In turn, the Major appeared to be revelling in the attention of a not unattractive young woman with a taste for plunging necklines. Retired army officer turned big game hunter, living off an army pension and apparent personal family fortune, Major Marmaduke Horsley had never been married to anyone in his life, other than Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Everything there was to know about the Major was there for all to see on the surface. A man like him couldn't hide his opinions if he tried, and he wasn't inclined to try in the first place. A bluff and hale character with a laugh as big as his belly - army muscle long ago turned to fat, the legacy of too many mess dinners and an aversion to physical activity - he was like everyone's incorrigible favourite uncle. There was something of the seasonal gift-giver about his appearance, as well as his manner, his red face bulging with purple veins, from his bulbous, port-swollen nose to his cheeks and unapologetic white whiskers of sideburns and moustache.

And finally, facing Ulysses from where he had been placed between Dexter Sylvester and Miss Birkin was the highly-respected global-trotting travel writer, Thor Haugland. The accent of his homeland apparent in his cultured tones, his command of English was better than that of many Englishmen Ulysses had met, and English was only one of seven languages spoken by the Norwegian. Should the conversation ever falter, with the way in which he turned any comment or question into an excuse to relate another of his many overseas adventures, Haugland would be able to keep the dinner entertainment going single-handedly. And despite his high-brow, pseudo-intellectual approach, there was no doubting his abilities as a storyteller; even the most insignificant experience was related with attention gripping skill and, in the process, turned into an intriguing anecdote. Miss Birkin certainly seemed happy to hang on his every word, rather than confront the reality of her charge's hasty - and possibly rebellious - engagement. As was Miss Celeste.

And then there was Jonah Carcharodon. Strangely, Ulysses realised, although in many ways he was the most publicly recognised figure amongst the party, after Ulysses himself, he was the biggest unknown as far as the dandy adventurer was concerned. Rumours abounded, but the actual facts behind those rumours remained frustratingly clouded by a fog of contradictions, uncertainties and downright lies. The Great White Shipping Line was an undoubted global success but there were still persistent rumours that the building of the Neptune had almost sunk the company. Everyone knew that Carcharodon was confined to a wheelchair but no one seemed to know why. It was popular knowledge that Carcharodon was an eccentric billionaire but n.o.body knew what he spent his considerable fortune on. He had given many interviews over the years but still no one seemed to know anything of real substance about the man. He remained a mystery. What Ulysses knew from his own investigations was that Carcharodon was the owner of the shipping company that bore his name and the host of this party, a grumpy old sod with an eye for pretty young a.s.sistants, who didn't like being upstaged on his own boat, and that was about it. At this moment, as the Umbridge Industries man was trying to ask him another searching question, Carcharodon appeared to be berating his put-upon a.s.sistant.

Looking at the arrangement of guests around the table Ulysses wondered if one or more of them had carried out their own bit of judicious place-swapping, for Dexter Sylvester to have the undivided attention of the patently irritated Jonah Carcharodon and for Glenda Finch to have ended up sitting next to Ulysses - or was that just self-flattering egotism on his part?

What an unlikely lot to be sharing dinner on the foremost luxury sub-liner in the world, he thought to himself. What were the chances of some of these characters ending up on board the Neptune at this auspicious time - except that many of those present had specifically been invited, guests of the Great White Line with all expenses covered. The roster of guests at the captain's table would have had all the potential of a Penny Dreadful murder mystery, in the hands of the right author.

Out of a sense of pity for the mousey young woman, rather than to relieve Carcharodon from the unrelenting networking of Dexter Sylvester, Ulysses directed a comment at the billionaire.

"Mr Carcharodon," he said, "or can I call you Jonah?"

"You can call me Carcharodon."

"I must thank you for your personal invitation to join in this wonderful experience."

"What?"

"For inviting us on the inaugural round the world cruise of the Neptune."

"Don't thank me," Carcharodon bit back. "Wasn't down to me. My PA here sent out those personal invitations. Does everything for me, don't you?" he shot back at her, not sounding in the least bit grateful about it. "But then that's what you're paid for, isn't it? She's only here tonight to make up numbers. You know how b.l.o.o.d.y superst.i.tious sailors are," he said, directing this particular barbed comment at Captain McCormack.

As the waiter-drones were clearing away dessert and preparing to serve coffee, Ulysses was distracted from his half-hearted conversation with the ever-garrulous Glenda by Lady Denning rising, making the usual excuses to her host, the captain, and making to leave. There was an apology of chairs being pushed back as the gentlemen diners bid her ladyship a good evening.

"Going so soon?" Carcharodon asked, the tone he had taken with the eminent marine biologist almost challenging.

"Yes, Mr Carcharodon. It has been a most enjoyable evening," she said, without anything about her expression supporting her words - something having soured the evening for her - "but it is time I retired. I am a creature of habit I know, but it's too late change this old goat now."

That in and of itself would not have been particularly out of the ordinary but for the fact that Professor Crichton then made the same excuse, and left almost straight after her, his face like thunder. It was enough to pique the interest of a man like Ulysses Quicksilver and he didn't need his uncanny sixth sense on this occasion to tell him that something strange was going on.

"Captain McCormack, thank you for a wonderful evening," Ulysses said, placing his napkin on the table, "but if you will excuse me too."

"Really, Mr Quicksilver? That is a shame." It was Carcharodon who interjected. "I haven't heard you regale us yet with your part in the events at Hyde Park. I do hope you won't keep us waiting long."

"The night is still young, Carcharodon," Ulysses said, making for the door. "I'll be back. Please, don't get up."

"Ulysses?" Glenda slurred, her tone both tipsy and incredulous.

"Have your gla.s.s topped up, Glenda, and I'll be back before you know it."

Exiting the banqueting room, Ulysses pa.s.sed through the anteroom where the captain's guests had earlier gathered for pre-dinner drinks and into the corridor beyond. This area of the ship was for the exclusive use of the VIP guests and so Ulysses found the corridor devoid of other pa.s.sengers. However, he could hear two voices, their words made incoherent by distance and the m.u.f.fling effects of carpet and drapes. Tone and intonation, however, made it quite clear that the two were not happily discussing the joys of a cruising holiday.

Moving as stealthily as he could, Ulysses crept along the corridor to the junction from beyond which he could hear the voices of the two dissenters. But as he reached the junction the arguing stopped and, if it hadn't have been for his flaring sixth sense, he would have walked straight into the mantis-like Professor Crichton as he stormed back around the corner.

The professor was obviously just as surprised to encounter Ulysses and could not hide the startled look that seized his face or stifle the gasp of astonishment.

"I'm sorry, Professor Crichton," Ulysses said, recovering first. "I almost didn't see you. I thought you had retired for the evening."

"And so I have. Good night, sir."

With that the professor pushed pa.s.sed Ulysses and back along the corridor. A moment later, in his wake, came Lady Denning.

"Lady Denning, what a pleasant surprise. You appear to have lost your way. Can I help you back to your room?"

The thunderous look on the older woman's face faltered and then gave way under Ulysses' devilishly charming smile. Without making any efforts to disguise what she was doing, she briskly looked him up-and-down.

"Twenty years ago, Mr Quicksilver, perhaps. But not tonight."

There was no denying she was a handsome woman. Handsome as an expression of attractiveness in the more mature lady suggested, to Ulysses, that once she must have been alluring. Lord Denning had obviously thought so.

"Very well, your ladyship. And please, call me Ulysses," he conceded. "Good night to you."

"And to you, Mr Quicksilver."

Ulysses turned to watch Professor Crichton and Lady Denning make their way back along the corridor towards their respective rooms. He couldn't help thinking that they must be about the age his parents would have been, had they lived. A strange thought to have, perhaps, but something about the imperious, bickering couple had triggered a recollection in his mind - some distant memory maybe.

Although he hadn't discovered what it was they had been arguing about, he now knew something else about the two biologists. There was history there, between the two of them, a prior acquaintance, and it was one that neither of them seemed particularly keen to renew.

CHAPTER THREE.

Waterworld The evening continued in much the same vein as it had done for the last few hours, although with the notable absence of both Lady Josephine Denning and Professor Maxwell Crichton. Captain McCormack, finding himself without anyone to share slight conversation with on his immediate left or right - John Schafer too preoccupied with his bride-to-be to make pleasant small-talk with the captain and Dr Ogilvy apparently having made it his goal to empty a bottle of port by himself - looked lost and uncomfortable. It was an obvious relief to him when one of his crew apologetically interrupted with a message. Tapping an empty wine gla.s.s with a dessert fork, Captain McCormack drew everyone's attention back to him.

"I do apologise for interrupting you all," he said, his calming Scots brogue filling the room with soft-spoken authority, "but I have been informed that the Neptune is about to dive, as we will make this leg of our journey towards Pacifica underwater."

There were murmurs of excited interest from around the room.

"For those of you who missed the opportunity when we dived down to Atlantis City, a truly dramatic way to experience the submersion is from the Promenade Deck, whilst enjoying a post-dinner stroll along the Promenade."

Taking this as their cue that the meal was over, the guests rose and made their way out of the gilt banqueting room.

As Ulysses rose from his chair, Glenda clutched at this arm. "I think moonlit walks are so romantic, don't you, Ulysses?"

The dandy looked down at the flirt clinging to him, her face upturned towards him, a tipsy smile on her painted lips. His initial feelings of irritation towards her in light of her almost possessive att.i.tude dissolved as he looked into her eyes and thought he sensed something beyond the story-hunting hack.

"My dear," he said. "Would you care to join me for a stroll along the Promenade?"

"I thought you'd never ask," she beamed.

She was a distraction, he told himself, nothing more, something to take his mind off what still had to be done. Someone to take his mind off the one woman who had dominated his thoughts of late, despite the fact that the last time he had seen her she had tried to kill him.

As Ulysses strolled arm-in-arm with Glenda along the Promenade he gazed up at the velvet night visible beyond the reinforced gla.s.s bubble enclosing the deck, which meant that they could happily enjoy the Neptune's gentle dive to Pacifica, safe in the knowledge that the air would be kept in and the sea out.

The Neptune's Promenade Deck was a miracle of modern Victorian engineering. It ran fully two-thirds the length of the ship, either side of the liner's ma.s.sive smokestack and across the entire width of the vessel towards the prow. To walk the entire circuit of the Promenade took roughly a quarter of an hour and covered a distance of half a mile. The enclosing network of steel girders and beams which held the panels of toughened gla.s.s in place, like the reinforced hull of the Neptune, could withstand enormous pressures of up to 9,000 pounds per square inch, meaning that the sub-liner could comfortably travel down to the deepest of the undersea cities sunk beneath the oceans of the world to cope with the planet's ever-expanding population.

Out here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, away from the ever-present light pollution of industrialised centres and cities like Londinium Maximum or Paris, the rich deep blue of night was splashed with the stream of diamond dots that were the Milky Way, the myriad stars reflected in the rippling black surface of the sea.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Glenda whispered, following Ulysses' gaze beyond the toughened gla.s.s shield.

"Incredible," her escort mused, lost in a dream world of his own thoughts. "That we can walk here as the ship submerges with no fear of drowning."

Ulysses felt a sudden sharp poke in his ribs. "I meant the stars," she said.

"Oh, yes... beautiful."

"Have you ever seen the constellations from this lat.i.tude and longitude before?" asked an accented male voice.

Thor Haugland, the travel writer, was leaning against the rail, the gla.s.s bubble still another few feet beyond the edge of the deck to allow for spectacular views of the sea surrounding the vessel as it descended.

"Oh yes," Ulysses replied.

"I take it you are well-travelled?" the writer went on.

"Oh, you know. I get around a bit. Work mainly."

"And you, Miss Finch?"

"Oh, no, not really. The Continent a little, Europe mainly. Paris, Cannes, Milan; again with work," she gushed, fl.u.s.tered. "But this is a first for me. I have never been on board a cruise ship before."

"Then it's a first for both of us," Ulysses admitted.

"If you think this is spectacular," Haugland said, indicating the spread of the Milky Way above them, "you should see the Aurora Borealis of my homeland in Hammerfest - within the Artic Circle, in the far north of Norway - the scintillating Northern Lights."

"Ah, there's no place like home, eh, Haugland?" Ulysses said with a smile.

"The more one travels the more true that particular adage becomes, Mr Quicksilver," the Norwegian said, stroking his well-tended goatee and turning his gaze out across the wine-dark sea towards the horizon, as if trying to spy his homeland from here. "But in memory only. To go back would be to shatter the perfect illusion, like the destruction of a wonderful dream on waking. And where would we be without our dreams?"

"Home?" Ulysses suggested. Glenda giggled and poked him in the ribs again.

The sound of wailing sirens rose from speakers positioned around the Promenade deck, announcing that the time had come, and the Neptune was ready to dive.

Without altering its speed the liner continued ploughing its furrow of white water across the night-black mirror of the sea. Ulysses and Glenda joined Haugland at the rail and peered down at the churning waters beside the ship. As they watched, the Neptune began to sink, creating the illusion from their viewpoint that the sea level was rising, eating up the lower decks of the ship, swallowing portholes and sealed hatches.

The ship was keeping to an even keel as the crew flooded the ballast tanks, taking the sub-liner under the waves whilst keeping it as level as if it were still riding the calm surface of the sea, rather than gliding beneath it.

Glenda gasped. Ulysses took in her delighted expression - agog with child-like wonder - and followed her gaze beyond the gla.s.s bubble. The waves were now splashing against the shield that contained the Promenade. Other late-evening wanderers had also paused to take in the spectacle. The silvered amethyst line of the far horizon disappeared as the waves lapped higher. Submarine darkness closed in on either side of the ship, with only the glimmer of the strung out galaxy across the cloudless night sky visible through the clear gla.s.s ceiling of the Promenade. Then the sea poured in from all sides, closing in on a rapidly shrinking circle of sky until, in moments, that too was gone. The last part of the ship to submerge was the shielded smokestack.

Glenda let out, what Ulysses realised must have been, a long held breath. "That is incredible," she said, her voice still barely more than a whisper.

"Yes, I really rather think it is," Ulysses found himself having to agree.

The running lights of the ship turned the underside of the waves that had closed over them sky blue for a moment. The Neptune continued to descend and the light became a curiously diffused sphere around them, with only darkness beyond.

Ulysses was aware of gentle creaking sounds as the superstructure of the Neptune adjusted to the weight of the water pressing down on it. But there was nothing to suggest that anything untoward was happening. No cracks appeared in the heavily toughened gla.s.s. The dome was holding.

But then of course it was, Ulysses chided himself. He had not thought himself the kind of man to see disaster wherever he looked, but then experience had taught him caution at all times. He was sure that there were very few on board who would be worried, not when entire cities could remain safe beneath the sea, resisting the colossal pressures exerted by trillions of tons of water pressing down on them.

"Look at that!" Glenda suddenly exclaimed, squeezing Ulysses' arm in excitement and pointing out beyond the gla.s.s. Ulysses looked.

Lights were appearing out of the darkness beyond the ship: silvered bubbles of air - released by the ship's submersion - rushing past; a bio-luminescent green soup of feeding plankton; the rippling purple and orange running lights of transparent squid; the swaying blue lantern-lures of nocturnal submarine feeders.

"Welcome to water-world," Ulysses announced. "Pacifica, here we come."

The sound of the child's footfalls rang from the grilled walkways, echoing back from the curved pa.s.sageway walls. Tears streamed from her eyes, blurring her vision, but she still knew where she was going. After all, she knew the place as well as she knew the back of her hand, better in fact.

She certainly knew it better than any of the others. Everyone else on board was a grown-up, and grown-ups didn't play. It was only when you played hide-and-seek, made secret dens, and spied on the grown-ups as they went about their secret work in their white coats and overalls, that you discovered every twisting rat-run, every hidden ventilation duct, every unplanned hiding place.

Sounds of death and destruction chased her along the curving corridor. She was also aware of a moaning, whimpering coming between great sobbing gulps of breath. It took her a moment longer to realise that it was she who was making this sound. She swallowed a sob in an effort to stop the fearful, childish noise.

The tears kept coming, splashing onto the grille beneath her hobnail boots, and mingling with the grime and blood already streaking her face. Her pinafore dress was dirtied and torn as well. She had barely got away. She had had to leave Madeleine behind; there had not been time to go back for her. As she thought of Madeleine, abandoned and alone, she could not contain the howl that burst from her in an outpouring of emotion, an unrestrained wail of grief and fear. She had not cried like this since she had lost her mother. Now she was losing Madeleine - her dear Madeleine - and her father all in one go.

She stumbled, the toe of a boot catching in the open mesh of the grilled walkway, and fell. She landed on hands and knees, breaking the skin, grazing her palms. Blood flowed. The shock of the fall stopped the crying for a moment and in that moment she struggled to take control.

She tried to calm herself, that small internal part of her that she liked to think of as her mother still, telling her to stop being such a silly girl and stop crying. How was crying going to help at a time like this? What would her father say?

Her father's face came to mind now as she ran on along the corridor, the hollow-eyed look of exhausted panic, the screaming mouth, strings of spittle flying from his lips. And she heard the last words he had spoken to her again, over the roar and crash of the structure collapsing behind her.

"Run, Marie! Run!"

So she ran.

CHAPTER FOUR.

City Beneath the Sea Pacifica first appeared out of the abyssal gloom as a conglomeration of fuzzy b.a.l.l.s of light.

As the Neptune powered on, corkscrew propellers churning the darkness behind it, the blur of suffused light sharpened in focus to become one vast dome connected to others of steadily decreasing size. The main dome of the undersea city was huge, a cyclopean structure of steel and gla.s.s, sprouting antenna relays, airlocks and the vent-ports of the cathedral-sized machineries that maintained the life-support systems of the city.

Closer still and it became apparent to anyone seeing the city for the first time from on board the Neptune that where Atlantis City had been all straight lines and angular outcroppings - its superstructure looking more like a gargantuan version of the only recently reconstructed (and then devastatingly de-constructed) Crystal Palace - the structure of the newer undersea metropolis appeared to have been created in the likeness of a spiralling nautilus sh.e.l.l. The central dome of the city dominated the vista visible from the sub-liner's prow viewing ports, and it was still some miles away.

Even from outside, and from this distance, it was clear that the internal structure of the city reflected that of a nautilus sh.e.l.l also, with the internal s.p.a.ce divided into a number of reducing, separately-sealable, self-contained compartments. The interconnecting smaller contained environment domes followed the same pattern, miniature replicas of the primary biome. Such an architectural structure would provide added rigidity and also an extra element of safety. Should the unthinkable happen, and one of the domes crack, depressurising and letting in the sea, the surrounding divisions of the city could be locked down and kept airtight.

Closing on the city, the Neptune began to pa.s.s some of the outer domes where droid-slaves tended the plantations, whilst outside, automaton machines - rust-red crab-like constructions the size of tug boats - harvested the vegetation of floodlit kelp fields.