Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) (35 page)
Read Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) Online
Authors: Niall Teasdale
Tags: #ultrahumans, #action, #superheroes, #superhero, #adventure
Southern Ocean, 20
th
September 2014.
Aquarian checked the instrument he had been given, moving it left and right a few times before picking a direction and then swimming that way. Above him, far above him on the surface, the weather was about average for September around the Antarctic, but here it was calm and he just had to worry about the current. It was not the best time of year to be out looking for
anything
in this region, but when Doctor Ultimate said there was ‘an anomaly of a worrying nature’ which needed to be checked out, he generally meant it.
Aquarian was uniquely suited to search for something lost at the bottom of an ocean. It was one of those long stories, but there had been an accident at sea, a lot of toxic waste, and now he could breathe water and swim at high speeds. He had never got the whole ‘talking to fish’ thing, but then he had got the impression that fish were not that exciting to talk to. Dolphins were a different matter. Whales seemed like they should have something pretty deep to say. He had grown up in San Francisco and the hippy culture back there had been part of his childhood.
He paused in his descent, frowning into the water. There was no light down here, but his sonar was picking something up, something a little too smooth to be sea floor. Even with his adaptations, he was having to wear a suit here, to keep the cold out. Cold he could stand, but the local fish in these parts had chemicals in their blood to stop them turning into fish fingers. Whatever, the suit was hampering his normally excellent non-visual senses. Following the display on his sensor gadget as much as his ‘sight,’ he swam deeper until he could definitely make out something half-buried in the seabed.
Sonar suggested something hard, smooth, and maybe twenty metres across, though it could have been larger since it was definitely stuck in the sand and silt which covered the bottom here. There seemed to be a blister of some sort near one end and that, combined with the smoothness of the structure, suggested something artificial.
The sensor unit had a high-powered torch attached, and he activated it; sonar was useful, but it tended to give poor details. He needed to know what he was dealing with. The light illuminated a metallic hull which Aquarian thought might be a submarine until he found the blister and looked in at the corpse buckled into some sort of flight chair inside it.
He activated the sonar-comms unit built into his suit and spoke. ‘I’ve located it and we’re going to need some specialist gear to lift it. I think Hugh was right; we’ve got ourselves a crashed UFO.’
###
About the Author
I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.
Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.
I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote science fiction when I was playing
Traveller.
I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing
Dungeons & Dragons
. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing
City of Heroes
. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.
Writing, sadly, is not my main source of income. By day, I’m a computer programmer. I work for a telecommunications company in Manchester, England. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, and (recently) Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.
For More Information
The
Thaumatology
Blog:
http://thaumatology.wordpress.com
The
Steel Beneath the Skin
Blog:
http://steelbeneaththeskin.wordpress.com
Other Books by this Author
The
Thaumatology
Series
Thaumatology 101
Demon’s Moon
Legacy
Dragon’s Blood
Disturbia
Hammer of Witches
Eagle’s Shadow
Ancient
Dragonfall
The Other Side of Hell
For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll
Vengeance
Anthologies in the
Thaumatology
Universe
Tales from High Towers’ Study
Tales from the Dubh Linn
The
Aneka Jansen
Books
Steel Beneath The Skin
The Cold Steel Mind
Steel Heart
The Winter War
The Greatest Heights of Honour
The Lowest Depths of Shame
Hope
The
Ultrahuman
Books
Ugly
Shadows
The
Unobtainium
Books
Kate on a Hot Tin Roof
Table of Contents