"And what else are we supposed to do? Wait here until we either drown or end up as the next course on the Kraken's banquet?"

"But we can't go out there, against that, in those!" the purser was ranting, in danger of losing any semblance of rational behaviour altogether. "We don't have any means of fending it off."

"He's got a point," Selby added, speaking up for the first time in a long time. "The b.l.o.o.d.y thing's d.a.m.n well near indestructible anyway; it's armoured and it can regenerate parts of itself."

"So what do you suggest?" Ulysses threw back. An uncomfortable silence returned.

"Quicksilver's right. There's no other way." It was Captain McCormack who broke the silence, his words laced with teeth-gritting groans. "Get out now, while you still can."

"But what about the captain?" Lady Denning asked, indicating her patient.

"Oh. Yes," Ulysses stumbled, blindsided. "How is he?"

"Not good," the captain gasped, wincing with the effort of answering for himself. His voice was thick with saliva and he coughed, bubbles of blood bursting on his lips.

It was only then that Ulysses realised that the doctor's body had been moved.

"Where's Ogilvy?"

"There," Schafer said, pointing to a s.p.a.ce behind one of the curved iron b.u.t.tresses that supported the internal structure of the dome. Ulysses could just see the top half of the doctor's body around the end of a strongbox, his face and torso covered by his own jacket.

"Oh. Did he say anything else before he died?"

"Oh yes," the purser replied. "Kept going on about how it wasn't his fault, how they had used his own weaknesses against him to ensnare him. He was delusional at the end, but it seems as though he thought Agent Cheng was going to take him in for the part he had played in an opium smuggling ring."

Ulysses was suddenly sharply reminded of the initial reason for him joining the Neptune's maiden round-the-world voyage, to track down the source of the supposed smuggling ring. That was before the murder of Glenda Finch, before the act of sabotage upon the sub-liner, before the Kraken. It was strange to think now that this hadn't all been about the Kraken, the murders and the sinking of the Neptune right from the start.

"He might have been a washed-up narcotic-addled fool, but he didn't deserve that!" Lady Denning cried, directing her bile at Cheng, where he sat handcuffed to another of the pillar-b.u.t.tresses.

Ulysses turned and, with purposeful steps, approached the defeated Chinese agent. "And what do you have to say for yourself?"

Cheng looked up at him with hooded eyes but said nothing.

"You weren't lying when you confessed to being a double agent, were you? Only I didn't realise that you were a turncoat to such a duplicitous degree, working for the Chinese Empire, making your Magna Britannian bosses believe you were on their side, leaking them secrets, only to use the information you gained in return to get back in with your slanty-eyed masters back in Beijing!

"But tell me something," Ulysses said, drawing even closer now to Cheng's sourly scowling face. "All this," he indicated the dome around them, "Project Leviathan. It was all going on a quarter of a century ago. Why now? What put you on to the possible existence of this place?"

Cheng took a deep breath and then, apparently deciding that confession was good for the soul after all, began. "There's been rumours of monsters in and around the Marianas Trench for as long as seafarers have plied these waters but in more recent years unexplained disappearances seemed to have been on the increase. Occasionally we would even find evidence, remains from the aftermath of such attacks. And then a long range scouting patrol turned up a survivor of just such an attack.

"He'd been in the water for days, drifting on a sundered piece of hull, and was suffering from the effects of exposure as well as dehydration. It's a wonder that something else didn't snap him up before we found him. Didn't last long either, but long enough to tell us that he had been part of the crew of a tramp steamer, six days out from Shanghai. He told us what had happened, what he had witnessed. He had no reason to lie.

"As you like to put it, Mr Quicksilver, all the pieces of the puzzle fitted then. We knew the beast that had taken the Venture for what it really was, a bio-mechanical weapon, engineered during the long cold war that has been fought between our nations for decades. But then I suspect you know this already."

"And if your government could steal the technology that had been created by Project Leviathan, they could then put it to use themselves, perhaps even take control of the creature."

"Precisely, Mr Quicksilver."

"And the homing beacon you triggered. It all makes sense now!" Ulysses exclaimed. "That's what brought your allies here in their sub only for them to be wiped out by the one thing they were after, because the same signal that drew them here also worked on the cogitator part of the Kraken's brain. It must have driven it insane, and brought it here as surely as it summoned your yellow brethren."

The dome shook once more, another tremor, like the presaging of a deadly seaquake.

"It's time we were gone," Selby stated bluntly.

"But if you all go now, and the true killer is one of you," Cheng suddenly piped up, a cruel smile of smug satisfaction on his lips, "don't you risk taking the murderer with you?"

"Don't think you're getting out of this that easily, Cheng," Ulysses spat. "You're coming with us."

The smug look vanished from the Chinaman's face in an instant.

"Everyone's in this together. It's in everyone's best interests to help us get out of this alive. I've said it before: our killer's not the suicidal type. This is revenge, pure and simple. They want everyone involved with Project Leviathan to suffer, for a reason, and to know about it. They'll not be able to get out of here without the rest of us. At least this way, we buy ourselves a little more time.

"So, back to the dock. John, Mr Wates, can you bring the captain with you? Nimrod, bring Cheng. And Mr Selby, if you would be so kind as to lead the way?"

"Well the Ahab and the Nemo are both still seaworthy and ready to go when we are. But there's a problem," the chief engineer confessed.

"There's enough fuel for our journey to the surface, isn't there?" Captain McCormack managed, from where he hung limply between John Schafer and Mr Wates.

"The subs aren't the problem -" Selby started to explain.

"So what is?" Carcharodon bellowed before Selby managed to complete his explanation.

"It's this place. The base. Some automated failsafe or other's kicked in. Must have been after that thing out there commenced its attack. The whole place is on lockdown."

Ulysses looked from Lady Denning to Jonah Carcharodon, the latter now with his a.s.sistant back to pushing his chair.

"The same thing must have happened last time, twenty-five years ago, when Lamprey tried to bring an end to everything."

"Yes!" Carcharodon snapped. "What's your point, Quicksilver?"

"So how did everyone get away that time?"

"I remember now," Lady Denning said, a growing sense of excitement colouring her words. "The lockdown was overridden. The correct access codes were entered and the pressure gates opened." Her face fell almost as quickly as her tone had brightened.

"Do you know those codes now?" Ulysses asked, already knowing the answer.

"I never knew them, I'm afraid, Mr Quicksilver."

"And you?" he asked Carcharodon.

"I was privy to them then, yes. But you don't expect me to remember them now, do you? It was twenty-five years ago, for G.o.d's sake!"

"Then we're stuck here," Ulysses said with cold finality.

"No, wait. There may still be a way," Lady Denning dared. "Lamprey designed and programmed the supporting cognisances used to control the bio-weapons, as well as the cogitator systems that operated the base - that are still operating the base - the logic engines which were the precursors of the Neptune AI."

"Of course!" Carcharodon shrieked in excitement. "If we could somehow link up the Neptune AI to the base's core cogitator systems - the ship's still out there, isn't it after all? - we could use it to crack the codes for us using a simple repeating algorithm."

"But how do we do that?" John Schafer said.

"I can answer that one," Captain McCormack coughed, his breath rattling in his chest. "One man, in a pressure suit could exit through an airlock - they all have manual overrides - return to the Neptune, find the AI chamber and initiate a link with Marianas Base."

All eyes looked back towards the entrance to the dive chamber where the motionless pressure suit still stood, where Ulysses had abandoned it.

"Well done, McCormack, that sounds like a capital idea. And I do believe I'm just the man for the job!" Ulysses said, a daredevil glint in his eye. "What do you say, captain?"

But Captain McCormack said nothing. For captain McCormack was already dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Ghost Ship "Wish me luck then, old boy," Ulysses' voice crackled from speakers built into the exterior of the pressure suit, just beneath the bulbous fishbowl helmet.

"Good luck, sir," Nimrod offered obligingly, and Ulysses squeezed himself through the hatch into the airlock.

The solid circular door closed behind him with a clang and through the external comm-relay Ulysses heard the locking clamps shunk into place. The dull, droning siren that signalled that the airlock had been activated began to sound and the huge suit was bathed in a slowly circling amber light.

Using the techniques he had learnt during his time with the Monks of Shangri-La to keep his nerves at bay, with a pang of regret Ulysses recalled the last time he had heard the sound, and was reminded of the old woman's terrified face caught in that same orange light.

Having decided that Captain McCormack's dying piece of advice to them was the only way any of them were going to get out of Marianas Base alive, and having made sure that Cheng was now securely handcuffed to a roof support - John Schafer keeping a gun on him at all times - Nimrod, Selby and the indefatigable Mr Wates had accompanied Ulysses towards the airlock. As Nimrod had helped him back into the c.o.c.kpit position of the hulking pressure suit, the engineer and the Neptune officer made sure that the suit's internal oxygen supply was hooked up properly and working efficiently, providing Ulysses with breathable air at the appropriate pressure.

The outer door of the airlock was shut using the manual controls inside the chamber and, once the water had been pumped out, air pumped in and pressures equalised, Selby opened the inner door again.

Ulysses swept his gaze around the small chamber, having to turn the huge suit from the waist to be able to take it all in from his cabin position, macabre curiosity getting the better of him. Of course there was no trace of Miss Birkin left inside the airlock now.

Since Whilomena Birkin had died, the first member of the party to lose their life since arriving at the Marianas Base, another eight people had lost their lives in that accursed place. Thor Haugland, the engineers Swann and Clements, Dr Samuel Ogilvy, Captain Connor McCormack, Major Marmaduke Horsley and Professor Maxwell Crichton. Four of them had died at Harry Cheng's hands alone, thanks to his deadly marksmanship. But four had died at the hands of the mysterious Marianas murderer. He sincerely doubted that Cheng and the Marianas murderer were one and the same. As far as he knew, Ulysses was leaving the rest of them behind with the killer in their midst.

He didn't like it, but he didn't see that he had any choice. If he didn't risk life and limb himself, then none of them would be getting out of Marianas Base alive. And he would rather be out there, trying to do something about it, than be one of those waiting behind, trapped like a caged animal, putting his future well-being into the hands of another. There weren't many he trusted with that responsibility.

But then perhaps the murderer wasn't one among their party at all. Perhaps there really had been a stowaway who had somehow escaped the Neptune with them, hidden on one of the submersibles, and who was now lurking within the pa.s.sageways of Marianas Base, biding their time, picking off the members of the team that had worked together on Project Leviathan one at a time. But it was highly unlikely, Ulysses reasoned.

The alarm still sounding, amber hazard lights whirling like miniature lighthouse beams, vents opened and water began to flood the chamber. The outer door creaked open, the two halves of the opening hatch looking like blunt-toothed metal jaws. But was he escaping the hungry maw or entering into it, freely and willingly? Ulysses wondered as he took his first lolloping strides out into the abyssal depths beyond.

Adrenalin was rushing through his bloodstream with every pounding heartbeat, the excitement, trepidation and urgency of the moment all working together so that Ulysses' mind and body were operating at their maximum fight-or-flight-heightened potential.

He was aware of an ominous creaking sound with every step he took, just like those unsettling noises that had formed an almost constant background soundscape when he had been inside the Marianas Base with the others. But there he had quickly become used to blocking it out, so that after a short time he didn't notice it at all. He wasn't sure if the same would prove true now, as those same sounds reminded him that all that was stopping the ma.s.s of water all around him from crushing him flat as a pancake was the armoured suit.

From where he sat, harnessed within the c.o.c.kpit, Ulysses' arms and legs reached into the armoured limbs of the suit, any movements he made magnified by the machine so that the monstrous appendages moved as if they were extensions of his own arms and legs. He could also drive the suit using controls in front of him in the c.o.c.kpit.

So now, as he moved his legs inside the body of the pressure suit, so the mechanical legs of the contraption strode forwards, carrying Ulysses along the edge of the trench towards the place where the wreck of the Neptune still lay precariously balanced.

Cooped up inside the Nemo as the small submersible had chugged towards Marianas Base from the Neptune, the distance between the two locations had seemed long enough. But now Ulysses realised how quickly that journey had pa.s.sed in comparison.

The p.r.o.ne shape of the Neptune lay ahead of him, still a good hundred yards away, teetering at the brink of the bottomless abyss. He could see that it had moved again since the refugees had escaped the flooding wreck. It now appeared to be resting more on its keel again, caught in a wide fissure in the crumbling sea-cliff beneath it, so that it had more or less righted itself. However, with such dramatic shifts taking place, Ulysses wondered how long he would have before the drowned sub-liner took its final voyage to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He pressed on: there was no time to lose.

Each slow step kicked up silt from the rocky bed underfoot. He had not realised how slow progress was going to be, but he couldn't make the ma.s.sive exo-skeleton move any more quickly had he wanted to. With a sudden cold pang of fear he remembered the Kraken. Dull booms carried by the dense water around him, and relayed to him both by the suit and its external pick-up mikes, told him that the monster was still labouring away at the devastated facility.

Intrigued, he dared to pause in his advance and bodily turn back to look for himself. His first anxious thought was how little distance he seemed to have covered on his route march across the seabed. The second was how huge and terrible the Kraken was. Its sheer size alone was threatening enough but its primal, aggressive temperament and appalling strength, married to a primitive determination, made it ten times worse. As Ulysses watched, the squid-beast tugged at a piece of the base's superstructure that had come free of its pile-driven moorings and cast it away, letting it tumble slowly into the hungry trench beyond the spur where the facility sheltered.

Turning back to the Neptune he plodded ever onwards, skirting the edge of the abyss, heading for the sunken liner, not daring to look back again. After all, it was now or never. Either he would make it in time or the Kraken would do for him first, and he was not about to encourage the latter by dallying here any longer.

And then, at last, he was standing in the shadow of the ma.s.sive super liner. To see such a magnificent vessel brought low like this, made Ulysses fear the Kraken even more. That something could bring down so vast a ship was almost incomprehensible. Worse things really did happen at sea.

Ulysses entered the Neptune through a vast hull rift, giving him access to the bilges and engineering decks. It was dark inside the ship and there wasn't anywhere left within the vessel that wasn't flooded, at least not as far as his penetration of the ship revealed. In places damage caused by the Kraken's attack and the action of the sea working on the beleaguered superstructure had created further obstacles for him to overcome. Fortunately the servo-hydraulics of the suit increased his strength ten-fold, allowing him to pull huge iron stairways out of his path and wrench open bolted hatch doors.

The lights projecting from the helm chased away the bizarre creatures that called these abyssal depths home, and which had already begun to colonise the dead wreck, dining upon the choicest morsels of the brand new banquet the sinking of the Neptune had provided for them. Slithering albino ragworms, skittering near-translucent shrimps and warty, black-skinned fish, every one of them as ugly as sin.

The pressure suit having effectively doubled his size, Ulysses could only just squeeze down some of the corridors at these lower levels, making his journey even more challenging. The other factor which made his expedition all the more arduous were the bodies. He had seen death in all its myriad forms more times than he cared to remember, but that didn't make it any easier, seeing the bloated, bulging-eyed corpses that had become trapped within the buckled pa.s.sageways; crew, pa.s.sengers, men and women, even children. The place had become a veritable ghost ship.

He also pa.s.sed the occasional droid-automaton, the drudges non-operational now, the seawater and dreadful hydrostatic pressures having done for their delicate internal workings. But he continued to make steady progress as he negotiated the tortured pa.s.sageways of the flooded wreck nonetheless, using the cutaway deck plans of the ship located at regular intervals to help check his progress, until he finally made it to the heart of the vessel.

Forcing open the doors bearing the Neptune's trident crest, Ulysses pushed through the s.p.a.ce between them and entered the AI chamber. Having seen what the sea had done for the ship's automata crew, he only hoped that the significantly more complicated Babbage systems of the AI were better shielded and, as a result, still operational, otherwise they were all doomed.

Apart from obviously being entirely flooded and in utter darkness, Ulysses seeing everything through a particle-suffused murk of chill sea-water, illuminated only by his suit lights, the chamber did not look significantly different to the one and only time Ulysses had been here before.

The green-topped desk stood in the centre of the room before him, although the chair that was normally tucked in behind the control console was floating against the ceiling above him. Ulysses considered the keyboard of the Babbage terminal and then considered the ma.s.sive pincer claw and Gatling harpoon gun gauntlet of his right hand. This wasn't going to be easy.

Carefully he manoeuvred the gauntlet hand over the control console and depressed the b.u.t.ton recessed into the top of the desk. Ulysses held his breath, hoping against hope, not only that the artificial intelligence was still operational but also that the input terminal was also working.

He thought he heard a faint bleep and then, with a definite click, the cover on the opposite wall slid open, the screen humming into life.

"Thank G.o.d for that," Ulysses said to himself as he let out a pent-up heartfelt sigh. "Or should that be, thank Neptune?"

The start-up image of the trident logo on a calm blue sea glowed into life, bathing the room in ghostly white light. The artificial waves appeared to ripple in the current swirling within the chamber with Ulysses' every movement, magnified by the hulking diving suit.

A prompt appeared on the screen.

USER:.

The Purser had hopefully provided him with all the information he needed - codenames, pa.s.swords and the like. Slowly he entered the late captain's name, keying in each letter with careful movements of the ma.s.sive gauntlet's index finger.

Another prompt appeared.

Pa.s.sWORD:.

Ulysses could see that this was going to be slow progress, typing with one finger.

There was a jolt and Ulysses had to steady himself. The ship had moved again. Not very much, but enough to emphasise the point that he didn't have long. And here he was having to type like an imbecilic child.

All he had to do was initiate the link and set the AI's systems to cracking the codes that would open the sub-dock doors and free those still trapped inside the base. But, there was so much more he wanted to do before he had to quit the ship. He had been given unprecedented access to the Neptune AI and all the secrets it contained.

His suspicions about what was going on were stronger than ever now, the possible ident.i.ty of the culprit at the forefront of his mind. And he hoped that the AI would be able to help him uncover the last pieces of the complex puzzle this mystery had become, and confirm the psychopath's ident.i.ty.