The Swarm (100 page)

It's not going to be able to get itself out of here, Bohrmann realised. He channelled his strength into pressing the trackhound against the shark's skull. Surely the creature couldn't be jammed. How much power did the jelly have over it? It was obviously controlling its behaviour, but could it teach it to swim backwards?

Evidently it could. The hammer withdrew from the crack.

Bohrmann waited.

Something shot out of the cloud. A hammer came at him horizontally. One of the smaller sharks. Its head crashed into the domed visor of his helmet. Its jaws opened. Rows of teeth scraped against the Plexiglas. The shark's body obscured the light to such an extent that Bohrmann could barely see, but what he could see was enough. He tried to push himself further inside the crack and suddenly the walls of the crevice seemed to give way. He toppled backwards into nothing.

Pitch blackness.

The left manipulator moved erratically over the console. The switch for the trackhound's floodlight was just above the homing button. He'd had it a moment ago…

There!

The floodlight lit up. The wandering shaft of light revealed that the back of the crevice had widened into a spacious cave. He shone the beam
at the opening and saw the head of the shark. The hammer was shaking back and forth but the shark didn't advance.

It was stuck.

Bohrman raised his arm and showered blows on the box-like head. The shark had to be at least half-way into the cave. Suddenly he realised that it wasn't a good idea to wound the shark enough to make it bleed. Instead he used all his weight to push against it, but in the water it wasn't nearly enough. He pushed off and hurled himself against the twitching head, banging into it with his chest, shoulders and arms until the shark gradually retreated. The beam from the trackhound wandered all over the place, illuminating the pink gullet and flapping gills.

I don't care
how
you get out of here, thought Bohrmann. But I want you out now. This is my cave, so piss off!

‘Piss off!'

‘Dr Bohrmann?'

The shark disappeared.

Bohrmann slumped down. His arms trembled. Suddenly he felt overwhelmed with exhaustion and sank to his knees.

‘Dr Bohrmann?'

‘I don't need you bugging me, van Maarten.' He coughed. ‘Do something to get me out of here.'

‘We'll send down the robots and the men right away.'

‘Why robots?'

‘We're sending down anything that might scare the sharks or distract them.'

‘They're not sharks. They only look like sharks. They can recognise a robot - and they know exactly what we're trying to do.'

‘The sharks know?'

Frost evidently hadn't told van Maarten the whole story.

‘That's right. They're no more sharks than the whales are whales. Something's controlling them. The men should be on their guard.' He had to cough again, this time more loudly. ‘I can't see a bloody thing in this cave. What's going on out there?'

For a moment van Maarten was silent. Then he said, ‘Oh, God…'

‘Talk to me!'

‘There's more of them - dozens, hundreds! They're smashing up the floodlights.'

Of course they are, thought Bohrmann. That's the whole point.
They're trying to stop us cleaning up the worms. That's what this is about.

‘Then forget it.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘I said forget the rescue operation, van Maarten.'

There was so much noise inside Bohrmann's helmet that he had to get van Maarten to repeat his answer a second time: ‘But the men are ready.'

‘Tell them that intelligent predators are lying in wait for them. The sharks are intelligent. The stuff in their heads is intelligent. You're not going to achieve anything with two divers and a decoy. Think of something else. Like you said, I've got enough oxygen for two days.'

Van Maarten hesitated. ‘OK. We'll keep an eye on things. Maybe the sharks will disperse in the next few hours. Do you think you're safe for the moment?'

‘How the hell do I know? I'm safe from ordinary sharks, but these guys are unbelievably resourceful.'

‘We're going to find a way, Gerhard. We'll have you out of there
before
your oxygen runs out.'

‘I sincerely hope so.'

Light was returning gradually to the crack, but if what van Maarten was saying was true, the lamps were about to go out.

He'd be alone in the darkness of the ocean, alone until someone declared themselves ready to brave hundreds of hammerhead sharks.

No shark in possession of its natural instincts would have swum into an electromagnetic field. A hammerhead shark would never attack two humans in exosuits, and even if it did, it would quickly lose interest. Hammerheads were known to pose a threat to humans and to be infuriatingly inquisitive, but they usually gave anything suspicious-looking a very wide berth.

They didn't normally swim inside crevices.

Bohrmann cowered inside the cave, equipped with enough oxygen for another forty or so hours. He hoped there wouldn't be a bloodbath when van Maarten's men came down.
If
they came down.

A bloodbath in the lightless water.

He switched off the floodlight on his trackhound to conserve its battery. He was immediately engulfed in inky black. Light shone through the crack. It was getting fainter all the time.

Independence, Greenland Sea

Johanson couldn't settle. He'd been down on the well deck where Li's men were preparing for the jelly to be transferred to the deep-sea chamber under Rubin's supervision. The tank had been emptied and decontaminated, and the
Pfiesteria
-laden crabs deposited in liquid nitrogen. The whole process was being conducted under the most stringent safety precautions. Johanson and Oliviera were planning to start the phase tests as soon as the jelly was in the tank. In the meantime, while they'd been exchanging notes and laying down the procedure, Crowe and Shankar had begun to decipher the second Scratch message.

‘The shock is still with us,' Li had said, in her improvised speech. ‘Every one of us has been deeply affected by what happened. Our enemy is trying to demoralise and destroy us - but we mustn't give in. I'm sure you're all asking yourselves whether this vessel is safe. Let me assure you,
it is
. Providing we don't give our enemy any further opportunities to come aboard, we've got nothing to fear on the
Independence
. All the same, speed is of the essence. It's more important than ever that we focus our energies on forcing a dialogue. We need to convince our enemy to put a stop to its campaign of terror against the human race.'

Johanson went up to the flight deck, where the kitchen staff were clearing away the remnants of the abandoned party. The sun had risen again, and the sea looked no different from usual: no blue glow, no flashes, no luminescent vision presaging a nightmare.

He walked back to where he'd been standing before Li had presented him with a glass of red wine and tried to pump him for information about his night-time escapade. Two things had been clear to him: first, that Li knew what had happened to him; and second, that she wasn't sure how much he could remember and whether he was telling her the truth - which worried her.

She'd lied to him. He hadn't fallen over.

If Oliviera hadn't mentioned that he'd seen Rubin walk through a door in the hangar deck, nothing would have come back to him, and he would have swallowed Dr Angeli and the others' explanation. But Oliviera's comment had triggered something in his mind. His brain was reprogramming itself. Enigmatic images appeared and faded. As he stared at the uniform seascape of waves, his gaze turned inwards. Suddenly he was back on the crate, chatting to Oliviera, glass in hand. Rubin stepped
through a door in the hangar-deck wall. A door…It appeared in the distance, and yet in another picture he seemed to be standing right in front of it - proof to Johanson that the mysterious passageway existed.

But what had happened next?

They'd gone down to the lab. Then he'd returned to the hangar deck alone. Why? Was it something to do with the door?

Or was he imagining it all?

You could be getting old and crazy without even knowing it, he thought to himself. That would be embarrassing.

While he was still puzzling over it, Fate took pity on him and sent Weaver to him. Johanson was pleased to see her walking over the deck. They hadn't spent much time together lately. At first he'd seen her as his confidante, but he'd soon come to appreciate that she wasn't a replacement for Lund. They got on well, but it hadn't gone any deeper than that, neither in the Chateau nor on the boat. Maybe he had hoped that, through her, he could make up for everything that had happened to Lund. In the meantime things had changed. Now Johanson was by no means certain that he needed to make up for anything, and still less whether he'd share the intimacy with Weaver that he had with Lund. He had the impression that something might happen between her and Anawak, and they were much better suited…

But there was trust. If he put his trust in Weaver, he would surely be rewarded. She was much too down-to-earth to want to romanticise inexplicable events. She'd listen to him and tell him if she believed him or if she thought he was mad.

He gave her a succinct account of everything he could remember, including all the things that didn't make sense or that made him doubt himself, and how he'd felt when Li had given him the third degree.

After a thoughtful pause Weaver asked; ‘Have you been down to look?

‘I haven't had a chance.'

‘You must have had plenty. You're just scared in case there's nothing there.'

‘You're probably right.'

She nodded. ‘Let's take a look together.'

Weaver had surmised correctly. He did feel scared and unsure of himself - more so with every step that took them closer to the hangar deck. What if there was nothing? By now he felt almost certain that they wouldn't find a door, and then he'd have to get used to the idea that he
might be delusional. He was fifty-six, he was good-looking, and people seemed to find him intelligent, attractive and charming. There was never any shortage of women.

It was just as he'd feared. They paced up and down along the bulkhead, and there was nothing that resembled a door.

Weaver looked at him.

‘I know, I know,' he muttered.

‘Don't worry,' she said. And then, to his surprise, she added, ‘You can see the wall's riveted together. Look at all these pipes and joints. There must be thousands of ways of building a door into the wall without anyone being able to spot it. You need to remember
precisely
where you saw it.'

‘You believe me?'

‘I know you pretty well, Sigur. You're not nuts. You don't drink yourself into a coma or take drugs. You appreciate the finer things in life - and that means you see details that other people miss. I'm more of a fish-and-chips girl. I probably wouldn't notice a hidden door if it opened right in front of my face, because it wouldn't occur to me that something like that might exist. I don't know what you saw, but…yeah, I believe you.'

Johanson leaned forward impulsively and kissed her cheek. He headed down the ramp towards the laboratory, almost elated.

Lab

Rubin still looked pale, and when he spoke, he sounded like a squawking parrot. He was lucky to be alive. Greywolf had been well on the way to finishing him off. The biologist showed himself to be extremely understanding. He maintained a stiff smile, reminding Johanson for all the world of Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
after she had narrowly escaped being throttled by Jack Nicholson. Rubin swivelled his whole body ostentatiously whenever he glanced to either side. He was quick to let everyone know about his wretched state of health, and magnanimously announced that he didn't hold a grudge against Greywolf.

‘I mean, the two of them were an item, weren't they?' he rasped. ‘It must have been dreadful for him. And I was the one who insisted on
opening the sluice. Of course, he shouldn't have attacked me, but I understand.'

Oliviera exchanged glances with Johanson and refrained from comment.

Huge lumps of jelly were floating in the tank, beginning to glow again. But what interested the three biologists wasn't so much the jelly as the cloud. The two and a half tonnes of organic matter that Li's men had scooped up from the well deck included large quantities of dissociated jelly. Now big clumps of aggregated matter and countless individual amoebas filled the tank, while a robot flitted among them, armed with an array of sensors that monitored the chemical composition of the water and transmitted the data to the screens on the desk. The skirt of the robot was lined with tubes that, at the push of a button, could be extended into the water, opened, closed and returned to the rosette. The entire contraption was scarcely bigger than the Spherobot. It was robust, yet manoeuvrable.

Johanson sat at the control desk like the captain of a spaceship, waiting with his hands round the joysticks. The lights in the lab had been dimmed as low as possible to allow them to see what was happening. Before their eyes, the jelly was recovering. The lumps of matter were already glowing more intensely, pulsating with currents of blue light.

‘This is it,' whispered Oliviera. ‘It's about to start aggregating.'

Johanson steered the robot under one of the lumps, opened a test-tube and pushed it into the substance. The edge of the tube was razor-sharp: it sliced into the jelly, collected a sample, sealed itself automatically and retreated to the rosette. The clump changed shape slightly, swathed in blue mist. Johanson waited for a few seconds, then repeated the procedure elsewhere.

Pinpricks of light sparkled inside the jelly. The clump was about the size of a fully grown dolphin. Yes, thought Johanson, as he continued to fill the test-tubes with samples, that would be right: it was exactly the size of a dolphin. Although, actually, it wasn't merely the size of a dolphin: it was the shape of one too.