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

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—

SOS received

awaiting req approval on dsrv will advise

Nautilus LLC denies any knowledge of S.Earle req

No employees deployed to CCZ

No Alistor LNU listed on sh

—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.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa (suyidavies.com) is a Nigerian author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror inspired by his West African origins. His debut, the godpunk fantasy novel David Mogo, Godhunter , was hailed as “the subgenre’s platonic deific ideal.” His shorter fiction and essays have appeared in Tor.com , Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Fireside, PodCastle, The Dark , and in anthologies like A World of Horror and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction . He lives between Lagos, Nigeria, and Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches writing to undergrads while completing his MFA in Creative Writing.