The Swarm (55 page)

‘OK, then,' Vanderbilt said cheerily. ‘So Europe's drinking water is full of pretty little algae. What are we going to do about it? Drown them in
chemicals? We could always boil the water or pump it full of poison, that might kill the little assholes, but it would take us down as well. The water's running out. People never used to think twice about serenading themselves for hours on end in the shower, but not any more. Who knows when the first lobsters are going to explode in the States? God's favourite country had better watch out. The Lord's lost his patience with us.' Vanderbilt snickered. ‘Sorry, I should have said
Allah
. The shape of things to come, my friends. Prepare yourselves for some sensational news. Right after the break.'

What the hell's he talking about? thought Peak. Had Vanderbilt gone crazy? It was the only explanation. You'd have to be crazy to start talking like that.

A world map appeared on the screen. The countries and continents were linked by coloured lines. A thick bundle stretched from the UK and France right across the Atlantic towards Boston, Long Island, New York, Manasquan and Tuckerton. Another parcel of lines, a little more spread out, crossed the Pacific and connected the west coast of America to Asia. Thick strands extended past the Caribbean islands and Colombia, through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, past the east Asian coast up to Tokyo.

‘Deep-sea cables,' explained Vanderbilt. ‘Data highways. They carry our phone calls and let us chat online. Glass fibres are integral to the Internet. Some of the fibreoptic connections between Europe and America were destroyed in the underwater slide, including five of the biggest transatlantic cables. Two days ago another transatlantic cable by the name of FLAG Atlantic-1 also went dead. The cable runs from New York to St Brieuc in Brittany and manages a respectable 1.28 terabits per second. Sorry.
Managed
. It looks like FLAG Atlantic-1 has just handed in its notice, and this time the landslide's definitely not to blame. Ditto for the loss of TPC-5 that runs between San Luis Obispo and Hawaii. Does anyone see a pattern? Something's chewing through our cables. Our bridges are collapsing. So you think electricity comes from the socket? Not any more it doesn't. You say the world's getting smaller.
Au contraire
. You want to call Auntie Polly in Calcutta and wish her happy birthday - forget it! International communication is breaking down, and we don't know why. But one thing's certain.' Vanderbilt flashed his teeth and leaned over the lectern as far as his podgy body would allow. ‘This isn't coincidence. No, folks, there's someone behind
all this, and they're slowly disconnecting us from the drip of civilisation. But that's enough talk of the things we've lost and the things we may be losing.'

He nodded jovially at the delegates. Creases of skin wobbled round his chin.

‘Let's talk about what we've got.'

 

Anawak found some comfort in Vanderbilt's words. For a while he'd lost faith in the world, but now it seemed to be marching in front of him with a sign in big, bold letters proclaiming:
LEON
,
WE BELIEVE YOU
.

‘Dr Anawak saw a bioluminescent organism,' Vanderbilt was saying. ‘Flat and shapeless. We didn't find any creature of that description when we searched the
Barrier Queen
, but thankfully our hero didn't leave the vessel empty-handed. The scrap of tissue he took with him has been tested. It's identical to the amorphous jelly that Drs Fenwick and Oliviera found in the brains of those bullyboy whales. Now, remember how the algae hitched a lift in the gunk inside those lobsters? Well, their friendly driver wasn't Mr. Lobster. Some other dude was at the wheel. Those shells were chock full of a slime that kept dissolving as soon as it hit the air. Still, Dr Roche analysed a trace of it, and guess what? It's our old buddy, the jelly.'

Ford and Oliviera exchanged hurried whispers, then Oliviera said, in her husky voice, ‘The substance on the boat and the substance in the brains is identical, that's correct. But the stuff in the lobsters isn't as dense. The cells aren't quite so close together.'

‘I'm aware that there's a difference of opinion on the subject of the jelly,' said Vanderbilt, ‘but that's for you guys to sort out. I'll stick to what I know. We isolated that boat to stop any uninvited guests slipping away, and since then the dock has been glimmering blue. The light doesn't last long, but Dr Anawak saw it when he broke into our exclusion zone for a spot of unauthorised diving. Water samples show the usual soup of micro-organisms found in every single drop of the ocean. So where's the glow coming from? For want of a more scientifically accurate term, we're calling it the blue cloud, thanks to Dr John Ford, who witnessed its effects in some footage recorded by a URA dive robot.'

Vanderbilt played the footage of Lucy and her pod.

‘The flashes of light don't seem to frighten the whales or do them any harm, but that cloud is definitely influencing their behaviour. Maybe
there's something in it that stimulates the substance in their brains. Or maybe it even injects them with gunk. I mean, what are those flashing, whip-like tentacles actually
for
? OK, let's go one step further. Maybe the tentacles aren't just injecting the jelly: maybe they
are
the jelly. If that's the case, then what we're seeing with the whales is a giant version of what Dr Anawak interrupted on the
Barrier Queen
. It means the same unknown organism is driving whales crazy, helping mussels sink ships and hijacking lobsters. So you see, folks, we're making headway! Now all we need to know is, what is this stuff, why is it there, what's going on between the jelly and the cloud - oh, and which son-of-a-bitch cooked the whole thing up in his lab? Maybe this will give you some clues.'

Vanderbilt showed the film again. This time a spectrogram appeared towards the bottom edge of the frame. They saw a series of powerful oscillations.

‘The URA is a smart little dude. Seconds before the cloud took shape, the robot picked up a noise on its hydrophones. We can't hear it with our pathetic bunged-up human ears, but there are ways of making ultrasound and infrasound audible, if you know the right tricks - which for professional eavesdroppers like the guys running SOSUS is a cinch.'

Anawak sat up. SOSUS. He'd used the network before. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, ran a number of facilities aimed at detecting and analysing underwater sound as part of its Acoustic Monitoring Project. The sensors used for its marine bugging operation were relicts of the Cold War. SOSUS stood for SOund SUrveillance System, a worldwide network of highly sensitive hydrophones, first installed by the US Navy in the sixties to keep tabs on Russian subs. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the system was declassified in 1991, and scientists from NOAA were given access to its data.

It was thanks to SOSUS that scientists had discovered it was anything but quiet in the ocean depths. In particular, the frequency range below sixteen hertz was deafeningly loud. To make the noise audible to humans, they had to play it at sixteen times its actual speed. Suddenly an underwater quake sounded like thunder, and humpbacks sang like twittering birds, while blue whales could be heard booming staccato messages to one another over hundreds of kilometres. Almost seventy-five per cent of the annual data recordings were dominated by a loud,
rhythmic rumbling - the sound of airguns used by oil companies to explore the geological structure of the ocean floor.

Since then NOAA had added to SOSUS by developing its own systems. Every year the network of hydrophones probed further into the ocean. And every year the scientists heard a little more.

‘We can ID an object just from its noise,' said Vanderbilt. ‘That way we can find out how big a vessel is, how fast it's moving, what kind of power it uses, which direction it's coming from and how far away it is…Hydrophones tell us
everything
. It's a well-known fact that water conducts sound with great efficiency. Sound waves travel incredibly quickly under water–at speeds of up to five and a half thousand kilometres per hour. Which means that if a blue whale breaks wind off the coast of Hawaii, some guy in California will hear it in his headphones barely sixty minutes later. SOSUS doesn't merely detect sound; it identifies its source. NOAA's sound archive contains all the noises you could wish for: clicks, grumblings, whooshings, bubblings, squeaks, murmurs, bioacoustic and seismic data, and environmental noise. We can categorise pretty much everything - although there are a number of exceptions. And what do you know? Who have we got with us but NOAA's Dr Murray Shankar! He'll have the pleasure of telling you the rest.'

A thickset, timid man with Indian features and gold-framed glasses got up from the front row. Vanderbilt called up another spectrogram and played the artificially processed sound. The room was filled with a muffled drone, structured by gradual rises in pitch.

Shankar cleared his throat. ‘We call this noise Upsweep,' he said, in a soft voice. ‘It was first recorded in 1991, and its source seems to be located somewhere around 54 degrees south, 140 degrees west. Upsweep was one of the first unidentified noises picked up by SOSUS, and it was so loud that it was detected throughout the Pacific. We still don't know what it is. According to one theory, it may have been produced by resonance occurring between seawater and molten lava in an underwater range between Chile and New Zealand. The next images, please, Jack.'

Vanderbilt presented two new spectrograms.

‘Julia, recorded in 1999, and Scratch, detected two years earlier by an autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific. The amplitude was clearly audible within a radius of five kilometres. Julia sounds rather like an animal call, wouldn't you say? The frequency of the sound alters rapidly. It's broken down into a series of discrete notes, like whalesong.
But it can't be a whale. No whale could produce a noise of that volume. Scratch, on the other hand, sounds as though a needle is being dragged at right angles to the groove of a record, only it would take a record player the size of a city to create a noise like that.'

The next noise was a drawn-out creak that fell away slowly.

‘Detected in 1997,' said Shankar. ‘Slowdown. We think it originated somewhere in the South Pole. We've ruled out ships and subs. The noise might be caused by an ice plate scraping over the rocks in the Antarctic. Then again, it could be something else entirely. There's always the possibility that it's bioacoustic in origin. Some people are dying to see us use these noises to prove that giant squid really exist, but as far as I'm aware, creatures of that kind are barely capable of producing noise at all. It's a false lead, in my opinion. In any case, no one knows what Slowdown is, but…' He smiled shyly. ‘Well, at least there's one rabbit we can pull out of the hat for you today.'

Vanderbilt played the spectrogram from the URA again. This time he turned on the sound.

‘Did you hear what it is? It's Scratch. And can you guess what the URA told us? The noise was coming from the cloud! Well, from that we can—'

‘Thank you, Murray, that was worthy of an Oscar.' Vanderbilt coughed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘Those were the facts. The rest is speculation. OK, folks, let's round things off properly by giving you something to exercise your brains.'

 

The screen showed images that had been taken in the darkest depths. Floating particles sparkled in the floodlights. Then a flat-looking creature billowed up into the frame, and instantly retreated.

‘The film was cleaned up by Marintek, before the institute had the misfortune of being washed into the sea. Now, if you watch their version, two things are clear: first, this thing is enormous; and second, it glows, or, to be more precise, it flashes, then the light goes out when it enters the frame. All we know is that it was frolicking in the water seven hundred metres below sea level on the continental slope near Norway. Take a good look at it. Is it our jellified friend? Find some answers for us. The salvation of God's number-one species is in your hands.' Vanderbilt grinned at the rows of delegates. ‘I'm not going to lie to you: we're heading straight for Armageddon. That's why I'm proposing that we share the work between us. You're going to put a stop to this mutated
shit - find a way of taming it, feed it something that will make it spew its guts. Whatever. Meanwhile we'll find the bastard who's been sending us this crap. Do whatever it takes, but don't go shooting your mouth off. You can kiss goodbye to the thought of making headlines. A joint US-European policy of strategic disinformation is already in place. Panic would be the icing on the turd, if you know what I'm saying. The last thing we need is any social, political, religious or other unrest. So when we let you out to play, just remember what you promised Auntie Li.'

Johanson cleared his throat. ‘I'd like to express my thanks on behalf of everyone here for a thoroughly engaging presentation,' he said pleasantly. ‘Now let me get this straight. You want
us
to tell
you
what's lurking in the water.'

‘That's right, Doc.'

‘And what do you suspect it is?'

Vanderbilt smiled. ‘Jelly. And a few blue clouds.'

‘I see.' Johanson grinned back. ‘So you'd like us to open the advent calendar all by ourselves…You know what, Vanderbilt? I think you've got a theory. And if you want our co-operation, maybe you should tell us what it is. That's reasonable, isn't it?'

Vanderbilt rubbed the bridge of his nose. He exchanged a look with Li. ‘Well, let's see now…Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without any presents,' he drawled. ‘Aw, what the heck? The question we asked ourselves was this: where are the disaster hot spots? Which areas have got off lightly? Have any regions of the world been spared? And, hey presto, the unaffected areas are the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan and Thailand. Plus China and Korea. You could count the iceboxes too, I guess, but I don't see much point. Basically, the main victim is the West. Take the destruction of the Norwegian offshore industry. That alone is going to do the West some serious long-term damage and put us in a very tricky position of dependency.'