Beyond the Ice Limit

46

THE BLOOD ON the floor of mission control hadn’t been cleaned up; many of the maintenance employees had been assigned to the teams sweeping the ship on worm detail. Gideon made a careful detour of it. Normally the lights were kept low in the room, because of the many monitors, but now they were turned up to dazzling brilliance. A two-woman security team, wearing gloves and face protection, was moving along a wall of equipment with pencil lights, a toolbox, and dental mirrors. They were unscrewing panels, searching the guts behind, then screwing each back and moving to the next one.

“At the rate they’re going,” said Sam McFarlane, appearing at his side, “it’ll take months to sweep the ship.”

Gideon shook his head. “Let’s just get this done.”

They joined Garza at the central command console. McFarlane, once again taking charge of the operation, ran a series of checks, first on the explosive array along the seafloor, then on the seismic sensors. The central screen showed a view of the creature itself, taken from the green-light video cameras that had earlier been placed on the seafloor. The thing appeared quiescent, like a giant, semi-translucent and sickly-green tree.

About fifty yards from the Baobab, sitting on the seafloor, lay the crushed and balled-up DSV that had been commandeered by Frayne. The creature had expelled it about an hour before. A faint cloudy trail drifted downcurrent from it.

“Everything’s good to go,” McFarlane said. “Let’s restart the countdown at five minutes. Dr. Garza?”

“Initiating countdown,” said Garza. “Five minutes.”

A large digital timer popped up on the corner of the main screen. Gideon wondered if the creature would try to stop them again—if indeed it had initiated Waingro’s psychotic break. How could it communicate with the worms through two miles of water? He wasn’t as convinced of this as Glinn seemed to be. In his mind—and McFarlane’s, he knew—the bigger question was how the thing might react to the explosions themselves. They were small charges, just enough to trigger seismic waves, nothing that would do damage…but the creature might well believe it was under attack.

“Four minutes,” said Garza.

“Very well,” replied McFarlane.

Garza and McFarlane had settled down into a kind of cold-war détente. They cooperated—in fact, they cooperated well—but on a professional level only.

Gideon felt his heart rate accelerate. It seemed unlikely the creature could do anything to them directly. Would the worms on board react? Was there really any potential communication between the parasitic worms and the mother creature? They had recorded no long-range sounds from the creature other than Prothero’s whale song, nor any other potential mode of communication such as electromagnetic waves.

“Three minutes.”

The tension in the control room, already high, was spiking. But at least it was controlled. The atmosphere throughout the rest of the ship was not. Already, Gideon had seen restless, angry knots of people talking among themselves, many calling for the mission to be aborted and the ship steered to Ushuaia, Argentina, the nearest port.

Glinn wasn’t in mission control. Gideon wondered briefly what he could be up to that was more important than monitoring what they were about to do, but dismissed the thought. He was probably putting out fires all over the ship. The man had a unique ability to calm people down and project a feeling of unshakable competence and success. Gideon knew it was a mask, one of many Glinn put on.

“Two minutes.”

Gideon transferred his attention to the screen of the Baobab. It sat there, swollen, ominous, the branches swaying almost imperceptibly. George, the crushed DSV, remained in place on the seabed, unmoving.

“One minute.”

“Arming,” McFarlane said. His thin hand unlatched and lifted the cage covering a red button on the console.

“All systems go.”

Now Garza began to count down by voice: ten, nine, eight…

Gideon waited, staring at the screen.

“Fire in the hole,” said McFarlane.

On the monitor, Gideon saw a dozen silt clouds erupt from the seafloor in a geometric array around the Baobab. A moment later the muffled sound was picked up by the sonobuoys on the surface—sound traveling faster in water than in air.

The Baobab reacted violently, the branches abruptly whipping and snapping about as if searching for an invader, the mouth extruding and opening, apparently sucking in vast amounts of seawater. The trunk swelled grotesquely, to the point that it became almost spherical, looking as though it might burst. At the same time, the creature’s coloration underwent a swift, rippling change, turning from light green to an angry red, mottled with darker spots of purple.

And then an immense boom rocked the ship: a thunderous blast like a small earthquake that threw Gideon to the floor. The lights flickered and the ship shuddered strongly for a moment. There were some scattered screams. A shower of sparks spit out of a nearby console, and the sound of falling glass echoed from shattered monitors.

Gideon rose to his knees, but was thrown back to the deck again by another massive, booming noise. The lights flickered and this time went out, along with all the monitors, plunging mission control—which had no windows—into darkness. A second later the emergency lights came on, along with a series of alarms—including the fire-alarm siren.

A third thundering vibration struck the ship, weaker this time. Gideon rose to his feet, pulling himself up by a console. The monitors were still out, the dim emergency lighting barely adequate to illuminate the space.

McFarlane struggled up beside him, both of them bracing for the next attack. Nothing happened. Others were now getting up around them. Smoke was pouring out of a nearby console, and Gideon grabbed one of the ubiquitous fire extinguishers strapped to the walls and gave it a blast, extinguishing the embryonic fire.

Lennart’s voice came over the intercom system. “General quarters. All crew to general quarters. Seal all bulkheads, security to bridge and engineering…”

As the emergency announcement went on, McFarlane said: “There’s our reaction.”

“It felt like an explosion. Must have been some kind of sonic attack.”

“Yes. An ultra-low-frequency sonic attack with a remarkably high amplitude.”

Gideon’s radio buzzed and he pulled it out. It was Glinn. “I want you on the bridge,” he said. While Glinn was speaking, Gideon could feel the engines coming to life, along with the incipient movement of the ship.

McFarlane overheard. “I’m coming, too.”

Gideon did not argue.