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A Quantum Mythology

Page 29

by Gavin G. Smith


  ‘Big Henry will do the broad strokes then we’ll use the towfish to fill in the details,’ Hideo told him. Lodup had watched the towfish being lowered onto the flatbed by one of the moon pool’s overhead cranes before they left. It looked like a truly ancient piece of kit – some kind of brass antique from the history of diving, well before the invention of sonar, let alone magnetometers.

  ‘So what’s with the towfish?’ he asked Hideo.

  ‘We’ve got AUVs and teleprescence ROVs that use a kind of biomechanical water-jet propulsion which doesn’t get in the way of the instruments, but they’re all busy today.’

  Sal had set the ADS down on one of the nearby buildings. She was using the exoskeleton’s arms for support and occasionally kicking the suit’s legs. It made for a strangely incongruous image.

  They watched as Big Henry made another couple of passes down the boulevard and out over the seabed.

  ‘Hideo?’ Lodup asked. ‘Sometimes people go nuts, right?’ Hideo didn’t say anything. ‘What about the orcas?’ Hideo’s lack of answer told him everything he needed to know. ‘What happened with the dolphins?’

  ‘Thanks, Big Henry,’ Hideo said, ignoring Lodup. Lodup heard answering whale song, and the armoured creature swam up and disappeared over the roofs of the city. The holographic map was noticeably more complete but was still missing information. It definitely looked like there was another building under the mound of silt. ‘So, we’re going to take a number of passes. We’ll be using a mixture of acoustic swept-frequency pulses, a sensitive bottom and sub-bottom magnetometer and high-res multispectrum images from the cameras.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sal, you stay put whilst we do this.’

  ‘Understood,’ Sal answered.

  Lodup could hear the winch unspooling the towfish’s cable through the submersible’s hull.

  ‘Parts of it can’t be mapped,’ Hideo said quietly. All traces of the effusive cheerfulness he’d greeted Lodup with had disappeared. ‘It changes.’

  ‘Hideo, are you alright, man?’

  Again, Hideo didn’t answer. With the cable unwound, the submersible began its first pass. Lodup heard the first chirps as more detail was added to the three-dimensional map. He found the architecture revealed by the multispectrum scans disquieting, unnatural and all the more sinister, somehow, for currently being buried.

  The silt dredge was a dense-looking cube on the submersible’s flatbed. Lodup had left the craft and watched as the cube grew several concertinaed tubes. Lodup and Sal grabbed two of the tubes, whilst a larger one snaked of its own volition through the city and then out onto the seabed. Lodup and Sal wrangled the tubes they were holding roughly into place, but then the tubes came to life, reminding Lodup of the Hydra in old movies about Greek mythology. Sal explained that Hideo had taken the results from the towfish and Big Henry’s passes and fed them into the silt pump, then programmed it to remove the silt from designated areas. They were largely there to troubleshoot. She shared the data stream from the silt pump with Lodup. It was more than a little disconcerting how the telemetry appeared to cascade down his vision.

  ‘This is Hideo in flatbed four-two to Deane. Requesting permission to task a nano-screen for mapping in the upper-east quadrant?’ Hideo shared the infrasound packet burst with Lodup and Sal.

  ‘Flatbed four-two, this is Siska in C&C, permission denied.’

  ‘Thanks for thinking about it, at least,’ Hideo muttered over the local short-range ultrasound link.

  ‘Not getting jittery on me are you, Hideo?’ Sal asked over the ultrasound link. Hideo didn’t answer. Sal turned the exoskeleton’s head turn to look at Lodup. He gave her a very exaggerated shrug.

  They watched the tubes writhe around in the silt like angry snakes, sucking up the granular material and pumping it across the city to the seabed, where it was deposited in billowing clouds. They were slowly revealing a building made of the ubiquitous black, faintly organic stone. It was roughly rectangular, but again the angles were just off-kilter enough to cause confusion. It reminded Lodup of a warped version of the Egyptian tombs he’d seen on history and archaeological documentaries. If he understood what he’d been told properly, then the technology of this civilisation was fused into the very matter they used to build the city.

  Lodup couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He repeatedly glanced behind him. He told himself it was just the strangeness of the horrible architecture surrounding him. He was still struggling to believe that the larger ‘statues’ had once been somehow alive. He glanced behind him again.

  ‘You okay, dude?’ Sal asked. ‘You look spooked.’

  ‘Just getting used to the place, I guess.’

  ‘Go up about ten metres, check to the west down among the buildings.’

  Lodup headed over the building and found himself looking across the strange cityscape. He could just about make out the stone circle in the centre of the city. From this angle, alien statues made the tomblike buildings they sat atop look like thrones.

  He glanced to the west, the direction they had come from. The buildings that way looked lower. At first he saw nothing, then eventually glimpsed a large shadow moving low and slow among the buildings. He’d seen that sort of movement before. It was a marine predator hunting. At first he thought it was a shark, but the depth made that unlikely.

  ‘Is that one of the orcas?’ Lodup asked across the ultrasound link.

  ‘It’s Marvin, I think,’ Sal answered. ‘I’d ask for verification but they don’t like being disturbed.’

  ‘What’s he hunting?’ Lodup asked. He was a little surprised, as he thought the orcas fed on chum from the nipples on the underside of the habitat. He really didn’t want to think too much about what would be down here that was big enough for an orca to hunt. His reply was a burst of ultrasonically delivered laughter, which prompted him to ask, ‘Is he hunting me?’

  ‘More sort of stalking. Seeing what you’re made of. The pod’s almost tribal and all male, so there’s a lot of macho bullshit. They do this to all the newcomers. You’re probably fine as long as you don’t bolt,’ Sal told him.

  Great. A submarine-destroying cyborg killer whale is hazing me, Lodup thought as he watched the submersible bank and move sideways around the structure that was appearing through the cloud of silt.

  ‘Do you want to try and matter-hack the entrance?’ Sal asked. Lodup assumed she was talking to Hideo as he had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Fuck it. If they won’t task a screen for mapping, they won’t for a matter-hack, or a swarm for eating our way in,’ Hideo answered. Lodup could see what looked like some kind of cutting torch among the waldos and other tools on the front of the submersible. ‘Lodup, you stay well out of our way, understood?’

  Yeah, I’ll just stay out here being stalked by the armoured killer whale, Lodup thought and glanced behind him again. This time he caught a glimpse of Marvin. He was of the opinion he was supposed to. It didn’t matter how much of a game Sal told him it was, it was still difficult to suppress fear when a predator like that was playing with you.

  Sal moved closer to the building. Lodup’s augmented vision enabled him to watch the cutting torch unfold itself from a wrist mount on the ADS. There was a sudden strobing white and blue light as both fusion torches bit into the petrified material of the tomblike structure. Around the arc of the torches the superheated water bubbled and boiled, almost simultaneously going from steam back to water again.

  ‘Lodup,’ Sal said over the ultrasound link, ‘there’s a toolkit on the flatbed. You might want to grab the U-pulse.’

  ‘Why?’ Lodup asked as he joined his feet together, the thermal sheath’s fins bonding to form a rippling monofin. It made his swim to the submersible look somewhat mermaid-like, but it was quick. He found the toolkit and opened it up, removing something that resembled a stubby sonar pistol. He knew that the U-pulse emitted a weaponised b
urst of ultrasound at a frequency that could damage or even kill most unshielded biological creatures. At the very least it should discourage them.

  ‘We’re kicking up a lot of shit and making heat and noise. It’s bound to attract something.’

  ‘Anything down here that can hurt us?’ Lodup asked, starting to get worried. Most deep-sea life was too fragile to be any real threat to humans. Most of the dangerous stuff remained in shallower depths where all the food was. Other than psychotic work colleagues, cultists, rebellious dolphins and orca practical jokers, he thought, but kept that to himself.

  ‘Well, some of them have fed off the city,’ Sal said.

  ‘Them? What them? What’re you talking about?’ Lodup said, trying to fight off a sense of panic as he looked at the horrible statues. He found himself glancing all around, and suddenly Marvin didn’t feel like such a threat.

  ‘It changes them,’ Sal added in a way that really didn’t put Lodup’s mind at ease.

  Gradually, Marvin’s stalking became less frightening as the armoured orca weaved through the nearby streets of the submerged city. Lodup had his back to the light of the two fusion torches and bubbling plumes of water. Standing guard with him were the two autonomous underwater vehicles. Occasionally he heard one or other of them ‘chirp’ as they sent out a sonar pulse.

  ‘Here they come,’ Sal said over the ultrasound link.

  ‘Huh?’ Lodup said. ‘Where—’ Then he saw the shared telemetry from the AUVs. Ghost images of wriggling worm-like fish. They looked like hagfish – deep-sea carrion-eaters with no jaw, rather two rasping rows of teeth that they used to scavenge sunken carcasses for meat. Except these were much larger and looked like they were covered in some kind of segmented armoured shell. ‘Guys?’

  He was aware of the two AUVs rapidly firing directed pulses of ultrasound, and saw some of the mutated hagfish start spiralling towards the seabed, which in this case was the basalt streets of the strange city. Others veered off suddenly but then turned back, coming at the source of heat and light from another angle.

  ‘You’ll want to start firing at some point,’ Sal suggested over the ultrasound comms. Lodup was staring at the vast shoal heading towards them. They looked like they were wriggling rather than swimming through the water.

  Lodup raised the U-pulse and his vision filled with target solutions. With a thought, he sorted them in terms of urgency. He squeezed the trigger. The closest eel-like hagfish all but exploded from the blast of ultrasound. He shifted, fired, then again, and again. Suddenly the normally crystal-clear water was full of sinking hagfish remains. Those closest to him exploded and some dropped, either dead or stunned but still intact. Others ran from the pain of the ultrasound burst transmitted through a liquid medium. The AUVs shifted slightly, making sure their fields of fire overlapped and that they had all possible approaches covered.

  It was like a sick video game, Lodup thought as he killed the mutated hagfish en masse. He felt pressure on his left leg rather than actual pain. Glancing down, he saw one of the monstrous, alien-looking things clamped to his leg as it tried to rasp its way through the thermal sheath. On some level he knew that the thermal sheath was hardening against the hagfish’s attack. On another level, Lodup had a terrifying thing the size of an adult alligator attached to his leg and trying to eat him. He dropped the U-pulse and grabbed at the hilt of the diamond-bladed dive knife strapped to his right calf, somehow managing to draw it.

  ‘No!’ Sal shouted across comms, but it was too late. Lodup stabbed the blade through the top of the creature’s body, close to its mouth. The blade cracked the armour, passed straight through its primitive body and bisected its mutation-reinforced vertebrate, then out of the other side, through Lodup’s thermal sheath and into his leg. Lodup tried to scream in the liquid environment of his own larynx, and failed.

  He had a moment to register that the black ink he was seeing in the water was actually his own blood, and then the water was full of hagfish. He felt their teeth against the thermal sheath and tried to cry out as they found the rip in it, and the wound beneath.

  The burst of ultrasound was agonising. He felt his eardrums burst, and things tearing inside his body. The hagfish were now just so much chum sinking in the water. He saw the armoured maw of the orca swimming straight at him. It opened wide, displaying metal teeth. Then darkness.

  Light, heat, panic overwhelmed him. He reached down for his leg even as he managed to work out where he was. Hideo was standing over him inside the submersible.

  ‘Dude, you all right?’ The submersible driver was smiling again. At least Lodup’s brush with death had cheered him up.

  ‘I hate this place,’ Lodup said quietly. He was running his hand down the left leg of his thermal sheath. He couldn’t even find a cut in the material.

  ‘The suit’s repaired itself, so has your leg, and your ruptured internal organs. Marvin pretty much saved your life. They’re not that dangerous unless they can swarm you. They’re parasites.’

  ‘They live off the city?’ Lodup asked incredulously. ‘Anything else I need to know.’

  Hideo tapped his head. ‘Anything that’s not classified is in there. You just need to find a way to assimilate it.’

  ‘With all this tech, your only means of dealing with those things is zapping them with ultrasound?’ he demanded.

  Hideo looked uncomfortable. ‘No, there’s lots of other ways,’ the submersible pilot said. ‘But sometimes, particularly in and around the buildings, there isn’t.’

  ‘So this was training rather than a set-up?’

  ‘Sorry, dude, not my idea.’

  ‘Can you tell Siska to go and fuck herself?’

  ‘Not verbally. I could maybe glare at her while she’s not looking if you want, but this was more likely Yaroslav.’

  ‘Okay, so now that I’ve failed my training and the killer whales think I’m a pussy, can I go home?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  This stopped Lodup dead. He thought about it for a long time.

  ‘No,’ he finally admitted.

  ‘You’ve got a choice, man. The building’s open, the AUVs have been inside and mapped it. The interior’s too small for the ADS.’

  Normally after any kind of accident, a dive would be called off. This clearly wasn’t that sort of environment.

  ‘Any more fucking surprises?’

  ‘If there are, they’ll be a surprise to me as well,’ Hideo said, grinning.

  ‘Comforting,’ Lodup muttered.

  Lodup dropped out of the bottom of the submersible into water illuminated by the flatbed and the ADS’s running lights. Light projected from his mask and right wrist as the feet of the thermal sheath grew into fins, and he carefully made his way across to the dark, rectangular-shaped hole they’d cut in the low, tomblike building.

  ‘You all right, love?’ Sal asked.

  ‘Yes, Sal, thanks.’

  He gripped the side of the doorway and was surprised by the tactile feedback through the thermal sheath’s glove. The rock felt smooth, like a pebble in a riverbed, and despite the recent heat of the fusion torch it was cold again. The interior was illuminated by the AUVs. Sal dropped down behind him, using the ADS’s propulsion system to keep the exoskeleton off the seabed to avoid kicking up more silt.

  Lodup dived down a little and then gently finned into the building. Normally he’d use a line for any form of entry into a restricted environment, but the structure had been mapped, it was open plan, there was nowhere to get trapped.

  The interior was basically an oddly angled, almost rectangular chamber. Low panels of differing heights protruded from the walls, floor and ceilings. Something about them suggested they were incomplete, as if they’d been frozen in place at the moment the city was petrified.

  The AUVs were hovering in opposite corners of the long, low chamber, illuminating the interior wit
h their running lights.

  Lodup realised this was some kind of rite of passage. He played his wrist light over the walls as he slowly finned around the chamber. He jumped in mid-water and almost cried out when he saw them. Two figures. Largely humanoid, though their hairless heads looked slightly too large, and there was something wrong with their eyes. They had terrified expressions on their faces. They were both female, one of them a child. They were fused with the wall, as if they had been running through it and hadn’t quite made it.

  Lodup swallowed hard. He cast the light around but there were no more of them.

  ‘Now what?’ he subvocalized nervously.

  ‘Now we’ve done our piece, they’ll send in the bioengineers to see if it can be mined for anything useful,’ Sal said.

  Lodup made a thorough sweep of the place and then tried not to move too quickly as he finned back towards the exit. He didn’t look at the two figures fused with the wall. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching him.

  Lodup tried to scream, again, but it didn’t happen, again. He thrashed backwards in the water, trying to get away from them as he grabbed at the U-pulse where it had adhered to his thermal sheath. They were simply hanging there, moving just enough to keep them level in the water. They were squid, just under a metre long and about half that across. A web of skin, like a shroud, stretched between their tentacles, and the shroud was lined with sharp-looking metal spikes. The creatures were covered with segmented metal armour and their eyes were lenses.

  ‘It’s okay, they’re ours,’ Hideo said across the short-range comms.

  ‘Why are they hanging around out here?’ Lodup asked, trying to control his anger. And this is just my first day at work, he thought.

 

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