Mac answered first.
“Lass, the fly boys can land on a flea’s arse in a howling gale. They’ll be here.”
McCally and Mac were now playing cards, three-card brag, with cigarettes as collateral. Svetlanova might have joined them, had Banks not taken her to one side by the window.
“You mentioned a discontinuity on your tape. You think it’s where these things are coming from?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“And what is it, this discontinuity?”
“An anomaly in the rock strata,” she said, remembering what she’d told the ship’s captain. “Ever since 1909 when Andrija Mohorovičić noted a zone where seismic waves speed up when they should be slowing down, people have been itching to drill and find out what’s there. That’s what we were doing here; our surveys showed us the discontinuity was closer to the seabed here than anywhere else in the world. Our geologists thought it might mark a huge gas field or, barring that, a mineral layer that could be cheaply mined.”
“You’re in Canadian waters,” Banks said and Svetlanova waved her hand.
“The sea is the sea. Anyone can lay claim.”
Banks laughed.
“I’m not sure the brass see it that way, but I’m not a politician. Tell me more. You pierced the discontinuity and these things came out of it? So effectively, you made a hole, sprung a leak somewhere down there, allowing the isopods out of their cage?”
“Yes, that’s about the sum of it. We, as you say, fucked up. It’s a big hole in the seabed. We put a camera down; I saw the footage not long before everything went wrong. It was in black and white of course, color cameras won’t work at depth but even then the screen shimmered and glowed. The seabed looked like a scraped clean slab of stone, with tracks, almost like roadways, radiating out in all directions. There was a hole, glowing and gleaming like a flickering bulb, a giant eye, looking up at us from out of the earth’s crust, daring us to poke it again.
“That wasn’t even the worst of it. The hole had cracks radiating out from it, the same radii, mirrored in the scraped tracks on the seabed, glowing tendrils pulsing and spreading even as we watched. Far from closing up, the hole down to the discontinuity was still growing. Isopods swarmed everywhere below. Big ones, small ones, a multitude of them, pouring up out of the discontinuity, scuttling and scurrying and quickly lost in the dark seas beyond the camera’s reach.”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“You didn’t ask… and there’s little we can do about it. The drill is kaput and unless you’ve got a submersible hidden in your jacket, there’s no way down.”
“Will they keep coming?”
“Given I don’t know how many of them there are, whether they can survive for long out of their natural environment, or anything about their reproductive cycle, there’s no way to tell. They could stay local to here…”
“Or they could spread,” Banks finished for her.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it while I was stuck in the pantry. Imagine them getting into one of the main currents,” she said. “The big one from here goes down toward the St. Lawrence seaway. They could get all the way down to the Great Lakes. Imagine them in Toronto, Montreal, or even Chicago. Imagine the carnage.”
“Or going the other way, heading down the North Sea,” Banks said. “To London. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine one of those big buggers climbing Big Ben, or rampaging among the tourists in Trafalgar Square. We have to do something.”
Svetlanova motioned to the window.
“We’re on a holed boat, in a storm, with no operating drilling rig. You’ve lost two men already. What can we do?”
Mac looked up.
“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Fucking A,” McCally replied and the men all laughed as if they’d made a joke; she wasn’t sure if Mac was serious or not but replied as if he was.
“That might work,” she said.
Banks looked like he might reply but a gust of wind caught the boat broadside and the vessel lurched, metal squealing. They rolled and Svetlanova lost her footing, tumbled into Banks and sent both of them to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. For several breaths she thought they were going all the way over, then the old boat righted, almost over compensated, then rocked back into position. But something felt wrong now; they felt lazier in the water, too heavy but at the same time rocking and rolling more violently with the wind. Sleet, almost hail, spattered hard against the window.
Banks helped her to her feet and they looked at each other. Neither spoke, neither had to.
It’s going to be a long two hours.
- 13 -
“We can’t sit here, Cap,” Mac said. “This crate’s going down.”
“Aye, eventually,” Banks replied. “But I heard you earlier; these are hardy buggers and so are we. And we’re not going anywhere in this weather. So sit tight and pucker up.”
Banks couldn’t bring himself to take his own advice; the thought of the flooded engine room was too big in his mind.
If the damage has gotten worse, I have to know.
Another thought was growing in his mind too. If the isopods were coming up the drill rig, then it probably wasn’t a good idea to be so close to it. He had to find out whether they could uncouple from it, maybe even send the whole thing down to the seabed and how easy, or difficult, it was going to be.
Maybe the woman’s idea of a massive strike is the right idea.
There was little he could do about the rig in the current weather conditions; he wasn’t stupid enough to step outside in an Arctic gale if he didn’t absolutely have to. But at least he could check the engine room.
“Watch my back, Sarge,” he said to Hynd. “I’m going downstairs for a shufti.”
“What about all that bollocks about not splitting up?”
Banks smiled.
“You can come and hold my hand if you’d like? I’m going to the foot of the stairs; a quick look at the engine room to check the damage and I’ll be right back.”
Hynd nodded.
“Okay. But I’ll be down at the first deck level behind you, in case there’s another of those big fuckers about.”
“I think we’re all clear; I think she was right about the electricity thing.”
“I bloody well hope so.”
Getting down the stairs proved quite an adventure in itself, for the roll and yaw of the boat had got much more pronounced since his last descent. He fell, hard, against the wall twice and was almost thrown off his feet when a gust of wind again shook the whole vessel. He heard a loud creaking, like tearing metal, from somewhere up near the prow.
Two more hours; give me two more hours.
The only good news in the engine room was that the hole at the far end didn’t appear to be any larger. But the water was at least a foot deeper than the last time he’d looked, even accounting for the dead beast floating to and fro in the wavelets set in motion by the wind and the roll of the vessel. The wind howled and whistled through the hole and sleet, more like hail, spattered the hull like shotgun pellets. At least there was no sign of any more isopods and it didn’t look like the big dead one had been scavenged in any way; with any luck, they’d be able to hide out the remaining time without worrying about an attack.
But the weather and the rising water level in the flooded room had him worried more than the thought of an attack. Mac had been right, the RAF lads could land a chopper almost anywhere, but the wind outside showed no sign of relenting. A rescue might not be as imminent as they hoped and the danger of sinking was rising with every passing minute.