Now, suddenly the passage of time seemed hyper-real to him, as if his strange extrasensory perception was working in a new way, time slowing to accommodate everything that needed to be accomplished in what felt like, on the other hand, no time at all. He could almost feel the individual seconds ticking by.
He activated the controls within the suit again and strode forwards.
In the hulking pressure suit, the armoured exo-skeleton dented and gouged from the attentions of the sea and the monsters that dwelt within it, Ulysses Quicksilver strode across the dock, armoured boots clanging against the metal floor.
"T minus five minutes and counting."
He reached the spot where Schafer lay pinned beneath the fallen pillar, the young man struggling to free himself, desperation writ large across his sweating, contorted features.
Ulysses paused for only a split second to look again at Nimrod's unconscious form lying nearby. Then he reached for the steel beam. Catching the pillar in the pincer-claw of the suit, the notched clasping pads gripping, the metal of the beam crumpling fractionally as they did so, he heaved. The pillar shifted and Schafer groaned, with relief at being freed at such a crucial juncture and with pain, as the injuries he had sustained flared.
Wincing, Schafer struggled to work himself free.
Grasping the other end of the length of steel with the automated right gauntlet hand, Ulysses strained again, heaving on the controls inside the cockpit, as his protective suit struggled to move the beam out of the way. With the beam moved safely away from Schafer, Ulysses let it drop. The steel crashed onto the decking with a resounding clang, bouncing once with the force of its fall.
Ulysses tried to kneel down beside Schafer to help him, but the bulky suit hampered him. The injured Schafer stared at Ulysses through the glass discs of the sturdy helmet dome, the look in his eyes one of hopelessness and intense personal desolation.
"How badly hurt are you?" Ulysses asked.
"I've been better," Schafer replied. "My left leg hurts to buggery but I suppose I'm lucky."
"It could have been worse." Ulysses agreed.
"Although right now, apart from the fact I could be dead already, I can hardly see how it could be worse."
The young man's love of his life was gone and Ulysses knew there was no way that she could have left willingly, after everything else that could have torn them apart during their descent into disaster having failed to do so.
He didn't need to ask what had happened, or where Constance had gone. The answers to such questions wouldn't speed a resolution to their desperate situation and there would be time later, if there was to be a later, if they made it out of there.
Ulysses needed Schafer with him; he needed every able bodied man to play his part, if those left behind by the escaping Ahab were going to get out of this alive.
"T minus four minutes and counting."
"John, stay with me. We're going to get Constance back!" Ulysses declared. "But, right now, I need you to see to Nimrod. I need you to tell me the old boy's going to be all right."
Schafer just stared at Ulysses, his face wracked with a mixture of shock and disbelief, fear and grief. He looked like he was about to breakdown and lose all control.
"Come on, John!" Ulysses bawled. "Is he breathing? Does he have a pulse? Is he going to live?"
Schafer blinked as if only just seeing Nimrod lying there for the first time. With tentative fingers he felt for a pulse at the old retainer's throat.
"I-I can feel something. There is a pulse. He's still breathing."
"Destruction imminent. Total destruction of this facility will occur in three minutes. This is your three-minute warning. Evacuate now."
Another seismic rumble juddered through the decking beneath Ulysses' feet.
He swallowed hard. Somehow, someone had initiated a self-destruct sequence that would totally obliterate what was left of the Marianas base. But how? And why now?
He judged that their not-so mysterious killer was to blame, from everything he saw around him. The reason was clear: destroy the evidence, stop anyone - but Ulysses in particular - from coming after him. His calculating mind working nineteen to the dozen he began to see how it had been achieved as well.
In all their time within the facility, they had seen evidence of great difference engines, cogitator banks, analytical calculating machines and Babbage-unit terminals. The macabre chair device had been hooked up to a whole pile of the things. And yet, not once had he seen any of the thinking machines in an operational state. He had assumed that the systems were all dead, but of course he had now received evidence to the contrary. And there was the fact that he had been able to establish a link with the base at all. How stupid could he have been? If it had not been for the restrictive bracings of the suit, Ulysses would have kicked himself.
With Ulysses having established the connection between the Neptune AI and the Marianas Base's cogitator network, waking the sleeping machineries after a quarter of a century's dormancy, someone still within the Marianas Base had utilised the very same link with the sub-liner to terrible effect. They had effectively used the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to activate long dormant systems, to bring about the destruction of the Marianas Base.
For a moment Ulysses wondered whether the ghost of Felix Lamprey had somehow lived on in the link, everything that made him who he was - his thoughts, his memories, desires, beliefs, disillusionments even - retained within the precision engineered clockwork guts of the chair's difference engine, waiting to be woken when someone turned it on again. Was it possible that perhaps Lamprey was not truly dead at all, those marvellous machineries somehow keeping his mind alive inside the withered husk of his body?
But Ulysses dismissed such hokum as impossible. Surely it wasn't feasible, not after twenty-five lonely years, and it certainly hadn't been a lifeless husk of a man that had done for Miss Birkin, Haugland, the Major or Professor Crichton.
He could only guess at why Felix Lamprey had not used the same method to wipe all trace of the base from the bottom of the ocean. He supposed that, having decided to use the Kraken to bring about the demise of its creators, having strapped himself into the chair, he could not then access the base's difference engines to do anything else, having committed himself. Perhaps access to the difference engines he needed had been compromised. Perhaps there were too many who could have done something to countermand his instructions and prevent the cogitators from making the final countdown, thereby denying him the option of initiating the self-destruct sequence. Ulysses imagined that paranoia had caused the base's architects to include such a system, if the Marianas facility had been erected at the height of the cold war that had been waged between Magna Britannia and its imperial Chinese rival, in case it was in danger of falling into enemy hands. In all likelihood, Lamprey may well have hoped to make his own escape from Marianas before the Kraken wrought too great a level of damage, giving him the precious minutes to get away himself.
However, now, at this allotted time, at this allotted hour, someone had activated that which had being lying dormant within the very foundations of the base, far, far below the ocean waves. Someone insane enough, with their own escape route already planned had used the link to their own advantage, to ensure that any and all loose ends were finally tied up for good.
With a weak groan, Ulysses' faithful manservant, never one to shirk his responsibilities or be accused of dereliction of his duty, stirred at Schafer's touch.
Ulysses felt a surge of relief pass through every fibre of his being. "I knew you wouldn't let me down, old chap," he said quietly, as Schafer helped Nimrod into a sitting position, seeing what he could do for the cut on his head. After all, every able-bodied man would have to play his part, if any of them were going to escape from the base with their lives.
And talking of able-bodied men...
Still encased within the pressure suit, Ulysses cut an imposing figure as he strode towards Cheng's place of confinement.
&nbs
p; Harry Cheng physically withered before him, recoiling as much as was possible, given his state of bondage, until Ulysses slammed to an abrupt halt a few feet from him.
For a moment they regarded each other, Ulysses seeing Cheng through the panels of thick glass in the portholes of his helmet, a cowering wretch who had tried to seize control and take over but who had failed, now looking like he was convinced that his time had come.
"T minus two minutes and counting," came the monotonously cheerful voice of the Neptune AI as the countdown continued to echo from the walls of the dock.
Ulysses raised the massive, pincer arm of the mechanised suit above his head.
"Mr Quicksilver, have mercy. I beg your most humble apologies for my impolite actions earlier. It was not my wish that anyone lose their life."
Not a word issued from the speakers of the suit. The heavy claw hung there, motionless in mid-air.
Cheng pulled back as far as he could, exposing the links of the cuffs against the bare metal of the pillar to which he had been chained. There could be no doubt now that he believed Ulysses was going to finish him.
The claw swept down, describing a slow scything arc. There was the sound of impact, the shearing scream of metal on metal, the jingling of shattered links raining down on the deck, and Harry Cheng tumbled backwards onto the floor.
He sat up, looking at Ulysses with equal parts amazement and elated relief, distractedly rubbing at his bloodied wrists.
"Don't make me regret doing that," Ulysses' voice boomed from within the suit.
Cheng scrambled to his feet. Then, body straight, he bowed low. "I am your humble servant," he said.
"So, Nimrod, you think you can pilot this?"
Easing himself into one of the padded leather seats, Ulysses' loyal aide did his best to make himself comfortable, dabbing at the open wound on his head again with his no longer pristine handkerchief.
"Yes, sir. It shouldn't be too difficult."
"It certainly won't be if I take the co-pilot's seat," Cheng offered, smiling weakly and climbing into the seat next to him.
There was a moment's awkward silence. Nimrod looked back to where his master stood, squeezed into the cabin of the Nemo, still encased inside the massive pressure suit. Ulysses said nothing.
''Very well, sir," Nimrod said graciously, his aquiline features not betraying any emotion whatsoever. "That would be most kind."
"Take us out then, Nimrod," Ulysses commanded, as John Schafer buckled himself into a seat behind the pilots' position.
"As you wish, sir."
Slowly the Nemo powered up, its propeller chopping the water noisily behind it, and then, ballast tanks filling, it sank below the unsettled waters of the sub-dock and glided towards the open pressure gate. And then they were through.
Leaving Marianas Base behind - a strange, haunted place that had on first impressions appeared to be a place of sanctuary - the Nemo powered after the Ahab, already a good hundred yards ahead of their position.
"It's now or never, Nimrod," Ulysses stated soberly, observing the distant shape of the vessel chugging away from them. "We have to catch up with that sub."
"And then what?" Schafer asked.
Ulysses fixed the young man with a thoughtful look through a side port in the helmet dome.
"Don't worry, I'll think of something."
"Sir, I hope you don't mind me asking," Nimrod said. "But you do know what you're doing, don't you?"
"Oh, you know me, Nimrod. I'm making this up as we go along."
"Very well, sir. It is as I suspected."
Seeing the horrified expression on Schafer's face, Ulysses laid the gauntlet hand of the suit gently upon the young man's shoulder.
"Don't worry, old chap," his voice crackled from the suit speakers. "We'll reunite you with your precious Constance soon enough."
"And what of the Kraken?" It was Cheng who threatened to jinx their enterprise with his talk of the sea monster.
Ulysses turned awkwardly in his suit so that he could see beyond the viewing port at the rear of the Nemo's passenger pod. The Marianas Base was already a shrinking conglomeration of broken domes, like cracked open eggs, overshadowed by the cliff-spur above it. And there, amidst the twisted spars and shattered structures the squid-beast wrestled with a stubbornly resisting hull section, caught up in its own frenzied assault, as if it was determined to bring an end to the place that had spawned it, nature using this most unnatural of tools to eradicate what had been begun here twenty-five years before.
"As I said, Cheng, it's now or never. So let's make the most of now, shall we?"
"T minus one minute and counting," the sober English voice resounded around the empty dock, but there was no one left alive to hear it.
"Fifty seconds," the AI told the corpse of Lady Josephine Denning, rigor mortis having locked her body into the pose that electrocution by mecha-tentacle arm had forced upon it.
"Forty seconds," it announced to the floating bodies belonging to the two crewmen of the Neptune, the purser and Mr Wates, gunned down as they had tried to fulfil their obligations to those they had helped save from drowning.
"Thirty seconds," it addressed the dead Captain Connor 'Mac' McCormack, hands still clasped to the ugly wound in his belly, the late Dr Ogilvy and the deceased engineers Swann and Clements, left behind in the dive preparation chamber.
"Twenty seconds," the voice boomed from the intercom panel in the Marianas archive, where Professor Maxwell Crichton lay, his face locked in a grimace of perpetual agony, the venom having done its work with deadly efficiency.
"Ten seconds," the voice of Neptune boomed from speakers in the workshop-cum-operating theatre, its continuing echoes sounding like the slamming of airlock hatches, Thor Haugland's hanging body swinging in its chains as the sub-seismic shuddering increased in intensity.
Nine.
Major Marmaduke Horsley, head hung low on his chest, the harpoon shaft still pinning his body tight to the chamber wall, stared with sadness into oblivion, a glassy expression in his never closing eyes.
Eight.
The mummified body of Felix Lamprey smiled its rictus grin with good reason now, knowing that the insane genius' final master plan would come to fruition at last, after so long a hiatus.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Framed within the rear view porthole of the Nemo, the detonation that enveloped the Marianas Base seemed like such a little thing. Nothing really to write home about, Ulysses thought.
But nervous anticipation did set his heart racing again as he saw the Kraken disappear within the expanding sphere of light that suddenly brought stark luminescence to the abyssal night.
Had the abomination been destroyed, caught up within the sphere of destruction, which came like the wrath of the God of the Sea claiming its own?
Tears obscuring her vision, mucus running thickly from her nose and into her mouth, she pulled hard at the life-pod hatch. A blubbering moan of despair issued from between her quivering lips, from deep inside her - so heart-rending a sound from one so young - at last, all her weight hanging off the door handle, she felt the clamp depress in her hands and with a slow gasp of compressed air and the creak of complaining hinges, she pulled the hatch open.
She clambered into the bathysphere capsule with ease, pulling the hatch shut again behind her, young muscles straining as she activated the locking clamps, sealing the pod tight.
In a moment of near panic she tried to make sense of the instrument panel above her head, all winking lights, dials and switches. But then she saw what her father had always told her to look for, on those occasions when he had reminded her of the safety protocols active within Marianas Base.
She slammed her open palm against a large red button and then collapsed back into the padded seat behind her, trembling fingers attempting to secure the harness straps over her shoulders and across her waist, as the warning siren blared its discordant wail, alerting the bathysphere
's passenger that it was about to blast free of the base, a sinister crimson light filling the pod with its hellish glow.
She tensed in her seat, eyes squeezed tight shut, teeth gritted in terror, desperate hands clutching for the doll that wasn't there, her ever faithful companion who could have seen her through this and made her feel better, but whom she had been forced to leave behind, just like her beloved father.
And then, announced by a deafening clunk-chsssss, the locking clamps blew, hurling the bathysphere away from the facility, the tiny escape capsule soaring upwards through the miasmal darkness, heading for the surface and safety thousands of feet above, the child howling in anguish, knowing that she would never see her father again.
He was inside the airlock now, the huge suit barely fitting inside the conning tower airlock of the submersible. The Nemo was closing on the Ahab at last, the smaller sub apparently the faster of the two.
Ulysses waited, with bated breath, his heart thumping hard against his ribs, every sense heightened by the rush of adrenalin pulsing through his body.
The crackle of static interference that presaged the activation of the radio pick-up in his helm was followed by the measured tones of his manservant's voice.
"We are closing, sir. Nemo will be in range in three, two, one. Ahab in range. It's now or never, sir."
"Now or never," Ulysses whispered, his mouth suddenly dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.
"Good luck, sir."
Leviathan Rising Page 25