Breakwater Read online

  Cannonbridge watched, arms folded. He was, Cally had to admit, an artist when it came to deploying the songun batteries. The songuns weren’t, strictly speaking, sonic weapons, but a more powerful variation on the Contact Programme’s shockwave transmitters. At close range, they could crumple or even punch through light armour, but their main use was breaking up wave-strikes before they could come ashore.

  Effective though they were, they were the aspect of Dunwich—as opposed to Breakwater—Cally loathed above all others. They embodied, more than anything else, how her and Ben’s creations had been weaponised. Even the lives they’d saved couldn’t change that.

  Cannonbridge picked up a phone. “Batteries One through Eight, you’re A Group,” he said. “Target midpoint of wave-front bearing on Yarmouth sector. Batteries Nine through Twenty-one, you’re B Group: target midpoint of the Harwich wave. Batteries Twenty-Two through Thirty—C Group—midpoint of wave approaching the Wash. Stand by to fire on my mark. All other batteries are D Group. You’re on mop-up duty today.”

  The wave-fronts expanded, thickened. Cally clutched the arms of her chair.

  “A Group, fire,” said Cannonbridge. There was a dull boom as songuns discharged, and Dunwich’s hull shivered and hummed. Cally’s screen jumped and flickered; she looked up at the wall-screen and the thick, fuzzily glowing bracket of the first wave-front.

  A foggy, whitish blur bloomed in the centre of the bracket, as the songun volley hit home. The bracket broke apart into two smaller, thinner brackets. As they sped on, the blur kept expanding, fading as it did.

  “D Group, fire at will,” said Cannonbridge. Another shudder ran through Dunwich, and one of the smaller waves fuzzed and crumbled away as the other songun batteries, spread throughout the pumphouse’s sprawling structure, opened fire.

  The songun blasts put solid fists of water through the wave-fronts, breaking them into smaller, weaker fragments. Breakwater, indeed: even the name felt tainted. However necessary Dunwich might be, it was part of the machine driving humankind and the Bathyphylax towards mutual destruction.

  B and C Groups fired, smashing through the Harwich and Wash wave-fronts. Cannonbridge directed further salvos at the half-dozen dwindling brackets that had been the Yarmouth wave; they, too, blurred and dissolved before they could hit the coast.

  The songuns kept firing. One by one, the wave-fronts broke apart and faded to nothing. Dunwich began to rattle and rock afresh—not to the hammered-out rhythm of the songuns, but the random surging of a sea stirred into fury by both sides’ fire and counter-fire. Heavy waves would still crash against the East Anglian coast tonight. Roads and farmland would be flooded, homes washed away, lives lost. Another chunk of the land might fall into the sea. But all that was as nothing to the havoc the wave-strikes would have wreaked had they come ashore. Cally had seen it firsthand.

  “That’s the lot,” said Cannonbridge at last. He looked grey-faced, tired. The battle—if it could be called one—had lasted minutes, and yet it had felt like hours—longer, perhaps, to him.

  “Sir?” Sugulle. “Coastal Command. Strikes carried out on Choir positions. They’re dropping salvage markers now.”

  In the morning, when the waters had calmed, ships would search for remains. Not that there was much point. They’d never found anything yet, and even if they did, how were you supposed to tell the remains of a Toad from a piece of their technology?

  “Good work, everybody,” said Harkness, and gave Cally a nod. “Doctor.”

  Cally tipped her butcher-boy cap at her. Harkness turned away with a faint facial twitch—a smile or maybe indigestion, Cally couldn’t decide.

  “That was amazing.” Baker stumbled over to her. The boy almost looked drunk. “You were brilliant.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Buy you a drink at the Mariner’s when we get ashore?”

  “Eh?”

  “You know the Mariner’s Rest?”

  It was a pub, not far from Cally’s static caravan—she lived on land commandeered by the Navy, so it was a popular drinking spot with the Jack (and Jane) Tars. “Oh, yes. Been there a couple of times.” In the afternoons, when the Navy boys wouldn’t be in there getting drunk.

  “Well, maybe go for a drink there?” he mumbled, turning an even brighter shade of red than before. Dear God, she hadn’t imagined it; he was hitting on her. Cally, knowing how easily hurt a young man’s pride was, did her best not to laugh—but then Baker’s smile faded: he was staring past her at the laptop screen.

  She turned and looked. “Oh, shit. Commander!”

  “What is it, Doctor?” Harkness was back to her usual tone of bored disdain.

  “I’m picking up another Chorale,” she said. “No, make that two. Three.”

  “Make your mind up, Doctor—”

  “At least three— the Choirs are grouped in close together. And big—five, six thousand voices each.”

  “Christ’s sake,” Harkness snapped at Sugulle. “Can’t you pick anything up first? Well, then? Range?”

  Cally didn’t answer. Her stomach was hollow, sucked empty by what was on her screen.

  “Doctor McDonald?” Harkness was used to immediate answers. “I asked you a question. I want the range, and the target.”

  “Range: right down our throats,” Cally said. Her own voice sounded far-off, distant, the signal from the depths she’d always hoped for and never heard. “We’re the target.”

  She’d never seen Choirs configured like this before. They weren’t aimed at the surface, but facing towards Dunwich, to discharge a single massive shockwave through the water.

  “Clever bastards,” she murmured. Launch a huge-scale attack as a diversionary manoeuvre, while moving more Choirs in on top of the pumphouse—which would be so focused on the other Choirs it wouldn’t even notice these till it was too late.

  Cannonbridge shouted orders to the songun crews. Harkness yelled something and Klaxons sounded, red lights flashing on the walls. But the Choirs were too close, and there was no time. What, really, could Harkness do? Dunwich was a pumphouse, not a ship; it couldn’t go anywhere.

  Harkness now must feel like Cally so often did—performing her pointless little rituals to tell herself she had control over something, anything. When in fact all they could do, either of them, was sit and wait for the—

  Bong.

  First one, then half a dozen more.

  “Incoming!” Cally shouted. First piece of military-speak she’d willingly used. Probably the last too.

  “Brace for impact,” shouted Harkness. Cally saw the others fumbling at the built-in safety harnesses on their chairs. She unlocked hers and strapped herself in.

  The bridge rocked and juddered—not the big shockwave itself, of course, only the rumblings before it hit. Then the bridge lurched sideways, and Cally would have flown out of her seat if not for the harness. She screamed, but it was lost beneath the blaring Klaxons, the screams of tortured steel and flesh, and the thunder of seawater blasting through the breached hull.

  More screaming, and a smell of salt. Water jetting through buckled plating, a haze of it filling the air. Someone was shouting, Another one. She fumbled at the seatbelt on the chair, tugged it to make sure it was secure.

  “Get that leak sealed,” Harkness shouted, and then the second wave hit. The bulkhead behind her caved inwards, driving Harkness into the catwalk railings with a wet crunch. The bridge shuddered, canting sideways. Rivets popped, and more water spewed into the module.

  “Abandon bridge,” Sugulle shouted. He was next in command. “Mister Baker, evacuate Doctor McDonald. Everyone else, to the auxiliary control module.” He grabbed the phone. “Dunwich to LVR—”

  A third impact shook the bridge, but it was fainter—the main blast had passed them by. They were targeting the LVR too, Cally realised, to leave Dunwich unable to communicate with land or air.

  Cally’s harness wouldn’t unlock. She thrashed against the straps, close to panic. “Hold on!” It was Baker, sawing
at the harness with a knife. “Move it,” he shouted as the straps gave way.

  “LVR36?” Sugulle yelled. “LVR, do you read?”

  Baker pulled Cally from the chair. Her cap fell to the deck; she bent and grabbed it, then stumbled after him across the bridge. He ignored the ladder above—even if the transport carts were working, the LVR was almost certainly gone, and with it the pontoon, Cally’s boat, and more than likely the docking station too. Even if Cally’s boat had somehow survived, between the wave-strikes and the songun salvos the sea would be a holocaust that no surface vessel short of a warship would last long in.

  Instead, Baker would be leading her deeper into the pumphouse complex in search of an evacuation pod. Cally had designed them to get crew off a damaged pumphouse and first to the surface, then to shore, alive. They were armoured and padded to cope with the most savage sea, and their internal pressure would adjust automatically to prevent barotrauma.

  Barotrauma: caisson sickness, the bends. That was how Ben had died, when a volley of Bathyphylax wave-strikes had torn through the Caribbean. He’d been overseeing the conversion of Nautilus, an early pumphouse—a scientific research station—into a military installation, when one of the naval vessels patrolling above had capsized and broken its back. When it sank, the wreckage had descended on the pumphouse, and there’d been an explosion—munitions of some kind, no-one had ever quite determined which. It didn’t matter: whatever it was, it crumpled most of Nautilus’s structure like a tin can.

  Caught in a collapsing pumphouse, Ben’s only way out had been through an airlock, in his scuba gear. Even then, he might have survived if he’d ascended to the surface slowly, giving himself time to acclimatise, but the surging waters had driven him to the surface in seconds.

  A fishing boat that somehow managed to weather the storm had found him, but the ship hadn’t had a decompression chamber and the five-man crew had been unable to do anything in the hours that followed but fight frantically to stay afloat. Ben had been laid on a bunk belowdecks, and there’d been no-one to help him as haemorrhages and embolisms had racked and twisted the body Cally had loved to watch finning and diving, lean and sleek and tanned, through the blue Caribbean deep, into a broken, crook’d and crippled thing that, had it lived, could barely have seen or walked or passed a day without drugs or drink to dull the pain.

  No-one had been certain how long Ben had survived. Worse: how long had it seemed to take? Cally had heard all about the agony of it—gas bubbles expanding in the joints, so it felt as though hands were being pushed free of wrists, knees from thighbones. There was said to be almost no pain like it, and Ben had suffered it alone.

  So if the Contact Programme had been an act of mourning for Ben, the evac pod was his memorial, one that might at least save others from such a death. As ever, it was all Cally had, and nowhere near enough.

  Baker pulled her to an airlock, opening the hatch. The bridge jerked and tilted further. Metal screamed. Popped-out rivets flew like bullets and plating tore. Jets of highly-pressurised water spewed through the splitting seams. Harkness’s body hung over the railings, cut almost in two.

  Steel tore and groaned. The bridge shuddered. Baker fell to his knees; Cally landed on her arse. She got back to her feet, reaching for his arm.

  And Dunwich began to hum.

  There was a vibration, rising, making the deck-plates sing in response. Cally’s eyes met Baker’s, and saw he understood too. Something was coming. Something was almost here.

  “LVR?” Sugulle was screaming now. “LVR, come in!”

  Baker pushed Cally into the airlock as the shockwave hit. All three Choirs must have fired together: the whole side of the bridge opposite Cally burst inward. Harkness’s upper body fell to the deck, the plates of which tore and separated before the force of the wave. For a split second the black glittering sea seemed to hang suspended outside the hull, as if waiting to show itself to her, then came crashing in. Sugulle vanished, swept from sight.

  Baker didn’t even attempt to enter the airlock. There was no time. Instead he slammed it in Cally’s face.

  Cally saw him, through the toughened glass, face furrowed in effort. The hatch wheel turned and locked. Then the wave hit him and his face slammed into the glass, flattened and split apart.

  Red.

  The bridge lights went out, and there was only the black water.

  III. Hanover

  Cally slammed the airlock’s second hatch. Dunwich gave a fresh lurch as another blow smashed into it, and then another. The corridor fluorescents flickered each time.

  The power plant, she realised, stumbling towards the next airlock. With the bridge destroyed, the pumphouse’s power supply would be the Toads’ next logical target. Whether or not Cannonbridge had made it out, the songuns were individually controlled and could at least have attempted counter-fire, but without power they’d be useless, leaving the pumphouse and the entire southeast coast open to attack.

  She was clutching her cap. Had the second it had taken her to snatch it up prevented Baker from getting into the airlock too? He might have survived, if she hadn’t—

  Cally was tempted to throw the cap away, but didn’t. If it had cost Baker his life, she had no right to leave it behind. She put it back on.

  More blows hit the pumphouse. Cannonbridge and the others were trained to fight, and she wasn’t. Cally’s only role here had been communication, which seemed to be held equally in contempt by both sides.

  She climbed through two more modules to reach a junction. The bright yellow arrows painted on the bulkheads pointed off towards the connecting modules, but that was all they told her.

  Breakwater was Cally’s creation, not Dunwich. She’d had no desire to familiarise herself with what had become of Ben’s memorial, so the layout of the pumphouse beyond the bridge was almost completely unknown to her. That might get her killed now.

  She took the right-hand fork, stumbling as another wave-strike hit. The module shuddered; metal creaked and cracked. The fluorescents jumped and danced.

  Cally stopped. First the bridge, then the power plant: she might not know her way around Dunwich, but the Toads clearly did. This had been a precision attack.

  Three more impacts followed, one after the other, and the lights flickered out.

  Cally stood in darkness, as around her the pumphouse stabilised but for the hull’s distant creaking. About a minute later, the lights came back on.

  Cally breathed out. Each module had a built-in battery to keep essential systems running. For now, anyway: thank Christ that was working as it should be.

  At the end of the module was a ladder leading upwards. Cally clambered up it into a Type 2 with an alarmingly tilted floor. More ladders led up to ceiling hatches marked EVAC, but each already had a red flag in its glass window, signalling that the pod had ejected.

  More shocks hit the pumphouse. Cally yelped, clutching for a handhold. Far away she heard rushing water and a dull knocking; then they subsided, and the only sound was the pumphouse’s slow, faint creaking.

  The auxiliary command module, maybe, in case Cannonbridge and the rest had made it there. Cally braced herself for another strike, but nothing followed. There was no need. The Toads—no, the Bathyphylax, she wouldn’t keep using that slur—might finish the job later, but with the pumphouse crippled the attack was over for now. For Dunwich, at least: for the Suffolk coast, it might only have begun.

  Which made finding a pod all the more imperative. If the T— the Bathyphylax were about to launch a full-scale assault, no-one ashore would even think of a rescue mission to Dunwich till it was too late for anyone who remained aboard.

  Even as Cally considered that, Dunwich groaned and shuddered, and the deck tilted further. “Not good,” she muttered. She’d seen this before. The damage already done would be putting what was left of the pumphouse’s structure under ever-increasing strain as the disturbed waters raged. Sooner or later, other sections would give way, and a chain reaction would begin. It migh
t happen quickly or slowly, but would almost certainly end in a major structural collapse.

  She mustn’t think, just act. The internal machinery that had sustained Cally for so long was no less shattered than the pumphouse itself. There was a chart on the wall—when she went and looked, she saw it showed some of the station’s layout. Some bloody common sense at last. Or had it been? Cally eyed the portholes in the module. Was that how the Bathyphylax had known where to hit? Had that been all they’d had to do, look in through a porthole, to learn every weak spot on the station? Their organic technology made anything in the sea a potential enemy.

  She could puzzle over it later, if she lived. The chart showed the location of the next evacuation point: that was what mattered now.

  The journey should have taken no more than twenty minutes, but before long she reached the first obstacle. Inside one of the modules along her route, the lights glowed through a fog of murky water. Three blurred limp shapes drifted in it, arms and legs dangling. Cally thought of Ben, and looked away.

  A particularly alarming screech of tortured metal sounded. Move, Cally. If she’d read the layout plans correctly, another section ran underneath the one she was in now—she could travel under the flooded section, come up into the next clear module.

  Cally opened the floor hatch and climbed down. Seawater was trickling in through some joins in the vertical module that should have been watertight. She sealed the airlock hatches behind her and crossed the module below the flooded one. When she found the ceiling hatchway at the end, she reached up for the locking wheel, grinning as she did—she was making her way, slowly but surely, a section at a time—

  Cally only remembered as the wheel turned that she’d forgotten to look through the glass panel to check whether that module, too, had flooded or not. She tried to resecure the wheel, but the weight of the water was too much. Stupid, she thought, and threw herself backward.

  The cover flew open—away from Cally, thank Christ, or she’d have been flattened outright—and a surge of water burst out, threatening to sweep Cally’s legs from under her, but there was a dull clang and the gush of water tailed off, revealing a coughing, spluttering figure dangling from the hatchway. A woman, in sodden greyish coveralls: short black hair plastered to her scalp, a sharp face and large dark eyes.