The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [40]
“The K-129 was rather an elderly boat at the time she sank. In fact, a few years later the Soviets retired the last of the Golf-II class—except for one of the K-129’s sister ships, which was retained for covert operations duty. As a ballistic missile boat it had a large hold that could be repurposed for other payloads, and as a diesel-electric it could run quietly in littoral waters. Diesel-electrics are still popular for that reason: when running on battery juice they’re even quieter than a nuke boat, which has to keep the reactor coolant pumps running at all times. Without the rear section—including the missile room—we could only theorize that K-129 had already been converted to infiltration duty. However . . .”
SLIDE 7: A blurry gray landscape photographed from above. A structure, clearly artificial, occupies the middle of the image: a cylindrical artifact not unlike a submarine, but missing a conning tower and equipped with a strange, roughly surfaced conical end-cap. Its hull is clearly damaged, not crumpled but burst open as if from some great internal pressure. Nevertheless, it is still recognizable as an artificial structure.
“We believe this was the real target of K-129’s abortive operation. It’s located on the floor of the Pacific, approximately six hundred nautical miles southwest of Hawaii and, by no coincidence at all, on the K-129’s course prior to the unfortunate onboard explosion that resulted in the submarine’s loss with all hands.”
SLIDE 8: Not a photograph but a false-color synthetic relief image of the floor of the Pacific basin, southwest of Hawaii. The image is contoured to represent depth, and colored to convey some other attribute. Virulent red spots dot the depths—except for a single, much shallower one.
“Graviweak neutrino imaging spectroscopes carried aboard the SPAN-2 Earth resources satellite are a good way of pin-pointing BLUE HADES colonies. For obvious reasons, BLUE HADES do not make extensive use of electricity for their domestic and presumed industrial processes; Monsieur Volt and Herr Ampère are not your friends when you live under five kilometers of saltwater. Instead, BLUE HADES appear to control inaccessible condensed matter states by varying the fine-structure constant and tunneling photinos—super-symmetrical photon analogs that possess mass—between nodes where they want to do things. One side effect of this is neutrino emissions at a very characteristic spectrum, unlike anything we get from the sun or from our own nuclear reactors. This is a density scan for the zone around the K-129 and Hawaii. As you can see, that isolated shallow point—near where the K-129 went down—is rather strong. There’s an active power source in there, and it’s not connected to the rest of the BLUE HADES grid as far as we can tell. The site is classified JENNIFER MORGUE, incidentally, and is known as Site One.”
SLIDE 9: A rock face, evidently inside a mine, is illuminated by spotlights. Workers in overalls and hard hats surround it, and are evidently working on something—possibly a fossil—with small hand-tools.
“As you can see, this is not a BLUE HADES specimen. It’s some other palaeosophont. This photograph was taken in 1985 in the deep mine at Longannet in Fife, right on our doorstep. Longannet—and indeed the rest of the British deep-mining industry—was shut down some time ago, officially for economic reasons. However, you would be right to conclude that the presence of nightmares like this was a contributing factor. This is in fact a DEEP SEVEN cadaver, and appears to have undergone some sort of postmortem vitrification process, or perhaps a hibernation from which it failed to emerge, approximately seven million years ago. We believe that DEEP SEVEN were responsible for the JENNIFER MORGUE machines and the neutrino anomaly in the previous slide. We know very little about DEEP SEVEN except that they appear to be polymorphous, occupy areas of the upper crust near the polar regions, and BLUE HADES are terrified of