A Quantum Mythology (26 page)

Hideo answered this time. ‘To a certain extent, that’s what we’re doing.’ He sounded subdued. ‘Reverse-engineering, anyway.’

Lodup tried to imagine what it would be like if the city came to life again. He figured most of its inhabitants would drown, assuming they could withstand the pressure, but he still didn’t like the thoughts he was having.

Hideo deftly swung the submersible around a corner. The impellers tilted to point downwards and the vehicle rose over an obstruction ahead of them that stretched across the street. Lodup couldn’t quite work out what it was at first as the submersible’s lights played across it. It looked like an elongated tin can that someone had stomped on. Slowly he worked out that it was a submarine. A Japanese U-boat from World War II, he guessed. He wondered if that was why Hideo hadn’t been overjoyed about working this part of the city.

They were on what, in a normal city, would be considered a long, narrow boulevard. Lodup could just about make out where the boulevard ended as the seabed rose up into the ridge. As they moved closer, he saw where some of the sepulchral structures had been covered with silt, rock and other benthic debris. Off to his right, the sea was boiling around the forest of chimney-like smokers. Wonder and disquiet warred within him.

Lodup became aware of movement in the water above him and glanced up to see one of the orcas lazily swimming overhead. Up close it looked like an unholy amalgamation of killer whale and armoured attack helicopter.

‘I’m going to deploy the towfish – can you come in?’ Hideo asked.

Lodup pulled himself under the submersible to the hatch and unscrewed it as Hideo held the submersible steady so as not to flood it. The thermal sheath was already drying as Lodup pulled himself into the warm interior. He felt movement within his head and torso as he slowly transformed back into something more human rather than a technologically adapted man-shaped fish.

‘You okay?’ Lodup asked Hideo. The submersible pilot nodded curtly.

Through the vehicle’s observation bubble he watched the orca – Big Henry, Lodup assumed – glide easily down the boulevard and then out over the seabed. A holographic representation of the area appeared, floating in the air within the cabin. Lodup wasn’t entirely sure if it was actually holography or, like Siraja, an image that had just been uploaded into his perception. Whatever its origin, the map was incomplete. As Big Henry swam down the boulevard, the information gathered by the augmented iron oxide crystals in his head were transmitted to the submersible and back to C&C in infrasound packets, to form a more complete map.

‘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
AUV
s and teleprescence
ROV
s 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 burst 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
AUV
s. 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
AUV
s 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.