“Pacific’s a basin. Pacific’s got walls.”
“Pacific’s huge. I mean sure, ocean seiches go on world tours sometimes, but they’re slow. Stretch the mixing layer a few meters over a few years. Maybe kickstart an El Niño now and then. Nothing like this.”
“There was nothing like Nāmaka ten years ago either.”
“Yeah.”
“So much heat in the oceans now, hurricanes don’t even cool down enough to dissipate. Maybe it’s amping up your seiches, too.”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Maybe they’re even feeding off each other. Nothing’s linear anymore, it’s all tipping points and—”
“I don’t know, I said. None of that shit matters right now.” She slides her visor up, eyes a red handle protruding from the ceiling. A tiny metallic hiccough and a soft bloop carry through the hull after she yanks it. Something flashes on the dash.
“Emergency buoy?”
Moreno nods, downs visor, grabs the joystick.
“Shouldn’t we, you know. Make a recording? Send details?”
“It’s in there already. Dive logs, telemetry, even cabin chatter. Beacon stores it all automatically.” The corner of her mouth tightens. “You’re in there too, if that helps. Sub commandeered by NMI, prospecting dive. Maybe they’ll move faster, knowing one of their errand boys is in danger.”
She edges the stick forward and to port. Cyclopterus banks.
Galik checks the depth gauge. “Down?”
“You think anyone’s gonna fly a rescue mission through Nāmaka? You think I’d be crazy enough to surface even if they did?”
“No, but—”
“Any rescue’s gonna come in from the side. And since you wouldn’t have dragged Sylvia all the way over from the Cafe if there’d been anyone closer, I’m assuming it’s gonna have to come from further out, right?”
After a moment, he nods.
“Could be days before help arrives even if our signal does manage to cut through the shit,” Moreno tells him. “And I for one don’t feel like holding my breath for a week.”
Galik swallows. “I thought these things made their own O2. From seawater.”
“Lack of seawater isn’t the problem. Need battery power to run the electrolysis rig.”
He glances at their bearing; Moreno has brought them around so they’re following in the wake of the superseiche.
“You’re going after the Earle.”
Her jaw clenches visibly. “I’m going after what’s left. With any luck, some of the fuel cells are still intact.”
“Any chance of survivors?” Most habs come with emergency pods, hard-shelled refugia for the crew in case of catastrophe. Assuming the crew has enough advance warning to get to them, of course.
She doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s not allowing herself to hope.
“I’m—I’m sorry about this,” Galik manages. “I can’t imagine what—”
Cowled Moreno hunches over the controls. “Shut up and let me drive.”
Cyclopterus never stops talking. Her guts gurgle and hiss. Her motors whine like electric mosquitoes. Her relentless transducers ping the ocean for reflections of mass and density.
Her passengers—immersed in wireframe caricatures of the world beyond the hull—say nothing at all.
Eventually the seabed resolves below them: luminous plane or muddy plain, depending on which channel you choose. Sonar serves up more information, but after all the pixels the impoverished patch of bone-grey sediment in the headlights is a welcome glimpse of something real. Galik fiddles with the controls, finds an overlay mode that serves up the best of both feeds.
Moreno nudges the sub to port. Mud gives way to rock; rock subsides again under mud. Outcrops and overhangs erupt from the substrate at odd angles, like listing jagged-edged tabletops. Nodules of cobalt and manganese lie scattered about like encrusted coins strewn from some ancient shipwreck. There are things, everywhere. Starfish with arms like tiny sinuous backbones. Tentacled flowers on stalks. Tangled balls of jawless hagfish. Gelatinous blobs the size of softballs, floating just off the bottom; they iridesce like dragonfly wings in the glare of the headlight.
All drift aimlessly. None move on their own.
Galik slides his visor up, looks across the cockpit. “Are they all dead?”
Moreno grunts.
“What would do that?” Hydrogen sulfide, maybe. The whole zone’s rotten with cold seeps and hot smokers—the source of Clipperton’s mineral wealth—but Galik’s still taken aback to see such devastation in the middle of a protected wilderness area.
An eyeless shrug. “Dead zone moved in, probably. We get big slugs of anoxic water sliding down off the conshelf few times a year now. Suffocates whole ecosystems overnight.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” Her voice is toneless. “What a tragedy.”
Galik searches what he can see of her face, finds it unreadable. He gives up and downs his own visor.
Something’s waiting for him there.
It’s a hard ping, just a few degrees to starboard. Something big on the seabed, like an outcropping but more symmetrical, somehow. It echoes louder than any mere chunk of basalt.
“Is that a piece of the hab? Fifty meters, oh-two-eight?”
“No.”
“Sounds like metal, though, right?”
Moreno says nothing.
“Maybe we should check it out. Just to be sure.”
Technically he’s still in charge. Technically Moreno’s just a taxi driver. Technically she could still tell him to fuck off and there wouldn’t be a whole lot he could do about it.
After a moment, though, Cyclopterus noses to starboard.
The bogey’s partially hidden behind a ridge of rock; its echo flashes like the edge of some dim sun peeking over a horizon. Details resolve as they approach: a curve, a convexity. A series of interlocking segments, their lower edges fuzzed by incursions of mud.
A skull.
Sonar completes the tableaux a few moments before it scrolls into the light: a backbone, glittering with oily reflections. A silvered arrowhead cranium, three meters if it’s an inch, nostrils stretched along the top, empty eye sockets pushed down to the sides. The bones of some huge thumbless hand, laid flat across the seabed like a museum reconstruction.
“It’s a whale,” he whispers.
“Few million years old, probably.”
“But it’s metal…”
“It’s a fossil. It mineralized. The water’s saturated with metal ions. Why do you even think you’re interested in this place?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’d love to give you a scenic tour, Alistor, but in case you’ve forgotten my friends are probably all dead and I’d just as soon not join—”
She cuts herself off. Something’s caught her eye, something peeking into view from behind that enormous glinting spine.
“What the fuck,” she murmurs.
A fleshy torpedo, pale whitish-pink in the lights, a couple meters long. Arms. “Squid,” Galik says.
“Not like any squid I’ve ever seen.”
They edge in closer. Galik zooms his camera. The creature drifts listless as any other they’ve seen down here, arms limp as seaweed. There is something strange about it, though.
“Look at the eyes,” Moreno whispers.
He can see three from this angle, spaced at ninety-degree intervals around the absurd amidships head of the thing. (Presumably there’s a fourth on the far side.) And of those three, two of them look—wrong…
No iris. No pupil. No white. Galik sees three things positioned as eyes, but only one stares back at him. The others are dark, and—tangled, somehow. Sockets full of tendrils: as though someone has scooped out the eyeball and stuffed a nest of bloodworms into the socket.