Infestation

- 2 -

Rika Svetlanova put down the box of hard biscuits and stood still, listening, sure she had heard something, far off.

An engine? Please let it be an engine.

But the noise wasn’t repeated and she wasn’t about to leave the safety of the pantry to investigate, despite the growing cold. She tugged her jacket tighter around her, thankful she’d been wearing her outdoor clothing when she’d needed to run. She’d been here for two days now going by her watch and had heard no other voices, had talked to no one. The power had run down on her phone hours ago, although there was little chance of getting any kind of signal down here almost in the center of the many layers of hull and metal. And she wasn’t about to venture out of the room to look for company anytime soon.

It wasn’t safe.

It might never be safe.

The boat rocked gently below her. As far as she knew, they were still at anchor in the bay, moored alongside the drilling rig; they certainly weren’t under power, for she would feel the engines thrumming underfoot and hear the drumbeat thud of the turbines. Instead, all she felt was the gentle rocking, almost enough to send her to sleep.

Almost.

She had some light, so obviously an emergency battery somewhere was working but the bulb above her had dimmed considerably in recent hours. It wasn’t going to be too long before she was left in darkness.

She’d been awake now for over forty-eight hours and had found herself dozing several times, snapping awake when her head nodded on her chest. But full sleep was going to be a long time coming and untroubled sleep a long time after that, for she had seen too much these past days to ever sleep soundly again.

Maybe I’ll sleep when I get back to Moscow; my own bed, a good meal, and some large shots of vodka sound good right about now.

She laughed at the thought. Planning ahead wasn’t a great idea, given her circumstances. She was in the main larder of the boat, with plenty to eat and drink at hand and a flow of air that, although it tasted of death at times, was breathable, for now. But to venture beyond the door might well be the death of her and she didn’t know how long she’d stay brave enough to avoid opening it.

But she would go mad here if she stayed for much longer without doing anything.

If I cannot leave, at least I can make a report; it might be of use to someone, in the weeks to come.

She turned to her pocket Dictaphone, checked there was still power in the batteries, and spoke into it.

“I have decided to tell the tale here of our failure, in the hope that anyone who comes across this will not make the same mistakes we did, mistakes that have got us all killed… or worse.

“We got here in late spring. I know we’re not supposed to be in Canadian waters but there’s too much at stake here for us to ignore the wealth that’s lying in our reach, opened up by the warmer waters of the Arctic. Someone will harvest the riches lying here, untapped as of yet. If we don’t get it, another country will, and the Americans will be just as blind to the diplomatic niceties as we have to be. So we came across the Circle, determined to try.

“We went up and down the coast around here for several weeks, running seismic surveys, before deciding on the best spot for drilling. The week while the rig was put in place and made fit for operation proved to be a tedious one and I’m afraid I drank more vodka than was sensible and suffered for it with horrible hangovers and seasickness that had me quite debilitated for a time. But finally, it was done and we drilled.

“My job as chief scientist was to keep an eye on the sediments we brought up and check for value. As it turned out, I was kept busier than I would have hoped. The drill bit did its job for the most part, but the sediment, then rock, we drilled through varied wildly in porosity and density so we never knew from day to day how deep we would get, or what we might dredge up. I spent my days on the rig in the vicinity of the drill shaft trying to ensure the smoothest operation possible and my evenings in the mess with a never-ending procession of vodka shots and packs of Marlboro.

When I ran out of liquor, I took to getting beat by the captain at chess. The little Murmansk man was quiet but he had a mind like a steel trap and a game to match; I forced a couple of draws out of him but that was as far as I was able to get. We spoke little of matters beyond the game or the drilling, but he was a comfortable companion. I am going to miss him.

“In early May, we had a celebration when we struck an oil deposit and I’m afraid the lure of vodka got the better of me again. I staggered to my bunk and fell into a dark pit. I woke with a stinking headache, made all the worse by the loud ringing of an alarm and the incessant honking of our fog horn despite the fact bright sunlight lanced in through the porthole above my bunk.

“I went out onto the main deck and into a scene of almost comedic chaos.

“Stefan, the cook, stood at the gunwale, smacking something at his feet with a frying pan, again and again until whatever he was hitting was a streak of pulpy mush on the deck. Elsewhere, the crew stomped and yelled in a kind of macabre, badly choreographed, dance. It was only when I saw what the captain was holding at bay I realized this was no laughing matter.

“At first, I took them for horseshoe crabs; they were about the same, oval, dinner-plate size. But these had claws under the carapace, talons on their legs, pincers at the mouth parts, long antennae probing at the air as if tasting it and a squat, stubby rectangular tail rising in the air, giving them balance as they scuttled across the deck. I finally identified one as it stopped, raised its head, and tasted the air. I’d seen the like in books and on the Internet, but this was my first real-life encounter with the species. It was an isopod, Bathynomus Giganteus, normally a carnivorous bottom feeder.

“They weren’t anywhere near the bottom now; the whole deck swarmed with scores of them. The one tasting the air turned on scuttling legs and came straight for me. I didn’t think twice, I stepped forward and kicked it, hard, sending it soaring away over the gunwale.

“‘I need some help here,’ the captain shouted. He was at the main doorway into the superstructure, trying to close it against a frenzied attack of tens of the isopods. Three of the deck hands followed me in answering his call and we did what we could, stomping and kicking our way to his aid, leaving sticky trails of mush and slime behind us.

“The man next to me bent and tried to lift one of the things in his hands; it turned on him immediately, stripping two of his fingers to the bone with its rough mouth. Our stomping got more frenzied but even then the sheer number of the things threatened to overwhelm us. The noise of talons scratching on the steel deck sounded like tearing metal and the tap-tap of their legs as they scuttled was like rapid gunfire. Everywhere I turned there were more of them, and I finally saw the source; they came up the side of drill shaft and across the gangplanks from the rig, washing down in a wave onto the deck.

“My thought was we must have disturbed a colony on the seabed, enough for them to get curious… or hungry. It didn’t bear thinking about.

“I kept kicking and stomping. Behind me one of the crewmen yelled in pain, bent to grab at where his ankle had been attacked and immediately had three of the things scuttling up his arms and over his body. I saw his left ear get ripped off, then he fell, immediately submerged in a threshing, squirming pile of the isopods, all eager to get to him and strip the flesh from his bones. His screams were terrible but thankfully, they did not last long.

“We had almost reached the captain at the superstructure door. He laid into the attacking isopods hard with a long tire-iron, cutting swathes through the beasts like a swinging sword. Between the four of us remaining, we cleared the doorway and were finally able to drag ourselves in and slam the door behind us with a resounding clang.

“We quickly made our way up the stairwell to the control room, where we all stood there, looking at each other for long seconds, each wondering what the hell had happened. The whole deck swarmed with the beasts, crawling and scuttling over each other in a frenzied search for food. I couldn’t see any of the crew. I was hoping that, like us, most of them had made it to relative safety. At least the cargo hold doors were closed; I could only hope all remaining access points below decks were likewise firmly shut, for the thought of these things scurrying – feeding – in the corridors and cabins did not bear thinking about.

“‘Now what?’ one of the crew with us said. I realized the question had been directed at the captain.

“‘Now we get these boogers off my bloody ship,’ he said, his features set in grim determination. ‘Brute force obviously works but let’s try something a bit faster. Fetch the kerosene, we’ll burn these bastards out.’“

“So began the longest day of my life. The captain dispatched crews all over the boat with only one remit – find any isopods aboard and get rid of them by any means necessary. As it turned out, fire was damned efficient, sending the things skittering away in search of respite from the flames. We were able to herd large numbers of them into an empty cargo hold where they burned, crisping and cracking like hastily cooked bacon. If I’d expected them to smell like a seafood gumbo, I was much mistaken, for the stench they gave off was acrid, like burnt vinegar, and they cooked down, not to the equivalent of shelled crabmeat but to a green, oily goop that smelled even worse.

“But our tactics were working.

“It was while I was helping to get ten more of the isopods into the dark hole of the cargo hold I saw the luminescence for the first time. It was only a faint blue shimmer, for there was bright sunlight coming in from the now open bay doors above dimming the effect. But now I’d seen it, I started to notice it in other dark corners where we found the beasts hiding. I knew immediately what I was seeing; the light they used to hunt by down in the depths was giving them away up here on the boat.

“As the day drew on and the sun moved ‘round, casting deeper shadows in corridors and holds, I started to see the glow even stronger and along with it came a high, whining hum. I had to get up close to one of the things to find the cause; it rubbed its two largest limbs together, fast and furious and, like a cricket, sent out a message only its fellow isopods had a hope of understanding. But getting in close showed me something else and it was something needing further investigation. I didn’t want to share the information with anyone just then but if I was correct, we were in more trouble than we thought.

“Much to the captain’s disgust, I insisted on capturing a live specimen of the things for study; we finally caught one in a stout fishing net and I had it transported to the lab above the drill shaft out on the rig. I had no time to have a look at it then though, for the ship was far from clear of the things and it was several weary hours later before the captain pronounced himself satisfied.

“The last act of a long day was to go out onto the rig and pour a flow of kerosene over the rig and down the outside of the drill shaft then set it alight. I didn’t hear any more of the high whine but I saw several small bodies fall, flaming, into the sea far beneath the main body of the drilling rig. As night fell, we scoured the boat for any luminescence but found none. The job was done.

“The captain set a guard on the rig just in case and I dragged myself wearily off to my bunk where I fell, fully clothed, into a welcome oblivion that did not require any vodka to achieve.”

“Once again I was rudely woken, although this time it was still dark outside the porthole, and this time it was by the captain tugging at my shoulder.

“‘We missed one,’ he said as I rose.

“‘It’s alive?’

“‘Not anymore,’ he said. ‘But there’s something I need you to see and something we need to talk about.’

“He led me down to the main galley and through to the smaller, cold refrigerated larder at the rear. It looked like a gale had blown through it, with frozen meat, partially eaten by the look of it, strewn here, there, and everywhere. But it wasn’t what he’d brought me to see. The remains of one of the isopods were squished into a mass of pulp on the floor, mere inches from its obvious entry point. A hole had been made, scratched or eaten, in the metal door of the larder, a hole the approximate width and height of the isopod itself.

“We left the cooks to clean up the mess and went up to the captain’s cabin where, without asking, he poured us three fingers of vodka each and it went down the hatch so quickly I hadn’t even got a smoke lit before he poured another.

“‘Tell me again about the discontinuity,’ he finally said after we were both lit up.

“We had talked, briefly, of the theory before, so I knew there was little he didn’t already know but I also knew he needed to talk. The appearance of the isopods in such numbers and the loss of the crewman to them, had us all rattled. So I laid it out for him again as we made our way down the bottle. I spoke again of how our Russian scientists had discovered an anomalous layer between the mantle and the crust where sound waves behaved differently and the theories as to what might be the cause, from a porous rock stratum to large oil deposits or even, possibly, a liquid metal layer.

“At first, I thought he might not reply but then I noticed he’d definitely been thinking along lines I had not even considered myself.

“‘These things, isopods you call them, you say they live on the bottom, on the sea bed?’

“I nodded, unsure where he was going.

“‘But they only came up the shaft when we hit oil, when we broke through to a different layer. And here’s what I’m thinking about, what if they came up from there and not the ocean floor? You saw how it ate through the metal door? What if that’s what your discontinuity is? What if it’s these things, down there, eating through rock and sediment and whatever the hell they can find? They’re certainly voracious enough.’

“I was about to laugh, then saw he was deadly serious, so I took a long drag of smoke before replying, trying to compose an answer that would not sound condescending. I shook my head.

“‘The pressures and temperature differentials would be too great at depth for any living creature to survive, let alone thrive in such large numbers. It’s not possible –’

“He interrupted me.

“‘And it’s not possible for one of them to eat through a metal door. And yet here we are.’ He didn’t give me time to reply. ‘And if they are bottom feeders we have disturbed, why didn’t they come up when we started drilling and not this distance down below the sea bed?’

“His questions reminded me of something I’d forgot, the reason why I’d requested a live specimen.

“‘I don’t have any answers for you, yet. But maybe the one we caught will tell us something.’

“We made our way out onto the deck and across to the rig and the squat metal refurbished cargo container serving as my lab above the drill shaft. But our trip was wasted; the box lay half on and half off the shelf, clearly having been smashed open from the inside.

“‘I think we’ve found where the one we missed came from,’ the captain said dryly. ‘Was there something in particular that caused you to collect it?’

I had hesitated to mention it until now but worry had suddenly taken root and I wanted, more than anything else, to head back to the vodka and dive into it but the captain wouldn’t take my silence for an answer and insisted.

“‘You’re not going to like it,’ I said.

“‘I’m already bloody unhappy,’ he replied. ‘How much worse can it get?’

“‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ I replied, keeping my voice low so only the captain might hear, for there were other men on the deck having a smoke and they were within hearing distance. ‘I didn’t get a really good look but I’m pretty certain the ones that came aboard today were all juveniles and all recently born.’

“‘You’re saying there are more?’ he replied and I saw my worry reflected in his eyes. I hated to make it worse still but as captain, he deserved to be told.

“‘I’m saying there are bigger.’”