He drew the papers back towards him and flipped through them in a desultory way, only half examining them as he tried to understand the affair. “It’s all a bit mysterious, and I can’t say I’m very fond of mysteries.”
He seemed glad of the distraction when Quinn appeared in the doorway, although that gladness diminished somewhat when he saw Quinn’s expression. “What’s wrong, Mr Quinn?” he asked, already rising to his feet.
“It’s Giroux,” said Quinn. “We just picked up his communicator signal. He got out somehow, captain.”
“Impossible,” said Tasya, now on her feet too.
“He doesn’t have a suit,” said Kane, utterly astonished. “Never mind how he survived the explosion, he doesn’t have a suit.”
They were on the bridge seconds later. “It’s faint, but the signal’s good enough to detect the encryption assigned to Giroux’s channel,” reported Sahlberg.
“Where is he?”
“Back at the evacuation site, sir.”
“We were not far from there when we came back from the Zarya. Why didn’t we hear him then?”
Sahlberg shook his head. “I can’t tell you, captain. Maybe he found the facility’s communications room and is using its relay to get a message outside the Faraday cage.”
“Oh, gods. Poor Bruno.” Kane was horror-struck. “Set course. Best speed. We have to do what we can.”
The course had already been set in anticipation of the command, and the lean shape of the Vodyanoi, the fastest boat in all the seas of Russalka, surged forward. It was only when Kane took the captain’s seat that he realised he was still holding the evidence reports from the Vetsch investigation. He looked from them to the main display — currently showing the boat’s course and an area of likelihood where Giroux’s signal probably lay — back to the reports and finally at Katya who was standing to his right.
“This has been a very odd day,” said Kane.
It was to become odder still. While the Vodyanoi had been on station outside the evacuation facility waiting for contact to be re-established with the expedition, it had continued its survey of the mountain within which the facility lay. One of the elements it had positively identified was the disguised communications relay by which the facility kept in touch with the Yagizba Enclaves. As they grew closer to the mountain, and the probable location of Giroux’s transmission was refined into a smaller and smaller area, it became obvious that the two did not match up at all.
“That puts him physically outside the base,” said Sahlberg. “How did he manage that?”
Kane said nothing, but watched as the search area shrank steadily as they grew closer. Suddenly he leaned forward. “Mr Sahlberg, that area seems to be on the move. Is that an effect of varying signal strength, or…”
“No, sir,” said Sahlberg, studying the figures on his console. “He’s moving. Just a moment, we should be just about… There!”
On the main display, the search area resolved into a single point. “He’s descending the mountainside,” said Sahlberg, astonished. “What does he think he’s doing?”
“Is he falling?”
“I don’t think so, captain. His path is following a ridge line. No, look! He’s following the escarpment downwards. He’s not falling, sir. He’s climbing down.”
“Do we have any sort of inventory for the evacuation site? Would they have AD suits?”
“Unlikely, sir. Just soft suits for maintenance.”
Katya knew why Kane was asking. Giroux was descending too fast. In a soft suit, he would be breathing a mixture of gases that included helium rather than nitrogen, and he should be taking rests to allow his body to acclimatise.
“He’s approaching a cliff, captain. He’ll have to stop.”
The bridge fell silent but for Ocello trying to raise Giroux on the radio. They watched as the sharp contact point moved closer to the edge of a great cliff that stood above a gorge.
They watched as he reached it.
They watched as he jumped.
“Range, damn it! How far away are we?” shouted Kane.
“Three kilometres, sir. We’ll never get there in time.”
They could only watch as Giroux plunged into the abyss, deeper than their test depth, then deeper than their design depth, and then the contact went dark.
“There’s a Soup lake down there,” said Ocello quietly. “He’s gone in.”
However Giroux had survived the explosion, however he had had escaped the site, they would never know. The Soup was a dense emulsion of heavy metals in particle form, created in a natural process that had baffled Russalkin scientists ever since it was discovered in the early seabed surveys. No submarine dared enter it; no diver could hope to return from the crushing pressures within the toxic lakes.
“He must have been dead long before he reached it,” she said. “The pressure change was too rapid. Nobody could have survived it.”
“Nobody could have survived that explosion,” said Kane to himself, but Katya caught his muttered words. Abruptly he stood. “I shall be in my cabin. You have the bridge, Ms Ocello.” Without waiting for confirmation, Kane left the bridge in deep thought, the reports still clenched in his hand.
Katya went to see Sergei. The Vodyanoi who had been left to keep an eye on him was visibly relieved when she came in, and she could understand why; being in a confined space with a despondent Sergei would depress anyone. She had years of experience and had developed a resistance to it, but she could imagine what a drag it would be on the soul of somebody exposed to such accomplished passive-aggressive semi-professional martyrdom for the first time.
“Just wanted to tell you what’s happening, Sergei. I can’t tell you what the final conclusion will be for sure, but the evidence corroborated your story, so…”
“It wasn’t a story,” he said sullenly. “It’s the way it happened.”
“Don’t, Sergei. I have enough to deal with without you being miserable about good news. The captain believes your account, and even Tasya’s come around to it. Considering she was all for shooting you at first, that’s got be good, hasn’t it?”
Sergei managed a small reluctant nod, as if being found innocent and being allowed to live was only fractionally better than a maser bolt in the brain and an undignified burial at sea through a torpedo tube.
Satisfied that this was going to be the biggest outpouring of emotion she could expect from him, Katya turned to leave, but Sergei stopped her.
“Katya, what’s all this about? Why do they need you so much?”
It suddenly struck her that he would know nothing about what had happened in the evacuation site, no idea of what they had found there, what they had seen. Nor had he seen the wreck of the Zarya. To him the Feds were still just a bunch of snotty official types who ran things because they always had. “They want me to do something. Something scary. It will be dangerous, too. I don’t want you to go with me, Sergei. I’ll drop you off at Dunwich.”
The Vodyanoi crew man coughed and said, “I’ll just wait outside. I’ll be right outside if you need me.” He stepped through the doorway, sliding the door shut behind him.