The Swarm (29 page)

‘Maybe today you'll do something worthwhile,' said Ford, softly, to the robot. ‘Salvage your reputation.'

The URA glinted in the sun. Ford went over to the rails and gazed out at the ocean. Finding the whales was easier from the plane, but identification had to be done from the ship. After a while a group of greys appeared, surfacing one after another and ploughing through the waves.

The voice of the lookout sounded through the radio. ‘Look back and to the right. There's Lucy.'

Ford spun and raised his binoculars in time to see a ragged, slate-grey fluke disappear beneath the water.

Lucy was one of the two whales they'd identified. A fine specimen of a grey, measuring a full fourteen metres, she'd hurled herself against the
Lady Wexham
. For all he knew, she might have been responsible for splitting the vessel's thin hull.

‘ID authenticated,' said Ford. ‘Leon?' He squinted up at the sun and saw the plane dip towards the place where the flukes had been seen. ‘Well, I guess this is it,' he said to himself. ‘Happy hunting.'

 

From their vantage-point a hundred metres above the water, even the enormous tug looked like a toy, though the whales seemed to grow by comparison. Anawak watched a pod of greys swimming just under the surface, moving leisurely and peacefully. Refracted rays of sunlight danced on their colossal backs. The full length of each whale was visible through the water. They were only a quarter the size of the
Whistler
, but they still seemed absurdly large. ‘We need to get closer,' he said.

The DHC-2 descended. They flew over the pod towards the spot where Lucy had dived. Anawak hoped to God that she hadn't gone in search of food, since that would mean a lengthy wait. With any luck the water would be too deep for her here. Greys, like humpbacks, had their own feeding technique: they dived to the seabed and grazed on the sediment, rolling on to their sides and vacuuming up the bottom-dwelling organisms, such as small crustaceans, plankton and, their favourites, tube worms. The seabed near Vancouver Island was furrowed with trenches from their feeding orgies, but the giant greys seldom ventured into deeper water.

‘OK, folks, prepare for the breeze,' said the pilot. ‘Danny?'

The marksman grinned at them, opened the side door and pushed it back. A wave of cold air rushed into the cabin and swept through their hair. Delaware reached back and passed Danny his crossbow.

‘You won't have much time,' shouted Anawak, above the roar of the wind and the engine. ‘Once Lucy surfaces, there'll be just seconds to get the tag in place.'

‘No sweat,' said Danny. Holding the crossbow in his right hand, he pushed himself out of his seat until he was practically sitting in the linkage under the wing. ‘You gotta get me nice and close.'

Delaware shook her head. ‘I can't watch.'

‘Why not?' said Anawak.

‘It's never going to work. He'll end up in the water - I just know it.'

‘Don't you fret,' laughed the pilot. ‘These boys can do anything.'

The plane shot forwards, low to the water, on a level with the
Whistler
's bridge. They flashed past the spot where Lucy had been seen. Nothing.

‘Circle,' shouted Anawak, ‘and keep it tight. Lucy will come up pretty much where she went down.'

The DHC-2 banked sharply. Suddenly the sea rose towards them. Danny was balanced like a monkey in the linkage, one hand on the door frame, the other on the crossbow, ready to shoot. In the water below, the silhouette of a whale emerged through the waves. Then a grey shiny hump broke the surface.

‘Yee-hah!' screeched Danny.

‘Leon!' Ford was on the radio. ‘It's the wrong whale. Lucy's ahead of us, starboard side.'

‘Hell,' muttered Anawak. He'd miscalculated. Evidently Lucy was determined not to play the game. ‘Don't shoot, Danny.'

The plane stopped circling and sank even lower. The waves rushed beneath them. They were approaching aft of the tug. For a moment it looked as though they were going to fly straight into the
Whistler
's bridge, but the pilot adjusted their course and they passed to the side of the hulking vessel. A little way ahead Lucy dived again, showing her flukes. This time Anawak recognised her from the distinctive grooves in her tail. ‘Slow down,' he said.

The pilot reduced speed, but they were still travelling too fast. We should have taken a chopper, thought Anawak. Now they were going to overshoot their target. They'd have to wheel round, in the hope that the whale hadn't vanished again.

But Lucy's enormous body glistened in the sunlight.

‘Turn round, then down.'

The pilot nodded. ‘Just don't throw up on me,' he said.

The plane tilted abruptly. A vertical wall of water sparkled through the open door, terrifyingly close. Delaware screamed, but Danny cheered and waved his crossbow.

Anawak saw everything in slow motion. He'd never imagined you could turn a plane like a pair of compasses, with the wing tip acting as the point. The plane moved in a perfect semi-circle, tilted again without warning, and then they were upright.

Engine roaring, they headed for the whale, towards the oncoming
Whistler
.

 

Ford watched with bated breath as the plane returned from its daredevil manoeuvre. Its skids were almost touching the water. He vaguely remembered that one of Tofino Air's pilots used to fly for the Canadian Air Force. Now he knew which one.

The cylindrical case of the URA was dangling from the
Whistler
's stern crane on the other side of the railings, ready to be released as soon as the marksman fired the tag. The whale's grey back was clearly visible. The animal and the plane sped towards each other. Ford spotted Danny crouching under the wing and prayed that a single shot would do the job.

 

Lucy's hump surged through the waves.

Danny raised the crossbow, closed one eye, and bent his finger. Concentrating hard, he pulled the trigger. He was the only one to hear the soft hiss as the tagged dart left the bow at 250 kilometres per hour and whizzed past his ear. A fraction of a second later the metal barb penetrated the blubber and embedded itself in the whale. Lucy arched her back and dived.

‘We got it!' Anawak hollered into the radio.

 

Ford gave the sign. The crane released the robot, which splashed into the waves. As it made contact with water, a sensor was triggered and the electrical motor leaped into action. Plunging deeper, it homed in on the disappearing whale. Seconds later, it was out of sight.

Ford punched the air. ‘Yes!'

The DHC-2 thundered above the
Whistler
. Through the doorway Danny raised the crossbow and whooped triumphantly.

 

‘We did it!'

‘Nice work!'

‘One shot and - Christ, did you see it? Unbelievable!'

Inside the plane everyone was talking at once. Danny started to pull himself into the cabin and Anawak stretched out a hand to help him. Then something loomed out of the water.

A grey whale leaped into the air. The massive body shot towards them.

It was right in their flight path.

‘Take her up!' screamed Anawak.

The motors gave an agonised roar and Danny fell backwards as the
plane jerked up. Anawak caught a glimpse of an enormous head covered with scars, an eye, a mouth. A powerful blow rocked the cabin. A torn mess of broken linkage replaced the right wing where Danny had been standing. Delaware screamed. The pilot was screaming. Anawak screamed. The sea rushed towards them.

Something hit him in the face. Icy-cold.

There was a droning in his ears. The high-pitched screech of tearing metal.

Spray.

Dark green.

Then nothing.

 

Fifty metres further down, the onboard computer steadied the cylindrical body of the URA. The robot began to track the nearest whale. Not far away, barely visible in the gloom, others came into view. The electronic eye of the URA took note of them, but the computer wasn't interested in optical data. Other functions took precedence.

The URA's optical sensors were impressive, but its real strength lay in its audio capacity. This was where the inventor had shown a flash of true genius. The robot's acoustic technology allowed it to follow a whale for ten to twelve hours without losing track of it, no matter where it went.

The URA's hydrophones - four sensitive underwater microphones - didn't merely capture the whalesong: they could also determine its source. The hydrophones were fixed at intervals around the robot's case, so that when a whale emitted its high-pitched whistle, they received the sound sequentially. No human ear could register the tiny time delays, the rise and fall in volume: only a computer was capable of that. The noise arrived first at the hydrophone nearest to the whale, then reached the other three in turn.

From there, the computer created a virtual space, assigning coordinates to the source of the sound. Gradually the digital environment filled with positioning data on the whales. The co-ordinates shifted constantly as the animals moved. Now the inside of the computer held a virtual copy of the pod.

Lucy was also emitting sounds as she disappeared into the depths. The computer's memory contained extensive information on specific noises made by whales and different species of fish, as well as the calls of individual animals. The URA searched its electronic catalogue for Lucy
but couldn't find her. It automatically created a new entry for the sounds coming from her co-ordinates and compared them to other groups of coordinates, classifying all the surrounding animals as greys and accelerating to two knots to get closer.

Having located and identified the whales, the robot began its optical analysis, which was every bit as thorough as the acoustic diagnosis. Fluke patterns and shapes were stored in its memory, as well as fins, flippers and other identifying features of various whales. This time the computer was in luck. The electronic eye scanned the flukes pounding through the water ahead and identified one of the tails as Lucy's. The URA had been programmed with extensive data on individual whales that had been involved in the attacks. Now it knew which animal was the focus of its attention and changed course by a few degrees.

Whalesong allowed the animals to keep in contact with each other over distances of more than a hundred nautical miles. Sound waves moved through the water five times faster than they did in the air: Lucy could swim as fast as she liked and in any direction, but the robot would never lose her now.

Kiel, Germany

The metal door slid open. Bohrmann's gaze travelled up the imposing walls of the deep-sea simulation chamber. It was a way of taming the ocean, albeit in miniature. Created by man from second-hand experience, the world inside it was an idealised copy of the real thing. People knew less about reality than they did about its substitutes. Children in America drew six-legged chickens because drumsticks came in packs of six, while adults drank milk from a carton, and recoiled at the sight of an udder. Their experience of the world was stunted, but it only fuelled their arrogance. Bohrmann was enthused by the simulator and the possibilities it offered, but imitating life rather than analysing it could make science blind. Understanding the planet was no longer enough for most people; they were intent on trying to change it. In the Disneyland of botched science, human intervention was forever being justified in new and disturbing ways.

He was struck by the same thought whenever he came here: they could never tell for sure what science might achieve, only what it should never have attempted - and no one wanted to hear about that.

Two days after the accident on the
Sonne
, Bohrmann was in Kiel. The sediment cores and cold-storage tanks had been sent express freight to the care of Erwin Suess. He and his team of geochemists and biologists had lost no time in examining the expedition's haul. By the time Bohrmann had returned to the institute, the tests had begun. For twenty-four hours they'd been working non-stop but now their efforts had been rewarded. The simulator seemed to have revealed the truth about the worms.

Suess was waiting for him at the control panel, with Heiko Sahling and Yvonne Mirbach, a molecular biologist specialising in deep-sea bacteria.

‘We've put together a computer simulation,' said Suess, ‘not that we need it - it's for everyone else.'

‘So this isn't purely a Statoil problem, then,' said Bohrmann.

‘No.'

Suess dragged the cursor towards an icon and clicked. A computer graphic appeared on the screen. It was a cross-section of a gas pocket covered with a layer of hydrates a hundred metres thick. Sahling pointed to a thin dark line on the surface. ‘This layer represents the worms,' he said.

‘We'll zoom in a bit,' said Suess.

The picture changed to show a close-up of the surface and the worms took shape. Suess carried on zooming until a single specimen was in view, a cartoon-like representation, with highlighted sections.

‘Those red marks represent sulphur bacteria,' explained Mirbach. ‘The blue ones stand for archaea.'

‘Endo- and ectosymbionts,' muttered Bohrmann. ‘One set colonises the inside, the other settles on the skin.'

‘Right. It's a consortium. Different species of bacteria working in tandem.'

‘The scientists who produced those reports for Johanson had realised that too,' said Suess. ‘They wrote page after page on worms and symbiosis. But they drew the wrong conclusions. No one stopped to ask what the consortia were doing. All this time we've been working on the premise that the worms were destabilising the ice, even though we knew it was impossible. Now we know it wasn't them.'

‘The worms are just transporters?' said Bohrmann.

‘Right.' Suess clicked on another icon. ‘Here's how you got your blow-out.'

The cartoon worm began to move. The pincer-like jaws sprang open, and it burrowed into the ice.

‘Now watch this.'

Bohrmann stared at the picture as Suess zoomed closer. Tiny organisms became visible, boring into the ice. Then, all of a sudden—

‘Oh, my God,' said Bohrmann.

No one breathed.

‘If the same thing's happening along the length of the slope…' said Sahling.

‘Which it is,' said Bohrmann dully. ‘It's happening everywhere simultaneously, as far as we can tell. We should have figured this out on the
Sonne
. The hydrates were dripping with bacterial slime.'

He wasn't surprised by what he had seen. He'd hoped his fears would prove unfounded, but the truth was worse than he'd imagined. Assuming it was true…

‘Each individual process is an established phenomenon,' Suess was saying. ‘It's the combined effect that's new. When you isolate the details, we've seen it all before. But put it together, and it's obvious why the hydrates would dissociate.' He yawned. It seemed inappropriate to do so after what they'd witnessed, but none of them had slept for more than a day. ‘What puzzles me is why the worms are there at all.'

‘It beats me too,' said Bohrmann, ‘and I've been thinking about it for weeks.'

‘So who do we tell?' asked Sahling.

‘Hmm.' Suess tapped his lip. ‘It's confidential, right? We should tell Johanson first.'

‘Why not go straight to Statoil?' said Sahling.

‘No,' said Bohrmann, firmly. ‘Definitely not.'

‘Surely they wouldn't hush it up?'

‘Johanson's our best option. From what I can tell, he's not on anyone's side. We should leave it to him to—'

‘We don't have time to leave anything to anyone,' Sahling broke in. ‘If the situation on the slope is even half as critical as the simulation suggests, the Norwegian government should be informed.'

‘But you can't tell the Norwegians without informing all the other North Sea states.'

‘So much the better - and there's Iceland too.'

‘Hang on.' Suess flapped a hand to quieten them. ‘This isn't some kind of crusade.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘Oh, but it is. So far, we've only got the simulation.'

‘Sure, but—'

‘No, he's right,' Bohrmann interrupted. ‘We can't go putting the wind up people when we're not even sure ourselves. I mean, we know what's causing it, but as for the consequences - that's just speculation. All we can say right now is that vast quantities of methane are likely to escape.'

‘You must be joking,' said Sahling. ‘We know exactly what'll happen.'

Absentmindedly Bohrmann stroked his moustache, which had started to grow back. ‘Let's say we go public. We make all the headlines - and then?'

‘What would happen if the papers announced that a meteorite was going to hit the Earth?' asked Suess.

‘Is that a valid comparison?'

‘I'd say so.'

‘I don't think it's for us to decide,' said Mirbach. ‘Let's take this one step at a time. First, we'll tell Johanson. He's the one we've been dealing with and, from a scholarly viewpoint, it's his due.'

‘Why?'

‘He discovered the worms.'

‘Actually, Statoil found them. But whatever. We tell Johanson, then what?'

‘We get the governments on board.'

‘We go public?'

‘Why not? These days, everything's dealt with in the open. We're told about nuclear programmes in North Korea and Iran, as well as idiots releasing anthrax - not to mention BSE, swine fever and GM food. In France, dozens or maybe hundreds of people are dying because of contaminated shellfish - and they're not trying to keep it quiet, are they?'

‘But if the public hears us talking about a Storegga Slide…' said Bohrmann.

‘There's not enough evidence to be sure it's really that,' said Suess.

‘The simulation demonstrates how rapidly dissociation occurs. I'd say that's all we need to know.'

‘But it doesn't prove what happens.'

Bohrmann was about to argue, but he knew Suess was right. If they went public before their case was watertight, the oil lobby could dismiss the matter out of hand. Their theory would collapse. It was still too soon. ‘All right,' he said. ‘How long till we get a firm answer?'

Suess frowned. ‘Another week, I'd say.'

‘That's a bloody long time,' said Sahling.

‘I'd say it's pretty damn fast,' Mirbach argued. ‘You can spend months twiddling your thumbs for a taxonomy report on a worm, but we—'

‘It's too long
in the circumstances
.'

‘We've got no choice,' Suess decided. ‘A false alarm won't do anyone any good. We've got to keep working on it.'

Bohrmann couldn't take his eyes off the screen. The simulation had finished, but it continued in his mind, and what he saw made him shudder.