Конрад Уильямс: One

I’m extremely grateful to Dr Christoph Winkler, Project Scientist for the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) at the European Space Agency, for his input regarding gamma ray bursts. Paul McAuley also helped with the science (and encouraged me when the idea for this novel was in its infancy). If there are any factual howlers, point the finger at me, not them.

Thanks too to Rob Wilcock for details regarding oil platforms and for checking a couple of early chapters. Alan McGrath also chipped in with anecdotes regarding life on the rigs.

Other people who helped during the writing of this book were Nicholas Royle, Shaun Hamilton, Simon Strantzas, Ethan, Ripley, Zac, Mum and Dad. My superb editors at Virgin Books, Adam Nevill and Simon Lee-Price, made sure I didn’t take my eye off the ball. Thanks also to Robert Kirby at United Agents.

As always, Rhonda Carrier read drafts, rolled her eyes, shook her head, but generally infused me with confidence and hope. I love that woman.

…and in the morningtime we can drive in the jeep to the zoo and bort tikits and see the munkiz. Our jeep is cool acoz it goz reely fast and plays som grat muzik and its a green car…

Richard Jane glanced to his left and saw the other divers ranged away from him at ten-foot intervals, ghosts fading into the distance. Visibility was poorer than usual but he could just make out the yellow flashes of Henrikson Subsea’s company logo on the dive suits. His breath came in shallow stitches. He could feel his heartbeat where it played in the thin skin of his wrist whenever it pressed against his suit as he applied pressure to the wrench. Another few turns and this section of the clamp would be sound. The fatigue crack, fully three feet long, was a black frown in the scarred weld between the node and its supportive brace. The great leg of the oil platform rose into the murk and was lost. You had to move against the current to get the job done. You had to anticipate where it might try to drag you and plant your stance accordingly.

This deep, the pressure was so great that it could be felt like a vice around the chest. The first time Richard Jane experienced it, all those years ago during his training – hard, filthy work burning three-inch monel bolts out of the flanges of a rig in the Gulf of Mexico – he thought he was having a heart attack. Breathing was labour. But the complexity and physical demands of his work took him out of his environment, helped him to forget about the risk, or at least keep it at a manageable distance. The ocean was unforgiving at these alien fathoms. Death was in the deep. It cruised around like the shadows of sharks. And like a shark it could smell a drop of blood from miles away. It preyed on the mind after a while, if you let the thoughts settle. No amount of reading or cards or letters home would steer you away after that.

Jane had known two men, in his four years as a saturation diver, who had taken their own lives because of the pressures of the job. He was a veteran already. Few lasted longer than two years in this line. Despite the advances in technology and safety, it still put a drain on your health. Holes in the lungs. Neurological threat. Aseptic bone necrosis. A sense of never being able to escape the cold: helium’s thermal conductivity sapped the body of heat. The hot water pumped through the wetsuit was just never hot enough. Sometimes the grand a day he made on these two-week stints seemed insufficient. You spent so long down here you forgot what trees looked like; you’d be forgiven for believing the entire planet looked like this.

The helium mix turned everyone’s voice cartoonishly high, but it could only have been Stopper who said, ‘Down tools in fifteen. Three days from now I’m going to be suffering from a bad case of boozer’s elbow.’

‘Better than tosser’s forearm, you skirt-frightener.’ That was Carver.

Tyldesley’s voice, coffeewarm in the control room, nearly a thousand feet north of here, said, ‘Cut the banter, you prozzers. Job’s not over till you hear the school bell go. Till then, your freezing cold arse flesh is mine, d’you hear me? All mine.’

‘Charming fucker,’ said Rae, immediately to Jane’s left. He was making wanking gestures. There was something about seeing that, 600 feet beneath the surface of the North Sea, 150 miles from Aberdeen – that and Rae’s falsetto profanity – that Jane found hilariously funny. He started laughing and could not stop. He felt something pop in his head and thought he might have pulled a muscle. Tears in his eyes threaded his vision with colour. There was a strange sensation of increased pressure, as if a gust of wind had suddenly barrelled into them, and then the soft hiss of the headset died, the heat from the circulating water began to rapidly dissipate.

He saw Rae turn to him, arms outstretched: What the fuck?

‘Tyldesley? Tyldesley? Are you reading me?’ There might have been a trace of panic in Jane’s voice but the helium disguised it. He gave three quick tugs on the security rope binding them all together and made a start for the pair of two-man diving bells, twenty feet east. There had been some failure, some catastrophic failure. Fear swelled inside him, like decompression sickness. He had seen a man with the bends once. You don’t forget that. All of the limbs withdrawn into a core of impossible pain. The welter of blood at every orifice, fizzing bright red. Bubbles opening in the jelly of the eyes.

He checked back a couple of times on that shambling race for the bells. He could only see Stopper, but the silver streams of bubbles rising behind him suggested that Rae and Carver were at his heels.

Jane reached the second bell and swung himself under. He rose through the open hatch, pulling himself in with arms that felt too weak to support him, or anything else. He was shivering, trying to shoulder off his bale-out bottle when Stopper’s head emerged into the wet porch.

‘Electrics?’ Stopper asked, when he’d levered off his helmet.

‘Must be,’ Jane said. ‘Thank fuck the back-up kicked in or we’d have been sucking in nothing but the taste of rubber.’

‘What do we do?’

‘I’m calling this an emergency,’ Jane said. ‘How about you?’

‘I second that.’

‘We get back to the habitat,’ Jane said. ‘Decompress. Then kick the cock off whichever twunt sat on the off button. Are the others in?’

‘Already ascending,’ Stopper said.

Jane sealed the inner hatch and turned his attention to the depth gauge, so it was Stopper who saw the first of the dead fish drifting past the portholes. ‘Look,’ he said. His large goalkeeping hands kept wiping and rewiping the Zappa moustache that bracketed his tight nervous mouth. Shoals of dead fish – cod, coley, pollack – were raining down around them.

‘What’s it look like to you?’ Stopper asked Jane.

Jane shook his head. Visibility was improving as they rose out of the black of deep sea into the blue surface waters above 200 feet. Blood billowed out of the fish from the gills and the eyes, swinging in the pulses of current. ‘Explosion, maybe?’ he said. ‘Poison in the water?’

‘Poison wouldn’t put our comms out,’ noted Stopper. ‘But maybe they’re unconnected. Shall I try the radio in here?’

‘Already did,’ Jane said. ‘It’s dead.’

‘We need to get back to the Ceto,’ Stopper said. ‘We need to get inside.’