Jaunt (42 page)

In an instant, one word popped into his mind. “
Lights
!!!”

A spectrum of color exploded into Gilmour’s eyes, his gauntlets rushing to cover up his sensitive photoreceptors. Minutes passed before he could catch a decent breath, and his heart could slow down to properly function. In those intervening moments, though, a hundred different thoughts raced about his mind, each giving him pause.
Had hesucceeded? Had he just committed himself to death? Was this all folly?

Grasping for his left arm through the density of this medium in which he was suspended, he found his holographic interface and tapped it hard. On command, the Heads Up Display came to life centimeters from his eyes, giving him access to every system and the ability to ascertain their functionality.

“Where am I?” he commanded the vocal response computer.

Responding swiftly, the HUD brought up a window to the lower left: “45.79N, 153.05E, -4.838 KMs.”

Remembering back to his brief, Roget’s creation had taken him to precisely where he had meant to go: nearly five kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Gilmour was officially in the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, lord help him. The realization itself was the most bizarre part; floating in the second deepest waters in the world was as normal down here as it was at sea level.

Swiveling his head around, he lit the ocean water out to a distance of nearly five meters, enough to see what should have been the wreckage site. Particles of floating detritus and opaque, turquoise water were all that greeted him, however.

Toggling a green button on his interface, he activated his voxlink and shouted,

“McKean, can you hear me?!” Static ate at his ears in response, raising his defenses.

“Increase intensity ten percent, remodulate frequency one hundred megahertz.”

On his HUD, a holograph of the vox frequency appeared, the red peaks and valleys of the heightened and distorted signal widening in response to Gilmour’s request.

“McKean!” Gilmour repeated, all but pleading with his partner. “McKean!”

Again more static, but a faint “Gil—r...I...m...si...m...ters...pos...tion....” crept through the speakers.

Gilmour squinted, concentrating on the intermittent voice. “McKean, repeat, please!”

“Gil—r...I...m...si...m...ters...pos...tion....”

Raising the interface on his left arm, Gilmour accessed a secondary window, bringing up a sequence of yellow buttons, all labeled under the text “LIDAR GUIDED

LOCATER.”
 
s right index finger tapped the left-most button, creating a gold circle in the center of his HUD, along with a series of coordinate and distance markers. He then aimed his left arm forward, painting every atom of matter with guided laser pulses from his lidar cannon. Gilmour swept a five-meter radius, overturning nothing but assorted deep sea debris and the occasional eddy coursing through the water.

Having swept the water to his front and flanks, Gilmour slowly rotated his body around, once more combing the water with lidar. Now several minutes into wasting his time, he increased the lidar locating distance and yelled, “McKean! Can you hear me? Can you get a fix on my lidar?”

A distinct “ping” a few seconds later soon caught his attention. Swinging his right arm over to the interface, he ceased the lidar scan and commanded the computer to home in on the source and nature of the clearly artificial noise.

Gilmour’s HUD quickly split the signal noise into its components, revealing its source: a second lidar pulse, and from its frequency and distance, emanating from McKean. Initiating his lidar a second time, Gilmour painted the signal with his own pulse and finally gained a visual confirmation of a free-floating figure, six meters to his lower port flank.

Extending his arms forward, Gilmour dove ahead, pushing his legs up behind him. He then swept his arms against his torso ring, commanding the voice response computer to activate the supercavitating engine sled for a short, one-point-six-second burst. At once, a giant plume of carbon dioxide gas shot from the outtake barrel, forming a bubble over Gilmour’s haz suit helmet. Within a millisecond, the hydrazine fuel pushed him forward, and an instant later, at a speed of several meters per second, McKean materialized in front of Gilmour before he knew it.

The immediate drag created from the popping carbon dioxide bubble stopped Gilmour in his own trail, causing a cluster of bubbles to push by him in a sudden gust.

McKean reached out his right gauntlet and seized Gilmour’s torso ring, keeping the wayward agent from being carried off. Pulling him back, McKean’s helmet lamp found Gilmour’s faceplate, allowing him to see Gilmour’s green-tinged and blurry face. “You always did know how to make an introduction, didn’t you?” McKean said over his voxlink.

Gilmour nodded his head in response. “Watch it when you activate the sled, Neil. I almost knocked myself out by hitting my faceplate.”

“Understood. Say, any idea where this wreckage is at? I did a few lidar sweeps before I contacted you, but couldn’t find anything in this damned murk.”

“Good question.” Gilmour glanced at his own HUD’s lidar readings, which was drawing a blank on the site as well. “I assumed Dark Horse had been fairly accurate with his coordinates, but maybe we drifted upwards when we jaunted.”

“The only way to be sure is to keep going towards where the floor should be.”

“Exactly. Program your sled for a maximum burst of two seconds, and we’ll take this a few meters at a time. It might be slower this way, but I don’t want to end up as sludge on the bottom of the ocean floor.”

“Agreed.”

“Ready?” Gilmour asked.

McKean gave him a thumbs up.

The two agents individually commanded their voice response computers for the burst, positioned their hazard suits, and then shot off into the depths with a flurry, leaving nothing but a storm of white, gaseous spheres in their wake.

The first dive ended almost before it began. Checking the individual lidar at the end of their seven meter launch, the agents found nothing but turquoise water and ocean debris. Still no trench floor.

Without waiting for acknowledgement from McKean, Gilmour ordered, “Let’s go for another two seconds.”

The pair repeated the supercavitating burst, lurching forward with superhuman speed. For a split-second, brackish water buffeted the agents’ faceplates, the collective shine of the helmet lamps blinding their eyes and dulling their senses. The absolute hyperrealism of the burst made them slow to the transformation of the turquoise water to a slight ochre tint, then a more opaque sand.

In a flash, the supercavitating carbon dioxide bubble exploded, ending the burst, but not before the agents’ momentum sent them flying helmet first towards a vast expanse of seafloor sediment. Unable to stop soon enough, Gilmour’s and McKean’s limbs flailed as they crashed and tumbled into the trench floor, carving out craters large enough to swallow objects twice their size. Flinging silt and fine pebbles into the already thick ocean water, the pair finally came to rest, but not before their inertia slowed and gravity took over, gradually ensnaring them in a tract of sinking sediment, their heavy hazard suits unwittingly adding to the trap. The sediment quickly began to resettle over them, threatening to not only swallow them whole but bury them as well.

Four hands groped at the devouring sediment voraciously, hurriedly trying to find something to anchor themselves on to avoid sinking into the dozen-meter deep trench floor. Seconds became minutes, before finally the struggling hands descended until only fingertips, then burbling mounds of silt and pebbles, remained. The seafloor soon reclaimed the twin craters, carefully recompositing the vital silt matter abruptly blown into the surrounding water.

A moment later, a single plume of gas ascended from one of the former craters, loosening the sediment floor’s grip. Silence, then a second plume escaped, followed by tertiary gas bubbles, strangely lit from below. The darkened trench then exploded in a cascade of light as two gas spheres burst out of the seafloor, launched two meters into the ocean water, and then just as unexpectedly popped, revealing the haz suits of Gilmour and McKean, helmet lamps at full illumination.

Both agents cut through the water, hydrazine nozzles at full, before switching the sled engines off, allowing their ascending inertia to propel them forward. The two hazsuited agents drifted apart until Gilmour regained his wits and extended his arms to grapple McKean, pulling him back.

McKean steadied himself and quipped, “You were saying?”

Gilmour rolled his eyes. “Where are we now?”

“Nine meters from our last position,” McKean reported, eyeing his HUD. Raising his upper body, he angled his head around his helmet in an attempt to pick out landmarks with his lamp illumination. He studied the disturbed water for several seconds, scanning beyond the detritus and raised sediment.

Both men now swept the area with their helmet lamps, creating beacons of light that penetrated the ocean water like miniature lighthouses.

“Checking lidar,” Gilmour announced, his finger tapping his holographic interface. The lidar targeting circle flashed, painting the environment. Extending the search farther, a shield or wall of material blanketed the target, completely swamping Gilmour’s search, as if the lidar itself had been bounced back to its source. Looking up from the target, he widened his eyes in disbelief at the visually indistinct area of water. “What the hell....”

McKean turned to Gilmour. “What?”

Gilmour remained mute before saying, “McKean, double-check my scans. Center on four-five-point-seven-nine north by one-five-three-point-oh-five east, extend to elevenpoint-two meters.”

McKean nodded his head and performed the search on his own lidar, taking time to center on the precise target. Sure enough, on McKean’s HUD, the wall of matter blocked his lidar as well. “Confirmed. There’s something reflecting my lidar signal, some type of mirroring. What do you make of it?”

“Haven’t an idea. Let’s get a closer look the old-fashioned way. Keep the sleds out of it for now.”

The agents swam forward, methodically traversing the distance until their individual lidar guidance systems indicated they were within seven meters. Ahead, the twin helmet lamps slowly peeled away the layers of debris and sediment, soon transforming the ocean water from a ubiquitous turquoise to pale sand. Growing closer, waves of dull surface reflection danced in the high-beam lamps, adding to the mystery of the shield, until finally Gilmour and McKean drew to within four meters of the lidar mirror and paused their advance to ascertain just what exactly was in front of them.

“We should be able to discern terrain from here,” Gilmour said, his eyes darting from his lidar target to the visual object and back again. “Lidar should pick out soil composition, sedimentary differences.”

“I’m not seeing anything with my eyes, either. It’s as if I’m missing my hand passing right in front of my face.”

Gilmour nodded. Switching his lidar off, he reached around with his left gauntlet and pulled a cylinder from the magnetic ring on his torso. Holding the cylinder in front of his faceplate, Gilmour twisted it twice and aimed it towards an area of the trench beyond their vision, still clouded in darkness. He flicked his thumb up, toggling a button on the side of the cylinder, and then released it. A flash sizzled from its tail end and the cylinder took off through the water at several knots, fast enough to spin away from the agents and disappear into the darkness, leaving only a small, white wake.

Counting down, Gilmour watched in earnest while the wake faded. After a moment, an audible click could be heard through their voxlinks, followed by a larger boom. Out of the darkness erupted a white star, which grew larger until a disk shone like a waterborne supernova, spreading orange illumination and scattering shadows for scores of meters. Within seconds the trenchscape opened to the light of the sun, and before the two agents appeared the sight which brought the face of war to the world once again: a cavernous, collapsed ridge, one of at least a string, towering over them from the right, nearly half-akilometer in height, with a diagonal overhang reaching out some three meters above the agents. Underneath that great earthly mass was a wall of sheer metallic material buckled, crushed and cracked after two centuries of wait, running far beyond the flare’s reach like some ancient sedimentary strata.

Gilmour and McKean marveled at the immensity of the metallic debris, which, despite the weight of the ridge atop it, still managed to hold up an impressive three meters of height. As the flare slowly lost its intensity over the next few minutes, their helmet lamps threw white circles of illumination against the collapsed ridge overhang and the adjacent crushed metal, highlighting the absolute, otherworldly experience.

McKean swam the interval and extended his fingers, which brushed the twisted corpse, casting an exaggerated shadow along the watery hide. Running his fingers along the wall, he felt the rippled metal reverberate throughout the carapace, his mind failing to fathom the extreme forces required to bring down such a behemoth.

Meanwhile, Gilmour took precise lidar measurements of the collapsed ridge above them and beyond, allowing the flare light to aid his search for potential
Strela
warhead mines; none of his sensors had, so far, detected any electromagnetic pulses or gravimetric ripples thought to be caused by an approaching warhead.

McKean propelled himself along by grasping outcroppings of material, swiftly exploring the hulk much faster than by swimming at its side. Running his eyes in tandem with his gauntlets, he found dozens of pancaked layers, the lines varying in width and duration. Proceeding another ten meters, McKean discovered a mostly preserved section of the metallic hull, saved by a pronounced ridge crevasse. A hole breached the metal layers, and was large enough—just under a meter in diameter—for one of them to crawl through without too much difficulty. Peering inside, cracks along the hull of the metal permitted seams of orange flare light to flow inside for the time being, but not for much longer. If they were going to discover who or what had crashed here, and why, the time to do it was now.