Jaunt (43 page)

“Hey, Gilmour,” McKean said, “I’ve found us an entrance, a mousehole.”

Gilmour located McKean with his lidar and swam forward. “Are you serious?”

McKean craned his neck back and waved his arm, keeping the other one attached to the metal hull. “Come take a look.”

Gilmour took a few moments to swim across the expanse, finally meeting the metal wall at McKean’s right flank, having pulled himself along the outcroppings as well. While Gilmour approached, McKean busied himself with visually exploring the mousehole, his helmet lamp illuminating the tiny entrance. While the object itself was thoroughly crushed beyond retrieval, the mousehole had been spared, fortunate enough to be located in a pocket where the ridge had not collapsed to the trench floor. An even more fortunate circumstance was that this tunnel allowed access for the two agents, and perhaps a sanctuary if the
Strela
s started blasting all around. Gilmour just hoped the strange, highdensity properties of the jewels were shared by this lidar-bending metal. He’d hate to find out the hard way that de Lis was wrong, after all.

“How far does it go?” Gilmour asked, now within arm’s reach of the mousehole.

“Let’s see.” McKean toggled his interface, reactivating his lidar. Placing his left arm inside, McKean measured the tunnel, periodically reading off the distance numerals from his HUD. After a moment, he extracted himself and turned to face his partner. “If lidar is to be believed, at least twenty meters, maybe more. Signal didn’t bounce back for quite a while. I’d say we’ve got ourselves a nice, big wreck here.”

Gilmour nodded. “Care to take a dig around?”

“You’d better believe it.”

With that, McKean placed his right gauntlet inside and found a good outcropping to wrap his fingers around, then pulled himself inside the mousehole, his left gauntlet pushing his mass forward. Once McKean’s boots had cleared the threshold, Gilmour followed, watching his partner move ahead by the waning flare light.

After a few moments of uncertainty, both men disappeared inside the mousehole and headed forward into the unknown, their only assurance being that this would be the most challenging retrieval site of their lives, with the stakes of human freedom riding on their actions, five kilometers below the rest of civilization.

For the first time in two centuries, life once more echoed throughout the hull of the sleeping giant. Now, after a wait of so many decades, the great, ancient craft had been recovered, and corporeal beings again inhabited its confines. So long, the wait had been interminable....

Pulling themselves along centimeter by centimeter, Gilmour’s and McKean’s hazard suits clanged against the crushed metal tube, the watery medium in which they floated transmitting the clamor quite well. Periodic pauses to look ahead with the assistance of their helmet lamps seemed to make the mousehole stretch on for kilometers; the agents knew the cumbersome haz suits and the water pressure hindered their advance, bringing their fatigue levels and concentration to lower thresholds, forcing the ever-niggling question, “How much farther?”

After bouncing around the interior and subtly losing his bearings one too many times, McKean halted and signaled to Gilmour to let up. “I—I gotta stop.”

Gilmour nodded, allowing his body to come to rest against the tube. Consulting his interface, he said, “We’ve come fifteen...sixteen meters, the end should be right there. Looking though,” he took a deep breath, “I can’t see any entrance into this craft. Are you sure you didn’t get another lidar echo?”

“Why the hell would I say otherwise? If I thought it was a lidar bounce, I sure woulda said so!”

“I’m not accusing you, Neil!” Gilmour lifted his hand to massage his strained eyes, but the gauntlet ricocheted off his faceplate. “Shit...can’t even do that....”

McKean rested his head against the back of his helmet, then turned to Gilmour behind him. “James, is it just me, or...or are we a bit testy?”

Gilmour shook his head. “No, you’re right. Stress, or something. Having trouble thinking straight. Mind’s clouded.”

“Depth?”

“I wouldn’t think so. De Lis gave us plenty of nitrogen anti-bubbly to keep that from happening.” He gestured his hand around. “Maybe this thing’s affectin’ our judgment, bending our thoughts.”

“How could it do that? It’s just a hunk of corroded metal.”

“This hunk of metal’s from somewhere else. Ghosts...demons...if something died in here, could be some kind of haunted structure.”

McKean let out a half-laugh, half-sigh. “Don’t start that. We ain’t got time for campfire tales.”

“Sorry, just a theory. How’re you doing?”

McKean glanced around and blinked his eyes several times, readjusting them.

“Better. Just needed a breather.”

The two picked themselves up and began the crawl again, focusing on getting to the end of the tunnel before it ended them. They traversed several more meters of nondescript tunnel sans complaint, not pausing to think about their monotonous and claustrophobic circumstances.

Making his way past the twenty-meter mark, McKean double-checked his HUD lidar target, his eyes glancing at the sudden shift in return signals. The holographic display, which had exhibited nothing but an indistinct wall of matter all the way there, now revealed a small, central circle of absorbed laser light in the midst of that wall; there was something up there, and it was close.

“Gilmour, I’m getting something on lidar, six meters straight ahead.” Angling his helmet so that his lampbeam shown on that spot, McKean swam forward, galvanized by this renewed sense of purpose.

A minute elapsed before the agents were within an arm’s distance of the mousehole’s end. Twin lampbeams now highlighted it, giving the agents’ eyes the first real glimpse of the object, which faintly resembled a hatch, at least in the respect that it was circular, with a crystalline, twenty-centimeter-diameter sphere embedded within the metallic structure. A kaleidoscope of color now danced around the tunnel as they drew nearer, thanks to the queer refraction of the lamp light through the glass sphere. The two agents’ highly distorted and mocked forms were also colored in the spherical mirror, adding surreality and a somewhat comical nature to the already incredible adventure of finding this extraterrestrial craft buried below the sea.

McKean laid his gauntlets on the hatch, fingers extended, eagerly searching the metallic structure for a lock, or any other mechanism that could allow them access inside. Gilmour swam up alongside his partner and began his own study of the hatch, his gauntlets focused on the spectrum-bending glass sphere. He tapped it several times, each one sounding as if he had set off a cataclysm of crashing crystal shards. The echoes were hauntingly beautiful, astonishing and peaceful all at once. If it wasn’t for the duty they had to perform, he’d be just as content sitting down and playing this makeshift instrument all day.

“I don’t see any handle or locking mechanism,” McKean said.

“This is the handle,” Gilmour determined, then glanced at McKean. “I think.”

“You’ve been playing with it the last few minutes, I should hope you’ve some certainty of this.”

Gilmour furrowed his brow in agreement. “Let me think.” He tapped with his index finger once more, letting loose more crystalline emanations into the water. “All right, not touch activated, at least not this sensitively.”

“Should we break it?”

“That seems kind of foolish. You couldn’t use it again.”

“Well...” McKean sighed, pausing to think himself. “Looks kind of difficult to rotate like a doorknob. Can’t see pulling it out...well, why not
push
it in?”

Gilmour shrugged, then put both of his gauntlets over the sphere, eclipsing the shower of brilliant color. He voice-activated the magnetic locks on his haz suit’s boot heels, anchoring himself into the metal tube in the event a vacuum on the other side would entice the ocean water to push him through. “Neil, anchor yourself, too.”

McKean followed Gilmour’s lead, and both men were now prepared for the worst. The only question was, were they prepared for the alien?

Gilmour put all of his mass behind his gauntlets, and pressing mightily, pushed the glass sphere forward until it had all but pierced the metal hatch in which it was embedded. A massive reverberation of the metal structure sent a great creech through their haz suits, rattling their soft tissues. Both men gritted their teeth as Gilmour found himself thrust forward by the action of the hatch, which seemed to be taking him with it. Before him, he could see globules of seawater burble out of the mousehole and travel up his arms and out the circular hole, following in the now-detached hatch’s wake.

Taken along, Gilmour passed beyond a series of concentric rings of metal, apparently the craft’s inner complex of bulkheads. Clearing a half meter, the hatch pulled away from him and drifted out into a dark beyond, the glass sphere growing fainter as it sped into the distance. Underneath him, he felt the magnetic locks disengage, allowing him freedom to drift sideways into the empty compartment. Globules of water continued to trickle off his haz suit, lending Gilmour the first clue that he was no longer in a watery medium, but an atmosphere. Somehow, it seemed impossible; how could all that pressure be held in check by simple air? He twisted himself around to see McKean trailing behind, water bubbles in his wake, giving himself a view of the whole bizarre process he had just undergone.

Beneath them, the shimmering ocean water roiled softly in the open hatch before subsiding, as if they had just stepped out of a pool and were now flying above it. The curious sensation of floating soon overtook them both, but this was not the water buoyancy they had grown accustomed to, this was microgravity—zero G—for lack of a better metaphor. Gilmour caught McKean’s puzzled visage in his lamplight, a face Gilmour was quick to admit he probably wore as well. This was like orbiting in space, but they were nearly five clicks under the ocean...what the hell was going on?

Forgetting for a moment that he was without weight, and drifting aimlessly into a dark abyss, Gilmour raised his left arm and activated his lidar, then swept the interior of the craft for as far as the lidar could go. Glancing up into his faceplate, he readjusted his eyes to the lidar’s HUD target, reading the shifting yellow and red patterns the laser guidance was providing. As before in the trench, Gilmour’s lidar was inconclusive, leading him to believe that again the craft was absorbing the lidar signal, for whatever reason.

A moment later, McKean matched Gilmour’s inertia, sidling up next to him, his ghostly lamplit helmet and face providing Gilmour the only object to focus on. “I’m receiving nothing on lidar. How about you?”

Gilmour shook his head. “Nothing but this absorption pattern, like outside. Not even any spectrum refraction to give me an idea of distance.”

“Well,” McKean sighed, “judging by the Doppler effect on my lidar scan, I think our inertia is slowing down. There must be an atmosphere in here causing drag.”

“I can’t imagine after all these centuries this place still being airtight.” He paused for a moment, pondering the situation, and how to best utilize the potential boon of microgravity. “The hydrazine nozzles will give us some maneuvering capability, if only for a while.” Gilmour craned his neck around, fruitlessly searching their pitch black surroundings for a hint of what this place truly was. “Now if we only knew where we were headed....”

McKean toggled his holographic interface, accessing the engine sled’s systems. “I’m setting mine for the lowest possible acceleration...shouldn’t take much to give us a boost.”

“Agreed.” Gilmour did the same on his interface, hoping the infinite blackness wouldn’t stretch their allotted fuel beyond the sixty-seven minute limit imposed by de Lis’

restrictions.

With two short bursts of hydrazine, Gilmour and McKean were propelled forward into the ink, accelerating to a velocity of approximately two-and-a-quarter meters per second, enough to overpower the vague atmospheric drag and still maintain a comfortable speed at which to take measurements of the craft’s interior.

Speeding across the vastness of the craft for incalculable moments, the two agents encountered nothing, scanned nothing, and generally grew bored with the lack of
anything
in their path, with the exception of the ceaseless, omnipresent black.

“No temperature variations, of small or large degree, no electromagnetic activity, no gravimetric variations beyond nominal,” McKean moaned, shaking his head. “As of this minute, I’m not even confident that we’re even here!”

“This has to lead somewhere....” Gilmour whispered, refusing to quit searching after coming this far, through this long journey. “There has to be some reason the Confederation wants to mine this trench, wants to possess this craft....”

“I sure as hell hope this isn’t some intergalactic joke on us. I’m gonna be pissed if these aliens of yours are watching a holograph of us stumbling around in the dark.”

“I’m sure the—” Gilmour’s voice broke, his eyes catching a glint of light ahead of them.

McKean turned towards the now-silent Gilmour. “What?”

Gilmour pointed his finger straight ahead. Looking methodically, he yelled, “There!

Check your HUD again! I’ll get lidar!”

Still puzzled, McKean did as commanded and toggled the controls on his interface, activating the various sensors arrayed on his left forearm. While McKean busied himself with the other scans, Gilmour swept his lidar cannon in the direction of the flash, which still hadn’t appeared to his eyes a second time. On his HUD’s lidar target appeared another circular pattern, matching exactly the one from the hatch the pair had used to enter. Swinging his helmet lamp again, Gilmour recreated the glint of light, which shone with the same kaleidoscopic colors as the glass sphere.