by Jeff Carlson
"I don't see anything," Hunt said.
"She's pointing to our portside," Vonnie said and Ben shouted, "Behind the heated columns! There!"
The nearest vent was 1.3 klicks from the Lewis. On its far side, at a distance of 6.6 klicks, Ben had located a cloudy, rushing mass.
The storm followed a super-charged current up the trunk of the mountain. Most of its bulk consisted of particles of silt -- the soil, minerals and torn bacterial mats that seemed common in the Great Ocean. Like an immense serpent winding through the sea, the front end of the storm bulged, spitting tendrils into the surrounding water.
Inside this long, cloudy mass were thousands of rocks -- the spongy, ever-present basaltic lava. The rocks clattered loudly. They were small. They'd been mashed into gravel.
"That's a huge amount of material," Ben said. "There must be a mountain falling apart somewhere deeper in... Oh."
He'd identified other objects as large as mecha. They were smooth globs wholly unlike the tattered rocks. They paddled and fluttered inside the storm.
"Jesus, they're alive," Wester said.
Vonnie was fascinated despite herself. Maybe these are O'Neal's predators, she thought.
"Sir, permission for active sonar," DeBrun said as Ribeiro barked, "Permission denied! Weapons hot! Sierzenga, ascend to starboard."
The Lewis tipped upward to its right.
--They'll strike our belly! Brigit screeched. --Swim down and left! Swim down and left!
Most of the nanotags pulled away from the Lewis. The microscopic devices swirled into the darkness, cast in all directions. Beeping to each other, each batch generated just enough data/comm to imitate the Lewis.
The nanotags could not mimic the submarine's bulk. If the HKs painted them with active sonar, there would be nothing there, but Ribeiro had chosen his moment well.
As the Lewis swerved to starboard, it was obscured from the HKs by the southernmost peak. They traversed along the mountainside as the nanotags continued their hoax, although the tags weren't beeping only for the sake of beeping. The tags transmitted real data -- encrypted data -- that the Lewis combined with passive sonar, temp readings, and what little their AIs could see through their cameras.
They also had Brigit's uncanny sense of spatial relationships. Listening to her interface, Brigit wriggled with Angelica and the males, testing her extrapolations.
--Swim down! Swim down! Angelica screeched. Her arms knotted in shapes to indicate the Lewis, the mountain peak and the rogue current.
Her pedicellaria thrashed. She showed objects hurtling from the rogue current toward the Lewis.
--They'll rip our belly! Tom screamed.
At the same time, the astronauts in the conn drew their own conclusions. "Range five-point-eight klicks and closing fast, but the bogies will miss us by a good margin," DeBrun said. He posted sims on their group display.
The Lewis was at full speed, moving up and southeast at 35 kilometers an hour. To the north, between them and the rogue current, hydrothermal vents burbled on the mountainside. The vents created two heated pillars. This hot zone was partly what drew the current up from the depths.
As the rogue current passed the vents, it wavered, slowing to 80 kph. But before it entered the hot zone, the current moved as fast as 115 kph.
"I wonder how far it reaches," Ben muttered as DeBrun said, "We're safe. The current veers north."
"Maintain your heading," Ribeiro said.
"Yes, sir," Ash replied as Vonnie made one of the hardest decisions of her life.
She chose to trust Ribeiro, although Brigit was adamant. The four sunfish lashed, shrieking for the Lewis to turn to port -- not to starboard -- and down -- not up -- but Vonnie had just laid a new cornerstone in her relationship with Ribeiro.
Shouting at him would merely add to the chaos. He could hear the sunfish. If he wanted to heed Brigit's advice, that was his prerogative -- and for the first time, Vonnie doubted the matriarchs.
During their descent through the ice, the sunfish had skipped one sleep cycle. Brigit and Hans had napped uneasily while Angelica and Tom caressed their topsides, but Vonnie knew all too well how a lack of recovery time affected even the most shrewd and capable matriarchs.
It made them aggressive. It left them deranged.
Brigit's course corrections would steer them toward the rogue current. Why?
Vonnie brought her face near Brigit's topside, hugging her as she asked, "Do you recognize those things inside the silt and rock? Are they predators?"
--No! Yes! No! Danger! Brigit cried.
Ben scrolled through their data from the nanotags. "Sir, I don't think we're dealing with living creatures," he said.
"They're moving," Wester told him. The larger objects gyrated and flapped as if they had wing-like fins. "They remind me of manta rays or even pterodactyls."
--Turn! Turn! Brigit cried.
Vonnie punched her, demanding quiet as Ash guided the Lewis further from the rogue current.
"Dawson, tell me what we're looking at," Ribeiro said.
The old man was noncommittal. "That's impossible to say, Colonel."
"We're getting a lot of scatter from the mineral content," DeBrun said. "Temp readings are warm. Neutrino pulse shows some indication of internal structures like organs."
"Sir, the sunfish seem to think the... uh, the mantas will attack us," Hunt said. He must have been watching the transcripts from their AIs, and he toyed with his combat menus, matching warheads with targets.
"Do not fire," Ribeiro said. "Torpedoes will reveal our position to the HKs."
"Sir," DeBrun said, "sonar is detecting what may be another storm cloud of silt and mantas. It's five klicks south of our position and two klicks up. It's moving away from us. Moving slower. They're in a surface current."
Ben said, "If they are alive, they go wherever the ocean takes them. They don't have the strength to separate themselves from a current. There's no musculature. I see internal strands and wads, but not muscles. They're like jellyfish."
"They aren't uniformly shaped, either," Harmeet said. "There's more differentiation than you'd expect even in a primitive lifeform."
"Mutants?" Ribeiro asked. "My squad was told there are radioactive isotopes in the food chain."
"I don't think they're mutants, sir," Ben said. "More likely they grow with age, available nutrients, whatever adaptations they've made. They look more like plants than animals to me. Whatever we're looking at, they're more like bacterial mats than--"
--Turn! Turn! Brigit screamed. Alarm bars flashed on their display. "Colonel!" Hunt shouted.
The solids inside the rogue current were at the vents. Near the boiling heat, the current's boundaries were malleable. The ruffled water compacted tons of loose matter. One of the mantas whapped into a substantial block of silt. The long, dirty storm compressed into a tumbling mass. The front end of the current widened. It washed over the vent. One side of it was lifted by the heated column.
Rocks and mantas whirled up and around as if scooped by a tornado. Hundreds of them were flung away. Hundreds more were flung at the Lewis.
"The current comes apart every time a storm cloud intersects with the thermal vents," Ben said. "That's the source of the other cloud of mantas and silt above us to the south," he finished, although Vonnie barely heard.
In hab one, the sunfish screamed, flailing against Vonnie and Harmeet. Harmeet's brown face drained white. Vonnie felt the same appalling terror.
Brigit knew.
On her display, the AIs flickered through ten sims. Each sim incorporated Brigit and Angelica's extrapolations.
The Lewis had increased its distance from the vents to 2.3 klicks, but the rogue current's speed persisted as the storm cloud curled and rose.
Far larger than the horseshoe of enemy warheads, the storm shot toward the Lewis. It was too wide and too fast to evade. Rocks and silt and mantas filled the sea. Probable safe zones were at lower depths to port, exactly where Brigit had called for
them to go.
Ash thrust the Lewis into a dive before the word left Ribeiro's mouth. "Dive," he said.
The submarine's nose canted down.
"Fire torpedoes," Ribeiro said. "Give me active sonar and pulse. All personnel--"
"Torpedoes away!" Hunt shouted.
"--stage one to ESUs. Brace for impact."
18.
As the storm raced toward them, Ash adjusted her heading. She swung to port. The Lewis tipped in a steepening angle like an old plane initiating a barrel roll.
"C'mon, c'mon," she pleaded with the heavy sub.
"We're going to be fine," Ribeiro said. "In forty meters, level out, then dive again."
The storm came at them in clusters and strands. It wasn't a shotgun blast. It was an uneven, stretched-out swarm.
Inside its tumbling mass were gaps large enough for the Lewis. Ash aimed for a clear path through the debris, but there was another reason to dive. Turning into the storm presented a smaller silhouette and their armor was thickest on the nose.
"Our torpedoes will reach their targets in ten seconds," DeBrun said. "We'll make contact in--"
"Look at the tags!" Ben shouted.
Hundreds of rocks and mantas had blundered through their nanotags. The tags physically touched the mantas, and, as the Lewis sped closer, they gleaned more details from their cameras and neutrino pulse.
"We'll make contact in twenty," DeBrun said as Ben shouted, "The mantas can't--!"
Fifteen torpedoes detonated, illuminating the water, deafening their sonar, yet Brigit had memorized the trajectory of every rock. She and Angelica writhed, augmenting the Lewis's sims with their depictions of the storm.
"Here and here," Ribeiro said, directing Ash.
Open spaces had developed among the explosions, but each blast had also contorted the water. "Sir, we'll be hit," Ash said. "There's a manta--"
"The mantas can't hurt us!" Ben shouted. "They're thermophile growths!"
Bacterial mats, Vonnie thought.
She bowed her head, not in surrender but in self-reproach. How many times would they fool themselves?
When the Lewis had descended over the mountains, they'd let the HKs encircle them as they gazed at the magma vents. Then she'd disregarded Brigit's warnings as she stared at a fantasy of higher lifeforms. Again and again, Earth's crews had been deluded by curiosity and hubris.
Maybe the sunfish with their cold intellects were better, more effective. Wasn't that why armies trained men like Ribeiro to act like machines? Ash had been sculpted by the same coldness. So had Peter and Jan.
If all of us were colder, we wouldn't have distracted Ribeiro from looking for the PSSC. We wouldn't have allowed ourselves to be herded through the mountains into this sea. It was a trap. We babbled about cities while the HKs set us up.
"Five seconds," DeBrun said.
Woodenly, Vonnie tapped her display, prepping their Emergency Survival Units. Stage one was mostly automatic. The job wasn't enough to counteract her spiraling mood.
The Lewis shuddered. They were caught in a vortex as they passed between the concussions of the torpedoes. Shockwaves bumped them sideways and down, slapping at the hull like huge, invisible hands.
Vonnie shuddered, too. She remembered the homicidal rage she'd felt during the battle between the Jyväskylä and the Dongfangzhixing. She was tired of being a victim. She had been blindsided too often. By now, she should be battleworn, a veteran, an asset, a matriarch, not a child in an adult's universe.
It's past time for me to kill first and dream later. If we get out of this alive, I swear I'll--
A dull crump shook the hull. They'd rammed into a manta. It slid across their nose like a pouch of salt juice and tar, laying a fibrous blanket over their tool pods.
Gravel jangled against their belly.
"I'm ascending for fifty meters!" Ash said. "Hunt, lead me with torpedoes!"
"Weapons free," Ribeiro said, authorizing them to fire at will. "Troutman, Metzler, sonar and maps! I want to hear from the nanotags!"
Harmeet screamed when another crump shuddered through the Lewis. Then another.
Their display glared with alerts. Hull breach in weapons storage A4. Tubes A2 - A3 offline. Tool pods C6 - C11 offline. Flooding in compartment 7.
The sunfish screeched. They were providing their own alerts, but Vonnie's head was overwhelmed with noise. All she could see were the sonar tracks from the conn.
As the Lewis convulsed, shoved upward by the impacts, more rocks and mantas billowed toward them.
--The next strikes are on our weak side! Brigit shrieked.
Ash was yelling. Ribeiro was yelling. Troutman was yelling. Ash: "Bring all our mecha to port!" Ribeiro: "Torpedoes, no fuses! Harpoons!" Troutman: "I've lost Six but One, Five and Nine are in position!"
The Lewis expelled weapons. The people in the conn fired harpoons and torpedoes as battering rams -- punching into anything they could slow or deflect -- without activating their explosives. At this range, the detonations would kill them. But without explosives, their torpedoes were lightweight bundles of plastisteel. Their harpoons were slender arrowheads meant for fish or eels.
The storm bashed through.
Vonnie felt the Lewis thrum with emergency power as Ash threw her propellers in reverse, struggling to drag them into a gap among the rocks. "We won't--!" Ash yelled as Troutman hollered, "Five and Nine are shielding--!"
"Hold on!" DeBrun roared.
It seemed like only Ben was not shouting. With a peaceful voice that was startling in its contrast to their mayhem, he said, "Some of those rocks are granite. Ash was right. The Top Clans' tools were probably lifted from the ocean floor. The currents are several times stronger than we predicted. Von, I--"
Soft hunks of basaltic lava and a manta whapped into the Lewis, knocking on the hull like drumsticks and a pillow. The manta also acted like a flat, gooey sail. It increased their backward drift.
In a stroke of fortune, the manta protected them from a Frisbee-sized granite shard. The manta burst, spilling its fibrous innards and juice.
The next piece of granite was larger. Mecha Five lunged into its path. Struck by the granite, Mecha Five smashed into their portside, its spine and legs severed -- but it had absorbed most of the rock's momentum. Shrapnel scraped through their anechoic coating.
It was the third and fourth pieces of granite that ruptured the Lewis. Combined with lava rocks and a clot of silt, a large chunk of granite crushed Mecha Nine where it was guarding the repaired hatch on lock two. The last chunk pierced the hull into ready room two.
The puncture was small and nanomesh might have sealed it, but at this depth the damaged hull could not withstand the Great Ocean. Ready room two imploded.
The Lewis squealed, its frame twisting. Water blasted into the Lewis, rupturing the walls on either side of ready room two, flooding lock two and hab two. The GPs inside lock two stopped transmitting. Ben was still completing his sentence. "--left you a message in--" when his data/comm shut off. Life signs for Benjamin Metzler, William Dawson and Matthew Wester continued for 1.4 seconds.
Ben had described the hydrostatic pressure as like an elephant balanced on a sheet of paper. If the paper tore, everything inside the Lewis was weaker than the paper. The pressure shattered the GPs and squashed the men into pulp.
They winked off of Vonnie's display. There were no reports of injuries. They were just gone.
Vonnie went numb. She went blank.
The Lewis rolled onto its flooded side, its guts contorting like a bent paperclip. The last external mecha was swept away. The storage room imploded. The pressure crushed their rations, meds, electronics, spare suits.
Leaks sprayed into the central corridor as loud as jackhammers as Vonnie exchanged signals with her GP, evaluating the Lewis via radar.
There was no room inside her for emotion. Drowning wasn't a concern. The pressure would crush them first, room by room, crumpling every bulkhead. Maybe the end would come sooner.
/> The central corridor was flooded. For the moment, it had held, but its walls groaned and stretched.
Her radar indicated that everything on their portside had been obliterated except decon two. If hab one or either of the decon chambers failed, the sub might break in half.
Could she stop the domino effect?
She drew repairs for her GP. Simultaneously, five panels opened on the floor of hab one. According to her display, the same square plates had opened in the conn. Each revealed a two-meter-wide cube -- an ESU -- that would unfold into a geodesic sphere as it catapulted from the Lewis.
Harmeet clawed at the belts securing her to her bunk. In her panic, she couldn't release the buckles.
Vonnie's soul said, Ben, Ben, but she couldn't stand to hear his name. "Harmeet, no!" she yelled even as she unsnapped herself. There were scout suits in ready room one. "We can seal the damaged areas!"
"Propulsion's at only forty percent!" Ash shouted. "We're descending steeply."
"Here comes another rock!" Troutman.
"Weapons offline! I can't--" Hunt.
"--where are--" DeBrun.
Crump. They were struck again.
"Jettison all probes and nanotags," Ribeiro said. It was an admission of defeat. Even if they died, they'd leave their mark on the Great Ocean. Some day, allied forces might benefit from everything learned by their probes and tags.
Harmeet sobbed. The Lewis anguished with her, its hull keening. The sunfish cried, too.
--Death! they shrieked. But they weren't singing of their own demise. Hans and Tom combined their calls with body shapes that implied food and eat. They welcomed the bloodshed with the insatiable gluttony of the Top Clans.
The matriarchs were also eager to swim in the billowing water. They could endure the pressure.
They could feed on the mantas. Explore. Colonize. Yet there was something else in their shrieks. Not horror. Not grief. A vow to defend their human clanmates?
Vonnie leapt onto the floor, which was a listing metal plain, slippery and steep. She grabbed the openings created by the ESUs. She climbed like a primate, hooking bare fingers and toes on every ledge or seam. Her nails scratched on the hard steel.
Tom scrabbled alongside her, and she rejoiced. The hatch into decon one was above them. Tom clenched at her arm and Brigit caught her waist. They hoisted her up. Tom's pedicellaria scraped from her elbow to wrist and her skin welled with blood. She didn't care.
