Walter Greatshell - Apocalypso

I went to the Big Room, the biggest space in the boat, which had once held twenty-four nuclear missile tubes. Now it was packed with mountains of treasure. Not treasure in the form of gold and jewels (although there was some of that), but more human-essential valuables such as food, drink, and medicine. It was a regular Costco down there.

Some months earlier we had plundered these things from an anchored barge that was the cache of the Reapers. They didn’t need the stuff anymore, and neither did their masters at MoCo. For that matter, we didn’t need it either, but it came in handy as a lure for hungry refugees.

The Blackpudlians were in there, tuning their instruments.

“You sure it’s safe out there?” asked Ringo.

“We’re already dead,” said Paul. “What more can they do to us?”

“I don’t know. Crush our souls?”

“Our souls are like our bodies, mate, only more so. Like rubber.”

“Rubber soul, my arse,” said John. “There’s no such thing as a soul, rubber or otherwise.”

“There’s filet of sole,” mused George.

“I prefer plaice, myself.”

“One must have a good sense of plaice.”

“I’ve always known my proper plaice.”

“There’s a thyme and a plaice for everything.”

“Or even a nice bit of halibut.”

“The halibut is, we haven’t the slightest idea of what we are, what any of this means, or what the risks are in going ashore.”

I said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ve been out there, and it’s perfectly safe. We’re adapted to that world now.”

“Lulu’s right. Fire with fire, mates.”

“Right,” I said. “As a wise man once said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.’”

“You hear that, lads? We are the egg men.”

Climbing inside the forward escape trunk, I made room for as many guys as would fit, then ordered the inboard hatch shut. The chamber was “full as a nut,” as my mother would have said, but it didn’t matter; we weren’t claustrophobic, and didn’t need room to breathe. My only concern was logistical, how to best utilize the available space without touching skin, and we had solved that by wearing full-body, hooded wet suits.

I backflashed to a pregnant cat I had dissected in biology class, how its unborn kittens fit together as neatly as Escher designs, interlocking yins and yangs. Then I opened a valve and let the water in. It was salty and freezing cold, gushing up powerfully from below.

As brine covered my head, I had the oddest need to scream, recalling a similar experience when I was alive-Chick is ice-cold-but then the feeling passed. A few seconds later, the chamber was full. I cranked open the topside hatch, releasing a plume of trapped bubbles.

We set to work. Twenty leagues beneath the sea, three groups of Dreadnauts exited the three hatches and slid down lines to the bottom. To human eyes, the water would have been utterly black and impenetrable, but to Exes it glowed with the muted auras of living creatures. Even plankton had its own light, so that the ocean was full of luminous motes.

Hiking through twilit meadows of eelgrass, with the incoming tide pushing us like a breeze, we made our way up a wide valley carved in the continental shelf. This was the mouth of the deepwater channel, the Chesapeake stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway, connecting Norfolk with Annapolis and Baltimore in the far upper bay. Up there, it had been regularly dredged to accommodate shipping, but at this end it was plenty deep enough for even the largest ships to pass without risk of hitting the undersea highway tunnel-which was a good thing, because an Ohio-class submarine required enormous clearance. Passively drifting on the current, it loomed behind us walkers like a great black zeppelin, weightless as a cloud.

My party followed behind a team led by Alton Webb. This was a man I had hated and feared in life, and who hated and feared me. He had abused me, terrorized my friends, killed my father, and betrayed the entire boat. All this was irrelevant now, dismissed as pocket change amid the wages of human ignorance. I could no more hold a grudge from life than I could blame a trapped animal for biting the hand that fed it-any more than I could blame myself for my former human foibles.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Blame might be gone, but guilt was forever. In fact, guilt was the emotional currency of this new existence-one of the side effects of immortality was an almost frantic selflessness, a deep pity and shame more potent than Original Sin. This grim empathy was what kept us working on our common task: to save humanity. Not in the crude, almost sexual way of wild Xombies but as a simple matter of conscience.

Alton Webb, bearing a larger burden of shame, was now perhaps the most humane of all the Dreadnauts, the silent martyr of the sub, whose devotion to me made him a practical extension of my will. Without his example, I could not have persuaded the others into continuing the journey after Providence. I felt guilty about making them feel so guilty- and round it went, a wheel of never-ending remorse that we all sublimated in duty: duty to the memory of home and country, duty to the ship, duty to each other, and, most intensely, duty to the still-doomed. More than anything else, we lived to save the living.

Before us were fields of sonar buoys, proximity mines, curtains of steel mesh, an obstacle course that no unescorted ship could hope to navigate. So how do you propose to do it? Coombs had asked.

Simple, I said. We walk.

Unlimbering their tools, the blue boys began cutting a wide swath through the barricades. Nearing the drilling rig’s anchorage, we could sense humans around us-wisps of life energy like blurred X-rays. Our proximity to them goaded the teams to work faster, Clears and Blues competing for the right to those prizes. The men were drunk on it, desperate to play God. I wanted to say, Calm down, but the others were already well ahead of me, bounding up the rocky slope. Darn it. Here was the problem with weaning them off my blood; I should have known it wouldn’t be so easy.

We reached the spot directly below the oil platform and directly above the tunnel crossing. There was something like a large building on the seafloor, a rusty ziggurat connected by a thick pipeline to the surface. I had brought a device called a Momsen lung, a kind of inflatable life preserver. We had hundreds of them on the sub. Opening the air valve, I instantly became buoyant and shot for the surface.

Emerging between the towering legs of the superstructure, I listened for signs of life, but the thing felt empty. Whoever had been there was gone now.

“Hey!” I shouted. My voice echoed hollowly above the slosh of the waves. There was no answer.

I bled air from my vest and sank back to the bottom. Brushing floating hair out of my face, I checked my GPS display, mentally feeding my coordinates to Cowper’s head in the Nav Center, where he typed it out for the crew using his long black tongue.

We came across a sunken ship, a guided-missile frigate. Then a destroyer. A helicopter assault ship. Dozens of smaller vessels. This had been a battleground. Now it was a graveyard.

Signaling the rest of my party to take it slow, I studied the white seabed around us. The bottom appeared to be covered with dead coral, clinking underfoot like bleached bones, and it took me a second to realize it was not coral at all but actual bones-human remains. The whole area was a vast killing field. The sheer quantity of bones was remarkable, far more than was accounted for by the sunken wrecks. How did they get there?

Before I could work this out, there was a strange commotion from up front, a lot of yelling inside my head. Pull back, pull back! At the same time, a swarm of dim objects, visible only as pale wisps against the bioluminous haze, suddenly swept across the bottom and started fastening onto me with sharp pincers.