"Wasn't that what you called that wee beastie that attacked us just now, Haugland?"
"The Kraken, you mean?" the Norwegian agreed. "It somehow... seemed appropriate."
"I couldn't agree more," Lady Denning added.
"Do tell us more. What is it? The Kraken I mean?" Ogilvy said twitchily.
"Kraken, Kroken, Krayken, they're all the same thing really," Haugland said.
"And what is that?"
Ogilvy was on edge. Ulysses wondered how long it was since he had been able to sneak his last fix.
"The Kraken is the legendary sea monster of Norse myth, although that particular name never appeared in the sagas. Instead it was called the hafgufa or the lyngbakr. The name Kraken comes from another Scandinavian word krake, which refers to some unhealthy, unnatural animal; something twisted. The Kraken was said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Iceland, a beast of gargantuan size. Some said it was as big as a floating island, a creature so large that it could pull even the biggest warship to the bottom of the sea without any trouble at all." Haugland was into his stride now, the natural storytelling abilities of the travel writer coming to the fore. "It is almost always described as having numerous, far-reaching tentacles and a soft pliable body like an octopus. And although it lived within the ocean depths, it would surface to hunt prey and supposedly attack small ships."
"It sounds horrid," Miss Birkin said, managing to sound indignant, as if such discussion was not appropriate for those of a delicate sensibility at this time.
"But, Miss Birkin, you have to remember it is only a legend, an exaggerated unreal creature, inspired by sightings of the much more timid, yet real, giant squid. At least I had thought it a legend, until now. In all my days travelling the world, I have never seen the like!"
"Was that thing that attacked us a giant squid? Was that some mythical monster?" Ogilvy railed. Unconquerable fear had taken the face of anger with the wretched doctor. "Was I hallucinating?"
"I wouldn't be surprised." Ulysses couldn't help himself.
"Why, you -"
"But I saw it too, and I know that I haven't put anything illicit or intoxicating into my body in almost twenty-four hours."
The damned doctor didn't know how to respond to such a blatant accusation.
"But then, maybe, neither have you, which would explain a lot as well."
A fearful hush descended over the party once again and another three flights were negotiated in silence. Pausing at the next landing Ulysses made note of the deck they were now on. Deck 7. Only another eight to go until they reached the bowels of the ship wherein lay the ever-elusive sub-dock, with its pressure gate and its means of escape to the outside world. They still might not make it to the surface alive, but if they could make it off the Neptune that should at least buy them a few more hours - unless the Kraken had other ideas.
"I don't know what it was," Captain McCormack said, disrupting the tense silence, "but that wasn't simply some overgrown cephalopod."
"You're a biologist," Dr Ogilvy said suddenly, almost challenging Professor Crichton, who looked like he was trying to remain anonymous in the background. "And you, Lady Denning. What was that... thing?"
"I... I don't know," Crichton said, taking another long draw on what must have been his rapidly emptying hipflask.
"No. Nor I," Lady Denning said in a tone that broached no further discussion.
"But can't you take a guess?"
"I don't know what it was," Lady Denning said, her tone sharp enough to cut glass.
"Some... some kind of giant cephalopod," was all Crichton would offer.
"But what kind of sodding giant bloody cephalopod?" Ogilvy pressed. "I'm not an idiot, you know. What kind of cephalopod has jaws like that and an armoured shell?"
"The Kraken, it would appear," Nimrod offered bluntly. The doctor looked like he was about to make another challenge and then wilted under the intense sapphire-eyed stare Ulysses' manservant gave him.
"Perhaps it's something prehistoric? Something forgotten, like the coelacanth was for so many years," Miss Birkin piped up, finding her voice despite the fatigue she was feeling, the conspiracy theorist in her excited at the prospect of uncovering a genuine conspiracy herself.
"You're uncommonly quiet on this matter," Ulysses said, addressing the noticeably tight-lipped Carcharodon, "particularly for one usually so forthcoming with his own opinion."
"How in blazes would I know what that thing is?" he snarled back. "I'm no Hannibal Haniver, am I? I'm not a bloody naturalist!"
"It could be an aberration," John Schafer suggested, as he assisted both fiancée and aunt-in-law to be ever onward, down the uncomfortably angled stairwell, making sure that they did not slip on the wet metal steps. "Some mutation of a better known genus created by the unchecked industrial pollution that is such a blight on our world."
"Careful, Schafer," Ulysses warned, with a wry smile. "You're in danger of sounding like a fully paid up member of the Darwinian Dawn."
"Or," Captain McCormack said darkly, adding his own opinion to the discussion, "could it have been specifically engineered this way? Is it, in reality, a living weapon of war?"
"Preposterous!" Carcharodon suddenly butted in, driven to finally voice his own opinion by McCormack's patently hair-brained suggestion, nailing his colours to the mast in the debate regarding the nature of the beast.
"What do you mean, Captain?" Constance asked, her own latent curiosity piqued. 'How can it have been engin -"
"Ah, here we are!" Major Horsley announced with gusto as they reached the bottom of the stairs, before Constance could finish. "Engine rooms, don't you know! That's the way we want to go, isn't it, McCormack, what?"
"That was the plan," McCormack said.
"We hope," Ulysses cautioned.
Talk of the nature of the beast ceased as all members of the party were filled with nervous anticipation at the prospect of entering the engine halls of the Neptune. What little information they had been given about this area of the ship was that some of the great engine chambers were flooded, or on fire, or God alone knew what.
Captain McCormack paused before the steel bulkhead door. It would be a risk venturing inside, but there was really no alternative. There was no going back now.
"Well, here goes nothing," he said as Wates and the Purser joined him in cranking the wheel to open the door. The seal popped open with nothing more dramatic than a hiss of air which smelt of charcoal and seaweed; an indication perhaps of what they might find beyond.
Looking like a sorry, rag-tag band of refugees rather than the great and the good, the cream of the elite society of Magna Britannia trudged through into the echoing engine halls. The way Captain McCormack led them through the shadowy halls they encountered neither fire nor flood until, before too long, they came to another door.
"It's through here," McCormack said, as he and Ulysses took hold of the door-wheel.
A murmur of excitement passed through the party. Against all the odds it looked like they were actually going to make it. Even Ulysses allowed himself a brief internal whoop of delight.
And then - inevitably just when everything was going so well, when it looked like they might actually all make it out of this mess - that old unwelcome guest, Ulysses' precognisant sense, flared in the back of his brain once more.
With an iron-wrenching groan, like the dying cry of some giant whale, the entire engine chamber listed to port. The survivors should have been used to such lurches and shifting movements of the ship by now, only this time the Neptune didn't stop until it was lying flat on its side as the distribution of sea-water within it caused it to re-settle on the edge of the trench.
The group fell sideways, crashing into the network of pipes running up the walls. People were injured, bruises, gashes and grazes appearing where before there had been none, their blood painting them, their clothes and the enamel white walls scarlet.
Just when it had all been going so well.
And, that was when th
e sea rushed in after them, as if it had been pursuing them ever since the Promenade Deck and the Grand Atrium before that, determined not to let them escape briny oblivion any longer. And this time, it looked like the sea might just get its way.
With shouted guidance from McCormack and his men, and Ulysses' own rallying cries of encouragement, the escapees began to scale the floor, which now formed a climbing wall of scantly fissured plating before them, a full ninety degrees to perpendicular. Mr Wates and the Purser had seen fit to cling onto the bulkhead door-wheel and hung there, securing their own position, bracing themselves against pipes and buttresses as they battled to open the door. But as well as fighting time and the door clamps reluctance to shift, they were also fighting gravity. The door opened away from them, which now meant it opened upwards.
The water level was rising fast. Schafer struggled to help Miss Birkin and his precious Constance to secure holds within the new 'wall', whilst it took all the efforts of Nimrod, Ulysses and Thor Haugland to stop the chair-bound Jonah Carcharodon being lost below the waves lapping around the rapidly filling bucket of the engine hall.
But they struggled on, every man and woman of them, the still-locked door in tangible reach. And still the crewmen struggled with the wheel-lock and still it would not turn, and still the waters rose, until they were all of them bobbing upon the surge, the air space lessening with every passing second, forced together before the door, which remained stubbornly, cruelly shut.
When all seemed lost, with a loud grating screech the wheel turned, the locking clamps sprang open, the door opened upwards, pulling free of the wet grip of Mr Wates and the Purser, and a hand reached down to them.
A gruff voice called down after it, over the bubbling surge of the water filling the engine hall, "Take my hand if you want to live!"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Finding Nemo
A grease-black sweaty hand reached for Ulysses, and he gladly took it in his own. His shoulder protested as he was pulled sharply upwards, but the elation he felt at being rescued helped him put aside the pain, compartmentalising it for later when he might actually have time to deal with it.
Carcharodon was already through, seawater running from his chair onto what must have previously been the wall of the dock. When the last of them were through the bulkhead door was allowed to drop shut, before the rising water bubbled through, and the wheel spun tight again.
The VIPs stood around him - or in the case of Carcharodon sat there - in a nervously fidgeting huddle, every one of them a bedraggled wretch. They looked like men and women who had once had everything but who now had nothing - thanks to the sinking of the Neptune and the predations of the Kraken - which was precisely what they were.
Captain McCormack, Mr Wates and the purser, however, were behaving exactly like men whose position aboard ship had suddenly been dramatically elevated. They were the ones whose status had risen as the disaster unfolded. It was they who were now in control, in command, responsible for the lives of those very wretches arrayed before them, awaiting their instructions.
"Selby!" McCormack exclaimed, throwing his arms around a short, oil-black grease-monkey of an engineer. It had been this man's hand that had appeared like God's saving hand from heaven to lead them to a salvation of sorts. "I can honestly say that I have never been so pleased to see you in all my life!"
"Mac, you old bugger! I thought everyone else was dead! Clements and Swann and meself were making ready to leave when this happened." He indicated the dock around them. 'Why didn't you try to contact us down here?'
"Ship-wide comms went down," Mr Wates explained, shaking Clements furiously by the hand. "But then, you must have known that yourselves."
"We suspected it but couldn't test our theory as when the ship went down, after the engines cut out and then after..." Selby was lost for words.
"The attack," McCormack filled in for him.
"What was it?" the engineer asked, a manic gleam in his eye.
"It was a..." Now it was the captain who was lost for words. "It would take some explaining. I'll fill you in. Just finish telling me your side of the story."
"Well, whatever it was that happened after that, after the attack, we knew we were in trouble when engine three started to flood and both two and four caught fire." A faraway look entered the engineer's eyes as if he were casting his mind back years, even though the events he was relating had only taken place a matter of hours before. "I tried to get the men out as quickly as I could, but the fires spread so quickly..."
"So many died," one of Selby's fellows muttered half to himself. "It was the fire at first, and then the smoke." He seemed to cough involuntarily at this recollection. "It did for so many of them."
"It was only the three of us that made it down here and shut ourselves in," Selby went on. "But in all the chaos and confusion, when the ship was being knocked about, our comms panel got damaged. We couldn't call out and only heard static back over the thing. We couldn't even get through to the AI. We dared not get back out; we didn't know how far the fires had spread."
"We had to assume the worst," one of the younger soot-smeared men explained, his face pale beneath the covering of grime.
"Swann's right," Selby took over again. "Our only course of action was to get off this ship, and the only way of doing that was on board one of those." He pointed at the two submersible vehicles bobbing up and down on the water lapping at the edges of the up-ended dock-chamber.
It was only now that he had had time to come to terms with the curious perpendicularity of the sub-dock that Ulysses could make sense of its cantilevered layout. With the Neptune now lying fully to port, everything inside the docking chamber was at ninety degrees to how it should have been. Ulysses realised that before the wrecking of the Neptune, the Ahab and the Nemo must have been floating upon a rectangular pool, surrounded by all the engineering resources needed to maintain the two submersible vehicles. At the bottom of the pool had lain the dock's pressure gate which, once opened, would allow the subs to emerge from the bottom of the ship. Ulysses could see it now because half of it was free of the water, with the disconcerting tilting of the sub-liner, the keels of the two subs were scraping against what had, moments before, been the wall of the dock.
There was a curious frame to what had now become the left-hand wall of the twisted dock, which Ulysses realised had been a balcony viewing area above the docking pool. That same balcony now helped contain the displaced water, the Ahab and the Nemo bumping against the edge of it close by. All manner of debris and detritus - from aqualungs and oxyacetylene torches to maintenance materials and spare air tanks - littered the space. And now that Ulysses looked more closely at the three surviving engineers, amidst all the dirt and sooty burns he could also see glistening open wounds on their arms, hands and heads. He wondered how close they had come to losing their lives when the Neptune had tipped over and they found themselves caught beneath an avalanche of falling equipment, plenty of it heavy enough and hard edged enough to kill them.
"So what have you been doing down here all this time, since," McCormack made an expansive gesture with both his arms, "all this happened?"
"At first?" Selby said, the grease-monkey's eyes glazing as he called to mind every last detail of that appalling moment when the ship went down. "We waited, we recuperated, we hoped we might hear word from somewhere else on the ship - the Bridge at least - but there was nothing. Once we realised we couldn't send a message out and having heard nothing coming in, we decided that escape was a viable avenue to explore. We weren't going to trust to fate, in the hope that rescue crews might be on the way."
Captain McCormack nodded sagely.
"You know what it's like, Mac, if we're going to be honest with each other. Even if Neptune, or anyone else for that matter, got a distress signal out before we went down and comms went offline, it would take days for the nearest ship to reach us and then they'd have to find us down here."
The huddle of dishevelled VIPs were staring, u
nashamedly listening in on the interchange between the captain and his chief engineer, their tired faces bearing expressions of zombie-slack horror, the truth of their situation becoming ever more painfully apparent. If there were any who had still been labouring under the expectation that they were about to be rescued by some outside agency, those slim hopes were now cruelly dashed on the rocks of cold reality.
"And that's, like I say, if a Mayday signal had ever been sent in the first place.
"And it didn't seem likely that we would be sitting around down here for days until someone kindly knocked on the door and let us out," Selby went on. "So me and the lads got on with sorting out a way off this bloody death ship, pardon my French," he added, eyes darting over the faces of the women ranged before him, his cheeks reddening in embarrassment beneath the grime.
"It is pardoned," Lady Denning said caustically.
"After the viciousness of the attack - yeah, that makes sense now," Selby pondered aloud, "we had to check both the Nemo and the Ahab over, to make sure nothing crucial had been damaged. It was a bastard of an assault after all. Then we had to make sure they going to be up to making a journey at these depths. And there were only three of us to do it."
"So which one's sea-worthy?" Carcharodon asked, trying to regain some sense of authority whilst sitting damply within his waterlogged chair, every part of him soaked to the skin.
"They both are, sir. We made sure of it, just in case something else should happen to one of them. We were just getting ready to leave when, well, this happened." He took in the dock again.
"And you reckon both of them could still be piloted out of here?" McCormack asked.
"Yes, Captain, yes I do."
"But what about the pressure gate?" Mr Wates queried, pointing at partially exposed round steel doors revealed by the dislocation of the space around them.
"Clements?" Selby said, calling on the support of another of the surviving trio of engineers, "you're the one who's been checking out that side of things."
"As far as we can tell there's no damage. We should still be able to access it remotely from on board the Ahab," Clements said, a little too sheepishly for Ulysses' liking.
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