Authors: Ian Douglas
“As in molten lava hot,” Carver said. “I'm giving that area a wide berth.”
The Manta banked gently to port, toward the south. The smokers appeared to be strung out in a chain, running roughly northeast to southwest. The Manta swung left to run parallel to them, looking for a way around. Carver switched the outside lights back on.
“Life,” Shigeru said, pointing. “
Undeniably
life.”
The bottom was alive. Where it had been completely barren before, the bottom was smothered now in waving, shifting forests of fronds, some ten meters long. Something like a vast, diaphanous bell pulsed and wiggled in the glare of the Manta's lights.
“What is that?” Jeff asked. “A jellyfish?”
“I have no idea,” Shigeru replied. “If it is, it's a dozen meters acrossâlonger than this submarine. Fantastic!”
“Major?” Carver said. The light ahead was stronger now, an odd, intense blue.
“Yes, Chief?”
“I still can't find a way through those smokers, and we've got a problem.”
“What is it?”
“This new heading, sir. It's taking us straight to the Singer.”
Damn. He'd wanted to avoid the alien construct.
“I think,” Carver said slowly, “I think that might be it up ahead.”
Jeff peered through the port at the black towers silhouetted against that impossible blue light, and knew that the SEAL was correct.
The city illuminated the night, holding it at bay with a pale, wavering blue-green luminescence that back-lit soaring towers, the sweep and curve of arches, the rugged thrust of slab-sided buildings the size of mountains, the prickle of antennae all but lost among vaster structures of incomprehensible purpose.
“I'dâ¦uhâ¦better take us up,” Carver said.
“I think you'd better,” Jeff replied, his mouth dry. It was impossible to judge scale in this alien setting. What he was looking at could have been a large and complex spacecraft seen from meters away, or a city the size of Greater New York, seen from an altitude of kilometers. Much of it appeared to be submerged in the seabed.
“Is thatâ¦is thatâ¦it?” Jeff asked, awed.
“The Singer?” Shigeru nodded. “The sonographs we've taken don't do it justice.”
“Is it a ship? Or a city?”
“Maybe both. Or neither. How can we know?”
“Okay.” Jeff said. He managed a weak grin. “Is it alive?”
Shigeru looked at him, startled. “That, Major, remains to be seen.”
“Even on VR, I don't think I'm seeing the entire thing,” Carver said. “It measures at least twelve kilometers across. Can't get decent infrared. The water absorbs those wavelengths. Sonar, though, seems to indicate an even bigger structureâbut it's soft, almost mushy.”
“Soft? What do you mean?”
“I think what he is seeing,” Shigeru said, peering out the porthole again, “is that most of it is covered with moss.”
It was true. In the uncertain lighting, in the drifting haze of particles above the ocean floor, it was hard to see, but as the tiny submersible hummed past one of those upthrusting towers, Jeff could see that its outline was blurred. Like some ancient, sunken wreck at the bottom of an Earthly ocean, the Singer was coated by
Muscomimus
and by other growths, things like seaweed that writhed and twisted with a life of their own, things like sea fans and bumpier, rougher things like coral growths. And, at closer hand, it was clear that the underlying structure was pitted and gouged and cratered in places, as though it had been subjected to eons of steady, gradual erosion and decay. Here, a needle-sharp spire had crumpled and fallen, dragging with it a lacy network of filaments now tufted with mosslike accretions. There, a low, flat arch, like a bridge a hundred meters across, had snapped in the middle, the span fallen through a delicate tracery of interlocking tubes far below.
The Singer's song surrounded themâ¦embraced themâ¦
The Manta continued its climb. As Jeff watched that enigmatic city drop away into a glowing, blue-hued mist, he kept expectingâ¦
something
. A tractor beam out of a science-fiction vidâ¦a sudden bolt of searing energyâ¦a giant handâ¦anything to indicate that the minute craft passing above this eldritch vista had been seen, had been noticed, by the godlike powers that must dwell within.
Kaminski screamed.
Kaminski
Â
Fallingâ¦fallingâ¦falling down the endless, empty light-yearsâ¦
Aloneâ¦so aloneâ¦so
emptyâ¦
But there were voices within the empty lonelinessâ¦voicesâ¦shoutsâ¦hollow-ringing echoesâ¦a cacophonyâ¦voicesâ¦unintelligibleâ¦words unknown, alien and harshâ¦yet each separate, exquisitely painful and throbbing syllable called forthâ¦an imageâ¦
He understood so very little of what he saw, though he clutched at each image, each scene, each thought, a drowning man grasping at flotsam.
Starsâ¦a vast and empty sea of blackness, strewn with stars and the wisp-fog veil of twisted nebulae
.
His fatherâ¦vast and terrifying in a drunken rage. “C'mere, you little snot, and get what you deserve!
”
Aâ¦city? Was it a cityâ¦stone pyramids the size of mountainsâ¦no, carved from mountains, whole mountains shaped and reworked according to some colossal engineering scheme undreamed of by manâ¦A pink ocean gently lapping the shoreline beneath a reddish skyâ¦andâ¦and men in this alien placeâ¦men and women in strange clothing with strangely angled faces, mingling with silently drifting, upright forms, all organic curves and undulations cast in shapes of crystal and plasticâ¦but the red sky is filled with flame and bursting lightâ¦and the strange people are screaming and falling in the city streetsâ¦
And in the sky, the Ship blotted out the sun. Explosionsâ¦savage detonations shaking the mountainsâ¦People shrieking as the atmosphere field failed and the air exploded into near-vacuum
.
His mother, eyes blackened, nose bloodied, sobbing hysterically on the sofa
.
His first day of boot camp. Standing rigidly information. “Youâ¦miserableâ¦
worms
have the unprintable expurgated
gall
to think you can be Marinesâ¦
”
Major Garroway seated at the desk at Candor Chasma, on Mars, hard eyes pinning the three Marines to the spot where they stood at attention. “Very well. Corporal Slidell, Lance Corporal Fulbert, Lance Corporal Kaminski. You three have a choiceâ¦
”
A tattered, faded American flag hung from a five-meter metal pole above the Cydonian encampment on Mars. Someone had used a thin strip of wire to stretch the fly out from the hoist in the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. Still, there was wind enough to ripple the cloth a bit. The fighting with the UN forces was almost over
.
Voicesâ¦myriad voicesâ¦gibbering in the darkness
.
Â
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and
Asterias Linea
Europan Ocean
2250 hours Zulu
Â
Kaminski's shriek brought Jeff up out of the couch so quickly he painfully slammed his head into a section of conduit tubing in the overhead. Kaminski had slumped in his seat, eyes staring, a trickle of blood flowing steadily from his left nostril and smearing on his chin. Cartwright, Hastings, and Wojak had all gathered around him, holding his head, calling to him. Kaminski's eyes, wide and staring, seemed to focus on something far beyond the barren confines of the Manta's aft compartment.
There was no corpsman along. Jeff had ordered McCall to stay at the E-DARES and take care of the wounded there. There didn't seem to be anything to do except pull his PAD from its thigh holster, open it, and call up Chesty with a touch. “Medical emergency, Chesty,” he said. “Give us a hand here.”
“Bringing medical protocols on line,” Chesty said. “I have his med readouts.”
The med layout appeared on the PAD screen, waveforms tracing out the pulse and quiver of heartbeat, respiration, metabolic function, neurological and brainwave function, pain levels, and other readings Jeff only hazily understood.
“Sergeant Major Kaminski is unconscious,” Chesty said. “Except for minor nasal and upper pharyngeal bleeding, I detect no gross trauma. Brainwaves indicate a mild alpha state, but probably no loss of mental function. No ischemia, no cerebrovascular trauma, no internal hemorrhage.” There was a brief pause. “Please hold the PAD sensory pickup close to his head.”
Jeff did as he was told, holding out the PAD just above Kaminski's head, pointing the optic and audio pickups at his bleeding face.
“I have detected an anomaly,” Chesty said. “Sergeant Major Kaminski's skull appears to be the source of low-grade infrasonics, at approximately ten to fifteen Hertz. I cannot account for this.”
“What's that?” Nodell asked. “What's that mean?”
“Infrasound,” Jeff replied. “Sound waves at frequencies too low for humans to hear.”
“We can sense 'em, though,” BJ put in. “They can make us feel uneasy, even induce panic attacks.”
“Look,” Wojak said. He jabbed a thumb toward the overhead, and the eerie wail of the Singer. “I don't need infrasound to feel creepy with
that
goin' on!”
Kaminski's eyes were closed now, but Jeff could see the eyeballs shifting and moving beneath the lids. REMâRapid Eye Movements. Frank was dreaming.
Of what?
“I have a possible correlation with Sergeant Major Kaminski's medical history,” Chesty reported.
“What is it?”
“In 2053, then-Gunnery Sergeant Kaminski received three intracranial implants, one occipital, two temporal. These were intended to facilitate virtual reality downloads with IBM-K20 interface equipment. He was taking part in an experiment at the time, with the goal of developing new training techniques through direct man-machine interface.”
“Jesus,” Wojak said. “Ski was a
jackhead?
”
“The external sockets were surgically removed in 2061 after noninvasive, more technologically advanced VR feeds came on-line. The implants, however, were simply disconnected and left in place.
“The implant remaining over the right temporal area of his brain appears to be vibrating in response to those low-frequency radio waves. The vibrations are generating sound waves in the ten to fifteen Hertz range.”
“Damn!” Jeff said. “Should have remembered! Doc McCall told me about that the other day, when that EMP knocked him out! Is there anything we can do?”
“Maybe wrap his head in something,” Amberly suggested.
“The ELF radio waves penetrate the Europan ocean easily, and even leak through the ice where it is thin. We have no materials available on board this craft that would provide adequate insulation. The effect should lessen, however, as we move away from the Singer artifact.”
“Which I intend to do as quickly as possible,” Jeff said. “Chief Carver! Can you get any more speed out of this thing?”
“Got her full throttle, Major. We're getting the hell out of Dodge!”
“Chesty, I want a list of everyone in this command, including the scientists, who might have cranial implants like that.”
“A complete search must wait until this part of me is again in communication with the main system at Cadmus. The only medical records I have access to here are those of the personnel embarked aboard Manta One. Of those personnel, only Sergeant Major Kaminski possessed such implants.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” it was hard to remember Chesty's limitations sometimes. Because he was dependent on the hardware he was running on, he had access to much larger files, much more information, when he was resident within a large, fast, powerful machine like the E-DARES's IBM IC-5000. Since they were currently out of radio or laser contact with Cadmus, the Chesty on Jeff's PAD and within the Manta's computer system was considerably slower in terms of operations per second, and much more restricted in the data available to it.
How must it feel, Jeff wondered, to break off a part of yourself, to live in isolation from the “real” you in a much more cramped and tiny space?
Â
The Life Seeker
Time unknown
Â
2703: >>
â¦wantingâ¦
<<
1201: >>
â¦needing othersâ¦needingâ¦want/must-have
/mustmustmust
<<
937: >>
â¦but othersâ¦wrong/bad/tainted/evilâ¦
<<
1391: >>
â¦communicationâ¦senseâ¦touchâ¦talkâ¦knowâ¦
<<
2703: >>
â¦aloneâ¦so aloneâ¦
<<
Chorus: >>
Nononono WE are here!â¦
<<
0001: >>
Reintegratel We must reintegrate!
<<
Chorus: >>
Nonononononoâ¦
<<
1391: >>
â¦need to knowâ¦to feelâ¦
<<
1450: >>
â¦reaching outâ¦
<<
538: >>
Reintegration incompleteâ¦failureâ¦failureâ¦
<<
Â
Manta One
Between the Cadmus and
Asterias Linea
Europan Ocean
2330 hours Zulu
Â
With her MHD drive humming at full throttle, the Manta climbed steadily clear of the alien sprawl of the structure lying on the Europan seabed. With the possible and apparently accidental exception of Kaminski's collapse, it had not seemed to notice the flyspeck submarine at all.
Another hour passed, surrounded still by the eerie wailing of the Singer. The Marines in Manta One were quiet now, lost in their own thoughts or trying, somehow, to get some sleep. Kaminski, at least, seemed to be getting better. The REM beneath his eyelids had ceased, and he was breathing more easily.
There was one piece of good news in the gloom. Manta Two made herself known with a single, low-powered sonar chirp. Manta One responded, careful to keep the pulse wattage low enough that it wouldn't be detectable by listening hydrophones at the Chinese base, and the two moved onto converging courses. Within another hour, they were close enough to acquire one another's navigation lights, and fifteen minutes later, a direct ship-to-ship laser communications channel had been opened.
Jeff exchanged quick briefings with Lieutenant Biehl. Like Manta One, Manta Two had turned south to avoid the line of black smokers; she, too, had encountered the alien construct on the ocean floor. No one aboard had been affected by the ELF waves, howeverâthank God.
The plan had been for the two submersibles to stay widely separated. After the encounter with the Singer, however, they made a tacit agreement to stay together. The Europan Ocean seemed far vaster, and far stranger than it had twelve hours earlier, when they'd first slipped beneath its black surface.
Another three hours passed. Jeff tried to catch some sleep, stretched out on the viewing couch, but sleep eluded him. His suit was growing wearily uncomfortable, with intolerable itches he couldn't scratch, and raw patches spreading at every pressure point: shoulders, wrists, waist, groin, knees, ankles. Worst of all, he was aware of the growing stink within the closely enclosed Manta, mingled smells of fear and sweat.