly seen a lot and knew better than any of them what was going on. Privately, Tanner started thinking of him as the Colonel, though he had no idea what the man's actual rank was, or if he even had the right branch of the service. It wasn't even possible to guess at where he might be--the background had been deliberately pixilated out, which lent an odd shimmer to the edges of the Colonel's body. It was the Colonel who had taken the data they'd intercepted from various scientists' reports and generated a model that gave them an idea of what might be waiting for them at the heart of the crater. It was the Colonel who immediately had the security system replaced, who had seen the potential for the technician who had installed the first system to leave a back door for himself. And when that young geophysicist named Altman started asking around about anomalies in the crater, the Colonel immediately had his phone tapped. A few minutes later, the Colonel was back on the vidscreen, telling Tanner that Altman had already had a call from the technician--Bacon was his name. Or no, not quite that, another kind of meat: Ham. Hammond. "Too late to trace it," the Colonel said, "but let's bring this Hammond in and have a chat." Which brought Tanner back to where he was now, impressed by how impassive and stern the Colonel's face remained as Tanner told him that Hammond was dead. "Any chance they're lying to you?" asked the Colonel. "I've seen the body myself," said Tanner. "He's dead, all right. They were just trying to bring him in, just talking to him, and he flipped and slit his own throat." "He what?" "Slit his own throat. Almost sawed his head off." "Just talking to him, you say," said the Colonel. "What's that supposed to mean? People don't slit their throats when you're just talking to them." Tanner swallowed. Talking to the Colonel made him nervous. "Any chance they nudged him along a little too hard?" the Colonel asked. Tanner shook his head. "I've worked with these men before," he said. "They're completely reliable. They had their orders straight. Trust me, they were as surprised as you and I." The Colonel gave a curt nod. "You think this Altman's a threat?" Tanner shrugged. "I was hoping to find that out from Hammond." "Best guess," said the Colonel. "Threat or not?" Tanner glanced down at the holofiles he'd spread before him, spun them through the holoscreen. Copies of them, he knew, were appearing on the other side of the link, where the Colonel could see them. "I don't think there's much to worry about with Altman," he said. "There's nothing special about him. Your run-of-the-mill scientist. No Einstein, not really the sort that stands out from the pack." "In my experience," said the Colonel, "nobody stands out from the pack until they're given a reason to. It's not until then that you know whether they'll bend or break." "I suppose so," said Tanner. "In my experience, very few people ever get that far." The Colonel nodded, lips tight. "But if Altman does? . . ." Tanner thought about it. "I don't know," he said. "He doesn't seem to be the hero type. He's not likely to be an industrial spy for another corp, I don't think, and not likely to opt to become one. He seems to have taken his current job exclusively so as to follow his girlfriend down to Chicxulub." "Could be a good cover," said the Colonel. "Could be," said Tanner. "But you'd probably know better than me if it was, and, if so, for what. I don't think it's a cover." The Colonel scanned quickly through the files. "No," he said, once he'd finished. "I don't think so either." He stayed for a moment, staring straight into the screen. To Tanner it felt like the Colonel was staring through him, not even seeing him. Finally the Colonel said, "Let's move things forward quickly." He turned to his own holobank, sent a rendering through his vidscreen to Tanner. A three- dimensional image. Some kind of vessel. At first Tanner thought it was a spacepod and experienced a brief wave of fear: he had been part of the shock troops for the moon skirmishes, part of the deadly fight over which nation had the right to the resources of the moon. He had spent harrowing hours with his oxygen running out, siphoning from the tanks of the dead and dying around him. Last thing he wanted was to be in space again. But then he noticed the screw engines and realized it wasn't a spacecraft at all: it was some sort of submarine. Deepwater, from the looks of it. "What is it, sir?" he asked. "The F/7," the Colonel said. "Prototype submersible, not released yet, even among our people. I'm sending it to you. Find two men to man it, people you can trust. And quickly. We need to get there first."
12 He chose Dantec, an ex-military man from his own outfit he'd brought with him ten years back when he'd first signed on, someone whom he trusted implicitly and who, in addition, knew how to pilot just about anything. Dantec was good at thinking on his feet, very quick. He also had no compunctions about doing something questionable as long as Tanner was the one asking. But he'd also been known to be a little too quick to resort to violence if something went wrong. Something had happened to Dantec during the moon skirmishes, something that had left his eyes steady but flat, as if nobody was home inside. Tanner wasn't sure what it was. He's not a bad guy, Tanner told himself the few times Dantec had done something that he found hard to accept, even with his own fairly lax morals. He just doesn't see things the way I do. And then, as an afterthought, he would often find himself thinking, I'm not a bad guy either. Tanner sighed. Bad guys or not, both he and Dantec would do what they felt, in their own way, they had to do. He had to search a little for the other man, pulling him out of DredgerCorp's North American headquarters. His name was Hennessy and he was a marine geologist, also with quite a bit of submarine experience. He was bald although still fairly young, mid-thirties. He was also well respected, and if he was already with DredgerCorp, that probably meant he wouldn't object too strongly to something a hair outside the law. But the Colonel's question
about Altman was still nagging at him: If push came to shove and Hennessy realized the full extent of what they were doing, would he bend or break? No way to tell, Tanner thought, but thought he was more likely to go with the flow than to protest or try to stop them. Tanner made arrangements through President Small, got Hennessy on the next flight south. By the time the man had reached Puerto Chicxulub, the F/7 had arrived, was waiting for them under a tarp on the deck of an unmarked freighter about fifteen miles away from the center of the crater. Though a rusty hulk on the outside, the freighter was retrofitted with state-of-the-art equipment inside. It was crewed by either military or ex-military--they didn't wear regulation uniforms, but their training was clear from the tight economy of their movements, their meticulous haircuts, and the way they snapped to obey an order. "Should we be careful what we say around the crew?" Tanner asked the Colonel over the vid linkup. "You should be careful what you say around anybody," said the Colonel, and then showed his teeth in a way that Tanner guessed might be a smile. Definitely a carnivore, Tanner thought. Then the Colonel's lips slid over his teeth again and he said, "Don't say more than you have to." The F/7 was a bathyscaphe. A prototype drilling model, something made to descend to great depths and then bore quickly down through solid rock. Hennessy responded to it like a kid waking up on Christmas morning to find a pony waiting downstairs. He went around the craft with Tanner and Dantec in tow, babbling about the combination of the titanium alloy drill and the molecular pulverizers meant to keep the path clear. Tanner and Dantec just pretended to humor him. "Don't tell me we're going down into Chicxulub," said Hennessy, excited. "I've always wanted to go there. What are we looking for?" You'll know soon enough, thought Tanner grimly. "Just a few dives," he said as casually as possible. "Just something to run the F/7 through its paces. Routine." Over the next few days, Tanner had them do just that. They put the F/7 through its paces, first seeing how maneuverable it was gliding along the surface, then testing it in deeper waters. and then finally testing the drill and the pulverizers. It wasn't the most maneuverable craft Hennessy had ever seen, but that wasn't the point of a bathyscaphe: it had to be solid and able to withstand tremendous pressure when it dived deep. On the surface it bobbed drunkenly along, slowly tacking in the direction it wanted to go. Underwater it was better, more responsive. And it was best of all once they had it boring through mud and into rock. Even when the drill was on full and biting into hard rock, the craft was stable, hardly shaking at all. Rear thrusters kept it up against the rock, and the drill itself pulled them forward if the threading had anything to grab. Meanwhile the pulverizers turned the remaining rock into a fine gravel and forced it back to where it caught in the thrusters and kicked away or dissolved entirely. Hennessy claimed he'd never seen anything like it. They took the F/7 down seven or eight times, test runs. At first, Dantec just watched what Hennessy did, listened to him talk, observed him. And then one day, suddenly, Dantec informed Hennessy that it was his turn. "But this is a delicate piece of equipment," cautioned Hennessy. "You need to have months and months of training before--" "You're making my headache worse. Move," said Dantec. And Hennessy, turning away from the instrument panel and taking stock of his partner for perhaps the first time, seeing his dead expression and his steady eyes, did. That night, just as he had sat down on the bed and begun to take his shoes off, Tanner heard a knock at the door. "Come in," he said, continuing to work on his laces until he saw a familiar pair of boots appear. He looked up. Why is it, he wondered, that Dantec always looks so predatory? "It's you," he said to Dantec. "Everything coming along nicely?" Dantec nodded. "I've figured it all out," he said. "You can pilot the thing if you need to?" "After a moon lander, it's a piece of cake," said Dantec. "I won't have any problems." "What about using the drill?" Dantec shrugged. "Nothing too complicated to it," he said. "I know how to drill a bore tunnel and can probably figure out how to make it do anything else we need. Hennessy is no longer essential. If he gets cold feet or something goes wrong, I can take over." "What do you mean if something goes wrong?" asked Tanner. Dantec shrugged. "Just being prepared," he said. "If something does go wrong," said Tanner slowly. "I prefer you don't kill him." Dantec hesitated, then nodded. "Your preference is duly noted," he said. The next morning found Tanner speaking to an image of the Colonel on the vidscreen. "We're ready," he said. "Anytime you want we can move the ship over the center of the crater and drop the F/7. Both pilots are trained and comfortable with the vessel. Both are eager to leave." "Very good," said the Colonel. He seemed again to be looking through Tanner, as if Tanner weren't there. "Move the freighter into position tonight," he said. "Tonight?" "Weigh anchor just before dusk. I want you in position by 2100 hours and ready to go by 2200. No need to tell your two pilots anything or do anything to make them suspect or get word back to someone if you're wrong and they're spies. Just wake them up and get them on board in time to drop the F/7 well before midnight." "Yes, sir," said Tanner. The Colonel reached out to disconnect the link, then stopped. "You look tired, Tanner," he said. "Everything all right?" "I'm fine, sir," said Tanner. "Just a little headache. I've been having trouble sleeping. But nothing to worry about." "Tomorrow may be a historic moment," the Colonel speculated. "Yes," said Tanner. "What do you think is down there?" Tanner had been wondering the same thing for days now. How could something seemingly man-made end up at the bottom of the crater, buried under miles of rock? "I don't know," he said. "Maybe it's just a natural formation that somehow doesn't seem natural. Or maybe it's something man-made that's been placed there God only knows how. Or maybe . . . ," he said, but couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. It was too big to get his mind around. "Maybe what?" asked the Colonel. Tanner shook his head to clear it, which just made the headache throb more. "I really don't know, sir," he said. "I'll tell you what you're thinking since you're not man enough to say it yourself," said the Colonel. "You're thinking, `Sure, it may be constructed, but not by us, not by humans.'" Tanner didn't say anything. "Believe it or not, Tanner, it's a genuine possibility. That's what we're hoping for. The first contact with intelligent life other than our own." It made Tanner dizzy to think about it, even scared him a little. If that was what it was, if that's what happened, it could change everything. "With a little luck, we'll know soon enough," he said in as steady a voice as he could muster. "I'll keep my fingers crossed, sir," he added, and then cut the link.
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