by E. E. Knight
“It’s like a diving bell. They’re growing stuff in here, or drying it, or preserving it.” She pointed at the nets full of berries, or grapes, or whatever they were.
“I don’t like this. I feel like these vines are reaching for me.”
She plunged her face into the water; the taproots that held the spheres had masses of fronds waving back and forth in the lagoon current. They gave off tiny, champagne-sized bubbles which rose within the diving bell, evidently replenishing the oxygen supply. With her eyes, she followed the seafloor down to the glow, saw more of the crystal diving bells, then looked up again. “There’s more of these. We can use them to get to the bottom of the lagoon. To the glow.”
“You can dive that deep without a helmet?”
“I’ve heard of pearl divers who go deeper, just on what they can carry in their lungs.”
“You’ll need weights,” Borg said, blowing his water wings back up. “My arms will do for me. I’m a fantastic sinker.”
“I remember.” They left the crystal diving bell suspended in its seaweed cables, and Lara led him toward the surface. On shore, they filled their flipper bags with rocks. Lara put her guns back in their plastic bags and secured them in her holsters, and then they turned and waded out into the lagoon.
“You ready?” she asked, kicking with her flippers to stay on the surface.
“I’ll follow you.”
“If you need to go back to the surface, just grab me and do a dive kill.” She demonstrated the classic throat-cut pantomime. “Just rise slowly and wait for me at the mango tree where we hid the gear.”
They both took three deep breaths and plunged into the undersea world of Blood Bay.
***
They dove, Lara leading Borg with the knotted line. They rested and caught their breath in the first diving bell, then swam to the next in the direction of the blue glow at the bottom. The second held more masses of the odd bulbs, some as big as a healthy-sized lemon. They made easy adjustments to the changing water pressure thanks to the diving bells. The diving bells obviated the ear pain and the feeling of being wrapped up by a python from sinus cavities to diaphragm that made deep skin diving a mixed pleasure on the way down.
From the second diving bell they examined the lagoon-bottom glow. It came from a dome—almost a sphere. The top of it was perhaps thirty meters below the surface, the bottom sixty. The glowing dome rested upon an upthrust rock like a seer’s crystal ball on its mount. The gash of a deep abyss ended at the upthrust. Lara had a hard time gauging the scale of the dome, but she thought it looked to be about the size of the Pantheon in Rome: roughly the same size as the dome at the Whispering Abyss.
Borg elbowed her. “Lara, at the bottom of the sphere.”
A pair of figures with smallish flippers swam out from under the edge of the dome and disappeared into shadow at the lagoon floor.
“Next we’ll head for that sphere,” she said, pointing to a small one near the dome.
“Long swim, Lara. There is another one, closer, on the way,” Borg said.
Lara spotted gray shapes in the blue glow, with odd T-shaped heads.
“Look around the base of it. Those are sharks. Hammerheads. They can be dangerous, but their usual prey is stingrays—that’s why their heads are like that, to pin the rays.”
“I’d rather not get pinned. Sounds like my drowning dream. The far one it is.”
They filled their lungs and dove again, a long downward glide. The sharks fled as they passed—were they afraid of swimmers here? Lara did not want to meet anyone who frightened a great hammerhead. Lara looked up at the diving bell they were bypassing. She saw feet hanging down. She waved Borg on and made a detour.
The diving bell held two bodies. She recognized both from the ceremony on the beach: the older woman and the first man in, the one with the bad leg and the head wound.
She took a quick breath of air and dove to catch up with Borg.
He hung about the bottom of the final diving bell. When he saw she was on her way, he entered and rose.
“What was that about?” he asked, after they’d taken a few breaths. This sphere was apparently unused or had recently been emptied; nothing hung within, though the taproot and undersea vines still kept it full of oxygen.
“Two of the people who walked into the water—their bodies ended up there.”
Borg asked the question on her mind. “Where are the others?”
“I’m not sure I want to find out.”
“Where to next?”
“The dome. At the bottom where it overhangs the rock.”
“If we see other divers?”
“Avoid them. Maybe the Méne swim in and out of here all the time. If we can’t find an entrance, we meet back here.”
Nearer to the dome, Lara saw that the light came in patches rather than being uniform. The sandy floor looked like an underwater vineyard. Stakes held plant tendrils in place, and there was none of the riotous mix of corals, rock, and plant life of a typical near-shore bottom. Lara put her hand on the meter-thick crystal of the dome. The translucent crystal was faceted irregularly, as though it had been grown into the dome shape rather than cut. She looked beneath the lip and saw air trapped within, and waved for Borg to follow. They broke the surface among thick roots that reminded her of mangrove growth, stretching from crystal to rock seabed and back again in a tangled web. The light from the crystal gave everything a blue-green glow. She heard water lapping and dripping in a confusing mix of echoes—
Borg disappeared with a yelp. She felt something seize her foot. It dragged her down, she grabbed at one of the roots, but the pull was too strong.
Then she saw what pulled at her. She gasped involuntarily, losing precious air.
Three inhuman figures, web-fingered and flipper-footed, were pulling her down to the edge of the dome. Another three had Borg. Naturally green or made to appear that way in the light from the glowing dome, they had thick, swollen skin, great wattles under their necks, and faces reminiscent of the creature from the black lagoon. One of the three released its hold on Lara’s leg and went for her arm.
Borg’s piton arm bubbled as he fired into one of his attackers. The creature folded at the waist.
Lara drew her diving knife and stabbed at the clawed hands pulling her down. The creatures seemed immune to pain. She tried sawing at a wrist instead, and the grip released. She must have cut a tendon.
Borg sent his claw shooting toward the surface. Lara felt the pressure of its passage as it shot past her face. It fixed on something, probably a root, and stopped his descent. Lara stabbed at another of the creatures, but only managed a glancing blow. The blade opened a shallow wound in the swimmer’s thick, sharklike skin, but no blood flowed. It won her a chance to grab on to Borg’s cable with her free hand.
Borg pressed his piton arm to the forehead of the creature gripping his left leg. Lara saw an explosion of gray tissue as the piton shattered its skull.
Her lungs screamed for air. She almost severed another webbed hand, stomped at the one holding her leg, her flippers making anything but blows from the heel ineffectual. Borg fired two more pitons at one coming for her, jaws agape to reveal pointed teeth. Both pitons hit home, and the creature sank. But now Borg was in real trouble. One of the swimmers had gotten him in a bear hug and emptied his lungs with a Heimlich maneuver. Another bit Borg in the fleshy softness behind his knee.
Face contorted with pain, Borg looked up at Lara and used his piton arm to release his claw arm from its mounting before she could come to his aid. Freed of the pull, the arm drew Lara back up into the dome, away from Borg, as the monstrous creatures dragged him down to the caves. She shot past yet another swimmer coming out of the depths.
She recognized him—or it.
It was the wounded man from the ceremony who’d been tipped off his stretcher into the lagoon. Where wounds had been, she saw thick, pasty scabs of greenish skin. Thin wounds at his neck—gills?, she wondered—leaked blood into the water,
and his eyes had a milky film covering them, so that just the vaguest suggestion of iris and pupil remained. Lara did not have time to make a more detailed examination; the cable drew her past him even as he reached out toward her sluggishly with hands that were now ragged claws. She surfaced back in the root forest.
Her lungs sucked in life-sustaining air. For an intoxicating second she forgot Borg, the swimming monstrosities, even the Méne, in the joy of simply breathing.
Then she scrambled up and out of the water, kicked off her flippers and turned, ready to stab anything that came up behind her.
Nothing emerged.
She clambered up the roots, into a honeycomb of smooth-skinned, fungus-covered wood, and found a place to hide next to the edge of the dome. She quieted the rage she felt at the loss of Borg by drawing her pistols. The VADS control screen, after some hesitation, glowed green to show that it was ready for action.
She heard water, lapping and dripping and trickling among the roots. The oxygen and clean salt smell made her feel strong and alert.
The crystal wall next to her diverted her for a moment. Unlike the outside, it was regularly formed from triangular facets about the size of her hand. She looked within the crystal and saw that blotches of tiny glowing growths clung together. Some bits floated, spiraling in the currents moving through the crystal. Evidently the dome was constructed like double-paned glass, with a space in between where water flowed and these organisms thrived. Animal or vegetable, she couldn’t tell without a microscope, and interested as she was, she had a bill to settle with the Méne.
Alex Frys, the Prime, would hate paying the wergild on Nils Bjorkstrom’s life.
The Tomb Raider picked a promising root and climbed up into the dome.
***
The space stole the Tomb Raider’s breath away.
She crouched among the roots next to the dome wall, peering across the arena-like circular space. Frozen, hardly breathing, moving only her eyes, she tried to take it all in.
The floor at the center of the great dome was over half water, a gigantic moon pool such as divers use in undersea stations open to the ocean. The mangrovelike plants grew in a web up the sides of the dome, pressing against the luminous crystal. Thinner branches grew right to the top of the dome. Here and there they flowered. There was something vaguely familiar about those white flowers, and after a moment, the Tomb Raider realized that they had been cultivated to make a map of the night sky in the northern hemisphere. She marked Ursa Major and Minor, Orion, and several other constellations, all formed from the white blossoms. Here and there tiny buds grew.
She’d seen similar buds before, at Ukju Pacha. Was this a saltwater variant of the Méne plant?
At the center of the dome, a clear crystal cylinder the width of an ancient redwood ran down to the ocean. The cylinder housed another crystal within, shaped like a screw. At the bottom, where the cylinder met the water, six long wooden spokes the size of palm trunks stuck out into the water, pushed round and round by thrashing creatures like the ones that had taken Borg.
It was a giant Archimedes’ screw. It drew water to the top of the dome, where it sprayed out in a mist, feeding the tangled roots there as well and perhaps feeding fresh water to the organisms in the space between the two domes. The Tomb Raider looked at the plump leaves on the vines. Some, new and young and uncurling, were as thin as a fingernail. As they grew, they swelled, it appeared, until they turned into the grape-sized fruit pods she had seen earlier in the diving bells, gathered there for some unknown purpose.
At the edge of the moon pool the nine platinum panels she’d removed from the Whispering Abyss stood fitted into a ledge where the root-covered floor of the dome met the moon pool. The arrangement and spacing reminded her of how they had been placed in Peru.
At the center of an orderly line of fourteen older Méne facing the water, Alex Frys led chants with Ajay. Behind them, held by cultists of lesser rank, Heather stood with some others. Lara marked that they had plastic cuffs about their wrists—the sort of disposable restraints placed on protesters and political demonstrators.
The green-skinned swimmers at the Archimedes’ screw left off their labors and swam to the edges of the pool.
“The Awakening is coming,” Frys said. “Power and glory!”
“The Awakening is coming,” his flock repeated. “Power and glory!”
“A new dawn is coming,” Frys said. “In power and glory.”
“A new dawn is coming in power and glory.”
The slice of water Lara could see from her vantage point boiled and clouded as something rose from the depths. The Tomb Raider made out the crest of a bulbous head the size of a weather balloon. It almost filled the moon pool.
Then the eyes, the terrible, shining, multifaceted eyes, began to glow with a red light bright enough to turn the dome into an antechamber of hell. The hair on the back of Lara Croft’s neck rose as she gazed upon the Deep God.
24
The Deep God extended a thin, rippled tentacle from the hanging, rootlike mass that trailed from the bottom of its bulbous head and rested the tip upon one of the panels. The Tomb Raider watched, transfixed, as Frys hurried over. He splashed into the water, and in his eagerness slipped and sat down hard.
The Deep God took no notice, but an irreverent chuckle or two broke out among the Méne.
“Behold!” Frys said. “Uhluhtc calls its fellow Deep Gods.”
Whitish etchings on the nine panels began to glow. The patterns now looked like circuitry designed jointly by Intel and M. C. Escher, the artist who did the never-ending forced-perspective staircases. Lara felt the dome begin to vibrate.
The tentacle danced across the panels. Lara Croft saw flaps of skin atop the Deep God’s head move, like flower petals opening and closing. When they opened, she saw fold after fold, ring after ring, of what looked like brain tissue. So the thing was called Uhluhtc? It was a fitting name.
“For the Deep Gods will wake, the Deep Gods will restore, the Deep Gods will rule,” the assembly chanted. “Power and glory for ever and ever!”
“Hear the Call!” Frys shouted. His face was expressionless. The Méne were silent.
A faint rumble, like whale song played through a subwoofer, echoed in the dome. The frequency was too low for Lara to determine its source: Uhluhtc, the panels, or the dome itself.
With that, the Méne’s eyes went to the dome. The Tomb Raider’s gaze followed. A single red flower opened to the left of the flower representing Rigel in Orion’s Belt.
“The sign of the Cataclysm,” Ajay called, pointing up at the red flower.
“Then the Deep Gods will wake, then the Deep Gods will restore, then the Deep Gods will rule,” the Méne said as one. “Power and glory for ever and ever.”
“Show your devotion through sacrifice,” Frys said, his face blank, as though he were in a trance. Only then did Lara realize that the inhuman monstrosity was actually speaking through the Prime. Frys was somehow channeling Uhluhtc.
“Give Uhluhtc the sacrifices,” Ajay barked to the Méne.
The Méne parted; the gun-carrying cultists shoved Heather and the other eight of the bound group forward toward the stairs into the ocean.
The screams of the sacrifices cut the misty air.
Long tentacles ending in three-fingered webbed hands the size of car doors reached for the bound figures. The captives screamed and kicked as the armed cultists shoved them toward the creature in the moon pool.
Lara had seen enough. She aimed her gun at the thin tentacle working the panels fifteen meters away. She flicked off the safety—
Three figures emerged from a dark archway of roots. Borg—soaked, bleeding, and bound, his piton arm removed—was dragged in by a pair of native cultists.
Alex Frys came out of his trance as he recognized Borg.
“Croft,” he said.
The Tomb Raider aimed. A shot echoed across the pool. The thin tentacle fell, twitching along its severed length.
; A moan, a moan the like of which had not been heard in twelve thousand years, sounded and shook the ripening bulbs from the vines. Lara shifted her aim to Ajay—
HOW DARE YOU! The Voice exploded in Lara’s head like a psychic bomb.
Through double vision, she saw Ajay draw her machine pistols.
LESSER THING YOU CROFT MAMMAL WOMAN PAY IN PAIN OUTRAGE!
Lara fought the drunken, painful sensation in her brain that threatened to paralyze her, pointed her other gun, tried to aim for the gigantic head, fired…
The lines of Méne dissolved into chaos.
“There she is,” she heard Ajay shout.
PAIN! TRAITORS FOOLS WEAK STUPID VERTEBRATES DIE YOU SHALL DIE ALL DIE!
The Deep God disappeared in a whirl of water. The pain went with it, and Lara could see and hear and think clearly again … just in time to duck behind one of the lichen-covered roots as Ajay fired her machine pistol. One of the Méne guards fired his Kalashnikov at her as well.
“No, you fools, you’ll damage the dome!” she heard Frys shriek.
Lara popped up on the other side of a mass of roots and took down the guard holding Borg with a .45 double tap to the chest. She fired at Frys as he dove among the roots at the edge of the dome, but missed.
“Kill her! Would someone please kill her?” Frys screamed from his hiding spot.
Ajay rushed toward Borg.
“Nils!” Lara shouted.
Borg raised the stumps of his amputated arms, but they did not slow Ajay. She grabbed him, pivoted, and suddenly he was in a headlock, held as shield between his former lover and Lara. Ajay fired a burst from her free pistol at Lara.
The old schoolmates’ eyes locked.
Lara sighted on Ajay’s right eye, placed her finger on the trigger. Ajay fired again, but Borg chose that moment to try to wrench free, throwing off her aim.
Lara wanted to shoot. No, too much risk of hitting Borg.
Borg, still facing Lara, butted his head backward and connected solidly with the front of Ajay’s skull.
Alison Harfleur dropped senseless to the ground. Borg fell beside her.
