Knife Fight and Other Struggles (30 page)

This time it wasn’t his jets that sent him backward. He tumbled head over heels through the darkness for what the suit said was eighty-three feet before he escaped the giant ink cloud. It hung above him in a black thunderhead, the dim glow of the burning phosphorous at its core flickering like lightning.

“Scratch one kraken,” Jim improvised.

The comlink was silent. Jim tongued the cue-card HUD. <
STANDBY
>, it blinked back in green letters.

“Hey,” said Jim. “Anybody read me? Mimi? Jerry?”

Still nothing. He minimized the cue card and called up the comlink status bar. The words <
SIGNAL LOSS
> blinked amber across his view, even as his depth gauge rolled higher.

“Ah,” said Max Fiddler, “shit.”

From
I, Jerry
:

Danger is a media-induced state.

All right—I’ll grant you there was a time that this wasn’t so. Back in the days when a bad weather forecast meant you should bring your umbrella to work and not a submarine, when ocean-view property was actually a selling point, when catching the flu meant taking a few days off work and not updating your will, yeah, all right, danger meant something. That’s because danger is a study in contrast—it’s the threat of something worse around the corner, a catastrophic disruption of your delicate equilibrium. And if you’re going to disrupt that equilibrium, it goes without saying it must exist in the first place. No equilibrium, and people have nothing to worry about—nothing to disrupt. Shit just happens.

Except, that is, here by the screen. I’m constantly amazed at you zombies—drop my pal Jim on a savannah with a pack of pissed-off white rhinos, give him a box of hand grenades and a shoulder-cam, and suddenly you’re all squirmy and alive again. You start thinking and worrying and fretting—“Holy crow, Ethel, you think old Jim’s met his match this time?” “Oh Jeb, I don’ know I jes’ don’ know. Them rhinos nearly finished him the first time, and this here’s in their natural en-vi-ron-ment.” For those fleeting moments in front of your screen, you morons actually start to give at least a vicarious fuck about someone’s survival, if not your own.

I tell you—if Jim and I had come along thirty years earlier, that spark we’re igniting every week might actually have given me some hope for this dying wreck of a planet.

Max stabilized himself at six hundred feet and switched on his armour’s sonar to sweep the ocean above him. It wouldn’t show him squid—they were too close to the ocean’s density to register—but, with the ink-clouded water intervening, sonar was the only way he could find the studio and the comlink to the surface. He hung still and quiet, listening for the ping that would point him in the right direction.

Listening—and watching for another kraken.

But Max didn’t hear anything but the rasping sound of his own breath, and he didn’t see anything but the dark of the deep waters, the dying star of phosphor in the dissipating ink cloud. The sonar quacked as it finished its first hemispheric sweep of the motionless waters around him, adding final confirmation:

The kraken were gone—and so were the studio and his link to
Wylde’s Kingdom
.

Christ
, thought Max,
Jerry must be shitting himself
.

It was possible that the
Minnow
had managed to pick up a small portion of his battle with the squid—but even if the crew had managed to fire the whole thing up the cable, the fight had lasted barely a few seconds, and most of that would have taken place in the midnight cloud of ink. And the script hadn’t anticipated a battle this early in the show anyway; Max had seven hours of air in his suit, and Mimi and the team of oceanographers had expected that a few hours would be spent on scripted chit-chat and a guided tour of the installation before any squid came up to investigate.

And now, just twenty minutes into Jerry’s big ratings comeback—
Kraken!
—was all but over.

Max started to chortle at Jerry’s unhappy misfortune—but at a soft ping from his headset, he stopped himself, listening for it to repeat.

The sonar pinged a second time, and then a third, and the dive computer flashed confirmation: it had located the studio sub, two hundred feet to the north of Max and below him by about four hundred feet. On the third ping, the computer announced that the studio sub was descending, and quite rapidly.

Max checked the dive armour’s help file. The structure and the life-support and propulsion system were all rated for a mile and a half, but the harpoon gun was only good for half that, and the cameras weren’t rated any deeper than a thousand feet. So as far as Jerry and the show were concerned, the studio and its inhabitants were already casualties.

Of course, by now
Wylde’s Kingdom
would be a ratings casualty in and of itself. Max had been around long enough to know that people didn’t tune in to Jerry Wylde to watch him get creamed.

Max hit the dive sequencer with his chin and told the suit to lock onto the studio’s signature and follow it down. Strictly speaking, Max knew the decision was counter-survival, but that was fine with him: off the air in the depths of the Atlantic, Max’s inner Jim really had no say in the matter.

The pings multiplied as Max and the studio descended farther: they were approaching bottom, or more accurately, side—moving in a neat diagonal toward the southern slope of the sea mountain. The dive computer correlated the pings with its oceanographics database and came up with a three-dimensional map of the mountainside, which it displayed in a small window at the top of the HUD. Max and the studio were represented by little red triangles. The graphic was gorgeous—it reminded Max of the time he and Jerry had made a tiger-bombing trek to the southern Himalayas—and Max became so engrossed in the memory that he nearly gave himself a concussion against the back of his helmet when one of the cameras popped with a crack like a gunshot at 1,287 feet.

Head throbbing, Max wondered just what he expected to do when he got down there. If he were serious about rescuing Mimi and the rest of the crew, he would have done better to surface and report on the situation to Jerry. If he were halfway responsible, never mind just survival-oriented, Max supposed, that’s what he’d do.

The second camera imploded at 1,315 feet, but this time Max was braced for it and just winced.

The thing was, Max wasn’t halfway responsible. What he was, apparently, was more than halfway suicidal. And no amount of AbSucker treatments or spasmodics or steroids or anything else could mask that.

But what he also was, he realized, was damn curious.

Because from the look of the graphic on his HUD, the sub studio had just come to a landing on a high ledge of the mountain Mimi believed to be a giant-squid breeding ground.

Max accelerated downward, toward the now-motionless sub. Once again, the lights emerged from the murk—not as many as before, but enough to see by—and Max made sure to film it, in the seconds before the suit’s third and final camera cracked under the pressure.

“Mimi,” said Max as he grew nearer. “Do you read me?”

“Jim?” Her voice sounded woozy, like she’d been drinking.

“Max,” said Max.

“Max,” said Mimi. “What the hell are you doing here? You should have broken for surface right away. Jesus, you should do that now. . . . It’s trouble down here.”

There was a lot of silt stirred up around the studio; all Max could make out was about a dozen shafts of light, tangled in an opening-night criss-cross. The shafts didn’t move, but they flickered now and again, as though occluded by something very large passing over it. Something the shape of a squid.

Max thought about it: if the sub had only fallen, it should have fallen straight down, not on a diagonal—from what Max had gathered, it was essentially a diving bell, with no locomotive power of its own. Something had pushed it.

“Trouble,” Max repeated. “How many squid?”

“Three,” said Mimi. Her voice trembled, and he heard the ugly chuffing sound of a man’s tears in the background. “One’s about thirty feet, another one’s just a baby—fifteen, seventeen feet. And a big one—I can’t tell how big, but from the parts of it we’ve seen, I’d say it tops a hundred.”

“Feet?” said Max.

“Feet,” confirmed Mimi.

As if on cue, Max saw an immense tentacle pull itself out of the cloud and wave a moment in the water, trailing silt in gossamer threads. It was wrapped around an object—a metal triangle, very tiny in the huge tentacle. It was a piece, Max realized, of the squid cage.

“It’s got a piece of the cage,” observed Max.

“Yeah,” said Mimi. “It’s got quite a few pieces of the cage. They all do. The bastards are cooperating. . . . This makes no sense, Jim . . . Max. . . . Ah, shit. Squid shouldn’t be smart enough for this. They’re opening us. Listen.”

The comlink went silent for a moment—and sure enough, Max heard an echoing sound of rending metal: both over his headphones and vibrating through the walls of his armour.

“Wow,” said Max.

“Yeah,” said Mimi, her voice taking on a weary affection. “
Wow
. God, Jim. You are
so
malleable.”

Max nudged on the jets and inched forward. His heart was thundering, and his mouth was dry as a desert. What the hell
was
he going to do here? Three squids, and one of them big as Godzilla. The monster tentacle let go of the metal and descended back into the silt cloud, which itself immediately expanded away from a mysterious crash-and-scrape of metal-on-rock within it. One of the lights winked out, and then another, and one more.

Max hit the jets again, and now he shot down toward the cloud of muck. “Mimi!” he shouted into his comlink. “What’s going on in there?”

Mimi spoke quickly, shouting herself over various alarms sounding in the background. “Shit! Shit! They’ve stripped away the cage! Ah, shit! It’s gotten in! Jesus, Jim,
it’s inside the cage
!”

Max entered the cloud, and his view filled instantly with dancing motes of dirt. Fearful of hitting the mountainside, he reversed the jets. “Jim, Jim, Jim,” he muttered desperately. “You would know what to do.” But there was no Jim: Jim was just a character Max played on television.

And this deep down, there was no such thing as television.