"But you didn't stop there, did you? You couldn't, not after Miss Birkin revealed that she'd seen the murderer with Glenda, the poor old biddy. What was it the Major said about her? Oh yes, always looking for a conspiracy behind everything. If only she'd known. If only she'd kept her mouth shut!
"Only she hadn't seen you at all, had she? She saw me, escorting Glenda back to my room after the Blackjack game. She didn't need to die, not even by the standards of your twisted logic. And of course, having killed Miss Birkin you had to keep on eliminating all of those who might have overheard her conversation with the captain.
"She wasn't a threat to you, but then you couldn't have known that until later, after Captain McCormack accused me of your crimes! And while people were busy thinking it was me, and added to that when Cheng tried to carry out his ill-timed little coup, it gave you all the distraction you needed to keep killing, hunting down the doomed members of Project Leviathan one by one, making sure they all paid for what they had done to your father. What they had done to you. You even bought yourself some more time by faking that attack on Carcharodon and yourself, when your attack on the Captain failed.
"And each of them died in a manner befitting the part they played in the creation of the Kraken. Horsley the big game hunter, skewered like a shish kebab by a harpoon, Crichton the evolutionary biologist poisoned with a lethally evolved neuro-toxin, Denning the marine biologist, electrocuted with a prototype cybernetic tentacle that she had helped to create. And now you've turned Carcharodon into some kind of living bomb.
"So, what I'm thinking now, having reached something of an impasse, is - where do we go from here?"
"We're not going anywhere," Marie Lamprey said coldly.
Reaching behind her with her free hand, she lifted something from the control console, something Ulysses had failed to notice, so preoccupied had he been with the goings on between Marie, Carcharodon and himself, although he realised now that he had seen it before - they all had, only the last time it was being worn by a dead man.
Carefully, Marie placed the metal-banded helmet on top of her head. The coloured light-emitting diodes that covered its surface were blinking on and off like fairy lights. The wires that trailed from the crown had been bound together into one thick cable which, in turn, had been plugged into the console.
"You were busy while I was away, weren't you? Well, they do say the Devil makes work for idle hands."
Marie said nothing, but continued to press the barrel of her gun roughly against her employer's temple, staring ahead of her at Ulysses. There was something about the look in her eyes that suggested she was seeing something else, that wasn't there with them inside the submersible.
"I'm guessing you're as much a whiz with computers as your father was. It looks like you've also inherited his tendency towards mental instability," Ulysses added. "But what, precisely, are you planning on doing with that, Marie?"
A slow smile spread across the haggard young woman's lips, and at that moment it scared Ulysses far more than the gaping grin of the Megalodon that had tried to make a meal of him.
"Why, don't you know? This is how I'm going break this stalemate we've got ourselves into. This is how I finally put paid to the last of the masterminds behind Project Leviathan, behind my father's murder, and the son of the government representative who allowed such a scheme to continue. All in one easy stroke."
Knowing he had nothing to lose by doing so, Ulysses turned and peered out through the viewing port at the rear of the cabin.
There was something moving out there in the night-blue darkness.
The cold chill of fear slithered down his spine and made itself at home in his gut, turning his bowels to ice water.
He had hoped against hope that they had seen the last of it, that it had been destroyed along with Marianas Base. But deep down he always knew that such a result would simply be too good to be true.
He could see it more clearly now as it slid through the water after the two craft, chasing them to the surface, its grasping arms reaching out ahead of it.
And now Ulysses could see the injuries it had sustained, the damage it had suffered, caught up in the death throes of the dying facility. It had lost parts of several of its arms, sheared metal showing amidst the torn flesh. There were also whole areas where its pallid underbelly, and even pieces of its armoured shell, had been torn asunder to reveal its endo-skeleton beneath. And yet, despite having suffered such extensive damage, the Kraken still looked more than capable of taking down both the Ahab and the Nemo.
Ulysses turned back to face Marie. She looked very peculiar with the bulbous metal helmet covering her head down to her eyes, almost comical.
"I was wrong in my assumptions about the value the killer placed on their own life."
"What do you mean?" Marie asked, Ulysses having got her attention, piquing her own sense of the curious.
"You would willingly sacrifice yourself to see us all dead."
"With my father's killers brought to justice, my life has no further purpose. This has been my life's work. With it completed, there is no reason for me to keep on living."
"Why? Why? Why?"
Ulysses was slightly surprised when he realised that Carcharodon was sobbing as he repeated the same word over and over through his tears. The man who he had known to show hardly any emotion, other than anger or annoyance, was crying like a baby.
"What do you mean, why?" Marie shrieked, lifting the gun from the old man's head only to bring it down hard again against his skull a second time. "Haven't you been listening? He never listens, does he, Madeleine?" She was screaming now, her words a screeching banshee wail. "Don't you understand? You have to understand why you have to die! He has to, doesn't he, Madeleine, otherwise it's all been for nothing." Tears were streaming down her face again, mucus running from her nose.
"I understand. I understand why I have to die," Carcharodon struggled on, gasping for breath from the pain of the blows to his head. "I drove you to this. I understand that. But why did the others have to die?"
Now it was Marie Lamprey's who suddenly didn't understand. "What?" she said, her voice suddenly quiet. Ulysses thought he preferred it when she had been screaming.
"It was me. It was me who killed your father."
"What?"
"It was me. I shot him."
Marie's attention was now fully on the old man, slumped forward in his wheelchair at her side. He suddenly looked so very small and frail as he quietly confessed his sins, the two of them, employer and psychotic employee, master and servant, frozen in that moment of time in some weird parody of priestly absolution.
Ulysses readied himself. He could feel the moment coming when he would be able to bring this matter to its resolution.
"You killed my father?" Marie stammered, suddenly the uncertain, insecure Miss Celeste surfacing again.
"Yes. And there is another crime of which I am guilty. In doing so I helped create another monster, and this time I'm going to face up to my responsibilities and do away with it!"
With that, Carcharodon flicked the switch on top of the timer in his lap.
With a whirring hum the hand began to turn, the needle on the dial hastening away the seconds until the moment when the bomb would detonate.
"What have you done?" Marie screamed levelling the gun at Carcharodon again, holding the weapon tightly with both shaking hands.
The old man looked her straight in the eye and said with chilling calmness, "I'm bringing an end to this impasse."
The woman pulled the trigger. Ulysses heard the sharp crack of the gunshot even as he saw Jonah Carcharodon's head disintegrate in a spray of blood and bone.
It was now or never. Ulysses took a bounding step forwards. Still screaming, Marie grabbed Carcharodon's wheelchair by its handles and pushed it into his path, the old man's body lolling forwards as she did so.
Catching the chair in the huge gauntlet fist and the pincer-claw, Ulysses pushed back. Caught between the arms of the ch
air, Marie Lamprey stumbled backwards, the helmet falling from her head. Unbalanced she fell against the chair, skewing it sideways, before she toppled over, falling into the still open airlock.
The timer continued to spin round, speeding towards inescapable oblivion. Ulysses could still hear it over the muffled screams of the bound Constance Pennyroyal.
Without a second thought, Ulysses pushed the dead Carcharodon, in his invalid's chair, in after Marie and punched the control panel beside the airlock. With a satisfying shunk, and the hiss of altering air pressures, the inner door shut. Sirens sounded. Lights flashed. Marie Lamprey's face screamed at Ulysses through the small window in the airlock door. But there was nothing that could be done, not now.
With a sudden violent rush of escaping air the dead Carcharodon and the still living Miss Celeste were jettisoned from the airlock. The Ahab hurtled onwards, thanks to Selby's last act before he had died, the engineer having switched on the submersible's autopilot.
Ulysses turned his attention back to the rear viewing port. He could see the Kraken even closer now, grasping limbs outstretched, hideous jaws angling open. And he could see Carcharodon's chair sinking towards it, falling in slow motion through the churning water. And he could see Marie Lamprey kicking against the currents, arms flailing, as if trying to swim free, mouth open wide, silvered bubbles of air escaping her lungs in one last defiant scream, wide staring eyes, piercing Ulysses' own, staring straight into his soul, chilling him to the core.
The first thing she thought as she peered up through the porthole above her was how blue the sky was. She had almost forgotten, she had been dwelling down there in the ocean depths for so long. Seeing it now she could almost believe that what had happened down there, so far below, had been nothing more than a bad dream.
Only it hadn't been a dream. It had been a nightmare, and one from which she would never - could never - wake up.
The bathysphere bobbed on the rolling waves, making her feel a little queasy. She had stopped crying now, her tears spent, but the pain was still there, an aching hole in her heart, a hole that she knew time could never hope to heal.
She peered up again through the porthole. There were seabirds now, wheeling over the ocean under the porcelain sky, and something else, an iron hull, streaked red with rust, plying its way through the water towards her.
The vessel bumped against the side of the pod with a resounding clang. The bathysphere bell rang again, tolling an arrhythmic tattoo as it knocked repeatedly against the hull of the ship. A death-knell for those lost to her, far, far below the ocean waves.
She could see a ladder now - rungs black with pitch, crusted white with salt - and a man descending it. Ropes slapped against her small round window on the world and she could hear the shouts of sailors as the pod was secured to the side of the ship.
At last a face appeared at the glass above her. It was lined and weather-beaten, having something of a doting aged relative about it that comforted her. And then a kind smile spread across the crab apple features as twinkling eyes caught sight of the little girl inside.
"It's a child," she heard him say, his voice muffled. "A little girl, for God's sake."
Strong hands worked the hatch handle on the outside of the escape capsule and the sailor pulled it open, letting out the musty, stale smell of fear and letting in the rich aromas of brine, fish guts and stale tobacco. It was a heady mix of scents which, in that instance smelt like heavenly perfume to the terrified little girl.
A calloused hand reached into the pod.
"Come on, my little sparrow," the sailor said warmly, his voice thick with the apple orchard accents of the West Country. "Let's be having you."
Tentatively she reached up, putting her small, soft white hand into her liberator's meaty paw. His fingers closed around hers firmly and, in a trice, he had hauled her through the open hatch out of the musty pod.
"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" came a voice from among those crowded at the deck rail above them.
"What's your name, little sparrow?" the kindly sailor asked.
"M-Marie," she stammered, her mind reeling as she tried to take everything in.
"Marie?" the sailor repeated.
"Marie," she said again.
She listened now to the murmurings of the crew on deck. "What's she doing out here, all alone?" someone was saying.
"Who'd abandon a child like that, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?" asked another.
"Marie, did she say?" said a third. "Would that be Marie Celeste then?"
She looked up, trying to find the face in the crowd, the face of the man who had named her.
Marie Celeste, she thought. She liked the sound of that name. She wondered what sort of a life Marie Celeste would have had so far. With a name like that she had probably had a much happier life than little Marie Lamprey had had to endure until this time.
Yes, Marie Celeste. She liked the sound of that.
And then, jaws agape, the Kraken swallowed them - chair, Carcharodon, Celeste and all. The massive jaws hinged shut and, for a moment, Ulysses thought that the creature was slowing, pulling back, satisfied at last. But it was not to be.
With a flick of its tail the monster powered forwards again, closing on the Ahab once more.
This is it, Ulysses thought. This is the end. There's nowhere left to run now, no aces left to play.
The suckered tentacles reached for the sub, the vessel's autopilot still directing it straight up towards the surface, that hideous angler-fish mouth opening once again, the grotesque limpid jelly-saucer eyes locked on its new prey.
And then the bomb detonated.
The beast's stomach swelled violently, distending horribly. Ulysses could almost believe that there was a look of startled surprise in the leviathan's eyes. And then there was fire in the water, fire and an expanding ball of concussive force.
The Kraken underwent one last appalling transformation as its body - grey-green flesh, cybernetic endo-skeleton, waving tentacles, and crustacean armour plating - was ripped apart by the explosion, destroying it utterly from the inside out.
Marie Lamprey, Jonah Carcharodon and the Kraken were gone. For good.
EPILOGUE
Britannia Rules the Waves
The Ahab surfaced first, closely followed by the Nemo. Within moments, Ulysses was standing in the open air on top of the Ahab, drawing in great lungfuls of salt sea air, relishing the freshness of it, delighting in the warmth of the sun beating down on his face. The pressure suit stood unoccupied within the sub. In his hand he held his bloodstone-tipped cane once more, having recovered it from Marie Lamprey's stash that she had carried on board the Ahab.
Constance Pennyroyal huddled next to him, anxiously watching the Nemo for signs of her beloved fiancé. Her patience was rewarded a moment later when Nimrod popped the hatch of the Nemo's conning tower, the equally anxious John Schafer emerging after him. Without even a pause for thought, Schafer took a swan dive off the top of the sub into the Pacific and, with confident strokes, covered the stretch of choppy water between the two vessels to be reunited with his sweetheart once more.
As the elated crying couple renewed their promises of love, Ulysses and Nimrod made use of hawsers to pull the two tubs together.
"Where's Cheng?" Ulysses asked, as he offered his manservant a hand.
"I took the liberty of securing him below, sir," Nimrod said, with a hint of satisfaction in his usually impassive voice.
"Well done, old boy. Good thinking."
Nimrod looked exhausted and unwell. The trials they had all been through, and the wound he had suffered during the Kraken's final attack on the base, were taking their toll, now that the adrenalin rush of the chase and their escape from the beast had passed.
"That was a close call there," Ulysses said, flashing his loyal family retainer a wicked grin, "I don't mind telling you, I thought we were all done for that time."
"I had faith in you, sir," Nimrod said, struggling to maintain his mas
k of professional detachment.
"Thank you, Nimrod."
"So, am I to take it that the Marianas killer has been brought to book, sir? They have been made to pay for their crimes?"
"Oh yes, there's no doubt about that," Ulysses said, a wry smile on his lips. "Remind me, Nimrod, when we get back to civilisation to send a letter of condolence to Jonah Carcharodon's family."
"Really, sir?"
"Really, Nimrod."
"And what about Miss Celeste's family? Will you be sending them a letter of condolence as well, sir? Or flowers perhaps."
"I don't think so," Ulysses replied, his face suddenly hard as stone.
There was the roar and chop of a propeller starting up, and the water behind the stern of the Nemo became a churning spume of white froth. The tiny sub slid forwards, pulling the ropes holding it to the Ahab taut, for a moment even dipping the nose of the larger vessel, before, with a sharp crack, they snapped.
"Nimrod, what did you secure Mr Cheng to, I wonder?" the dandy said, his features relaxing again.
"I do apologise, sir," Nimrod said, his rigidly maintained façade of indifference suddenly crumbling, his face flushing in embarrassment, "there really wasn't very much else to secure him to. Should we pursue, sir?"
"I don't think so, Nimrod. I don't know about you, old chap, but I've had quite enough of breakneck pursuits for one day. Haven't you? I think we can leave him to his own fate now. After all, he's going to have to face the wrath of his superiors, and I'm sure that whatever they have in mind for him will be much worse than anything our government would dare to implement against an agent of the Chinese Empire. I'm not sure our new Prime Minister is ruthless enough."
"So, if I might be so bold, sir, what now?"
"Now, Nimrod? Now we just have to wait for the Royal Navy to pick us up. We're broadcasting on all bands a general distress call so it shouldn't take too long. A day or two at most."
"Very good, sir."
"And seeing as how the young couple are so bound up in each other, that just leaves you and me, Nimrod."
Leviathan Rising Page 27
