The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [37]
“But we’ve got a deterrent, surely . . . ?”
“No.” Angleton’s expression is implacable. “Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it—” he gestures at the screen “—they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine. They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It’s like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don’t even think about threatening them; we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly.”
“Then what the hell was JENNIFER about?”
Click-clack. “A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential. The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking.”
I’m looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s a deep-ocean mudscape. Scattered across the layered silt are small irregular objects, some of them round, some of them long. A couple more seconds and my brain acknowledges that what my eyes are seeing is a watery field of skulls and femurs and ribs. I’ve got an idea that not all of them are entirely human.
“The Caribbean sea hides many secrets. This field of silt covers a deep layer rich in methane hydrates. When some force destabilizes the deposits they bubble up from the depths—like the carbon dioxide discharge from the stagnant waters of Lake Nyos in the Cameroon. But unlike Lake Nyos, the gas isn’t confined by terrain so it dissipates after it surfaces. It’s not an asphyxiation threat, but if you’re on a ship that’s caught above a hydrate release, then the sea under your keel turns to gas and you’re going straight down to Davy Jones’s locker.” Angleton clears his throat. “BLUE HADES have some way of replenishing these deposits and triggering releases. They use them to keep us interfering hominids away from things that don’t concern us, such as the settlement at Witch’s Hole in the North Sea . . . and the depths of the Bermuda Triangle.”
I swallow. “What’s down there?”
“Some of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. And some of the largest BLUE HADES installations we’re aware of.” Angleton looks as if he’s bitten into a lemon expecting an orange. “That isn’t saying much—most of their sites are known to us only from neutrino mapping and seismology. The portion of the biosphere we understand is limited to the surface waters and continental landmasses, boy. Below a thousand fathoms of water, let alone below the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, it’s a whole different ball game.”
“The Moho-what?”
“The underside of the continental plates we live on—below the discontinuity lies the upper mantle. Didn’t you study geography at school?”
“Uh . . .” I spent most of my school geography lessons snoozing, doodling imaginary continents in the backs of exercise books, or trying to work up the courage to pass a message to Lizzie Graham in the next row. Now it looks like those missed lessons are about to come back and bite me. “Moving swiftly on, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Ellis Billington has purchased a CIA spy ship designed for probing