Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  22

  ELI GLINN DIMMED the lights in his stateroom and began undressing for bed. He slipped off his shirt and paused to examine his left arm. It was the one most injured during the sinking of the Rolvaag; the limb had taken the brunt of the explosion. Despite the low light he could still see smooth, shiny areas that had once been knotted burn scars, along with rills and ridges of wounds and shrapnel cuts. He flexed his arm and the muscles rose under the skin, their power slowly returning, helped along by his daily workouts.

  The bones in his arm had fractured into dozens of pieces, which the doctors had to reassemble, like jigsaw pieces, screwing everything back together with plates and rods. Most of the metal had now been removed—a few fresh scars attested to that.

  He raised his hand and stared at it. It amazed him how that awful claw, which he’d thought he would never use again, was now almost normal. He held it up and moved his fingers. He’d never be a concert pianist, but at least he could now dine at table like a human being instead of an animal, spilling his food and barely able to dab his own lips with a napkin.

  He flexed his fingers, then his arm again, rotating it this way and that, enjoying the freedom of movement, the lack of stiffness or pain. He turned with a sigh. This was unlike him; he was not the kind of person to admire his own body, to take pleasure in it. At least, he hadn’t been. But now, with his injuries almost healed, he was far more aware of—and grateful for—his healthy limbs. Somehow, that gratitude made him recall those who hadn’t survived—one in particular—and he felt the old guilt and sadness come creeping back in, like the tide.

  Stripping down to his underwear, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth before the mirror. His face looked better, the bad eye healed up. Strangely enough, its color was a slightly different shade of gray: just a touch darker. Fresher. Younger.

  The lotus root he’d ingested, on that strange distant island two months before, had performed nothing less than a miracle.

  He washed his face, dried it, combed his thinning hair, and returned to his stateroom. From his closet he removed a silk dressing gown, slipped it on, then went to the nearest porthole. Undogging it, he pulled it wide and breathed in the fresh, incoming air—the scent of salt and ice. A nearby berg was a mere gray shape in the darkness, dimly illuminated by the lights of the ship. The sea was calm, the moonless night full of stars.

  With a sigh he moved away from the porthole and lay on the bed, putting his hands behind his head, his thoughts, like water in a well-worn groove of rock, inevitably going back to the terrible events of the sinking of the Rolvaag.

  He reached out and slid open the bedside drawer and removed a slim volume: Selected Poems of W. H. Auden. Turning the well-thumbed pages, he arrived at the poem titled “In Praise of Limestone.” He did not need to read the poem; he knew it by heart; but still he took a measure of comfort from the printed words.

  …But the really reckless were fetched

  By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:

  ‘I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing…’

  After a long time of reading and re-reading the poem, he laid the book aside and rose from the bed. Once again he went to the window and breathed in the sea air, and then, tightening the belt of his dressing gown, he put on slippers. He went to his desk, took a spare flash drive out of a drawer, slipped it into his pocket, and quietly left the room.

  It was one forty-five: almost two hours into the midnight watch. The ship was quiet, motionless, all but the watch sleeping. He made his way noiselessly down the corridor, up a set of stairs and down another, until he arrived at mission control. It was locked, but he had the key. The room was, as he’d hoped, empty. Going to the central station, he flicked on the main screen, pulled up a series of menus, hit some additional keys. Moments later a video started: the feed from Gideon’s mini sub as it entered the Rolvaag’s hold. He fast-forwarded to the point where the deck plates and pipes were cut away—and the DSV’s headlights illuminated the corpse of the captain. Sally Britton.

  He stopped the video, inserted his flash drive into a USB slot, typed in a few commands, then resumed the video as he copied it to the drive.

  There it was again: that swirl of blond hair; the body’s arms thrown out as if in surprise; the uniform, still neat and clean despite years in the water. Slowly the face turned to him once again, those sapphire eyes wide open, the lips parted, the neck and throat so real, so white, so life-like…

  He abruptly stopped the video. The download was complete and he removed the flash drive and made his way back to his cabin. Lying down again on the bed, he pulled his laptop over, inserted the USB stick containing the video, and replayed it, slower this time, and then again, frame by frame, finally freezing the image as the face turned to the point where the eyes were looking straight into the camera. He stared at it for a very long time.

  He was still staring at it when the blood-red light of the rising sun speared through the porthole into his stateroom, signaling the start of another day.

  Now he closed the notebook, pulled out the flash drive, and went to the porthole window. He stood there a moment, watching the day rise out of the calm ocean, and then took the flash drive and flung it as far as he could into the deep-blue water, where it made a tiny splash. And then something incredible happened: one of the many seagulls hanging around the ship swooped down and grabbed it from the water before it could sink and flew away with it, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished into the brilliant orange sky.

  23

  AT EIGHT AM, Gideon knocked on the door to Prothero’s marine acoustics lab with a feeling of foreboding. He had managed little more than an hour or two of sleep the night before—if it could be called sleep.

  His instinctual dislike of the sonar engineer had only deepened after the man’s galling comment about the “knight in shining armor”—a comment made all the more offensive by Alex’s death.

  “Door’s unlocked,” came the muffled voice within.

  Gideon eased it open and was greeted by a wave of electronic heat and a fantastical jumble of electronic gadgetry. There, in the corner, he could see Prothero in a torn T-shirt, hunched over a circuit board with a soldering iron. It was exactly as he imagined the lab would look, a god-awful mess, and Prothero himself was utterly predictable in his shabby T-shirt and disheveled contempt for civility. There was nobody else around; the tall Asian woman who had been at Prothero’s side during the earlier briefing had not yet, apparently, reported in.

  He waited while Prothero continued to work.

  After a long silence Prothero said, without turning: “Be with you in a sec.”

  Gideon looked around, but there was no place to sit. Every chair and table was covered with electronic crap; the very walls were invisible, hidden by racks and shelves of exotic equipment. Even Gideon, who had advanced computer skills, did not recognize some of it, especially the stuff that looked jerry-built. But it was clear enough that much of it—the speakers, microphones, and oscilloscopes—involved acoustics.

  Prothero finally gave a loud snort of annoyance, straightened up, put away the soldering iron, and swiveled around on the office chair. He came toward Gideon, still seated, pulling himself along with the heels of his feet, the casters of the old chair creaking.

  He came to a halt a foot in front of Gideon. “What is it?” he asked.

  “We had an appointment?”

  A grunt. “Okay.”

  And now Gideon had the distinct feeling Prothero didn’t even recall the appointment.

  “I wanted to chat with you about the, ah, last transmission from Alex Lispenard.”

  Prothero ran a hand over his limp, longish black hair, combing the greasy strands back with his fingers. He rubbed his neck. He looked like he’d been up all night; but then, he always looked like that.

  “Have you managed to figure out the glitch?” Gideon asked.

  Prothero rotated his head on his scrawny neck, getting the kinks out. “Ther
e is no glitch.”

  “Of course there’s a glitch, or some other sort of technical problem. I mean with the timing.”

  “Just what I said. No glitch.”

  “I saw the mini sub crushed,” said Gideon. “I witnessed it. Then five seconds later, her voice came through the hydrophone. If there was no glitch, then obviously there was some sort of delay in the transmission, some kind of time lag.”

  “No delay.”

  “Come on. What are you saying?”

  “What your hydrophone picked up was a direct acoustic sound coming through the water, at that moment.”

  “Impossible.”

  A shrug from Prothero; some scratching of his arm.

  “So you’re saying a dead person spoke,” Gideon pressed on.

  “All I’m saying is, there was no glitch.”

  “Jesus Christ, of course there was a glitch!”

  “Ignorance combined with vehemence doesn’t make it so.”

  Gideon tried to hold down his anger. He took a deep breath. “You’re telling me that Alex spoke when, a, she was dead, and b, she was inside the creature?”

  “I haven’t gotten far enough to draw those conclusions. Maybe it wasn’t her speaking at all.”

  “It was her. I know her voice. Who else could it have been?”

  Another maddening shrug.

  “Besides, a person can’t speak underwater anyway. You’re telling me someone was able to speak a sentence clearly through four hundred yards of water? Of course there’s a technical issue here. Whatever she said somehow got stuck in an analog conversion algorithm, or whatever, and took a few seconds to come through to my sub.”

  “Hey, Gideon?” Another round of neck rotations. “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”

  Trembling with rage, Gideon forced himself not to utter his next, escalating comment. This was getting nowhere—and he realized it was partly his fault. He had come in here with a chip on his shoulder; he was way too emotionally invested in the outcome; and he was letting this jackass get under his skin.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” he said with barely maintained calm. “You see, a good friend died.”

  “Look, I get it. I get that you’re freaked out. I’m sorry about what happened. But don’t come in here telling me my job. I’m way ahead of you.”

  “Then how about filling me in on where you are? I would appreciate that very much.” Someday he would kick this son of a bitch’s ass all the way to the South Pole—but not just now.

  “Thank you.” Prothero scratched his arm again, like an ape. Gideon waited, letting the silence build.

  “I’ve been working on the physics of how that message was actually transmitted through the water. And here’s where I’m at.”

  He fell silent.

  “Go on,” Gideon said after a minute.

  “It’s weird as shit.”

  “How so?”

  “It was digital.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know the difference between analog and digital sound waves? One looks smooth, while the other is made up of individual samples. Time slices. Little steps, like a staircase. This one was digital. And the wave was constructed to pass through water so it would sound normal when it emerged from the speaker, back in the air, the way it did coming out of your hydrophone.”

  “But…how?”

  Another shrug. “No biological system produces digital sound. Or digital anything. Only electronics do that. And that blue whale vocalization? Also digital. It came from the Baobab—not from above.”

  “The Baobab made a blue whale sound? Digitally?”

  “Yup.”

  “So…this thing isn’t alive? It’s a machine? It’s like—recording audio signals and playing them back at us?”

  “Who knows what the hell it is, or what it’s doing?”

  Gideon stared at the engineer. “We don’t have to know what it is,” he said slowly, “to kill it.”

  24

  DEEP WITHIN THE belly of the R/V Batavia, inside an unnamed and unlabeled storage area that was always kept carefully locked, Manuel Garza stood, examining the massive steel racks that held the partially assembled pieces of the bomb. It was all here, everything but the plutonium core, which was in a secret, shielded vault in another location. As he looked over the tidy racks with their components, carefully sealed and vacuum-packed in silvered plastic, and sitting in custom-made Styrofoam cradles, he felt concerned. He did not like the way Gideon, after showing no interest for weeks, had suddenly, angrily, insisted on seeing the nuke. It struck him as primeval: the vengeful warrior seeking comfort in the presence of his weapons. Since the death of Lispenard, he knew, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. It had become grim and purposeful. Under ordinary circumstances, that would not necessarily be a bad thing—but Garza was concerned nevertheless. He was deeply suspicious of vengeance as a motive, and he did not believe that the life-form they were going to kill should be thought of as an enemy any more than, say, a grizzly bear or a virus should. The hungry bear did what it did; the virus did what it did. And this thing did what it did, too. There was no intelligence about it, he was sure; just instinct.

  The turning of a key; the undogging of the hatch; and then Glinn was in the room, Gideon at his side.

  “Here it is,” said Garza. “It’s all sealed up—nothing much to see.”

  He watched as Gideon silently moved past him, staring at the bomb. He reached out and touched the plastic. “This looks pretty small for a nuke,” he said after a moment.

  “It’s an efficient one,” said Glinn. “Originally the payload for an R7 Semyorka ICBM.”

  “Soviet-era.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “We already told you all you need to know about that.”

  “The yield?”

  “About one hundred kilotons.”

  “Weight?”

  “One forty kilograms.”

  “How big is the plutonium pit?”

  “Twenty kilograms. Oval.”

  He watched Gideon run his hand along the plastic. “What type of trigger?”

  “It’s got a polonium-210 initiator.”

  “Jesus. I can’t believe you were able to get all this. Makes me worried about where the rest of those old Soviet bombs are ending up.”

  “There is much to worry about. But that’s a problem for another day and someone else.”

  Gideon withdrew his hand. “Was it expensive?”

  “Extremely.”

  “And how has it been modified for underwater use?”

  “The obvious engineering challenge,” said Glinn, “was dealing with water pressure. We plan to put it inside a small titanium sphere and send it down in an ROV, operated remotely. We have an ROV specifically designed for that task, in fact, standing by in the hangar.”

  “I see. And how will the weapon be deployed?”

  “That, Gideon, is your department. You’re the expert on modeling nuclear explosions. No one’s ever detonated a bomb two miles deep, in water pressure four hundred times that of the surface. We want to make sure it’s maximally destructive.”

  Gideon looked from Glinn to Garza and back again. “You’re talking about a massive computational problem.”

  “Yes. And we have the computing power on board to do it. A Q machine.”

  Gideon said, “The explosion has to wipe that thing out completely, leaving nothing that could take root and grow again. So we need to know where it’s most vulnerable, where its vital organs are, how its tissue might respond to the bomb’s effects. It wouldn’t do any good to blow it apart if all the pieces just drifted to the seafloor and re-rooted themselves.”

  “You clearly understand the problem,” said Glinn. “It might be as simple as killing the brain. On the other hand, it might be as complex as atomizing the entire Baobab.”

  Gideon turned to Garza. “I want to start assembling this as soon as possible.”
/>   “Hold on,” said Garza. “We’ve got a long way to go before we’re ready to nuke this thing.”

  “We need to put the son of a bitch together and have it ready to go at a moment’s notice. We’ve no idea what that thing’s going to do.”

  “As soon as we start opening these packages,” Garza replied, “we’ll be dealing with high explosives, fragile computer components, and a hunk of deadly plutonium. And having an armable nuclear weapon on board the ship for an extended period is dangerous as hell.”

  “What’s dangerous as hell is sitting here with a useless nuke, unable to defend ourselves if that thing figures out what we’re up to and decides to take us out.”

  “That thing isn’t going to ‘figure out’ anything,” said Garza. “It’s not an intelligent life-form. Probably a plant or some kind of giant anemone.” Garza felt exasperated; this was Gideon letting his emotions take over, letting his thirst for vengeance drive his thinking.

  “We’ve no idea what kind of intelligence this thing has,” said Gideon. “If that dark thing I saw is its brain, it’s pretty damned big—bigger than yours,” he added drily.

  “Having a live nuke on board the ship,” said Garza, “is insane. What if a storm comes up? What if a component fails? What if the device is jarred or struck by lightning?” He turned to Glinn.

  “Gideon wants to assemble it,” Glinn said. “Not arm it. And don’t forget the fail-safe. That should allay your concerns.”

  “What fail-safe?” asked Gideon.

  “The three of us—and only the three of us—will have the code to arm the nuke and start the detonation sequence. But as a precaution, we also have a code to abort it, should we jointly or singly determine that using the device is an unsound idea.”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” Garza said. “We’re not on a military base. We’re on a ship full of civilians. The security here is porous. As engineer in chief, I strongly recommend against assembling the nuke until just before we need to use it.”

  A long silence, and then Glinn told him quietly: “Arrange for delivery of the plutonium core.”