Leviathan Rising Part 23

He could only guess at why Felix Lamprey had not used the same method to wipe all trace of the base from the bottom of the ocean. He supposed that, having decided to use the Kraken to bring about the demise of its creators, having strapped himself into the chair, he could not then access the base's difference engines to do anything else, having committed himself. Perhaps access to the difference engines he needed had been compromised. Perhaps there were too many who could have done something to countermand his instructions and prevent the cogitators from making the final countdown, thereby denying him the option of initiating the self-destruct sequence. Ulysses imagined that paranoia had caused the base's architects to include such a system, if the Marianas facility had been erected at the height of the cold war that had been waged between Magna Britannia and its imperial Chinese rival, in case it was in danger of falling into enemy hands. In all likelihood, Lamprey may well have hoped to make his own escape from Marianas before the Kraken wrought too great a level of damage, giving him the precious minutes to get away himself.

However, now, at this allotted time, at this allotted hour, someone had activated that which had being lying dormant within the very foundations of the base, far, far below the ocean waves. Someone insane enough, with their own escape route already planned had used the link to their own advantage, to ensure that any and all loose ends were finally tied up for good.

With a weak groan, Ulysses' faithful manservant, never one to s.h.i.+rk his responsibilities or be accused of dereliction of his duty, stirred at Schafer's touch.

Ulysses felt a surge of relief pa.s.s through every fibre of his being. "I knew you wouldn't let me down, old chap," he said quietly, as Schafer helped Nimrod into a sitting position, seeing what he could do for the cut on his head. After all, every able-bodied man would have to play his part, if any of them were going to escape from the base with their lives.

And talking of able-bodied men...

Still encased within the pressure suit, Ulysses cut an imposing figure as he strode towards Cheng's place of confinement.

Harry Cheng physically withered before him, recoiling as much as was possible, given his state of bondage, until Ulysses slammed to an abrupt halt a few feet from him.

For a moment they regarded each other, Ulysses seeing Cheng through the panels of thick gla.s.s in the portholes of his helmet, a cowering wretch who had tried to seize control and take over but who had failed, now looking like he was convinced that his time had come.

"T minus two minutes and counting," came the monotonously cheerful voice of the Neptune AI as the countdown continued to echo from the walls of the dock.

Ulysses raised the ma.s.sive, pincer arm of the mechanised suit above his head.

"Mr Quicksilver, have mercy. I beg your most humble apologies for my impolite actions earlier. It was not my wish that anyone lose their life."

Not a word issued from the speakers of the suit. The heavy claw hung there, motionless in mid-air.

Cheng pulled back as far as he could, exposing the links of the cuffs against the bare metal of the pillar to which he had been chained. There could be no doubt now that he believed Ulysses was going to finish him.

The claw swept down, describing a slow scything arc. There was the sound of impact, the shearing scream of metal on metal, the jingling of shattered links raining down on the deck, and Harry Cheng tumbled backwards onto the floor.

He sat up, looking at Ulysses with equal parts amazement and elated relief, distractedly rubbing at his bloodied wrists.

"Don't make me regret doing that," Ulysses' voice boomed from within the suit.

Cheng scrambled to his feet. Then, body straight, he bowed low. "I am your humble servant," he said.

"So, Nimrod, you think you can pilot this?"

Easing himself into one of the padded leather seats, Ulysses' loyal aide did his best to make himself comfortable, dabbing at the open wound on his head again with his no longer pristine handkerchief.

"Yes, sir. It shouldn't be too difficult."

"It certainly won't be if I take the co-pilot's seat," Cheng offered, smiling weakly and climbing into the seat next to him.

There was a moment's awkward silence. Nimrod looked back to where his master stood, squeezed into the cabin of the Nemo, still encased inside the ma.s.sive pressure suit. Ulysses said nothing.

''Very well, sir," Nimrod said graciously, his aquiline features not betraying any emotion whatsoever. "That would be most kind."

"Take us out then, Nimrod," Ulysses commanded, as John Schafer buckled himself into a seat behind the pilots' position.

"As you wish, sir."

Slowly the Nemo powered up, its propeller chopping the water noisily behind it, and then, ballast tanks filling, it sank below the unsettled waters of the sub-dock and glided towards the open pressure gate. And then they were through.

Leaving Marianas Base behind - a strange, haunted place that had on first impressions appeared to be a place of sanctuary - the Nemo powered after the Ahab, already a good hundred yards ahead of their position.

"It's now or never, Nimrod," Ulysses stated soberly, observing the distant shape of the vessel chugging away from them. "We have to catch up with that sub."

"And then what?" Schafer asked.

Ulysses fixed the young man with a thoughtful look through a side port in the helmet dome.

"Don't worry, I'll think of something."

"Sir, I hope you don't mind me asking," Nimrod said. "But you do know what you're doing, don't you?"

"Oh, you know me, Nimrod. I'm making this up as we go along."

"Very well, sir. It is as I suspected."

Seeing the horrified expression on Schafer's face, Ulysses laid the gauntlet hand of the suit gently upon the young man's shoulder.

"Don't worry, old chap," his voice crackled from the suit speakers. "We'll reunite you with your precious Constance soon enough."

"And what of the Kraken?" It was Cheng who threatened to jinx their enterprise with his talk of the sea monster.

Ulysses turned awkwardly in his suit so that he could see beyond the viewing port at the rear of the Nemo's pa.s.senger pod. The Marianas Base was already a shrinking conglomeration of broken domes, like cracked open eggs, overshadowed by the cliff-spur above it. And there, amidst the twisted spars and shattered structures the squid-beast wrestled with a stubbornly resisting hull section, caught up in its own frenzied a.s.sault, as if it was determined to bring an end to the place that had sp.a.w.ned it, nature using this most unnatural of tools to eradicate what had been begun here twenty-five years before.

"As I said, Cheng, it's now or never. So let's make the most of now, shall we?"

"T minus one minute and counting," the sober English voice resounded around the empty dock, but there was no one left alive to hear it.

"Fifty seconds," the AI told the corpse of Lady Josephine Denning, rigor mortis having locked her body into the pose that electrocution by mecha-tentacle arm had forced upon it.

"Forty seconds," it announced to the floating bodies belonging to the two crewmen of the Neptune, the purser and Mr Wates, gunned down as they had tried to fulfil their obligations to those they had helped save from drowning.

"Thirty seconds," it addressed the dead Captain Connor 'Mac' McCormack, hands still clasped to the ugly wound in his belly, the late Dr Ogilvy and the deceased engineers Swann and Clements, left behind in the dive preparation chamber.

"Twenty seconds," the voice boomed from the intercom panel in the Marianas archive, where Professor Maxwell Crichton lay, his face locked in a grimace of perpetual agony, the venom having done its work with deadly efficiency.

"Ten seconds," the voice of Neptune boomed from speakers in the workshop-c.u.m-operating theatre, its continuing echoes sounding like the slamming of airlock hatches, Thor Haugland's hanging body swinging in its chains as the sub-seismic shuddering increased in intensity.

Nine.

Major Marmaduke Horsley, head hung low on his chest, the harpoon shaft still pinning his body tight to the chamber wall, stared with sadness into oblivion, a gla.s.sy expression in his never closing eyes.

Eight.

The mummified body of Felix Lamprey smiled its rictus grin with good reason now, knowing that the insane genius' final master plan would come to fruition at last, after so long a hiatus.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Framed within the rear view porthole of the Nemo, the detonation that enveloped the Marianas Base seemed like such a little thing. Nothing really to write home about, Ulysses thought.

But nervous antic.i.p.ation did set his heart racing again as he saw the Kraken disappear within the expanding sphere of light that suddenly brought stark luminescence to the abyssal night.

Had the abomination been destroyed, caught up within the sphere of destruction, which came like the wrath of the G.o.d of the Sea claiming its own?

Tears obscuring her vision, mucus running thickly from her nose and into her mouth, she pulled hard at the life-pod hatch. A blubbering moan of despair issued from between her quivering lips, from deep inside her - so heart-rending a sound from one so young - at last, all her weight hanging off the door handle, she felt the clamp depress in her hands and with a slow gasp of compressed air and the creak of complaining hinges, she pulled the hatch open.

She clambered into the bathysphere capsule with ease, pulling the hatch shut again behind her, young muscles straining as she activated the locking clamps, sealing the pod tight.

In a moment of near panic she tried to make sense of the instrument panel above her head, all winking lights, dials and switches. But then she saw what her father had always told her to look for, on those occasions when he had reminded her of the safety protocols active within Marianas Base.

She slammed her open palm against a large red b.u.t.ton and then collapsed back into the padded seat behind her, trembling fingers attempting to secure the harness straps over her shoulders and across her waist, as the warning siren blared its discordant wail, alerting the bathysphere's pa.s.senger that it was about to blast free of the base, a sinister crimson light filling the pod with its h.e.l.lish glow.

She tensed in her seat, eyes squeezed tight shut, teeth gritted in terror, desperate hands clutching for the doll that wasn't there, her ever faithful companion who could have seen her through this and made her feel better, but whom she had been forced to leave behind, just like her beloved father.

And then, announced by a deafening clunk-chsssss, the locking clamps blew, hurling the bathysphere away from the facility, the tiny escape capsule soaring upwards through the miasmal darkness, heading for the surface and safety thousands of feet above, the child howling in anguish, knowing that she would never see her father again.

He was inside the airlock now, the huge suit barely fitting inside the conning tower airlock of the submersible. The Nemo was closing on the Ahab at last, the smaller sub apparently the faster of the two.

Ulysses waited, with bated breath, his heart thumping hard against his ribs, every sense heightened by the rush of adrenalin pulsing through his body.

The crackle of static interference that presaged the activation of the radio pick-up in his helm was followed by the measured tones of his manservant's voice.

"We are closing, sir. Nemo will be in range in three, two, one. Ahab in range. It's now or never, sir."

"Now or never," Ulysses whispered, his mouth suddenly dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.

"Good luck, sir."

Ulysses punched the emergency eject and the airlock blasted open in a torrent of bubbles and swirling seawater. The abominable pressures working on the craft at these depths sucked out the air, the pressure suit and Ulysses with it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Sea Change Bubbles of escaping air blinding him, the hull of the Ahab nothing but a blur in the whirling confusion of light from the one remaining suit spot and the surrounding hungry darkness of the deep, Ulysses flung out the left arm of the suit. As the pincer touched the second sub, he pulled hard on the closing mechanism built into the arm, the effort of his exertions jarring his shoulder just as much as if it had been his own arm that had grabbed hold of the speeding vessel. The pincer teeth seized a protrusion on the outside of the Ahab and snapped shut, biting into the fin they had captured.

For one heart-stopping moment, the two subs touched, the collision barely more than a kiss but one which still sent the two craft reeling away from one another, the Ahab spinning on its axis. Ulysses clung on for dear life, but he needn't have worried; the vice-like grip of the steel lobster claw held fast. However, this didn't stop the suited Ulysses from being thrown against the hull of the sub, rebounding with a metallic thud that left him feeling nauseous and disorientated.

He reached out with his other arm, the gauntlet-hand taking hold of another protruding part of the vessel. Heaving on that hand as well, he was able to bring himself under control again. He was now flat against the hull of the Ahab, facedown, cinched tight to the curved surface, a tail fin in one pincer and a maintenance ladder rung held tight within his right gauntlet-fist.

To his right he could see a porthole, yellow sodium light was.h.i.+ng out of it. He was so close that he could almost see inside the sub, but he wasn't quite close enough.

His curiosity frustrated, instead Ulysses focused on his primary task, that of reaching the Ahab's lateral airlock access. Hand over cautious hand he pulled himself along the side of the submersible, first releasing the pincer and then, when that was securely clamped around another handhold, loosening the grip of the suit's over-large robot hand.

And all the while the Ahab continued powering through the water, heading inexorably for the surface, forcing Ulysses to battle the drag of the slipstream, which tugged horribly at the unstreamlined pressure suit.

Slowly but surely he traversed the exterior of the Ahab, the convoluted construction of the hull providing him with plenty of handholds with which to heave himself up, until eventually he came alongside the entrance to the vessel's airlock.

Where those who had made the journey to Marianas Base from the incapacitated Neptune on board the Nemo had had to exit through the conning tower airlock - as Ulysses had just done again himself - when they had surfaced in the pressure dock pool, Carcharodon's cronies aboard his private submersible had been able to stride out through the lateral dock and down a gangplank to the deck below.

Ulysses found himself alongside that same hatchway now and, grabbing hold of the door's opening mechanism cranked the manual override. With a shunk the door opened and Ulysses pulled the ma.s.sive bulk of his suit inside, manually sealing the airlock again from inside.

He realised that one of the things he did not have working for him, given this approach, was the element of surprise. Those on board the Ahab already knew that the Nemo was on their tail, the two, thankfully unarmed, submersibles having already sc.r.a.ped together. They would also have heard Ulysses' clanking progress as he struggled up the side of the craft and would now be listening to him operating the airlock. But he did have something else on his side. He was, of course, encased inside an armoured suit that made him twice as tall as any other man, and ten times as strong, a suit that had resisted the horrendous pressures exerted upon it down in the ocean depths as well as the attentions of a fully grown Megalodon.

It wouldn't be a matter of what Carcharodon could do to him now that would be the problem, but what he might do to his hostages in desperation, as he stared into the gaping jaws of defeat.

With the hiss and suck of water being drawn out of the chamber, the air inside the airlock equalised with that inside the craft, allowing the inner door to be opened. Spinning the wheel-handle with a flick of his wrist, readying himself - his breathing slow, his heart racing - Ulysses opened the hatch.

He took in the scene that greeted him inside the cabin of the Ahab in a second. Constance Pennyroyal was huddled in a corner, tied up and gagged. Her eyes widened first in shock at seeing the bulky ma.s.s of the deep sea diving suit crammed into the airlock and then brightened noticeably on seeing who it was inside.

At the other end of the cabin, Chief Engineer Selby stood at the controls, being forced to pilot the vessel with a gun to his head; a gun, which was held in the wobbling hand of Miss Celeste. Next to her, Jonah Carcharodon sat hunched within his wheelchair, his back to Ulysses.

"Quicksilver? Is that you?" Carcharodon challenged.

"Miss Celeste," Ulysses said, speaking through the intercom of the suit. "Put the gun down. It's going to be all right."

"So it is you. I thought so," said Carcharodon, weariness evident in his voice. "Who else would it be?"

"I'm sorry, Mr Quicksilver," the PA said in a quavering voice, "but I can't do that."

"Whatever hold Carcharodon has over you, it's finished. I know what he's done. It's over now. He can't hurt you anymore. I won't let him."

"But, Mr Quicksilver, it would appear you have made a terrible mistake."

Taking the gun off Selby, Miss Celeste turned, spinning Carcharodon's chair around with her free hand at the same time - in which Ulysses now saw she was also holding a moth-eaten rag-doll - and trained her weapon on Ulysses, for all the good bullets would do against the abyss-resistant armour. A look of surprise flickered across her face as she took in the imposing figure of the dandy adventurer sheathed within the ma.s.sive pressure suit, but only for a moment. A second later, it was replaced by a cruel frown, a dark expression which filled Ulysses with a sense of unaccustomed foreboding.

The pa.s.sing look of surprise on Miss Celeste's face was nothing compared to the shock which possessed Ulysses' features on coming face-to-face with the ageing s.h.i.+pping magnate once more.

He was wearing a bright yellow, yet deflated lifejacket, tied tight around his neck and waist. The pockets, pouches and ripped open inflation chambers had been loaded with sticks of dynamite, the same explosives the escapees had found in their search of the divers' prep chamber. The cobbled together bomb-jacket was packed with enough dynamite to obliterate the Ahab and all on board. Twists of wire protruded from the explosives, connecting them to a black box in Carcharodon's lap, on the front of which was a dialled timer.

"You've been busy," was all Ulysses could think to say.

"Oh, he doesn't know the half of it, does he, Madeleine?" Miss Celeste said, addressing the doll in her hand. The doll she had rescued from the base. The doll Ulysses had seen in a flaking sepia-tint in the hands of - "The little girl," he said in wonder. "The child in the photograph."

"You recognise me then?"