‘UNECTA have built a fairly detailed sonar modeclass="underline" Foa Mulaku is like a chopped-off cone with its base on the sea floor and its uppermost sections twenty metres beneath the surface. The cone is made up of a number of distinct levels piled on top of each other – imagine a giant wedding cake. Over the past month Foa Mulaku has increased its growth rate to forty metres per day, and we expect the upper structures to break the surface in the next five hours.’
‘We’ll be going back to the Maldives live as the situation develops; in the meantime, Gaby McAslan, thank you.’
She held the smile until Tembo marked her out and the transmission light was extinguished. There was applause and encouraging shouts from the reporters who had ambled out of the bar to watch the baptism of fire. Paul Mulrooney, CNN’s Man in Africa, brought her something with rum and ice cubes in it.
‘Pissed my pants, first live link I did,’ he said. ‘Looked straight into the camera and talked about a cholera epidemic in a Rwandan refugee camp with it running down my leg and over my shoes. Thank God they only see you from the waist up.’
The course display monitors placed around the passenger areas showed that the SeaCat had passed the halfway point and the journalists began to move to the fore deck for their first glimpse of East Seven Five’s gantries. By sea as on land, UNECTA had been forced to buy creatively. A few well-placed bribes had beaten the Indonesian breaking-yard’s offer on the de-commissioned Royal Dutch/Shell exploration rig. The submersibles and remote equipment had been beachcombed from the hundred mile wrecking yard that was the east coast of Scotland after North Sea Oil. Half of East Seven Five’s crew were redundant Aberdonian off-shore men who mingled uncomfortably in the accommodation blocks with the laid-back researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Centre.
As the SeaCat moved in to East Seven Five around a Beriev seaplane refuelling from a tanker pontoon, inflatable Gemini craft burst from between the legs of the rig and furiously circled the catamaran.
‘Greenpeace protesters,’ Paul Mulrooney said. ‘I don’t know what they’re blaming UNECTA for, they didn’t invent the thing.’ As the rubber boats made a final circle and dashed toward an ancient Greek ferry with a rainbow painted on its bow that was moored a mile west, he shouted, ‘Go and sail your stupid little boats around Iapetus, or the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud, if you want someone to protest at.’
R.M. Srivapanda, East Seven Five’s director, was waiting on the pontoon to receive his guests. He was a dark, patient Tamil wearing one of those round-collared suits that look so well on Indians and so poorly on any other race. The left cuff was tucked into a pocket: Gaby recalled from T.P.’s rushed airport briefing that he had lost his lower left arm in a close encounter with a boat propeller while diving off Sri Lanka. All he needed was a white Persian cradled in his one good arm and twenty women in red catsuits with machine guns to be a criminal mastermind from a James Bond movie, hell-bent on world domination from his Indian Ocean base. Except James Bond was waiting up on Level One, in the mêlée of tripods, satellite dishes and correspondents pouring out of the elevator cages in search of the best locations. He had the smug expression a man would wear if he had license to go anywhere and do anything in the name of UNECTA.
‘You!’ Gaby yelled.
‘Me!’ Shepard agreed. He came to her through the tide of news people. Faraway shouted. He had found a place with an unparalleled view of the Maldive Ridge Object: a crow’s-nest on East Seven Five’s main communications mast. Tembo manoeuvred himself up, connected up his camera and shot background footage. As Faraway let a hand down to pull Gaby up. Shepard said, quickly and quietly, ‘Move in with me. I want to sleep with you, wake up with you, breakfast with you, perform acts of personal hygiene with you.’
‘Jesus, Shepard, you pick your moments,’ Gaby said as she scrambled up the mast.
‘Is that an answer?’ Shepard shouted up. But Gaby was already contemplating the thing in the sea. It required a trick of looking to see it, like the pictures that had been fashionable when Gaby had been in her early teens that looked like so much multi-coloured spaghetti but, if you looked past them, were supposed to magically resolve into 3-D leaping dolphins or dinosaurs. The trick here was like that, of looking not at the surface but beneath the lap and shiver of the water so that the patterns of light and dark and colour and joined together and became a picture.
It is not much like a wedding cake, Gaby thought. It is not much like anything other than what it is, what its makers have designed it to be. If it has makers, if those round white brain-like things just beneath the surface are not natural forms, if those deep fissures and meandering blue ridges are not just accidents of evolution, if those spines down there are not something that once had a meaning and function on some world among the gas veils of Rho Ophiuchi, but here, eight hundred light years away, is an empty remnant.
‘The dragon in the sea,’ Tembo said reverently. ‘It is written in the Book of Ezekiel.’
It is written in pages far older than those, Gaby thought. It is written in the racial memory, in the same genes that enable babies to swim before they learn the fear of water. The Kraken. The Midgard serpent. The sea-gods and mermaids and treacherous she-spirits of the ocean. The thing that lives in the sea.
The public address system whined feedback. A Scottish accent announced seat allocations in the recreation room on level three in five minutes. Gaby fought for a place in the line for the woman sitting at a table with a PDU and a box of badges issuing seats on the spotter helicopters. She came to the table and gave the names of her team members to the helicopter woman. ‘She won’t be needing a seat,’ a voice said in her ear and before Gaby could protest that it was seat or job, had drawn her aside to a quiet place among the pushed-together pool tables. Journalists awaiting their turn stared.
‘I’m probably going to regret this,’ Shepard said. ‘Grab your team, come with me.’
30
‘There is no way I am ever going to fit into this.’ Gaby McAslan held up the red and silver suit with the big black numbers front and back.
‘It stretches,’ Shepard said. He had already pulled his over his swimwear. He ran his thumb up the seals.
‘It smells,’ Gaby said. ‘Who was the last person inside this?’
‘It smells of you. It’s made from synthetic skin, the same stuff they graft on to burns victims, with a few chemical tricks we’ve learned from the Chaga and a colour scheme so the helicopters can find you if you fall overboard. The fullerene machines have never touched human flesh, so the perfect material for an isolation suit is skin. Or would you rather another night in decontam?’
‘Lois Lane is not the one who puts on the tights in the phonebooth,’ Gaby complained as she put the thing on. It did stretch. It was quite comfortable. She would have welcomed a gusset, but presumably men had designed the suits and never gave thought to Visible Sanitary Towel Lines, let alone having the fanny cut off you. They checked suit numbers with the out-lock controller and went down to the jetty.
‘Hey! Nineteen!’ Faraway shouted, reading the number on Gaby’s chest. He made a yelping noise like a hunting dog in heat.
Tembo was busy in the third boat with a Chaga-protected camera with UNECTAsie’s horns-and-yin-yang logo on the side. Faraway wired Gaby as she took her seat.
‘We are transmitting back to a satellite link on the rig and they will relay it to London.’ He fitted the plug into her ear and eased her hair back under the protective hood. His touch was very gentle. The other boats had already cast off. In the first was UNECTA’s own recording team. In the second was the landing party. Two last crew jumped into the third boat. They frowned at the SkyNet team. Shepard looked at them as if to challenge their right to query him and waved for the off. The helmsman pushed the throttle up. The little surf boat stood up in the water and skidded out from the shadows under East Seven Five into the light.