David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Stephen gulped down the rest of his coffee and set the nearly empty cup down on the map table. The waves in brown liquid near the base vibrated in tidy little concentric waves. He put the last of the bread in his mouth and gnawed at the crust. The coffee at the bottom of his cup, he noticed, was pooling to forward.

They were diving again.

“Aren’t you supposed to sound a horn or something when you dive?” said Stephen. The bridge crew didn’t look up. The hull metal groaned. The engines thudded.

“ Help us ,” whispered a voice at Stephen’s back.

Stephen turned fast enough to set the cup tumbling. It splashed coffee over 2the top of the map board, pooling and beading on the grease pencil delineation of their course — running in thick streams toward the American coastline at the fore end of the map table. He grabbed the cup and, seeing no towels about, daubed up the coffee with his sleeve. It still smeared the grease pencil, but not to the point of illegibility. Some did make it underneath the plexiglass, and it spread underneath to make new contours on the sea bottom off Key West.

By the time Stephen looked back, whoever it was that had asked for his help was long gone.

Help us .

Stephen hurried to aft through the spinal corridor — ostensibly to take his coffee mug back to the galley and wash up — but really, because the whole Help us thing had creeped him out. The voice had sounded plaintive — beaten. It made it sound like the best way you could help was to find a brick or a rock, and bring it down on the whole miserable bunch of them.

Stephen stopped in the galley. Chenko was sipping coffee there; Uzimeri was fooling around with something at the stove. Boiling water spilled over the forward edge of his pot and made a devilish hissing sound on the element.

Chenko spotted Stephen and smiled at him.

“We are diving again,” he said amiably. “How deep do you believe we can go, before the sea crushes us?”

“Hopefully,” said Stephen, “a little deeper than this.”

“Trust in Zhanna,” said Uzimeri from the kitchen.

Chenko rolled his eyes.

“Refill your cup,” he said.

“Later.” Stephen sat down at the galley table. “So what do you think Petroska Station is?”

“Back to that, are we?” Chenko laughed. It was a little game they’d started at dinner the night before — before Mrs. Kontos-Wu had showed up, and the conversation had defaulted back to group therapy mode.

What on earth could Petroska Station be?

“Okay — here is one. It’s a weather station in the Antarctic. Tunnels run deep into the mantle — miles deep — and intersect with the massive tombs of an ancient civilization. The Mystics are using pyramid power derived from complicated crystalline structures that rested there untapped for cold millennia, to commune with the Universe.”

“Blasphemy!” shouted Uzimeri and made a face. Stephen laughed in spite of himself.

“What do you think, then, Konstantine?” said Chenko.

“A blessed place where all prayers are answered and Paradise is laid out for all to see.” Uzimeri gave a quick curt nod.

“That’s what you said last night.”

“Well that is what I think.” Uzimeri looked at Stephen. “It might have been revealed to me in a Vision, for all that you would know — hey boy?”

“Leave him be,” said Chenko. “Look to your water — it’s making a terrible mess in here.”

Uzimeri shook his head and turned back to the stove.

“So what do you think?” said Chenko, turning to Stephen. “Any clues?”

For an instant, Stephen debated telling Chenko about the strange voice he’d heard, begging him for help; the discomfort he’d seen in the Romanians who crewed this boat; and the dreams of great flowering squid, that kept a pace with the submarine as it sank deeper into the Atlantic murk.

He would, of course, say none of those things.

“Cuba,” he said cheerily. “Petroska Station is a little plantation outside Havana. The tourists don’t go there much, but it’s big with the locals.”

Chenko smiled — turned his coffee mug around as he peered into it, perhaps trying to read something in the grinds. He licked his lips, and opened his mouth to reply. Then he frowned, and looked up.

“What is it?” said Stephen.

“Listen,” said Chenko. His eyes scanned the bulkhead over them, and he squinted.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“ What ?”

“Nothing,” repeated Chenko, and gestured all around them. “Do you not hear it? Silence .”

Silence .

Now that, thought Stephen, was not entirely correct. You could still hear the rattle of the electric fan as it pumped air from one end of the boat to the other. There was the occasional ba-bong from the submarine’s hull as it adjusted to the increasing pressure. And there was the hissing sound of superheating water on Uzimeri’s stove element.

But much of the din that made the submarine such a joy to ride in was gone. The engines had shut down.

And as Stephen listened, the other noises diminished too: the hissing of steam stopped, and the hull went quiet.

The submarine, Stephen realized with a shiver, was finally levelling off.

Uzimeri looked up — first at Stephen, then to Chenko. He cleared his throat.

“Think this is Cuba now?”

Help us .

Mrs. Kontos-Wu staggered into the galley next, accompanied by Pitovovich. Stephen sniffed the air. They had both been drinking.

“What’s going on?” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, clutching her forehead as she sat down. “Why’s everybody so quiet?”

“Zhanna will explain,” said Pitovovich. Chenko nodded in agreement.

“Do you hear her?”

“Oh yes.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyes fluttered shut along with the others’. Zhanna, no doubt, was explaining things to them right now.

Stephen took it as his cue. He got up and headed toward the bridge.

The crew were like statues when he got there. They stood or sat at their posts, staring at nothing — like they had been shut down. Stephen ran his fingers in front of the eyes of one, standing by the periscope. The man didn’t blink.

Stephen went over to the map table. The coffee stain had obliterated the southern tip of Florida. Global warming couldn’t have done it better. He looked up the map. The grease pencil line hadn’t extended any further — although someone had obviously fixed it up after Stephen had left. And they had made a change. Stephen leaned closer to look. Now, at the end of the line, rather than just a dash of red, someone had drawn a tiny circle. Was this their destination? It was far short of the Caribbean — it was a point in the mid-Atlantic. There were no land masses here but Stephen noted that the contours of the chart connoting the topography of the sea bottom were nearly converged. Something was going on, on the sea bottom.

“Who,” he said quietly, “needs help?”

The men sat in place. They had not even heard him.

The submarine heard fine. It answered with a lurch, and a pok-pok-pok sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Stephen grabbed the edge of the map table with both hands. Sweat gleamed a white aura around his fingers where they pressed against the glowing plastic. The pok-pok-pok continued a few seconds more — and then there was a grinding noise that Stephen felt through his bones: metal against metal; a crack! sound.

A low rasping, like a screw-top turning on an ancient jar.

And then: quiet.

The deck became still as a cellar floor.

Stephen swallowed, as the truth of what was happening settled in on him.

The submarine had arrived. They were at the circle, on a great ridge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.