13
He was trying to run, but wasn’t getting anywhere. His arms
and legs were flailing in the air, but nothing was happening.
He couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his feet. And
there was something wrong with the air. Every time he tried
to breathe it, he ended up coughing, choking. He was
slowly suffocating. He looked frantically around him, but on
every side it was the same—an endless gray expanse,
nothing solid, nothing definite, just he himself, alone,
floating in a void, dying.
He knew he was dead, but he still, somehow, was. He
was floating, his eyes open but seeing nothing, his body
turning slowly around and around. There was nothing there
but him, but he wasn’t exactly there. He heard something.
Quiet, like the sound of an insect scuttling over paper. It
slowly got louder. It blossomed into a loud whisper. A
human voice, speaking to him.
Hennessy, it said. It was a familiar voice. He wished it
would speak louder than a whisper so he could be sure
about who it was.
Hennessy, it said again. He heard it close to his other
ear, and then in two slightly different whispers at once. It
wasn’t just one voice, he suddenly realized, but legion, all of
them whispering, all of them saying his name. Hennessy,
Hennessy, Hennessy.
And then, spinning around, the gray space around him
suddenly didn’t look so gray anymore. It was changing.
Transforming. Becoming something else.
He knew he was dead, and he couldn’t move. All he
could do was stay there, floating, body spinning slowly
about, listening to the voices, as the blank gray void that
had been there all around him quickly became more and
more textured. For a moment it was striated, run through
with creases and lines, and then those shifted and
crumpled in a way that reminded him of a human brain. And
then these, too, tightened and shifted, beginning to take on
vague features. It was not a void, he realized, but a tightly
packed mass of bodies, stuck to one another, fading into
one another, all of them dead.
He wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t. There were
thousands of them, maybe more, and as the faces became
more and more differentiated, he began to realize that they
were people he knew, all of them dead. There was his wife
there, her neck broken from the accident, his mother and
father, both withered and decrepit just as they had been
after the cancer took them, and others, many others, whom
he hadn’t forgotten but who, upon noticing them, he knew
were all dead.
Hennessy. The word came from one of those open and
unmoving maws, like an echo from deep within a cave. But
which? Hennessy, said another. And soon, they were all
saying it, pressing closer and closer to him, and there was
nothing that he could do to stop them. And then their fingers
were sliding under his skin, threading through his bones,
insinuating their way into him.
“Hennessy!” someone was yelling. “Hennessy!”
Something was grabbing him, shaking him. Hands.
Someone was screaming, Hennessy realized, and then he
realized that that somebody was him.
He lashed out and scrambled backward, out of the grip
of whatever it was, until he struck a wall. It was only then that
he was able to stop screaming and consider where he was.
A normal room, in the DredgerCorp complex, in Chicxulub.
There was his bed. It was his room. It was okay. He was
back in the real world.
There was a man bent over near the bed. An ordinarylooking
man wearing glasses.
“Jesus,” said the man. He was covering his nose. Blood
was dripping through his fingers and onto the floor. “What
did you do that for?”
Behind him, Hennessy saw, were two larger men. They
looked like they might be brothers, or even twins. He’d
seen all three lurking around at various times within the
complex, but never was quite sure what they did.
“You want us to rough him up a bit?” said one of the
larger men.
“Soften him up a little?” said the other, and smacked his
fist into his palm.
“You know we can’t do that,” said the man with the
glasses. “We’re just supposed to fetch him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hennessy to the man with the glasses,
confused by what they were saying. “I was having a bad
dream.”
“Bad dreams seem to be going around lately. It must
have been one hell of a bad one,” said the man with the
glasses. He tilted his head back and moved his hand away.
The bleeding seemed to have mostly stopped. He gave an
experimental sniff.
“What are you doing here?” Hennessy asked.
“We were sent to get you,” said the man with the glasses.
“Get dressed.”
Maybe I’m still dreaming, thought Hennessy. “Get me?
For what?” he asked.
“You’re needed elsewhere. Just get dressed and come
on. Or do you want me to let Tim and Tom work out some of
their nervous energy on you?”
They took him down to the dock, Tim and Tom to either
side of him, the man with the glasses leading the way.
There was a large speedboat there, Dantec already inside
it, seemingly at ease, sitting straight-backed, his arms
crossed. Unlike him, Dantec didn’t have an escort. One of
the vaguely military men from the freighter was standing
with one foot on the dock, the other on the deck, ready to
cast off.
“Where are you taking us?” Hennessy asked the man
with the glasses.
He was still rubbing the bridge of his nose. “We were told
to bring you to the boat. That’s all I know.”
“Get on,” said Tim, behind him.
“Or do you want us to put you on?” asked Tom.
Hennessy scrambled aboard, sat down next to Dantec.
The soldier cast off, pushed away from the dock, and
scrambled into the pilot’s seat. A moment later the engine
was screaming and they were tearing across the dark
water.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Hennessy asked
Dantec over the roar.
Dantec gave him a hard, dead look. “We’ve been
activated,” he said.
Activated? wondered Hennessy. What does that mean?
· · ·
With the wind and the spray of the water, Hennessy was
soon freezing. His teeth were chattering by the time they
arrived at the freighter. They climbed out and up the ladder
to find Tanner waiting for them on deck.
“You made good time,” said Tanner to the motorboat
pilot. “Well done, son.”
“Thank you, sir,” the man said.
Tanner turned to Hennessy and Dantec. “Well,” he said, “I
bet you two are wondering what the hell is going on. Come
onto the bridge and we’ll talk.”
After Tanner had finished explaining, Hennessy felt there
was something wrong. Sure, he was excited to go down to
the center of the crater, excited to find out what was there
and see where it was from. It could, as Tanner said, be
amazing, maybe even the first signs of intelligent
extraterrestrial life. But maybe it was nothing, just an
anomaly. He had to try not to get too excited.
Plus, something just didn’t add up. Certainly
DredgerCorp wasn’t the only one to have detected the
object. And even if they were, didn’t they have an obligation
to report it? Didn’t they have to go through proper channels,
consult with the Mexican government? Shouldn’t it be a joint
project, something that DredgerCorp was in on but which
the government controlled, instead of a hurried and sudden
operation in the dead of night?
No, they were definitely up to no good, and in a way that
might have serious consequences. Maybe he was a little
naïve, maybe in the past he’d sometimes looked the other
way when things were questionable, but he wasn’t that
naïve. He knew that if anything went wrong, it wouldn’t be
either Tanner or DredgerCorp that got stuck with the blame,
but he and Dantec. DredgerCorp would cut them loose
without a second thought.
He looked over to Dantec, who turned and met his gaze.
He seemed as cool as ever, his gaze dead, his eyes
predatory. He doesn’t care, Hennessy realized. He’ll do
whatever he’s asked. So Hennessy took a deep breath and
turned to Tanner.
“Why at night?” he asked.
“Why not?” said Tanner. “The F/Seven has lights. You’d
have to use them anyway once you got far enough down,
and would definitely have to use them once you started
digging.”
“I don’t think that’s what he’s asking,” said Dantec coolly.
“No?” said Tanner. “What’s he asking, then?”
“If it’s legal.”
“Is that right?” said Tanner, turning to Hennessy. “Is that
what you’re asking?”
Hennessy hesitated a moment, then nodded. “It just
seems a little odd to me,” he said. “Isn’t all this, this whole
crater, owned by Mexico? Wouldn’t it have been leased by
a local retrieval organization? And what’s going on with the
crew of this freighter? Are they military or not? If they are,
why aren’t they wearing uniforms? Whose side are they on?
If they’re not, then what the hell is going on?”
“You don’t need to think about that,” said Tanner. “I’m
handling all the details. There’s no reason for you to worry.”
“But we’re the ones who will bear the brunt of it if things
go wrong,” said Hennessy.
Tanner didn’t say anything.
“Aren’t I right?” asked Hennessy, appealing to Dantec.
“Shouldn’t we be worried? Don’t you have a problem with
this?”
Dantec said nothing.
Hennessy turned back to Tanner. “Shouldn’t I be
worried?” he asked.
Tanner said, “I’ve already given you an answer.”
Hennessy sighed.
“Look,” said Tanner. “Don’t you want to be in on this? It
could be extremely important, but that’s not to say there
aren’t some risks. You have to decide for yourself,
Hennessy. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go, but
you have to decide right now.”
Hennessy hesitated a long time. Whatever this was, legal
or not, it was big, important. He couldn’t trust Tanner, but
then again, he couldn’t really trust anybody at DredgerCorp.
He’d known that when he signed on. But he’d always
managed to avoid getting into scrapes before. Whether
what they were doing was legal or not, he told himself, he
could make sure that his part in it was legal. Besides, if
things got too bad, he could walk later. He’d go along with
them, but he wouldn’t trust Tanner as far as he could throw
him.
He finally nodded.
“Good,” said Tanner. “Off you go, then, the both of you.”
14
He’d never been inside the bathyscaphe at night before.
The fluorescent lighting, with darkness all around, struck
him at once as harsh and dirty, like the office of a deranged
dentist. It cast both his face and Dantec’s in stark relief.
They strapped into their seats, Hennessy at the controls
and in front, Dantec just behind and to his right, beside the
ballast release. The hoist lifted them up and over the water.
They hung there swaying for a moment and then, suddenly,
were released.
They crashed into the water, and the darkness became
even more total. Dantec flicked on the exterior lights, which
dimmed the lights inside. Hennessy checked the controls.
He put in his earpiece and adjusted the microphone so it
wasn’t scraping against the side of his cheek. He ran the
F/7 briefly forward and backward, turned on the drill, and
watched it swirl. He checked the sonar signal. He checked
the fathometer and had Dantec verify the porthole seals.
Everything seemed to be in order.
“This is Plotkin,” Hennessy said, speaking his code
name into the mic. “Are you there, dropship? Are you
reading me?”
Tanner’s voice crackled to life in his ears. The man was
there on the holoscreen as well, his image crisp, well
defined. “Hearing and seeing you loud and clear,” Tanner
said. “Everything a go?”
“Roger,” said Hennessy. Dantec confirmed.
“Proceed when ready, Plotkin,” said Tanner.
Hennessy stayed for a moment with his hands on the
controls, then cut the vid link and dived.
Now it is just a matter of time, thought Hennessy, four or
five hours. He leaned back and stretched. At first they went
down slowly, then a little faster. He was careful to adjust.
The air in the F/7 had grown thick and noticeably warmer.
He had Dantec check the oxygen recirculator even though
he knew it was just the climate system kicking in, that it was
deathly cold outside.
There was, from time to time, the flash of a fish through
their running lights, though as they descended farther and
farther, this became more and more rare. Mostly it was just
the two of them in the cramped vessel, breathing each
other’s air, waiting, just waiting.
His head hurt. It seemed like it was always hurting these
days. He turned slightly in his seat and cast a brief glance
at Dantec, who was staring at him, with steady eyes.
“What is it?” asked Hennessy.
“What’s what?” asked Dantec.
Hennessy turned back. That guy’s enough to freak
anyone out, he thought. It seemed to get even hotter. The
air became even more oppressive and difficult to breathe.
Another hundred meters. He’d never considered how
small it was inside the F/Seven. But now that they were
descending and the instruments didn’t need much attention,
that was all he could think about. He was sweating. It was
really pouring off him, buckets of it. He felt as if he could
drown in his own sweat.
He laughed.
“What?” asked Dantec.
He laughed again. He couldn’t help it; he knew it was
absurd to think of drowning in your own sweat, but what if it
happened? It was absurd, but all of this was absurd.
“Take a deep breath and get a hold of yourself,” said
Dantec.
He knew Dantec was right. The last thing he wanted was
to dissolve into hysteria here, in a craft hardly bigger than a
winter coat, miles from help. No, he couldn’t do that, no. But
then, there it came, another chuckle.
He heard Dantec’s seat belt click off and then suddenly
the man was there beside him, leaning on the instrument
panel, the bathyscaphe listing slightly for just a moment
before correcting itself.
He chuckled again and Dantec reached out and clamped
his hand around his throat. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe.
“Listen,” said Dantec. “We can do this two ways. We can
do it with you alive or we can do it with you dead. It doesn’t
matter to me which way we do it.”
He struggled, but Dantec was too strong. He had never
felt anything like it, had never been so afraid. He was
beginning to black out, red spots blotting out his vision. He
kept gulping for air, but getting nothing.
Finally, when he was just on the verge of passing out,
Dantec let go, gave him a long hard stare, and slowly
returned to his seat as if nothing had happened. Hennessy
sucked in air, panting, massaging his throat.
“All right now,” asked Dantec, his tone flat. Less a
question than a command.
“Yes,” Hennessy said, and was surprised to find he did
feel a little better, a little more in control of himself. Though
his head now throbbed even worse than before.
Hennessy checked the controls. They were still on
course. Had Dantec’s actions really been necessary? It
was just a little giggle after all, nothing to get upset about.
But Dantec had overreacted, had made a big thing of it.
Someone could have gotten hurt. What had Tanner been
thinking, confining Hennessy to this sinking coffin with a
madman? Maybe Dantec was stronger, maybe Hennessy
couldn’t do anything now, but let him get back on land and
he’d know what to do. He’d file a formal complaint. He’d go
to Tanner and tell him about Dantec’s behavior and
demand the fellow’s dismissal. And if Tanner wasn’t willing
to do anything, he’d go over his head. He’d keep filing
complaints until he’d gone to the very top, to Lenny Small
himself. Surely President Small was a reasonable man.
And if even Mr. Small wouldn’t listen, then he’d show them
all. He’d take a gun and he’d—
“A thousand meters,” said Dantec.
Hennessy started guiltily, the thoughts dissolving. “A
thousand meters,” he repeated. He noticed a tremor in his
own voice, but not too bad. Maybe Tanner wouldn’t notice.
He put the vidlink through.
“Mothership,” he said. “Come in, mother.”
Tanner’s voice crackled in, weaker now. His image was
present but less clear, eaten away at the edges.
“Here, F/Seven,” said Tanner. “Still reading you.”
“One thousand meters,” he said. “Seals good,
instruments good, no problems to report.”
“Very good,” said Tanner. “Proceed.”
They kept descending. It seemed even slower than before.
“Everything okay at your end?” Hennessy asked Dantec.
“Fine,” said Dantec. “And for you?”
Hennessy nodded. When he did, it felt like his brain was
rubbing up against the walls of his skull, getting slightly
bruised.
“Is the oxygen okay?” he asked.
“You just asked if everything was okay and I already told
you it was,” said Dantec. “Everything included the oxygen.”
“Oh,” said Hennessy. “Right.”
He was silent for a while, watching the water illuminated
by their running lights. Nothing alive anymore, or if there
was, he wasn’t seeing it. Floating through a dark,
undifferentiated world. It was like his dream, he suddenly
realized, which struck him as a very bad thing.
“I have a headache,” he said, as much to hear the sound
of a voice as anything else.
Dantec said nothing.
“Do you have a headache, too?” asked Hennessy.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Dantec said, turning to him.
“I’ve had a headache for days now.”
“So have I,” said Hennessy.
Dantec just nodded. “Stop talking,” he said.
Hennessy nodded back. He sat there, staring out at the
blank expanse surrounding them and their craft, listening to
the creaking of the hull as the pressure increased. There
was something else, some other sound he was hearing.
What was it? Almost nothing at all, but it was there still,
wasn’t it? Just loud enough to hear but not loud enough to
interpret. What could it be?
“Do you hear something?” he asked Dantec.
“I told you to stop talking,” the other said.
Did that mean he heard it or not? Why couldn’t he just
answer the goddamned question? He’d put it civilly enough,
hadn’t he?
“Please,” said Hennessy, “I just need to know if you hear
—”
Dantec reached out and cuffed him on the side of the
head.
He doesn’t hear it, a part of Hennessy’s mind told him. If
he heard it, he’d be wondering about it, too. Which means
that either it’s something close to me, near the instrument
panel or—
But the or, when he identified it, was too terrible to
contemplate. So he bent forward, tilting his right ear toward
the panel, bringing it close to each instrument, listening. He
kept expecting Dantec to ask him what he was doing, but
the man didn’t say anything. Maybe he wasn’t looking at
him or maybe he just didn’t care. But, in any case, there
was nothing. The noise was still there, but it didn’t grow any
louder.
Which meant, he realized, that the sound was in his
head.
As soon as he thought this, the noise became many
noises, and these quickly became whispering voices. What
were they saying? He was afraid he knew. He tried not to
pay any attention, tried not to listen and—
“Two thousand meters,” said Dantec.
Yes, thought Hennessy, pay attention to that, to your job.
Don’t think about the voices in your head, do your job.
Pull yourself together, man, last thing you need is—
“Did you hear me, Hennessy?” Dantec asked.
“I heard you,” said Hennessy, shaking his head. “Two
thousand meters. I’ll contact Tanner.”
He called up the link. There was Tanner, very pixilated
now. “Two thousand meters,” said Hennessy.
There was a wait of about three seconds before Tanner
replied. “Repeat that,” said Tanner, only it came out as a
burst of static and then “—peat that.”
“Two thousand meters,” said Hennessy again, slower this
time.
“Roger,” said Tanner, after the delay. “Proceed.”
· · ·
Another thousand meters, thought Hennessy. Maybe even
a little less. They were more than halfway there. Once they
were all the way down, he could occupy himself with running
the drill. He’d have something to focus on. Everything would
be okay. All he had to do was make it that much farther.
Then they could bore down straight to the object as quickly
as possible. They’d do as Tanner had asked and take a
small sample of it and get back up to the surface
immediately. And then—if whatever it was was worth taking
—it would be out of his hands. He’d fly back to the North
American sector, go back to his life, putting all this out of
his mind. If Tanner and DredgerCorp wanted to put
together a full crew and excavate the object completely
before other organizations got wind of it, that was their
business: he’d be long out of it, long gone. If he thought
about it that way, things weren’t so bad.
Maybe if he took short breaths, it would be better. Then
he wouldn’t use up the oxygen so quickly. He was still
sweating, the sweat was still pouring off him, but he wasn’t
giggling about it now: he was afraid. He was afraid of what
was happening and afraid of Dantec.
Hennessy, get a grip on yourself, he thought. Or, rather,
a part of him thought. Another part was screaming in his
head, over and over. Another part of him was trying to force
that part down belowdecks and then batten the hatch down.
But then there were also the parts that were speaking, or
rather whispering, all the whispering going on within his
head that he didn’t even know for sure was him at all.
Hennessy, the voices were whispering, Hennessy. As if
trying to get his attention. They were both a part of him and
not a part of him.
A wave of pain flashed through his head. He grunted and
pushed his thumbs hard into his temples, and then looked
back at Dantec to see if he’d noticed. Dantec, he saw, was
clutching his head as well, his face pale and pearled with
sweat. He was grimacing. After a moment his face slipped
back into expressionlessness and he straightened, met
Hennessy’s gaze.
“What are you looking at?” he growled.
Without a word, Hennessy turned back to his control
panel, hoping it had been longer, but not sure if any time at
all had gone by. Maybe they still had nine hundred meters
to go.
“How many meters?” he asked in as flat and
noncommittal a voice as possible.
He watched the distorted, ghostly reflection of Dantec’s
face in the observation porthole. The man looked
deranged.
“I’ll tell you when it’s time,” Dantec said. There was a
slight tremor to his voice now, unless Hennessy was
imagining it. Maybe, thought Hennessy, it’s as bad for him
as it is for me.
On one level, the thought was comforting. On another, it
made him realize that things might be much worse than
he’d thought.
He kept looking out the observation porthole, sometimes
watching the murky water, sometimes watching Dantec’s
phantom reflection. How much longer, he thought, how
much longer? He shook his head. Hennessy, the voices
said, Hennessy. They were voices he recognized but he
wasn’t sure from where, and then he realized they were the
voices he’d heard in his dream. But one in particular was
even more familiar. He knew who it was, he was certain,
but couldn’t picture a face to go along with the voice. How
could you hear a voice and know it was familiar and still not
know who it was? They’ve gotten into my head, he thought.
I must have done something to let them into my head.
Something is wrong with me.
Oh, God—oh, God, he thought. Please help me.
If he started screaming again, Dantec would kill him.
He’d said as much.
There was a flash of something outside the bathyscaphe,
down below them.
No, wait, he thought, it’s just Dantec’s reflection. It’s
nothing. But there it was again, coming out of the gray,
something lighter, slightly textured. The ocean floor.
He slowed the bathyscaphe until it was moving at a
snail’s pace.
“Three thousand meters,” said Dantec.
“We’re almost there,” he told Dantec, his voice suddenly
confident again. “We’re almost at the bottom.”
He watched it approach. It was as barren as the moon, a
thick layer of muck extending in all directions. They settled
down very softly, raising almost no sediment. A flatfish that
had been lying in the dust flicked its body and glided away,
slowly settling again just outside the lights. In practice runs,
there had been a fear that the craft would roll in landing and
they’d have to struggle to right her, but she came down
smooth and even.
“We’ve made it,” he said to Dantec. “Should be easy
from here on out.”
Dantec just stared.
Hennessy contacted Tanner. Strangely enough, the
signal here was better than it had been a thousand meters
higher up, perhaps because of the new angle of the craft,
though there were momentary pulses of energy that fuzzed
everything out.
“We made it,” he said once Tanner was on.
“What’s it look like?” Tanner asked.
“Smooth, flat,” he said. “First layer anyway shouldn’t be
too difficult to dig through.”
“It looks like the end of the world,” muttered Dantec from
behind him.
Tanner nodded. “—say?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, I missed that first part,” said Hennessy.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Tanner. “Proceed when ready.
And good luck.”
Hennessy put out the struts for stability and to elevate the
back half of the craft. The drill angled down until it was
touching the ocean floor. He readied the controls
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