After all, some still unidentified saboteur had used the Neptune itself to initiate the first phase of the sub-liner's destruction. And what was it that Glenda Finch had been trying to tease from the data files of the all-knowing AI?

He entered the last letters of the captain's pa.s.sword and then hit the enter key.

The synthesised voice of the artificial intelligence came to him in a buzz of static, relayed through the intercom speakers built into the helm.

"h.e.l.lo, Captain McCormack," the AI said in a softly spoken voice that would be forever England. "It is good to hear from you again."

With careful, patient movements, with the ship creaking and shivering around him, Ulysses set to work.

The ship groaned and shifted once more, the complaining sounds of metal under stress the Neptune's death rattle. The hull fissure was before him now. With pounding steps, moving as quickly as the bulky suit would allow, Ulysses powered towards the breach.

And then he was through. He dropped back down to the seabed, only a matter of feet from the precipitous edge of the black maw of the trench, his landing causing impact craters to appear in the silt and sand beneath the heavy weighted boots. Without pausing for a moment's thought, Ulysses kept moving forwards, towards the devastated domes, visible as no more than shadow-shapes in the murk, barely lit from inside. He was abruptly aware of how bright his own suit's spotlights must appear in the torpid darkness. But then, such feelings of conspicuousness and inferiority compared with what awaited him out there in the abyss could not crush the growing sense of excitement and euphoria welling up inside him.

He had risked life and limb but it had all been worth it, he thought with a burgeoning sense of elation. Not only had he been able to initiate the required link to the Marianas Base, and thereby hopefully help save the lives of those trapped inside, he had also been able to wheedle the other information he had wanted from the inner enigmatic workings of the Neptune's Babbage brain.

He had accessed the AI's log and had it confirmed for him that someone - and chances were it had been Glenda Finch, using another's ident.i.ty - had accessed files about the Carcharodon Shipping Company's accounts, just as McCormack had told those at the briefing after her death that now seemed like weeks ago, but which in reality must only have been the less than forty-eight hours before. More importantly, he also knew that whoever it was that had initiated the sabotage sub-routine had logged on as 'Father'.

These were indisputable facts, facts that would help him uncover the true villain of this tragedy, the one responsible for the deaths of so many, not only those murdered in the last few hours, but the thousands who had died when the Neptune went down.

He felt the seismic tremor of the sea-bed moving uncomfortably beneath him, like some great whale disturbed from its rest. He stumbled, not daring to stop and look back, knowing that time had run out for the Neptune at last. He ran on, at least he moved at what approximated to a run, hampered as he was by the grinding servos of the suit. It had been constructed for diver-engineers to work at static points outside the safety of the scientific facility. It had not been designed to win races.

He kept on, pushing the suit as hard as he dared. There was no telling how the ship might go. It might even swing round, slam into him and carry him over the edge with it. So he kept moving forwards, at the same time angling his course so that he was moving further and further away from the edge of the precipice, hearing the sc.r.a.ping of the ship as it grated across the sea-bed, the metal of its hull groaning in protest. Ulysses only hoped that the AI cracked the codes before the link was lost and the ship pitched into the crushing depths.

Then the cacophonous noise of the sliding vessel subsided and ceased, and so did the seismic juddering Ulysses felt through the heavy feet of the suit. Was the sub-liner gone? Had it plummeted over the edge and was it, even now, sinking to its final resting place, far beyond the reach of man?

Ulysses stopped and swung the suit round. The Neptune was still there, although in an even more precarious position than it had been before. It was lying along the edge of the abyss now, fully one third of its length suspended over the impossible drop.

He heard a crack as loud as a thunderclap, as if some colossus had broken a giant stone egg against a submerged mountain peak. Alarm bells rang inside his head as blood turned to ice in his veins. He had to keep moving.

The suit pounding across the seabed, ever carrying him towards the beleaguered base, Ulysses saw the fissure appear to his left and race away ahead of him. Rock shifted beneath him, slid sideways, dropping the section of seabed across which he was moving by several feet. His pulse thumped in his chest and in his brain. It seemed undoable now, impossible, but when had that ever stopped him?

An entire shelf of rock at the edge of the precipice had splintered free of the rest of the sea-bed, giving way under the weight and movement of the shifting sub-liner and weakened by the explosive destruction of the vessel's engines.

With a roar like pebbles being ground on a beach by the surf, only a hundred times louder, the cliff gave way, boulders the size of houses tumbling into the hungry darkness, taking Ulysses, helpless now, trapped inside the pressure suit, with it, down into the unfathomable depths of the Marianas Trench.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

The Belly of the Beast As the heavy suit dropped like a stone, plunging Ulysses into the untold depths on his back, watching the trench wall slide past, the lip of the precipice disappearing from view, he found himself wishing that he had fitted a grappling hook extension before embarking on his mission. Ulysses wondered how long he had before the ever-increasing hydrostatic pressures crushed the suit, and his body locked inside.

Now he came to think about it, there was a painful building pressure in his ears. Straining to peer through the bubble of the helm he was certain he saw a depression forming in the casing of the suit's left forearm. A rainbow of fairy lights began to blink on and off across the instrument panel in front of him. A discordant tinny beeping sounded in his ear.

A wave of nauseous panic washed through him and he wondered how many more seconds he had before the reinforced gla.s.s in front of his face cracked. With an audible pop, a spotlight imploded, the beam projecting into the gloom from his left shoulder snapping off.

Everything about the suit flashing him hazard indicators and blaring sirens in his ears, Ulysses' own sixth sense screamed loudest of all. But he could see nothing; there was no sign of any approaching threat. At least, not from above.

There was a metallic crunch as something closed around him and suddenly he was hurtling upwards. The trench wall raced past as if Ulysses were riding an express elevator to the surface. Straining his neck to see every which way he could out of the helmet dome, through the myriad porthole windows Ulysses saw saw-edged teeth, each the size of a man's hand, row upon row of them rolling back into the ma.s.sive jaw clenched around the suit. He saw pink flesh, his remaining spot-beam revealing flapping gills and a pitch-black cavernous gullet.

Ulysses could hear a cracking, creaking sound, suggesting that the enclosing jaws were trying to close even tighter. The pressure suit had resisted the terrible forces that tons of water pressure per square inch had worked on it, and was now resisting the crushing forces being applied by the ma.s.sive shark's jaws. But Ulysses couldn't be certain how long the suit could hold out. After all, he had seen with his own eyes what a Megalodon had done to the bio-mechanically engineered marvel that was the Kraken. The huge fish had, like as not, been surprised to find what it had considered to be a tasty morsel dropping into its abyssal home was then more resistant to its attentions than it had expected, but that sense of surprise wouldn't last for long.

Activate weapon systems, Ulysses told himself, his own imperative helping him to focus his mind on the matter in hand.

With his right hand he pulled hard on the trigger lever built into the suit's right arm. At once the Gatling-style harpoon gun opened up. Short, barbed quarrels tore through the flesh of the monster's jaw, shredding its gills, leaving ragged white flesh in its wake, black blood trailing from the savage wounds Ulysses had dealt the prehistoric fish.

The Megalodon's jaws were enormous, but Ulysses, encased inside the equally impressive pressure suit, was much bigger than a normal man. The giant looked like it could swallow even a Great White whole, but the dandy adventurer was something else. Ulysses fought hard.

A vast shadow pa.s.sed across his field of view, his remaining spotlight illuminating a circle of grey-green underbelly as the form soared pa.s.sed.

There was another abrupt lurch, this time as the Megalodon's speeding progress slowed, and another, jolting Ulysses hard within his harness. If it hadn't been for the restraining straps, Ulysses would surely have brained himself against the reinforced gla.s.s and steel in front of his face.

The shark's jaws spasmed, opening again, and Ulysses dropped from the huge mouth.

He could see the ruins of Marianas Base directly below him now, the devastated outer domes, the fractured tunnels, the dim lights of the still intact central hub. The Megalodon's attack had carried him right over the facility.

Ulysses dropped feet first, the leaden weights in his boots drawing him back down towards the seabed. It looked like he was going to land within the man-made canyon of rusted steel between two bulkhead domes, all that was left of another gutted laboratory-c.u.m-weapons-testing facility, a mere hundred yards from the airlock access. Lady Luck, or the G.o.d of the sea, was certainly smiling on him now.

He was moving before he even touched down on the solid seabed beneath him. That now seemingly ever-present dull throb of his subconscious warning him flared again and, instinctively, Ulysses turned.

He saw the severed head of the Megalodon, jaws open wide, its black pearlescent eyes bulging, dropping through the water.

Above it he saw a demon's maw of even more terribly distended jaws crunch down on the rest of its huge forty-foot long body, devouring it in three economic mouthfuls.

He saw an ensnaring net of boneless arms pull back around the squid's mantle, fanning out around the hideous alien head of the beast, ready to strike, as the dead head of the giant shark b.u.mped against a spar of sheered metal.

"There's always a bigger fish," Ulysses muttered.

Not waiting to see what the Kraken would do next, Ulysses turned and, with thudding steps, pounded towards the relative shelter of the dome wall in front of him. In his mind's eye he could see the creature behind him, as it readied to strike, hooked tentacles whipping forwards, ready to send a thousand volts of electricity through his body, cooking him inside the armoured suit. The thought spurred Ulysses onwards.

He felt the whoosh of the water surging around him, saw the shadow above him, caught a flicker of a tentacle paddle sweeping past him, and then was hurled forwards by the rippling watery shockwave of the monster colliding with something solid, something that was not Ulysses in the pressure suit.

On his hands and knees now, Ulysses risked looking behind him again. An unalloyed whoop of joy broke from his lips as, in his adrenalin-heightened state, he saw the Kraken trying to untangle itself from the skeletal ribs of the ruins, the outer limits of which Ulysses had pa.s.sed beneath before the monster could seize him.

"The one that got away!" he laughed, punching the wall with the balled fist of his harpooning arm in delight. The open outer pressure gate of the airlock was within reach.

The blaring siren died, the amber light stopped spinning, and, locking clamps disengaged, Ulysses was able to open the airlock door in front of him. Easing himself through the round hatch, he stepped back inside the Marianas Base, his feet clanging hollowly on the steel-mesh decking.

He was feeling suitably pleased with himself. Not only had he had an encounter with both a Megalodon and the Kraken and lived to tell the tale, he had freed those left inside the facility from Lamprey's legacy and he knew who the murderer was! From this moment on, Jonah Carcharodon was a man with a price on his head.

Ulysses was convinced that it was he who was responsible for the murders. The information ferreted away within the Neptune's Babbage data banks had provided him with the missing link that now made sense of the mystery. The billionaire's shipping line was in trouble, suffering serious financial difficulties. The building of the Neptune, which had wiped out Carcharodon's personal fortune, had been a last ditch attempt to improve the company's portfolio and raise the value of its stock again. But construction costs and running costs, with this project more than any other as it had turned out, far outstripped the income that could be derived from selling berths on the cruise-liner. Ulysses supposed that Carcharodon had planned to sink the Neptune and claim on the insurance. With the ship lost to the Marianas Trench there would have been no way for anyone to effectively check up on his claim. But discovering that Glenda Finch was onto his fraudulent little scheme, and the subsequent intervention of the Kraken, and then believing Miss Birkin was onto him as well, he had had to ensure that there were no other survivors to contradict his story. Glenda's initial attempt at investigative journalism had turned Jonah Carcharodon into a desperate man, driving him to become a murderer. And who would have thought it of an old man confined to a wheelchair? Who but Ulysses Quicksilver?

But such epithets of self-satisfaction were put to the back of his mind as two facts regarding the reality of the current situation pressed in upon him.

Firstly, Ulysses had expected to be greeted by at least some of the team who had seen him off, Nimrod at least. But there was no one. A nauseous feeling began to creep into his gut, knotting his intestines with the cold, clenching claw of horrified realisation. Had he been wrong to leave his manservant behind, alone? But what else could he have done? There had been no other way of reversing the lock down.

And secondly, there was the countdown.

"T minus nine minutes and counting," the voice of Neptune boomed from speakers set into the roof cavity of the dome-chamber, the voice that had sounded so soft-spoken and gentle when he had heard it in the quiet of the AI chamber now sounded as ominous and echoingly thunderous as might the strident wave-crashing voice of the G.o.d of the Deep himself.

But what concerned Ulysses more than the booming presence of the Neptune AI within the Marianas Base, was the fact that he didn't know what it was counting down to.

And then Ulysses noticed a third change that must have occurred within the last hour when he wasn't there. The already dim lights were dimmer than ever before and flickering fitfully. Power relay cables hung from the ceiling like streamers and he wondered what other destruction had been wrought by the Kraken in his absence. He could only hope now that he was not too late, that the Neptune AI would complete its task and crack the necessary codes before the damage wrought by the monster finally overwhelmed the facility and proved the end of them all.

"T minus eight minutes and counting," Neptune spoke again, the coldly detached voice crashing from the steel walls like the sound of the trench shelf collapsing into darkness.

Ulysses turned towards the access way leading to the sub-dock.

Then Neptune spoke again. "Decryption complete. Access codes accepted. Lockdown reprieved. Target achieved. You may now exit Marianas Base at your leisure, Captain McCormack. I wish you a safe and pleasant journey."

Ulysses' momentarily renewed feeling of triumph - that he hadn't been too late after all - was quickly replaced by feelings of confusion and equally compounded feelings of unease.

"T minus seven minutes and counting," Neptune boomed, increasing Ulysses' fears.

If the AI hadn't been counting down to the completion of the task he had set in the guise of the late captain, then what was it counting down to?

Ulysses stomped into the dock, his weighted footsteps clanging from the hard floor. The scene that greeted him rooted him to the spot, leaving him wrestling with a near-overwhelming mix of emotions: feelings of horror, guilt, fear and despair.

By the light of a swinging electric lamp, dislodged from its mounting in the vaulted roof of the dock s.p.a.ce and penduluming now back and forth at the end of a length of rubberised cabling, he saw - - Lady Josephine Denning dead, body stiff as a board, eyes wide open, too much of the whites showing, pupils contracted to pin-p.r.i.c.ks, the test tentacle they had found back in the abominable lab lying on the deck beside her, shrivelled and charred, its attached energy source discharged - - John Schafer, spread-eagled beneath a fallen pillar, groaning as he tried to shift the metal beam from on top of him - - Nimrod, unmoving, unconscious, a puddle of blood oozing from his scalp - - Agent Harry Cheng struggling to free himself, pulling at the loops of his handcuffs, rubbing his wrists raw until they bled, trying to use his freely running blood to help lubricate the manacles and allow him to escape - - two more bodies, this time those of Wates and the purser, bobbing on the surface of the disturbed pressure gate pool, facedown, both of them having been shot - - bubbles rising to the surface of the choppy waves in the wake of the pa.s.sing of the Ahab as the submersible sank beneath the water and powered out through the blossoming pressure gate and free of the Marianas Base, leaving the rest of them behind, to their fate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Sins of the Father "T minus six minutes and counting."

The continuing countdown shook Ulysses from the stunned stupor that had momentarily overcome him. He had been on the verge of being overwhelmed as the shock he felt on seeing the scene of death, devastation and despair before him took hold. To have battled against all the odds to lift the lockdown - risking life and limb aboard the doomed Neptune, having to contend with first an attack by a giant prehistoric shark and then confront the Kraken - and to discover it had all been for naught had almost been too much for his exhausted mind to bear. To find Lady Denning murdered and both Nimrod and Schafer apparently left for dead, with the Ahab steaming away with, he had to a.s.sume, Carcharodon holding Constance, Selby and his poor PA Miss Celeste hostage. What had it all been for if they were to die here now? But he wasn't about to let that happen!

Now, suddenly the pa.s.sage of time seemed hyper-real to him, as if his strange extrasensory perception was working in a new way, time slowing to accommodate everything that needed to be accomplished in what felt like, on the other hand, no time at all. He could almost feel the individual seconds ticking by.

He activated the controls within the suit again and strode forwards.

In the hulking pressure suit, the armoured exo-skeleton dented and gouged from the attentions of the sea and the monsters that dwelt within it, Ulysses Quicksilver strode across the dock, armoured boots clanging against the metal floor.

"T minus five minutes and counting."

He reached the spot where Schafer lay pinned beneath the fallen pillar, the young man struggling to free himself, desperation writ large across his sweating, contorted features.

Ulysses paused for only a split second to look again at Nimrod's unconscious form lying nearby. Then he reached for the steel beam. Catching the pillar in the pincer-claw of the suit, the notched clasping pads gripping, the metal of the beam crumpling fractionally as they did so, he heaved. The pillar shifted and Schafer groaned, with relief at being freed at such a crucial juncture and with pain, as the injuries he had sustained flared.

Wincing, Schafer struggled to work himself free.

Grasping the other end of the length of steel with the automated right gauntlet hand, Ulysses strained again, heaving on the controls inside the c.o.c.kpit, as his protective suit struggled to move the beam out of the way. With the beam moved safely away from Schafer, Ulysses let it drop. The steel crashed onto the decking with a resounding clang, bouncing once with the force of its fall.

Ulysses tried to kneel down beside Schafer to help him, but the bulky suit hampered him. The injured Schafer stared at Ulysses through the gla.s.s discs of the st.u.r.dy helmet dome, the look in his eyes one of hopelessness and intense personal desolation.

"How badly hurt are you?" Ulysses asked.

"I've been better," Schafer replied. "My left leg hurts to b.u.g.g.e.ry but I suppose I'm lucky."

"It could have been worse." Ulysses agreed.

"Although right now, apart from the fact I could be dead already, I can hardly see how it could be worse."

The young man's love of his life was gone and Ulysses knew there was no way that she could have left willingly, after everything else that could have torn them apart during their descent into disaster having failed to do so.

He didn't need to ask what had happened, or where Constance had gone. The answers to such questions wouldn't speed a resolution to their desperate situation and there would be time later, if there was to be a later, if they made it out of there.

Ulysses needed Schafer with him; he needed every able bodied man to play his part, if those left behind by the escaping Ahab were going to get out of this alive.

"T minus four minutes and counting."

"John, stay with me. We're going to get Constance back!" Ulysses declared. "But, right now, I need you to see to Nimrod. I need you to tell me the old boy's going to be all right."

Schafer just stared at Ulysses, his face wracked with a mixture of shock and disbelief, fear and grief. He looked like he was about to breakdown and lose all control.

"Come on, John!" Ulysses bawled. "Is he breathing? Does he have a pulse? Is he going to live?"

Schafer blinked as if only just seeing Nimrod lying there for the first time. With tentative fingers he felt for a pulse at the old retainer's throat.

"I-I can feel something. There is a pulse. He's still breathing."

"Destruction imminent. Total destruction of this facility will occur in three minutes. This is your three-minute warning. Evacuate now."

Another seismic rumble juddered through the decking beneath Ulysses' feet.

He swallowed hard. Somehow, someone had initiated a self-destruct sequence that would totally obliterate what was left of the Marianas base. But how? And why now?

He judged that their not-so mysterious killer was to blame, from everything he saw around him. The reason was clear: destroy the evidence, stop anyone - but Ulysses in particular - from coming after him. His calculating mind working nineteen to the dozen he began to see how it had been achieved as well.

In all their time within the facility, they had seen evidence of great difference engines, cogitator banks, a.n.a.lytical calculating machines and Babbage-unit terminals. The macabre chair device had been hooked up to a whole pile of the things. And yet, not once had he seen any of the thinking machines in an operational state. He had a.s.sumed that the systems were all dead, but of course he had now received evidence to the contrary. And there was the fact that he had been able to establish a link with the base at all. How stupid could he have been? If it had not been for the restrictive bracings of the suit, Ulysses would have kicked himself.

With Ulysses having established the connection between the Neptune AI and the Marianas Base's cogitator network, waking the sleeping machineries after a quarter of a century's dormancy, someone still within the Marianas Base had utilised the very same link with the sub-liner to terrible effect. They had effectively used the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to activate long dormant systems, to bring about the destruction of the Marianas Base.

For a moment Ulysses wondered whether the ghost of Felix Lamprey had somehow lived on in the link, everything that made him who he was - his thoughts, his memories, desires, beliefs, disillusionments even - retained within the precision engineered clockwork guts of the chair's difference engine, waiting to be woken when someone turned it on again. Was it possible that perhaps Lamprey was not truly dead at all, those marvellous machineries somehow keeping his mind alive inside the withered husk of his body?

But Ulysses dismissed such hok.u.m as impossible. Surely it wasn't feasible, not after twenty-five lonely years, and it certainly hadn't been a lifeless husk of a man that had done for Miss Birkin, Haugland, the Major or Professor Crichton.