Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Page 21
His comlink crackled. “Okay!” shouted Mimi. “We’ve got the feed back! Jim—you all right?”
Jim was too busy to answer—and the power draw for the EelSkin jolt he’d activated wouldn’t have let him transmit for a few seconds anyway. The HUD dimmed for a second while it powered to send its 150,000 volts through the suit’s skin, and then went black for what seemed like an eternity for the discharge. When the display came up again, the beak-scraping and sucker-drilling sounds were gone, but the world was still black out there and Jim wasn’t fooled into thinking the kraken was gone too. He made a fist, raised his right hand in front of him, and sent a torpedo speeding into the darkness. It made contact almost instantly, and, giving it another second to burrow a little deeper, Jim raised his thumb against the detonator pad.
This time it wasn’t his jets that sent him backward. He tumbled head over heels through the darkness for what the suit said was eighty-three feet before he escaped the giant ink cloud. It hung above him in a black thunderhead, the dim glow of the burning phosphorous at its core flickering like lightning.
“Scratch one kraken,” Jim improvised.
The comlink was silent. Jim tongued the cue-card HUD.
“Hey,” said Jim. “Anybody read me? Mimi? Jerry?”
Still nothing. He minimized the cue card and called up the comlink status bar. The words
“Ah,” said Max Fiddler, “shit.”
From I, Jerry:
Danger is a media-induced state.
All right—I’ll grant you there was a time that this wasn’t so. Back in the days when a bad weather forecast meant you should bring your umbrella to work and not a submarine, when ocean-view property was actually a selling point, when catching the flu meant taking a few days off work and not updating your will, yeah, all right, danger meant something. That’s because danger is a study in contrast—it’s the threat of something worse around the corner, a catastrophic disruption of your delicate equilibrium. And if you’re going to disrupt that equilibrium, it goes without saying it must exist in the first place. No equilibrium, and people have nothing to worry about—nothing to disrupt. Shit just happens.
Except, that is, here by the screen. I’m constantly amazed at you zombies—drop my pal Jim on a savannah with a pack of pissed-off white rhinos, give him a box of hand grenades and a shoulder-cam, and suddenly you’re all squirmy and alive again. You start thinking and worrying and fretting—“Holy crow, Ethel, you think old Jim’s met his match this time?” “Oh Jeb, I don’ know I jes’ don’ know. Them rhinos nearly finished him the first time, and this here’s in their natural en-vi-ron-ment.” For those fleeting moments in front of your screen, you morons actually start to give at least a vicarious fuck about someone’s survival, if not your own.
I tell you—if Jim and I had come along thirty years earlier, that spark we’re igniting every week might actually have given me some hope for this dying wreck of a planet.
Max stabilized himself at six hundred feet and switched on his armour’s sonar to sweep the ocean above him. It wouldn’t show him squid—they were too close to the ocean’s density to register—but, with the ink-clouded water intervening, sonar was the only way he could find the studio and the comlink to the surface. He hung still and quiet, listening for the ping that would point him in the right direction.
Listening—and watching for another kraken.
But Max didn’t hear anything but the rasping sound of his own breath, and he didn’t see anything but the dark of the deep waters, the dying star of phosphor in the dissipating ink cloud. The sonar quacked as it finished its first hemispheric sweep of the motionless waters around him, adding final confirmation:
The kraken were gone—and so were the studio and his link to Wylde’s Kingdom.
Christ, thought Max, Jerry must be shitting himself.
It was possible that the Minnow had managed to pick up a small portion of his battle with the squid—but even if the crew had managed to fire the whole thing up the cable, the fight had lasted barely a few seconds, and most of that would have taken place in the midnight cloud of ink. And the script hadn’t anticipated a battle this early in the show anyway; Max had seven hours of air in his suit, and Mimi and the team of oceanographers had expected that a few hours would be spent on scripted chit-chat and a guided tour of the installation before any squid came up to investigate.
And now, just twenty minutes into Jerry’s big ratings comeback—Kraken!—was all but over.
Max started to chortle at Jerry’s unhappy misfortune—but at a soft ping from his headset, he stopped himself, listening for it to repeat.
The sonar pinged a second time, and then a third, and the dive computer flashed confirmation: it had located the studio sub, two hundred feet to the north of Max and below him by about four hundred feet. On the third ping, the computer announced that the studio sub was descending, and quite rapidly.
Max checked the dive armour’s help file. The structure and the life-support and propulsion system were all rated for a mile and a half, but the harpoon gun was only good for half that, and the cameras weren’t rated any deeper than a thousand feet. So as far as Jerry and the show were concerned, the studio and its inhabitants were already casualties.
Of course, by now Wylde’s Kingdom would be a ratings casualty in and of itself. Max had been around long enough to know that people didn’t tune in to Jerry Wylde to watch him get creamed.
Max hit the dive sequencer with his chin and told the suit to lock onto the studio’s signature and follow it down. Strictly speaking, Max knew the decision was counter-survival, but that was fine with him: off the air in the depths of the Atlantic, Max’s inner Jim really had no say in the matter.
The pings multiplied as Max and the studio descended farther: they were approaching bottom, or more accurately, side—moving in a neat diagonal toward the southern slope of the sea mountain. The dive computer correlated the pings with its oceanographics database and came up with a three-dimensional map of the mountainside, which it displayed in a small window at the top of the HUD. Max and the studio were represented by little red triangles. The graphic was gorgeous—it reminded Max of the time he and Jerry had made a tiger-bombing trek to the southern Himalayas—and Max became so engrossed in the memory that he nearly gave himself a concussion against the back of his helmet when one of the cameras popped with a crack like a gunshot at 1,287 feet.
Head throbbing, Max wondered just what he expected to do when he got down there. If he were serious about rescuing Mimi and the rest of the crew, he would have done better to surface and report on the situation to Jerry. If he were halfway responsible, never mind just survival-oriented, Max supposed, that’s what he’d do.
The second camera imploded at 1,315 feet, but this time Max was braced for it and just winced.
The thing was, Max wasn’t halfway responsible. What he was, apparently, was more than halfway suicidal. And no amount of AbSucker treatments or spasmodics or steroids or anything else could mask that.
But what he also was, he realized, was damn curious.
Because from the look of the graphic on his HUD, the sub studio had just come to a landing on a high ledge of the mountain Mimi believed to be a giant-squid breeding ground.
Max accelerated downward, toward the now-motionless sub. Once again, the lights emerged from the murk—not as many as before, but enough to see by—and Max made sure to film it, in the seconds before the suit’s third and final camera cracked under the pressure.
“Mimi,” said Max as he grew nearer. “Do you read me?”
“Jim?” Her voice sounded woozy, like she’d been drinking.
“Max,” said Max.
“Max,” said Mimi. “What the hell are you doing here? You should have broken for surface right away. Jesus, you should do that now
. . . . It’s trouble down here.”
There was a lot of silt stirred up around the studio; all Max could make out was about a dozen shafts of light, tangled in an opening-night criss-cross. The shafts didn’t move, but they flickered now and again, as though occluded by something very large passing over it. Something the shape of a squid.
Max thought about it: if the sub had only fallen, it should have fallen straight down, not on a diagonal—from what Max had gathered, it was essentially a diving bell, with no locomotive power of its own. Something had pushed it.
“Trouble,” Max repeated. “How many squid?”
“Three,” said Mimi. Her voice trembled, and he heard the ugly chuffing sound of a man’s tears in the background. “One’s about thirty feet, another one’s just a baby—fifteen, seventeen feet. And a big one—I can’t tell how big, but from the parts of it we’ve seen, I’d say it tops a hundred.”
“Feet?” said Max.
“Feet,” confirmed Mimi.
As if on cue, Max saw an immense tentacle pull itself out of the cloud and wave a moment in the water, trailing silt in gossamer threads. It was wrapped around an object—a metal triangle, very tiny in the huge tentacle. It was a piece, Max realized, of the squid cage.
“It’s got a piece of the cage,” observed Max.
“Yeah,” said Mimi. “It’s got quite a few pieces of the cage. They all do. The bastards are cooperating. . . . This makes no sense, Jim . . . Max. . . . Ah, shit. Squid shouldn’t be smart enough for this. They’re opening us. Listen.”
The comlink went silent for a moment—and sure enough, Max heard an echoing sound of rending metal: both over his headphones and vibrating through the walls of his armour.
“Wow,” said Max.
“Yeah,” said Mimi, her voice taking on a weary affection. “Wow. God, Jim. You are so malleable.”
Max nudged on the jets and inched forward. His heart was thundering, and his mouth was dry as a desert. What the hell was he going to do here? Three squids, and one of them big as Godzilla. The monster tentacle let go of the metal and descended back into the silt cloud, which itself immediately expanded away from a mysterious crash-and-scrape of metal-on-rock within it. One of the lights winked out, and then another, and one more.
Max hit the jets again, and now he shot down toward the cloud of muck. “Mimi!” he shouted into his comlink. “What’s going on in there?”
Mimi spoke quickly, shouting herself over various alarms sounding in the background. “Shit! Shit! They’ve stripped away the cage! Ah, shit! It’s gotten in! Jesus, Jim, it’s inside the cage!”
Max entered the cloud, and his view filled instantly with dancing motes of dirt. Fearful of hitting the mountainside, he reversed the jets. “Jim, Jim, Jim,” he muttered desperately. “You would know what to do.” But there was no Jim: Jim was just a character Max played on television.
And this deep down, there was no such thing as television.
There was another crash, nearer this time, but it somehow sounded softer. It took Max an instant to realize why: he wasn’t hearing it over the comlink.
“Mimi!” he shouted. The familiar amber
The silt cleared for an instant, and Max saw the wreckage: a twist of geodesic titanium, two or three lights dangling from wire, surrounding a shattered tangle of metal and plastics, all beneath a galaxy of air bubbles shooting toward the surface.
And he saw the squids. The smallest of them was indeed inside the cage, tail sticking out of the wreckage as its tentacles rummaged greedily inside. A larger squid hung above, tentacles spread like a spider’s web over the wreckage. And the third squid—the giant one, the hundred-footer—lay supine on the rock, its tree-thick tentacles lazily gripping torn pieces of the cage like they were toys. Its eye was as big as a manhole pit, and as black.
Max called up the heads-up display for the harpoon targeting system, and centred on the giant. It wouldn’t be a difficult shot by any means. His thumb hovered below the trigger, and he was about to fire when the small squid emerged from the wreckage. It had something in its tentacles, Max couldn’t help but watch.
It was one of the bodies, or most of one. Mimi? It was hard to tell—the body was not in good shape. It trailed blood like ink from its torn abdomen, and Max thought about babies—about the one Mimi had wanted to make with him. Maybe she had furtively conceived already. If it was Mimi’s body, their little zygote would be mingled in with the cloud. Max shuddered.
The squid dragged the body behind it, wrapped in three long tentacles, over to the giant’s head. The giant’s tentacles rippled and spread apart, and the smaller squid disappeared within them, dragging the body behind it. There was a flurry as the tentacles shifted, and a tremor went along the length of the kraken’s body.
Max swore softly. The little squid was feeding the giant. These creatures were cooperating, to pillage the wreck and eat the TV oceanographers. God, he thought: if only we were live now. . . .
Of course, if they were live, it would have been Jim and not Max, and he would have pressed the trigger the second the targeting system showed a lock, and the whole thing would have gone up in a brilliant phosphorous explosion. Then, before the fires had even dimmed, Jim would be off looking for the hatcheries and planting some shaped charges there, and moving off just far enough to escape the blast, but not so far he’d lose the shot. Jim would not feel a pang of regret about the deaths of the people in the studio sub, particularly Mimi, who might have been pregnant with his child. Jim would be so caught up in the moment that he probably wouldn’t have realized it had happened. And Jim would certainly not pause to wonder what the significance of giant squids cooperatively cracking open a studio submarine and sharing the meal meant about the way that squids’ brains worked and just what kind of a hierarchy they’d managed to build for themselves down here in the aftermath of their unlikely population explosion.
And, thought Max as he heard the click! of chitinous squid-sucker boring against his armour and felt himself being drawn backward and up and then fast around, Jim would not have likely let a fourth squid get the jump on him from behind. Not as easily as Max just had.
The side of the mountain filled Max’s view for only an instant before the impact came. It wasn’t hard enough to rupture the suit, but it was surely enough to twitch his thumb. The ocean around him caught fire as the phosphorous harpoon tips burst and ignited in the deep-sea water.
SERIES FINALE:
I, MAX
The GET team found him in the evening, a coal-black knob at the edge of the Minnow’s spill. They were using hovercraft too small to haul the armour on board, so Max didn’t actually see a doctor until one of the craft had hooked up a chain and hauled him back to the base at Sable Island and a team of GET engineers cut him out of the damaged suit.
Max was a mess. The hard-shell suit had protected him from nitrogen narcosis, but at some point Jerry’s three-day regimen of spasmodics and steroids and liposuction had caught up with Max. When the med team cracked open the suit, they found him in full spasmodic flashback.
He’d already shattered his left elbow, cracked his collarbone, and nearly bit his tongue off. Apparently he’d been hallucinating as well.
Max’s delicate condition led to a spirited but inconclusive debate among the command staff as to whether to press the same charges against Max as they planned to lay against Jerry Wylde, and ship them both back for trial immediately. Because there were far too many unanswered questions, and Max Fiddler might be persuaded to answer them if there was a chance that charges could be stayed.
Where, for instance, was enviroterrorist Mimi Coover? Was she alive or dead? Where were the files she’d stolen from GET when she took flight? And, of prime concern, why did Jerry Wylde, mid-broadcast, pull the stopcocks on the Minnow’s oil tanks and unleash the largest oil spill the planet had seen
in three decades? All Wylde would say on the matter was the oil spill was the only way he could save his ship, but that didn’t make sense; the threat of an oil spill was the only thing that had saved him from arrest for the better part of a decade. He’d done the equivalent of shooting all his hostages when he opened his tanks.
The only explanation they had to go on was the story that everyone in the world who wasn’t battened down against Atlantica saw on their screens. And that, the staff agreed, was not an acceptable answer. Wylde’s CGI squid-monster was more convincing than the one in the old Disney movie, but it was still pathetic: a desperate attempt to inject some life into a questionable property that should have been killed a long time ago. There was something else going on—and Jerry Wylde and what crew they’d managed to round up so far weren’t saying what that thing was.
So they determined to wait for Max Fiddler to regain his senses and tell them what had really happened. Then, and only then, would they take him and Wylde outside, skip the trial, and shoot them both.
Waiting, as it turned out, carried its own risks.
Two days after they arrived, the sky over the GET base was a Jovian bruise, purples and golds and reds that swirled above them and mingled into a malevolent blackness in the east. The oil-dappled waters in the Sable Island shallows—where the complex’s hadrosauric buildings perched on thick alloy legs—reflected the rare beauty of that sky like the mirror on a cokehead’s coffee table.
No one stopped to appreciate that beauty. The sky told them all what the satellite ring would confirm once they reached the command polyp at the low-lying island’s highest point. Atlantica was back on the move.
Max awoke to the roar of wind, the crack! of breaking glass, and a nail-tip pain in his elbow. Someone was tugging on his cast.