The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Not on the phone. So, are you coming or not?’

  ‘All right, give me an hour,’ said Johanson. He yawned expansively, then stopped in case he strained his jaw. ‘In fact, give me two. I’ll call in at the lab on the way. There might be news on the worms.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. Weird, isn’t it? First I was the one making all the fuss, and now it’s the other way round. OK, take your time - but don’t be too long!’

  ‘At your service,’ Johanson mumbled. Still dizzy, he dragged himself off to the shower.

  Thirty minutes later, he was feeling more alive. Outside, it was sunny and Kirkegata Street was all but deserted. The last piles of snow had melted and as Johanson drove out towards the Gloshaugen campus he was whistling Vivaldi. The university was supposed to be closed at the weekend, but no one paid any attention to the rules: it was the best time to sort your mail and work undisturbed.

  Johanson went to the post-room, rummaged in his pigeon-hole and pulled out a thick envelope. It had been sent from Kiel and almost certainly contained the lab results that Lund was so desperate to see. He stowed it away, unopened, went back to his car and resumed his journey to Tyholt.

  The Institute for Marine Technology, or Marintek, as it was known, had close links with the NTNU, SINTEF and the Statoil research centre. In addition to its collection of simulation tanks and wave tunnels, it also housed the world’s biggest artificial ocean-research basin, offering scientists scale-model testing in simulated wind and waves. The Norwegian shelf was covered with floating production systems that had been tested in the eighty-metre-long by ten-metre-deep pool. Two wave machines created miniature currents and storms that seemed terrifyingly powerful. Johanson was pretty sure that Lund would use it to test the underwater unit that she was planning for the slope.

  As he had expected, he found her at the poolside, talking to some scientists. There was something droll about the scene. Divers were weaving through the blue-green water past Toytown platforms, while miniature tankers floated past lab staff in rowing-boats. It resembled a cross between a toy-shop and a boating party, but it had a serious purpose: the offshore industry needed Marintek’s blessing before any new structure could be built.

  Lund spotted him, broke off her conversation and headed over. It meant walking all the way round the pool, which she did at her usual canter.

  ‘Why not take a boat?’ asked Johanson.

  ‘This isn’t the village pond, you know,’ she said. ‘Everything has to be co-ordinated. If I ploughed willy-nilly through the basin, hundreds of oil workers would die in the tidal wave.’

  She gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘You’re all scratchy.’

  ‘All men with beards are scratchy,’ said Johanson. ‘It’s lucky for you Kare hasn’t got one, or you’d have no excuse for picking him instead of me. So, what are you working on? The subsea problem?’

  ‘As best we can - the basin only lets us simulate realistic conditions for depths of up to a thousand metres.’

  ‘You don’t need to go deeper.’

  ‘Theoretically, no. But we still like to run through the scenarios on the computer. Sometimes its predictions don’t fit the results from the basin, so we keep adjusting the parameters until we get a match.’

  ‘Shell’s looking into building a unit two thousand metres down. It was in the papers yesterday. You’ve got competition.’

  ‘I know. Marintek’s doing the research for them too. It’ll be an even harder nut to crack. Come on, let’s get some breakfast.’

  Once they were out in the corridor Johanson said; ‘I still don’t understand why you can’t use a SWOP. Isn’t it easier to work on a floating platform and connect it via flexible flowlines?’

  She shook her head. ‘Too risky. Floating structures still have to be anchored.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And they can always come adrift.’

  ‘But the shelf’s full of them!’

  ‘Granted, but only where it’s shallower. In deeper water, the waves and currents are different. Besides, it’s not just a question of anchoring the units. The longer the riser, the less stable it becomes. The last thing we need is an environmental disaster. And, anyway, who’d want to work on a floating platform on the other side of the shelf? Even the hardiest would spew their guts out. This way.’

  They went up some stairs.

  ‘I thought we were going for breakfast,’ said Johanson in surprise.

  ‘We are, but there’s something I want to show you first.’

  Lund pushed open a door and they went into an office on the floor immediately above the ocean basin. The large glass windows looked down on neat rows of sunlit gardens and gabled houses that stretched out in the direction of Trondheim fjord.

  She walked over to a desk, pulled up two Formica chairs and flipped open the widescreen laptop. Her fingers drummed impatiently while the program loaded. The screen filled with photos that seemed strangely familiar. They showed a milky-white patch dissolving into darkness at the edges. All of a sudden Johanson realised what he was looking at. ‘The footage from Victor,’ he said. ‘It’s that thing we saw on the slope.’

  ‘The thing I was worried about.’ Lund nodded.

  ‘Do you know what it is yet?’

  ‘No, but I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not a jellyfish, and it’s definitely not a shoal. We’ve tried putting the image through countless different filters, but this is the best we could do.’ She enlarged the first photo. ‘The thing was caught in Victor’s floodlights. We saw a part of it, but not as it would have looked without the artificial lighting.’

  ‘Without the lighting you wouldn’t have seen anything. It was far too deep.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘Unless, of course, the thing was bioluminescent, in which case—’ He broke off.

  Lund appeared pleased with herself. Her fingers danced over the keyboard and the picture changed again. This time they were looking at a section from the top right-hand corner. At the edge of the image, the bright patch dimmed into darkness, and faint marks could be seen. It was a different kind of light, a deep-blue glow streaked with pale lines.

  ‘When light is directed at a luminescent object you can’t see its natural glow. Victor’s floodlights are so powerful they illuminate everything, except at the very edge of the picture where they’re no longer so bright. But there’s definitely something there. That proves to me we’re dealing with a luminescent creature - a pretty big one.’

  Many deep-sea creatures could luminesce. Their light was the result of symbioses with bacteria. Some organisms on the surface of the ocean could emit light too - algae, for instance, and some small species of squid - but the real sea of lights only started where darkness began, beyond the reach of the sun.

  Johanson stared at the screen. There was only a hint of blue, barely visible, and most people would have missed it. Still, the robot was known for the high resolution of its pictures. Perhaps Lund was right. He scratched his beard. ‘How big is it, do you think?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say because it disappeared so quickly, but in that time it must have swum to the edge of the beam. If you look here, though, it still almost covers the frame, which suggests…’

  ‘That the part we’re looking at measures ten to twelve square metres.’

  ‘Exactly. The part.’ She paused. ‘Judging by the light at the edge of the picture, I’d say we saw just a fraction of it.’

  A different explanation occurred to Johanson. ‘It could be planktonic organisms,’ he said. ‘Micro-organisms of some kind. Plenty of species glow.’

  ‘How do you explain the markings?’

  ‘You mean the paler streaks? Coincidence. We’re only assuming that they’re markings. We used to think that the channels on Mars were markings too.’

  ‘I’m certain they’re not plankton.’

  ‘We can’t see well enough to tell.’

  ‘Oh, but we can. Take a look at this.’

  Lund called up
the next images. The milky patch retreated further into the darkness. It had been visible for less than a second. The pale area of luminescence was still apparent in the second and third frames, but the streaks seemed to shift. By the fourth frame everything had vanished.

  ‘It turned off its light,’ Johanson said, amazed. Certain species of squid could communicate with bioluminescence, and it wasn’t unusual for them to flip the switch and disappear into darkness when they felt threatened. But this creature was bigger than any known species of squid.

  There was an obvious conclusion, but he was reluctant to draw it. It had no business on the Norwegian continental slope. ‘Architheuthis,’ he said.

  ‘Giant squid.’ Lund nodded. ‘It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But it’d be the first time anything like that showed up in these waters.’

  ‘More like the first time it showed up anywhere.’

  That wasn’t strictly true. For a long time stories about Architheuthis had been dismissed as sailors’ yarns. Then some enormous corpses had washed ashore, which seemed to prove its existence - or would have done, if it weren’t for the fact that normal squid flesh was amazingly elastic and could be stretched to almost any size, even when it was decaying. Then a few years ago a team of scientists working off the coast of New Zealand had caught some juvenile specimens whose genetic profile demonstrated conclusively that in less than eighteen months they would grow into twenty-metre squid, weighing a tonne each. But no one had ever seen such a monstrous creature. Architheuthis lived in the ocean depths, and there was no reason to believe it might be luminescent.

  Johanson’s brow furrowed. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, “no”?’

  ‘Think of all the evidence against it. For a start, it’s the wrong place for giant squid.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Lund waved her hands in the air, ‘but we don’t know where they live. We know nothing about them at all.’

  ‘They definitely don’t belong here, though.’

  ‘Nor do those worms.’

  They fell silent.

  ‘OK, suppose you’re right,’ Johanson said eventually. ‘Architheuthi are shy creatures. No one’s ever been attacked by one, so what have you got to worry about?’

  ‘That’s not what people who’ve seen them say.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Tina, maybe they’ve capsized the odd boat, but you can’t seriously be suggesting that they’re a danger to the oil industry.’

  Lund closed down the screen. ‘All right. So, what have you got for me? Any new test results?’

  Johanson brandished the envelope at her and opened it. Inside was a fat parcel of closely typed documents.

  ‘God!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be a summary…and here it is.!’

  ‘Let me see!’

  ‘Just a moment.’ He glanced over the sheet of paper. Lund got up and walked over to the window. Then she started pacing round the room.

  Johanson frowned and leafed through the bundle of documents. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Spit it out!’

  ‘They say the worms are polychaetes. This isn’t a taxonomical report, but they mention similarities with Hesiocaeca methanicola. They’re puzzled by the size of the jaws. They also found…hmm, details, details…OK, here we go. They examined the jaws. Powerful mandibles, designed for boring or burrowing.’

  ‘We knew that already,’ Lund said impatiently.

  ‘That’s not all. Next come the results from the isotope ratio mass spectrometry and the scanning electron microscope. Our friend is minus ninety parts per thousand.’

  ‘Would you care to translate?’

  ‘It’s as we thought. The worm is methanotrophic. It lives symbiotically with bacteria that break down methane. It…I’m not sure how to explain this…You see, depending on the isotope - you do know what an isotope is, don’t you?’

  ‘Any two or more atoms of a chemical element with the same atomic number but with differing atomic mass.’

  ‘Ten out of ten! So, take carbon. It doesn’t always have the same atomic mass. You can have carbon-12 or carbon-13. If you eat something with more of the lighter form of carbon in it - that is, with more of the lighter carbon isotope - your isotopic ratio will decrease too. Do you see?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Now, take methane. Methane contains both isotopes of carbon, so when worms live symbiotically with bacteria that feed on the lighter form, the bacteria start to get lighter and so do the worms. Our worm is very light indeed.’

  ‘You’re an odd lot, you biologists. What the hell do you have to do to a worm to figure that out?’

  ‘It’s a most unsavoury process. It means grinding it into powder, then measuring its mass. Now, the results from the scanning electron microscope…They dyed the DNA…All very rigorous…’

  Lund strode over to him and tugged at the documents. ‘I don’t need a lecture. All I want to know is if it’s safe for us to drill.’

  ‘There’s no—’ Johanson snatched back the summary and reread the final lines. ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re coated with bacteria, inside and out. Endosymbiotic and exosymbiotic bacteria. It seems your worms are transporting bacteria by the busload.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t add up. The worm lives on gas hydrates and is bursting with bacteria, so it doesn’t hunt and it doesn’t bore. It just lies there on its fat belly, lazing around on the ice. Yet it’s equipped with enormous jaws that are perfect for boring. And the worms on the shelf looked anything but fat and lazy. I’d say they were distinctly agile.’

  Neither said anything for a while. In the end Lund asked, ‘What are they doing down there, Sigur?’

  Johanson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they really have crawled straight up from the Middle Cambrian. But I’ve no idea what they’re up to.’ He passed to consider. ‘And I’m not sure if it matters. I mean, what’s the worst they can do down there? They’ll wriggle all over the place, sure, but they’re hardly going to chew through a pipeline.’

  ‘Well, what are they chewing, then?’

  Johanson stared at the summary. ‘There’s one more place that might help us,’ he said, ‘and if they can’t, we’ll have to wait for a revelation.’

  ‘I’d rather it didn’t come to that.’

  ‘I’ll send off a few specimens.’ Johanson yawned. ‘You know what would be ideal? If they sent out their research vessel to take a proper look. At any rate, you’re going to have to be patient. There’s nothing we can do for the moment so, if you don’t mind, I’d like some breakfast. Besides, I need to give Kare a piece of advice.’

  Lund smiled, but it was clear from her expression that she wasn’t satisfied.

  5 April

  Vancouver Island and Vancouver, Canada

  Business was picking up again. Under any other circumstances Anawak would have shared wholeheartedly in Shoemaker’s rejoicings. The whales were returning. The manager of Davie’s could talk of nothing else. Slowly but surely they were all coming back: grey whales, hump-backs, orcas and even some minkes. Of course Anawak was pleased to see them - it was what he’d been hoping for - but he would have liked them to show up with a few answers to his questions, such as how they’d eluded the satellites and probes. He kept thinking back to his encounter with the humpbacks. He’d felt like a rat in a laboratory: the two whales had examined him as coolly and thoroughly as though he’d been laid out for dissection.

  Were they spies? And, if so, what were they looking for?

  It was a ridiculous idea.

  He closed the ticket desk and went outside. The tourists were waiting at the end of the jetty. They looked like a Special Forces unit in their orange overalls. Anawak made his way over to them.

  Someone was running after him. ‘Dr Anawak!’

  He stopped. Alicia Delaware was beside him, red hair scraped into a ponytail and wearing trendy blue sungl
asses.

  ‘Can I come too?’

  Anawak glanced at the hull of the Blue Shark.

  ‘We’re full.’

  ‘But I ran all the way to get here.’

  ‘Sorry. The Lady Wexham’s got a tour in half an hour. She’s more luxurious, with heated indoor seating and a snack-bar…’

  ‘I don’t need a snack-bar. Come on, there must be room for me somewhere. How about at the back?’

  ‘There are two of us in the cabin already - Susan and me.’

  ‘I can stand.’ Alicia smiled at him. Her large front teeth made her look like a freckled rabbit. ‘Please, Dr Anawak. You’re not still mad at me, are you? Your tour is the only one I want to go on.’

  Anawak frowned.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Delaware rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve read your books and I like your work.’

  ‘That’s not the impression I got.’

  ‘At the aquarium?’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘Forget it. Dr Anawak, I’m only here for one more day. It really means a lot to me.’

  ‘It’s against the regulations.’ The excuse was lame and made him sound petty.

  ‘God, you’re stubborn,’ she said. ‘I’m warning you it doesn’t take much to make me cry. If I can’t come along, I’ll be sobbing on the plane all the way to Chicago. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.’

  Anawak couldn’t help laughing. ‘All right. If it means that much to you, you can come.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. But don’t get on my nerves. And try to keep your abstruse theories to yourself.’

  ‘It wasn’t my theory. It’s from—’

  ‘On second thoughts, don’t say anything at all.’

  She opened her mouth, then thought better of it.

  ‘Wait here a moment,’ said Anawak. ‘I’ll fetch you some water-proofs.’

  For a full ten minutes Alicia Delaware stuck to her promise. Then, when the skyline of Tofino had disappeared behind the first of the tree-covered mountains, she sidled up to Anawak and held out her hand. ‘Call me Licia,’ she said.

  ‘Licia?’

  ‘From Alicia. You’re Leon, right?’