Research

Chapter 2 - Act I - INGRESSION

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Chapter 2 - Research

Paysha

Mornings are now my favourite time of day, replacing teenage urges for long, hot evenings to escape parental restrictions. Sunsets now only provoke a selfish desire for the screams of raided neighbours to be brief, so I can scrape more sleep.

I emerge onto my sun-baked rooftop dressed in old khaki shorts and a faded dolphin print t-shirt. The apartment block I’ve called home for almost a year is a generous three floors above mean tide, sat on five submerged below. After being rewarded with the block of squat concrete, I’d boarded up the broken windows and adorned it with a mishmash of scavenged Stinker essentials: a beach-wrecked yacht’s turbine; a jumble of guano-streaked solpanels; rain-catching tarps and storage butts. A hydrofuel tank crowns my hard-won success as a diver.

It’s a lavish bolt-hole compared to what the Flood’s chaotic initial aftermath had forced me to endure. Surviving cargo hulks had become temporary refuges, prisons in all but name. Within them, hammocks and folding cots had been triple-stacked like third-class sleeper carriages. Lice weren’t the only animals who’d invaded inmates’ personal spaces without consideration of age, gender or permission. My own obnoxious trespassers had quickly discovered people bled a lot more.

The clattering of a futile search for food rises through the roof hatch. Someone has dragged their sorry carcass out of my bed. I shout down, “I told you yesterday, Markus, I’m not running a bloody hotel.”

“Why always this phytoshit and unknown tins? You must have fish, for hell’s sake,” he shouts back. “Smoked. Dried. I do not care. We are surrounded by sea. How hard is it?”

“For the millionth time, I’m not eating anything fished from the Stink,” I yell back. “Have you seen what’s down there?”

“And again, no coffee. How can you live with no coffee?”

“Because you drank it all, Markus. Not that you’d remember.”

I ignore the rest of his moans. His selfishness has been harder to tolerate with each passing day. Markus doesn’t know it, but a successful dive will mark the end of our shallow union. My repeated promise to myself means shutting the door on any further exchanges, no matter how convincing his pity patter. My stray sailor will be dumped where I found him, along with his baggage of whining pleas, tear-jerking tales and empty bottles. This is about fulfilling my goal, not accepting a new normal – if that’s even possible. I have to give my body the chance it deserves.

I lean against the roof’s parapet and raise my battered binoculars for a customary scan of my surroundings. Any change has rarely proved beneficial. To the south is the City’s fractured Wall. Built originally to create a tidal lagoon for generating guilt-free energy, the barrier had instead defended our City against the accelerated rise in sea-level. Its complacent population was sleeping through yet another ‘one in five-hundred-year’ storm when the sirens sounded only one minute before the Wall’s massive breach. A tsunami of frigid sea water had mercilessly erased the thriving metropolis, engulfing sleeping citizens, shops, docks and hospitals without discrimination. Only the buttresses of the northerly chalk cliffs had eventually rebuffed the Flood’s tumultuous assault.

A tight v-formation of cormorants heads westward across the lagoon towards the open sea. The water’s glassy surface reflects a few rare clouds as I track their flight towards the lagoon’s inner edge, wing-tips skimming the water. My view is interrupted by the Spire, an anomalous, vertiginous spike of reinforced concrete which dominates the Stink. Originally a grand project to celebrate the City’s former millennial pride, its deep foundations had protected it from the Flood’s onslaught. Now seawater slaps idly against a collar of broken boulders fortifying the lair of Lewey Greaterex, notorious local kingpin and my landlord. Criminals abhor a vacuum and he’d muscled in two years ago to help himself to a large slice of Stinker cake, offering in return a needless greasing of our small enterprise cogs. The Spire’s looming shadow is a constant reminder of Lewey’s paranoid surveillance of our every move.

In the middle of the lagoon, competing gulls wheel and dive in the wake of converted trash trawlers, their solpanels extended to catch the early sun. The birds’ screeches are drowned out by the loud buzz of hovers flitting over the foul, debris-laden swells from whatever rusting hulk or flooded building their pilots call home. Every morning, Stinkers compete as solo or team divers to stake that day’s hope on an underwater City location. Their ever-shifting claims are determined by rare maps and the latest rumours. But today I won’t be joining them – I’ve a far more intriguing item to hook.

A stabbing shoulder pain reminds me of the additional risks for this dive. I pull out some folded scraps of paper from my pocket and slump into a rickety deckchair. Markus had scrawled some deck plans which I need to memorise before going below. I have to trust they’re from intact memory and not drunken imagination. Cupping my chin in my hand, I smooth out each sheet in turn, trying to interpret his unsteady pencil lines and dubious scaling. More whining from downstairs disrupts my focus. This time it’s Py, eager to join me upstairs. He’s often anxious in my absence, howling if I’m gone too long. But I can’t risk a stupid navigation error after the frustrating days and nights I’ve spent extracting details from my cast-adrift captain. I need to exit the Stink alive, without owing favours or taxes to anyone. Forgetting a vital bulkhead or passageway could mean Py howling for a very long time.

It had taken several over-attentive prompts for an alcohol-soaked Markus to stumble through his intriguing story. Between fanciful tales of shackled ‘fugees gouging precious polar water from vanishing glaciers, I’d learnt the Aleutia had been an Arctic exploration and research vessel. Venerable but dependable – its unreliable captain assured me – it had carried scientists and sensitive instruments instead of grizzled ice miners and massive toothed machines.

In the early hours of another aurora-lit night, an anomalous magnetic signal from a towed array had alerted a sleepy on-board scientist. The seabed maps hadn’t shown nodule deposits, but the signal had persisted on a repeat pass. A remote sub was duly launched from the moonpool within the Aleutia’s cavernous internal chamber.

After an hour of bleary-eyed joystick and camera work, the signal’s source had been located, half a klick under the dirty green ice. A featureless ovoid, its large magnetic signature belied its small size, with a long axis barely an arm’s length and its mid-section width only half that. Once grabbed from its blanket of diatomaceous sludge, the sub’s spots had reflected from the object like chromatic swirls of oil on water. It had no obvious seams or markings, nor any of the usual denizens growing on it. It seemed to have settled on the seabed only yesterday.

After the artefact was brought topside, the baffled scientists discovered its unblemished, oddly tinted surface was uncannily smooth, almost frictionless. They could only assume an artificial origin, despite no clue as to its maker, or why it had been mysteriously deposited under millions of tonnes of ice.

However, the expedition’s chief scientist had been as hard to rouse as his curiosity. Advising against wild conjecture, he’d ventured it was an old war relic, a torpedo remnant, a blob of furnace-smelted mining metal. He didn’t care, and it wasn’t why they were there. So, like good scientists, they’d photographed, measured and weighed the object, wrapped it in plastic film, and placed it in a box labelled ‘Metallic Artefact?’. With the bridge’s night watch briefed and ship’s log cursorily updated, towing operations and the chief scientist’s snoring had resumed without further interruption.

A blonde head pops up through the roof hatch. “I come up, Paysha?”

With a sigh, I beckon Markus to join me. I could do with some sketch clarifications. As he struggles with unfolding another deckchair, I ask: “The artefact is definitely in a box, yes?”

“Yes, yes, in a box. A big cardboard box. Like this.” Markus drops the unfolded chair beside me with a clatter and spreads his arms as wide as a boastful weekend angler.

“So, a very soggy box. And is it silver or grey or…?”

His brow furrows as he falls back into the faded canvas seat. “I remember mainly grey – like a rain cloud. But it changes.”

“Changes? You mean with the light? But it’s pitch black down there. I’ll only have my melon and helmet spots.”

“Yes, I know. You like mini-submarine.”

“Thanks.”

“No, not shape. Shape is good!”

He must be kidding – or still drunk. I’m like a teenage boy from the waist up. Half-woman at most. “Never mind my shape. What do you mean, ‘changes’?”

“Like a…what was animal in old zoos? Green, red, blue – always changing.”

“A chameleon. You mean a chameleon?”

“Yes! A kam-eel-on. But not colour. More like—” He twists his hands like an Eastern dancer.

This is like pulling teeth. “I won’t even ask what you’re doing.”

“You will see.”

“I hope so. If you’re lying to me, you know what will happen.”

“You tell me so many times. No more whisky. Blah, blah—”

“Definitely no more whisky. And…”—I turn in my chair to catch his darting pale-blue eyes and make a sawing motion with my hand—“I’ll cut your balls off – with a very blunt knife.”

There’s only a brief pause before he thumps my arm, his laughter reverberating around the rooftop. “Hah! Both of them? You are so funny, Paysha.”

My jaw muscles bulge as I wait for his mirth to subside. “You’ve no idea just how funny I can be, Markus,” I reply. A familiar, fleeting pulse of arousal is pricking my consciousness. She’s stirring deep inside my head, but I need her to remain quiescent for now, her thresholds observed. I shouldn’t have threatened him, or even contemplated it. But he shouldn’t have thumped me, despite being ignorant of the danger.

“So I wait here for my funny girl to bring back my prize,” he says, settling down into his seat.

“Not yours. Mine. What I find is mine. Stinker’s code.”

“Okay, okay. Stinking code, no problem. You are clever and funny. My other beautiful prize to celebrate, yes?”

“Let me guess,” I say, putting an index finger to my lips and frowning. “By getting blind drunk and showing me how manly you are?”

“Exactly! I am very lucky captain. And you are even luckier girl.”

There’s another booming laugh as I grate, “So very fortunate.”

I make a final attempt to extract more than casual reassurances from my cheery bunkmate: “This moonpool you keep mentioning, you’re sure it’s not sealed off from the rest of the Aleutia?” But his reply remains as sketchy as his drawings. I can only hope I’ve stuffed enough of the Aleutia’s layout into my head. Struggling out of my deckchair, I scrunch the sketches into a ball and toss them into Captain Cocky’s lap.

I yank my fetid flexiskins from a clothes-line and balance awkwardly on the roof ladder. As I descend, Markus calls out, “Good luck, my best girl!”, with a flurry of poorly aimed kisses. Below me, Py jumps out of his plastic crate and circles the bottom step. “Fancy going diving, Py?” I call down. His silky ears prick up and he barks loudly. Of course he does. Not everyone who follows me is sad, mad or drunk.

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