"Very well, your ladyship. Mr Wates, I want Lady Denning to go with you."
"Yes, Captain."
"And take the doctor too."
"What? But I don't want to go. I want to stay here!" Ogilvy protested, his anxious expression saying it all.
"Tough," McCormack growled with all the menace of a rottweiler. He turned back to his officers. "And the purser."
"Yes, captain," the Purser and Wates replied together.
McCormack surveyed those that were left. Necessity, having already made strange bedfellows of them all, was now spawning its own inventive arrangements.
"Professor Crichton, I want you with me. I rather suspect you know your way around here better than most."
The ageing professor gave a heartfelt sigh, but then nodded in weary agreement.
"And Selby, come with me too."
"Very good, Mac."
That left Cheng, and the young sweethearts, who had been through more together on this adventure than most couples saw in a lifetime of wedded bliss. "Whatever you want to do, I suppose I can't stop you," McCormack stated, defeated by the situation surrounding Haugland's disappearance.
"We want to do our bit," John Schafer said, clutching the hand of his beloved tightly in his, the two of them exchanging an impassioned look, words now unnecessary between them. Their earnest intentions could not be disputed, one determined to do his bit and cleanse himself of the foolish trust he had had placed in the charismatic killer Quicksilver, and Constance, not only not wanting to be separated from her fiancé again but now also driven by her own passionate desire for vengeance against the murderer of her aunt - a purity of purpose that was frightening to behold in the changed young debutante.
"Then I will go with you," Cheng said, bowing respectfully.
"Let us not waste any more time, or any more lives," the professor said with unexpected steely resolve.
He seemed more clear-headed without his comforting hip flask, as determined to do his part as Constance Pennyroyal, which was just as dramatic a change in attitude, compared to the edgy individual who had disembarked from the Ahab on reaching the Marianas base.
Having checked that he had a bullet ready in the breach, Captain McCormack led his party back towards the heart of the base as the others took diametrically opposed routes through the domes and laboratories positioned around the edge of the complex.
Taking this path they found themselves back at the laboratory where he and Miss Celeste had been attacked. He entered with caution this time, pistol raised, just in case.
"So that's where I left it," he heard the professor say and observed, with no small amount of disappointment, Crichton retrieve his battered hip-flask from a work top, and give it a pat like it was an old friend.
"Come on, Haugland's not here. What's through there?" he asked, indicating another door on the other side of the lab.
"We called it the 'Shop'," Crichton said, a faraway look in his eyes.
"Then let's try that."
Leaving the lab again by the other door, the three of them passed along an arterial passageway littered with broken beams and dangling bundles of cables, spilling from the roof like the entrails of a gutted fish, until they reached another of the familiar hatch-doors. The opening mechanism activated with a hiss of compressed air and the hatchway rolled open.
McCormack, Crichton and Selby passed through into a darkened dome. Eyes adjusting to the gloom, the captain could see that it opened out, extending away from them. There was a sharp intake of breath from the professor next to him.
"You've been here before, of course," he said.
"Once. Long ago."
With slow, careful steps, McCormack continued to lead his search party further into the vast chamber. Strange pieces of equipment covered gurneys and work tables, looking not so unlike giant examples of operating implements. Huge pieces of machinery, such as large crane-gantries filled the space, rising away into the darkness of the roof, slack links of heavy chains that would not have been out of place attached to a ship's anchor hung suspended between them. The place looked like a curious cross between a factory floor machine shop and a vast operating theatre.
"God in heaven!" Selby swore loudly.
"What is it?" McCormack demanded, his attention immediately on his chief engineer.
"See for yourself," Selby said, pointing up into the trailing loops of chains.
Hanging there, suspended a good six feet above them, was the limp body of the Norwegian Haugland, a loop of chain knotted tight around his neck. His tongue lolled fat and bloody from his mouth, and his eyes bulged from his puffy purple face.
There was no doubt about it. Thor Haugland was dead.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Enter the Dragon
"Now, what do you make of this?"
"I suppose it's a pressurised suit, sir, to allow a lone aquanaut to venture out into the abyss without having to be inside a submersible and yet still survive. And by the looks of these," he said, putting his hand to a massive steel claw, "whoever was inside could effect repairs to the reinforced outer skin of the base, or take rock samples from the seabed."
"It's a beauty, isn't it?" said Ulysses with a twinkle in his eye, as if enamoured of the monstrous thing. He reached up to stroke the smooth metal casing of a huge armoured arm, mounted with what looked like a Gatling-style harpoon gun, built-up around the left wrist of the suit.
Mounted on the wall behind them were a number of different attachments - from large drill bits to huge shears - which could be fitted to the wrist mountings of the exo-suit. It looked as though, in the wrong hands, it wouldn't be so much a diving suit as a one-man walking war-machine.
"Yes, or one could use it to break out of an inadequate prison," Ulysses said, a broad grin splitting his face from ear to ear.
There was a sudden loud clang that seemed to reverberate across the outer hull of the pressurized chamber within which the two of them had been imprisoned.
"What was that?" Ulysses was about to say, but there was no need; there could be no doubt.
There was a second crash that rang through the reinforced metal walls of the base as though the whole structure was a colossal tuning fork, the vibration making Ulysses' ears ache.
He looked at his manservant who was wincing in pain also.
"Something tells me it's time we got out of here." he said.
"It's time we got out of here," Selby said as a seismic tremor shook the dome, setting the chains rattling and Haugland's body swinging.
"Agreed," Captain McCormack said, scouring the darkness of the dome above them, as if half-expecting something to burst through the armoured roof at any second.
"And go where?" Professor Crichton demanded, his face ashen, his uncontained trepidation having returned with a vengeance.
"All I'm saying is we should get back to the dock and leave this place," Selby grumbled.
"What? Aboard the Ahab or the Nemo, with that thing out there?" Crichton exclaimed.
"Nothing but death awaits us here!" Selby shouted over the noise, staring at the dangling corpse of the Norwegian, the lifeless body swinging from side to side like a pendulum.
"You have a better idea, professor?" McCormack challenged.
Crichton stammered a response but it went unheard as another more violent crash shook the complex, louder now and seeming nearer.
"No, I thought not. Then follow me. Back to the dock!"
"Back to the dock!" Wates called, his ringing footfalls increasing in pace as he led his team past the habitation pods. The purser was having no trouble keeping up, although both Dr Ogilvy and Lady Denning were gasping for breath. With her ladyship he put it down to her age. With the doctor, from what little had picked up, withdrawal symptoms were the most likely explanation. "Come on!" he called. "Try to keep up!"
As he ran, Wates was becoming increasingly aware of a creaking, groaning sound, singing from the steel structure of the ageing complex around them like eerie distorted whale-song
. Whatever was happening to the base elsewhere, the years of salt-decay and sea-rust were beginning to take their toll, as the ringing clangs threatened to upset the uneasy equilibrium the structure of the Marianas Base had so far managed to maintain thousands of feet below the sea.
The huge water pressures, coupled with the Kraken's predations, were starting to work on the damaged structure in ways that could only lead to one outcome.
Rounding a bend Wates suddenly caught sight of another door ahead of them. "We're almost there," he gasped.
"Come on, your ladyship," the purser called from behind him. "And do keep up, doctor!"
"How far is it?" Lady Denning spluttered.
"Not far now!"
"What's that?" Wates said, suddenly distracted as his ringing footfalls on the grilled metal floor turned to wet splashes and he felt the uncomfortable chill of near-freezing seawater at his ankles.
He faltered in his run, the purser almost colliding with him as he too splashed into the spreading pool. The water was coming from the far end of the passageway, from where the door that would lead them back to the sub-dock stood firmly shut. Papers floated in the encroaching shallows.
"That can't be good," the purser managed, his face turning pale. "Should we go back?"
"What's the matter?" Lady Denning asked, staggering up to them, gasping for breath. "Oh," she said, the sensation of wet and cold at her feet causing her to lift the hem of her already sodden dress, "I see."
With a cacophonous groan of rending metal, a noise so painful to the ear that Wates half-expected to see the hull of a ship ploughing through the side of the tunnel, the ceiling opened up above them. Sheet metal, structural beams, utility cabling, along with flakes of rust and disturbed dust, rained down upon them. Reacting by instinct alone, the four threw themselves out of the way, falling in an untidy heap amidst the detritus and the sloshing water, throwing their arms around their heads to protect themselves from falling debris.
When the echoes of the catastrophic cave-in had died away again, leaving in their wake the protesting groans of the facility's superstructure, and when the abyssal depths didn't rush in, drowning them all, the four of them sat up and took stock.
"I'd say we won't be going any further that way," Wates said stoically.
"And I'd say we're trapped!" Dr Ogilvy shrieked.
"I've not had to endure all I've been through for it to end like this!" Lady Denning suddenly shouted, pent-up rage and frustration finding a sudden release. Struggling to her feet, she offered a hand to the purser, who was sitting on his rump in the cold lapping water. "Come on," she said, looking back along the passageway, "this way."
"This way!" Harry Cheng called back over his shoulder. "We have to get back to the dock. It is the only way." He waded onwards, splashing through the water that was sluicing around their calves, pistol in hand ready, just in case.
Behind him, John Schafer and Constance Pennyroyal struggled on, with single-minded resolve, the two of them united now in their determination not to be beaten by the predations of the beast outside the base, or the one trapped inside with them.
"Don't worry about us, Cheng," Schafer said. "We're right behind you."
The further they went, the further the water level rose. If the rest of the Marianas Base was in the same state as this intermittently lit corridor, then they really were in trouble.
Another bone-shaking tremor passed through the passageway, the vibrations creating rippling waves skittering over the water, and sending the three of them stumbling forwards. Far away they heard a metallic scream, as if part of the structure was giving way. Their situation had changed from merely desperate to downright disastrous.And then he saw it.
"Come on, my friends," Cheng said, the smile growing on his face brightening the tone of his voice, as he indicated the closed bulkhead door ahead of them. "There's no time to lose."
"There's no time to lose," Ulysses said, gazing up into the myriad bottle-glass 'eyes' of the pressure suit's domed helmet.
The metal surface of the exo-skeleton was tarnished, having been left to rot deep beneath the sea in Marianas Base, but Ulysses was confident that it would serve their purpose.
"Here, give me a leg up, old chap," he told Nimrod, "and I'll have us out of here in a jiffy."
"Very good, sir," his sullen-looking manservant said, assuming the necessary position at the back of the deep sea diving rig, hands locked together at the fingers, palms held upwards.
Ulysses put his hands on Nimrod's shoulders to steady himself, and a foot on the hand-step his butler had created. Yet another juddering quake shuddered through the structure and, in response, the base groaned an ominous cry of its own, the superstructure starting to lose cohesion in the face of the monster's relentless attack.
"I would hurry, sir, if I were you," Nimrod added, his eyes widening in horror as he gazed, transfixed, through a tiny porthole that revealed the ocean depths beyond. "As you said yourself, there's no time to lose."
Only a matter of a hundred yards from the spot where Ulysses' was struggling into the pressure suit, the leviathan beast of the abyss pulled back in a rush of jet-siphoned water, before launching another attack on the base.
It bore fresh scars from its battle with the Megalodons, but the stump of a tentacle that had been so viciously severed by one of the giant sharks - an ageing bull - had already healed and was even showing signs of new growth. Within a matter of days, it would be as if the tentacle had never been taken at all.
Rocketing forwards like a torpedo blasted from one of the submersible boats of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, the Kraken slammed into the dome beneath it. At the last second it splayed its tentacles wide and seized the frustratingly stubborn structure in its suckered grip, hinging wide its massive angler-fish jaws.
Its repulsive body pulsing, the squid-beast delivered a massive bio-electrical burst of energy, ten thousand volts of raw power, to the outer surface of the dome. Much of the charge dissipated into the water around the base but inside lights flickered, the air crackled with the odour of burnt ozone, and Babbage consoles sparked, igniting small fires within the mildewed laboratories.
The creeping tips of the creature's tentacles sought out weak points within surface of the structure, as its implanted hunter's instincts were pre-programmed to do. The pulsing signal coming from inside the underwater complex had driven it into a frenzy. It would not stop until it had retrieved the source of the signal and destroyed it. One probing limb uncovered a ruptured seam in the outer skin of an access tunnel and teased the metal free, peeling it like a banana skin and letting in the sea.
Sensors positioned along the dorsal line of the squid-monster's body detected the change in the pressure around it. Releasing its hold on the docking dome, the Kraken twisted its whole body to face whatever it was that was approaching.
The prow of the submarine emerged from the eternal gloom, heading directly for the Marianas base and on an intercept course with the monster. As the Kraken turned to meet this new threat to its supremacy, it presented its left side as a clear target to the submarine's already oncoming torpedoes.
The two missiles struck the beast full amidships.
The abyssal darkness, pierced only by the beams of the submarine's lights and what little luminescence shone from the glass bubbles of the Marianas base, became even more obscured in the aftermath of the twin detonations. Purple ink-blood clouded the water, distorted by the swelling watery sphere of the expanding explosion, pieces of pallid grey-green flesh amongst the debris.
The submarine ploughed on through the mess and murk, swaying as it entered the shockwave, chasing after the leviathan. But by the time it cleared the debris beyond the perimeter of the undersea complex, the Kraken was gone.
"We're saved!" Captain McCormack exclaimed. Bursting back into the dive preparation chamber, the escapees initial entry point, he, and those with him, caught a glimpse of the submarine that had driven off the Kraken, its sleek gun-metal grey shape cutting through the
darkness like a blade of shining steel.
Selby and Professor Crichton followed his gaze beyond the glass bubble at the crest of the dome, expressions of bewilderment becoming grimaces of disbelief which slowly transformed into smiles of joy.
"I knew it. They are here!" came another excited voice from behind McCormack, the man's English accent Oxford-perfect.
Harry Cheng stopped at the entrance to the chamber, John Schafer and Constance Pennyroyal stumbling past him, their own faces going through the same contortions as those of the professor and the chief engineer.
"I am sorry to disappoint you, Captain, but I think you'll find that you have been prematurely presumptuous."
McCormack turned. Cheng had moved away from the chamber entrance, so that no one could get the jump on him from behind, the gun in his hand trained on the captain.
"Cheng? What do you think you're playing at, man?"
"I am not playing at anything, Captain McCormack, I can assure you," the Chinaman replied. "What I am doing, however, is taking over."
"Taking over?" Schafer said, stunned.
"Yes, Mr Schafer. I am taking over. And as long as everyone remains calm, as I respectfully ask of them, no one need get hurt."
Cheng's attention was suddenly drawn back to the captain who, without moving and going for his own weapon, had turned his face towards the two engineers standing guard before the pressure suit chamber door.
"Captain, I would advise you against trying anything you might see as being heroic."
Even as he spoke, Clements and Swann, having lip read the instructions their captain had mouthed at them, went for their own weapons, moving from in front the hatchway as they did so.
Two shots rang out, sharp and loud in the confined, echoing space. Two thudding clangs followed as two bodies crumpled onto the steel deck.
Constance gasped. McCormack stood, mouth agape.
Leviathan Rising Page 20
