“I think — Marius, it looks like some kind of unmanned probe.”
“But that doesn’t make sense… we’d have been informed if one was operating in this area.”
Cédric was silent again. Marius was right, it didn’t make sense. Just as a splice that shouldn’t have been in the cable made no sense. Yet there it was lying uncovered on the seabed only a few steps from where he stood. And there in the bright fan of his lights was an autonomous underwater vehicle unlike any he’d seen in his entire diving career.
Then it struck him that it did resemble something he’d seen before — and that flash of sudden recall instantly branched off into another like electronic data through a signal splitter. Cédric’s first clear memory was of a fish he’d often spotted skimming through the sea grass while on a year-long Planétaire telecom project in the Caribbean. His second was of an article he’d read mentioning the same creature — a fish, family Ostraciidae — in one of the scientific monthlies he read with compulsive diligence. National Geographic’s French edition, perhaps, but that didn’t really matter. The important things for him were that the boxfish was distinguished by the hard outer carapace that deterred predators but also made its body rigidly inflexible… and that the boxfish’s means of locomotion, which gave it exceptional stability and maneuverability despite the unbending armor, had been studied by American military researchers interested in using it as a model for the steering and propulsion systems of future generation AUVs.
All this passed through Cédric’s brain in milliseconds, flashing along parallel but independent paths of recollection toward a sharp, startling convergence as he focused on the robotic craft bearing toward him. If he’d had time to consider them, the implications of what he saw might have caused a slow trickle of fear to filter through his surprise — but he didn’t.
When fear did overtake him it would be in a cold, blustering rush.
The AUV had closed to within five meters of the hardsuit pilot and leveled in a stationary position. Cédric noticed a small lenticular window on its underside, a nubby black projection at its front end, and did not like the looks of either.
Then an opening appeared on the starboard side of the vehicle’s flat hull. Cédric would never know whether the hatch, lid, panel, or whatever it was had recessed into the hull or sprung inward like a trap door — it happened too quickly for him to tell. The opening appeared. And before he could react, a compartment behind the opening released its implausible contents into the water.
The twenty or so dispersing spheres looked to him like metal ball bearings, although they were somewhat larger than racquetballs in size. Each of them had four tiny screw propellers — one on the upper axis, one on the lower, another two on opposite points across its diameter.
His eyes wide with amazement, Cédric thought crazily of a toy called a Pokéball he’d once gotten his youngest nephew for his birthday, something that opened up like an egg to release a little cartoon imp.
He was still thinking of it when the spheres assembled into tight cluster formation and came swarming toward the spot where he stood with his dive partner.
“Cédric… what’s going on?” Tension brimmed in Marius’s voice. “What are those things?”
Cédric couldn’t waste an instant with guesswork. He switched to the diver-to-surface freq.
“Africana, we have a situation,” he said.
He got an earful of silence in response.
“This is a mayday, Africana. Repeat, mayday, can you read?” he said.
More dead silence from topside.
“God damn it, come in, what’s wrong with you up there?”
Still nothing. And the rapidly moving spheres were almost on them.
Cédric abandoned the radio, looked at Marius. He had no shred of a plan in his head, and the knowledge that their thrusters weren’t designed for speed hardly inspired confidence one would come to him. But Cédric had been a navy man for a very long time, and he did not like it at all that the lens-shaped aperture and black projection on the minisub were reminiscent of the guidance and homing packets of seeker torpedoes.
The robotic swarm meant danger.
“We have to get away,” he said. The declaration sounded blandly, hatefully obvious. “Try to—”
They were the last words he managed to get out of his mouth before the spheres came swooping down on them.
He felt three quick, clapping thumps on the back of his thruster unit, a fourth against the POD encasing his right hand, followed by a fifth and sixth on his left. There were some hard claps to his chest and the side of his neck, and the next instant a staggering thump-thump-thump against his foot that almost threw Cédric off balance into the muddy sediment.
“My God!” Marius shouted over the comlink. “They’re sticking to us. Sticking!”
More of the obvious. The globes were clinging wherever they struck. Cédric could see them becoming affixed to the same areas of Marius’s hardsuit as his own, fastening themselves to its thruster pack and dome collar joint, bunching onto the prehensors of both extremities like crops of giant metal berries. He simultaneously realized they weren’t attaching to Marius’s upper arms and legs, points that had also escaped contact on his suit.
Again Cédric had no chance to wonder what this implied. He was far too cognizant that if either of their hulls suffered a breach, its internal environment would be displaced by sixty atmospheres of pressure — a compression so vastly beyond human tolerance that it would pulp its occupant’s internal organs and burst the very walls of his blood cells.
He felt another of the spheres hit his back. How many were on him now? Ten, twelve?
Beside him, Marius was close to panic. His arms rose and fell against heavy water resistance, rose and fell, flapping in what looked like slow motion as he tried to shake the spheres from his gripper claws.
Cédric knew he was scarcely further away from losing his composure.
“Marius, hold still, I’ll try to pull them off you,” he said. “We need to stay calm, try and get them off each other.”
Marius met his gaze through their rounded dome ports, gathered his wits enough to stop the furious paddling of his arms.
Cédric reached out to Marius with his lefthand prehensor, testing its mobility with his individuated finger control rings. He was somewhat amazed to find that he could still open and close it despite the weight of the spheres attached to two of its four stainless-steel claws.
He clamped the gripper around a sphere lodged at the base of Marius’s neck, gave it a strong tug. It didn’t budge even a little. He tugged harder, microelectromechanical sensors inside the control rings transferring his exertion to the claw as increased output. The sphere would not yield, and now Marius was screaming again, unnecessarily reminding him that it was sticking, it was sticking, the damned thing wasn’t coming off. Cédric could feel himself start to nervously perspire inside his suit and added a prying motion on his third try, straining the gripper’s servos to their limits.
The sphere finally detached from the collar joint — but by just the slightest bit. A few centimeters at most before clamping right back on, pulling along Cédric’s MEMS-AIDED gripper claw with a powerful attraction that jerked his arm up and out toward Marius.