The Abyss Read online

  This was not work that could be done at the bottom of the sea, however. Our radio and television signals never reach that level. Even the sun's light means nothing to them - they take their energy from vents in the Earth's crust, the breakdown of molecules, the temperature differential between layers of seawater. To comprehend us, they had to rise up out of the sea.

  They knew how to do it, of course. After all, they had crossed vast reaches of space to get here, and when their cities under the oceans of Earth reached maturity, they would build new starships and send out more colonies to other deepwater worlds. That day was still far in the future, but in the meantime their original starship still circled the Earth, out beyond the moon and perpetually behind it, where no landbound telescope could see it.

  For the first time since the builders reached Earth, they released certain chemical codes among some of the porters, a related species that they had long ago domesticated. When young ones budded off the altered porters, they looked different. When they grew, they did not take the shape of bottom-crawling haulers or the small, darting messengers that were most commonly used. Instead they grew into gliders, able to hurtle through the sea at speeds we landbound creatures can't even hope for, and then to rise up into the air, taking vast energy from every ambient source - power enough to carry them over our cities and fields, over our sea lanes, through our flightpaths as the builders inside each glider watched us, listened to us, tried to understand what kind of creature we were.

  Our movements were meaningless to them. They could not imagine individual people choosing to live wherever they liked, so they could not understand why we wasted incredible amounts of energy in repetitive, unproductive travel. Even our buildings were incomprehensible. Since they lived in a place without weather, the notion of shelter did not come easily to them. Building a hollow structure just to contain something was strange enough. But when they realized that most buildings were mostly empty most of the time, they could only conclude that we were unimaginably stupid. Everything they built was completely full and completely used; when it was no longer needed, even temporarily, it was broken down and the parts used for something else. Their contempt for us was complete.

  We never saw them watching us. Oh, maybe a glint of sunlight at just the right moment of the day reflected from a smooth, normally transparent surface. Maybe, on a very dark, moonless night, the faint glow from inside a glider was visible as it soared overhead. A light in the sky, moving at unbelievable speed, then suddenly stopping, changing direction with no regard for the laws of motion. The gliders never came to rest on land. And since builders would die in seconds outside the hard-shelled gliders, no alien creature could possibly have emerged. Any such story you heard was - I was going to say it was a lie, but how do I know? It might have been a hallucination. It might have been a dream. It might have been a hope so hoped for that the mind believed it had come true. But it was not true. A builder could no more land and leave her glider than you could shed your skin and walk away. Almost transparent, filled to the shell with the cold spicy liquid of life; they were near us, but we never really saw them.

  When we started sending up satellites, their work in understanding us leaped forward. Out in space, they could finally touch something we had made, reaching inside the metal skin to explore. They found many of our open secrets there. Electronic circuitry. The digital minds of computers.

  And, the most ominous secret of all, nuclear power. To them it was brighter and more terrible than sunlight. Now they knew we were worse than a sewage-spewing race of stupid, wasteful land slugs befouling the edges of their home. We had the power to kill the world. Their world, too - the ocean. We were even more dangerous than they had feared.

  That's why on a certain morning at the peak of hurricane season, a glider fled from the satellite it was studying and flung itself earthward. The glider easily absorbed all the heat of reentry, storing the energy in intricate structures inside itself, which could be used to speed its movement under the sea, or later to help build underwater towers, or to help another glider escape from gravity on a later outbound flight. Almost invisible to the eye, and completely invisible to radar, it glided southeastward over the Gulf of Mexico at four times the speed of sound, crossed the horn of the Yucatan, and then plunged down into the Caribbean. So smoothly did it enter the water that there wasn't even a splash. The ocean simply opened up to receive it.

  Now, in the dark sea, the bright energy stored during reentry gave off a clearly visible glow as the glider skimmed along not far under the surface. Even though it was underwater, technically the glider was not wet. Not a molecule of Caribbean water physically touched the surface of the glider. Instead, it flowed around the shell as if it were repelled by a magnet. There was almost no friction. The builders were better at moving through water than they were at moving through air.

  The glider seemed to be on a simple homebound flight. The oldest and greatest of all the builders' cities was here in the Caribbean, deep in the Cayman Trench, where almost no Earthborn life could penetrate. The glider's course did not vary - it was heading home.

  But all these processes were carried on by the glider, by reflex. Once the homeward course had been set, there was no further intelligent guidance. The builder inside was severely injured.

  The satellite she had been studying was launched into orbit only a few days before. It did what no other satellite had been able to do before: It tracked all submarines in the ocean. The exact location of every sub, in port or on maneuvers, on the surface or in its deepest dive, was detected and reported in coded messages to a series of Earth stations, hour by hour. The existence of such a sub-tracker meant that for the first time in the age of missiles, a first strike could take out land- and sea-based nuclear weapons. The surface of the Earth had just become a far more dangerous place.

  Individual builders are often granted a great deal of intelligence and good judgment, especially if they are required to be separated from their city for long periods, doing perilous, delicate work. So this builder understood that this new satellite was the most dangerous object in space, knew that if it were allowed to remain in working order even for a single hour, it could trigger the final, terrible war. Either the nation that controlled it would use it to launch a preemptive strike, or the nations that didn't have it might find out about it and launch their own nuclear attack, fearing that if they didn't use their weapons, they'd lose them.

  There was no time of safety in which she could return home, transfer the information she had learned, and let the city come to a decision. Therefore the builder made the decision herself. This satellite could not be allowed to continue to function.

  Carefully she isolated her memories behind a shielded portion of the glider. Unfortunately, she could not shield her judgment and intelligence, since they were needed for the job at hand. Using the limbs and tools she had grown out of the belly of the glider, she reached into the shell of the satellite, searching for its burning nuclear heart. Her reflex was to absorb all its energy, but that would have killed her instantly. Instead, she channeled the energy flow into the satellite's most delicate computer parts. Only then did she release the power supply - rapidly, but not so rapidly as to cause a nuclear explosion. There was a burst of heat and light, visible to every tracking station on that side of the Earth. More important to the builder, the power burst included a deadly amount of radiation. The intricate molecules that comprised her intelligence were scrambled beyond repair. Except for her carefully shielded memories, she was intellectually dead.

  That's why the glider's homeward course was so direct. Porters had intelligence comparable to that of a dog. Enough to carry out simple tasks - fetch, stay, go home - but not enough to do any complex maneuvering. How could the builder foresee that there would be another encounter with a human artifact on the way home? It would require only a fraction of the intelligence and judgment that she had used to make her decision about the satellite, but she lacked even that fraction, and it was c
ompletely beyond the feeble intellect of the porter. So even as surface tracking stations were trying to make sense of the burst of light and heat that had just come from a recently launched spy satellite, another encounter between human and builder, this time even more direct and fatal, was about to take place.

  On that day, it happened that Hurricane Frederick was moving across the Caribbean out of the east-southeast, due to pass over that region of the sea within twenty-four hours.

  Bud Brigman and his crew were twenty-two miles away, conducting the third shift of the first deep-sea trials with Deepcore, the underwater drilling platform that was the culmination of Lindsey's life work.

  Lindsey Brigman herself was in Houston, doing the landside work and itching to get back out under the water.

  Hiram Coffey was in Houston with three SEALS from his twelve-man team, preparing to go in to a certain country in the Caribbean to destroy, with surgical precision, the headquarters of a leftist guerrilla operation that posed a threat to the security interests of the United States, as defined by Coffey's superior officers.

  Within an hour of the moment the glider entered the waters of the Caribbean, all would be diverted from the work they had planned to do.

  What if they hadn't been there? What if Lindsey hadn't brought Deepcore to readiness so far ahead of schedule? What if Coffey had flown out to begin his mission the night before, breaking off radio contact so he couldn't be reassigned? What if Bud and his crew had been assigned to one of the alternate drilling sites, farther north in the Caribbean? What if Hurricane Frederick had taken the more northward course originally predicted for it, so it would dump on Cuba instead of thrashing along the north coast of Jamaica? Maybe even with changed circumstances things would have worked out to the same result, except that it wouldn't be me telling you about it.

  But if things had worked out wrong, there wouldn't have been anybody much to tell it to.

  Aaron Barnes was on duty with the sonar system of the USS Montana, an Ohio-class SSBN ballistic missile submarine on its way back home after a seventy-day mission. When they were running underwater, which was most of the time, Barnes was the sub's eyes and ears. He took the job seriously. He never let his concentration lapse. Because he knew that if he made one mistake, they were all blind and deaf in the belly of the sea.

  So when the glider, still far off, began to emit a thrumming noise as it moved through the water, it was less than a second before Barnes noticed it, and only a few seconds more before both Barnes and the sonar computer concluded, from the sound-source's course and speed, that it wasn't a fish.

  Within moments the whole crew was at battle stations; Captain Kretschmer and the Exec were both in the attack center, and Barnes was the most important man on the Montana. He had to identify the contact - the whatever-it-was that he was tracking - and he had to do it before it could pose a danger to the ship. There weren't all that many countries in the world that even owned submarines, and none of them were neutral. Not at that speed, not at that depth, not at this time, not in these waters.

  Wait a minute. How fast is it? Barnes checked again. No lie. "Sixty knots," he whispered.

  "Sixty knots?" said Captain Kretschmer. His voice was calm enough - he simply didn't believe the information. "No way, Barnes. The Reds don't have anything that fast."

  "Checked it twice, skipper," Barnes told him. "It's a real unique signature. No cavitation, no reactor noise. Doesn't even sound like screws." In fact, it sounded like a fish with an incredibly loud heartbeat. But sixty knots? Wasn't a fish in the sea could move that fast even if it was pissing pure rocket fuel. Moving that fast, the contact should be screaming with the sound of overloaded engines. The screw or turbine or rocket or whatever was making it go that fast should be churning up the water louder than a thousand kids splashing in a swimming pool. Barnes put the signal onto a speaker so everybody could hear it. Let Captain Kretschmer make sense of it, if he could.

  He couldn't. Kretschmer had never heard anything like this before. From the moment Barnes had reported the contact, he knew it was Russian. This close to Cuba it could only be theirs or ours. And if it was ours, it wouldn't sound like this. But then, neither would a Russian Alfa-class fast-attack sub.

  Yet the electronic position board made it plain to Kretschmer that whatever it was, it was heading on a course that would put it in spitting distance in less than a minute. There weren't many options. Kretschmer ran through them in a moment: We can't possibly outrun something that fast. And it isn't like we've got a lot of maneuvering room. We've got the walls of the Cayman Trench like a canyon on both sides of us. The only choices are up or down. Go up, and we're sitting on top of the water like sharkbait - if the contact's an enemy sub, we're dead meat up there.

  What Kretschmer couldn't forget, not for a moment, was that he had a full carton of unfiltered longs on board - a full load of nuclear missiles. The greatest prize any Russian ship could hope for was a boomer like his, right on the surface, ready to pluck out of the water and take home to Archangelsk for study. How did he know there wasn't a Soviet group lurking in the shadow of Cuba right now, waiting for him to show himself? The worst outcome - worse than dying, worse than losing his ship - was to let the other side get its hands on a single warhead, or the code books, or the electronics.

  So Kretschmer couldn't surface to avoid the contact, couldn't turn to left or right, and there was only so far he could go downward. Maximum operating depth for his sub was officially a thousand feet down, though he knew others of its class had safely gone at least half again that depth. Go under that and you didn't necessarily reach crush depth right away, but there wasn't much leeway. He'd read the reports about that Russian Golf-class sub that went down in the Pacific about seven hundred miles west of Hawaii. When she went into an uncontrolled dive, her crew found out what her crush depth was. The sea blew in at the stern like a jackhammer into an anthill. When the Hughes Glomar Explorer raised a part of her, U.S. intelligence found out something about sudden violation of hull integrity. Two-thirds of the bulkheads were crushed into the first forty feet of the boat. Six-foot bunks were compressed to a foot and a half. Between the pressure and the turbulence, the bodies were broken up like egg yolks in a Cuisinart. He couldn't go very far down, no sir.

  The noise kept thrumming. If it was false sonar, shouldn't it have faded by now?

  "What the hell is it?" said Kretschmer.

  "I'll tell you what it's not," said the Exec. "It's not one of ours."

  Nor did he dare to call for help, giving away his position. There was still a chance that the contact didn't know he was there. There was even a chance that the contact didn't exist at all - after all, if the sonar was pegging it at sixty knots, which was ludicrous, it might be malfunctioning to such a degree that it was inventing the contact out of nothing. He could imagine the review board looking at his report. Captain Kretschmer broke radio silence because of a sonar report of an object traveling at sixty knots. That was the sort of nonsense that could end a man's career.

  So what choice did that leave him? Don't pick a fight, but don't run, either. Not yet. Hold tight. Maybe by not running he could provoke the other guy - if he existed - into changing course, showing something of what his strange ship was capable of. If there really was a craft that could go sixty knots under water, then he might as well find out as much about it as he could. The Navy needed to know about this thing. If it existed.

  Barnes didn't even try to guess what was going through the captain's mind. Deciding what to do - that was Captain Kretschmer's business. Making sure he was getting a true reading from the sonar was enough to keep Barnes busy. He wasn't about to let nothing break his concentration. Even the fact that if the Russians could actually build something that could act like this thing on his computer screen, it could sure as hell blow them out of the water, no, he didn't let that idea keep him from concentrating perfectly and completely on his work.

  The moment the contact changed heading, Barnes was on top of it. Sp
eak calmly. Convey the information. Do not ever sound upset. "Sir. Contact changing heading to two-one-six, diving. Speed eighty knots!" He wasn't sure they'd understand him. Eight knots was believable - that's what they'd hear. So he said it again: "Eighty knots!"

  The captain moved away. The Exec walked along behind him, looking at Barnes's screen, as if he thought he could see something Barnes and the captain had both missed.

  "Eighty knots," said the Exec. He didn't believe it. Saw it with his own eyes, but didn't believe.

  Hell, neither do I, thought Barnes. But either it's true, or we're blind down here.

  Kretschmer stopped at the chart table. The navigator came over, reporting their own current position. "Still diving. Depth nine hundred feet. Port clearance to cliff wall, one hundred fifty feet."

  Kretschmer sketched out the Montana's present depth, the contact's current angle of approach. Was the contact trying for a collision or not? It was hard to tell. It looked like he was going to skim just over the Montana. If the contact wasn't threatening a collision, then maybe it wasn't hostile, and if it wasn't hostile, maybe they should get close enough to pick up more data when it passed - enough to help the Navy figure out what in hell it was.

  "It's getting tight in here," the Exec warned. That was his job. To warn the captain that maybe they shouldn't try any kind of maneuvers down here so close to the wall of the Cayman Trench. But Kretschmer knew there was still plenty of room. The contact might be going fast, but the Montana wasn't. Besides, it was a matter of pride. Even though standing orders said that when a boomer had a near encounter its duty was to avoid being spotted, the great powers' undersea boats played a constant game of nuclear tag with friends and enemies alike, getting as close as they could before running away. It was like counting coups among the plains Indians - tagging up on an enemy who hasn't spotted you counts as victory.