“Management says—” She stops. “You’ve got blue eyes.”
Clarke smiles faintly. “You’ve seen them before.”
“I know. It’s just kind of surprising, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you without your caps in.”
Clarke sits down with her breakfast. “So, what does Management say?”
“We’re on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four.” Ballard sits down across from Clarke. “I wonder sometimes why we’re not online right now.”
“I guess they just want to be sure everything works.”
“Still, it seems like a long time for a dry run. And you’d think that—well, they’d want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that’s happened.”
After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.
“And there’s something else,” Ballard says. “I can’t get through to Piccard.”
Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galapagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.
“You ever meet the couple there?” Ballard asks. “Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?”
Clarke shakes her head. “They went through before me. I never met any of the other Rifters except you.”
“Nice people. I thought I’d call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through.”
“Line down?”
“They say it’s probably something like that. Nothing serious. They’re sending a ’scaphe down to check it out.”
Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate—one’s all it would take—
Something creaks, deep in Beebe’s superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn’t looking.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I wish we didn’t keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull.” She knows it’s an impossible dream; most gases kill outright when breathed at three hundred atmospheres. Even oxygen would do you in if it got above one or two percent.
Ballard shivers dramatically. “If you want to risk breathing ninety-nine percent hydrogen, you’re welcome to it. I’m happy the way things are.” She smiles. “Besides, you have any idea how long it would take to decompress afterwards?”
In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.
“Seismic. Wonderful.” Ballard disappears into Comm. Clarke follows.
An amber line writhes across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.
“Get your eyes back in,” Ballard says. “The Throat’s acting up.”
They can hear it all the way to Beebe: a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The color is different. It ripples.
They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.
Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.
The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.
“Jesus!” Ballard shouts over the noise. “It’s not supposed to do that!”
Clarke checks her thermistor. It won’t settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty-eight and back again, within seconds. A myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.
“Why the light show?” Clarke calls back.
“I don’t know!” Ballard answers. “Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!”
Without warning, the tumult dies.
The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.
A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.
“Smoker,” Ballard says into the sudden stillness. “A big one.”
They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There’s a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several meters long, between two of the generators.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Ballard says. “That’s why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!”
“The rift’s never stable,” Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.
Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. “Well, according to this there’s no damage,” she calls down, after looking inside. “Hang on, let me switch channels here—”
Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.
And does.
“We were lucky,” Ballard is saying above her. “The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it’s not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!”
Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she’s planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.
“Are you crazy?” Ballard shouts. “That’s an active smoker!”
Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. “We need temperature readings,” she says, “from inside the mouth.”
“Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!”
I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. “It already blew,” she calls back. “It’ll take a while to build up a fresh head.” She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.
“Get out of there, now!”
“Just a second.” Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.
Clarke stiffens and pulls free. “Don’t—” touch me! She catches herself. “I’m out, okay? You don’t have to—”
“Further.” Ballard keeps swimming. “Over here.”
They’re near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. “Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!”
Clarke doesn’t answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. “Watch your back,” she says.
Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can’t see the creature’s tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.
Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.
The gulper’s jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.
Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.
Clarke puts her hand out. “Wait a minute. It’s not coming at us.”
The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.
“Are you crazy?” Ballard moves clear of Clarke’s hand, still watching the monster.
“Maybe it isn’t hungry,” Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.
“They’re always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?”