“Kill the lights,” he says.
“Why—”
“Just do it.”
Darkness crushes in. Galik’s hullcam goes black—except for one bright pinpoint, flashing a steady emerald beat in the darkness. Right about where one of those not-eyes gapes, invisible now.
“There’s an LED in that thing,” Galik says softly.
Moreno kicks the floods back on. The blinking star vanishes in high-contrast light and shadow. Cyclopterus closes with renewed purpose; a manipulator unfolds from her belly like a mantis limb, clawed fingers reaching for the flaccid thing. They touch it.
Instantly the squid flexes and recoils, jets away into the darkness.
“Huh,” Galik grunts.
“Humboldt squid,” Morena tells him. “Started off as one, anyway. Resistant to low-oxygen conditions.”
“But it was—”
“Tweaked. Whole lot of neurons cable to the eyes. Nothing says they gotta carry visual information. Hook up the right sensors, you could read anything. pH. Salinity. Name it.”
“So it’s some kind of—living environmental sensor.”
“That’s my guess.”
“Not yours.”
Moreno snorts.
“Whose, then?”
“I dunno,” Moreno says. “But look where it went.”
She’s aimed the sonar, cranked the range. The squid—whatever it is—doesn’t register on such far focus. Something does, though. Way off in the distance, at the very limit of sonar sight, something bounces back faint as a ghost.
“Looks like an outcropping,” Galik says.
“My ass. Those edges are too straight.”
“Sylvia Earle?”
“Wrong bearing.”
“Maybe we should just stay the course. Given our limited reserves.”
Cyclopterus turns toward the echo.
Galik slides his visor back. “What do you think it is?”
Moreno’s is up as well. Her eyes are hard as glass.
“Let’s find out.”
“Well, at least we know now,” Galik says.
“Know?”
“Why Clipperton’s off-limits. Why the ISA didn’t—” He shakes his head. “Someone bought them.”
Cyclopterus floats across an unfinished landscape of plastic and metal. Spreading out in all directions, a grid of rails turns the seabed into a chessboard; spindly towers rise from its interstices. Printers the size of automobiles glide along their tracks, drilling holes, laying eggs, extruding pools of hot thick liquid that freeze harder than basalt. Strange jet-propelled machines splice rock and metal together at critical junctures. Everywhere are the frames of half-completed domes and tunnels and conduits, wormy with bundled cabling and fiberop.
All invisible in the darkness. All this industrious activity hidden beneath four kilometers of sunless black, except where Cyclopterus’s eyes and echoes lay it bare.
Galik whistles. “This is going to be one hell of a hab.”
“This isn’t a hab. It’s a fucking city.” Moreno rechecks the onboard database. “Not on the charts. No transponders. This thing is totally off the books.”
“I guess they’re not all going to New Zealand.”
Moreno taps a control; blotchy rainbows bloom here and there across the display. A slash of red smoulders at two o’clock, broken by huddles of intermittent machinery. “Hot seep.”
“Power source,” Galik guesses.
“Hey, you see that?”
He does. Bearing eighty-five degrees: something round and smooth, something anomalously complete in the midst of all this in-progress disarray. It glows green and warm on thermal.
A pressure hull.
Moreno reads the echo like a soothsayer. “Atmosphere.”
“Occupied?” This could be a problem. Anyone going to these lengths isn’t likely to welcome drop-ins.
But Moreno shakes her head. “Looks like a foreman’s shack. Place to crash when you come down to check on your pet project. Anyone who can keep a place this size off the scope isn’t gonna risk giving themselves away with telemetry broadcasts. Can’t see anyone living here full-time, though. Not until they’re ready to move in permanently. In the meantime”—Cyclopterus is already coming around—“there’ll be power. Food. Beds even.”
The shack’s dead ahead now, growing in their sights. “We hang around too long, we’ll have company,” Galik surmises.
“Unless we’re extremely unlucky, the rescue guys show up first. And then this fucking place gets dragged into the sunlight for everyone to see.”
“That’s assuming whoever’s behind it—”
“You know who’s behind it, Alistor. Your masters. Their masters. Zero-pointers cashing out before the bill comes due.” She glances meaningfully at him. “Guess they didn’t save you a spot, huh?”
“You’re assuming they won’t be keeping an ear on the local chatter. That they won’t just reach out and squash a rescue mission as soon as they see the coordinates.”
Moreno’s fingers tighten on the joystick. A soft Shit hisses between her teeth.
The shack resolves in their headlights like a grey moon, maybe ten meters across at the equator. Moreno pulls the stick and Cyclopterus climbs low over the northern hemisphere, her lights pooling across ducts and grilles and stencilled warnings to keep clear of the vents. Moreno navigates over the north pole, coaxes the sub into planting a perfect watertight kiss on the docking hatch. Machinery grapples and clenches and blows seawater back into the abyss.
She boots up a dashboard interface and curses. “Figures. Only one atmosphere in there.”
“How long to decompress us?”
“From nine atmospheres? Breathing trimix? Five days, easy.” She studies the dash. “Fortunately, we’ve also got remote access to hab support. I can bring inside pressure up to nine in about”—she runs her finger up the dash—“fifteen minutes.”
“You rock,” Galik tells her.
It gets him his first small smile. “I do, don’t I?”
They don’t have fifteen minutes, though. The board starts beeping after five.
“That was fast,” Galik says.
Moreno frowns. “That’s not the hab. That’s an ELF handshake.” Her face brightens. “Text message! The beacon got through!”
Galik’s jaw tightens. “Don’t get your hopes up. Remember, these people”—taking in the half-built complex around them—“they have ears, too.”
“No, this is through Cospas-Sarsat. This is NOAA.” She leans forward, focusing as if sheer concentration might somehow squeeze the signal from the water a little faster. Alphanumerics accumulate in front of her. They’re too small to make out from where Galik’s sitting.
He sighs.
“Says here—it says…” The anticipation drains from her face. Something darker rises in its stead.
She turns to face him. “Who the fuck are y—”
Galik’s fist connects with her right temple. Moreno’s head snaps sideways, cracks against the hull. She sags like a rag doll against the shoulder strap.
Galik unbuckles his harness and leans over. There’s still awareness in her eyes. Her drooling mouth twitches and gapes, trying to form words. From somewhere inside Koa Moreno, a moan escapes.
He shakes his head. “It really was a preliminary survey, for what it’s worth. We didn’t know what was down here any more than you did; we only had—suspicions.”
“You fuh…” she manages.