Northern Stars Read online

  “It could be worse.”

  “Oh, I’m not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “What brings you down here? What are you looking for?”

  Clarke doesn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know, really,” she says at last. “Privacy, I guess.”

  Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” Ballard says pleasantly.

  Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch swinging shut.

  Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I’m not the sort of person you really want to know.

  * * *

  Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke’s breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.

  “Management says—” She stops. “You’ve got blue eyes.”

  Clarke smiles slightly. “You’ve seen them before.”

  “I know. It’s just kind of surprising, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you without your caps on.”

  Clarke sits down with her breakfast. “So, what does Management say?”

  “We’re on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four.” Ballard sits down across from Clarke. “I wonder sometimes why we’re not online right now.”

  “I guess they just want to be sure everything works.”

  “Still, six months seems like a long time for a dry run. And you’d think that—well, they’d want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that’s happened.”

  After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.

  “And there’s something else,” Ballard says. “I can’t get through to Piccard.”

  Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galapagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.

  “Did you ever meet the couple there?” Ballard asks. “Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?”

  Clarke shakes her head. “They went through before me. I never met any of the other Rifters except you.”

  “Nice people. I thought I’d call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through.”

  “Line down?”

  “They say it’s probably something like that. Nothing serious. They’re sending a ’scaphe down to check it out.”

  Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate—one’s all it would take …

  Something creaks, deep in Beebe’s superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn’t looking.

  “Sometimes,” she says, “I wish we didn’t keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull.”

  Ballard smiles. “Come on. Would you want to spend three months sitting in a decompression tank afterwards?”

  In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.

  “Seismic. Wonderful.” Ballard disappears into Systems. Clarke follows.

  An amber line is writhing across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.

  “Get your eyes back in,” Ballard says. “The Throat’s acting up.”

  * * *

  They can hear it all the way to Beebe; a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The colour is different. It ripples.

  They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.

  Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.

  The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.

  “Jesus!” Ballard shouts over the noise. “It’s not supposed to do that!”

  Clarke checks her thermistor. It won’t settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty-eight and back again, within seconds. A myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.

  “Why the light show?” Clarke calls back.

  “I don’t know!” Ballard answers. “Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!”

  Without warning, the tumult dies.

  The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.

  A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.

  “Smoker,” Ballard says into the sudden stillness. “A big one.”

  They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There is a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several metres long, between two of the generators.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Ballard says. “That’s why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!”

  “The rift is never stable,” Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.

  Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. “Well, according to this there’s no damage,” she calls down, after looking inside. “Hang on, let me switch channels here—”

  Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.

  And does.

  “We were lucky,” Ballard is saying above her. “The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it’s not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!”

  Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she’s planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.

  “Are you crazy?” Ballard shouts. “That’s an active smoker!”

  Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. “We need temperature readings,” she says, “from inside the mouth.”

  “Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!”

  I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. “It just finished erupting,” she calls back. “It’ll take a while to build up a fresh head.” She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.

  “Get out of there, now!”

  “Just a second.” Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.

  Clarke stiffens and pulls free. “Don’t—” touch me! She catches herself. “I’m out, okay, you don’t have to…”

  “Further.” Ballard keeps swimming. “Over here.”

  They are near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. “Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!”

  Clarke does not answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. “Watch your back,” she says.

  Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke cannot see the creature’s tail, although several metres of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.

  Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.

  The gulper’s jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.

  Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.

  Clarke puts her hand out. “Wait a minute. It’s not coming at us.”

  The front end of the gulper is about ten metres distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.

  “Are you crazy?” Ballard moves clear of Clarke’s hand, still watching the monster.

  “Maybe it isn’t
hungry,” Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny un-winking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.

  “They’re always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?”

  The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a great meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.

  “Fuck this,” Ballard says, and charges.

  Her first stroke opens a metre-long gash in the creature’s side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.

  Clarke watches without moving. Why can’t she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she’s better than everything?

  Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a great tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.

  She frees the things inside.

  They spill out through the wound; two huge viperfish and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn’t recognize. One of the viperfish is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.

  Ballard. From behind.

  “Lenie!” Ballard’s knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The viperfish begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.

  Finally, Clarke begins to move.

  The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear of those thrashing coils.

  Ballard’s knife continues to dip and twist. The viperfish is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard cannot twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature’s head in her hands.

  It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.

  “Kill it!” Ballard shouts. “Jesus, what are you waiting for?”

  Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.

  There is a silence.

  After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard is still there, and Ballard is angry.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says.

  Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.

  “You’re supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned passive all the time?”

  “Sorry.” Sometimes it works.

  Ballard reaches behind her back. “I’m cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—”

  Clarke swims behind her and looks. “A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?”

  “It broke through the diveskin,” Ballard says, as if to herself. “And when that gulper hit me, it could have…” She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. “… I could have been killed. I could have been killed!”

  For an instant, it is as though Ballard’s ’skin and eyes and self-assurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.

  You can screw up too, Ballard. It isn’t all fun and games. You know that now.

  It hurts, doesn’t it.

  Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. “It’s okay,” Clarke says. “Jeanette, it’s—”

  “You idiot!” Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. “You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!”

  Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn’t just anger, she realizes. This isn’t just the heat of the moment. She doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like me at all.

  She never did.

  * * *

  Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-grey planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There is an airlock for divers at the south pole, and a docking hatch for ’scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armour and Lenie Clarke.

  She is doing a routine visual check on the hull; standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the Communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.

  Besides, out here in the void it seems only natural to be alone.

  She is examining a cable clamp when an angler charges into the light. It is about two metres long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe’s floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The angler twists to one side, knocking the hull with her tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.

  Clarke watches, fascinated. The angler swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.

  The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. The angler lashes its dorsal spine. The lure at its end, a glowing worm-shaped thing, luminesces furiously.

  Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.

  “Lenie? Are you okay?”

  Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: “I’m okay.”

  “I heard something out there,” Ballard says. “I just wanted to make sure you were…”

  “I’m fine,” Clarke says. “It was just a fish, trying to eat one of the lights.”

  “They never learn, do they?”

  “No. I guess not. See you later.”

  “See—”

  Clarke switches off her receiver.

  Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn’t?

  We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they’d leave us alone …

  She stares out past Beebe’s electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?

  Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe’s lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she is face to face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe’s hull.

  She pushes off.

  The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She does not know how far she has come.

  But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.

  Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.

  Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke’s field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.

  There are so many of them.

  She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.

  It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don’t know when to quit. It doesn’t matter how much they eat. Their voracity is as much a part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws. Ravenous dwarfs attack giants twice their own size, and sometimes win. The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.

  But even a desert has oases, and sometimes the deep hunters find them. They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and gorge themselves; their descendants grow huge and bloated over such delicate bones …

  My light was off, and
it left me alone. I wonder …

  She turns it back on. Her vision clouds in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to unrelieved black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty water wherever she points it.

  She switches it off. There is a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.

  They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand metres from the nearest sunlight, that it’s only dark when the lights are on.

  * * *

  “What the hell is wrong with you? You’ve been gone for over three hours, did you know that? Why didn’t you answer me?”

  Clarke bends over and removes her fins. “I guess I turned my receiver off,” she says. “I was—wait a second, did you say—”

  “You guess? Have you forgotten every safety reg they drilled into us? You’re supposed to have your receiver on from the moment you leave Beebe until you get back!”

  “Did you say three hours?”

  “I couldn’t even come out after you, I couldn’t find you on sonar! I just had to sit here and hope you’d show up!”

  It only seems a few minutes since she pushed off into the darkness. Clarke climbs up into the lounge, suddenly chilled.

  “Where were you, Lenie?” Ballard demands, coming up behind her. Clarke hears the slightest plaintive tone in her voice.

  “I—I must’ve been on the bottom,” Clarke says. “That’s why sonar didn’t get me. I didn’t go far.”

  Was I asleep? What was I doing for three hours?

  “I was just … wandering around. I lost track of the time. I’m sorry.”

  “Not good enough. Don’t do it again.”

  There is a brief silence. They hear the sudden, familiar impact of flesh on metal.

  “Christ!” Ballard snaps. “I’m turning the externals off right now!”

  Whatever it is gets in two more hits by the time Ballard reaches the Systems cubby. Clarke hears her punch a couple of buttons.

  Ballard comes out of Systems. “There. Now we’re invisible.”

  Something hits them again. And again.

  “I guess not,” Clarke says.