Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Read online

  “Cover your head!” Ingles shouted at Lena. “Put your helmets back on!”

  But it was too late for Fiske as the a globule the size of a pancake leapt from Will’s hazmat suit to strike Fiske full in the face and disappear in rivulet-fashion through his ear, which he desperately tried to prevent without success as there was no getting hold of this thing.

  Amid the screams from everyone in the cabin a second and a third egg hatched and began flying about the small space, David grabbed hold of Lou’s headgear and placed it on him.

  At the same time, Forbes warned from above that David must slow the ascent. “You’ll all die of the bends.”

  David knew there was no fear of the bends as Max accounted for every pound per square inch as they went, adjusting the pressure accordingly. The PSI gauge said they were fine, except for the speed. The captain was right about that; at their current rate of ascent, they could enter Scorpio at the keel and come out her deck and still go off into the sky. But his immediate concern was simply finding a way to stay alive.

  He’d managed to slip his own mask on in the nick of time as one of the hatchlings slapped into him. Through the mask, he saw an intricate network of nerves and the pulsating blood inside this black sack of goop.

  While the parent of this thing may have evolved to a complex creature capable of mimicking or using humans, the sacs had remained in stasis and as rudimentary organisms, however deadly they might be.

  Jens had failed to get his suit sealed in time, which allowed one of the creatures entry through his mouth, and the others watched his throat bulge as the creature slipped down it like an enormous oyster, seeking safety and a ready food supply—every liquid in Steve’s body. Jens would become the carrier of this dread organism; he’d carry it to the surface in unholy conspiracy with it, unless stopped, and David had been through too much, to let that happen.

  He had earlier, while at the controls, reprogrammed the airlock door, and now he was grateful that he had. Fiske was unmistakably infected, and David had his doubts about both Jens and Gambino as well. If he was correct, Will, Lou, and he faced certain death by infection. The image of Alandale’s body flashed through his mind.

  Lena Gabio, Steve Jens, and Kyle Fiske needed to be isolated and now, but first he slammed the airlock HAZMAT lockout tray used for passing medicines, food, and water to a confined or quarantined person. David had lifted the two specimen nets, and now he shoved them into the HAZMAT tray to shoot them into the confined area to isolate them.

  David then grabbed Fiske and shoved him into the airlock hatchway, the door knocking him dizzy. David then entered the airlock combination on the keypad and the hatchway whooshed open. He quickly tossed Fiske inside. He then did the same with Jens over Lena’s objections, but Will held her in check as he too objected.

  David, working around the creature still probing his mask for entry to his suit and then his body, worked against every moral fiber in his being to take these necessary steps. All while Fiske pleaded, “Dave… don’t do this, David, David.”

  “No time to take a vote!” he shouted to the others in the cabin, and with a swift hand on the controls, he jettisoned everyone and everything in the airlock out into the depths of the ocean, and the others, including Lou, watched Fiske and Jens implode along with the egg sacs that’d been jettisoned alongside them.

  Will Bowman held a frozen stare on David. David shouted at him, “I had no damn choice, and you know it, Will! You saw those damnable things!”

  “Who’s next, me? Lena? Lou?” shouted Bowman, angry, glaring.

  David’s laser came up with lightning speed, and it fried one of the alien creatures still lurking in the cab as it came within inches of Bowman’s head, and Bowman, at first thinking David about to strike him, had raised his laser knife. But in the same instant, he saw that David was not out to strike him, so he lowered his knife and holstered it.

  Lena let out with a sudden howl as if the killing of the thing that attacked Will had caused her pain, and she suddenly went for her laser knife to confront and challenge David’s authority here. She was already infected, David realized now, and she had been since entering the sub. He recalled her vital signs becoming so erratic, and her mantra about getting to the surface. David imagined that during the time she discovered the eggs and had placed them into her collectibles bag, one of them had gotten into her suit. How the thing had wormed its way into her suit without her imploding out there, he could only speculate; possibly through some sort of extended osmosis, having attached itself to the suit, and if this were possible, how long did he himself have before the damnable splat on his mask would find a way in?

  He fired his laser through Lena’s mask and into brain as if in a reflex action and her head exploded within the helmet she wore, filled now with brain matter and superheated flesh. She never saw it coming, and she dropped across Will Bowman’s feet.

  David shouted, “She’s infected, Will! Help me grab up this thing she’s become and throw it the hell outta here, now! Into the airlock chamber!”

  “Where Fiske and Jens were pleading for you to help them, Will?” he asked, his face pinched in pain at what had occurred within the last few minutes.

  Then Will froze up, his mouth behind the mask agape, eyes wide, terrified of David it appeared. David snatched off his mask at the realization that the thing on it was indeed working its way through to him, so in one smooth and speedy action, he snatched it off and into the HAZMAT lockout tray that sent the mask and it into the airlock. On the inside, the vile creature was still trying to ooze through the mask.

  Fiske’s voice suddenly filled the cabin, and it sounded robotic as he pleaded with David from inside the airlock, crying out, “Don’t do this, Dave… Dave… please, Dave…” It was a recording now, one that Bowman has placed on replay. “You’re the killer here, Ingles—you!”

  Bowman tried to get to the airlock controls to block his way and keep him from disposing of Lena’s body as he had the others. Poor Will had no idea what was happening, but his gesture proved hopeless when David suddenly held him at the point of his laser knife. One press on the handle and Bowman’s head could be rolling about the floor.

  Bowman said through gritted teeth, “You bastard! How do we know you’re not one of these things?”

  “I’m not allowing a single one of those eggs to the surface, Will. Not even the one residing inside you.”

  Lou had his laser gun now at David’s exposed throat. “You put it down, now!” he demanded. “There’s been enough killing today!”

  “You can’t allow Bowman back onto Scorpio, sir, please!” David shouted, holding his position, a breath away from killing Bowman on the suspicion he was one of them now.

  “Enough! Enough! Put it down, David!” shouted Lou. “As for Will, perhaps he can be held in isolation and that thing cut out of him if it’s there at all! Now cease and desists! That’s an order, David.”

  “Thousands gave their lives that this thing might go forever to the ocean bottom, and I won’t let the death of Titanic be in vain.”

  No one moved.

  “Step back and away from him, Will,” suggested Lou.

  Bowman took a cautionary step back from David an inch at a time. “With the oxygen tanks so near,” he said, sounding like a reasonable man, “we all die, David, if another laser cutter is opened… well, we’ve been lucky so far.”

  Lou Swigart, barely able to move after his exertion, reached out to David. “It’s in your hands, David. All of it. We live or we die, all of it, on you.”

  “Davey Boy, please, be reasonable.” It was Bowman again; he now reached a hand out to David, offering to take charge of his laser knife.

  Forbes’ voice warned again of their speed, shouting for reason.

  “Be reasonable!” Lou added his voice.

  David had been unable to be certain of just how many of those damnable eggs had exploded out at them, and it had been impossible to know how many had gotten onto and under the suits of t
he men sharing this tight space. Or how many had managed to find a human host.

  He looked into Lou’s eyes for answers, for what to do and for a millisecond, he thought he saw a shadow cross the man’s brow, speeding past his eyelids.

  “Slow the ship, David. Bring it to a reasonable speed.”

  Reasonable, thought David. They are all asking me to be reasonable.

  His gaze went from one to the other of those who’d survived going into Titanic, those still with the living. They were few, three in number, and all saying the same thing. Be reasonable, David. Even David was chorusing the word in his head, and he wondered if something inside him, the infection itself, was talking to him. He heard it in the deepest recesses in his brain like a coiled snake hissing the word: reasonable… be reasonable. It all sounded like a hypnotist’s trick—like a post-hypnotic suggestion but not quite.

  Then Lena’s mantra was repeated suddenly by Bowman. “Gotta get out of this tin can… gotta get to the surface. Gotta get real air.”

  The desperation in Will’s voice recalled David’s reading about the two miner’s in that mine in Belfast—or rather Declan Irvin’s recreation and rendition of those early moments in the mine—entirely theoretical, entirely fictional as an account—that part of the journal entry. Yet there was nothing fictional about what he’d done to Jens and Fiske in the airlock or to Gambio here in the cabin.

  “It’s your girlfriend’s turn, Will. She’s infected. We both know it. Put her remains in the airlock. As acting captain, that’s an order!”

  “You just murdered Fiske and Jens, and-and then Lena!”

  “They were infected! She was infected!” David shouted at the others here and on Scorpio. “They’d have infected the rest of us and everyone aboard Scorpio.” David refused to give up his only weapon, the metal-cutting laser. “Go ahead, Lou,” he said, “strike me down. Do it now. I won’t fight you.”

  Lou looked angry enough to do it, his eyes wide behind the mask David had covered him with, and for another half a second, David saw a black, inky shadow cross Lou’s eyes, traveling from one side to the other like a sloshing watery shadow, yet gone as fast as it had appeared.

  “David, be reasonable.”

  Will Bowman chorused this. “Be reasonable, Ingles.”

  Swigart again reached out to David, trying to touch him, looking like a stroke victim struggling with words. “We hafta… have got to make it to… to the surface safely. Slow the damned sub, David.”

  Forbes was shouting the same over the communications panel. David snapped it off, silencing at least one of the voices coming in at him.

  “Maybe I have gone crazy,” he murmured to himself.

  When he took his eyes off Lou and the others for the millisecond it took to snap off the communications from Scorpio, he was attacked by Bowman, who began pounding him against the control panel.

  “Get him! Get him now!” Lou shouted in unison with those aboard Scorpio who had begun to believe David had completely gone mad. But David, although pummeled, held tightly to his only weapon, the laser. Seeing their determination and hearing them saying to one another, “Gotta get out of here… need better air,” he knew they had all been infected, including himself.

  Swigart was now shouting, “Get that laser out of his hands! Now!”

  Will struggled to do as Swigart said, but David held tightly to his only weapon. All of the others had become infected; they were all now incubators for this parasitic creature—each carrying and nurturing one of those things… each having been taken over by this alien life form.

  David had become the modern equivalent of Ransom and Declan rolled into one, and he acted as they had—bravely. He now squeezed the trigger and the laser knife beam hit the life-giving oxygen tanks, and Max exploded from within, killing them all and spreading their atoms to the deep, their sprinkled ashes and that of the sub floating back and down and down to have each and all return to the Titanic miles below now.

  The explosion aboard Max had occurred several hundred feet below Scorpio.

  The men aboard Scorpio felt the explosion lift the ship and drop her down.

  Dr. Juris Forbes cursed their luck and cursed Titanic, going to his knees, knowing that his years of preparation for this expedition had come to an abrupt and horrid end, and he imagined the reason why. David Ingles had gone berserk down there, fabricated a complex story, fed by paranoia and fear, making everyone around him the enemy. A terribly sad end to his dream.

  There had been no guarantees; no one knew what going to such depths might do to the human psyche. It now appeared that nothing good had come of it, and so much opportunity had gone to hell.

  Forbes now stared at the ancient book that his crewmen had indeed found in the wall panel in Ingles’ quarters. Dr. Entebbe had scanned the book earlier and had insisted Forbes read it. For this reason alone, Forbes knew he must read it to fully understand what had triggered Ingles’ deadly rampage, and what’d gone on in his fevered mind.

  Furthermore, how had David pulled it off? How had he killed Alandale and Ford? What had he used? What precisely had it been that killed Alandale and Ford, and ultimately all of Swigart’s dive team, including Lou?

  “Sir, Captain,” his first officer—promoted after Alandale’s death, called for his attention. “Warren Kane’s helicopter is landing on the aft helipad deck, sir, now! Says he wants answers, sir.”

  “Answers… fucking answers… everyone wants answers.”

  “Sir? Sir? Did you hear me, sir?”

  “Kane, yes, damn it, I heard you.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  “That we’ve failed, Mr. Walker; that we’ve failed and failed miserably.”

  When Kane rushed into the control room, he had bits and pieces of what was going on likely transmitted to him by Craig Powers, Forbes imagined. Kane came in shouting, “Captain Forbes, what in God’s name happened with Ingles? He sure as hell never exhibited any signs of madness in training. So what the hell happened down there?”

  “We aren’t a hundred percent sure; perhaps it was the enormous pressures. I mean they were working two and a half miles down. No one’s ever attempted anything like this before; it’s all experimental. Everyone knew that going in.”

  “I want a full set of all video and voice recordings, do you understand?”

  “I’ll see to it, Warren.”

  “I’ll have my people study every inch of it.”

  “It may help us to determine what happened to Ingles.”

  “You mean what turned him into a killer, don’t you?” Kane paced the small control room, knocking over Styrofoam cups and wrappers. He angrily erupted again. “And damn it all, perhaps we’ll get another shot at Titanic in what, another hundred years?”

  Walker had gotten out of the way, dropped his gaze, and had snatched off his cap, averting his eyes. He was trying to appear as if not here, looking somewhat sorry for his captain’s predicament.

  Forbes took Kane aside and calmly said, “Look, shit happens; you know that better than anyone, Warren. I’m sorry, truly, but none of this could have been avoided.”

  “All of us are a sorry lot, Juris! All of us are damned sorry sons-a-bitches. Especially you and Swigart—not informing me of murders aboard Scorpio when they occurred! What the hell were you two thinking? God, there’ll be inquiries, possibly a senate investigation, most certainly a forensic inquest. We can hire the best forensic psychiatrist in the business. Maybe head things off, get some answers before we all get crucified in the press.”

  “What we do, gentlemen, is to arm ourselves with the truth,” said Dr. Entebbe, who, overhearing the rancor had stepped into the control room. “We have ample evidence of the parasitic organism at work—given the condition of the bodies kept on ice. We also have this.” He held out Declan Irvin’s journal, which Forbes had carelessly left in the control room. “It’s a hell of a story but one which may convince you, Mr. Kane, and you, Dr. Forbes, that Titanic must be left alone and undisturbe
d forever more.”

  “What’s this?” asked Kane, taking the journal from Entebbe’s outstretched hand.

  “Read it… makes for a compelling argument.”

  “Perhaps after the grieving is done, the dead are buried, and what we’ve botched is buried we should leave Titanic to rest in peace,” said Forbes, nerves shot.

  “For now, we’ve got our investors to deal with,” said Kane, Craig Powers now back of him with a microphone and a cameraman, asking him for an interview. Kane whispered to Forbes, “I suppose we can explain what happened in time… maybe share this book with somebody… See if we can fathom what that lunatic was going on about, eh, Juris?”

  “You really must read the journal before you make any rash decisions,” Entebbe warned.

  “Dr. Entebbe is it?” asked Kane, not waiting for an answer. “I’ll do what is necessary.”

  “Captain, you too… you need to read the journal, sir,” Entebbe insisted.

  Forbes reached for the journal and Kane handed it to him. He held Declan Irvin’s journal up to the light and it was bathed in the sun of a new day.

  THIRTY SIX

  A shudder went through Titanic, an unusual creaking, followed by odd sounds that didn’t belong out here on the ocean. Just after a bell was rung from the crow’s nest, Declan Irvin looked up at the man in there, a young fellow Murdoch had hand-picked; Declan recalled his name—Frederick Fleet. He was placed on duty tonight expressly at Murdoch’s discretion. Frederick Fleet, who, aside from ringing the alarm three times in rapid succession to signal danger ahead, had lost his cap in his excitement to get on the call phone. Declan watched the hat float down toward him, and catching it, he imagined the best part of Fleet’s job was the occasional opportunity to call the bridge. But this time it was a dire shout to Officer Will Murdoch.

  Murdoch had stoically and dejectedly waited for just this news from Fleet: “Iceberg, sir, dead ahead! A mountain of it come outta nowhere! Thought it night sky, but there’re no stars in it!”