The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  The system was to blame, Stone thought grimly, but most of all Skaugen, with his sickening brand of bigotry. All the directors, smiling and thumping him on the back; well done, old man, keep up the good work, just don’t get caught, because we won’t want to know. It wasn’t his fault he was in this mess, it was theirs. And Tina Lund was just as bad, sucking up to Skaugen to take Stone’s job and probably sleeping with the asshole too. Worst of all, he’d even had to pretend to be grateful to her for getting Skaugen to give him another chance. He was supposed to find the missing prototype. Some chance. It was a trap. They’d all turned against him, the whole bloody lot of them.

  He’d show them, though. Clifford Stone wasn’t finished yet. Whatever was wrong with the unit, he’d find the problem and sort it out. Then they could look for skeletons in the cupboard, and he, for one, had nothing to hide.

  He’d get to the bottom of it.

  The Thorvaldson had scanned the site of the unit with multibeam sonar, but there was still no sign of the processor. The morphology of the seabed seemed to have changed. Within a few days the site of the unit had become a gaping chasm. The thought of the depths made Stone as queasy as the next man, but he pushed aside his fears. All he could think of was his voyage to the seabed and how he’d show them what he was made of.

  Clifford Stone, intrepid man of action.

  On the afterdeck of the Thorvaldson the submersible was waiting to transport him to the seabed, nine hundred metres below. Of course he should have sent the robot down first on a recce. That’s what Jean-Jacques Alban and all the others had been urging him to do. Victor was equipped with fantastic cameras, a highly sensitive articulated arm and every conceivable instrument necessary for the highspeed evaluation of data. But going down there himself would make more of an impression. In any case, Stone disagreed with Alban. He’d spoken to Gerhard Bohrmann on the Sonne about travelling on manned submersibles. Bohrmann had explored the Oregon seabed in Alvin, the legendary DSV: ‘I’ve seen thousands of video images - footage recorded by robots, all of it very impressive - but actually sitting in the submersible, being down there on the seabed, seeing it all in 3-D, I never thought it could be like that. It beats anything you’ve ever seen.’ Besides, he’d added, there was no real substitute for the senses and instincts of a human.

  Stone smiled grimly. It was his turn now. The submersible had been easy to get hold of, thanks to his excellent contacts. It was a DR 1002, a Deep Rover, made by the American firm Deep Ocean Engineering, a small, light boat, belonging to the new generation of submersibles. Its transparent spherical hull was mounted on bulky battery pods from which a pair of robotic arms emerged. Inside, there were two comfortable seats with controls to each side. As he approached the Deep Rover he felt pleased with his choice. The vehicle was attached to the boom by a cable, and had been jacked up to allow just enough room for them to crawl in through the bottom hatch. The pilot, Eddie, a stocky ex-navy aviator, was already inside, checking the instruments. There was the usual bustle before the launch of a submersible, with crew, technicians and scientists milling on the deck. Stone spotted Alban and called him over. ‘Where’s the photographer?’ he shouted. ‘And the guy with the video camera?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Alban. ‘I saw the cameraman prowling around earlier.’

  ‘Well, tell him to stop prowling and get here,’ Stone snapped. ‘We’re not going under without this being filmed.’

  Alban frowned and looked out to sea. It was a misty day with poor visibility.

  ‘It smells bad,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the methane.’

  ‘It’s getting worse.’

  It was true. A sulphur-like odour hung over the sea. A good deal of gas must have escaped for the air to smell that bad. It didn’t bode well.

  ‘It’ll sort itself out,’ said Stone.

  ‘I think you should postpone the dive.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Stone glanced around. ‘Where’s that bloody photographer?’

  ‘It’s too risky - the barometer’s plummeting. A storm’s on its way.’

  ‘We’re going, and that’s that.’

  ‘Stone, don’t be a fool. And, anyway, what’s the point?’

  ‘The point,’ Stone said, in a hectoring tone, ‘is to get a better, more accurate look at the problem. For God’s sake, Jean, nothing’ll get in the way of the Rover, least of all a few worms. It can descend to a depth of four thousand metres—’

  ‘At four thousand metres the hull will implode,’ Alban corrected him. ‘It’s cleared for a maximum of a thousand.’

  ‘I know the facts. And we’re only going nine hundred metres. What could possibly go wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. But the seabed’s changed. The water’s filling with gas and the processor won’t show up on sonar. God only knows what’s going on down there.’

  ‘Maybe there’s been a slide. Or a partial collapse. If we’re unlucky, there’ll have been some subsidence. It happens, you know.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘So, what’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem,’ said Alban, losing his temper, ‘is that a robot could do the job for you. But - oh, no - you have to play the hero.’

  Stone pointed at his eyes. ‘You see these? They’re still the best way of working out what’s wrong. That’s how problems are solved. You take a good look, then you fix them.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So when are we going down?’ Stone glanced at the time. ‘OK, another half-hour. No, twenty minutes.’ He waved at Eddie, who raised his hand and turned back to the controls. Stone grinned. ‘What are you worried about? We’ve got the best pilot around. I’ll even steer the thing myself, if I have to.’

  Alban didn’t reply.

  ‘I’m going to take one last look at the dive plan. I’ll be in my cabin if you need me. And do me a favour, Jean, find those bloody camera people. Anyone would think they’d fallen overboard.’

  Trondheim, Norway

  Could he really be out of aftershave? Impossible. Sigur Johanson kept a stockpile of life’s little luxuries. He never ran out of wine or grooming products. Surely he had another bottle of Kiton eau-de-toilette.

  He went back to the bathroom and rummaged through the cabinet. He needed to get a move on. The helicopter was waiting at Statoil’s research centre to transport him to his meeting with Karen Weaver. But for someone who cultivated dishevelment, packing was complicated: neat people never had to bother with deliberations about which shade of jacket clashed to just the right effect.

  Hidden behind two tubs of styling wax he found what he was looking for. He put the bottle in his wash-bag, then squeezed it into his suitcase, with some poetry by Walt Whitman and a book about port, then let it click shut. It was an expensive bag of the kind popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century among rich Londoners, who used them for weekend jaunts. The leather straps had been sewn by hand.

  The fifth day!

  Had he packed the CD? All the material supporting his incredible idea about the plan was on it. Perhaps there’d be a chance to discuss it with the journalist. There it was, buried under a pile of shirts and socks.

  He left his house in Kirkegata Street with a spring in his step, and crossed the road to his jeep. For some reason he’d been raring to go since first thing that morning. There was something almost hysterical about his energy. Before he started the engine he took a last glance at the house.

  Suddenly he realised that he was trying to distract himself. His hyperactivity was an attempt to ward off thought, like whistling in the dark. His hand hovered beside the ignition as he gazed towards the city. A damp mist was hanging over Trondheim, blurring its contours. Even his house on the other side of the street seemed flatter than usual. It looked almost like a painting.

  What happened to the things you loved?

  He had spent many hours in front of Van Gogh’s paintings, feeling an inner peace as though the artist hadn’t suffered from suicidal depression. Nothing could destroy the
painting’s impression. Of course, a picture could be destroyed but as long as it existed, it was a definitive moment captured in paint. The sunflowers would never fade. The Langlois Bridge at Arles could never be bombed. The image of horror would always be horrifying; the image of beauty stayed beautiful for ever. Even the portrait of the man with the angular features and the white bandage over his ear had something comfortingly constant about it. At least in the picture he couldn’t become unhappier, he couldn’t age. The man in the painting was eternal. In the end he’d triumphed over those who’d tortured him or couldn’t understand him. With the help of a paintbrush and his genius he’d outwitted them all.

  Johanson looked at his house. If only it were a picture, and I was in it too, he thought. But he didn’t live in a picture, and his life wasn’t a gallery where he could pace out his past in a matter of steps. His house by the lake would make a fabulous picture, then a study of his wife, and pictures of all the other women he’d known, the friends he’d had - and Tina Lund, of course. Tina, hand in hand with Kare Sverdrup, at peace for all time.

  He was assailed by a dull sense of loss. The world is changing, he thought. They’re closing ranks against us. Somewhere something has been decided, and we weren’t part of it. Humanity wasn’t there.

  He started the engine and drove away.

  Kiel, Germany

  Erwin Suess walked into Bohrmann’s office with Yvonne Mirbach in tow. ‘Call Johanson,’ he said, ‘Now.’

  Bohrmann had known the Geomar director for long enough to grasp that something out of the ordinary had happened. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, although he felt certain he knew.

  Mirbach pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘We’ve run through different scenarios on the computer. The collapse will take place sooner than we thought.’

  Bohrmann’s brow furrowed. ‘Collapse? Last time we weren’t even sure it would come to that.’

  ‘The evidence doesn’t look good,’ said Suess.

  ‘Because of the consortia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bohrmann felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. It’s not possible, he thought. They’re only bacteria - minute, microscopic organisms. He knew he was thinking like a child: how could something so small destroy a layer of ice a hundred metres thick? There was no way. What difference could a microbe make to thousands of square metres of seabed? None. It was inconceivable, unreal. It couldn’t happen. Scientists knew relatively little about consortia, but it was clear that various microorganisms worked in symbiotic partnerships at the bottom of the ocean. Sulphur bacteria, for example, allied themselves with archaebacteria - odd single-cell microbes that numbered among the oldest forms of life. The symbiosis was extremely successful. Consortia of this type had first been discovered on hydrates only a few years previously. The sulphur bacteria took up oxygen to break down nutrients, including nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds, which were released by the archaea as they feasted on their delicacy of choice.

  Methane.

  The symbiosis meant the sulphur bacteria also lived off methane, although they never got a taste of it. Most methane was found in the oxygen-free sediment, and sulphur bacteria needed oxygen to survive. Archaea didn’t. They broke down methane without oxygen, and could carry on doing so several kilometres beneath the seabed. Scientists estimated that archaea converted 300 million tonnes of marine methane each year, which probably benefited the climate: broken-down methane couldn’t escape into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. In that respect, archaea were a kind of environmental task-force.

  Provided they stuck to the seabed.

  The trouble was, archaea also lived in symbiosis with worms, and the mutant worm with monstrous jaws was covered with consortia of archaea and sulphur bacteria, living in its guts and on its skin. With every metre it descended into the ice, the bacteria were transported further into the hydrates, where they destroyed the frozen layers from the inside, spreading like a cancer. Before too long the worm would perish, and so, too, the sulphur bacteria, but the archaea would chomp their way steadily through the ice, turning the dense layer of hydrates into a porous friable mass. Gas would leak out to the surface.

  Worms can’t destabilise the hydrates, Bohrmann heard himself saying.

  True. But that wasn’t their purpose. They were only there to transport their consignment of archaea through the ice, like shuttle buses: next stop, methane hydrates, depth of five metres, alight here, time for work.

  Why didn’t we think of it before? thought Bohrmann. Fluctuating water temperatures, a decrease in hydrostatic pressure, earthquakes - all that was part of the hydrate expert’s standard litany of doom. Whereas bacteria - everyone knew what they did down there, but no one had stopped to think about it. Not even in their worst nightmares had anyone envisaged an invasion like this. A methanotrophic suicidal worm? The sheer numbers of them; their distribution across the full length of the slope. It was absurd, inexplicable - even without the armies of archaea, driven by their deadly appetite, too many of them to imagine.

  And he couldn’t help thinking, How the hell did they get there? What are they doing there? What could have brought them?

  Or who?

  ‘The problem,’ Mirbach was saying, ‘is that our first simulation was based on largely linear assumptions. But real life isn’t linear. We’re dealing with developments that are chaotic and, in some cases, exponential. The ice is crumbling, which means gas shoots up from inside it, cracking more of the hydrates, so the seabed starts collapsing and the crisis point comes much—’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Bohrmann waved his hand. ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘A few weeks. Or days. Or even…’ Mirbach hesitated. ‘But we still can’t be certain - I mean, we can’t say for definite that it’s really going to happen. All the evidence suggests it will, but it’s such an unusual scenario. We can’t prove a thing.’

  ‘Cut to the chase, Yvonne. What do you think will happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She paused again. ‘OK, say three army ants crossed the path of a mammal. They’d be stepped on and squashed. But if the same mammal were surrounded by thousands of army ants, they could eat it alive. That’s how I imagine it is with the microbes. Do you see?’

  ‘Call Johanson,’ Suess repeated. ‘Tell him we’re predicting a Storegga Slide.’

  Bohrmann exhaled slowly. He gave a silent nod.

  Trondheim, Norway

  They were standing on the edge of the helipad, looking down on the fjord. On the other side of the water, the shore was barely visible. The lake stretched out like tarnished steel beneath the greying sky.

  ‘You’re such a snob,’ said Lund, jabbing a finger at the helicopter.

  ‘Of course I am,’ replied Johanson. ‘But since I was press-ganged into this business, I think I’ve got the right to be picky.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start that again.’

  Anyway, you’re just as bad, insisting on driving around in my jeep.’

  Lund smiled. ‘Well, give me the key.’

  Johanson fumbled in his coat pockets and pulled it out. He placed it in her palm. ‘Take care of it while I’m gone.’

  ‘You can count on me.’

  ‘And no funny business with Kare.’

  ‘In the jeep? I’m not that kind of girl.’

  ‘I know what you’re like. Anyway, at least you took my advice about defending poor Stone. He can fish his own bloody prototype out of the water.’

  ‘I hate to disappoint you, but your advice didn’t count. His reprieve was Skaugen’s doing.’

  ‘So he has been reprieved?’

  ‘There’s a chance he’ll keep his job, if he can get things back on track.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He’ll be heading off in the submersible any time now. Wish him luck.’

  ‘Why isn’t he sending down a robot?’

  ‘Because he’s nuts. Actually, I think he wants to prove that in a crisis you need to do things his way. No one can handle it better than Clifford Stone.’


  ‘And you’re all letting him do it?’

  ‘He’s still the boss. Besides, in some ways he’s right. He’ll get a better picture that way.’

  Johanson had a vision of the Thorvaldson in a seascape of blurry greys, with Stone deep in the water beneath the keel, enshrouded in darkness and sinking towards the unknown. ‘Well, you can’t fault his courage.’ He picked up his bag and they made their way to the helicopter. Skaugen had kept his promise and had loaned him Statoil’s flagship model. It was a Bell 430, the last word in helicopter comfort, with minimal noise.

  ‘About this Karen Weaver,’ said Lund, as they stood outside the cabin door. ‘What’s she like?’

  Johanson’s eyes twinkled. ‘Young, unbelievably pretty…How should I know?’

  Lund flung her arms round him. ‘You will take care of yourself, won’t you?’

  Johanson patted her back. ‘I’ll be fine. Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘No reason.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Your advice wasn’t entirely wasted, by the way. Those things you said to me - they made up my mind.’

  ‘To see Kare?’

  ‘To see things differently. And to see Kare.’

  Johanson smiled. Then he kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I’ll call as soon as I get there.’

  He climbed inside and threw his bag on to one of the seats behind the pilot. There was room for ten passengers but he had the cabin to himself.

  ‘Sigur!’

  He turned back.

  You’re the best friend I’ve got.’ She lifted her arms helplessly, then dropped them. ‘What I’m trying to say is—’