The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [4]
It’s official—they’ve found what they’re looking for.
THE ATMOSPHERE IN SPOOK CITY IS TENSE BUT triumphant. “We’re there,” announces Cooper. He smirks at the hatchet-faced Brit in the crumpled suit, who is smoking an unfiltered Camel in clear violation of shipboard fire regulations. “We did it!”
“We’ll see,” mutters the Brit. He stubs the cigarette out and shakes his head. “Getting there is only half the struggle.”
Nettled, Murph glares at him. “What’s your problem?” he demands.
“You’re messing with something below a thousand meters, in strict contravention of Article Four,” says the Brit. “I’m here as a neutral observer in accordance with Section Two—”
“Fuck you and your neutral status, you’re just sore because you guys don’t have the balls to stand on your waiver rights—”
Cooper gets between them before things can escalate again. “Cool it. Murph, how about checking with the bridge again to see if there’s been any sign of the commies taking an interest? They’ll twig when they see we’ve stopped lowering the string. James—” He pauses. Grimaces slightly. The Brit’s alias is transparent and, to a Company man, borderline insulting: Cooper wonders, not for the first time, Why the fuck does he call himself that? “—let’s go take a hike down to the moon pool and see what they’ve found.”
“Suits me.” The Brit stands up, unfolding like a stick-insect inside his badly fitting gray suit. His cheek twitches but his expression stays frozen. “After you.”
They leave the office and Cooper locks the door behind him. The Hughes GMDI ship may be enormous—it’s bigger than a Marine Corps assault carrier, larger than an Iowaclass battleship—but its companionways and corridors are a cramped, gray maze, punctuated by color-coded pipes and ducts conveniently located at shin-scraping and head-banging heights. It doesn’t roll in the swells but it rocks, weirdly, held solidly on station by the SKS thrusters (a new technology that accounts for a goodly chunk of the cost of the ship). Down six flights of steps there’s another passage and a bulkhead: then Cooper sees the dogged-back hatch leading out into the moon pool at the level of the fifty-foot catwalk. As usual it takes his breath away. The moon pool is just under 200 feet long and 75 feet wide, a stillness of black water surrounded by the gantries and cranes required for servicing the barge. The giant docking legs are fully extended below the waterline at either end of the pool. The drill string pierces the heart of the chamber like a black steel spear tying it to the ocean floor. The automatic roughneck and the string handling systems have fallen silent, the deafening clatter and roar of the drill system shut down now that the grab has reached its target. Soon, if all goes well, the derrick above them will begin hauling up the string, laboriously unbolting the hundreds of pipe segments and stacking them on the deck of the ship, until finally Clementine—also known as the HMB-I “mining barge”—rumbles to the surface of the pool in a flurry of cold water, clutching its treasure beneath it. But for now the moon pool is a peaceful haven, its surface marred only by shallow, oily ripples.
The engineering office is a hive of activity in contrast to the view outside the windows, and nobody notices Cooper and the British spook as they slip inside and look over the operations controller’s shoulder at his screens. “Left ten, up six,” someone calls. “Looks like a hatch,” says someone else. Strange gray outlines swim on the screen. “Get me a bit more light on that . . .”
Everyone falls silent for a while. “That’s not good,” says one of the engineers, a wiry guy from New Mexico who Cooper vaguely remembers is called Norm. The big TV screen in the middle is showing a flat surface emerging from a gray morass of abyssal mud. A rectangular opening with rounded edges gapes in it—a hatch?—and there’s something white protruding from a cylinder lying across it. The cylinder looks like