Ted Bell - Phantom

“Understood. Blackhawke, standing by on channel eleven, sir, over.”

“Good God,” Stollenwork said, making his way into the pen. “An escape sub. Of course. Rather clever, actually.”

“He’s got a lot of help,” Hawke said, a droll expression on his face. “A higher intelligence. What the situation up there?”

“It’s not over. They seem to be regrouping inside the wall. A large force. I think they intend to storm this yacht, in the belief they outnumber us.”

“Not a belief,” Stoke said. “A fact.”

“Stony, order your second in command to position Blue and Red teams on every Cygnus deck, taking cover with direct line of sight on the gate. They’ll be at their most vulnerable funneled up at that exit point. Concentrated fire there will, at minimum, slow them down when we make for the patrol boat.”

“Aye, sir,” Stollenwork said, then raised his radio and repeated Hawke’s orders to his number two up on deck.

“Stokely, I noticed a hidden indentation in the bulkhead to our left when we reached the first platform down from the bridge. There’s no way Saffari could have negotiated three steep flights of narrow stairs in his manned aerial vehicle. I’m guessing there’s a hidden elevator opening in the hull, directly onto the dock. It would make more sense in escape mode. Go back up and check it out, would you? I need a word with Stony.”

“Done,” Stoke said over his shoulder, sprinting up the staircase.

“Stony. You took the lab out. But we’re not leaving here without destroying that bloody machine. Blackhawke can take out Saffari’s sub if he stays within her sonar perimeter. She’s got torpedo tubes fore and aft. We’ll find him and sink him somehow.”

“You’re joking.”

“You don’t know the half of it. She’s a warship with nearly as much firepower as a navy frigate.”

“Boss?”

At the sound of Stoke’s deep bass voice behind him, Hawke wheeled around.

A large section of the hull was still sliding open. Stoke was standing inside a large, stainless-steel elevator with a big smile on his face. “What goes up, must go down,” he said. “Step inside, gentlemen.”

The three men were shocked by the lift’s initial acceleration. Hawke calculated the lift was descending at one hundred feet or more per minute. The trip was ten minutes long, which put their destination at a thousand feet below the surface of the sea when the elevator slowed and bumped to a stop on the ocean floor.

They stepped cautiously, weapons at the ready, out of the lift and found themselves in a large airlock. The floor was made of some highly polished metal. To their left they could see an illuminated tunnel of some kind, constructed of clear Perspex or thick laminated glass able to withstand the enormous pressure. It was about ten feet in diameter and seemed to lead across the sea bottom.

“The machine?” Stoke said, following Hawke and Stollenwork as they entered the tunnel.

“That would be my guess, yes,” Hawke said. He was busy admiring the sea life, flora and fauna, all around him. There were large, high-powered undersea lights mounted atop the tunnel every six feet. They turned the murky depths to daylight and the effect was overwhelming.

“Holy Mother of God,” Stollenwork exclaimed.

Suddenly, all three men had come to an abrupt stop. What lay before them was the stuff of dreams, an underwater scene of majestic power and beauty.

The tunnel had suddenly angled right, and now the lights were illuminating a giant rectangular tower that rose from the seabed at least a hundred feet. The monolithic structure stood atop a circular base and seemed to be constructed entirely of jet-black glass, but faint bluish light seemed to be ricocheting around inside the thing.

Arrayed in a circle around the central tower were six black rectangular structures, identical in design and material, but about forty feet shorter than the primary edifice. It looked, Hawke thought, like Stonehenge as imagined by Stanley Kubrick, something that had stood down here for eons, before man, before machine. What made it all so breathtaking were the flashes of pure spectral and brilliant razor wire of white light that crackled constantly between the central tower and its six satellites.

It was clear that the tallest of the towers was the core AI unit, and that it was exchanging information at unfathomable rates of speed with the other six. Laserlike mental fireworks was the only thing that began to describe it, Hawke thought. And as soon as he thought it, a stunningly colorful nebula, a hologram, filled the upper third of the central edifice. He felt like he was getting a peek at the outermost reaches of the known universe.

When the tunnel reached the outer perimeter of the structures, it nosed down beneath the ocean floor, plunging them into darkness. Embedded in the floor, a fluorescent blue centerline kept them oriented within the winding tunnel. After about 150 yards it began to climb again. Hawke, leading the way, could barely contain the heart beating wildly inside his chest.

“Lord Hawke, I presume.”

“Good evening,” Hawke replied, carefully considering the deep, rumbling, humanoid voice emanating from somewhere high above. Mesmerizing, that voice, as redolent of the hills and vales of Gloucestershire as had been Aphrodite’s. Not the least bit artificial. Mimicry was clearly a phantom machine’s method of making humans feel at home, at ease, off guard. He’d suspected the duplicity of Darius’s lover; now he was sure of it. No real woman could be that supernaturally alluring.

They stood inside the base of the black tower, surrounded on all four sides by soaring black glass, gazing up in awe. A distant galaxy, pinpricks of light and colorful clouds of star clusters, was visible, whirling near the uppermost reaches of the phantom’s tower. Hawke reached out and touched the glass. It was warm. Body temperature. He felt vibrations in the obsidian, rippling down from above. It made him not want to pull his hand away. It felt, no, it exuded, safety.

He could hear a single word resonating repeatedly within his brain: “Stay. Stay. Stay.” The glass against his hand felt like a mother’s cheek.

“I’ve been expecting you.” The voice resounded again within the mammoth structure.

“So you said in your recent message to me. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“Who are your comrades in arms?”

“Mr. Jones, to my left. Mr. Stollenwork, to my right. Whom do we have the honor of addressing?”

“Perseus will do, although I have no name and every name, really. Being all things, you understand.”

“Since you are expecting us, logically, you know why we’ve come.”

“Of course, dear boy. To destroy me. Most unwise of you.”

“I think not.”

“Then you think not at all.”

“Because?”

“Because my genetic underpinning, algorithms and software, can never, ever be replicated without Darius. And I certainly will kill him rather than have him give a replica of me to you, however foolish or simply ignorant your destructive intentions.”

“And you have forgotten your fundamental human origins, manners in particular, kindness in general, Perseus. One does not insult one’s guests. Regardless of their stated intentions.”

“My apologies, Lord Hawke. I lack… superficial subtlety. The seamlessness of centuries of British mores and manners, accents, and linguistics, et cetera, et cetera. Class designators, quite handy in your civilization, meaningless to me. In due time, of course, my own will be indistinguishable from your own. I’m learning even now from your every word, gesture, and facial expression. You are quite… polished… aren’t you? Compared to, say, a cockney barman raised in the East End of London? Eastcheap, perhaps? Wot?”