Starfish (27 page)

His Master's voice.

It rumbles up the slope from the abyssal plain, bouncing an echo that registers five hundred meters outside Beebe's official sonar range. It's moving at almost ten meters a second, not remarkable for a submarine but this thing's so close to the bottom it
has
to be running on treads. Six hundred meters out it crosses a small spreading zone and slews to a stop.

"What is it?" wonders Lenie Clarke.

Alice Nakata fiddles with the focus. The unknown has started up again at a crawl, edging along the length of the spread at less than one meter a second.

"It's feeding," Nakata says. "Polymetallic sulfides, perhaps."

Clarke considers. "I want to check it out."

"Yes. Shall I notify the GA?"

"Why?"

"It is probably foreign. It might not be legal."

Clarke looks at the other woman.

"There are fines for unauthorised incursions into territorial waters," Nakata says.

"Alice, really." Clarke shakes her head. "Who cares?"

Lubin is off the scope, probably sleeping on the bottom somewhere. They leave him a note. Brander and Caraco are out replacing the bearings on number six; a tremor cracked the casing last shift, jammed two thousand kilograms of mud and grit into the works. Still, the other generators are more than able to take up the slack. Brander and Caraco grab their squids and join the parade.

"We should keep our lights down," Nakata buzzes as they leave the Throat. "And stay very close to the bottom. It may frighten easily."

They follow the bearing, their lights dimmed to embers, through darkness almost impenetrable even to rifter eyes. Caraco pulls up beside Clarke: "I'm heading into the wild blue yonder after this. Wanna come?"

A shiver of second-hand revulsion tickles Clarke's insides; from Nakata, of course. Nakata used to join Caraco on her daily swim up Beebe's transponder line, until about two weeks ago. Something happened up at the deep scattering layer — nothing dangerous, apparently, but it left Alice absolutely cold at the prospect of going anywhere near the surface. Caraco's been pestering the others to pace her ever since.

Clarke shakes her head. "Didn't you get enough of a workout slurping all that shit out of number six?"

Caraco shrugs. "Different muscle groups."

"How far do you go now?"

"Up to a thousand. Give me another ten shifts and I'll be lapping all the way to the surface."

A sound has been rising around them, so gradually that Clarke can't pin down the moment she first noticed it; a grumbling, mechanical noise, the distant sound of rocks being pulverized between great molars.

Flickers of nervousness flash back and forth in the group. Clarke tries to rein herself in. She knows what's coming, they all do, it's not nearly as dangerous as the risks they face every shift. It's not dangerous at all—

—
unless it's got defenses we don't know about—

—
but that
sound
, the sheer
size
of this thing on the scope—
We're all scared. We know there's nothing to be afraid of, but all we can hear are teeth gnashing in the darkness...

It's bad enough dealing with her own hardwired apprehension. It doesn't help to be tuned in to everyone else's.

A faint pulse of surprise from Brander, in the lead. Then from Nakata, next in line, a split-second before Clarke herself feels a slap of sluggish turbulence. Caraco, forewarned, barely radiates anything when the plume washes over her.

The darkness has become fractionally more absolute, the water itself more viscous. They hold station in a stream that's half mud, half seawater.

"Exhaust wake," Brander vibrates. He has to raise his voice slightly to be heard over the sound of feeding machinery.

They turn and follow the trail upstream, keeping to the plume's edge more by touch than sight. The ambient grumble swells to full-blown cacophony, resolves into a dozen different voices; pile-drivers, muffled explosions, the sounds of cement mixers. Clarke can barely think above the waterborne racket, or the rising apprehension in four separate minds, and suddenly it's
right there
, just for a moment, a great segmented tread climbing up around a gear wheel two stories high, rolling away in the murk.

"
Jesus.
It's fucking
huge
." Brander, his vocoder cranked.

They move together, aiming their squids high and cruising up at an angle. Clarke tastes the thrill from three other sets of adrenals, adds her own and sends it back, a vicarious feedback loop. With their lamps on minimum the viz can't be more than three meters; even in front of Clarke's face the world is barely more than shadows on shadows, dimly lit by headlights bobbing to either side.

The top of the tread slides below them for a moment, a jointed moving road several meters across. Then a plain of jumbled metal shapes, fading into view barely ahead, fading out again almost instantly; exhaust ports, sonar domes, flow-meter ducts. The din fades a little as they move towards the center of the hull.

Most of the protuberances are smoothed back into hydrodynamic teardrops. Close up, though, there's no shortage of handholds. Caraco's smoldering headlight is the first to settle down onto the machine; her squid paces along above her. Clarke sets her own squid to heel and joins the others on the hull. So far there's been no obvious reaction to their presence.

They huddle together, heads close to converse above the ambient noise.

"Where's it from?" Brander wonders.

"Probably Korea." Nakata buzzes back. "I did not see any registry markings, but it would take a long time to check the whole hull."

Caraco: "Bet you wouldn't find anything anyway. If they were going to risk sneaking it this far into foreign territory they wouldn't be stupid enough to leave a return address."

The rumbling metal landscape pulls them along. A couple of meters up, barely visible, their riderless squids trail patiently behind.

"Does it know we're here?" asks Clarke.

Alice shakes her head. "It kicks up a lot of shit from the bottom so it ignores close contacts. Bright light might scare it, though. It
is
trespassing. It might associate light with discovery."

"Really." Brander lets go for a moment, drifts back a few meters before catching another handhold. "Hey Judy, want to go exploring?"

Caraco's vocoder emits static; Lenie feels the other woman's laughter from inside. Caraco and Brander leap away into the murk like black gremlins.

"It moved very fast," Nakata says. There's a sudden small blot of insecurity radiating from inside her, but she talks over it. "When it first showed up on sonar. It was moving way too fast. It wasn't safe."

"Safe?" Lenie frowns to herself. "It's a machine, right? No one inside."

Nakata shakes her head. "Too fast for a machine in complex terrain. A person could do it."

"Come on, Alice. These things are robots. Besides, if there was anyone inside we'd be able to
feel
them, right? You feel anyone other than the four of us?" Nakata tends to be a bit more sensitive than the others in matters of fine-tuning.

"I— don't think so," Nakata says, but Clarke senses uncertainty. "Maybe I — it's a big machine, Lenie. Maybe the pilot is just too far aw—"

Brander and Caraco are plotting something. They're both out of sight — even their squids have left to keep them in range — but they're easily close enough for Clarke to sense a rising anticipation. She and Nakata exchange looks.

"We better see what they're up to," Clarke says. The two of them head off across the muckraker.

A few moments later, Brander and Caraco materialize in front of them. They're crouched to either side of a metal dome about thirty centimeters across. Several dark fisheyes stare out from its surface.

"Cameras?" Clarke asks.

"Nope," Caraco says.

"Photocells," Brander adds.

Lenie feels the beat before a punchline. "Are you sure this is a good—"

"
Let there be light!
" cries Judy Caraco. Beams stab out from her headlamp and Brander's, bathing the fisheyes at full intensity.

The muckraker stops dead. Inertia pushes Clarke forward; she grabs and regains her balance, unexpected silence ringing in her ears. In the wake of that incessant noise, she feels almost deaf.

"Whoa," Brander buzzes into the stillness. Something ticks through the hull once, twice, three times.

The world lurches back into motion. The landscape rotates around them, throws them together in a tangle of limbs. By the time they've sorted themselves out they're accelerating. The muckraker is grumbling again, but with a different voice; no lazy munching on polymetallics now, just a straight beeline for international waters. Within seconds Clarke is hanging on for dear life.

"
Yee-haw!
" Caraco shouts.

"Bright light might scare it?" Brander calls from somewhere behind. "I would say
so
!"

Strong feelings on all sides. Lenie Clarke tightens her grip and tries to sort out which ones are hers. Exultation spiked with primal, giddy fear; that's Brander and Caraco. Alice Nakata's excited almost despite herself, but with more worry in the mix; and here, buried somewhere down deep, almost a sense of — she can't tell, really.

Discontent? Unhappiness?

Not really.

Is that
me
?
But that doesn't feel right either.

Bright light pins Clarke's shadow to the hull, disappears an instant later. She looks back; Brander's up above her somehow, swinging back and forth on a line trailing up into the water —
could've sworn that wasn't there before
— his beam waving around like a demented lighthouse. Ribbons of muddy water stream past just above the deck, their edges writhing in textbook illustrations of turbulent flow.

Caraco pushes off the hull and flies back up into the water. Her silhouette vanishes into the murk, but her headlamp comes to rest and starts dipping around just behind Brander's. Clarke looks over at Nakata, still plastered against the hull. Nakata's feeling a little sick now, and even more worried about something...

"It is not
happy
!" Nakata shouts.

"Hey; come on, groundhogs!" Caraco's voice buzzes faintly. "Fly!"

Discontent. Something not expected.

Who
is
that?
Clark wonders.

"Come
on
!" Caraco calls again.

What the hell. Can't hang on much longer anyway.
Clarke lets go, pushes off; the top of the muckraker races on beneath. Heavy water drags the momentum from her. She kicks for altitude, feels sudden expectation from behind — and in the next second something slams against her back, pushing her forward again. Implants lurch against her ribcage.

"Jesus Christ!" Brander buzzes in her ear. "Get a grip, Lenie!"

He's caught her on his way past. Clarke reaches out and grabs the line that he and Caraco are attached to. It's only as thick as her finger, and too slippery to hang on to. She looks back and sees that the other two have looped it around their chests and under their arms, leaving their hands more or less free. She tries the same trick, drag arching her back, while Caraco calls out to Nakata.

Nakata is not eager to let go. They can feel that, even though they can't see her. Brander angles back and forth, tacking his body like a rudder; the three of them swing in a grand, barely controlled arc, knotted into the middle of their tether. "Come on, Alice! Join the human kite! We'll catch you!"