Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  He looked about him. There was a gap in the wall, roughly triangular in shape and large as a tea-tray. Some water was spraying in through this, but – weirdly – the ocean outside seemed almost to form some kind of skin. Its flow and ripples were visible through the rent.

  Lebret looked to the hatch that led through to the bridge. Shut. He got to his feet, acting almost on instinct, thinking to stumble across to it. But the pain in his jaw sang inside his skull. And then what? he asked himself. Get through to the bridge – and have Billiard-Fanon shoot you again?

  The whole ship shook. It was fantastic – the ensign had shot him in the mouth, and the bullet had ricocheted off his teeth, to pierce the skin of the submarine! What odds of such an occurrence? Lebret would not have believed it possible, if there were not such intense pain bunched in at his jaw.

  The white noise of gushing and swirling water surrounded him.

  He looked again at the breach in the side of the vessel. How had a single bullet-hole mutated into such a large gap? It was impossible.

  And as he looked, he saw what Billiard-Fanon had seen – a talon. More than a single claw, a bunch of three, reaching in through the gap – a monster’s paw, groping in at the space. The skin of it was profoundly purple in colour, and the claws themselves a pale green. It scooped at the air and drew a bubble out, wrenching back more of the Plongeur’s plating in the process, widening the hole.

  Just for a moment – no longer – Lebret’s terror blotted out his pain.

  Then his senses returned, or at least some of them. His mouth flared and throbbed in agony. ‘Oxygen,’ he gasped, spitting out red pearls and blobs with the words. ‘The creature is scooping the—’

  The vessel rolled again, with a great metallic groan, and Lebret was thrown hard on his back. He cried out with the impact. The agony in his face made him sob like a child.

  The hole in the side of the vessel was now as wide as a manhole. By all rights, water ought to be flowing in – the whole mess ought to be flooded. And some water was coming in, spraying and swirling to join the crazy internal monsoon. But the bulk was being held out, as if by an invisible force field. Through the shimmery window formed against this breach, Lebret saw something move – something indistinct, and large, slithering by.

  ‘Worry later,’ Lebret told himself, although it was painful to move his jaw. Globules of blood scattered from his mouth to join the larger swirl. ‘Get out now.’

  Something was giving him a moment of grace, but the mess would eventually flood entirely. If he got through the hatch and into the bridge, he would have to confront Billiard-Fanon again. But there was the other hatch, that led forward. There wasn’t much there, but at the moment it seemed a preferable direction. I’ll need to fix this tooth – or kill the nerve, he thought. This pain will drive me out of my wits.

  He thought – alcohol. Would he have time to snatch a bottle from the kitchen before getting away?

  Lebret got to his feet, unsteadily. The pain in his jaw scorched his senses, and made it hard to coordinate his actions. The hatch through to the kitchen was not as solid as the main hatchways that separated the successive chambers running the length of the Plongeur – but perhaps it would hold? Should he sequester himself in there? But that thought was chased down hard by a why? What good would it do, prolonging his life by some hours, or even days – to cling on to life in agony – only to die in the end?

  What to do?

  The thought of a drink decided him – to take at least the edge off his raging jaw. He started towards the kitchen, fighting through the swirling internal rainstorm, his legs sloshing through an increasing depth of water.

  Then the world turned upside down – the vessel rolled through a half-turn and Lebret’s legs swooped round and over his head. He cried out, a single syllable, and fell – plummeted straight down.

  His body was configured in an L-shape, legs straight and torso at ninety-degrees. He was in that rather awkward posture when he thumped against the wall – or floor – of the vessel. His head went straight through the breach, like a diver, into the water. But his gut thumped against the edge, and his legs clattered painfully against the internal wall.

  Lebret felt a conflict of orientations. He felt as if he were simultaneously lying – from the waist down – prone on the floor, and – from the waist up – he felt as if he were hanging upside down in a pool. Then the Plongeur shuddered, and began to roll back.

  And with that Lebret slipped all the way through, and out into the ocean.

  Instinctively he grabbed at the lip of the hole, and his hands held on. His legs came out into the water, and his whole body swung about. Then he was smacked against the external curve of the Plongeur’s steel plating, and he let go. Worse, the collision knocked the breath from his lungs. Bubbles fled from his mouth.

  The water was neither cold nor hot, and the sea was not black around him. He was aware of a faint blue-white glimmer all around him. Something vast moved in the corner of his eye. Focus, he told himself. If I don’t get back in through the gap, I will drown here.

  The pain helped him; it refused to release its clamp upon his jaw, and this in turn stopped him drifting away. He did not wish to drown. That was a fact solid enough to cling to.

  He drew his knees up and lifted himself unsteadily. It was easier to see through this salt-less sea than in ordinary brine, but still the vision was hard to process. A great wraith-like, silvery-white shape was interposed between himself and the breach in the flank of the Plongeur. It looked so entirely like a ghost that it took Lebret a moment to recognise it for what it was – air! A great blob of air, a metre across, somehow not rushing towards the surface as an air bubble would do in a terrestrial ocean, but instead balancing itself and forming a slowly morphing protoplasmic shape upon the external surface of the submarine.

  Lebret’s empty lungs spasmed. He pushed himself forward. His head passed from water to air, and he sucked in a huge breath; but then he was down again, on his stomach, and back in water.

  Fighting the rising panic, Lebret struggled to his knees. The silvery twisting bulbous shape of the air bubble had moved a few yards away from the side of the Plongeur. Looking up, he saw his own face, slightly distorted, as if in a funfair mirror, in the side of the bubble. It was a strange sight – his hair floating in the water, trails and tendrils of blood dribbling from his mouth.

  Breathe. He must breathe. He got to his feet, and his head broke through once again.

  He panted. Gulped more air.

  For the briefest moment he was conscious of the strangeness of his situation. He was standing on the outside of a submerged submarine. His legs were in the water, yet his head was inside a giant air-bubble. The walls of his temporary air-cell bulged and trembled, and that made it hard to see through them, but he could just about make out the long grey-black flank of the submarine (upon which he was standing) stretching away before and behind him. He brought both his hands out of the water and into the bubble to wipe his eyes. He looked again. He had to get back inside the Plongeur. The breach must be nearby.

  How his jaw hurt!

  Then he saw it – a fold of metal plating, and the dark, irregularly spaced gap. Lebret emptied his lungs then took a deep breath, readying himself to scramble – somehow – across to that gap; to pull himself back inside and hope that he could get through the forward hatch before he drowned. He readied himself.

  At that exactly moment, the leviathan – for whatever manner of beast it was swimming around, it was a being of prodigious size – knocked him down. It swept round the curve of the Plongeur’s hull, and stuck out a gigantic clawed-flipper. Even as he flew backwards, Lebret had the presence of mind to think: the creature seeks only to dissipate the oxygen! He is not interested in me. But what if it weren’t true? I am bleeding into the water. What if these beasts are like terrestrial sharks? Would they devour me? Would my oxygen rich haemoglobin drive them wild?

  He had more immediate concerns, though. The leviathan’
s vast flipper caught him in the chest and face, and as it knocked the larger air bubble into a million spherical fragments it also pushed him down. He skidded on the curving metal floor, scrabbled to regain his grip. But it was no good. He was falling – sliding round the curving flank of the Plongeur. Something was sucking him down – the vortex that had tried to claim Avocat and had in fact claimed de Chante! If he fell off the submarine, he would be dead in moments.

  He hauled himself over onto his front with a slam and slapped at the hull with his empty hands. This did little to slow his precipitous slide, and he knew he must soon fall entirely off. At the edge of his vision he saw the belly of the leviathan rearing up, and caught a glimpse – did he? – of a pyramidic head, and two, gigantic, nightmarish human eyes, with whites and pupils, peering down at him. Then he felt the curve of the hull go vertical underneath him, and he was falling free.

  His right hand struck some jut or prop, and grasped it. His shoulder complained, but he clung on, and his body executed a slow, underwater monkey-swing. His left hand reached for the hold, and found it – the airlock hatch. He pulled himself up, set his feet against the side of the hull, and tried to turn it.

  It was stiff, and he could hardly gain purchase, but his life depended on the effort, so he pulled again. It turned, turned a little more, and the hatch opened a sliver.

  This was enough. He pressed himself through, like a letter going through a slot, and broke through into air.

  Gasping, heaving air into his lungs, he pulled the exterior hatch shut behind him. Once again the weird physics of this place had somehow prevented the air in the airlock from simply flooding out, or the water rushing in. There was a spatter mist of water, like rain, swirling through the confined space, but he could breathe – thank Providence, he could breathe! Had the chamber flooded, as it would have done in any terrestrial ocean, he would surely have drowned before he could have opened the inner door. As it was, he collapsed against the side of the space (which was, on account of the orientation of the vessel, below him) and lay for a while simply recovering his breath. His heart was thumping in his chest; the pulse throbbed in his jaw, and this accentuated the pain in his jaw with every throb.

  He felt his own face, gingerly. Perhaps the jaw was not actually broken, but it had certainly suffered a potent trauma. The hinge-joint felt tender, and by touch alone Lebret could tell that the right side of his face was much more swollen than the left. The teeth were a different matter; the raw nerve squealed with pain every time he breathed in. The pain would presumably fade, eventually, if only because the nerve had died; but Lebret wondered if it were possible to speed that process up. How does one kill a nerve? Could he, perhaps, reach in and pinch it dead? The very thought made him shake with revulsion. Once again he felt his gorge rise.

  Still, he thought, I’m alive. Against all the odds, and the best efforts of Billiard-Fanon, I am still alive.

  He had to decide what to do next. Certainly he couldn’t lurk in this intermediary space between ocean and the submarine’s interior – quite apart from anything else, the air would soon be used up. But going back into the Plongeur remained an unappealing prospect. He could go inside, crawl through to the bridge – but Billiard-Fanon would surely only shoot him again. For a minute or so he pondered the likelihood that Billiard-Fanon had been disarmed and locked in his cabin. Maybe the crew had seen the ensign for the lunatic he was. Perhaps Lebret, were he to reappear, would be greeted joyously, clapped on his shoulder, asked to repeat his incredible story – perhaps given treatment, painkillers, a shot of whisky. This thought made him giddy with hope, but he dismissed it. Illusory. He had to be realistic. Billiard-Fanon had the gun. He was quite mad enough to shoot anybody who challenged him.

  No. Going back into the Plongeur was not an option. But what else could he do?

  His jaw twinged and flared. There was, he decided, only one other possibility. There remained a single diving suit, just on the other side of the inner airlock door. He could take this, swim back along to the breach in the side of the Plongeur, and back into the mess. It would be completely flooded by now, of course; but he ought to be able to open the forward hatch and get into the dry forward compartments – if the crazy physics of this place still obtained, he could do so without necessarily letting in too much water. He could get access to the food and drink stowed in the torpedo tubes. And then? Well, then he would have to consider his position.

  The pain inside his skull swelled savagely, and slowly fell away from that dolorous intensity. He swore. His thoughts reverted to the strange leviathan that was swimming about the Plongeur, and whose gigantic talon had presumably ripped the gigantic hole in the hull. Presumably it was after oxygen, as the cuttlefolk had been. But what if it wanted more? Was it alone? Then, thinking further, Lebret’s thoughts went back to de Chante. What had happened to that brave sailor, on his dive to repair the ballast tanks? Had there been some cousin of this leviathan, this alien whale, that had noticed him swimming and had snapped him into its jaws?

  Then the whole crazy unreality of the situation he was in fell upon Lebret’s mind like a landslide. He had started this voyage with only the vaguest intimations that there was anything beneath – or more strictly speaking, beyond – the Atlantic. Now he was confronted with the appalling reality of those suspicions. The message had been true. And yet, the truth had been more than he could possibly have imagined, and had cost lives. ‘Including mine, more or less,’ he said aloud, spitting blood. The strange thing was: water droplets from his body rolled through the air in the small space as if blown by a breeze, but his blood fell fell slowly downward.

  The pain brought him back – well, not ‘to earth’, but to whatever the equivalent was in that place. He had to think practically.

  The only illumination in the airlock space came through the little window set in the internal door. It took Lebret a deal of fumbling about, all the while struggling to ignore the debilitating pain in his face, before he found the release catch. Once it was sprung, he was able to spin the wheel and open the door. He tumbled through into the larger chamber.

  Awkwardly he got to his feet. It took him longer than it ought to understand why the room looked wrong, and why he could not locate the cupboard with the diving suit inside it. The whole space had been rotated through ninety-degrees (of course!). The cupboard was part of the floor rather than part of the wall.

  Pain stabbed through him. It throbbed, coming and going, but the going was never far enough, and the coming excruciating. Lebret shut his eyes and waited. Finally the agony in his mouth abated, even if only a little. When he opened his eyes, Capot was standing in front of him.

  Lebret was surprised to see him; but, judging by the colour of the sailor’s face, not as surprised as Capot was. ‘What—what?’ the young man gasped.

  ‘Get out,’ said Lebret, without thinking. Blood spattered from his mouth when he spoke. ‘You should get out.’

  ‘Why?’

  A cold anger swelled inside Lebret. ‘Have you seen what is swimming through the waters outside the Plongeur?’ His words were rendered somewhat indistinct by the swelling in the side of his face, and the slick lubrication of blood inside his mouth. ‘Leviathan, larger than earthly whales. Will it swallow us all, whole? Billiard-Fanon called me a Jonah. I suggest he consult the relevant Biblical passage!’ These last few words were little more than incomprehensible splutters, but they galvanised the terrified-looking Capot. He turned and fled the small space.

  He will go and warn Billiard-Fanon, Lebret thought, with a sinking heart. I must work quickly.

  He tried to ignore the swelling-withdrawing-swelling agony in his jaw, and brought out the diving suit. Its cold rubbery weight – still wet from its previous wearer – gave it a most unpleasant, flayed-amphibian quality. Lebret’s own clothes were sodden; he removed his shoes, and peeled his socks off with an audible smacking sound. Then he took off his trousers, sweater and shirt and rolled them into a bundle around his shoes. He was shi
vering, but the cold was not unbearable. The sub oceanic sun must have heated the water to a reasonable temperature. He tied the bundle of clothes to the back of the suit with one of its straps, and then pulled the clammy fabric over his legs. It squeaked, as if in pain. With some difficulty he got his arms and body into it. Finally there was the helmet. Lebret examined it – the design was a little different to the rebreathers he’d been trained on during the war – it had been that long since he’d swum underwater. This design was a full face mask that left his head bare at the back. On the side it said, in small letters, Air Liquide. ‘Necessity,’ he told himself, ‘is the best drill instructor.’ He fitted the miniature rubber anvil mouthpiece between his lips, fiddled with the tank, and breathed in.

  He would only need it for the ten minutes it would take him to scramble over the top of the sub, into the now-flooded mess, and through into the forward compartments of the Plongeur. As to what he would do then – well, he would deal with that problem when it presented itself. It did not do to think too far into the future. After all, there almost certainly was no far future for anybody on the Plongeur.

  He had to hurry. Cabot must have informed Billiard-Fanon of his presence aboard by now. He was surprised the ensign hadn’t come hurrying straight over with his pistol out to finish what he had started.

  Lebret fitted himself clumsily back through the airlock, water spraying up through the opening. He pulled the door shut behind him. The outer door opened easily enough, and he squeezed himself out. The added pressure of the water upon his jaw caused the pain to flare. The spike in agony was sharp enough to make him lose concentration; his grip on the edge of the door loosened, and the current – or whatever it was – snatched at his body. Adrenaline skittered through him, and he gripped tight at the lip of metal of the airlock door.