Kill The Monster, Chapter 17

XV. REYKJAVIK IS SO BRACING

The Pearl shone in the dark, glowing with an internal fire. Every now and again, a bright beam like a searchlight swept around over the trees. Sean had no idea what the beam was for - low-flying aircraft, shipping, or maybe simply advertising.

Snow crunched underfoot and hung heavily from the trees. It was rare enough to see trees at all in Reykjavik, and certainly not conifers rather than dwarf willow. He was glad the wind had died. It had been screaming round his suite at the Radisson all night, sandblasting the windows, trying to find a way in. But Icelandic houses offered no way in to weather.

It had been unthinkable for any previous president of the USA to go for a walk on his own in the evening. Surrounded by swarms of security personnel, no man from Lincoln onwards had gotten any closer to solitude out than being discreetly tailed by one spook a hundred yards to the front and another a hundred yards to the rear. But this president had only to speak, and security men obeyed him. He also knew he was going to live for another sixteen years. He had only had to walk out of the hotel into the night. Nobody had stirred to stop him.

It had taken him a good half hour to get this far. The two points seemed very close on the map, but were separated by a snowbound dual carriageway with massive SUV's tearing down it like a multi-lane luge, and if there were any bridges or pedestrian underpasses he had not been able to locate them.

The air was perfectly still now, as if the world were cast in crystal. Stars were coming out. The roads would be like oiled glass by morning.

Reykjavik was a big city now, not the small but precocious town he'd known back in his pre-presidential days. It now had two international airports, an ekranoplan and hover terminal, and a Church Way House beaming coloured light benevolently out to sea from a hilltop in Laugardalur. The very first Way House had been a breeze block structure only marginally larger than a public toilet. The Church had built it in Cambridge, within walking distance of the railway station. It had housed one bed, in which it was advertised that one person who had no place to sleep, could. It had had inscriptions on the lintel in Hebrew, Latin and Arabic. The Church had scarcely been able to cram even its own poor flock of worshippers into it.

Within the year, there had been Way Houses in every major British city, particularly those housing large numbers of London refugees. The message of brotherhood and commonality between faiths had appealed to more Britons, tired of constant self-replicating wars in the Middle East, than John Lang had anticipated. Soon Way Houses were being built ten stories high, large enough to house orchestras and church organs. Always, however, they had been simple structures, without columns or cupidons, and if any had an arched lintel, it was in order to ensure the building would last even when the steel in reinforced concrete skyscrapers around them rusted.

The Icelanders had put coloured glass in theirs. Good for them.

He passed his own face on the highway five times, blown up to house size and animated by the magic of liquid crystal. He was going through the motion of grinning cheerily, looped back ad infinitum. Wilson had told him that such billboards still existed in 2035, faded and full of bit errors in the loop, still going through the motions of a grin from the time when the President had still needed to get himself elected.

He passed a billboard the size of a building, announcing CHASE MANHATTAN: THE NEW NAME FOR HSBC. All vestiges of Chinese culture were slowly vanishing from the West. China was no longer the USA's Most Favoured Nation. Lines of ABM defences were going up across Siberia, Japan and Indochina. In response, the Chinese had initiated a programme of stealth cruise missile development projected to match America's and Russia's nuclear arsenals by 2031, and seemed to be confident that America's and Russia's arsenals would lie back and be matched. China had become almost pathologically suspicious of the West in recent years, closing its borders, insisting that all visitors to the People's Republic undergo extensive medical tests. Ninety per cent of recipients of valid visas were turned back at the Chinese frontier regardless. It was darkly rumoured in the Western press that Beijing was attempting to make slaves of its population by clandestinely circulating methadone in state-supplied foodstuffs.

The Pearl was an oddity even among Icelandic engineering projects - a hemispherical glass restaurant sitting on top of the city's tanks of volcanically-obtained hot water, on Öskjuhlíð, one of the highest hills in Reykjavik. Only the looming white crags of the fjeld looming over the city inland, the magic lantern of the Way House, and the concrete skyrocket of Hallgrímskirkja rivalled it.

The city had once obtained nearly all its electricity from geothermal power. Now, the Church's opening up of the oil deposits of the Middle East, Russia, and America's Alaskan wildlife refuges had made oil so cheap that geothermal energy could not compete. A major oil-fired power station had been built at Kópavogur, and the old installations at the Blue Lagoon stood rusting in the snow.

This was the first snow Reykjavik had had all winter. Icelanders from remote farms and fishing villages too isolated to be properly Taken Up were superstitious about it, claiming it forebode the End of the World via the greenhouse effect, the lowered reflectivity of land uncovered by retreating ice, and human waste heat. Many of them did not watch nearly enough television had turned away from Christianity to the older religions of their country, worshipping Þor, Óðinn and Baldur. Many believed in elves. Iceland still had its own parliament, and the Church was having to tread carefully, but moves were afoot in the Alþing to make paganism illegal. There were more than enough Illuminated representatives. Average helotone resistance was quite high here, however. Committee officials had talked more than once of instituting a secret sterilisation programme. Brought in under the guise of regular free cervical screening in the nation's well-funded free clinics, it would be easy to implement, and had already been carried out in Switzerland.

The front way up to the Pearl was via a long, curving roadway leading up to a more than adequate car park, giving the lie to the fiction that the restaurant was isolated on a lonely hill surrounded by Arctic seas. Approaching from this side, however, on a little-used footpath through the seas, one could still feel one was alone somewhere on Earth. That was seldom possible nowadays in Venice, Minneapolis, Thunder Bay, Washington or Jerusalem. He had a house in each place, though he did not care for the one in Washington. The hypersonic transport terminal at Torcello would, embarrassingly, be finished before the first sub-orbital transports that would fly out of it, though embarrassment was a thing he felt himself nowadays rather than have forced on himself by others. The Veneto was becoming Italy's transport and manufacturing hub, catalysed by the prsence of a state-of-the-art sub-orbital launch facility, presenting a ripe military target for anyone with a quarrel with the West. Unfortunately, it was looking increasingly likely that such a quarrel would actually happen.

The steep slope was presenting him with some difficulty. He didn't have as much time to exercise nowadays, and the big dinners that were both a president's right and his onerous duty had added an unshiftable cincture of fat to his middle. His breath was puffing out in clouds. His doctors told him his cholesterol levels might take ten years off his life. Other doctors told him liposuction and nanotechnological pipe-cleaning were easily and freely available.

Mickey should already be at the Pearl. A car had been sent for him at six. He had intended for Mickey to have a proper twenty-first birthday celebration - hundreds of friends, scantily-clad though tasteful women bursting out of cakes. Troupes of whimsical performing dwarves. Rollerskating vicars. Elephants. Mickey's name projected on the sky in kilometre-wide letters of fire.

Mickey's birthday, however, had been in October, and a whole set of international crisis conferences had come between then and now. The ongoing crises - the Voice Office hesitated to call them wars - in Kashmir and the Chicken's Neck had required constant attention to keep the Indians and their Chinese allies from letting fly with their nuclear arsenals before the allotted hour. Congo, South Africa, and Canada had had to be warned off exporting yellowcake ore to China. Taiwan had had to be prevented from voting to join the People's Republic. Russian bases had had to be established in Mongolia, Pan-Arab ones in Bangladesh, American ones in Vietnam. And Mickey had not seemed highly interested in spending his twenty-first birthday with his father in any case.

Still, he had been interested in visiting Iceland, one of the few states on Earth where snow still existed. The world was now a full two degrees warmer than in 1950. The African exodus had now started in earnest. The first few trickles had begun at the turn of the century - now boats were coming over by the thousand. An independent EU coastguard force now patrolled the shores of the northern Mediterranean, equipped with a new Italian-designed 'safe torpedo' that opened holes in a hull without a violent explosion, allowing stick-thin refugees to die by slow drowning rather than instant immolation. But still the boats came, fuelled by famine and desperation, carrying Nigerians who had walked across the Sahara, South Africans who had seen vineyards turn into burning wilderness, Egyptians who had seen their homes washed away by floods that had made a shallow sea of the Nile delta.

Inland, uphill from Gulfoss and Geysir in what had once been a wilderness, Iceland was now one of the world's premier ski resorts, second only to Alaska and Greenland. Mickey had spent an entire day on the slopes, surrounded by a small army of Committee security personnel. Unlike most world leaders, Sean had no current cause to fear that his son might be a target for terrorism, but now the boy was getting to an age where he might conceivably be the young man who had tried to kill his father back in 2013. Experimental matter transmitters were being built right now. Foreknowledge of the future made it certain that Mickey would live long enough to try to shoot his father; once he had done that, it would be worth his father's while to worry about Mickey's welfare. It would do no harm, however, to start now, to drill the security staff in advance. And best to tell Mickey the truth.

Sam, too, would be at the Pearl. She'd agreed to accompany him here on the strict basis that no official hand-shaking, crowd-greeting or Chief-hailing would be involved. She also apparently had a charity she supported in Iceland - a sanctuary for bioengineered animals, which existed to house former laboratory subjects turned luminous green or overburned with superfluous appendages by the wonders of science. One of Sam's demand sin return for meekly accepting the role of wife of the Evil Emperor had been as much charity money doled out to various worldwide worthy causes as the Church and State could support. Her activities, of course, made the Church even more wildly popular, an effect she loathed.

She had even had sex with him earlier on today, an uncommon enough occurrence nowadays. Had even seemed eager to do so. Had insisted, for some weird female reason, that he didn't use a condom. The Committee insisted that he use a condom to prevent Level Thirty-Three turannone complexes from getting out into the population. The Committee could and would go fuck itself. He would arrange for it to do so in the morning.

Would Sam still be capable of conceiving at forty-six? Would she even want another baby?

Christ, Mickey had been bad enough.

Sam knew who he was going to the Pearl to meet tonight. She was probably glad he had decided to take the burden of telling Mickey on himself.

Sam, for all her high-minded bullshit, had never told Mickey. She had hinted, during their many arguments, and in Mickey's hearing, that Sean was involved in things the Devil himself would disown, but had stopped short of going into specifics. And Sean had had little communication with Mickey for the last few years. Suddenly the Dad who had occasionally arrived back from Africa with presents and taken Mickey guiltily to the beach, aquarium and cinema, had become a wild-eyed religious headjob who had removed Mickey first of all from his friends in Britain, then from his friends in Canada, and who the other kids had smaned about behind Mickey's back all through school. And now Mickey, too, was slowly beginning to realize that his Dad had people murdered.

Sean was too scared to step through one of the new-fangled doors into the future to discover whether the life of Sean Agnello, 1972 to ?, had a happy ending. The future was a shiny pebble which, when turned over, might hide things too hideous to contemplate.

Halfway up the hill, he eased his family-sized backside onto a half-seen concrete structure, sat and looked out at the stars. It was not possible to see stars any more in Venice or Minneapolis. The need to build weapons rapidly to be able to break the power of China had put paid to any idea of reducing greenhouse emissions.

He fumbled in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. If he knew he looked like shit in the future, he might as well reap the benefits of it in the present. Besides, there were surgical techniques today for scrubbing out his lungs. Once he'd passed the hump at 2035, he could cut down, stop smoking, do more exercise, spend more time with his family, restrict genocide to Mondays and Tuesdays.

Suddenly, undeniably, he realized that he was not alone.

It was almost impossible to move silently on a carpet of fresh snow. However, whoever was in the dark scary woods with him had almost managed to do so. He could hear footsteps crunching powder snow very close behind him, which meant that whoever was there was moving with deliberate stealth.

He was, at first, shocked that someone seemed to be trying to assassinate him, but quickly accepted it. He was the world's most evil living dictator, after all. The attempt, of course, would fail. He was protected by causal angels.

He realized the flaw in his plan when the gun butt smashed down on the back of his neck. The world went white, as if he'd been shot by a death ray, then black as the moon and stars and power company all went out at once.

***

And when he woke up and sat up, it hurt.

Principally, it hurt because he seemed to be in an extremely confined space. The surface he was sitting on was both hard and curved. There was also a very hard ceiling extremely close above him, and he had just headbutted it with violent enthusiasm.

Oh my god. I'm in a coffin.

Relax, idiot. You don't die for years yet.

It didn't feel like a coffin. It felt more like a pipe. There was freezing cold water, or what he hoped was water, trickling down the back of his neck, and he could smell that distinctive stink of decaying marine life that prurient Victorians had referred to as 'ozone'.

The advantage of being successfully assassinated, he reasoned as he wriggled about in the cylinder, was that a dead man could no longer feel pain. Pain was a preoccupation of the living. The back of his neck and shoulders was once solid block of agony. He was unable to move normally; his hands seemed to be tied not only to each other, but also to his ankles. The pins and needles alone in his legs and forearms were driving him crazy. He tried to move them away from them, straighten them out; he could not.

"Pretty unimpressive for a great leader", said a voice.

A single light-emitting diode flicked on blindingly above his face. The diode was the idiot light for a tiny CCTV lens immediately above his head. The lens also had an accompanying microphone and speaker, the source of the voice. By the LED's red glow, he could see that he was indeed in a cylinder of a heavy, hard, and above all freezing material which was not metal. He could tell it wasn't metal. It didn't taste like metal. Plastic, perhaps, or glass.

He realized that a great deal of the pain he had been feeling was bitter, diabolical cold.

"We would have liked to have used one of the new foam insulators from your own submarine programme", said the voice. "Allow so little heat to escape, you'd think a submarine was an iceberg, and absorb sound waves like water. But there's a war on, of course. Only an economic war, for the time being at least, but a war all the same. So we have to use shitty old carbon fibre, which is why you can feel every swirl and eddy of the Arctic Ocean through the walls of your suite right now. Haven't you figured out where you are yet?"

He's mentioned submarines twice now.

Oh my god, I'm not in a coffin.

I'm in a fucking torpedo tube.

"I can see you're waking up a little now. We are cruising at a depth of thirty metres beneath an isothermal layer so beautiful it would make a hardened submariner weep. Despite the fact that you hear no more noise than you would in the average elevator, we are actually moving at around twenty knots. We are right now a good five hours south of Iceland, heading further south towards the great open seas of the South Atlantic -"

That made sense. The Pole was criss-crossed by so many seabed sonar stations that Russian or American operators saw a blip on their screens if a herring moved. The US Navy had known for years exactly how many varieties of giant squid existed in the deep oceans, exactly how large each was, exactly how fast it moved. The fact that the Navy had sonar powerful enough to tell it such things, however, was classified, and the general public still thought giant squid were a mystery.

"Hai Ho Shang class", said Sean. It even hurt to talk. "Five hundred tonnes displacement. First ship in class launched 2019. Look like underwater doorstops. Designed to bounce sonar signals off their hulls like a shell off tank plating, or radar off a stealth fighter. You have five of them."

"Five that you know about. Ain't quite as effective as your Abbazaid class, but still capable of sneaking through your sonar."

I know that voice. But where from? "So I've been kidnapped by the Chinese government. Is the Chinese government going to tell me why?"

"We want to take your blood."

Sean could see a flaw in this. "Wouldn't that be the Transylvanian government?"

"We know about turannone, Mr. President."

The voice was middle class English, neither plummy nor chavvy. But that meant nothing. He had met thousands of Chinese who had been educated in England. The Beijing government sent them there because England was only half as expensive as the U.S.

"And?"

"We represent the free nations of the world. We represent democracy. What you are doing strikes at the very basis of all we believe in."

Sean could not help laughing, despite his discomfort. "You had over thirteen hundred peasants cleared from land in Hainan this year, just so you could build a nuclear waste disposal station. And don't think I don't know what you're doing with those boosters, firing your Class A waste into space. In wartime that entire facility becomes an intercontinental ballistic dirty bomb arsenal. You don't even need to change the payloads."

"I'm not saying we're perfect", sniffed the voice. "But at least we maintain a pretence that our society is based on democracy." The voice was hissy and distorted, but definitely male. He was sure of that, at least.

"What are you going to do with my blood?"

"You produce more turannone than any man alive. You are, I believe, what you refer to as a 'Level Thirty-Three'. Your ability to continue to oppress your people is, indeed, based solely on the fact that you are the only Level Thirty-Three. The strain of virus you use to perpetuate that state was created in a heavily guarded military facility in Thunder Bay, Canada, and has only left that facility once. Only a few milligrams of viral medium, accompanied by an armed escort appropriate to a nuclear warhead. And yet you, whose blood contains several litres of the stuff, are apt to wander around foreign capitals unescorted, believing that the good lord himself will protect you. Such inattention to basic security procedure has been seen before in America, of course, but not since the days of Nine One One -"

"Are you going to take all my blood?"

"Of course not. If we took all of it, we'd kill you and be unable to produce more. No, for the time being at least we'll simply take as much as is removed in a standard blood donation, and allow you to recover on a high-iron, high-protein diet so we can come back and take more on a regular basis."

"So I become a sort of human sanguine milch cow." The tube wasn't even long enough to stretch out straight in. This made sense - the Hai Ho Shangs were not large ships. There would be no spaces on board that had no practical purpose.

"You will be well treated, as long as you cooperate. We have access to high-compatibility blood for transfusion to you in case of emergency."

"And what will you do with my blood, once you've collected it?"

"Larger quantities of the virus will be synthesized. It will be disseminated to the general population. All the general population. Your own lust for power will destroy you. Your armies will be unable to fight an entire nation of High Primates. Instead, they will capitulate. The democratic nations will once again rule the Earth."

Sean wriggled against his bonds, but could feel no give. Besides, he was still wriggling directly underneath the camera lens, which was installed flush with the tube wall. He was not surprised that the supposedly democratic Chinese state had installed integral cameras in every area of its military boats, including the insides of the torpedo tubes.

"So you believed all that when they told it to you, did you?", he said, and added, as a final barb, "Craig."

The speaker was quiet for several seconds. It was not part of the camera, he realized. It had been wired in as an afterthought, and secured to the top of the tube with tape.

"You recognized my voice", it said. It sounded almost hurt.

"You see, the problem is, we're dealing with real human beings here", said Sean. "I'll admit to you, the boys in Beijing could win a war by making my blood widely available to all. It's a good plan. But it's like giving a man a billion dollars and saying I've a sure-fire business plan. Just hand out one of these dollars to every of your billion neighbours, and it can't fail. The man you trusted the money to would have to be a saint, and so would everyone who ever got wind of the fact that he had the money. Would you describe yourself as a saint, Craig?"

"I'd describe myself as a man who isn't tied up in a torpedo tube."

"I'll be out of here before long", said Sean without concern.

"Yes", said Craig, "you will be rescued by time troopers from the futre. We know all about your instantaneous matter transmission programme."

Fuck. "My instantaneous matter transmission what?"

"You will be interested to note that your voice stress jumped seven points on our machine during that last pathetic attempt at denial. You are aware that we can flood that tube with freezing cold seawater just by pressing a button? Would you like us to demonstrate?"

Tripe super sized McFuck with fries. "And why ever would you do that?"

"Sean, this is Major Ho. He is particularly interested in the possibilities of matter transmission. He would like you to answer a few questions."

The speaker went silent. Evidently Major Ho was not a major talker. The massive valves at the breech of the torpedo tube hissed. Arctic Ocean water came in like an oxyacetylene spray.

"I can see", said Sean, "that this is going to be a long night."

***

He had not believed it was possible to be this cold. He was arched up high in the roof of the tube, pushing against its base with his feet. The water level was only up to his neck so far. A freezing cramp was crushing his ribs like a hydraulic press. He could hardly breathe now, even before he went under. His testicles burned as if being attacked with paring knives. His toes and fingers now only existed as nervous terminals pumping pain into his brain at maximum throughput.

"Major Ho does this sort of thing a great deal", said the voice from the ceiling. "He is very good at it."

"WHICH MEANS -" Sean panted out desperately "- THAT HE'S - VERY GOOD AT - NOT KILLING PEOPLE WITH IT -"

"Very good though, at making you wish he would kill you", said the voice. And Sean realized the truth behind it as, at maximum stretch, he was unable to stop the water rising past his mouth.

They hadn't even asked him any questions yet.

***

The water was at one millimetre below his nostrils. How long could a man survive in water this cold? Assuming he could breathe it, of course.

"There are currently three main schools of thought on instantaneous teleportation", said a calm Oriental voice. "Firstly, wormholes; secondly, 'hyperspace', or extra dimensions that map to this one; and thirdly, quantum tunnelling. Which of the three areas does your own research concentrate on?"

If he hadn't been on the point of death, he could have laughed. The excision of ethnically Chinese research staff from every single US scientific facility had worked. They had absolutely no idea how to build a temporal transmitter, or even what sort of physicists to get hold of research one. Given that they'd received no leg-up from the future either, how many years behind did that put them?

Not that that would matter, of course, once they'd built one.

Which meant they hadn't. Which meant he hadn't broken under torture. Oddly, that thought alone filled him with despair. The possibility that he'd be able to break after a decently prolonged session of gritted-teethed resistance had always been there up till now. Now, however, that option was unavailable. He was in for the long haul.

He heard voices whispering in the intercom. Surely they couldn't be that incompetent? And while he was on the subject, why the whole torpedo tube deal? Why weren't they simply standing over him pushing his head down into a bowl of water?

"His core temperature is getting dangerously low -"

And then he felt victory rising in him like a red killing tide. They're not going to kill me. They're scared to even dunk me underwater. They want the dimensional research data, want it badly, but they know where their masters' top prioritie slie.

The water level had sunk down past his lips. He was shivering uncontrollably.

"Can he hear us, do you think?"

Of course, there was another good reason why they wouldn't flood the tube floor to ceiling. The intercom speaker was jury-rigged, probably mounted up high to protect it from the salt water.

The one talking while the mike was still on was Craig.

He made shift to appear more broken than he actually was. I could bite out the speaker. That might give me a few minutes' peace while they replace it. But it'd also let them know I'm still capable of biting. And what would it accomplish?

"His heart rate's still steady."

How do they know what my heart rate is?

He realized suddenly that half the bindings round his arms and legs were not bindings but pressure cuffs and electrodes. They've got to be able to tell exactly how far they can push me before they lose me. Ergo, they're scared of losing me.

Sod this for a game of soldiers.

He wriggled himself around in the tube, trying to get purchase to attack the diagnostic equipment on his arms and thighs. Despite the restraints and the confined space, he was able to locate man of them with hands and teeth.

"Mr. Lamb, that is a very unwise move. If you remove the telemetry we will no longer be able to tell whether you are on the point of death."

He flipped up in the tube like a cross between seal and salmon and bit through the speaker cable. There were sparks, and the voice went silent.

The inside of the tube had to be close to zero Centigrade. After his last ducking, however, it felt like a sunny beach in Marbella. He wondered whether he had any toes missing due to frostbite in the future.

He heard the dogs whirring into the door at the head end of the tube, and the squeal of the hatch opening, before he lost consciousness.

***

"Are you feeling all right?"

The voice was female. Sean knew the speaker, but could not quite place her. Red light was filtering through his eyelids. He felt warm - wonderfully, beautifully warm. He had heard that this was common among men who died of hypothermia - a final, blessed heat, leading victims to die with smiles on their faces, tearing off their clothes in the snow. The heat had to be illusory, because he was still shoulder-deep in water.

"I think they got you out of there just in time. No, don't move too quickly - you'll jerk the feed out of your arm."

His eyes flickered open. The ceiling was beyond arm's length away, and made of white plastic. He panicked, realizing he was no longer in his nice safe torpedo tube. He was no longer lying on a curved surface in an enclosd space, but in a flat-bottomed tank with taps at one end, which might more accurately be described as, erm, a bath.

There was indeed something in his arm. He strained to look sideways and down. Tubes were indeed attached to his shoulder, but they weren't feeding in saline goodness. Instead, they seemed to be stealing blood.

"There's one of these units on every stealth sub, so I'm told. Often divers need to be sent out to swim inland and blow things up, in wartime. Sort of Chinese SEALs. Sudden immersion in warm water will revive a man suffering from hypothermia. Putting him next to a hot radiator with lots of towels round him, meanwhile, will kill him. You know how medical science found that out? You told me once, remember?"

He looked up sharply, nearly banging his head on the plastic tank, saw a female figure silhouetted against the ceiling lights.

"The Nazis experimented on Jews in Dachau", he said. "When the Allies captured the camps, the research was deemed valuable for use in Air Sea Rescue. A number of Jews campaigned against it, claiming that knowledge that had been obtained by genocide should somehow be just forgotten."

"But how do you forget knowledge? That research has saved thousands of lives. Probably even a few hundred Jewish lives. Sometimes it's necessary, Sean, for one man to suffer so that the world's wounds can be healed. You know that."

He forced his eyes to focus. A paper-masked assistant removed the phlebotomy tubes from his arm. The face outlined by the light became clear.

"S-Sam?" Sudden terror filled him. They couldn't kill him, but they might force him to watch her suffer. "Did they get you as well?"

There was a sigh. "If that's what you want to believe. How do you think they knew exactly where to find you?"

Panic closed his windpipe, forcing his voice into a croak. "What do you mean? I don't understand."

"Sean, you perform enormities every day in the knowledge that you have to because it's your destiny. You know that you end up being tyrant of the world, and I've seen you try to twist and turn out of accepting that destiny, but you've ended up with it. My role is to leave you, and I'm done twisting and turning. I know I'm going to have to do it, so I might as well do it on my terms."

He nodded slowly, staring at her dumbly like a child being lectured by a primary school teacher.

"I love you, Sean. I've loved you ever since the first time I ever saw you being threatened with arrest by a police officer. But I'm told that I can't stay with you. And I hate this whole big evil thing you've made half the world into."

He nodded. "I hate it too", he agreed.

"If I must leave you, I intend to fight you. Somebody has to tell the world what the Church and the Presidency and the new UN are doing. Somebody has to form the basis for the Resistance."

He nodded again, feeling as if he belonged on a parcel shelf.

She sat down on the only chair in the chamber. He looked around himself properly for the first time. The walls of the space they were in were made of clear glass or plastic. He could see crewmen moving about beyond the glass. The room outside appeared to be a sickbay, though a small one; there was only room for one couch, and most of it had been taken up by the airtight container Sean and Sam were sitting in, which was, in its turn, tiny.

"It's airtight", she said, looking at the walls. "It has an airlock at one end behind you. The crewmen who are dealing with us right now are methadone addicts. They're resistant to the effects of turannone." She raised a hand, showing a blood drain plugged into her own arm. "I'm as much of a prisoner as you are. You made me a high level Churchwoman. They can't afford to have me walking around their ship any more than they can you."

"Boat", he said automatically.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's a boat. Submarines are all boats, not ships." He sat up in the bath. The water, grown colder by now, sloshed over the lip of the tank onto the deck. The medical attendant scuttled to his side to make sure he hadn't shaken out his monitors. "They'll use you as a transfusion source. Keep bleeding you and farming you for turannonovirus."

"That is what I think they plan to do with you, I'll grant you", she said. "But you and I both know they won't get to do that. I don't know how you'll escape, and I certainly won't do anything to help you do it, but I know these walls won't hold you. Me, I might well die on the way to China. You have no proof I'll still be alive in 2035, have you?"

He considered lying, then shook his head. "I'm pretty sure you're alive in one year's time, though. For me to have been calling you every type of bitch I'm pretty sure you'd have had to be still up and walking."

She frowned. "And 'have run off with Craig' as well, which is not going to be the most pleasant task in the world. Still, if history demands that I do it, I suppose it'll have to be done."

He noticed that drops of blood were swirling in the water around him. That had been why the nurse had run to his side to adjust the drain. "I don't want you to go."

"I don't want to go. But you know that trick, the one you're so fond of at parties with your wanky High Primate chums, the one where you pull a gun off a security man and try to shoot yourself in the head and it just goes Click-click-click? Well, I've been trying it too. I bought a gun - correction, I walked into a shop, asked for a gun, and the guy behind the counter gave me one, handed it over saying nothing's too good for the wife of the Pastor -"

"That's what being a Level Thirty-Two does for you", murmured Sean.

"I tried to shoot myself with it. Just to see what would happen."

"What did happen?"

"Click-click-click."

She stared at him.

"Well?" she said.

"You're trapped in a locked airtight box travelling south in international waters guarded by armed Chinamen. How are you going to get out of that?"

He mulled this over. "Where exactly are we in international waters?"

"Approximately ninety-five miles dead south of Surtsey." A smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. "I shouldn't really have told you that, should I?"

He smiled back. "Not really."

The first detonation hit the walls like Leviathan knocking to come in. Sean's ears rang. Lights flickered. Circuitry in the walls shorted. Belatedly, an alarm began wailing elsewhere in the boat.

"JESUS", said Sam. "That was close."

"No. That was a warning shot. If they'd wanted to damage us we'd be flat sinking iron by now." He reconsidered the statement. "Or flat sinking plastic."

She was confused. "But they can't see us? How can they? We have a sonar signature barely larger than a herring!"

"Herring very seldom travel at a straight-line speed of twenty knots. Modern sonar and radar tracks everything in the sea or sky, then picks out only those components that don't look right. It's the same principle the Committee use to listen in to every single phone cal in the world and pick out only those calls that contain the words Death to Pastor Lamb."

Crewmen were scurrying down the corridor outside gabbling excitedly in what Sam assumed to be some form of Chinese. Two marines stormed into the sickbay toting firearms, throwing the protesting doctor away from the airlock door. They burst into the airtight space and levelled miniscule machine carbines at Sean. The weapons were flechette pistols developed by the Chinese Second Artillery Corps against the eventuality of combat on board space vehicles. They would not penetrate or even ricochet off a steel wall, though they would very efficiently flay a man's face clean from his skull. Being Chinese weapons, they could also be picked up by a trooper from a comrade's dead fingers after a tank had run over him, and fired. Sean looked up a pepperpot of micrometric barrels, and waited patiently.

There was neither a CLICK nor a BANG.

Slowly, inevitably, the crewman nearest to Sean dropped to the deck with an impact that Sean judged must have broken both his knees. He was very possibly unconscious before he hit the ground. Drool curled from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the floor. At his side, his colleague was shivering spasmodically, hand quivering dangerously on the trigger of his sidearm.

"Anaphylactic shock", said Sam. "I'm impressed."

"Helotone has been circulating freely in Western populations for nearly ten years", said Sean. "But the Chinese closed their borders three years ago. They have no natural immunity. And the latest versions of what we still call turannone, the ones pumping in your and my veins and being sweated out through our pores, use greatly improved vectors, more similar to nerve gas than to scopolamine." He rose dripping from the bath, picked up one of the weapons, examined it for safety catches and cocking levers. There seemed to be only one setting - full automatic.

The medics moved away from the airlock door respectfully as Sean walked out of the chamber. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the doctor.

"I want this vessel to surface", he said. "Tell the captain."

The medic gawped at the three twitching marines, but said nothing. Another armed crewman ran to the sickbay door, took aim at Sean, and stared in disbelief as his weapon failed to fire. Sean blew on him. He collapsed in a tangle of quivering limbs.

Outside in the corridor, further crewmen attempted vainly to turn weapons on him before throwing them away in disgust. The Chinese submarine service evidently did not recruit fools. They retreated down the corridor to a huge, circular bulkhead hatch, which they began frantically trying to close.

Before the hatchway stood a white man, holding a service pistol directly between Sean's eyes. Sean grinned, and raised his own weapon.

"Fancy a little causal roulette?"

The other man yanked the trigger on his gun back hard enough to have missed at any range greater than ten yards. The range Sean was standing at was considerably less. The hammer clicked uselessly in the receiver. The man holding the pistol stood frozen in terror.

"Now my turn." Sean's weapon failed to make any sound at all. Electronic action. Nice. "Looks like you still have something to do in the future, Craig. Like fucking my wife." Unable to kill the other man, Sean stepped in and drew bold, confident artistic strokes cross Watkyn's face in crimson with the gun butt. Craig collapsed in a heap on the deck. As he did so, the hatch clanged shut behind him. Sean heard mechanical teeth winding out of the mechanism, meshing with the jamb plastic.

He could hear a sound of rushing water.

The hatch had to go for'ards. They would hold on to the control room.

He turned round. Water was sweeping down the corridor in a cold tide. Ice was forming on the walls around it.

"Sam?"

There was no answering shout.

"SAM!" He charged into the sickbay, where the medic was still standing staring at the rising water. Sam was nowhere to be found. He continued to rampage through the aft section of the vessel, discovering weapons lockers, machine rooms, and the smallest berths the human mind could contemplate; but he was unable to find her. There were other hatches leading aft, possibly towards the main engine room, where the bulkhead was thick and made of metal. This made sense; the Hai Ho Shang boats were thought to be powered by small nuclear reactors. What would be in this part of the ship? Stealth boats, unlike stealth plans, were shaped like double Stone Age daggers - long, tapering multifaceted hulls, each facet's curvature precisely calculated by supercomputers. There were no diving planes, no conning towers, no keels; the boats were steered and kept stable only by microscopic computer adjustments to their batteries of caterpillar drives, and the water that would normally swirl over their surfaces like a millrace was made millpond-smooth by batteries of magnetohydrodynamic combs installed just under their plastic skins. A major hazard for stealth subs was colliding with whales who simply hadn't known the sub was there.

If he had any sense, the sub's skipper would be running quiet, having possibly used the turbulence caused by the the detonations up above to slow the boat almost to a dead stop to a point where sonar analysts up above could no longer be certain whether they were looking at submarines or dead fish.

The water was rising up around his ankles now, and was colder than a mortician's handshake. He could no longer feel his feet. He seemed to have only swapped his old torpedo tube for one slightly larger.

The only way of safely leaving a vessel while submerged was via a purpose-designed airlock. As far as he knew, the Chinese boats had no such thing, using the torpedo tubes themselves as dual-capable points of access for both SEAL sabotage teams and underwater ordnance. And the torpedo tubes were either abaft or in the bows.

Ridiculous of them to suppose that just because they couldn't kill him with gunfire, they could do it by closing off the hatches fore and aft and flooding the compartment. He'd survive whatever they attempted.

I only hope surviving doesn't hurt too much.

Two years before, the Navy had wanted to install a device called a Deep Eject on all American sub-surface craft. Deep Eject had been a Star-Wars-style pressurized escape pod that two or three men could sit in and use to bail out of a stricken submarine. He had personally rejected the design on grounds of cost, which would have put a thousand workers in a company in Groton, Connecticut on welfare if an alternative foreign customer hadn't been found. What had the name of the company been? Retrogen? Rescuegain?

The concept had also been copied by several foreign navies.

I wonder -?

If it existed, it would exist along the spine of the ship. (The boat, he reminded himself.) He pulled himslf up a ladder and back into the higher of the vessel's two main companionways, having little choice but to do so now; the water in the lower corridor was rising up to waist level. There were one or two Chinese marines still quivering in dribbling heaps on the deck, but apart from them, it was deserted up there now; Craig had gone. It figured. They had CCTV throughout the boat. They'd have seen him move away from the hatch leaving Craig injured on the deck. Sam had probably made them fetch him in. She hadn't worked out that it didn't matter whether they fetched him or not. The bastard can't die. Yet.

This accessway surely had to run straight down the ship's centreline, but there were no openings in its ceiling leading upward. If there was a way out, it would be large and clearly labelled. Unfortunately, it would also be labelled in Chinese.

Wouldn't it also be the biggest, reddest label on the ship? On a Communist vessel, of course, there was already a surfeit of red labels. But there were six wall panels on either side of the corridor bearing indecipherable letters each the height of a small child. The panels had no handles, levers or opening mechanisms or opening mechanisms of any kind.

They're emergency exits.

He leaned in on a panel and kicked at it hard enough to break his foot. He did not break his foot. Instead, the panel shifted slightly in the frame, and a klaxon began sounding, accompanied by a loud, calm voiceover in Mandarin. Encouraged, he kicked again. The panel fell out, revealing a wardrobe-sized alcove housing a rubber suit resembling a wetsuit, with an obvious red toggle similar to a life vest inflator in the centre of its chest. On one side of the alcove, another obvious red control sat behind glass evidently intended to be Broken In Case Of Emergency.

For all he knew, the suit was NBC gear, nothing to do with underwater escape. He considered leaving it where it lay until he caught sight, on the cuff of the suit, of a blue-and-white label saying RESURGAM: MADE IN CONNECTICUT.

Blessing his nakedness, he began hurriedly shrugging himself into the suit, being careful not to touch the scarlet toggle. The suit had no noticeable air supply. This worried him. However, it did appear to be made of neoprene, which reassured him.

Water was now pouring from the single access ladder to the lower deck. Feeling not a little ridiculous, he sat in his suit in the alcove, wondering which toggle to pull first. Finally, realizing whatever choice he made would be the right one, he reached down and crashed his fist into the glass over the toggle in the wall, jerking it upwards.

The impact nearly severed his spine. His ears rang. The world was suddenly black, and he was shooting upwards in a silent constellation of what he hoped were bubbles rather than fellow souls rising towards Jehovah. It was several seconds before he remembered to breathe; when he tried, he found it difficult, as if his chest were being squeezed on all sides. He saw the world through a flexible plastic mask, as if a condom had been pulled over his head.

He floundered upwards in the dark. He could not even see the submarine below him - but of course, a stealth sub would not have running lights.

What happens to me if whoever is overhead drops a depth charge now?

What happens to me if no-one is overhead?

He suddenly remembered the chest toggle. Quickly, he reached for it and pulled it. The plastic mask ballooned outwards, alowing him to breathe. What felt like steel hands closed around his chest, preventing him from breathing. He could feel his upward progress speeding up, as if a powerful upwelling had taken hold of him.

He could not take in air; he was certain he was about to pass out. He was conscious of a bright white light, brilliant as a magnesium flare, glowing in the dark above his head like an anglerfish lure. He hoped no large underwater predators were close by.

He felt the pressure on his chest suddenly ease, and a plane of shimering liquid sweep over his head, as if he'd fallen into water. There were stars in the water he'd fallen into, and a moon. His internal organs squirmed in his belly, and he felt himself falling, tumbling. He fell into water. This time, the water contained neither stars nor moons. It was possible to breathe. His breath misted up the clear plastic faceplate. A burning light, intolerably bright, was hurting his retinas.

He closed his eyes. The water rocked him gently. For the first time in hours, he felt warm.