Leviathan Rising Part 20

"Do not interrupt!" Ulysses barked.

Realising that he was dealing with a man on the edge, Carcharodon fell silent.

"Go on, Professor."

"We believed our intentions to be honourable. It was all for the greater good of the Empire. To create bio-mechanical constructs, weapon-creatures to protect Magna Britannia's interests at sea. But in reality it was an act of the greatest hubris against G.o.d and nature. I can't even tell you about the experiments the German exiles were said to be carrying out on live human specimens."

The professor looked close to emotional collapse again. He paused and took a deep breath.

"But we were all equally to blame. We all had our roles within this blasphemous exercise. Carcharodon's company provided the s.h.i.+ps to transport everything here, Umbridge Industries built the base itself." He paused, and pointed at the emaciated elderly man in the photograph. "That's Josiah Umbridge there."

"And he was the one prevented from coming on this trip due to ill health?" Ulysses asked rhetorically, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.

"He sent that fellow Sylvester in his place, yes." Crichton resumed his story. "Lady Denning and myself were brought in because of our expertise in the fields of marine biology and evolutionary biology to help Seziermesser and his team of Frankenstein Corps exiles here," he pointed at a white-coated, also bespectacled, haughty looking scientist, "to create the hybrid-vivisects themselves."

"Hybrid-vivisects?" Ulysses couldn't help interrupting at hearing this.

"The Kraken, if you prefer. The amalgam of the Architeuthis Dux with genetic material from a number of other marine creatures, so that it might exhibit the properties of those species. There are the obvious accoutrements, of course, of the electric eel, crustacean armour and the melanocetus jaws, but other creatures had their parts to play as well. For example, the prototype also had grafted into its genetic matrix the attributes of Asterias Rubens, the common starfish, and aNemones. It can regenerate damaged limbs, even re-grow other parts of its body, allowing it to recover from significant injury, given time."

Ulysses felt like he was sitting in on one of Professor Crichton's lectures. For a brief moment he caught a glimpse of the scientist at his most relaxed, talking about that which interested him the most - his work.

"Professor, you said they were bio-mechanical constructs," Ulysses said intrigued, trying to get to the heart of the matter.

"Well, yes. We needed some way of controlling them after all and marrying the mechanical to the biological made them even more effective and resistant to damage. Felix Lamprey, this man here," - he pointed at a young, bearded man - "designed both the creatures' internal endo-skeletons, including the mechadendrite tentacle cores, and also programmed the Babbage-unit adapted nervous systems. That was our way of controlling them. He was an undisputed genius. Until he lost it."

"Where did you collect your monstrous specimens from in the first place?"

"From the trench, of course. That was where Horsley came in," Crichton said melancholically, nodding at the still skewered Major. No one had thought to take the body down with everything else that was going on. "Big game hunter, wasn't he? He provided the expertise by which to hunt and trap the colossal squid living down there."

Ulysses paused. There was one last thing he wanted to know about, more so than Felix Lamprey's implied mental instability.

"Professor," he began cautiously. "Did you know my father?"

"Oh yes. We all knew Hercules Quicksilver."

"Then what part did he have to play in Project Leviathan?"

Crichton took another pull on his flask before answering. There couldn't be much left in the silvered container now.

"I believe his t.i.tle was that of Observer. He was the face of the Empire down here in these d.a.m.ned abyssal depths."

"And what did you mean by Lamprey losing it? What happened to him?"

The professor suddenly froze and tensed, his face becoming a contorted gargoyle grimace.

"Professor?"

Crichton's body tensed again involuntarily and he fell, pole-axed, onto the floor with a painfully loud clang. The others surrounded him in a moment but there was nothing any of them could do. The professor was fitting, joints seizing, hands contorted into paralytic claws, spittle foaming from between vice-tight jaws.

"Professor!" Ulysses shouted helplessly. Just as the old sod had started to give him some idea of what might be going on, this happened. Could it be something other than coincidence?

"What's wrong with him?" Carcharodon squealed, his face pale as ever.

"He's suffering a seizure," Wates said. "It's like he's having a stroke,"

"I've seen this sort of thing before," Nimrod revealed.

"Go on," Ulysses encouraged.

"The introduction of certain neuro-toxins to the human nervous system can have such an effect."

"Which toxins?"

"Those naturally produced by some animals to help protect them against attack from larger predators. Sea-urchin venom, for one."

"But he hasn't come into contact with anything like that since we've been stuck down here," Selby said. "Has he? I mean there's not a mark on him to say that he has, is there?"

Ulysses picked up the hip flask from where the thras.h.i.+ng Crichton had dropped it. He sniffed at the open neck of the container. There was the heady aroma of alcohol and... something else.

"He didn't have to have been stung. He could have ingested it."

Renewed looks of horror spread throughout the group.

"Our killer has been busy."

The fitting Crichton's body tensed one last time and then his muscles relaxed and he lay motionless on the cold hard floor, his eyes wide open, the flicker of life within them faded. Nimrod felt for a pulse.

"The professor is dead."

"I see it now," Ulysses said, in a tone of wonder, as if he was experiencing an epiphany of sorts. "Carcharodon, what was the outcome of Project Leviathan? Why have I never heard of it? Why did everyone involved swear never to speak of it again?"

The s.h.i.+pping magnate met Ulysses' intense stare with one of his own. "I do not see how raking over something that happened a quarter of a century ago is going to be of relevance to our situation now."

"What? You can't be serious!"

"You heard what Crichton said. We swore."

"And look where that's got us! This has all been planned from the start only I couldn't see it. But now I have one more piece of the puzzle in my hands. Someone has tried to lure as many members of Project Leviathan here as they can and is now b.u.mping them off one by one."

"I do not wish to discuss this matter any further."

"What sordid little secrets are you so determined to keep hidden?"

"I do not wish to discuss it!"

"Well we better had start discussing it, because unless I find out what's going on here, people are going to continue to die, Carcharodon!" Ulysses bellowed. "And you could be next!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Lamprey's Legacy Ulysses Quicksilver stormed back into the sub-dock anteroom, shoving a scowling Jonah Carcharodon in his chair before him.

"Horsley's dead," he announced, "Crichton's dead and you, Lady Denning and Carcharodon, are the only surviving members of Project Leviathan left on this base. You're the only ones left and this stubborn old fool," he roared into the cowed Carcharodon's ear, "refuses to tell me what happened to the project. Would you be so good as to tell me what the h.e.l.l's going on before we all die here?"

"Mr Quicksilver? What do you mean?"

"Know anything about poisons, do you, your ladys.h.i.+p? Specifically neuro-toxins synthesised by certain sea creatures to defend themselves from potential predators?"

"Well, yes, I do," the older woman admitted, wrong-footed by Ulysses' bizarre tangential line of questioning, shocked by both his approach and the revelation that two of her erstwhile colleagues were dead. "In my work as a marine biologist."

"Care to elaborate?"

"Well, there are various species that employ such a method of defence, sea urchins, sea snakes and the like. Many of them produce toxins powerful enough to kill a man. But I don't understand. What are you getting at?"

"Professor Crichton just died of a neuro-toxin induced stroke," Ulysses revealed, with all the lurid panache of a Grand Guignol theatrical compere.

"Oh my G.o.d," Lady Denning gasped, covering her mouth in horror, as did a number of others around the room.

"I know all about Project Leviathan, Lady Denning. I know that you were here, twenty-five years ago, part of the team that created the monster that's been hounding us ever since our, as yet, unknown saboteur sent the Neptune plummeting to this watery h.e.l.l. There's no point trying to deny it. Tell me, what happened to Felix Lamprey?"

"You've already seen for yourself," the marine biologist stated coldly.

"What? Enough riddles, Lady Denning. I want the truth, plain and simple. Tell me now! Tell us all!"

"In the chair, in the central chamber. I was not there at the end, but it couldn't have been anyone else. Of that I am sure. Felix Lamprey is the mummified corpse in the chair."

Ulysses called to mind the macabre discovery sat in the ma.s.sive chair contraption in the central laboratory chamber, the curious helm upon the desiccated corpse's skull, the bullet hole in the middle of its forehead. Another piece of the puzzle was slotting into place.

"There's more you're still not telling me!" Ulysses snapped. "Tell me everything!"

"If you know of Project Leviathan, then you know of the auspices under which we all worked," she began. "We all had parts to play, that is true, but it was Lamprey who made everything work together. He was the genius who managed to programme a semi-organic ent.i.ty to do as it was commanded. And not only that, he was able to use all of his technical know-how to cram all of the control mechanisms inside a helmet that transferred the controller's commands to the creature at virtually the speed of thought. He was undoubtedly a genius when it came to thinking machines and artificial cognisances. But then his daughter arrived."

"His daughter?" Ulysses thought of the photograph he had found in the archive.

"Little Marie," Lady Denning said, tears glistening at the corners of her eyes.

"How did her arrival change things?"

"I suppose, to put it simply, Lamprey had an attack of conscience. He had been so bound up in his work here at Marianas Base, determined to find a solution to every problem, driven by the question of could it be done, that he had never stopped to think whether it should be done. I suppose not many of us did. And if we had, then the question was always answered with the same plat.i.tude, 'For the greater good of Magna Britannia'. We had the security of the Empire in mind when we set about creating that beast out there."

Her words trailed off, as if she were reconsidering now her own att.i.tudes towards the matter, or as if she were living in the moment of the memory.

"So what happened?" Ulysses pressed.

"His wife and little Marie were coming for a scheduled visit when their s.h.i.+p was attacked."

"Attacked?"

"We were told in strictest confidence that it had been the Chinese but there were those among us, Lamprey included, who suspected that the truth was something much worse. Rumour had it, that one of the test subjects had gone rogue during a field test. Some claimed that the beast attacked and sank the s.h.i.+p, mistaking it for a viable hostile target before it self-destructed. There were a handful of survivors, Marie amongst them, left bobbing on the surface in their lifeboats to be picked up by the Royal Navy rescue teams, but Lamprey's wife - little Marie's mother - she didn't make it.

"Her father now her sole guardian, Marie came to live with him here, at the base. It wasn't normal practice but then these were exceptional circ.u.mstances, and Lamprey was one of the senior members of the team.

"I suppose seeing her face, day in, day out, reminded him of what his work had cost them both. Lamprey's grief and overriding sense of guilt slowly wore away at his sanity until he went over the edge, and by that point it was too late to do anything to stop him.

"To his credit, he had tried to warn us," she said, a distant look in her tear-misted eyes. "He did try to persuade the others to abandon the project but, of course, our secret masters back in Whitehall wouldn't listen. And so he initiated the destruction of the base by the Kraken, using the control helm he had developed."

Lady Denning halted in her narrative, an icy silence following her words as all those listening considered the implications of what she had told them.

The sense of everything he had witnessed since arriving at Marianas Base was all becoming so much clearer now to Ulysses, like a smog lifting from the polluted streets of Londinium Maximum. The damage he had seen visited upon the base all made sense now too. The state of disarray in which they had found the place, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry, because it had.

"So, I take it, when the onslaught began that full evacuation procedures were initiated."

"Exactly so, Mr Quicksilver. Some died. Most escaped alive."

"And what happened to Lamprey?"

"I told you, I was one of the first to be evacuated. From what we have seen here tonight, I'd say someone managed to put an end to Lamprey before he was able to initiate the ultimate destruction of the facility. With, what we believed to be, the total destruction of Marianas Base, the project was deemed a failure and officially 'forgotten about' by those that had plotted it all from the start."

Ulysses considered the possibilities for a moment.

"And what happened to the girl, Marie?"

"That's the most tragic part of the whole affair. Such a young life, snuffed out."

"She was killed by the Kraken? Or by whoever did for her father?"

"I don't know," Lady Denning admitted angrily. "Her body never turned up. She was cla.s.sified as missing, presumed dead, just like her father."

"And now history's repeating itself," Ulysses said.

"Yes," Lady Denning agreed. "It has a nasty habit of doing that."

A tremor rumbled through the base, this time lasting longer than any that had shaken the facility so far.

"Well, I know what we need to do now," Ulysses said confidently.

"And what is that, sir?" Nimrod enquired.

"We evacuate again. We take the Ahab or the Nemo and we get out of here before the beast brings this place down on all our heads."

"You can't be serious!" the purser bl.u.s.tered, obviously terrified at the prospect. His world had been shaken to the core when his commanding officer had been injured. Any nerve he might have once had had now deserted him.