Frank Schatzing - The Swarm

Bohrmann shuffled his flippers towards the edge. Even the tiniest movement was an amazing feat of strength. He took a deep breath and allowed himself to fall forwards. The water rose up towards him and he saw the artificial lights of the tunnel flash above him, then found himself upright. He sank slowly through the tunnel and out into the sea, landing in a shoal of fish. Thousands of shimmering bodies dispersed, regrouping in a tightly packed spiral. The shoal changed shape a few times, strung out in a line, and fled. Bohrmann saw the trackhound beside him and sank deeper. Above him the tunnel glowed against the dark contours of the pontoon. He kicked his fins and realised he could hover on the spot. The divesuit felt good now, like wearing his own submersible.

Frost followed him in a column of bubbles, then sank until he was on a level with Bohrmann and looked at him through the view port. Bohrmann saw that the American was still wearing his cap.

'How are you feeling?' asked Frost.

'Like R2-D2's older brother.'

Frost laughed. The propeller on his trackhound started to turn. Suddenly the robot dipped its nose and pulled the volcanologist into the depths. Bohrmann activated his own. He felt a sharp jerk, then shot off head-first. The water darkened. Van Maarten was right these things were fast. In no time it was pitch black. It was impossible to see anything apart from the diffuse rays of light emitted by the trackhounds.

To his surprise he felt uneasy in the darkness. He'd sat in front of the screen hundreds of times, watching robots dive to the abyssal plains or even as far as the benthic zone. He'd been down to a depth of four thousand metres in the legendary submersible Alvin , yet nothing had prepared him for being encased in a suit and whisked into the unknown by an electronic guide-dog.

Hopefully the thing he was clutching had been properly programmed or there was no telling where he was headed.

Showers of plankton appeared in the glow of the floodlights and the electronic hum of the trackhounds buzzed inside Bohrmann's helmet. Ahead he saw a delicate creature drifting through the night with elegant pulsing movements, a deep-sea jellyfish sending out ring-shaped signals of light like a spaceship. Bohrmann hoped they weren't being emitted in panic as it fled from some predator. Then the jellyfish disappeared. More jellyfish luminesced in the distance, and a bright cloud flashed before his eyes. He couldn't help flinching. But the cloud was white, not blue. Its source luminesced briefly before it disappeared within its own mist. Bohrmann knew what it was: a mastigoteuthid , or whiplash squid, a creature usually only found at depths of around a thousand metres. It made sense for it to expel white ink when threatened – in the darkness of the depths, black would be useless.

The dog strained at its leash.

Bohrmann scanned the water for a glimpse of the lighting scaffold, but he was surrounded by darkness, with just a faint dot of light moving in front of Frost. At least, he assumed it was moving. It might as well have been stationary: two fixed points of lights, his beam and Frost's, in a starless universe.

'Stanley?'

'What's up?'

The promptness of the answer soothed him.

'It's about time we saw something, isn't it?'

'You've got to be patient, buddy. Look at the display. We've only gone two hundred metres.'

'Oh. Of course. No problem.'

Bohrmann didn't dare ask Frost whether he was sure that the track-hounds had been properly programmed, so he kept quiet and tried to stifle his mounting anxiety. He almost wished a few more jellyfish would show themselves, but there was nothing to be seen. The robot hummed busily. All of a sudden Bohrmann felt a change of direction.

There was something ahead. Bohrmann screwed up his eyes and made out a distant glow. At first it was just a faint patch of light, then a hazy rectangle.

He could barely contain his relief Good dog, he felt like saying. There's a good boy.

How small the lighting scaffold looked.

He was still puzzling over its size as the distance decreased and the glow brightened, separating into individual floodlights along the unit's frame. They continued towards it, and suddenly it was above them, a canopy of light overhead. Of course, they were above and it was below, but the head-first dive had turned everything upside-down. Next the terrace appeared, and it, too, was suspended in the sky. For a moment Frost became visible, a shadow being pulled by a torpedo on a leash, rushing towards a football field of light. Now the view opened up before them: the terrace, the snake-like body of the tube towering out of the darkness, the lumps of rock blocking its mouth…

And the writhing mass of worms.

'Turn off your trackhound before you crash into those lights,' said Frost. 'We can swim the last few metres.'

Bohrmann flexed the fingers of his free hand and tried to get the manipulator to hit the right button. The first attempt failed, and he sped past Frost, who'd slowed down.

'Gairhard? Where do you think you're going?'

He tried again. The manipulator slipped. Finally he succeeded, kicked his fins a few times and realigned himself on the horizontal. The scaffold was very close, stretching out seemingly endlessly in all directions. After a few seconds Bohrmann recovered his sense of up and down, and the scaffold and the terrace were beneath him.

Kicking evenly, he swam to the wedged tube and sank alongside it. The scaffold was now fifteen metres above his head. Within an instant the worms were swarming over his fins. He had to force himself to ignore them. They didn't stand a chance against the suit. They were revolting, of course, but no more. Worms could never pose a danger to a creature of his size.

Or could they? After all, these worms weren't even meant to exist. The trackhound had sunk on to the terrace alongside him. Bohrmann parked it on a ledge of rock and looked up at the tube. Man-sized chunks of black lava blocked the propellers – nothing they couldn't handle, though. More worrying was the larger splinter of lava that was squashing the tube against the side. It looked at least four metres high. Bohrmann doubted that he and Frost would be able to shift it, even though things weighed less under water and lava was porous and relatively light.

Frost joined him. 'Disgusting,' he said. 'Those sons of Lucifer are everywhere.'

'What's everywhere?'

'Worms of course! I suggest we deal with the smaller chunks first and see how far we get. Van Maarten?' he called.

'Over.' There was a tinny quality to the man's voice. Bohrmann had forgotten that they could communicate with him, too.

'We're going to tidy up a bit down here. We'll start by clearing the propellers. If we're lucky, the tube might be able to work its own way free.'

'OK. Are you all right, Dr Bohrmann?'

'Never been better.'

Frost pointed to an almost spherical chunk of lava that was blocking the swivel joint of one of the propellers. 'We'll start with that.'

They got to work, and after a good deal of pushing and shoving, the rock came unstuck, freeing the propeller and squashing hundreds of worms.

'OK,' said Frost.

They moved two more boulders, but the next was larger. After a concerted effort they tipped it to one side.

'See how strong we are down here,' said Frost, enthusiastically. 'OK, Jan,' he said to van Maarten, 'we've only got one propeller to go. They don't look damaged. Can you rotate them? Don't turn them on, just rotate them.'

After a few seconds, the tube started to purr. One of the turbines was rotating on its shaft. Then the others began to turn.

'Good,' shouted Frost. 'Now try to switch them on.'

Having retreated to a safe distance a few metres away from the tube, they watched the propellers start up.