“Uncle?” said Katya, suddenly spotting a flaw in the plan.
“Hmm?”
“How are we supposed to find the Leviathan? It’s virtually invisible when it wants to be. We could swim backwards and forwards all day two hundred metres from it in this murk and never see it.”
“Ah, well,” said Lukyan in a voice that indicated that he hadn’t considered this either, but wasn’t about to admit it.
Kane saved him by saying, “It will find us. It will interrogate the IFF unit with a coded signal, detect the correct reply — if we’ve made a mess putting in the IFF then that will be about the point where this pleasure cruise finishes — and try to bring us in on remote control or command the drone’s artificial intelligence to bring itself in. Neither will work, it will assume there’s been damage, and recover us for repairs.”
“How violent is this recovery likely to be?” asked Tokarov.
“Not violent at all. You’ll see.”
“You said the drone had artificial intelligence?” said Katya.
“Yes. They have to have some autonomy. Those tunnels block communications so the drone was given its orders and left to complete them.”
“But the Leviathan itself has a synthetic intelligence?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“Is this relevant?” Tokarov interrupted.
“No,” said Kane, “but it’s better than listening to your weak puns. An artificial intelligence, Ms Kuriakova,” Katya noticed the formal use of her name, “only looks like intelligence. A machine is taught a lot of responses to assorted situations and uses them if such a situation arises. The more contingencies are covered, the more intelligent the AI seems. The best have heuristic routines programmed in; that means they observe how well what they’ve been taught works and how other approaches work. If something else is better, then they’ll start using that in future instead. They’re ‘learning,’ for want of a better word. Artificial intelligences can get very good, even passing the Turing test.”
“What’s…?”
“It’s a rule of thumb test for intelligence. If you can talk to an AI for a few hours and never realise that you were talking to a machine all along, then it’s passed the Turing test. That’s artificial intelligences; they’re artificial because they’re not real minds, just good impersonations. A synthetic intelligence is something else again. The Leviathan carries a massive silicon analogue of a brain. At the moment nothing much more sophisticated than a good artificial intelligence programme is in it. The idea was for it to interface with a human…”
“You,” said Tokarov, fascinated.
“…me, and the human intelligence would act as a catalyst to spark the same sort of cascading sapient effect in the synthetic brain. The result would be a single intellect, the will and experiences of the human combined with the massive knowledge resources and capabilities of the Leviathan.
“It’s not just a theory either. They’ve done it on Earth. Nothing quite like the Leviathan, though.”
“What’s different?”
“The interface had to be more… I’m not sure how to describe it. Thorough, perhaps. Intimate.”
Tokarov laughed. “You make it sound like a marriage.”
Kane didn’t laugh along with the joke. He only said, “’Til death do us part.”
Katya’s right-hand multi-function display started showing a flashing box and bleeped urgently. “The IFF unit has been hailed,” she said quietly. A faint sense of fear was growing in her. She’d secretly hoped the Leviathan had moved on, but the indicator on the MFD showed that to be a vain hope. How many times did she think she could encounter that monstrosity and live? She was starting to hate the stupid pride that had made her volunteer for the mission.
“I’d cut the engines, if I were you,” suggested Kane to Lukyan. “There’s less chance of an accident if we’re not moving when it takes us.”
Katya didn’t like the sound of being taken at all. It made them sound like prey. But Lukyan cut the engines and now they had only the sound of the life-support fans and their breathing as they waited and listened for the Leviathan to make its move.
The seconds turned into a minute and then minutes. Katya was wondering whether to suggest sending an active sonar pulse to try and provoke the Leviathan into doing something (she wasn’t wondering it very hard, though, since it didn’t seem to respond well to having sound waves blasted at it) when something touched the hull. A whispering light scraping as something travelled cautiously across the Baby’s skin.
“Here we go,” whispered Kane.
Suddenly the boat lurched and then started to move swiftly and smoothly upwards.
“What’s happening?” growled Lukyan. “Have we been grappled?” He looked to Kane for a reply, and the pirate nodded.
Grappled. Somehow the Leviathan had managed to attach lines to the Baby with barely any warning at all. Katya had read and seen stories of historical grappling actions and having harpoons banged through your hull was usually a very obvious process. This was something else again. The hiss of water travelling quickly over the hull modulated into a gruff roar for a moment and then, suddenly, they were bathed in harsh, white light.
Out of the ports, they could see the Baby was being dragged through a great hatch in the floor of a white circular chamber, perhaps twenty metres in diameter. Through the top porthole, they could see cables as thick as a man’s wrist running from a cluster in the roof and down to where they encircled the minisub. They flexed and moved like the arms of a russquid, Katya thought, even though they were obviously made from metal. She’d never seen anything like them before. Beneath the Baby, a great iris valve slid shut, sealing them off from the sea. They were trapped in the belly of the beast now.
The tentacle-cables — or cable-tentacles, Katya didn’t know which — gently lowered the Baby to the floor of the chamber and then slid back into the ceiling above. As they watched the metallic hemisphere in the ceiling into which the cables had retracted, they saw its image distort with ripples and realised the chamber was being pumped out. The water level dropped rapidly, much faster than the dock had flooded back in the mining site. Within a very few minutes, the minisub was sitting on its landing skids in the middle of the white chamber, dripping dry as the last dregs of water were efficiently sucked away from the floor.
They sat in silence for a few seconds, everybody waiting for somebody else to make the first move.
Tokarov was the first to find his voice. “Now what?”
Kane unbuckled his seat restraints. “The aft hatch, please.” Uncle Lukyan flicked a switch, and the aft hatch unsealed and swung open. Kane walked back and stopped just before stepping out. “You might as well follow,” he said. “There’s no getting the sub back out of this chamber without the Leviathan permitting it, so there’s not much point in staying behind.” The others released their restraint buckles and climbed out after him.
Katya stood by the Baby and looked around in wonderment at the chamber. It was so harshly white in here, with no obvious source of light as though the walls themselves were glowing. Everything was white except for the unpainted and untarnished dome in the ceiling, pocked with the large regular holes in its surface that were home to the tentacles, and the iris valve they were standing on. She couldn’t see any way of getting into the rest of the Leviathan from here.