A Quantum Mythology (18 page)

She could tell he meant it. She could tell he knew it wasn’t enough. She stared at him angrily until Teardrop came back out of the house carrying something wrapped in a beaded medicine bag. He held it out to Fachtna. Fachtna reached for it, but Teardrop didn’t relinquish it.

‘You go as well,’ he told the Gael.

‘I have to—’

‘You go as well, or my wife and I kill you here and now.’

Fachtna stared at his friend but then finally nodded.

‘What is tha—’ Raven started. Her eyes widened as Fachtna took a small bronze rod shaped like a cross out of the bag.

‘Is that one of the control rods?’ she demanded.

Teardrop swallowed hard, and then nodded. ‘We found it in the sourlands during the first war with the Naga.’

‘Why didn’t you give it to one of the medicine societies?’ she demanded.

He had no good answer for her. ‘Because I coveted it.’

‘You can’t—’ Raven started, but Fachtna was already climbing into the chariot’s weapon cupola as the chariot rose up from the ground. Teardrop moved closer to his wife and tried to hold her, but she jerked away from him.

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Shout at me all you want later. I’m so sorry, but please just hold me now.’

She glared at him but then wrapped her arms around him. She could feel the sobs wracking his body, and she cursed the bonds that men formed in war.

His blood had stabilised her well enough that she could stare at him with accusing eyes.

‘You killed a
dryw
,’ she said quietly. He looked away from her and tried very hard not to think about it. He’d been concentrating on getting the still-living branch out of her flesh on the way to Teardrop’s. Making sure her now slightly more than mortal, fragile form survived. He felt the chariot bank.

‘We’re here,’ Adarc called from the head of the chariot. A warrior was always close to his charioteer, but he could hear the distance in Adarc’s voice as well. Not least because the charioteer knew he would be judged for aiding Fachtna.

He had a moment to take in the scene as they circled the crater full of crystal-clear water. Every inch of the chariot’s skin fed imagery and data directly to Fachtna’s mind. They’d picked their course well, flown low and dark when they could, but angry warriors were closing on them now. In the distance, the hard terminator between the night and the day was creeping towards them as the wings of Lug moved.

Lightning shot from the ground. The chariot was cut in two. And they were falling. The cupola hit the water so hard it might as well have been rock. The matter of the chariot softened to try and cushion the blow, but it was too little, too late. The cold, clear water was filling the cupola as it sank. It was the water that kept him awake. Many of his bones were broken and he could see bones sticking out of Britha’s flesh, blood bubbling from her mouth. Somehow her chest was still moving as she tried to breathe. Fachtna reached for her.

13

Close to the Oceanic Pole of

Inaccessibility, 6 Weeks Ago

Lodup hated the feeling of falling that sometimes accompanied drifting off to sleep.

He had arrived at the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defence Test Site on the Kwajalein Atoll earlier in the day. He had gone to sleep in his room at the Kwaj Lodge after working out and trying to catch up with the advances in atmospheric diving suit, or
ADS
, technology.

Lodup opened his eyes. He had a moment, only a moment, to register an HV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft hovering in the night sky above him with its rear loading ramp down. Then he hit the ocean, hard, and immediately went under. Panic overwhelmed him and he started to flail wildly. He forced himself to calm down, and then realised he was being dragged deeper. Something heavy was tugging at his leg. He looked down and saw a lanyard with a heavy kitbag attached to it.

He tried to ignore the odd feelings in his chest. For a fleeting moment he wondered if he was having a heart attack but there was no pain, just a sensation of movement inside him. He felt water flood his ears. He assumed his eardrums had burst, though he didn’t think he was deep enough. Lodup started to flail again as he felt liquid rushing into his sinuses. This didn’t fit with what he knew about drowning, what he had experienced of it during training exercises and on two separate occasions when things had gone disastrously wrong.

Lodup reached down to release the tether around his ankle but found that the lanyard was securely locked. Then he realised he was also heavily weighted. When he tried to remove the weights, he found them locked in place as well. That was when panic really took over. That was when he truly knew he was dead. He was too frightened even to wonder why they had gone to such extravagant lengths to kill him.

He made no conscious decision to get it over with or to try and breathe water. He held his breath for as long as he could with the air he’d managed to inhale before he hit the water. Then he opened his mouth and tried to do the impossible. He tried to breathe seawater.

It was a curious feeling. It was less like drowning, more like being sick in reverse, if the vomit was cold water. Coldness spread throughout his chest but then was replaced, almost immediately, with a very peculiar warm, liquid feeling, not unlike pissing yourself, but again the sensation was inside his chest. It grew darker and darker as he dropped. It took him a number of minutes to realise he was somehow breathing water. It was a lot more strenuous than breathing air.

As he managed to control his panic, he realised he wasn’t suffering any of the ill-effects of pressure, either. He was in total darkness now. The tugging sensation on his leg and the feeling of falling told him he was still being dragged down, but there were no visual clues to his predicament.

He felt around and found that he was wearing some kind of dive suit. The material was unfamiliar; it was a little less bulky than a semi-dry suit and completely form-fitting. A hood covered his head and face and appeared to have some sort of built-in mask.

Then he realised he could see something – a counter with luminous numbers. Those numbers were increasing and he knew he was looking at a depth reading. He had just passed five hundred metres. He should be dead.

Lodup found himself desperately wishing for a dive light. A beam of light shot out from the centre of his head, another from his right wrist. It didn’t make that much difference – he was surrounded by black water, and all the light illuminated was particulate matter. He reckoned he was mid-ocean somewhere, judging by the utter lack of visible sea life. He was surprised by how perfect his vision was, as if the lenses of the built-in mask were compensating for the visual distortion caused by the liquid medium.

He noticed a dive knife strapped to his right ankle. He reached for it, thinking he could at least cut away the heavy pack that was dragging him down and try to control his descent. He drew the knife, then realised that it had an oddly crystalline-looking blade.

Lodup noticed his descent was slowing. He concentrated on controlling it some more and finally stopped as he managed, somehow, to attain neutral buoyancy. If the number in his vision was correct, he was at a depth of a little less than a thousand metres. He hung there in the darkness. He could feel the water pressing in all around him, but he was the warmest he could remember being on any deep dive not in an
ADS
. In fact, other than the effort it took to breathe, he felt pretty good. Except for the terror.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t tried to ascend. He also wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but was beginning to suspect there was a faint light coming from far below.

He did know that he had been hanging there motionless for exactly seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds before the beam of light cut through the water and his vision darkened, compensating for the sudden brightness. Lodup moved himself around carefully in the water, the waterproof kitbag hanging from his ankle hampering his ability to manoeuvre. Though he was impressed that the bag appeared to be able to withstand the depth.

Beyond the light he could make out a mechanical shape moving towards him. It looked like some kind of submersible. Lodup reckoned it was fitted for salvage, with a large flatbed area on top of it for storing tools and carrying salvage material. Its multidirectional impellers would give it manoeuvrability and power. There were lights and cameras all over the vehicle, and the observation bubble at the front of the submersible was large enough to provide a good all-round view. He noticed that the powerful-looking waldos on the front of the vehicle had grips that looked more like hands with fully opposable thumbs, which could be capable of quite delicate work. In fact, Lodup was somewhat surprised to see it this deep. An observation bubble that size, at this depth, had to be on the very edge of its material tolerances.

The pilot was wearing beige overalls with no logo on them. He looked Asian – Japanese, Lodup guessed – in his early- to mid-twenties. His head was shorn and he had a curiously slack, emotionless expression on his face. He worked the joystick controls with some expertise, using the impellers to make tiny adjustments to hold the submersible completely steady.

The pilot looked up at Lodup but didn’t appear to register his presence. Then a shiver ran through the man and he was smiling at Lodup, and pointing down under the submersible. With some difficulty because of the kitbag, Lodup made his way towards the submersible. He located a series of rungs that led beneath the vehicle to a hatch embedded in its hull. This was insanity, Lodup decided. Surely the submersible pilot didn’t mean for him to enter the craft. They couldn’t be running it at ambient pressure, not at a thousand metres, which would put it at a hundred atmospheres or a hundred times the pressure at the surface. Lodup actually pulled himself back into the pilot’s line of sight again to double-check, but the pilot just smiled and repeated the gesture.

Suit yourself
,
Lodup thought.
I can breathe water, apparently.
Lodup moved back and reached up to unscrew the hatch. He pushed it open and then climbed up into warmth, dryness and air – or a breathable gas, at least. The submersible didn’t crumple. The interior was surprisingly spacious. Due to material tolerances when working under pressure, space was normally at a premium in such vehicles. He also observed that the controls looked surprisingly simple, though he noticed a pair of odd-looking gloves lying on the transparent material of the observation dome.

He opened his mouth to ask something and gurgled liquid into the hood/mask covering his face and head.

The pilot turned to look at him. ‘You’ll need to purge, my man. I’d prefer it if you do it outside before you close the hatch. You’ll need to take the hood off first, though. Grasp it at the base of your neck and pull.’

Lodup did what the man suggested and the hood slipped easily over his head to hang down the front of the suit. He noticed that the suit was dripping very little water. He leaned forwards and thought about throwing up. Water surged from his mouth. It was unpleasant but not as bad as vomiting. There appeared to be a lot of water and it was coming in a constant stream. He also noticed two streams of water gushing from his chest. He felt movement inside him. He wondered if that was his lungs reinflating.

‘Now, when you see them you’re going to freak,’ the pilot said, ‘so we might as well get this out of the way now. You have what look like grilles implanted in your chest. They’re mechanical gills. You’ll need to get used to them.’

‘What? The fuck?’ Lodup exploded.

‘A reasonable question. My name’s Hideo, by the way. Could you secure the hatch?’

Lodup did as he was bid and felt the submersible start to descend.

‘You’re going deeper?’ Lodup demanded.

‘Oh yeah,’ Hideo said. He was facing away from Lodup, but the Mwoakilloan was pretty sure the other man was grinning. He also realised that their voices sounded normal, regardless of the gas they were breathing.

‘Dude, I know it’s harsh, but trust me, we all got dropped in the first time round. They tried explaining beforehand but people never believed it, you know what I mean? They defeated themselves with their minds, panic attacks, wouldn’t put their heads underwater, that sort of thing.’

‘Nitrogen?’

‘Scrubbed from your system.’

‘By what?’

‘The same thing that’s modifying your body to allow you to deal with other pressure issues, which reinforced your joints, and which rebuilt you for submarine operations. You know what nanites are?’ Hideo asked, glancing around. Lodup stared at the man. The pilot’s English was slightly accented, but otherwise flawless.

‘You injected me with nanites?’

‘Wooah! I’m just a working stiff like you.’

Lodup was appalled. ‘Bullshit! Nano-technology is nothing like advanced enough to do that.’

‘Fine,
you
explain it.’

‘So you, what, drugged me on Kwaj, modified me and threw me out of an Osprey in the middle of … where the fuck are we?’

‘Forty-seven by nine degrees south, and a hundred and twenty-six by forty-three degrees west, and again I didn’t do shit to you other than come and pick you up.’

The coordinates sounded familiar to Lodup. ‘Point Nemo?’

‘We’re not far from there.’

‘Look, you can’t just—’

Hideo looked back at Lodup, a sympathetic expression on his face. ‘This is so far above classified it’s just not true. They take liberties, but that’s why you’re getting paid what you’re getting paid.’

Lodup lapsed into silence. He was aware of the pressure adjusting as they descended but felt no real effect from it. He didn’t even have to equalise. He was now certain there was a cold blue glow coming from beneath them. Ahead of him, some of the water looked darker than the rest, and he could just about make out what looked like a mountain, but its jagged outline stretched in either direction as far as he could see.

‘Is that a ridge line?’ he asked. Hideo nodded and started playing the searchlight around in the water. Lodup glimpsed what looked like high-tech spiked balls hanging motionless in the water. More distantly he could see a small, sleek sled-like vehicle.

‘Smart mines, and that’s a patrol
AUV
,’ Hideo told him, meaning an autonomous underwater vehicle, but now Lodup was staring down at the bright lights below him.

The first thing he noticed was the black lake. His mind tried to cope with the absurdity of finding a lake at the bottom of the ocean, particularly as it appeared to have a beach.

‘Is that a cold seep?’ he asked. Again Hideo nodded. Lodup knew this phenomenon consisted of salty brine much thicker than the surrounding water, while the ‘beach’ was made up of hundreds of thousands of mussels existing in a methane-eating bacteria-based food chain. A forest of swaying tubeworms also bordered the lake. The tubeworms survived by harvesting sulphides from the seabed itself

‘We stay away from the lake,’ Hideo said, genuine fear in his voice, but Lodup was too overcome by awe to notice.

Water bubbled above towering chimneys at the base of the ridgeline – black smokers venting hydrogen-sulphide-saturated water, hot as molten lead, into below-freezing water maintained in a liquid state by the immense pressure. The same pressure kept the water liquid around the mouths of the bubbling chimneys at temperatures as high as four hundred degrees centigrade. The forest of chimneys vented black smoke in the form of iron sulphite which dissolved into the water, and when the minerals in the boiling water hit the freezing water, the smokers were created. Their existence at the base of the ridge made sense. The ridge itself would have been formed by solidified molten volcanic rock. Lodup knew that there were probably Pompeii worms, crabs and shrimps around the vents, all filled with bacteria that turned the sulphides in the water into simple sugars which allowed them to exist in a food chain separated from the Sun by – Lodup checked his depth – what must be over four thousand metres.

The mass of chimneys gave the whole scene a curiously industrial look, but it was whatever lay between the chimneys at the base of the ridge and the eerie black lake that stunned Lodup. That disquieted him. That hurt to look at. That made him feel nauseous. That filled him with equal parts awe and dread.

It took him a while to realise what he was looking at. The geometry was all wrong.

‘What is it?’ Lodup asked, stumbling over the words.

‘One of the changes they make to you before you can work here involves neurosurgery that enables you to perceive this safely, so that it doesn’t cause neurological and psychological damage.’ Hideo paused. ‘So they say.’

The whole area was illuminated by cold artificial light. Lodup was having trouble coping with the idea of a place that required brain surgery before you could see it without going mad. Parts of it looked as if they’d been carved from massive pieces of rock that appeared to share characteristics with both soapstone and basalt. The forms were disturbingly organic.