Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“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.