The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Cyclopterus PETER WATTS

Galik sneaks in through blue-green twilight a hundred meters down, where it’s calm. Overhead, lost in the murk, the mixing zone churns beneath the surface; the surface churns beneath the sky; immortal Nāmaka churns between, in ascension once more after four weeks slumming it up north as a Category 3.

A dim shape looms in the sub’s headlights: Sylvia Earle, an inflatable bladder four stories high, freshly relocated from its usual station over the White Shark Cafe. The sub sniffs out the dorsal docking hatch and locks on. Galik grunts a farewell to his pilot and drops into a cramped decompression chamber outfitted with a half-dozen molded seats and a second hatch—sealed—to complement the one he came in through. His ride disengages with a clank and slips back the way it came.

They let him out when the gauge reads nine atmospheres. A sullen tech in a blue coverall leads him down through a maze of pipes and ladders and bulkheads festooned with shark posters. She counters Galik’s small talk with grunts and monosyllables, abandons him in a dimly lit sub bay where every bulkhead wriggles with blue wavelight. A fat tadpole-shaped cubmarine wallows in the moon pool at its center, hatch agape at the end of a folding catwalk. Its flanks bristle with gifts for the seabed: magnetometers and CTD sensors, SIDs, current meters and cytometers. Other things even an oceanographer wouldn’t recognize. A name is stencilled onto the hull, just to the left of No Step: RSV Cyclopterus.

It can’t go as far or as fast as the craft that brought him here. But it can go way, way deeper.

The pilot’s fixated on the predive checklist as Galik climbs down into the cockpit and dogs the hatch. Galik breathes in sweat and monomers and machine oil, settles into the shotgun seat. “I’m Alistor.”

“Uh-huh.” Her head dips in perfunctory acknowledgment: a jaw-length curtain of dark ringlets, a cheekbone and profile behind. Moonpool light filters in through a smattering of high-pressure viewports arrayed like spider eyes around the front of the cockpit, paints her in faint watercolor. Her eyes never leave the board. “Buckle up.”

He does. Mechanical guts gurgle and belch. The lights past the viewports ascend and fade.

Cyclopterus drops into the void.

Galik settles back in his seat. “How long to the bottom?”

“Forty minutes. Forty-five.”

“Nice to be able to measure things in minutes again. Took me a day and a half to get here from Corvallis, and that was at forty knots.”

The pilot taps a flickering readout until it steadies.

“Kinda miss the old days, you know? When you could just fly out, drop down. No giant-ass superstorms getting in the way.”

She reaches back and grabs the pilot’s VR headset from its hook. Puts it on, slides the visor over her eyes.

Galik sighs.

VR’s not much use this high off the seabed; the 2D display spread across the dashboard is more than sufficient when there’s nothing but empty sea for a thousand meters in any direction. But for want of anything else to do, Galik grabs his own headset and boots it up. He finds himself suspended in a sparse void sprinkled with occasional readouts and scale bars. Close below, a faint translucent membrane spreads out across the universe at 1,300 meters. Four thousand meters below that, the ocean floor bounces back solid corduroy.

“That’s strange,” the pilot murmurs.

Galik raises his visor. “What?”

Under hers, the pilot’s lips are pursed. “Pycnocline’s way down at thirteen hundred. Never seen it so dee—” She catches herself consorting with the enemy, falls silent.

Galik rolls his eyes and weighs his options. Goes for it.

“You be breaking any protocols to at least tell me your name?”

Her hooded face turns toward him for a moment. “Koa Moreno.”

“Pleased to meet you, Koa. How did I manage to piss you off in the past five minutes?”

“You didn’t. We just—don’t do small talk down here.”

“Ah.” He nods, though she can’t see it. “Parties on the Sylvia Earle must be a hoot.”

“Try spending a few months breathing recycled farts and belches from the same ten people. You’ll reset your boundaries soon enough.”

“It’s more than that.”

Something changes in her posture, some subtle slumping of the shoulders that says Fine, asshole, have it your way. She ups her visor up and turns to face him.

“This could be the last one. And you’re going to fuck it up like everything else.”

“Me?”

“Nautilus.”

“What makes you think—”

“After you strip-mined every last park and refuge and vacant lot on land, you moved offshore. We’ve been watching it happen, Alistor. I was there when Lizard Island went down. Clipperton’s one of the last places the ISA didn’t cave on. But it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Seabed’s just another resource to tear up while we wait for the ceiling to crash in.”

Galik feels his face pulling into a tight little smile. “Well. I guess I asked.”

She turns her attention to the dashboard.

“This is just a preliminary survey,” he tries. “Might not come to anything.”

“Give me a break. The whole zone’s rotten with polymetallics and you know it.” She shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know why you’re even going through the motions. Why not just buy yourself a rubber stamp and go straight to the strip-mining?”

Galik takes a careful breath, keeps his voice calm and friendly. “Good question. Why haven’t we?”

She glares at him.

He holds up his hands, palms out. “I’m serious. The mineralogical data’s been on the books for twenty years, you said as much yourself. If they just wanted to strip-mine Clipperton, why didn’t they do it years ago?”

Moreno doesn’t answer for a moment.

“It’s a deep dig,” she says at last. “Maybe you went after the low-hanging fruit first. Maybe you just didn’t notice it until now.”

“Maybe they tried,” Galik suggests, “and the ISA wouldn’t give them their rubber stamp.”

“You keep saying they. Like you’re not one of them.”

“Wasn’t Nautilus went after the permit. Wasn’t Nautilus got turned down.”

“Who, then?”

“PolyCon. They went after Clarion Clipperton on five separate occasions. ISA wouldn’t budge. Heritage site, they said. Unparalleled deepwater biodiversity. Unique conservation value.”

“Bullshit. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore.”

“They’re the ISA. It’s their job to care.”

“They caved everywhere else.”

“Not here.”

“Maybe not for PolyCon. Here you are.”

“I told you: nothing’s decided.”

Moreno snorts. “Right. You dragged Sylvie hundreds of kilometers off-site so you’d have your own private base camp. You put everyone’s research on hold, and you’ve got me spending the next eight hours planting your money detectors on the seabed. You think I don’t know what that costs?”

Galik shrugs. “If you’re that sure, you could always refuse the gig. Break your contract. Take a stand on principle.”

Moreno glowers at the dashboard, where the luminous stipple of the thermocline thickens and rises about them. Cyclopterus jerks and slews as some particularly dense lens of water slaps lazily to starboard.

“They’d probably send you home then, though, right? Back to the heat waves and the water wars and that weird new fungus that’s eating everything. Although I hear some of the doomsday parties are worth checking out. Just last week one of ’em ended up burning down half of Kluane National Park.”

Moreno says nothing.

“ ’Course, if you really wanted to stand up and be counted, you could join the Gaianistas.” And in response to the look that gets him: “What? You gonna let the fuckers who killed the planet get away scot-free again?”

“That’s rich. Coming from one of their errand boys.”

“I chose my side. What about you, hiding out here in the ocean while the world turns to shit? You going to do anything about that, or are you all sound and fury, signifying nothing?”

“There’s nothing to do,” she says, almost whispering. “It’s too late.”

“Never too late for payback. Way I understand it, that’s what the Gaianistas are all about.”

“They’re a lost cause.”

“What isn’t, these days?”

“Don’t think for a second I don’t sympathize. Of course I fucking sympathize. We’re ten years past tipping point, planet’s doomed, and you lot are making out better than ever because there’s no point in any pesky ineffective environmental regulations any more. So, yeah. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that might make life worthwhile would be to take some of you out before you all bugger off to New Zealand.”

“So?”

“So it’s no-win. Go up against the people in charge and they’ll squash you like a bug.”

“That’s the thing about revenge, though, isn’t it? We’ll go after those who’ve fucked us over even if it hurts us more than them. Just as long as it does hurt them, even a little. And the worse things get, the more we’re willing to sacrifice just to strike back.”

“Bullshit.”

“They’ve done studies. It’s a kind of a—justice instinct, I guess you’d call it. Primal. Like sex, or money. They say it worked pretty well at discouraging cheaters back when we were living in caves. Maybe not so great now, but, you know. Some people just haven’t evolved.”

“So, what? You’re saying you don’t blame them?”

“The Gaianistas? Would you blame a rabid dog for biting you?” Galik shrugs. “ ’Course, you still have to put them down. For the public welfare.”

“That’s funny. I imagine they’d say exactly the same thing about you.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Put me down? If you had the chance.”

Moreno opens her mouth. Closes it again. Cyclopterus hisses into the silence.

“I had the chance,” she says at last. “If you must know.”

“Tell me.”

After a moment she does. “Trying to catch a flight to Galveston, shuttle gig out in the Gulf. Some zero-pointer was in a hurry to make it to his private jet I guess, just him and his family and a swarm of drones. Three gens of rich entitled assholes trying to sneak through Departures, pretending not to notice all the hisses and hate stares.”

“Weird they were even on ground level. They’re usually not so exposed.”

“Someone said some kind of technical issue up on the roof, sidelined the helipad. You could tell they were really not happy to be there. Looked downright scared actually, even before—anyway, they had their drones keeping the riffraff at bay but before they even made it into the terminal this big white van pulls up and it must have been loaded with capacitors because zap.”

“EMP?”

Moreno nods. “Drones drop like birds in Beijing. And suddenly all these people dragging suitcases over the curb or hailing cabs or kissing each other goodbye—they all just turn like some kind of hive mind and suddenly Richy McRich and his nearest and dearest are the eye in the storm. It’s really quiet for a moment or two, and nobody’s saying anything, but one of the rich kids—this little snot in a Nermal T-shirt—he kind of whimpers. And then the mob just closes in and—tears them apart.”

Galik mouths a silent Fuuuccck.

“I don’t know how many were in on the plan and how many just happened to be in the neighborhood. But almost everyone joined in. They were making this sound, like the whole mob had a single voice. Like—like a wind howling down a street between skyscrapers.”

“What about airport security?”

“Oh, they showed up. Eventually. But the pulse took out local surveillance, right? And it’s not like the ’nistas were wearing ID. They did their thing and faded and by the time anyone showed up it was just a bunch of people milling around all Heavens, whatever happened here and How’d this blood get on my pants?”

Galik doesn’t speak for a moment. “You said almost everyone. That include you?”

She shakes her head. “Actually, I tried calling 911. But the pulse, my phone was…”

“So you chose a side, too.”

“What?”

“Some of the people who wrecked the world were right there in front of you. You could have had justice.”

She gives him a hard look. “It was a lynch mob.”

“When the despots own the justice system, what else is there?”

“Your bosses know you talk like this?”

“I don’t. I’m being, what’s the word, Socratic. Since you blame my bosses for the end of the world and all, seems to me you’d want a little payback. But when you had the chance, right in front of you—no danger, no consequence—you tried to help them.”

She taps a control; something burbles to stern. “Oh, I wanted a piece of them. It’s not like the spirit didn’t move me. But it also scared me, you know? The size of that thing, the way everyone just sort of—coalesced.” She draws a breath. “And yeah, they fucking deserve it. But the damage is done, the planet’s fucked. Killing a few rich assholes isn’t going to unfuck it. I just—I guess I have better things to do with whatever time we’ve got left.

“Besides—” She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter if they bugger off to New Zealand. Doesn’t matter if they bugger off to Antarctica. The pandemics are everywhere. Cholera or Rift Valley Fever or whatever’s on top six months from now will get them eventually.”

Galik doesn’t have anything to say to that.

“It’s funny,” Moreno says after a few moments. “You hear about them all the time, right? Idiot kids and grannies in running shoes, waving signs and chanting Hey ho hey ho as if that ever changed a fucking thing. But these guys, they had resources. They were organized. It was almost military.”

“They are military,” Galik says.

“What?”

“Some of ’em, anyway. You never noticed how all the mercs and mall cops just kind of went away over the years?”

“Drones replaced everyone. Why should mall cops be any different than cab drivers or pizza delivery guys?”

“Drones don’t turn on you when everything goes Law of the Jungle. At some point it dawned on the zero-pointers that their private armies might not be quite so obedient when the lights went out. Might just rise up and take over all those apocalypse bunkers for themselves. Way I hear it, a lot of guys with Middle East stamps on their passports ended up out of work, past ten years or so. Some of ’em are probably pissed about it. Maybe even looking for pay—”

Something lifts Cyclopterus like a toy in a bathtub.

Inertia pushes Galik into his seat. The vessel tilts, nose down: slides fast-forward as though surfing some invisible wave. Moreno curses and grabs the stick as Cyclopterus threatens to turn, to tumble.

Wipe out…

In the next moment everything is calm as glass again.

Neither speaks for a moment.

“That was one hell of a thermocline,” Galik remarks.

“Pycnocline,” Moreno says automatically. “And we passed it a thousand meters ago. That was—something else.”

“Seaquake?”

She leans forward, interrogates the board. “Sylvie’s transponder isn’t talking.” She conjures up a keyboard, starts typing. Out past the hull, the metronome chirp of the sonar segues into full-throated orchestra.

“Technical glitch?” Galik wonders.

“Dunno.”

“Can’t you just call them up?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

Acoustic modems, he remembers. They can handle analog voice comms under normal conditions—but what’s normal, with Nāmaka churning up the Devil’s own background noise? Down here, the pros use text.

But judging by the look on Moreno’s face, that’s not working either.

She drags her finger along a slider on the dash; the pointillist seabed drops away around some invisible axis as the transducers swing their line-of-sight from Down to Up. Static and confusion rotate into view; the distant surface returns a blizzard of silver pixels to swamp the screen. Moreno fiddles with the focus and the maelstrom smears away. Closer, deeper features stutter into focus. Moreno sucks breath between clenched teeth.

Far overhead, something has grabbed the thermo—the pycnocline as though it were a vast carpet, and shaken it. The resulting waveform rears up through the water column, a fold of cold dense water rising into the euphotic zone like a submarine tsunami. It iterates across the display in majestic stop-motion, its progress updating with each ping.

It must be almost a thousand meters, crest-to-trough.

It’s already passed by, marching east. Patches of static swirl and dissipate in its wake, clustered echoes whose outlines shuffle and spread in jerky increments. Galik doesn’t know what they are. Maybe remnants of the Garbage Patch, its dismembered fragments still cluttering up the ocean years after Nāmaka tore it apart. Maybe just bubbles and swirling cavitation. Maybe even schools of fish; a few of those are still supposed to be hanging on, here and there.

“What—” he begins.

“Shut up.” Moreno’s face is bloodless. “This is bad.”

“How bad?”

“Shut up and let me think!”

Her visor’s back down. She plays the panel. Scale bars squeeze and stretch like rubber on the dash. Topography rotates and zooms, forward, aft; midwater wrinkles blur into focus and out again as Moreno alters the range. Her whispered fuck fuck fuck serves up a disquieting counterpoint to the pinging of the transducers.

“I can’t find Sylvie,” she admits at last, softly. “Not all of her, anyway. Maybe some pieces bearing eighty-seven. Swept way off-station.”

Galik waits.

“She was ninety meters down.” Moreno takes a deep breath. “The tip of that—thing reaches up to fifty. Must’ve slapped them like a fucking flyswatter.”

“But what was it?”

“I don’t know. Never seen anything like it before. Almost like some kind of monster seiche.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s like—when the pycnocline sloshes back and forth. Underwater standing wave. But the strong ones, they’re just in lakes and seas. Basins with walls the wave can bounce against.”

“Pacific’s a basin. Pacific’s got walls.”

“Pacific’s huge. I mean sure, ocean seiches go on world tours sometimes, but they’re slow. Stretch the mixing layer a few meters over a few years. Maybe kickstart an El Niño now and then. Nothing like this.”

“There was nothing like Nāmaka ten years ago either.”

“Yeah.”

“So much heat in the oceans now, hurricanes don’t even cool down enough to dissipate. Maybe it’s amping up your seiches, too.”

“Dunno. Maybe.”

“Maybe they’re even feeding off each other. Nothing’s linear anymore, it’s all tipping points and—”

“I don’t know, I said. None of that shit matters right now.” She slides her visor up, eyes a red handle protruding from the ceiling. A tiny metallic hiccough and a soft bloop carry through the hull after she yanks it. Something flashes on the dash.

“Emergency buoy?”

Moreno nods, downs visor, grabs the joystick.

“Shouldn’t we, you know. Make a recording? Send details?”

“It’s in there already. Dive logs, telemetry, even cabin chatter. Beacon stores it all automatically.” The corner of her mouth tightens. “You’re in there too, if that helps. Sub commandeered by NMI, prospecting dive. Maybe they’ll move faster, knowing one of their errand boys is in danger.”

She edges the stick forward and to port. Cyclopterus banks.

Galik checks the depth gauge. “Down?”

“You think anyone’s gonna fly a rescue mission through Nāmaka? You think I’d be crazy enough to surface even if they did?”

“No, but—”

“Any rescue’s gonna come in from the side. And since you wouldn’t have dragged Sylvia all the way over from the Cafe if there’d been anyone closer, I’m assuming it’s gonna have to come from further out, right?”

After a moment, he nods.

“Could be days before help arrives even if our signal does manage to cut through the shit,” Moreno tells him. “And I for one don’t feel like holding my breath for a week.”

Galik swallows. “I thought these things made their own O₂. From seawater.”

“Lack of seawater isn’t the problem. Need battery power to run the electrolysis rig.”

He glances at their bearing; Moreno has brought them around so they’re following in the wake of the superseiche.

“You’re going after the Earle.”

Her jaw clenches visibly. “I’m going after what’s left. With any luck, some of the fuel cells are still intact.”

“Any chance of survivors?” Most habs come with emergency pods, hard-shelled refugia for the crew in case of catastrophe. Assuming the crew has enough advance warning to get to them, of course.

She doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s not allowing herself to hope.

“I’m—I’m sorry about this,” Galik manages. “I can’t imagine what—”

Cowled Moreno hunches over the controls. “Shut up and let me drive.”

Cyclopterus never stops talking. Her guts gurgle and hiss. Her motors whine like electric mosquitoes. Her relentless transducers ping the ocean for reflections of mass and density.

Her passengers—immersed in wireframe caricatures of the world beyond the hull—say nothing at all.

Eventually the seabed resolves below them: luminous plane or muddy plain, depending on which channel you choose. Sonar serves up more information, but after all the pixels the impoverished patch of bone-grey sediment in the headlights is a welcome glimpse of something real. Galik fiddles with the controls, finds an overlay mode that serves up the best of both feeds.

Moreno nudges the sub to port. Mud gives way to rock; rock subsides again under mud. Outcrops and overhangs erupt from the substrate at odd angles, like listing jagged-edged tabletops. Nodules of cobalt and manganese lie scattered about like encrusted coins strewn from some ancient shipwreck. There are things, everywhere. Starfish with arms like tiny sinuous backbones. Tentacled flowers on stalks. Tangled balls of jawless hagfish. Gelatinous blobs the size of softballs, floating just off the bottom; they iridesce like dragonfly wings in the glare of the headlight.

All drift aimlessly. None move on their own.

Galik slides his visor up, looks across the cockpit. “Are they all dead?”

Moreno grunts.

“What would do that?” Hydrogen sulfide, maybe. The whole zone’s rotten with cold seeps and hot smokers—the source of Clipperton’s mineral wealth—but Galik’s still taken aback to see such devastation in the middle of a protected wilderness area.

An eyeless shrug. “Dead zone moved in, probably. We get big slugs of anoxic water sliding down off the conshelf few times a year now. Suffocates whole ecosystems overnight.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.” Her voice is toneless. “What a tragedy.”

Galik searches what he can see of her face, finds it unreadable. He gives up and downs his own visor.

Something’s waiting for him there.

It’s a hard ping, just a few degrees to starboard. Something big on the seabed, like an outcropping but more symmetrical, somehow. It echoes louder than any mere chunk of basalt.

“Is that a piece of the hab? Fifty meters, oh-two-eight?”

“No.”

“Sounds like metal, though, right?”

Moreno says nothing.

“Maybe we should check it out. Just to be sure.”

Technically he’s still in charge. Technically Moreno’s just a taxi driver. Technically she could still tell him to fuck off and there wouldn’t be a whole lot he could do about it.

After a moment, though, Cyclopterus noses to starboard.

The bogey’s partially hidden behind a ridge of rock; its echo flashes like the edge of some dim sun peeking over a horizon. Details resolve as they approach: a curve, a convexity. A series of interlocking segments, their lower edges fuzzed by incursions of mud.

A skull.

Sonar completes the tableaux a few moments before it scrolls into the light: a backbone, glittering with oily reflections. A silvered arrowhead cranium, three meters if it’s an inch, nostrils stretched along the top, empty eye sockets pushed down to the sides. The bones of some huge thumbless hand, laid flat across the seabed like a museum reconstruction.

“It’s a whale,” he whispers.

“Few million years old, probably.”

“But it’s metal…”

“It’s a fossil. It mineralized. The water’s saturated with metal ions. Why do you even think you’re interested in this place?”

“Yeah, but—”

“I’d love to give you a scenic tour, Alistor, but in case you’ve forgotten my friends are probably all dead and I’d just as soon not join—”

She cuts herself off. Something’s caught her eye, something peeking into view from behind that enormous glinting spine.

“What the fuck,” she murmurs.

A fleshy torpedo, pale whitish-pink in the lights, a couple meters long. Arms. “Squid,” Galik says.

“Not like any squid I’ve ever seen.”

They edge in closer. Galik zooms his camera. The creature drifts listless as any other they’ve seen down here, arms limp as seaweed. There is something strange about it, though.

“Look at the eyes,” Moreno whispers.

He can see three from this angle, spaced at ninety-degree intervals around the absurd amidships head of the thing. (Presumably there’s a fourth on the far side.) And of those three, two of them look—wrong…

No iris. No pupil. No white. Galik sees three things positioned as eyes, but only one stares back at him. The others are dark, and—tangled, somehow. Sockets full of tendrils: as though someone has scooped out the eyeball and stuffed a nest of bloodworms into the socket.

“Kill the lights,” he says.

“Why—”

“Just do it.”

Darkness crushes in. Galik’s hullcam goes black—except for one bright pinpoint, flashing a steady emerald beat in the darkness. Right about where one of those not-eyes gapes, invisible now.

“There’s an LED in that thing,” Galik says softly.

Moreno kicks the floods back on. The blinking star vanishes in high-contrast light and shadow. Cyclopterus closes with renewed purpose; a manipulator unfolds from her belly like a mantis limb, clawed fingers reaching for the flaccid thing. They touch it.

Instantly the squid flexes and recoils, jets away into the darkness.

“Huh,” Galik grunts.

“Humboldt squid,” Morena tells him. “Started off as one, anyway. Resistant to low-oxygen conditions.”

“But it was—”

“Tweaked. Whole lot of neurons cable to the eyes. Nothing says they gotta carry visual information. Hook up the right sensors, you could read anything. pH. Salinity. Name it.”

“So it’s some kind of—living environmental sensor.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Not yours.”

Moreno snorts.

“Whose, then?”

“I dunno,” Moreno says. “But look where it went.”

She’s aimed the sonar, cranked the range. The squid—whatever it is—doesn’t register on such far focus. Something does, though. Way off in the distance, at the very limit of sonar sight, something bounces back faint as a ghost.

“Looks like an outcropping,” Galik says.

“My ass. Those edges are too straight.”

“Sylvia Earle?”

“Wrong bearing.”

“Maybe we should just stay the course. Given our limited reserves.”

Cyclopterus turns toward the echo.

Galik slides his visor back. “What do you think it is?”

Moreno’s is up as well. Her eyes are hard as glass.

“Let’s find out.”

“Well, at least we know now,” Galik says.

“Know?”

“Why Clipperton’s off-limits. Why the ISA didn’t—” He shakes his head. “Someone bought them.”

Cyclopterus floats across an unfinished landscape of plastic and metal. Spreading out in all directions, a grid of rails turns the seabed into a chessboard; spindly towers rise from its interstices. Printers the size of automobiles glide along their tracks, drilling holes, laying eggs, extruding pools of hot thick liquid that freeze harder than basalt. Strange jet-propelled machines splice rock and metal together at critical junctures. Everywhere are the frames of half-completed domes and tunnels and conduits, wormy with bundled cabling and fiberop.

All invisible in the darkness. All this industrious activity hidden beneath four kilometers of sunless black, except where Cyclopterus’s eyes and echoes lay it bare.

Galik whistles. “This is going to be one hell of a hab.”

“This isn’t a hab. It’s a fucking city.” Moreno rechecks the onboard database. “Not on the charts. No transponders. This thing is totally off the books.”

“I guess they’re not all going to New Zealand.”

Moreno taps a control; blotchy rainbows bloom here and there across the display. A slash of red smoulders at two o’clock, broken by huddles of intermittent machinery. “Hot seep.”

“Power source,” Galik guesses.

“Hey, you see that?”

He does. Bearing eighty-five degrees: something round and smooth, something anomalously complete in the midst of all this in-progress disarray. It glows green and warm on thermal.

A pressure hull.

Moreno reads the echo like a soothsayer. “Atmosphere.”

“Occupied?” This could be a problem. Anyone going to these lengths isn’t likely to welcome drop-ins.

But Moreno shakes her head. “Looks like a foreman’s shack. Place to crash when you come down to check on your pet project. Anyone who can keep a place this size off the scope isn’t gonna risk giving themselves away with telemetry broadcasts. Can’t see anyone living here full-time, though. Not until they’re ready to move in permanently. In the meantime”—Cyclopterus is already coming around—“there’ll be power. Food. Beds even.”

The shack’s dead ahead now, growing in their sights. “We hang around too long, we’ll have company,” Galik surmises.

“Unless we’re extremely unlucky, the rescue guys show up first. And then this fucking place gets dragged into the sunlight for everyone to see.”

“That’s assuming whoever’s behind it—”

“You know who’s behind it, Alistor. Your masters. Their masters. Zero-pointers cashing out before the bill comes due.” She glances meaningfully at him. “Guess they didn’t save you a spot, huh?”

“You’re assuming they won’t be keeping an ear on the local chatter. That they won’t just reach out and squash a rescue mission as soon as they see the coordinates.”

Moreno’s fingers tighten on the joystick. A soft Shit hisses between her teeth.

The shack resolves in their headlights like a grey moon, maybe ten meters across at the equator. Moreno pulls the stick and Cyclopterus climbs low over the northern hemisphere, her lights pooling across ducts and grilles and stencilled warnings to keep clear of the vents. Moreno navigates over the north pole, coaxes the sub into planting a perfect watertight kiss on the docking hatch. Machinery grapples and clenches and blows seawater back into the abyss.

She boots up a dashboard interface and curses. “Figures. Only one atmosphere in there.”

“How long to decompress us?”

“From nine atmospheres? Breathing trimix? Five days, easy.” She studies the dash. “Fortunately, we’ve also got remote access to hab support. I can bring inside pressure up to nine in about”—she runs her finger up the dash—“fifteen minutes.”

“You rock,” Galik tells her.

It gets him his first small smile. “I do, don’t I?”

They don’t have fifteen minutes, though. The board starts beeping after five.

“That was fast,” Galik says.

Moreno frowns. “That’s not the hab. That’s an ELF handshake.” Her face brightens. “Text message! The beacon got through!”

Galik’s jaw tightens. “Don’t get your hopes up. Remember, these people”—taking in the half-built complex around them—“they have ears, too.”

“No, this is through Cospas-Sarsat. This is NOAA.” She leans forward, focusing as if sheer concentration might somehow squeeze the signal from the water a little faster. Alphanumerics accumulate in front of her. They’re too small to make out from where Galik’s sitting.

He sighs.

“Says here—it says…” The anticipation drains from her face. Something darker rises in its stead.

She turns to face him. “Who the fuck are y—”

Galik’s fist connects with her right temple. Moreno’s head snaps sideways, cracks against the hull. She sags like a rag doll against the shoulder strap.

Galik unbuckles his harness and leans over. There’s still awareness in her eyes. Her drooling mouth twitches and gapes, trying to form words. From somewhere inside Koa Moreno, a moan escapes.

He shakes his head. “It really was a preliminary survey, for what it’s worth. We didn’t know what was down here any more than you did; we only had—suspicions.”

“You fuh…” she manages.

“The sensors were supposed to—not you. We were never supposed to get out this far.”

Moreno half-raises a hand. It flops on the end of her arm like a dead fish.

“Now everything’s gone to shit and I have to—improvise. I’m so sorry, Koa.”

“Mid… easht—pashpor…”

“I’m sorry you chose the wrong side,” he says, and breaks her neck.

By the time her heart stops the pressure in the shack is up to nine. Galik turns, crouching in the cramped compartment, catches passing sight of the text message still accreting on the board—

—and kneels to undog the deck hatch.

The lights come up as he climbs down: indirect, full-spectrum, illuminating a cozy half-hemisphere where struts and plating are all padded and wrapped in PVC. Interfaces and control panels sleep on curved bulkheads, on the desks that extrude from them. Behind a bulkhead that splits the upper deck, visible through an open hatch, bunks and lockers lurk in shadow. A spiral staircase corkscrews down to the deck below.

He searches the hab and finds it empty. He awakens its controls, checks logs and manifests. He explores remote-piloting options for Cyclopterus, teaches himself how to send the little craft far away on its own recognizance.

He eats from the shack’s well-stocked galley, sleeps in its salon.

Four and a half kilometers overhead the mixing zone churns beneath the surface; the surface churns beneath the sky; immortal Nāmaka churns between. Back on shore the fires burn ever-hotter along the coast. Deserts spread and clathrates bubble; winter heat waves scythe across the Mediterranean; wheat rust and monkey pox fell crops and people with equal indiscriminate abandon. Tuvalu and Kiribati sink beneath the waves. Protesters mourn the loss of the Pizzly Bear and the Bengal Tiger while underfoot, the trillions of small creeping things that hold up the world disappear almost unnoticed. The human race runs ever-faster to the finish line, numbers finally thinning out on the last lap, rioting and revelling and fighting over whatever crumbs are left after three hundred years of deficit spending.

All the while, the Nikkei never stops climbing.

Alistor Galik—formerly Staff Sergeant Jason Knowlton (ret.), USSOCOM—bides his time on the bottom of the ocean, drawing plans and selecting targets. Waiting patiently for the minions of Zero Point to arrive and show him the way back to their masters.