Scale, p.17
Scale, page 17
A motor began humming somewhere, adding a fresh note to the cacophony. Jake looked out through the window in the back of the truck, and realized that the entrance to the tower was sliding closed – as he’d certainly prefer it would, before a dive, though he’d have much preferred not to dive at all. He fought a rising sense of panic, closing his eyes and thinking of Cara Leon, which might at least amount to less magical thinking than any faith the sentry had in him. Cara had been dragged against her will to the bottom of the river, and lived, if not to tell the tale, to prove it was survivable. The loading bay made the truck seem small, but she must have been a tight fit. Could there have been more fragile cargo than a woman whose bones a toothless newborn from D7 could have gnawed through effortlessly, confined in an adamantine cocoon where an ill-fitting rivet could slice her skin open, as it plunged beneath millions of tons of ever denser liquid? He hoped they’d at least put down blankets for her. Or bubble wrap.
Jake opened his eyes. The guard’s face showed no concern or surprise at their descent, so it seemed the raid had always been aimed at this outcome. But who’d briefed him, and the others, on the plan? It was one thing to hear through the grapevine about a secret road leading to a secret dock, but even seizing the truck in the hope that it was carrying Scale Seven weapons would have been ambitious for a group of untrained civilians. The navy had to be orchestrating all of this, using these people as proxies – a culpably reckless act, and quite possibly flat out illegal.
The echoing soundscape had switched from a street brawl to the death throes of an industrial washing machine, but having overwhelmed the crew, and either forced them to descend or – even more alarmingly – taken on the task themselves, what did someone like Thaddeus or the tall man think they could do to gain admittance to the base? The more valuable the base was to the separatists, the less likely they were to be swayed by threats to the hostages, and Jake was still clinging to the hope that his own mild beating was about the limit of what the militia would do to an unarmed captive. Shane was hot-headed enough to smash a window, and Thaddeus was a preening thug, but a group skewing slightly sociopathic was still a long way from being cold blooded murderers, least of all when they’d suffered no casualties themselves. Who would they be avenging, by holding a knife to a hostage’s throat? A Scale Six soldier they’d never met, who’d already recovered from the flesh wound he’d received on the steps of the Town Hall?
Jake decided to risk an experiment. “How deep are we now?” he told his mouth to enunciate; something audible emerged through the gag, though he was in no position to give it an unbiased assessment for clarity.
“Keep quiet,” the guard counseled him, irritated but not enraged. Then he added, “How would I know? There’s no depth gauge up here.”
“Are they going to kill us?” Jake asked, trying not to choke on trapped saliva.
The guard recoiled. “Don’t be crazy. Just relax.”
That would have to do for now; an attempt at a real conversation would be pushing it too far. Jake turned away, back toward the sentry who’d seemed to be beseeching him for signs of encouragement. The man looked a lot less interested in engaging now; if nothing else, Jake had succeeded in disillusioning him.
What was in the base that was worth all this trouble? The satellite had been launched from the desert, and if there were multiple launch sites surely they’d just be elsewhere on dry land. Jake didn’t pretend to have much grasp of rocket science, but it seemed to defy all logic to imagine that anything could be lofted into the sky from beneath the weight of eight kinds of water. The base was unreachable without G8’s own submarine, but what exactly did they do down there that required that level of isolation? Holding prisoners like Cara was obviously an afterthought, but even a genuine attempt at a rehearsal for a lunar colony would be easily accommodated in a hundred other places for a fraction of the cost. There had to have been one original purpose, to justify the stupendous effort involved.
A part of the skull-grinding racket dropped away, leaving Jake with a kind of aural afterimage pounding in his head. If it was easier and faster to travel at a moderate depth, through the least dense layers of the river, perhaps they’d finished the horizontal component of their journey and were now proceeding to complete the descent. The air smelled stale and his breathing was labored, but he talked himself down from the panicky conclusion that the amateurs in charge had hit a wrong button and proceeded to suffocate everyone.
The noise had dwindled, mostly, to what might have been a single pump, or maybe several similar pumps acting in concert; it was hard to tell the difference between reverberation and genuine multiplicity. How did a submarine sink, without losing its capacity to rise up to the surface again? It couldn’t just vent air from a buoyancy tank, or it would have no means to reclaim that space from the invading water. There had to be a system of compartments at different pressure, with pumps and valves that could orchestrate the whole cycle, from the surface to the depths and back again. Listening to the relentless chugging and trying to visualize what might be flowing where, and why, Jake suddenly recalled the time in school when he’d learned about the circulatory system. He’d spent hours afterward listening to his own heartbeat and breathing, marveling at the processes keeping him alive, but half afraid to stop paying attention in case they faltered in the absence of his appreciation.
The submarine made a sound like a warehouse full of saucepans dropped from a bell-tower. The truck shuddered, then rocked back and forth on its suspension. Jake turned to the guard, who wasn’t just unperturbed; he was smiling.
“We’re ramming the docking tunnel,” he explained. “Don’t worry; we’re tough enough to take it.”
Jake didn’t risk a tortured vocalization begging for more details, but he declined to turn away as if this answer left him satisfied. Weren’t the base and the submarine made of the very same stuff?
“There are only three docks,” the guard explained. “They’re the weak points, and if we damage one of them, that will prove we can damage all three. But they can’t let us do that, or they’ll be trapped. They have to surrender; anything else would be suicide.”
Once the ringing had faded away, the relative silence stretched out interminably. Jake supposed they needed a run up to gather speed for another attack. Every Scale Seven child had a period in their life when it struck them just how many kinds of objects they could destroy merely by charging at them from a sufficient distance, in spite of all their parents’ efforts, first to avert their attention from the possibility, and then to persuade them that it was rarely a good idea. And every Scale Seven child also learned how poorly the lessons from those euphoric demolitions translated to occasions when the rammer and rammee were more evenly matched. Jake’s comeuppance had come from a sapling. He’d known it belonged to his own scale, but he’d convinced himself, prior to the impact, that this made no difference, and the plant would succumb to the exuberance of his limbs and the force of his will.
The submarine struck the base again, with the same percussive glory. Who exactly had convinced the hijackers, who had never dealt with anything like this structure before, that this was a viable strategy? Jake supposed the navy could have gleaned a certain amount about the base from a combination of sonar imagery, leaks from G8, and some subset of nautical engineering principles that continued to apply even at these hitherto unexplored pressures. But granting enough credibility to the plan that you’d trust your life to it was probably a feat that few professional submariners could have mastered.
The third impact set Jake’s teeth on edge; the truck began its now familiar bounce, but then something gave way and it went sliding across the loading bay. With his hands bound, all he could do was raise his legs and press his feet against the front of the opposite bench, pushing hard to try to brace himself.
The guard slammed into the back of the truck, tearing a hole in the door but not quite passing through it. One of the sentries skidded across the bench and collided with Jake’s shoulder, but the force was not quite enough to dislodge him.
“Quickly!” the man barked, garbled through the rag in his mouth; Jake got up and turned his back to the door, reaching around the guard to fumble with the handle. When that didn’t work, he and the sentry lifted the guard and drew him out of the way, then they kicked the misshapen door open.
Jake clambered out onto the floor of the loading bay, then limped away to give the others room to disembark. The front of the truck had hit the hull and crumpled completely. He looked around the bay, but he couldn’t see any place where the magic material had an exposed edge he could exploit; the cord binding his hands was woven from the fibers of a Scale Seven plant, so the truck’s torn chassis would be useless against it.
The guard hadn’t been left with one of the stolen rifles, but maybe he had a conventional bone knife. Jake went to him and squatted down, groping behind his back in search of a sheath on the man’s belt. He found it and grunted triumphantly, but his constrained fingers slid over it in vain. He nodded impatiently to one of the sentries to come and help him, afraid that the guard might regain full consciousness and stab him at any moment. The two of them succeeded in extracting the knife, and then cutting each other’s hands free.
Jake pulled the gag out of his mouth and cut the other sentries’ ties, then checked on the guard. He was still breathing, and he had no visible wounds; he really needed to be examined by a doctor, but there was nothing Jake could do in the way of first aid.
“What now?” the sentry who’d helped Jake free himself asked.
“Split up and try not to get recaptured,” Jake suggested. He was still holding the guard’s knife, but apart from that they were unarmed, so any notion that the four of them could disrupt the hijacking by a head-on assault would be fanciful. He didn’t want to sound entirely indifferent to Spotlight’s contractual duties, though, so he added, “Once we know exactly what they’re doing here, maybe we can figure out a way to intervene.”
His fellow escapees regarded him dubiously, but offered no counter-proposals. The four of them moved quietly to the narrow spiral staircase that led down from the loading bay. Jake couldn’t hear any voices echoing up from the heart of the vessel, but in the stairwell all manner of mysterious clanking sounds seemed to converge on his skull. His prospects for doing anything to get Shane out of harm’s way seemed to have evaporated; maybe he should just try to find a hiding place, and hope that the submarine made it back to the surface eventually.
On the first deck they reached, all the sentries departed together, clearly opting for safety in numbers. Jake stuck with his own advice and continued down a level. There was a narrow corridor leading away from the stairwell; as he walked along, hoping to chance upon a laundry room or storage closet, the panels beside him shuddered and banged, as if they were concealing some very old plumbing.
When he turned right at the end of the corridor he found himself in a short passage that terminated with a solid, oval-shaped door with a wheel in the middle. If he went through the door, for all he knew there could be people who’d spot him immediately, or see the wheel turning before he’d even entered. If he stayed where he was, at least he’d have a chance of hearing anyone approaching from either direction.
Before he could decide, he heard voices in the distance. He stole a glance back down the corridor, just in time to see half a dozen people ascending the staircase. At least two of them were carrying rifles. But no one stopped at his level.
He moved back into the passage and leaned against the wall, folding his arms across his chest, trying to think through the whole situation. One of his hands rested on a lump in his jacket; when he’d been frisked for weapons, they’d taken his phone, but no one had even noticed the small camera he kept in an inside pocket, so light compared to any knife or baton it was barely distinguishable from a handkerchief.
Was he really going to hide in a corner while the navy manipulated civilians, including a three-month-old boy, into carrying out acts of criminal endangerment that would have put their own personnel before a war crimes tribunal? If the base ended up as a tomb, its inhabitants crushed by an influx of water or stranded by irreparable damage, what use would his testimony be with nothing tangible to support it?
Jake stood for a while, listening for any response from the ascending party to the sight of the smashed truck and its missing prisoners, but the more he strained his ears, the more he started wondering if the indistinct voices he could hear woven between all the mechanical sounds were actually just hallucinations that his mind was plucking out of the noise.
He walked back down the corridor to the stairwell. Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting thud of metal against metal, but it seemed to come from a different direction than the other impacts, and he felt no jolt himself this time. If the submarine had not been brought from a state of rapid motion to a sudden halt, what was the clang?
He waited, then he heard a familiar sound: the motor that had closed the door before they dived.
Jake ascended the staircase slowly. As his eyes came level with the floor of the loading bay, he was still a half-turn away from the landing, but he stopped and peered across between the stairs.
The entrance was wide open, and a tunnel stretched out beyond it. The last thud had been the sound of surrender, not violence: the submarine and the dock slamming together to make a water-tight seal. Their attacks must have damaged the first tunnel they’d targeted, to the point where the threat became impossible to ignore, and this one had been offered up for their use, with no further resistance. In any case, the submarine was now attached to the base, though Jake wasn’t sure if there were other doors or hatches beyond the section of tunnel he could see, still limiting the hijackers’ access.
Six people stood at the edge of the loading bay, two of them with rifles, waiting for something. They could hardly have failed to notice the condition of the truck, but apparently whatever they were doing now was more important than chasing after the escapees, or taking the guard to the infirmary.
Jake dug out his camera and took a snapshot of the scene. The nationalists all had their backs to him, but at least the setting might go some way toward proving that he had been where he claimed he’d been.
“Are they ever coming?” someone asked impatiently.
“Give them time,” a comrade replied. “This place is as big as D7, and who knows how far away they’re coming from.”
“So they don’t have super-fast trains down here?” the original complainant joked.
“Maybe not.”
“I think they’re cheating us.”
“If they are, they’ll get another hard smack. And they really won’t want the third one.”
Jake cursed himself for not carrying a sound recorder; even if the words were ambiguous without their full context, every piece of evidence would have counted for something. He couldn’t imagine what they were hoping to receive that would be worth all the dangers they’d been through, but at least the expedition hadn’t culminated in a deranged attempt to take over the whole base, armed with a few stolen rifles.
As he watched the delegation waiting for their prize, he realized that his vision was blurring slightly. He rubbed his eyes but that didn’t help, and his sense of balance felt off. Was he concussed? He didn’t trust himself on the stairs, so he climbed down and stood in the corridor for a moment.
He heard a thud from the loading bay, and someone mumbling incoherently. He went back up the stairs, and saw that all six people had slumped to the ground, though there was no assailant visible, and no trace of blood.
Some kind of gas? Jake withdrew again and walked away from the stairwell; at the far end of the corridor he filled and refilled his lungs, and he could feel the fog clearing from his brain. The base might not have been the impregnable fortress the military would have tried to make it, but G8’s biochemists had their own means of defense. With their own colleagues in the sub potentially exposed, he assumed the gas would be an anesthetic rather than a fatal toxin, though he gathered the distinction could come down to the dose.
He ascended once more, and saw a group of people wearing respirators loading the limp bodies onto gurneys. How long would it take for the rest of the hijackers to realize something was amiss, and investigate? But there’d be a limit to how many could leave the bridge at once, when presumably they were standing over the crew there, pointing their rifles and issuing instructions.
Jake sat on the stairs, trying to decide if he was suffering lingering effects from the gas, or just a bout of claustrophobia. He wanted nothing more now than to wash his hands of both sides and walk away, but there was the small matter of forty meters of water above him.
“What’s going on?” someone whispered from below. It was one of the sentries, grown curious enough to emerge from hiding.
Jake needed a moment to orient himself, choosing the appropriate language to reflect their shared loyalties. “Six hijackers down to knock-out gas, so I’d say we’re winning.”
The sentry nodded happily, then called to his friends to join them.
Jake said, “We should wait for reinforcements.”
“Of course. But they’ll want us to brief them.” The sentry stood on the stairs, waiting for Jake to rise and lead the way back to the loading bay.
“There’s still a bit of gas around,” he said.
The sentry scowled. “It should have broken down, but they’ll have spare masks if we need them. Didn’t you train for this?”
Jake made a noncommittal sound, and decided that it would only make things worse if he tried to invent an excuse to hang back. He strode confidently up the stairs, with the sentries behind him.
One of the crew from the base challenged them: “Hibiscus rain?”
Jake had already put his mouth to his sleeve and begun feigning a gas-induced cough, leaving a comrade to respond on behalf of all four of them: “Fleet tangerine.”
