"Ahab away, over."
"Roger that," their own pilot replied, talking into a speaking tube as he held down the broadcast switch, and then eased up on the stick. The Nemo, its own engines thrumming now, disengaged its anchor cables and glided out after the Ahab.
"You said Selby's surprise came in two parts," Ulysses said, as the sub eased its way out into the abyss beyond.
"Yes, I did," Wates said, concentrating on what he could make out through the miasmal gloom beyond the glass and steel bubble in front of them.
"So, if the drone was the aperitif, what's the main course? "
Gliding out of the darkness, its coming heralded by the blue glow of its own lure, the monster slid towards the stricken ship once more, a thousand finely-attuned nerve-sensor-cells detecting movement coming from the grounded vessel.
The Kraken moved with all the grace and speed of something much smaller but with the unstoppable force and singularity of purpose of something primal and monstrous. Unusually regular pulsations in the slow-moving currents around it teased at tentacles and vibration sensors along its dorsal line. The throbbing, thrumming sensation was getting closer, as the creature and its target closed on a mutual collision course. Then, only a few hundred yards from the prone ship, the Kraken attacked.
A grabbing tentacle whipped out as adapted spiracles in its softer body parts launched it forwards with something akin to a propulsion boost. Dense suckers seized the object, pulling it violently from its course, through the water, and before its brain had even begun to process what the object was, the Kraken had drawn it into its mouth, devil-fish fangs closing around it, piercing the metal body, crushing the device. With one gulp, half of the drone was sucked down sharply into the creature's gullet and, with a snap, the rest of it soon followed.
But in the moment following its attack, the Kraken sensed more thrumming engines, the vibrations sending it into a frenzy, setting in on course to hunt and kill once more. Side fins rippling, the monstrous squid-thing rejoined its intercept course with the ship.
Its adapted brain could tell now that there were two more objects moving away from the hulk of the sunken ship. The Kraken moved in behind, using the sub-liner to shield its own approach from its target. With primal cunning it slipped over the hull of the craft, almost hugging the body of the liner to keep it hidden from its prey for as long as possible.
And then it was slipping over the stern section of the vessel, the two tiny submersible craft chugging away, their engines thrumming through the water ahead of it.
Easy pickings.
There was not one explosion but a series of detonations, a cascade of sub-sonic booms, muffled by the fluid ocean depths. They rocked the two fleeing subs, carrying them forward on a bow-wave through the roiling hydropelagic turmoil now consuming the abyss, as if the ocean was suddenly suffering a seizure, an underwater seaquake having rocked the depths.
"Ah, I see!" Ulysses said over the cries and shouts of alarm coming from the rest of the Nemo's passengers. Those didn't concern him. What did concern him were the subsequent creaking groans which seemed to possess the tiny submersible. Had the detonation of the Neptune's overloaded engines damaged the Nemo as well, putting yet more undue pressure on the already overburdened sub?
The next few minutes would answer that question, as they continued on the last leg of their journey to the submerged base, protruding from a rocky outcrop at the edge of the trench ahead of them.
"Yes, well done, Selby!" Mr Wates practically shouted in delight, punching the air. "Rigging the engines to overload and explode just when we needed them to was never going to be an exact science, not given the time and the circumstances, but the old bugger's only gone and done it!"
Behind them the Neptune and the Kraken were consumed by a cloud of broiling bubbles, silt thrown up from the seabed and debris from the massive, destroyed Rolls Royce engines. Then the prow emerged from the debris cloud - as obscuring as ink poured into water - swinging round as if to follow the escaping submersibles, as the Neptune shifted on the edge of the trench again, rocked by the rapid series of explosions.
Ulysses wanted to give his own whoop of joy, but had they really done it? Were they really free of the threat of the beast? Had Selby really managed to fluke it? Had he really killed the Kraken?
Awareness flared. And then he knew that they hadn't managed any such thing, even before the silt cloud seen clearing in the rear viewing port revealed the truth. Tentacles first, then that terrible maw and curious armoured squid-body coming after it, the Kraken emerged from the devastation, as far as Ulysses could see, with barely a mark on it. It hung there for a moment in the gloom, an awe-inspiring great grey-green leviathan of a beast. Then, having relocated its target, it surged towards the trailing Nemo. And Ulysses was sure that the look in its massive jelly eyes spoke of unleashed primal fury.
"But we have to go back, man! There are people on board!" Major Horsley bellowed, nose to nose with the captain. "I can't simply stand by and watch this happen all over again!"
"I know there are Major, but there's nothing we can do. It would be pointless to turn back now."
"Pointless? I didn't take you for a heartless bastard, McCormack, not after all we've been through so far." The red-faced Major was virtually screaming now, as if he were back on the parade ground or on the front line again, a platoon of wet-behind-the-ears recruits under his command. "And I didn't take you for a coward either!"
"Sit down, Major!" Carcharodon ordered, but Horsley was having none of it.
"You!" he boiled. "It doesn't surprise me coming from a self-serving, arrogant, egocentric bastard like you, but I thought the captain here was a man of decency and honour. Turn this tub around, right now! We've got to help them!"
"And how do you suggest we do that?" McCormack asked calmly.
The Major's blustering faltered at this point. "I... I..."
"You heard him!" Carcharodon snarled. "You saw what happened. We all did. That explosion should have killed it, but it came out the other side practically unscathed."
"I hate to say it but the Nemo is already doomed," the captain said, matter-of-factly, "and if we go back we'll simply be going to our deaths. I'm sorry, but there's nothing more we can do."
"Nothing except pray," Miss Birkin said through the agonising sobs now wracking her body as she thought of the niece she had left behind, poor innocent Constance whom it had been her duty to protect on this voyage of the damned.
"Then pray," the captain said. "Pray with all your heart and pray that their sacrifice might not be for naught, that through it we might be saved."
Almost as one, those survivors of the disaster gathered together within the Ahab watched, with appalled fascination, fearful for their own well-being, as the monster, all reaching tentacles and gaping fangs, closed on the Nemo, reaching for it hungrily, with hate in its eyes.
Captain McCormack was right. There was nothing they could do - except pray.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Relict
Suddenly there was nothing else they could do, nothing else that he - Ulysses Quicksilver, hero of the Empire and dandy adventurer, who had survived more than his fair share of close scrapes with death, who had turned things round at the last minute when everything seemed to be on the brink of collapse on dozens of occasions - could do.
They say that when a man faces death, his life flashes before his eyes. But for Quicksilver, as he gazed into the oblivion of the Kraken's gaping maw, he found himself reliving all those occasions when death had tried to come for him in the past. He saw the Black Mamba's evil grinning face, mere inches from his, as they plummeted towards the ice-hard peaks of the Himalayas. He saw the liquefying features of the fish-thing, felt its scaly skin grind beneath his fingers, as the incendiary fires spread throughout the flooded underground tunnels. He felt the wind whistling through his hair as he dropped towards the bellowing Megasaur rampaging through Trafalgar Square below him. He saw the howling locomotive thundering toward
s him down the track. He saw the scarred, blind in one eye lion as it prepared to pounce. He saw the indescribable thing emerging from the sludge and seaweed as the waves lapped at the sandy shore, his feet sinking into the sodden sand, and heard its blood-curdling cry again.
And then he saw nothing but the widening jaws of the monster, uncoiling tentacles reaching for the Nemo, escape impossible now, even as their pilot willed more speed from the chugging sub, Constance praying out loud for salvation, the wrung-out doctor humming in a continual monotone to himself.
A shadow suddenly passed across the viewing port at the rear of the sub that blotted out Ulysses' view of the closing Kraken completely. Then it passed and the horror was still there, so close now that Ulysses felt he could smell the squid-beast's rancid dead-fish breath. And then, between the writhing limbs of the beast, Ulysses saw something else moving out there in the sea-gloom.
Dark shapes darted out of the abyssal darkness, dark finned shapes, and then the Kraken's pursuit abruptly slowed as it was buffeted to the port side and disappeared from Ulysses' restricted view.
"What the hell was that?" he gasped.
"What's that?" Swann asked from the co-pilot's seat in front. "Are we not dead yet?"
"It would appear not," Ulysses replied, as if half in a dream.
"Well thank Neptune for that," said Wates, knuckles white around the control column, a look of grim determination etched into the lines of his face. "Then we could still make it."
Ulysses peered through the porthole behind him, the others on board - silenced by the fear of what was about to happen to them - doing the same, searching for any sign of the squid-monster. Although the thought of catching sight of the Kraken again doubtless scared the life out of them, not knowing where the creature had disappeared to was, for the time being, that much worse.
There was the Neptune, twisted around so that even more of its superstructure hung over the precipice, its hind-section completely destroyed by the detonation of the engines. There surely couldn't be anyone left alive on board now, not one single space within free of the sea. What had once - and not so long ago at that - been the most fabulous submersible cruise liner in the world had now become nothing more than a watery coffin for the thousands of paying guests who had signed up to join the Neptune's inaugural voyage around the world. But of the beast that was hunting them, or the dark shapes that appeared to have driven it away, there was no sign.
Ulysses dared turn his attention back to the main viewing bubble at the tip of the Nemo and gasped in amazement.
There, not one hundred yards ahead of them, the Ahab was making its final approach to the underwater sanctuary the Neptune AI had promised them was out here. And what a sight it was to behold.
The structure of the base was not unlike a cowry shell, although rather than calcite and mother-of-pearl, its builders had favoured reinforced glass and steel. The central, flattened dome was connected by the twisting half-cylinders of tunnels to other outlying domes. These in turn were networked together by yet more, smaller tunnels. Seen from above it must have had an outline not unlike that of an octopus with its tentacles intertwining around it. However, Ulysses soon realised that the base would have been difficult to spot from above unless a vessel was already practically right on top of it. It had been constructed in the shadow of a massive overhang, projecting from the solid wall of rock which continued to rise up beyond it, possibly right to the surface so many thousands of feet above.
It truly was a wonder to behold, and a fortuitous one at that. But more importantly it was to be their sanctuary, a place where they could wait out this nightmare until real help came. It was more delightful to the eye now, to Ulysses' mind at least, than the sculpted coral gardens of Pacifica.
Where the construction of the base differed from that of undersea cities such as Pacifica, however, was in its almost exclusive use of steel and only a little glass, allowing those inside to view the outside oceanic world beyond the confines of the complex. The most prominent window was the bubble of glass and latticed steel at the top of the largest dome.
Ahead of them the Ahab was approaching one side of the largest dome from which projected a circular pressure gate. This was doubtless the facility's submarine dock. As the Nemo came closer still, Mr Wates guiding them in, in the wake of the Ahab, those on board could begin to see more of the facility. Only then did Ulysses begin to wonder whether they hadn't simply swapped one potential watery grave for another.
It was clear that portions of the base had suffered catastrophic damage. Several of the connecting tunnels had been destroyed, effectively cutting off whole areas of the facility. One or two of the outlying domes had also had their roofs caved in, the incredible hydrostatic pressures at these depths doing the rest. Even the main, armoured dome of the undersea facility had suffered some kind of damage, what looked like great burnt gouges scarred its exterior. Ulysses couldn't help thinking that the damage looked not unlike the trail left by a welder's torch, haphazardly defacing the surface, and on a gigantic scale.
Ulysses' doubt began to ease, however, as he realised that the darkened dome at the centre of the complex still had its roof and hull-armour intact. The damage amounted to nothing more than some superficial scarring. There was no reason to suspect that the readings taken by the Neptune's state-of-the-art remote sensing equipment had given them false hope, and he felt even happier about their situation again when he saw the massive circular door to the facility's docking area open like the petals of a flower and admit the impatient Ahab.
The Ahab was through and safe, as far as they could tell. The Nemo was only a matter of ninety yards behind.
There was a sudden flicker of blue light in front of them that caused all those peering out of the fore-viewing window to gasp and cover their eyes.
"The lure!" Ulysses exclaimed. "It's right on top of us!"
He spun round, even as Constance gave voice to a terrified scream and, sure enough, there through the aft viewing port - obscuring their view of anything else at all - was a massive watery eye. By the cabin lights of the Nemo, Ulysses could see every disgusting detail of that limpid orb - the soured milk flesh of the eye, ribbons of underwater worms clinging to the surface of the cornea, purple veiny tendrils worming their way through the jelly-like substance, the misshapen black pit of its pupil with nothing beyond it but Biblical oblivion.
"Hell's teeth!" he gasped.
There was a sudden crash and the Nemo was sent hurtling sideways as something massive darted past and pushed it out of the way. There were more screams, shouts born of fear and confusion, but, to his credit, Mr Wates kept his head and, with the aid of the engineer Swann, brought the vessel under control again. Only they were now several hundred yards further away from where they had been mere moments before. The colossal bulk of the squid-thing had buffeted them over the edge of the precipitous trench, tripling the length of their journey to the base.
The hull of the sub groaned and for one heart-stopping moment it sounded like the engine was going to stall. But adjustments made by the pilot and the engineer kept the boat moving, the two men dogged in their determination to follow the Ahab into the savaged facility. But whether the persistent little craft would make it before it sprang a catastrophic leak as the dramatic pressures continued to work on its beleaguered frame, only time would tell. That was not something Ulysses could control. In fact, from this moment on, there was nothing he could do to influence their dreadful predicament, and that fact made him feel agitated and impotent at the same time.
Where was the monster now? Ulysses had to know. Leaving his seat he ran down the aisle and flung himself at the rear viewing port, pressing his face against the glass in the hope that he might see anything other than what was directly behind them.
In the misty glow of the sub's running lights, and the curious flickering luminescence of the monster's trailing lure beyond - a strange moon shining in this abyssal region's perpetual night - he thought he could see the shadow of th
e beast above them. But then again, it might have been the outcropping overhang of the continental shelf.
His sixth sense flaring so hard it made him wince, Ulysses turned his attentions downward, into the impenetrable, utter blackness of the gaping trench below. Dark shapes moved in the gloom, triangular-finned shadows detaching themselves from the hadropelagic night. With a flick of its knifing tail, one of these shapes rocketed out of the darkness, and was illuminated in all its appalling splendour by the lights of the sub, before it hurtled past, ignoring the Nemo in favour of another target.
The sub rocked again as the second monster nudged it with a fin six-feet long. Ulysses slumped to his knees numb with shock. The Kraken was one thing - he had had time to come to terms with that - but this was something else entirely.
In that split second, when the lights of the Nemo had arced across its carcharhinid body, Ulysses had taken in every detail. At least forty feet from nose to tail, a man could have fitted comfortably between its open jaws, filled with serrated arrowhead teeth, each the size of a man's hand, and with row upon row of them, one behind the other, providing the creature with hundreds of individual cutting tools, giving it a bite that could easily have snapped clean through the Nemo in one go. From his slim personal knowledge of fossil records and fully aware that other prehistoric creatures had survived extinction in isolated pockets around the world, Ulysses recognised the monster killer fish for what they were - Megalodons.
He suddenly realised that he was shaking. Finding his centre of focus again, as the monks of Shangri-la had taught him - nearly two years ago now - Ulysses recovered himself enough to return to his seat behind Wates.
"Whatever you do, Mr Wates," he said, "don't stop."
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