Chaga

Rho Ophiuchi, but here, eight hundred light years away, is an empty remnant.

‘The dragon in the sea,’ Tembo said reverently. ‘It is written in the Book of Ezekiel.’

It is written in pages far older than those, Gaby thought. It is written in the racial memory, in the same genes that enable babies to swim before they learn the fear of water. The Kraken. The Midgard serpent. The sea-gods and mermaids and treacherous she-spirits of the ocean. The thing that lives in the sea.

The public address system whined feedback. A Scottish accent announced seat allocations in the recreation room on level three in five minutes. Gaby fought for a place in the line for the woman sitting at a table with a PDU and a box of badges issuing seats on the spotter helicopters. She came to the table and gave the names of her team members to the helicopter woman. ‘She won’t be needing a seat,’ a voice said in her ear and before Gaby could protest that it was seat or job, had drawn her aside to a quiet place among the pushed-together pool tables. Journalists awaiting their turn stared.

‘I’m probably going to regret this,’ Shepard said. ‘Grab your team, come with me.’

30

‘There is no way I am ever going to fit into this.’ Gaby McAslan held up the red and silver suit with the big black numbers front and back.

‘It stretches,’ Shepard said. He had already pulled his over his swimwear. He ran his thumb up the seals.

‘It smells,’ Gaby said. ‘Who was the last person inside this?’

‘It smells of you. It’s made from synthetic skin, the same stuff they graft on to burns victims, with a few chemical tricks we’ve learned from the Chaga and a colour scheme so the helicopters can find you if you fall overboard. The fullerene machines have never touched human flesh, so the perfect material for an isolation suit is skin. Or would you rather another night in decontam?’

‘Lois Lane is not the one who puts on the tights in the phonebooth,’ Gaby complained as she put the thing on. It did stretch. It was quite comfortable. She would have welcomed a gusset, but presumably men had designed the suits and never gave thought to Visible Sanitary Towel Lines, let alone having the fanny cut off you. They checked suit numbers with the out-lock controller and went down to the jetty.

‘Hey! Nineteen!’ Faraway shouted, reading the number on Gaby’s chest. He made a yelping noise like a hunting dog in heat.

Tembo was busy in the third boat with a Chaga-protected camera with UNECTAsie’s horns-and-yin-yang logo on the side. Faraway wired Gaby as she took her seat.

‘We are transmitting back to a satellite link on the rig and they will relay it to London.’ He fitted the plug into her ear and eased her hair back under the protective hood. His touch was very gentle. The other boats had already cast off. In the first was UNECTA’s own recording team. In the second was the landing party. Two last crew jumped into the third boat. They frowned at the SkyNet team. Shepard looked at them as if to challenge their right to query him and waved for the off. The helmsman pushed the throttle up. The little surf boat stood up in the water and skidded out from the shadows under East Seven Five into the light.

The sea was dazzling. The speed was brilliant. The sky was full of clucking helicopters. Gaby seized a rail and stood up. She pushed back her hood and let her hair blow out behind her so the faces behind the helicopter windows would see it and know who was down there in boat three. Thank you, Shepard. Thank you, God. Thank you, aliens swimming in the molecular clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. Thank you, T.P. Costello, for trusting me not to fuck it up. Thank you, life.

Tembo was videoing the two lead boats. Faraway clambered unhappily over the seats and tapped Gaby.

‘I have London on the link.’

She nodded and screwed the phone deeper into her ear. Geostationary static burbled. A studio director in Docklands came on line to count her in. Instinctively, Tembo turned the camera on her as Jonathan Cusack said: ‘We’re going back live to our reporter at East Seven Five, Gaby McAslan. So Gaby, exactly where are you?’

And in.

‘I’m on a landing boat from East Seven Five on my way to Foa Mulaku itself. This rather fetching little number I’m wearing is the latest UNECTA biological isolation suit, so we can get close to the object without having to go through decontamination. The scientists who will hopefully be making the landing are in the boat immediately ahead of us: emergence is estimated in—’ Shepard had one hand splayed and two fingers of the other upheld ‘— seven minutes.’ The lens closed up on her face. Faraway was holding a sign with YOUR NIPPLES ARE SHOWING felt-markered on it. ‘I’m going to ask one of the crew here what the exact plan is.’ Out of shot, Shepard was scissoring his hands, eyes wide with panic. Gaby avoided him and sat down beside the helmsman, a sunburned Scotsman with a black 6 on the red front of his suit. Crouching in the bottom of the boat, Faraway handed her a microphone with the Sky Net box on it. Tembo pulled back out to frame them both. Painfully conscious of her nipples, Gaby said, ‘Excuse me, could you tell the viewers your name?’

‘Gordon McAlpine,’ the helmsman said, watching the other boats throttle back as they came over the emergence zone. He cut his speed to match.

‘So Gordon, could you tell me what’s going to be happening?’

‘The idea is that we make a visual survey of the surface and pick potential landing sites – we’ve no real idea of how high it will rise out of the water; some of the locations that look good on the sonar map may prove to be inaccessible. The research teams and the recording crew will go in first; only when it’s safe will we run up beside them.’

‘So a landing is a definite probability.’

‘Nothing is a definite probability in this business.’

Back to the studio, the director whispered.

‘Thanks, Gaby,’ Jonathan Cusack said. ‘We’ll be returning to Foa Mulaku as information comes in, but if I might turn now to our studio guests, Dr Fergus Dodds of the British Oceano-graphic Survey, and Lisa Orbach, our resident Chaga expert, for their comments…’

Nice one, Gaby, the unknown director said. Don’t go ‘way, now.

She patted Gordon the helmsman on the back. They exchanged thumbs-ups. The boats cut their engines and bobbed on the swelling deep dark water of the Equatorial Channel. The press helicopters wheeled raucously overhead, waiting, waiting.

A single Scottish voice called out across the face of the waters.

‘Thar she blows!’

‘Faraway!’ Gaby yelled.

‘I have them already,’ the tall Luo said.

Going to you, Gab said the London director.

‘And we’re returning to East Seven Five where Gaby McAslan tells us something is happening,’ said the unflappable Jonathan Cusack.

‘It certainly is,’ Gaby said without a break. ‘It’s show time.’

It had started as a swirling of water, like current around rocks in a shallow river. Now the surface was punctured from below by sharp spines, dozens of them, arranged in rings and rings of rings. Only when their points were three metres above the surface did the spines begin to gradually flare outward. The knotted holdfast bases of the crowns of thorns emerged. Now the uppermost folds of the formations that looked like monstrous human brains broke the surface tension. Sea water ran trickling and gurgling through the fissures as the massive white structures loomed ever higher over the flotilla of small craft. The pinnacles of the crowns of thorns were now thirty metres above sea level and still Foa Mulaku pushed itself up from the deep. A structure was becoming evident. This was not an island, but a society of islands: white brain-formations surrounded by halos of high thorn coronets, linked to each other by a web of blue and red buttresses that were now surfacing, strand by dripping strand.