Outlanders 38 - Lords of the Deep, page 1
Table of Contents
(Untitled)
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Prologue
"Deep Probe 23 approaching the target," Warden Lang reported. Ostensibly he was addressing the submersible's commander, Senior Technician Zoster, but really he was speaking for the benefit of the ultra-low-frequency broadcast by which every detail of their mission was being tracked in the great submerged dome of Lemuriaville.
"Idiot," Zoster snarled from beside him. "I can see that as plainly as you can.''
He gestured irritably with a moon-pale hand at the armaglass front viewscreen. Below and ahead of the descending craft the deep Pacific floor scrolled slowly beneath them in the light of twin spotlights. A mile or so ahead lay a black line like a knife cut across the sinuous ridges and silt-filled valleys.
The image was not altogether real; down here, four miles beneath the surface, no light penetrated. Even the hundred-million-candlepower fusion-driven beams could do little to pierce the eternal gloom. They were assisted by a variety of forward-looking sensors ranging from sonar to millimeter-wave radar to gravitic anomaly detection, which was computer-translated into visual representation and painted on the view screen by micro- lasers mounted in the console.
Lang jerked a thumb toward the thin microphone curving from his headset in front of his mouth. "For base," he mouthed. Zoster was nominally his superior on this mission—and certainly Baron Lemuria would enforce the chain of authority with the same imaginative zeal he enforced all his laws, not to mention passing whims—but one of Lemuriaville's elite Wardens of the Deep could only put up with so much from a mere civilian. Zoster only glared. The prick. He had black hair like sparse steel wool receding from a bulging forehead that glowed faintly blue in the lights of the panel. His eyes, a blue somewhat less faint, stood out from his head. His beard had twin swipes of gray down the sides; Lang would bet he wore it to conceal a weak chin. His breath stank and he smelled as if he had a long-uncleaned pisser.
That was the sort of thing you became acquainted with on a long voyage in a cramped deep-sea vessel. Intimately acquainted.
"Deep Probe 23, do you see anything yet?" came the voice of the controller sitting back in Central Control in Lemuriaville.
"Prime Base," Technician Zoster said importantly, "we have sighted the undersea canyon."
"Proceed as planned."
"Affirmative," Lang said. He resisted an urge to flick a glance at the technician beside him. In fact, he felt anything but affirmative.
The seabed below was devoid of apparent life, as it generally was at this depth. Yet something supposedly lived down here. Farther down, in fact, deep within the canyon ahead. So patrol reports claimed. Remote sensors periodically showed what appeared to be enormous, unexplained masses moving about this region.
Such reports weren't what were making Warden Lang's palms moist and his mouth dry. They were all bullshit and anomalies. Nothing really lived way down here, except the strange sulfur based life-forms clustered around deep-sea vents. And they were nothing but tubeworms and bacteria and a few mutant crustaceans that fed upon them.
What Lang feared was crush depth. The submersible was enormously strong, a titanium shell sandwiched in polymerized ceramic wrapped around a collapsed-crystal lattice framework. Submerged, the craft was driven by jets of water sucked into ducts, ionized and then accelerated by fluctuating magnetic fields, with no moving mechanism whatever. It was designed to resist not only the unimaginable pressure of the deep ocean, but also the stresses and projectile impacts of high-speed surface combat.
Nor was Lang a stranger to the concept of being at a depth at which he would be instantly crushed if for any reason the pressure ceased being resisted for even a microsecond. He had been born and raised in Lemuriaville, sealed within in its great dome three hundred fathoms below the Pacific's seldom peaceful surface.
But this was an extreme depth indeed. The Lemuriaville whitecoats assured him the craft was good to at least three thousand fathoms, but how would they know? There was never a call to send a craft this deep. And besides, Zoster was a Lemurian tech, too. And just look at him.
Though he could never admit it, for fear of being yanked from warden duty and dropped into the Bilge— or just being recycled—Lang had a fear of being crushed by the awful weight of water at depth that bordered on the phobic. Though nobody he'd ever met had been fused-out to say so out loud, he reckoned he was far from the only one.
Maybe everybody in the dome had it. To judge by all the Ames he'd been awakened by someone screaming in their sleep in the dorms, until he reached pilot status and rated his own tiny closet of a compartment. To judge by the strange, strained silences in the mess and wardroom, the haunted glances people cast overhead and toward bulkheads when they thought no one was looking at them. Though it was said that the dome had been built centuries before, before the nukecaust even, and thus had survived the awful shocks sent crashing through the Pacific seabed by the Soviet earthshaker nukes that sank America's West Coast and lit off Ring of Fire volcanoes like so many firecrackers, Lang wasn't reassured.
The sea had its way. He'd been on enough patrols to know that. He'd known enough men who never came back from patrol, known of enough seafloor mining and aquaculture accidents. Even away down deep in Lemuriaville, where even the most violent surface storms were as remote as if you were off perched on the Moon's pimply ass, the brutal Cific would always find a way to reassert its tenable might.
So he reckoned it was just a matter of time before the dome cracked. Hell; it wasn't as if surviving the nukecaust was such a good thing. What if the shocks had caused some tiny imperfection, a crack in the foundation, a flaw in the armaglass bubble of the dome itself and it was even now building, slowly and inexorably, toward failure?
Being out in a pod, as the Deep Wardens called their dual-purpose submersible craft, was worse, of course. Barring accident or enemy action, they didn't fail often. Often.
Lang shook his head, blew air silently out bearded lips. And we're going deeper still....
The pseudo picture painted on the inside of the front viewport was deceptive. What at first glimpse appeared to be a cut in a flat floor was in fact edged with what would, on the surface, have been a range of young mountains, and jagged as a moray's lower jaw. He could feel Zoster tightening up beside him in instinctive dread as they skimmed the fang peaks, and the abyss dropped away before them, black, right down to the heart of the world.
Chickenshit civilian, he thought. He acts so high and mighty, but once the pressure gauges start to get near redline, his shit turns to water.
"Entering canyon now," he reported. He thought it was chickenshit that he had to report everything verbally, too. It wasn't as if Lemuriaville wasn't monitoring everything within the pod and everything its sensors detected through telemetry. But that was procedure, and as a warden, it was in his job description to come down hard on anybody who thought to break or even bend the rules, including his fellow wardens. Independent thinking was not considered a virtue in Lemuriaville. It was the kind of thing that caused unrestrained humanity to blow up the world, he'd always been taught.
"Pilot," Zoster commanded, eager to impress himself on the action again, "start your descent."
Descend on my chubby, Lang stopped himself from snarling. "Aye, aye, sir," he said, as he worked the controls to use jets and gyros to direct the submersible's nose fifteen degrees downward.
In tomb stillness the craft dived toward the blackness. The chasm was swallowing their floodlights like a blue whale imbibing plankton, and for some reason the sensor suite wasn't sucking in enough information to image whatever was down there. Lang had a flash fantasy that there wasn't anything down there, that they had come into a rift not just in the seabed but in the fabric of reality itself, no that he and Zoster stared down into the naked void. "Curious," Zoster murmured, a trickle of sweat down his bluish balding forehead giving the lie to the studied detachment of his tone. "Shouldn't we be, well...seeing something?"
"Don't mean nothing," Lang said. "Software just takes its time updating the display sometimes...sir." "
“Ah. of course."
Then he scowled. "What's that?" he asked. Lang glared at him. "What's what?"
The senior technician pointed ahead. Lang's gaze followed his finger.
Down in the black blackness, blackness stirred. "Deep Probe 23." The voice from the speakers was harsh and peremptory. "Deep Probe 23, what is happening?"
Turbulence began to rock the deep sea vehicle. Zoster was babbling questions. His nervous spittle pattered against the side of Lang's face.
Lang didn't he ar him. He was fighting to hold the craft steady against the buffeting of some kind of mysterious current.
The blackness below reached for them.
It reached with waving sinuosity. "Tentacles?" Lang said, more disbelieving than frightened.
Like ink diffusing through water, the tentacles flowed out to surround them. Lang furiously worked the controls, but it was already too late to escape.
Zoster emitted a strangled sound. A black bulk of unimaginable size heaved itself up from the darkness of the abyss. Lang had a sense it was vaguely triangular.
A giant eye, luminous and red, startlingly human, opened in the center of the black triangle like a hatchway into Hell.
The tentacles closed in. The submersible jerked as they seized it and wrenched.
Lang just had time for one scream of searing agony as the piston effect of water blasting at unimaginable pressures through half a dozen hull breaches simultaneously sent the temperature of the air within the submersible soaring to crematory temperatures in a fractional second, igniting his hair and skin. He had a brief glimpse through his one private Hell of Zoster burning yellow like a wax figure.
Then a fresh hypersonic leak cut through his head like a diamond saw and put an end to pain.
Chapter 1
Brigid Baptiste was sitting bolt upright with her H&K clutched white-knuckled in both hands before she realized the 9 mm handgun would do no good against the terrors that had awakened her.
The black, she thought, shivering as if in the throes of fever. The cold. The crushing...
Voices drew her attention, and the flicker of pale light. A campfire burned on the beach. The others sat clustered about it.
She put the handblaster away and stood up. Her legs shook slightly beneath her. She frowned, inhaled deeply. Get control of yourself.
She raised her head and smoothed back her hair. Then she made herself walk steadily toward the leaping orange-and-yellow light.
Kane sat directly across the fire from her. At her approach, although she knew she moved very quietly indeed, he raised his dark shaggy head to gaze directly at her. Yellow flames danced in his wolf-gray eyes. "Dreams again, huh, Baptiste?" he said. His voice was a baritone, rich but roughened by hard use.
He hadn't asked a question. She answered anyway. "Yes," she said, nodding and smoothing back her hair again. Her hair was mach the color of the flames, as her eyes were green like the sea beyond in sunlight. The leaping campfire brought the true colors of both to rich light where it struck them. She sat down, careful to arrange the tails of the man's tan shirt she wore between her bare legs for modesty's sake, although she wore underpants. To her left, Kane's right, knelt Grant. His big, slightly grizzled head was sunk to his muscular bare chest in a meditative pose. He looked like an idol carved of mahogany. A god of strength, hidden wisdom—and anger, which smoldered sometimes deep, sometimes near the surface.
"We’ve all had them," Grant said. His voice rumbled like a boulder rolling down a rocky chute. His own amber eyes were turned down so that Brigid could read no reflection in them. He wore loose camou trousers; his feet were bare. Though shirtless, he wore his Sin Eater in its power holster on his right forearm. Kane wore his, too, visible below the short sleeves of his khaki T-shirt. The Sin Eaters were the badges of the Magistrates, once the terrors and tyrants of the nine villes of North America. Since the barons had apotheosized into living gods—the original Annunaki reborn—the villes had slid into decline. Some persisted as power centers; others had fallen to internal strife. Some Magistrates hung on in the remaining occupied villes to enforce the will of whichever power figure claimed their allegiance.
Others roamed the countryside like the masterless samurai or Ronin of Japan, especially in the days following the overthrow of the shogunate by the Meiji Restoration in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Like the Ronin of old, some had become mere laborers or even mendicants, some mercenaries hiring their blasters to whoever was willing to offer pay or km, and some outright bandits. They had become one more of the pervasive evils the growing complement of Cerberus redoubt fought against.
Kane and Grant were different. They had become renegades through their own choice, rebels against the tyranny of the barons and the vast secret conspiracy they once served. Although as in the case of Brigid herself, an erstwhile archivist who had fallen from grace and escaped Cobaltville with the pair, how big a role free will or choice had actually played in their exile was subject to debate. All had on one level or another been manipulated by Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh, the scientist who had been one of the architects of the program of Unification and the baronial system, and who subsequently had betrayed both—ostensibly in the interests of humanity. He was now director of Cerberus, and de facto commander of the resistance based there. Kane and Grant, sometimes even Brigid herself, had repeatedly rebelled against Lakesh's arrogance and manipulation and assumption of command. Yet somehow he remained in charge. Perhaps in the end, Brigid reflected, because no one else actually wanted his job.
"Same as last night," Grant said. "Same as every night, lately."
"What?" a female voice asked. Domi appeared like a photonegative shadow out of the darkness. She wore a brief red top and loose khaki shorts against the warmth of the Snail Cove night.
Dosed was a small woman. She was an albino, her skin the white of milk or sun-bleached bone, as was her hair, which she wore trimmed to a silvery plush. Ruby highlights glinted in her eyes in the firelight. Though she was slimly built, her breasts and hips and buttocks were full, and her legs long for her inconsiderable height. With her pen, gamine features and a web belt cinched about her narrow waist to hold a holster for her Detonics Combat Master .45 counterbalanced by a sheath for her pet knife with the nine-inch saw-backed blade, she looked like a naughty elf.
The elfin resemblance didn't carry too well—unless, as Brigid knew, one looked back at the old myths to learn what the elves were really like. Although physically the least imposing of the four fugitives who had fled Cobaltville together to wind up in Cerberus, Domi was as casually deadly as a krait.
Domi plopped down on the sand across from Grant and sat with the soles of her feet together and her legs carelessly splayed. "What every night?" she asked. "Did you start getting some, Grant? Shizuka-san'll be pissed."
Grant's dark cheeks actually flushed—he was light-skinned for a black man. He lowered his head and his heavy brow furrowed further.
"The nightmares," Kane said. "Souse ones we've been having for weeks." He looked up at Brigid. "Seem to be getting stronger."
"What nightmares?" Domi asked brightly. "I didn't have any nightmares."
"You really don't have the dreams, Domi?" Grant asked. Only occasionally did Domi's needling get under his skin; he was, as he said, used to her bullshit.
She shook her head, her ruby eyes wide. "No. I really don't."
Watching her narrowly. Brigid could see no signs she lied. It meant little, Brigid was painfully aware. Having grown up in the desperate Outlands, a forager, scammer and survivor, Domi was a skilled dissemble, while Brigid was only slowly and painfully building the most basic skills of reading and understanding other people, which formed no part of her training and practice as an archivist. Indeed, interaction among people on any but a duty basis had been kept to a rigorous minimum throughout the Cobaltville Enclaves, and particularly in her Historical Division.
Around them the night lived with the rustling of the palms and the inland vegetation, the twittering of night birds and the variegated insect noises. The sea was relatively calm, the surf a soft susurration. The air was warm and soft. The waning moon had fallen away behind the island hours before. The stars' reflections floated and played in the gentle waves out beyond the shore, like schools of phosphorescent fish. Just another night in Paradise--except for the dreams.
"What was your dream, Baptiste?" Kane asked. Challenge rang in his words, though they were softly voiced.
She flushed and made herself meet his gaze. Their fates, their very souls, were linked—throughout time and space, if the jump dreams were to be credited. Yet they also seemed fated, at least in this incarnation, always to rub each other the wrong way. Nor. Brigid knew, was Kane always at fault.
"You know I'm uncomfortable talking about such matters at the best of times, Kane," she said.
