Silent City

by G R Matthews

  My ribs ached as they pulled in and then pushed out the Oxyquid. I tried to stay calm, but my efforts were largely wasted. Shielded by damaged ribs my heart beat rapidly. Adrenalin surged through my veins and into my brain. I gave myself over to it, every muscle tensed as I pushed the suit motors further - taking power from the Oxyquid pumps and the suit assists. The whine rose to a pitch above human hearing. I could still feel it in my skull. It gave me a headache.

  An explosion of bubbles caught up with me, obscuring my vision. They surrounded me, lifted me. I began to tumble, losing my sense of direction. Up was down, east was west, north was up, and down was backwards. I couldn’t do a thing to control my path. The suit motors, designed to move water around, became confused by the bubbles of air and gave up. I did all I could and tucked up into a foetal huddle, wrapped my arms around my legs, ducked my head into my knees and hoped.

  I was out of the narrow valleys and still in the larger valley which was home to the city. Had been home to the city. This fact was confirmed when I slammed into the rock slope and bounced off. The bubbles and the pressure wave picked me up once more, sweeping me back into the rock again, and again. Even with the padding of the suit, its electronics, its support ribs and motor assists, big purple bruises were sure to be forming. If I survived.

  The bubbles and pressure wave had come from the city. Or rather, it had come from the final destruction of the city and the topography of the valley. As the city hit, or even before, its pressure hull would have ruptured. The one thing that kept everyone inside safe from the crushing presence of the deep ocean outside would have split and torn apart. Subs tended to have two hulls, cities had three and some, those whose creators were very fearful of the depths or just sensible, had four.

  The Silent City was likely to have only two. It was built in a rush and in secret. It was designed to do a job and do it without drawing attention to itself. Two hulls would be the minimum and quickest to build. One to encase the living area and another to safeguard the first.

  As long as the city stayed upright, on its supports, the hulls would hold. But, it hadn’t and they hadn’t. The first point of rupture would spell doom for everyone on board. Water would rush in through that gap, faster and harder than anything could stop. Anyone caught in that initial flow would be torn to pieces by the pressure. The gap would have widened and the air inside the city would have been compressed as the city filled with water. More ruptures would open as the city continued to fall, twist and contort. Inside the city, the inhabitants would find their eardrums bursting as the pressure intensified. Those furthest from the ruptures would be closing bulkhead doors, trusting that everyone else was too. Survival would be the only instinct. Altruism, the desire to keep the doors open a little longer in case anyone came down the corridor at the last moment, would only kill more. The selfish might survive. The very lucky might survive. But “might” was measured in thousandths of a percentage chance.

  And then, with in-rushing water filling the levels, with the pressure outside collapsing the superstructure and with the compressed air inside trying to escape through any gaps or leaks, it would all give way. In the space of a second, the walls would collapse inwards to the centre and the air would rush outwards. The city would be gone and only debris would remain.

  The valley would channel that rushing wall of air and water. It would pick up anything in its path and send it careening down the valley like a pool ball. I was the ball and I was hitting every cushion.

  I had no control. The wall was coming closer, through the bubbles I could see it. I tried to twist, to hit the wall with my back rather than my helmet. Not a chance.

  Chapter 18

  “Tyler,” I said as I picked up my lunch from the kitchen side, “don’t forget to hand in your homework.”

  “Dad.” A word that should be full of love was dragged out into a whine.

  “Tell you what I don’t want to hear, Tyler? I don’t want to hear that you haven’t done it again. You get told off, that’s your look out,” I said. I could see, through the half-open door, Tyler’s legs and feet stretched out from the sofa in the main room.

  “I didn’t have time, Dad.”

  “You had a week. What more time did you want?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Well, good luck today.”

  “Dad, can’t you help me? It is about the ancient world. You like that stuff.”

  “I like it because I studied it when I was at school, Tyler. Just you have to now. So I suggest you turn off the clips and hit the books. You’ve got time to get some of it done before you leave for school.” I headed towards the apartment door.

  “Come on, Dad. Please.”

  “Tyler, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Dad, please.”

  I paused, my hand on the door handle, ready to turn it. If I was late for work my pay would be docked and the wife would complain. I twisted the handle.

  “Dad, please. She’ll give me a detention again.”

  “Taylor, why do you always leave it till the last minute?” The door handle slipped from my grasp. The lunch bag went back on the table and I pushed open the door to the main room. “You can’t keep doing this, Tyler. You have to get yourself organised.”

  # # #

  I woke up. My head hurt. It hurt like hell, way beyond a ten. My thoughts were scattered and forming anything coherent was a struggle. I moved my arm and the pain increased, racing up my arm and smashing into my skull with the sharp point of a six inch nail driven by the full weight of a carpenter’s hammer.

  My hand couldn’t reach my head. There was an obstruction, something preventing me from cradling my skull. I poked at it a few times. There was something familiar, but also a great deal of confusion. Had I slipped on the way into the room? Had the door clattered me around the head or had I smashed into the hard floor of the apartment.

  I tried to speak. My tongue felt swollen. It wouldn’t obey my commands. In my head I stitched the sentence together, a word at a time. It was short and simple. All I needed to do was say it, shout it, scream it and someone, hopefully Tyler or his mother, perhaps both, would come running.

  Nothing. I couldn’t speak. My mouth was full of liquid. Blood? I’d have bitten my tongue or cheek when I fell. I spat it out. Least I tried. All I accomplished was to add a pain in my chest to the one in my head.

  I couldn’t clear the liquid. It wouldn’t go. I couldn’t spit it out. It was in my throat. In my lungs. Fuck. I was drowning. I was dying. Tyler, help. Nothing. Help me. Drowning. I coughed. I kicked at the floor and tried to drag the obstruction off my face. I pawed at the water surrounding me. Tried to kick for the surface. Tried to swim.

  Swim? My head hurt. More than a beating, more than a hangover, but swimming? I wasn’t on the floor at home. I hadn’t fallen. Tyler was dead, years ago. My wife was gone too.

  I stilled my arms and legs, let the current have me for a moment. My brain needed time to think, to remember. The explosion. A city had collapsed on me. All those people would be dead. Why had there been an explosion? Keller. Revenge and hatred forced the pain in my head aside for a moment.

  First, the city and the people. I opened my eyes for the first time. The Oxyquid blurred my vision for a moment. I forced my aching ribs to drag in more of the oxygen rich gel and then pushed it back out again. The suit wasn’t helping. The pressure ribs, that should expand and press down on my own to assist the muscles, weren’t working.

  I flicked my fingers in the control glove, the UI flickered on the screen and died. I pushed the controls again and nothing happened. Outside the helmet the ocean was black. I could have closed both eyes and seen more than I could now. The beating pulse of the blood vessels in my eyes would have created fireworks of orange and red blooms. With eyes open, I could see nothing.

  By touch, I checked the integrity of the helmet and suit. Considering I had been out of it for an indeterminate length of time, any holes or cracks in the suit would have long ago killed me. I
t was comforting to go through the rituals. By feel, I knew that I was floating free. Judging by the higher pressure on the front of my suit and only slightly lower on the back I guessed I wasn’t moving too fast. I found the switch I wanted at the base of my helmet, at the juncture between it and the pack on my back, pushed it down and held it. This would be a risk. I was kilometres from help, no one around and no way to get anywhere safe, if such a place even existed. I didn’t have a lot of choices.

  The subtle hum of the Oxyquid filters and motors ceased. A noise I’d long ago grown accustomed to, that had become just background and automatically ignored, stopped. It was unsettling in its absence. The ocean is never truly silent but, at that moment, it was quieter than I ever wished it to be ever again. A quiet that made me doubt my sanity, made my eardrums hurt as they sought a sound, a faint tremor of noise to cup and hold dear.

  I was isolated. There was no light to see and nothing to hear. My brain hurt. Panic set in and adrenalin rushed through my veins. If it wasn’t for the faint sense of touch, the feel of my own pulse, my heartbeat in my chest, the friction of the suit upon my skin, I would have lost it there and then.

  In the bar I’d been alone but surrounded by others, not truly on my own. The presence of others, even silent and sullen, even without speech or communication, had been a comfort. I didn’t realise how much of one it had been until that moment. A drinker who drinks alone is but a moment from death. I felt alone now. There was no world but that of touch. It kept me sane. I needed it to. My brain was starved of input and tendrils of thought waved, lonely, in the silent darkness.

  The light came back and I almost cried. It died. And was reborn again. A flicker of an angel’s wing. A green light on the helmet screen. Nothing more than single short line blinking in the centre of the screen. It was the world. I watched it. On. Off. On. Off. On. The smile on my face was that of an infant confronted by its reflection for the first time. I wanted to reach out and touch the line. To confirm by touch, the most reliable of my senses and the one in which, at that moment, I placed all my trust, the reality of its existence.

  STANDBY...

  MEM CHK... COMPLETE

  PROC... COMPLETE

  STARTUP

  Four lines of absolute joy painted in green upon a transparent canvas. The suit came alive as I did. The assisted ribs flexing and taking the pressure off of my abused ones. The sound of the filters kicking in, working up to speed. The beginnings of small currents in the Oxyquid. I calmed my heart and took slow, deep breaths of the liquid.

  A few flicks of the control pads and a status check came up on the screen. Both battery and oxygen levels were reasonable. Not great by any description, enough for now and that’s all I could worry about. The clock in the lower left, and a quick calculation, told me I had been out of it for about twenty minutes. Nowhere near as long as it had felt, long enough for things to change.

  Another flick of the pads and the view on my helmet changed to a map of the local area. It showed the city, still standing, and the valleys surrounding it, the sharp mountains and the fractures that crisscrossed them. My actual position was harder to gauge. Working in a contested zone was never simple. There was no net of sensors, of cables, and signals from which to triangulate your position. Get lost somewhere relatively safe and you’d use the systems the corporation had laid across the sea floor to identify your location. Or, if you wanted to, use your own sonar scans to map the area and compare the topography with the on-board computer. Neither option was open to me, so it was back to basics and guesswork.

  The map showed the ocean currents and the instruments on my suit could tell me the speed. A few calculations and some educated stabs in the, literal, dark and I had an idea of where I was. Or, rather, I had an inkling of where the city used to be and that’s the course I set.

  I had two aims. First, survey the remains of the city in the hopes of finding an intact sub in which to climb. If anything had survived the destruction, it would be the vessels designed to survive the crushing pressure. My second aim, look for survivors.

  The first aim had the slim chance of success. The second had none.

  I switched on the suit lights and engaged the motors.

  Chapter 19

  There was a debris field. Small items had been carried further from the collapse than the large ones. It was always this way, whether the downed vessel was a small two-man or a large passenger sub. Only the size of the debris field changed. The closer you got to the site of the crash, or in this case the collapse, the more debris could be seen.

  The first bits I spotted, caught on ridges and spines of valley sides, were clothes and material. I’d probably missed other, smaller scraps, on the way. A red t-shirt here, a pair of trousers there, a uniform jacket further on.

  The suit engines pushed me onwards. I kept the white lights on. Giving away the position of the city was no longer an issue and being able to see properly, even in a limited range, was much more important. The falling city might have set off seismic alarms in NOAH or VKING, both of who claimed this part of the sea bed. However, the whole of the Faraday fracture zone was seismically active. The collapse could easily be written up a slight tremor and ignored.

  It had made a lot of noise. And noise travelled well through water. Whales could be heard hundreds of miles away. The military, of every Corporation, would have seeded the floor with acoustic sensors. In some areas they formed a net that captured any sound and sent it to bases for analysis. Out here, in a contested zone, there were bound to be a few dotted around.

  I’d expect the military on both sides spent a stupid amount of money finding the other side’s sensors and destroying them whilst seeding the sea floor with their own. It wouldn’t be anything as good as a real acoustic net, but the city’s collapse would have been registered somewhere. If it was my side, help might be on the way. If it wasn’t, well, then help was still a possibility. Either way, the people of the city deserved some assistance. At the moment I was it.

  There was a chance that Rake, Jordon and Elena might have survived. They had subs, they might have been working on them when it started to fall. She would have had... I mean, they would have had time to climb into them. If they’d been close to an airlock then diving into that, locking the doors and pressurising it would have been a possibility. They were constructed as complete, contained units and slotted into the superstructure whole. There was a chance.

  I saw the first body. I didn’t know who it was. It is hard to identify someone when they lack some of the very things you’d look for. In this case a head. It had been one of the scientists judging by the lab coat that wafted gently in the current. That was just the first of the bodies. On the way in I saw many more.

  There were sections of metal sheeting scattered about the valley floor. Cabling, tubes, shattered plastic, wires waving around like tube worms near a vent. In amongst the debris, the people. I could see more white coats and the grey uniforms of the soldiers.

  Between a smashed, twisted door and the strangely intact remains of a toilet was a body without a uniform. The back of a shirt was visible and there were only three people in the city who did not wear a uniform, the crew. I dropped towards the body.

  The bonus of existing in water is the fact that some objects become a lot easier to lift than they would be in the open air. Add in the extra assist from the suit, not a lot but the Fish-Suit had small motors and an exoskeleton system sewn into the fabric, and many objects became moveable.

  With great care, I wrapped my gloved hands around the door frame, avoiding the sharp edges where it had twisted and ripped, and lifted. I was separated from the destruction of the city by thirty, maybe forty, minutes but already the little beasts had moved in. Scavengers pecked and nibbled at the flesh. Others had begun to burrow into the flesh and eat it from the inside out.

  They scattered as I moved the door. Some scuttled into a dark crevice beneath another piece of rubble or flung themselves up and into the current, swimming away. The
larger creatures, shelled and many legged, had to be picked off the body. Evil looking things that, given the choice, I’d squash out of existence. Though for the one or two that were almost as large as my foot and carried more armour than a combat sub, I would need a very large hammer to accomplish that goal.

  I turned the body over, my hands trembling a little. It hadn’t been a pleasant way to go. The body was still, apart from the bite marks and burrow holes, intact. The pressure at this depth was the killer. When the city had ruptured, the air inside had compressed incredibly quickly.

  In the body, the lungs had been the first to feel the effects. They’d have been crushed in less than a second. The eardrums ruptured. Both would have hurt more than I wanted to imagine. Water would have flooded the mouth. No way to resist. The lungs had filled again, this time with achingly cold sea water. You wouldn’t even have the chance to scream or curse your fate. Worse still, your brain would still be operating on the oxygen supply brought to it by your beating heart. Perhaps, if you were lucky, the shock or the collapse of your lungs had stopped your heart. If you weren’t that lucky you might live, knowing what was happening for three or more minutes. The look on Jordon’s face hinted that he’d died knowing all those things.

  I moved on, towards the crumpled city. There were no other lights in the darkness above the site and I scoured the wreckage for an age. There were some places I couldn’t get to, but those I could all looked the same. The explosives had done their work. The city was destroyed. No wall was straight, no door was closed, no wiring was attached to anything still working. I found an airlock, it was empty.

  The moon-pool was vertical. It was an orifice, an entrance to the docks and a possibility, however slim, of finding an intact sub. The suit motor guided me in. I had to swim past the remains of two dock workers. They had died with their eyes and mouths open. Faces of panic now frozen in that expression forever.

  Any subs I could use would be near the top of the tipped up docks. Their hatches would have been closed and they would have been full of air. They would have survived because they were built to. I held onto the inner rim of the moon-pool and directed my lights downwards. There was a jumble of debris and below that the shape of subs. They’d sunk and I had no way to resurrecting them.