I.
Fish swam by observatory pane, white seabed beyond, a blanket of bone under barnacled skyscrapers. Vies stood by Valencia’s bed and stared at scaly vertebrates on inscrutable errands through the sunken metropolis. One of the scintillating school paused and looked at the hominid. He wondered if it thought he was also underwater. If it was capable of ascertaining alien environs. Then, as if recalling its mission, the curious creature departed. He continued watching until the scaly congregation vanished within the remains of what he assumed from decayed signage had been a cafe. He did not want to look at her. Face pallid, like her mother’s, contorted in agonized slumber. The machine that kept her alive hissed in regular undulations. Dreamland gasps fell from chapped lips like a demon’s cabaret. He thought of the unaccountable deaths that formed the ocean’s limestone floor and a probable future where Valencia’s ashes dressed it like snow. Close to the glass he saw a small octopus carrying a large shell struggle with an eel. The cephalopod was outmatched and just as it seemed the sinewy predator would have its meal the water churned black and the octopus retreated to a coral garden at the outskirts of the submerged city. The eel writhed in vexation and emerged from the inkcloud with an arm in its mouth. Shell astride the seabed. How many minutes passed before the octopus reclaimed it and Wakeford spoke, he did not know.
“Shoulda called. Coulda made tea. You still like chai?”
Vies mastered cranial tempest and turned to the speaker. An oceanographer of minor reknown, ochre clad, hair gray, face weathered. “Thought you’d still be in the lab.”
“They’re shutting it down.”
A look of panic flashed across Vies’ face. “Why?”
“Security concerns. Separatists are getting bolder. I’m not supposed to tell you this but we were working on marine diseases. Modifying them for medicine. Government judged it too great a risk, worried about our research falling into the wrong hands after the tanker fiasco, cut our funding, so the university is packing it up. You alright?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“You’re alot a things, fine ain’t one of em. You ate today?”
“I had an apple earlier.”
“Come on, I’ll fix some grub.”
The men shifted to the adjoining kitchen of the half submerged house. A sturdy driftwood table occupied the center of the wood paneled room and the walls were garland in nautical paraphernalia, coastal maps, seashells, an ancient whaling spear on a laquered holding rack. An archive of violence. Tectonic shearing of continental shelves, the evolutionary imperative to defend the soft body, the ranged implements that once bore lamplight from the abyss. He sat and studied the oddments as Wakeford prepared sweet spiced tea, grilled cod and dulse. As they sated themselves, Wakeford gazed inquisitively at his despondent guest.
“Don’t like being a pest but I need to ask about the payment.”
Vies scrunched his face, glancing to the slice of machinery visible through the doorway. Machinery forfiet as his daughter’s life should he fail to meet Haelingware’s unsparing schedule. “I’ll have it in time. Day after tomorrow.”
“New job?”
Vies nodded.
“What’s it this time?”
“Another dive. Didn’t tell me much. Getting briefed today.”
“Deep?”
Vies hesitated. “Almost to The Breach.”
Wakeford’s wiry brows knit with concern. “What they want you to go all the way down there for?”
“Why are you so concerned? I know my way around a hydroframe.”
“Course you do, its just,” the old man trailed off, reticent and when he spoke again it was in a fearful hush. “You heard of the Intacta?”
Vies chuckled despite his black mood. “Worried a sea monster will gobble me up?”
“You think they’re just a folktale.”
“They are. A harbor myth to scare kids,” he shot a pointed look at Wakeford. “And credulous oldsters.”
The old man folded his arms. “You think I’m getting doddery?”
“Could be. No shame in it.”
“Well I ain’t. So listen. There’s a rare type of predatory sponge lives way down. We needed a sample for our research. Month back. Normally we’d use the sampling drone but it was getting on and needed repairs and we just had the one. So Kelly—much my junior mind—volunteered to dive for the specimen in an h-frame slotted to a cycler. All the way to the edge of The Breach where the shelf slopes out. And she swears she saw something down there. Not on the scanners but with her own eyes. Something big in the black. Unlike any animal she’s ever heard of. Larger than a cachalot and serpentine. Almost insectal. Her voice trembled as she spoke of it.”
“You vet the breathing mix in her suit?”
“It wasn’t narcosis.”
“Uh huh. So where’s the recording of this fabled leviathan? You guys always keep a recorder handy for holotyping right?”
“There was a malfunction.”
“Convenient.”
“I’m serious.”
“What you want me to do, quit my job over your coworker’s hallucination?”
Wakeford sighed and got up. His face grim. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m doddery, remember. Forget it.” Wakeford walked to the window and looked out, up to where raindrops rippled across water’s surface. “Hurricane is rolling in.”
“Big one, they say.”
“Kryos Industries never failed to quell a storm.”
“First time for everything.”
“Sounds as if you’d like for them to fail.”
“No. Just think we should be handling it ourselves.”
“Its a niche field. There’s precious few know how to build that kind of machinery. If you can even call it that. You know the cloudcrafters aren’t assembled by hand? They’re grown.”
“Didn’t know it, don’t much care. Its not just the weather. We don’t produce our own power, we don’t make our own clothes. We barely even police ourselves. We’ve got Arkway crawlers on our streets instead of our own police.” He threw the dulce onto his plate as if casting off some hideous bug. “Surprised we can still think by ourselves. Sure that’ll be outsourced soon enough.”
The anger in the man’s voice dug furrows of concern in Wakeford’s face. “Scorre’s a small place. Ain’t many of us. We want to keep standards high, we need cooperation.”
“One day might be we’re gonna look back and wish we’d cooperated less.”
The men finished their meal in silence. As Vies made for the door Wakeford stopped him. “Left your back up respirator here last time you came.” Vies pocketed the device, thanked his host and left without fanfare. He pondered Kelly’s tale as he rode the hovtour an hour later. It could have been a giant squid, he thought. They could look vaguely serpentine at distance, though he’d never heard of one coming so close to shore. If she was really in her right senses during the dive. If she wasn’t just lying. The hovtour stopped at a crossing and a troop of Kryos Industries security officers filed into the autonomous transport. He figured it was a public relations move. Arkway personnel never rode public transport. The arrivals stood before Vies and looked out the window to a riot in the distance. A group of migrants, southers by their dusky complexion, gesticulated madly and shouted at a group of paler scorreite unionists baring signs and chanting slogans. The broil was bifurcated by Arkway security crawlers, whose carapaces bore half effaced graffiti. One of the men among the officers spoke to his superior. “Same scene everywhere we go.” The superior replied in a cold disinterested tone, carried despite the distortion of his respirator. “Primitivism is the world’s default. Evident even in those tin cans the council employs.” Vies’ gaze narrowed on the masked, sychitin clad speaker. Slowly, the officer looked over his shoulder, eyes veiled by helm’s visor.
“Problem?” The officer inquired.
“Always is,” he replied without averting his ireful gaze. “How come you’re not surpressing the picket line?”
“Your council does not pay us for peacekeeping. Though they wish to change that arrangement.”
Vies scoffed. “Of course. Not enough outsiders handling our business.” Some of the other officers turned upon Vies with disapproval but a stern gesture from the superior stayed them.
“I was stationed at Veras Sul before coming here.”
“Good for you.”
The commander tilted his head, as one studying a fresh insect. “Are you familiar with what happened there?”
“Famine, least that’s what the news said.”
“Do you know why it happened?”
“No.”
“Red tide. Every faction blamed the other for the dearth. The fault lay in a distant tanker fire. So every tried remedy produced a detriment. When sufficiently fearful, an eyeless man is as apt to club his friend as his foe.” The vehicle halted before the council hall at city’s center and the officers debarked.
Half an hour later Vies stood north of Wakeford’s compound before a desolate roofed pier, gray and unadorned as the sky. Pale sand extended left and right for miles. He gazed across the water. White hulls lanced horizon, bisecting ashen sky and foaming deep. Faraway machines hovered in the darkening atmosphere. Emerging from large platforms that rose from the water at regular intervals, like algorithmic calcimine trees. A sunglassed man stood the edge of the pier, a bundle strapped round his shoulder. Wakeford walked beside him. He was surprised Gyger would come himself. The Separatists maintained loosely affiliated cells and had no formal leadership, but every snake had a head. Gyger was theirs.
“Hows your h-frame?” Gyger asked languidly.
“Ready.”
“And you?”
“Waiting to be filled in.”
Gyger nodded and gestured to a fortified installation far to their left along the beach. “Know what that is?”
“Sea cable landing station.”
“That’s right and that white material covering it?”
“Sychitin, right?”
“Right. Kryos stuff. Shock absorber. Don’t entirely undestand it. Protects the line from anchors, mainly. But it doesn’t run the whole length. Its unsheathed in the middle. Cost saving since in The Breach few anchors will reach.” He brought his index and pointer together. “That’s where you’re gonna cut it.”
Vies followed the man’s gesture to the choppy water. The cable was Scorre’s primary power input, but not its only one. If it were severed, backup generators would sustain Scorre’s grid, but not the coastal defense system. Vies felt quesy. “If I do that this entire region will flood when the storm passes. Its too big for Kryos’ seadrones to generate enough cooling to dissipate it before landfall.”
“That’s exactly what we want. After it hits, the administration will blame the Pelagians, the people will blame Kryos Industries, and the Southers, well, they’ll blame everyone. As usual. It’ll be chaos. And there’s always opportunity in that.”
“How?”
He unshouldered the burden and slide it to Vies. “You’re going to use a Pelagian subsurface cutter. This will prompt the administration to sanction the Pelagians since only their Deepgram makes them.”
“Deepgram is Kryos’ regional competitor.”
“Exactly. The people will believe it self sabotage by Kryos. Freezing out a rival.”
“You sound confident of that.”
“We’ve been laying that narrative for months. Up and down the affin channels. It’ll take. Believe me. There’s little more pliable then an anxious herd.” Gyger’s eyes shone with exaltation as he spoke and he raised his hands as if drawing down the heavens. “Soon the masses will turn to us, when they do, Scorre will be ours.” As Vies bent to retrieve the cutter, he caught sight of two men at the landward side of the pier. They stood like statues observing the conversation. He recognized them but knew only their code names. Banks, reedy and rat like. Cleaver, muscular and leonine. By the long coats they wore he presumed they were armed.
“Extraction point?”
Gyger gestured rightward along the shore, to a domicile diminutive by distance. “Boat house, red roof, a little ways down the bay. There’s an anchored clutchpod on the seafloor in front of it, will pick you up as you’re rising. I’ve input the boathouse’s coordinates and security code for the clutchpod’s activation in your cycler.”
“And if I’m caught? I presume the cycler can be traced.”
“Its fitted with explosives. No need to be alarmed, they won’t go off by accident. If you need to, jettison and blow it.”
He felt pinpricks. “Alright.”
“Good luck. Though I don’t imagine you’ll need it.”
Before Gyger could walk away Vies put a hand on his arm. “And the payment?”
“As we agreed. Don’t worry about that sweet girl of yours. We take care of our own.” Gyger patted Vies on the back. “Make us proud.” Vies watched Gyger and his men pile into a small custom hovtour and disappear over horizon’s curve. He sat a moment on the dock. His heart felt as if it would burst and his palms were slick. He thought of Valencia and rose, slinging the satchel with the cutter over his shoulder. He trekked under the pier, removed the industrial cutter from the satchel and affixed it to his h-frame which crouched in speckled silt.
Vies entered the cycler and guided the machine out of the shallows. In the far distance, barely visible at horizon’s edge, a storm gathered strength. He tilted the submersible’s controls and plunged unto the swallowing dark.
II.
The cycler churned the abyss. Dim forms rose into view. Buildings, tall, crumbling, coated in coral. The heart of an old city. A necrotic organ devoured by a gelid maw. Mottled with the pale eggs of motherless octopi. Spindly crabs scavenged sacks from cement facades crowned in bubblegum coral. A banquet of the unborn beneath a pink forest. Light died to depth. 10,000 feet. 20,000. 30,000. Amid suffocating blackness the bioluminescence of strange jellyfish, an eerie virid constellation. Lower still he forded a chasm formed by twin mounts, checked the submersible’s scanner and furrowed brows. His scanner showed a over one hundred foot long void, 0.1 kilometers distant, as if a great stretch of sea had been ablated from existence. He presumed malfunction and awaited another scan as the vehicle passed to an uneven eggshell plain dotted with countless mountainous juts, a cradle strangled continent, draped in marine snow. The submersible’s lights transformed the barren reach beyond the mountains into a lonely stage garland with immaculate bones. Scoured skeletons of whales and sharks, odd angled, like foreboding totems. No sign of life. Only unfathomed black and merciless cold.
The cycler’s sensor screen flashed.
The void moved.
“Piece of junk,” Vies muttered, eyes to the mobile scanner blank as he crested a short bleak outcrop to gain a better view of the fissured plain. “Should be right over there.” From the edge of the structure the smooth white exterior of the cable was faintly visible in siliclastic distance. He grinned, descended and made full speed through a fissure for the line. Something moved in the dark between sea eaten pass before him. Something large. He halted the machine, heartbeat rising. Through palling liquid, a great and luminous eye shifted into view. Vies’ drew a shuddering breath. Hairs stood. The hull creaked. Wakeford’s story flooded his brain. “Intacta.” He banked sharply right as the enormous serpentine thing slithered to the left, above the seafloor canyon. As it rose, swirling sediment, he could make out two long tendrils that extended from a narrow head and a sleek segmented skeletal carapace, like a fathomless gossamer worm thick with the blood of eels. Beyond the canyon, a decline, filled with smaller seamounts, half tumbled together, a series of dense calcimine mesas that looked of a fractured moon.
A message appeared on the cycler’s screen in an archived nonstandard font. Unauthorized vessel. This area is restricted. Retire. For a long moment Vies stared at the screen with incomprehension as to who could have sent the message. At last it dawned. “Its not a sea creature,” he thought frantically, “Its a damned machine.” The revelation chilled his blood. “Kryos could make something like this?” The leaning mounds to either side of his ship formed a rift and at its end he could see the pale shape of his prize, lying on a broad declivity before which the mounts terminated. Through the back cameras he saw the creature behind him, closing fast, glowing an icy shade of greenish blue, its gargantuan coils scraping the surrounding sediment. His knuckles went white upon the controls. Escape was impossible. Tongued wetted quivering lips. Sweat slide across helm clad flesh. Digits clacked upon keyboard accompanied by a sly smile.
“I’m from Kryos Industries. This is a surprise inspection.”
The screen flickered. “I am the inspection. It is unwise to lie.”
Smile faltered. Vies cursed. Chill giving to molten ire. Only one path was left to him but he was loath to take it. He thought of his daughter and Wakeford and of Gyger and his thugs and the weapons deftly concealed by their ratty coats and steeled his nerves. Through the optical sensors affixed to the back of his craft he could see the dark shape closing upon him. The creature’s vast maw yawned, threatening to swallow him whole. He wonder why Kryos would have given it a mouth. The ponderance kept his mind from going to shambles as he slammed the ejection nodule. He ejected from the submersible, careening through a whorl of bubbles in his sealed hydroframe. The serpentine guardian consumed the cycler and tilted its head. Great luminous eyes scanning the nullity until it beheld him. “Too slow,” Vies shouted as he struck the control panel affixed to right arm, detonating the charges strewn throughout his borrowed vessel. Blinding light erupted and a shockwave roiled the deep. The creature burst, writhed and fell, its momentum carrying it into the seafloor protrustions, whereafter it sloughed from stone and crashed atop the cable. Marine snow plumed. A silent calamity.
Nerves afire, Vies landed upon one of the juts and watched the silt settle like the after image of an alien sandstorm. Nothing stirred.
The line was severed.
It was done.
III.
Long and slow was ascent from the abyss. Vies listened to the news through helm set speakers and glanced over his shoulder at intervals. A smooth female anchor rang within pressurized exoskeleton. “The entire northern shore has experienced severe flooding due to the effects of the hurricane and the failure of the coastal defense system. The cause of the system’s failure is yet unknown but authorities suspect separatist activity. If possible, do not remain in your homes. Please evacuate to the nearest storm shelter.” Vies found the clutchpod by Gyger’s coordinates hitched to the rising seafloor and let the automated water drone secure his suit and ferry him rapidly toward dim light. High above, he could see the once glassy water froth from the buffets of the storm. Upon breaking the surface wind roar was absolute and great waves tossed clutchpod and cargo wildly, veiling Vies’ vision and sweeping him shoreward. Far off, between ocean’s battery, he could see the great black bulk of the hurricane, rising double the distance he had dived. He had seen several hurricanes in his life, but none so large as this. A specter of bottomless voracity, vaster than the island of his birth. Surging waves left him beached where Gyger’s boathouse had previously stood. He detatched from the clutchpod and gazed about in shock. Only a heap of debris remained, boards and bricks strewn among a mess of floatsam. He crawled up the sloping inundated washout, struggling against sky and sea’s savage currents to find a looming black hovtour. The levitating machine’s side door slid open to reveal the men that had accompanied Gyger at the pier. Banks remained seated. Cleaver got out of the vehicle, heavy boots splashing, long coat fluttering like a funeral shroud. Vies rose tensely to his feet. He didn’t like the furtive look in their eyes. “Good job.” Cleaver spoke without affect, rough, brisk. “Just one last matter to attend to,” Banks noted with a casual wave of his hand.
“And what’s that?”
Cleaver replied. “You.”
Vies surveyed his comrades with horror mounted on the edifice of their intent. Cleaver drew his pulser from his hip hoslter. Vies lunged. Before he could aim it Vies seized the man’s arms and the two struggled amid rising tide and howling gale. The weapon went off, aimed at the diver’s thigh, missing and striking the water, it steaming thereafter. Banks raised his armament as the combatants spun and grunted, focusing on Vies’ center mass. Vies spotted the line up and shifted, forcing Cleaver between himself and the hovtour as Banks fired. Cleaver jerked as the blast ate his spine and slumped forward into Vies with wide unseeing eyes. The diver grabbed the weapon from foe’s limp hand and blew Banks’ skull apart against the hovtour’s interior. Then only panting and elemental keening. Vies stilled, body quivering, wired. Cleaver’s lifeless body slid clear of the diver and splashed into the surf. A hideous strangled wail flew to cloud embowered sky. It was several moments before Vies realized it had come from his throat. A voice emanated from within the vehicle. “Arkway sweepers closing on your position. Status?” He watched Cleaver drift like a lost toy and stepped into the hovtour, averting his gaze from the grisly remains, hand shaky upon controls. “Banks? Report.”
“Its done,” Vies replied, raising his voice to an unfamiliar register.
“Clean?”
“Spotless.”
“Good. Get to base. Got a situation here.”
The line went dead. Vies slammed paneling and hung his head. “Bastards. Treasonous bastards.” He vowed to pay Gyger a visit. They had much to discuss. He punched in coordinates for Wakeford’s house and set off across the wasted shore. The closer he drew to his destination the greater the sea’s violence. The waves devoured the coastline, roaring like mountainous beasts over pier and home. He arrived at the residential segment he had previously observed with the officer’s on the public hovtour and found it a den of chaos. Security drones lay inactive amid flooded streets and looters ran between shattered buildings, some afire, and fought with Arkway patrolmen. A gang of southers slammed metal bars against his hovtour as he idled and gesticulated like mad tribesmen. One of the interlopers scrabbled atop the vehicle and stomped upon the windshield and screamed. Vies accelerated the vehicle and swerved, throwing the man clear and passed beyond the self consumptive town. Upon arriving at Wakeford’s house he found only a collapsed cliff, washed out to sea. The land had been so thoroughly transformed by the maelstrom he thought at first he had made and error. He got out, hair snaking, water to his shins and fell to his knees where the stair he had taken to see his daughter had previously rested. Time’s reckoning ceased until a familiar voice crested his ears.
“Damn shame.”
He turned, face a portrait of rage. “How did you find me?”
Gyger leaned against the hovtour, chewing something. He was decked in a flexile diving suit and a heavy coat. “All our vehicle’s have trackers. Guess you didn’t think of that. Like you didn’t think about vocal profiles for the purpose of verification.” Gyger shrugged and drew a pulsar from his coat. “Don’t matter now.”
“No,” Vies replied blandly. He didn’t bother rising or looking at his executioner. He stared out to sea as Gyger’s blast tore gear and flesh, as he plummeted from the cored out cliffside. He sunk beneath the waves, full in currents grip, as red tendrils spooled out of him. Scrambling at his utility belt he removed his emergency respirator and affixed it to his face. He tried to swim but his left arm wouldn’t move. Nerve damage, he assumed. He no longer had any idea where he was relative to shore, nor how deep he had sunk. All he knew was that ascent was barred to him and he was falling too fast. Black upon black and light a distant thing. From that cavernous darkness, a great blue green eye, and within the semitranslucent maw below it, the slumbering forms of Wakeford and Valencia.