by Nick Cook
‘Oh my God! My children discovered Bartolomeu’s shipwreck after all,’ Carlos said, his eyes wide with wonder.
My thoughts began to whirl as I already knew exactly what this meant. Leon voiced it before I could stop him.
‘Hang on – if your children were killed for this treasure, considering there must be an absolute fortune down here, how come this site isn’t swarming with divers to recover it?’ he said.
Carlos nodded. ‘You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. So…I wonder what really happened here?’
I looked across at the two men. Of course, I’d already realised that only one organisation would be prepared to overlook that sort of treasure haul – one that was desperate to keep its secrets clutched to its chest. I might not want to tell either of them about the Overseers, but I also needed to find out for definite what had happened here. And thankfully, I already had an idea about how to do exactly that.
‘Leon, just how much can Bad Dog lift?’ I asked.
‘It’s not powerful enough to lift a solid gold bar, if that’s what you mean?’
‘No, not that, but how about a diving helmet?’
‘Yes I think so…’ Then he stared at me. ‘The camera inside it! You’re thinking it may be able to show us what happened to Raúl?’
‘It’s certainly a chance worth checking out.’
‘Okay, then let’s do it.’
He began to swing Bad Dog round towards the diving helmet, just visible in the distance, picked out by the spotlight.
One thing was certain - I couldn’t wait to see what was on that camera. Every instinct I had told me we would find some significant answers on there.
Chapter Eleven
A gurgling sound came from the other side of the hatch built into the floor as we waited for the water to be expelled by the pumps in the airlock and equalise the pressure in the cockpit.
On his couch, Leon watched the red light cycle to green, like someone hungrily eyeballing the microwave as it counted down to ready.
I was just as impatient, drumming my fingers on my knees over and over. We might be able to find out some real answers about what had caused the disaster that had unfolded here. The only one of us that seemed disinterested was Carlos, who’d remained on his couch, lying down and staring out of his window towards the cave month. He’d been like that since Bad Dog had returned with Raúl’s helmet and entered Neptune’s airlock.
I’d resisted the desire to strike up a conversation with Carlos to ask him how he was doing. I didn’t need to be a psychologist to tell that he needed a bit of space, something that was a slightly tricky proposition in a cockpit less than two metres wide. How much easier it would have been to break all of this to him gently, back onboard Venus.
When the light at last turned green, Leon practically tore the door off its hinges in his haste to get into the airlock.
The fluorescent red underwater drone sat in the middle of the metal floor, water dripping off it, Raúl’s helmet clamped in its pincers like a dog that had retrieved a stick for its master. All they needed to do was add a tail to Bad Dog and he’d be all set.
Leon stuck his hand in through the neck of the helmet and took hold of the camera, then found the clip and released it. A moment later, he closed the hatch, the camera safely retrieved. He looked at Carlos and I. ‘So, who else wants to see what’s on this baby?’ he said.
‘Do we have time? What about the storm?’ I said. I knew the camera might throw up something that would prove difficult to explain away. And with the storm coming in, our need to see that something might just have to wait a little longer…
‘I need to see it. Please.’ Carlos said quietly, his eyes desperate. ‘My son…’
I sighed, knowing that not letting him see it would potentially convince him that not only were we hiding something, we might even have been involved in the attack on his children’s boat. Nope, if the video did raise any tricky questions, I would just have to deal with it.
With no real choice, I picked the lesser of the two evils and reluctantly nodded to Leon.
‘She’s a way off yet,’ he said, ‘We do have time.’ He cracked open the camera’s waterproof housing to reveal a USB port, and then connected a cable, which he plugged into the monitor.
I mentally held my breath as an icon spun on the screen, and then a series of folders appeared. Leon clicked on the video folder, opened it and scanned the list.
‘The twenty-eighth of May is when they went missing isn’t it, Carlos?’
The old man nodded.
‘There’s a video file here with that date stamp on it.’ He double clicked on the folder and a familiar view appeared. I’d last seen it on Raúl’s video, the one taken on the deck of Hercules.
In the footage, Maricela was looking in through the faceplate at Raúl. She fired off some Spanish that my earbud translated to, So let’s see if today is our lucky day, brother, because I have a good feeling about this.
I noticed Carlos stiffen at the sound of her voice.
‘Yo también,’ we heard Raúl say, which was translated into, me too.
Then, just as I’d seen on the first video, Raúl was swung out by the harness and lowered into the water.
‘I think we should fast-forward to where he found the boat and take it from there,’ I said.
Leon nodded. He started to scrub through the video until the entrance of the cave came into shot. ‘Okay, here we go…’ He hit the play button.
Raúl took slow steps into the cavern, his torch penetrating the darkness ahead of him. His breathing was slow and steady, as was the sound of bubbles escaping from the valve on the helmet; a regular background beat. Then just as Bad Dog’s spotlight had done, his torchlight fell upon a glitter of gold on the cave floor. In an instant, his breathing rate shot up as he peered down at a gold bar. It only accelerated further as he stepped deeper into the cavern and spotted more gold scattered across the floor. But Raúl ignored them all, just as Leon had done, and pressed on until he was confronted with the wreck of the galleon.
He whooped, the sound amplified inside the confines of his helmet. He raised his arm, hand clenched into a fist, and punched the water.
A sheer moment of joy before whatever was about to happen to him. If only the guy had known what was coming next.
We watched Raúl as he walked up and down the wreck, punctuating the silence with whistles and whoops. But that only increased my sense of foreboding; that after all the joy of one of the biggest moments of that young man’s life, all this was about to go so catastrophically wrong.
At last, Raúl seemed satisfied that he’d seen enough for this first dive. He turned round and headed back towards the cave entrance, the pool of light growing larger with every step.
It was then that the exact moment that I’d been dreading actually happened. The tether, which had been lying on the ground like a sleeping python, suddenly flew up through the water and caught on the top of the cave mouth, going taut. It yanked Raúl off his feet and dragged him head first towards the entrance as it was reeled in.
As the cavern walls rushed past, the footage kept shaking as Raúl’s helmet clanged and bumped over the uneven floor, his arm thrashing around for purchase but finding nothing to grab onto. Then he had a sudden reprieve – the line that had been rubbing on a lip of rock snapped, sending the man skidding to a stop. Over his panicked and laboured breathing, I could hear the hiss that proved that at least his airline was still intact. But for how much longer? What had just happened surely had to be linked to Hercules being attacked?
Slowly, and with some difficulty, Raúl got back to his feet. As fast as his diving suit would allow, he began to move towards the cave entrance.
‘Maricela!’ he cried out, his voice echoing inside his helmet.
He reached the entrance, and the camera view tipped as he looked up. The air caught in my throat. There on the surface, like huge, predatory sharks, two black speedboats were circling around Hercules, flashes of muzzle
fire illuminating the gentle waves. The old trawler was already listing heavily in the water.
Leon hissed. ‘So someone did fucking attack them?’
Carlos visibly flinched, his face now pale.
‘I’m afraid it looks that way.’ I said.
But there was now no question in my mind that this brutal assault on the unarmed boat had all the hallmarks of an Overseers’ operation.
Hercules was now heavily listing, its hull shredded with bullets. Then almost in slow motion it began to slide beneath the surface, helm first. A splash came from just in front of the prow as a distant figure leapt into the sea, bullet trails zipping past them.
‘Maricela!’ Raúl cried out again, his voice filled with sheer panic.
As the boat sunk beneath the waves, the hiss of air that had been keeping Raúl alive stopped dead. The air compressor on the deck of Hercules must have flooded with water. Raúl was forced to watch helplessly as some of the hundreds of rounds being fired into the water struck his sister, and she twitched violently. A plume of blood began to stain the water as her limbs stretched out, and then she stilled, her dark hair gently waving in the water like jet black seaweed.
Tears filled my eyes as I listened to Raúl gasping and sobbing for his dead sister even as he suffocated. And still Carlos hadn’t turned round to witness his children’s death, although I could see his shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
‘We can stop the video, Carlos,’ Leon said gently, hitting pause.
‘No. You keep watching, for their sakes, so we know exactly what really happened here,’ the old man replied.
Leon shot me a grim look, then pressed play.
As we watched Hercules begin its long and slow descent towards the seabed along with Maricela’s body, it was like watching a heartbreaking, slow-motion dance of death.
Raúl’s breath began to rattle in his helmet.
A lump rose in my throat and unexpectedly, Leon’s hand sought mine out as we both bore witness to the young diver’s death.
The man’s breathing finally rattled to silence as he collapsed backwards into the cave, the gurgle of the helmet’s valve forever silenced.
Tears filled my eyes. Those bastard Overseers had done it again – needlessly thrown away innocent lives that had got in their way. But why on this occasion? They obviously had no interest in the wreck.
Leon was just about to stop the video, when there was a flash of light. He paused, his finger hovering in mid-air over the controls.
His hand fell away as the light grew stronger, illuminating the cave ceiling for the camera that was still filming. Was it another diver, coming to rescue Raúl too late?
But then I blinked in astonishment as a glowing blue crystal came to a stop directly over the dead diver. The Guardian. Its brilliance bathed the cavern in intense blue light, before the image broke up and the video went black.
Leon gave me a shocked look. He dragged the play bar back ten seconds and began stepping through the frames one by one. And there it was again, exactly as I’d suspected, a tetrahedron-shaped crystal of a Guardian. This image was much clearer than the last footage I’d seen. The Angelus device was slimmer and far more elongated than a micro mind; a dart shape if anything.
Leon gawped at it. ‘Is that some sort of underwater military drone…maybe launched by the same bastards who attacked Hercules?’
Although I was certain about what we were looking at, Leon’s explanation was the perfect cover story.
‘Maybe it was some sort of top secret military test that Maricela and Raúl stumbled across, and they were killed to keep their silence?’ I said.
For the first time, Carlos turned his tear-streaked face round to look at us. ‘You’re saying somebody’s military murdered my children?’
‘It’s only a guess, but possibly,’ I replied. It felt awful not just coming out and telling him the truth, but I couldn’t go there right now, for both their sakes.
‘Then somebody needs to be held to account over this,’ Leon said.
‘One day, I’m sure they will,’ I said.
Leon gave me the sort of look that told me he realised I knew more then I was letting on. That I was being economical with the truth. His expression hardened. He pivoted the monitor back upwards into the submersible’s ceiling and took hold of the control yoke. Maybe he was waiting for us to be out of earshot from Carlos onboard Venus before he laid into me and asked me what the hell was really going on.
‘We should head back to the surface and show the world what we have just found out,’ Leon said, his tone flat.
‘Of course,’ I replied, grateful that I wasn’t having to look him in the face.
He pushed the throttle forward and in a turning circle, we climbed away. We began to head up towards Venus on the surface, where the waves were visibly starting to build around its hull.
Carlos had returned to his seat, his gaze locked onto the cave where his son had died, until it was lost from view.
Despite the awful atmosphere in the cockpit, I laid back on the couch, lost in my own thoughts. Why had the Guardian turned up like that? Could it have been aiming to rescue Raúl, but had arrived too late? And if so, could the micro mind be close by too? That would certainly explain why the Overseers had been in the area.
‘What is that thing?’ Carlos said, pulling me back out of my reverie.
I turned my head to see him pointing down towards the seabed.
Then I saw it too. Elation surged through me at the sight of the glowing point of blue light, a few hundred metres out on the seabed.
‘Is that the thing that we just saw in the video?’ Leon asked, also staring down at it.
If it was a micro mind, I needed to confirm it, if only so I could come back later to retrieve it with the others. I could always pass it off as military technology, continuing the lie I’d already started spinning. In for a penny, in for a pound.
I looked him square in the eye. ‘There is only one way we’re going to discover that.’
Leon nodded. ‘Then let’s go and find out for sure.’
With a blast of full throttle, a fresh sense of hope filled me despite my grief for Carlos’s loss. We could be close to making a breakthrough. I crossed my fingers as Neptune surged down towards the distant beacon of light glowing in the gloom.
Chapter Twelve
Through the surface of the sea, far above us the sky had begun to turn from blue to steely greys. Our window of opportunity was starting to close and having already checked with Leon, at most we only had an hour until the hurricane hit. But technically this was still a reconnaissance mission, as I’d be pointing out to Tom when we got back.
The ocean bed stretched away below us, the canyons of coral smoothing out into a bed of silt and sand, across which crabs scuttled. A dense shoal of tiny fish swam through the water ahead, parting in complex patterns as Neptune passed through their midst, thousands of tiny eyes taking in our progress. There was a distinct lack of seaweed at this depth apart from the odd hardy specimen determined to make a go of it. In my imagination I pictured the submersible manoeuvring through vast kelp forests, but that was never going to be a thing. I knew from my own scuba diving experience that they only grew in depths of about thirty metres. But that aside, what we were about to discover would be infinitely more interesting than any seaweed we might encounter. We closed in on that glowing point of come and get me light.
If it really was the Guardian, had it somehow been shot down by the same Overseers that had sunk Hercules and murdered Raúl and Maricela? But if so, why hadn’t they attempted to recover the Angelus's AI? The one thing I was pretty sure of, based on the fact there was still light coming from whatever it was, suggested that its systems were still active. That might mean there was a way for me to communicate with it, and that excited me more than anything.
I checked my bag, putting my hand on the Empyrean Key. The next problem was how I was going to come up with a remotely plausible explanation for getting the ston
e ball out and striking it with a tuning fork.
Yes, Carlos and Leon, this is all part of my daily mindfulness mediation practice, which I just have to do as regularly as clockwork at this time every day, or my mind falls apart…
I sighed inwardly.
The light was growing steadily stronger as we neared it. I strained my eyes trying to make it out and then its shape suddenly became sharper. But rather than being a dart-shaped object as I’d hoped, what we actually saw was a slab pushing up through the silt.
‘Okay, so maybe not our mystery military drone, but it looks as though it’s something just as intriguing,’ Leon said.
‘It looks like a giant glowing gem,’ Carlos said, peering through his blister window at it.
But my heart was already racing. I’d first encountered something very similar one stormy night near the ancient Skara Brae site on Orkney. This was just like one of the Angelus runes that had formed a large spiral pattern, with Lucy at the centre. And the fact that this one was glowing had to be significant.
Leon throttled back the thrusters and slowed our approach to crawl as we closed in on the object. Our headlights picked up its highly reflective surface in the silt covering it. Like the roots of a tree, its crystal tendrils buried themselves in the silt. This rune was easily twice the size of any I’d seen before – at least two metres across. But frustratingly, we still couldn’t see any inscription on the top surface because it was partly buried in silt.
‘Is there any way you can clear away the dirt on the top of that structure, Leon?’ I asked.
‘Yes, there’s an air hose built into the hydraulic claws designed to do exactly that,’ he replied. ‘I just need to be very careful not to damage whatever that thing is, although it certainly looks strong enough.’
Once again, I had to bite my tongue because I knew the structure was built from solid crystal. Leon was in more danger of damaging the claw rather than the other way round.
