The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [6]
The strain gauges on the giant grabs are reading green across the board: each arm is supporting nearly 500 tons of submarine, not to mention the water it contains. There’s a loud mechanical whine from outside, and a sinking feeling, and the vibration Cooper can feel through the soles of his Oxford brogues has increased alarmingly—the Explorer’s drill crew is running the machines at full power now that the grab has increased in weight. The ship, gaining thousands of tons in a matter of seconds, squats deeper in the Pacific swell. “Satisfied now?” asks Cooper, turning to grin at the Brit, who for his part looks as if he’s waiting for something, staring at one screen intently.
“Well?”
“We’ve got a little time to go,” says the hatchet-faced foreigner.
“A little . . . ?”
“Until we learn whether or not you’ve gotten away with it.”
“What are you smoking, man? Of course we’ve gotten away with it!” Murph has materialized from the upper decks like a Boston-Irish ghost, taking out his low-level resentment on the Brit (who is sufficiently public-school English to make a suitable whipping boy for Bloody Sunday, not to mention being a government employee to boot). “Look! Submarine! Submersible grab! Coming up at six feet per minute! After the break, film at eleven!” His tone is scathing. “What do you think the commies are going to do to stop us, start World War Three? They don’t even goddamn know what we’re doing down here—they don’t even know where their sub went down to within two hundred miles!”
“It’s not the commies I’m worried about,” says the Brit. He glances at Cooper. “How about you?”
Cooper shakes his head reluctantly. “I still think we’re going to make it. The sub’s intact, undamaged, and we’ve got it—”
“Oh shit,” says Steve.
He points the central camera in the grab’s navigation cluster down at the seafloor, a vast gray-brown expanse stirred into slow whorls of foggy motion by the dropping of the ballast and the departure of the submarine. It should be slowly settling back into bland desert-dunes of mud by now. But something’s moving down there, writhing against the current with unnatural speed.
Cooper stares at the screen. “What’s that?”
“May I remind you of Article Four of the treaty?” says the Brit. “No establishment of permanent or temporary structures below a depth of one kilometer beneath mean sea level, on pain of termination. No removal of structures from the abyssal plain, on pain of ditto. We’re trespassing: legally they can do as they please.”
“But we’re only picking up the trash—”
“They may not see it that way.”
Fine fronds, a darker shade against the gray, are rising from the muddy haze not far from the last resting place of the K-129. The fronds ripple and waver like giant kelp, but are thicker and more purposeful. They bring to mind the blind, questing trunk of an elephant exploring the interior of a puzzle box. There’s something disturbing about the way they squirt from vents in the seafloor, rising in pulses, as if they’re more liquid than solid.
“Damn,” Cooper says softly. He punches his open left hand. “Damn!”
“Language,” chides Duke. “Barry, how fast can we crank this rig? Steve, see if you can get a fix on those things. I want to peg their ascent rate.”
Barry shakes his head emphatically. “The drill platform can’t take any more, boss. We’re up to force four outside already, and we’re carrying too much weight. We can maybe go up to ten feet per minute, but if we try to go much above that we risk shearing the string and losing Clementine.”
Cooper shudders. The grab will still surface if the drill string breaks, but it could broach just about anywhere. And anywhere