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Terry and the twins stood over him while he packed. They
hurried him along. They impounded his phone and his
holopod, as well as his terminal, the twins sealing them up
in a crate and carrying them off.
“You’ll have them back once Markoff has taken a look at
them,” said Terry. “Except for the phone.”
“Can’t I at least call Field and tell him I won’t be in?”
“No.”
“I need some time to wrap up my affairs—”
“No.”
“What about my family, they’ll be worried—”
“You’re stalling,” said Terry. “None of that other stuff is
important. What’s important is doing the job and doing it
right. You keep stalling, and I’ll give Mr. Markoff a call and
we’ll see how badly he wants you along.”
“And then what, you’ll kill me? Like you did Hammond?”
Terry winced. “I resent the implication,” he said. “I saw
him die, sure, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Then it was Tim and Tom.”
“Not them either,” said Terry. He looked at Altman in a
way that made the latter realize he was genuinely confused
and strangely vulnerable.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were just trying to question him and he flipped out,”
said Terry. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. One
moment he was running and the next he was trying to kill
us.” He showed Altman an angry, awkward scar on his
hand. “We didn’t even have any weapons. Tanner had just
sent us there to talk to him.” He rubbed his eyes with his
knuckles. “And then suddenly he took his knife and cut his
own throat. Never seen anyone cut quite that deep so
quickly. Been dreaming about it ever since.”
Abruptly he straightened up, his face becoming closed
again. “I don’t mind being blamed for what I’ve done, but
don’t blame me for what I haven’t. Come on, get moving.”
They walked quickly to the DredgerCorp building, Terry
holding on to his arm and hurrying him along. A few people
looked at them curiously in the streets, but most just
ignored them or deliberately looked the other way. The
building now had a security fence around it, made of
welded wire mesh. The building itself had been razed to the
ground and was in the process of being replaced by a
structure formed of interlocking concrete and steel panels,
more like a fortress than like a corporate building.
“Some changes being made,” said Altman.
Terry nodded. “You don’t know the half of it.”
He led him around behind the construction, to a concrete
pad. On it was a helicopter, blades already spinning. They
hurried to it, and Altman climbed aboard.
Ada was there, her face taut, drawn. He sat down next to
her and she clung to him. She isn’t usually like that, he
thought. She must be terrified. Almost immediately the
helicopter took off.
“I’ve been worried about you,” he said, having to shout to
be heard over the noise. “I thought they might have done
something to you.”
“I was worried about you, too,” she said. “Are you okay?”
He offered her a feeble smile. “No permanent damage.”
“Michael, do you know where we’re going?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I told you,” she said. “This would all end badly, I said. I
told you to leave it alone. But you wouldn’t listen.”
“It’s not over yet,” he said.
He looked out the window. They had turned and were
flying over the water now, were already fairly far from land.
He looked around the helicopter, at the other passengers.
Terry wasn’t there; either he’d stayed behind or was up with
the pilot. It contained eight other scientists, all people he
recognized by sight, even if he didn’t know them all. Field
was one of them, looking like he was sick to his stomach.
Skud was there, as was Showalter. Holding on to the roof
straps, he moved over closer to them.
“Where’s Ramirez?” he shouted.
“They didn’t have him come,” said Showalter.
“What did they do with him?”
Showalter shrugged.
“Did they give you a choice?” asked Altman.
“A what?” shouted Skud. “Why are they taking us?”
“A choice?”
“No!” shouted Showalter. “We had to come.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” shouted Skud.
Altman shook his head. “I was going to ask you,” he said.
He clambered back to his bench.
“They don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows where we’re
going.”
They flew for roughly three hours. Direction, Altman
thought, judging by the sun was northwest, or westnorthwest,
though he wasn’t exactly sure. At some point, he
thought they turned south. How fast could a helicopter fly?
Seventy-five miles an hour? A hundred? It seemed like they
were covering a lot of distance.
Maybe they’re just planning to kill us, he thought. Just
put all of us on the same helicopter and engineer a crash.
If so, he realized, there was nothing he could do. He was
already as good as dead.
He sat on the bench, half-deafened by the sound of the
blades, his arm around Ada. It was his fault that she was
here, he knew. He was to blame. Across from him, Skud
looked haggard, exhausted. Time slowed.
The hum of the blades fell an octave and the craft slowed
noticeably. They all started looking out the windows. Below
was a cloud of mist, almost perfectly symmetrical, clinging
to the water. They started moving down toward it.
Altman began to catch glimpses of something within the
cloud. A flash here and there. A strut or a bit of metal. They
came down slowly, the blades of the helicopter making the
mist roil. He could see the top of a large glass dome, the
glass bluish, wet and iridescent in the sudden light. They
came very close, hovering maybe ten meters above it, and
he thought he could see a glimpse of faces inside. He
could see, on the metal struts and partitions of the glass,
thousands of tiny jets, each of them releasing a fine spray
of mist.
Suddenly the jets stopped. The mist drifted around the
structure for a moment and then slowly dissipated,
revealing the dome and everything beneath it.
It was a huge floating compound, hundreds of feet in
diameter, made of a series of glass or plastic domes,
connected or overlapped like frogs’ eggs. Much of it
descended well below the surface of the water. Indeed, as
much of the structure seemed to be below water as above,
perhaps more.
The top of the central dome, where the metal supports
met, had a flat spot. Carefully, the pilot brought the
helicopter down. He touched once but with one strut off the
flat spot, and they began to tilt. He went up again, came
down even slower, and this time managed it.
The cabin door opened from the outside. Two guards,
wearing dark military garb, gestured to them to climb out.
Altman expected the dome to sway up and down with the
swells, but it was big enough that he hardly noticed
anything. He climbed down onto the deck then turned to
help Ada down. The others soon followed. Together they
made their way to a hatch and climbed down it. By
descending a short ladder, they reached a platform just
under the roof of the dome. The platform had a transparent
shaft in the center of it, one side of it open. As he looked at
it, a lift rose up into it.
The guards gestured and herded them into it. The lift
began to descend.
It was only once they were off the platform and moving
down on the slowly descending lift that Altman really got a
sense of how big the dome was. They were probably forty
or fifty feet up, the large dome open and nearly empty, the
foggy light dappling the glass walls and casting odd
shadows. It was a hemisphere rather than a dome, a solid
floor running along the bottom of it. Whether there was
another reversed hemisphere below, there was no way to
tell from here.
Stacks of boxes and crates littered the floor along with
partially assembled, or perhaps partially disassembled,
machinery. Also military guards, lots of them, some of them
standing at attention or employed in some small task, most
of them walking or chatting idly, perhaps off duty. Here and
there, a man in a white coat stood directing a group of
them, getting them to lug equipment around.
At the bottom of the lift, two more guards stood waiting to
meet them. Skud began to ask a question, but one of the
guards interrupted him.
“No talking,” he said.
They kept the group there until everyone from the
helicopter had made it down, then led them across the floor
of the dome. Groups of guards stopped talking as they
approached, following them with their eyes. Above, Altman
heard the sound of the helicopter taking off again.
Immediately the nozzles began to spray and the outside
world dissolved in a cloud of mist.
The ambient light in the dome dimmed, grew somber.
Someone shouted a command, and banks of harsh
fluorescents lined along the struts flickered on. The dome
brightened with an antiseptic light, inflicting the skin of
everyone around them with an unhealthy glow.
They came to the edge of the large dome and passed
through a sliding door, moving into a much smaller one.
Down through a pressure hatch. Into a passage running
around the edge of a third dome and curving slowly
downward.
Halfway around the passage, Altman noticed the water
lapping up against the side of the tunnel, going higher with
each step. There was a subtle change in the quality of the
sound, as if everything here was lightly wrapped in cotton
batting. He tapped the side of the corridor with his
fingernail, heard only a dull, echoless sound. Something
with a pale stretched eye veered out of the deeps and
toward his hand, and then darted away again. A few steps
later, the water rose all the way over their heads and closed
over the top of the passage. They were completely below
the surface.
They left the corridor and came into a dome cast green
from the reflection of the water. Fish and other animals
swam around the floating compound and here and there
barnacles had begun to take hold. At a distance was a
phalanx of submarines, connected by a series of cables to
the floating compound, pulling it very slowly along.
“It’s beautiful,” said Ada.
“It’s terrifying,” said Altman.
The guard stuck the barrel of his gun firmly against
Altman’s ribs, hard enough to hurt. “No talking,” he said.
They twisted to the bottom of the dome and took another
lift down, to a series of adjoined chambers, squarish
rooms. They passed from one to the next, the guards
keeping them in a straight line and hustling them along. It
felt to Altman like he was being led to his own execution.
Here the water was deeper, darker. The rooms had more
metal in them than glass. They were all lit by the same
harsh fluorescents.
The guards hustled them into another slightly descending
corridor, this one ending in a pressure hatch. Altman
judged that they were back near the center of the lab,
though well below the waterline now. One of the guards
opened it, ushered them through.
The room inside resembled the bridge of a moon cruiser.
It was a spherical chamber with a central elevated
command chair. In all directions, down a few steps, were
banks of controls, readouts, and holoscreens. An
uninterrupted bank of windows ran along the upper half of
the wall. The command chair was just enough above the
rest of the lab to give an unimpeded view of the water in all
directions.
The chair spun around to reveal Markoff. He looked down
at them, and smiled. Here, in this environment, with his firm
jaw and glittering eyes lit by the stark fluorescents,
surrounded by water on all sides, he seemed like
something monstrous pretending to be human.
“Ah, you’ve arrived,” he said without any warmth.
“Welcome to your new home.”
It took a while, but they eventually got used to their new
quarters. The lab was nicer than any he’d ever seen, and
was compromised only by his having to share it, just as he
had in Chicxulub, with Field. He saw this as a particular bit
of sadism on Markoff’s part, and even wondered if he’d
brought Field along only to irritate him.
They were still three weeks away from getting to the
center of Chicxulub crater. The floating compound was
towed forward very slowly and sometimes, depending on
weather conditions, had to be stopped. He’d initially
thought the command center was the lowest point on the
ship, but quickly realized that side corridors led to a tight
sequence of chambers just below that. And below that,
finally, was an even larger chamber, perhaps the largest
chamber on the floating compound. It was carefully
pressurized. It had a crane and a water opening and a very
high ceiling. It was a last-minute addition to the lab, Altman
learned from one of the other scientists, and had been built
specifically to accommodate the object in the heart of the
crater.
Everywhere Altman went, he was amazed. The floating
compound, obviously built for a specific but different
purpose, was being quickly retrofitted with state-of-the-art
equipment. Almost hourly, boats and helicopters arrived,
bringing not only brand-new equipment but also devices
that were still in prototype phase. Expense was no object.
Whatever was down there, they were prepared to spend
whatever it took to get to it.
They ate meals in shifts at the facility’s cafeteria. The
researchers stayed in dormitory rooms that, generally
speaking, slept six, though there were a few exceptions:
Altman and Ada, the only couple on board, were grudgingly
given a converted storage closet as a bedroom. It was just
big enough to hold their bed and a narrow filing cabinet that
they stuffed with their clothes and made into a dresser, but
they were still glad for the privacy.
As Altman got to know the others, he had to admit that
Markoff had assembled a first-rate team. Not knowing
exactly what the thing in the crater might be, he had his
bases covered. There were a few scientists whose fields
were so cutting edge that there weren’t names for them yet.
There were geophysicists and astrophysicists, robotics
experts, geologists, marine biologists, geneticists,
oceanologists, engineers of various stripes, a mining
foreman, an oceanographer, a seismologist, a
volcanologist, a gravitologist, a philosopher, a cognitive
scientist, various doctors, a medic specializing in
barotraumatism and decompression sickness, countless
mechanics and technicians, a housekeeping and kitchen
staff. There was even a linguist and, with Ada, an
anthropologist.
A number of them were researchers who, although once
quite famous, had vanished from the public eye years
before. None of them would speak about what they’d been
doing in the intervening years and if pressed, spoke only of
“coming out of retirement.” Retirement, my ass, Showalter
whispered to him. Altman agreed: if they were here now, it
was because they had been working covertly for military
intelligence in the meantime. They were given away by
being the only ones who didn’t seem surprised at the
massive expense and effort going into the expedition: they
took it all for granted.
What disturbed Altman even more were the number of
military guards present and how actively they were training.
It was clear—or in any case seemed clear to Altman—that
Markoff had some notion that they had to be prepared for
combat.
There were three possibilities for this that Altman could
come up with. One, the least disturbing to him, was that
Markoff was simply being a soldier himself. That he thought
the military weren’t needed but that as long as they were
here, they deserved to be put through their paces. The
second, more disturbing, was that Markoff expected
someone to try to take the object away from them, that he
was aware there were competing interests trying to get
their hands on it, or would be. The third, and the worst of all,
was: perhaps Markoff was expecting the object to fight
back.
Which made Altman realize something he should have
realized a long time before. Without having an altogether
clear idea of what it was, Markoff thought of the object at
the center of the crater as a weapon. Maybe he wasn’t
intending the extraction for the betterment of mankind or the
advancement of science after all.
Altman talked it over with Ada, told her his suspicions.
“Does that surprise you?” she asked. “Markoff’s ruthless.
He thinks of everything as a potential weapon. Even
people. He’s a very dangerous man.”
He quickly found that a lot of places were out of bounds
to him. There were certain areas, certain sets of
laboratories both below and above the waterline, that his
keycard did not grant him access to. Sometimes he could
get in following on the heels of a careless scientist or
guard, but he was never allowed to remain long enough to
get a good sense of what was happening. Other rooms
were even more off-limits, protected by round-the-clock
guards. Field was in one of these, but when Altman asked
him about it, he got nowhere, less because Field was
suspicious than because Field didn’t see enough of the big
picture to understand what was actually going on.
After just a few days, he started to notice he was being
watched. It began as just a vague feeling, but grew
stronger. He thought at first it was just paranoia, until
Showalter noticed it as well. The guards regarded him in a
different way than they did many of the other researchers,
and whenever he’d spent some time alone in one of the
corridors, often just to gather his thoughts, a guard suddenly
showed up. Several of the technicians seemed to be
paying him special attention. One man in particular, a man
who always wore the same rumpled coverall, seemed
always to be lingering, just behind him.
“What should I do?” he asked Ada.
“What can you do?” she said. “If they want to watch you,
they can watch you. There’s nothing you can do about it.
You’re in their power.”
She was right, he knew. Who was he going to complain
to? Markoff? Markoff had given him three alternatives: be
part of the team, be locked up, or end up dead. Maybe
Markoff had had his cake and eaten it, too: maybe he was
both part of the team and locked up at the same time. The
floating compound made a good prison. And it was a better
alternative than being dead.
“What do you think is going on?” he asked Ada.
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t want it to start all over again,
Michael. It’s dangerous to ask yourself these questions. So
what if we can’t go into certain parts of the ship? We’re not
the only ones in that position. Most of the researchers from
Chicxulub are being treated in exactly the same way.”
“Not Field,” said Altman. “Field has access.”
“Limited access,” she said. “One room only. I’ve been
watching. Showalter and Skud don’t,” she said, ticking
them off on her fingers. “Lots of others don’t as well.”
He didn’t answer, just turned away, thinking. There were
ways of finding out. All he’d have to do was to replicate a
card and then—
His thoughts were interrupted when she slapped him on
the cheek.
“Don’t,” she said, pointing a finger at his face.
“What?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You don’t need to
have full run of the place in order to do your job. If you did,
you’d only get into trouble. I want you to promise me you’ll
leave it alone.”
He looked at her for a long moment, finally shook his
head. “I can’t,” he said.
She slapped him once more for good measure and
turned away. He, not knowing what else to do, wrapped his
arms around her to prevent her from going. She struggled
at first, not willing to meet his eyes, but he kept hold of her
until finally she began to soften a little.
“You never listen to me,” she said. “I’m always right and
you never listen.”
“I always listen,” he claimed. “I just don’t always do what
you say.”
Finally she met his eyes. “Damn it, Michael. Promise me
you’ll be careful this time,” she said. “Be discreet. Promise
me you won’t do anything to end up dead.”
“All right,” he said, finally letting her go. “That I can
promise.”
He was careful. He learned more about the floating
compound, talking to some of the mechanics and
engineers. It was a converted semisubmersible rig, mobile,
made to float half in the water and half out. The mist, which
they referred to as the blur effect, was sprayed by highgrade
jets, their apertures less than one hundred microns in
diameter. The water was forced through the jets and onto
extremely fine needle points, causing it to atomize into
droplets so small that most of them remain suspended in
the air. If anyone with any sort of advanced equipment
wanted to determine what was in the cloud, they would have
no difficulty, but it was enough to keep at least a few of the
curious ships and boats away.
On the second or third day, a sturdy man with an
exceptionally frizzy red beard joined him in the cafeteria. He
stretched one large hand across the table, shook Altman’s
hand.
“Jason Hendricks,” he said. “You’re new here, aren’t
you?”
Altman nodded. “Michael Altman,” he said. “I just got
here.”
Hendricks gave a slow, easygoing smile that Altman
immediately liked. “None of us have been here for long,” he
said. “I just got here a week or so ago myself.”
He began to eat, and almost immediately his beard was
full of crumbs and scraps of food. “What brings you here,
Michael?”
Altman thought a moment about what to say, finally
settled on “They’re still figuring out what to do with me, I’m
afraid.”
“Me, I’m a pilot,” said Hendricks. He rubbed his hands
through his beard to work the crumbs out and then wiped
his palms on his shirt. “Submarines mostly. Was trained by
the navy to pilot a midsize sub. Also did some work with
submersibles for a construction firm.”
“You must enjoy it,” said Altman.
“I like it well enough,” said Hendricks. “Also spent some
time in a small one-man affair working for treasure hunters
in the Caribbean. Had to reconsider that line of work when I
realized the treasure they had me looking for was a sunken
boat full of heroin.”
“Probably a good decision,” said Altman.
“Probably,” said Hendricks, his eyes crinkling up warmly
as he smiled. “Though maybe if I’d stuck with it, I’d be rich
by now. Either that or very, very high. You think I’m going to
have the same ethical dilemma with this job?”
They met the next day at the same table, then the next,
and soon Altman had come to think of Hendricks as a
friend, as someone he could trust. After a few days,
Hendricks told him more about what he was doing, that he
was to be on a two-man team working with a bathyscaphe.
He’d had little enough experience with bathyscaphes, but
wasn’t worried: there was still plenty of time before they
arrived.
“I’m slated to copilot with some deep-sea explorer guy
named Edgar Moresby,” he told Altman. “Man’s in his late
sixties and has skin that looks like it’s been cured. Drinks
like a fish. Not much of a pilot as far as I’m concerned.
Claims to be the descendent of Robert Moresby.”
“Who?” asked Altman.
Hendricks shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “Some Brit
hydrographer and naval officer. He brings it up any chance
he gets.”
Moresby had no interest in going out on Hendricks’s
practice runs, claiming he could pilot a bathyscaphe drunk
and in his sleep. “And I often have,” he had told Hendricks.
“No better way of getting the job done, if you ask me.” But
as long as he had the choice, he preferred to do his
drinking in the privacy of his own berth.
“That leaves me in a dilemma,” said Hendricks. “I can’t
go out alone. What if something goes wrong?”
Altman waited for a few moments so as not to appear
too eager before answering. “I’ll go with you,” he said, trying
to sound casual.
“Would you?” said Hendricks, and gave Altman a warm
smile. “That’d be a big help.”
He fully expected Markoff to find out and put a stop to it,
but either news hadn’t gotten back to him or he didn’t care
that Altman was going out in the bathyscaphe. He didn’t
learn much new from either the bathyscaphe or Hendricks,
but he was at least keeping busy.
Plus, Altman quickly found that he had an aptitude for
piloting. He knew instinctively how much to flex the controls
to get the bathyscaphe to perform how he wanted it to.
When asked to dive to a certain depth or rise to a certain
level, he could let in just enough water or release by feel just
enough pellets to do it smoothly and precisely. He found it
curiously satisfying and gratifying in a way that geophysics
never had been.
“You should be piloting instead of me,” said Hendricks
one day.
“Yeah, right,” said Altman. “I don’t think Markoff would
ever agree to it.”
But surprisingly enough, when Hendricks asked Markoff,
he did agree. It’d be good to have a backup pilot, Markoff
claimed, in case anything went wrong. But that was not to
say that Altman was off the hook for his other tasks. He’d
still be expected to follow any instructions that the lead
researchers gave him and to continue to take his
geophysical readings. It was just that now he might
sometimes be asked to take these readings below the
water, from within the bathyscaphe.
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