Bright green eyes. A jungle, claustrophobic and humid. The unfamiliar weight of a gun in his hand. A grey beach beneath a grey sky, detonations echoing off cliffs and clouds, the sting of salt in a wound. A final, apocalyptic flash. The sea boiling above them. These images – no, memories, sleeted through his vision. Gradually, the events of the day settled into a coherent narrative and sensation flooded back.

Vash willed his eyes open. Light stabbed at his retinas and set off a pounding headache. At least the bullet graze in his shoulder was now subdued, if only because dozens of further pains were queuing up to make themselves known.

The disorientation slowly lifted and he began to make sense of his surroundings. The bathyscaphe cabin was so cramped that there was hardly room to walk five paces in any direction. The Dyn lay off to his left, its serpentine form coiled in on itself. Around him, nameless revolutionaries lolled unconscious in their seats; a shaven headed woman, a giant of a man, and another slumped against one wall, lank hair obscuring his features.

Christo was in the seat opposite. His skin, where it wasn’t darkened by bruises, looked ghostly in the dim, actinic light. His shallow, irregular breathing sounded muffled under an oxygen mask. Aurelie knelt by his side, concern etched onto her face. Her hands moved with the inhuman precision of the arms of a 3D printer. She glanced over her shoulder.

‘You’re awake.’

Vash stood and straightened himself as much as the low ceiling would allow. His back felt as though it had been subjected to an industrial stress test; the catamaran had pulled rocket gees on its brief skip across the ocean. As he crossed over to Aurelie he felt a slight lurch. They were still descending.

‘How long was I out for?’ he asked.

‘Not long, little more than a minute,’ Aurelie replied absently. ‘Here, lift his arms.’

She finished stitching the ugly gash in Christo’s torso and wiped it clean with antiseptic. Vash did as he was asked, which allowed Aurelie to replace the improvised bandages that had bound Christo’s torso with fresh ones. An ominous red stain bloomed through them.

‘There’s nothing more I can do,’ she murmured, noticing his gaze. ‘There’s internal bleeding and his lungs are flooded – I’m giving him oxygen but he’s lost too much blood already and there’s nothing I can do about that.’ She wrung her bloody hands, then seemed to grow self-conscious and stilled them.

Vash searched for something to say and found nothing. He wasn’t good at comfort, and doubted Aurelie would want some trite reassurance. Christo’s eyes flickered just below the threshold of consciousness.

‘Aurelie, if he’s dying… perhaps it would be best to ease his passing?’ Vash asked softly, aware that Christo might still be able to hear.

‘He’s got time. He’d want to see it through,’ she said, with a finality that brooked no further questions. Aurelie turned her unflinching gaze on Vash, her eyes conveying more than words ever could.

‘What about the others?’

‘Tuva, Jan, Pao,’ she said, indicating each of them in turn. ‘I’ve checked; some cuts, a few bruises but nothing significant. They’ll be awake soon.’

‘As for the Dyn…’ she continued, spreading her hands. ‘I’m unsure. It’s been motionless since it entered the bathyscaphe. It might be dormant, but for all I know it could just be pretending.’

They both looked at it uneasily.

‘We’ll keep it restrained,’ Vash said, sounding much more assured than he felt. It was a risk keeping the Dyn alive, but a calculated one. K’txl’s maddening remarks weighed heavily on his mind. Perhaps this Dyn might be able to provide some answers. Perhaps there was a way out of this that avoided further bloodshed.

To Vash’s surprise, Aurelie nodded in agreement.

‘There’s some rope, but we have nothing sufficient to keep it immobilised if it decides otherwise. We’ll keep the laser trained on it, but I really don’t want to have to use it. Not in here.’

‘It concerns me,’ Vash said, after a pause. ‘It could have escaped, yet it didn’t. It wanted to be here.’

‘The more important question is what bargain it made with Jan, although I think I can guess. But these are questions for later. We can’t risk confrontation now – we’ll take our willing prisoner with us.’

It wasn’t long before the others woke. Vash had expected them to regard him with suspicion, but he was more concerned by the barely disguised hostility in the glances exchanged between Tuva, Jan and Aurelie. It was clear why. They would have died on that beach if they’d followed Aurelie’s orders. Her plan might not have explicitly required their deaths, but they were not supposed to be on the bathyscaphe.

Having allowed them a few moments to come to, Aurelie addressed the last survivors of Christo’s Revolution. But there was no rousing speech, nor gentle reassurance, only a reel of practical concerns.

‘Vash, Jan, update our list of inventory, then get everything stowed away. Pao, help me check the bathyscaphe for damage. Tuva, take this,’ she said, handing her the laser. ‘Guard the Dyn.’

Vash watched this unfold with growing unease. Even an outsider like him could see that Aurelie didn’t command their loyalties as Christo had, but they did as asked without complaint. At this point, what else could be done?

Bundles of supplies and equipment had come loose during the chaotic first moments of their descent, and Vash and Jan began to gather them up. Jan was unlike the others, all of them recruits from the Conurbations, marked for life by the faded tattoos of gangs and identification barcodes. Whilst their years on the outside had changed them Jan was a wastelander through and through; wiry, with heavily tanned skin and uncut, matted hair.

‘How did you come to join Christo, Jan?’

‘Stole food from some warlord, he wanted to take my hand,’ Jan said.

‘Sounds like an interesting story,’ Vash prompted.

‘It’s not. I was hungry.’

‘What did you do before you joined?’

‘Stop digging,’ Jan snapped. ‘Christo obviously wants you here. But I don’t care if you think you’ve been fighting the good fight from the inside, or if you’re trying to convince yourself that you have. As far as I’m concerned you’re an Arco man. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

‘I didn’t mean to – ’

‘Let’s just get this done.’.

Vash couldn’t say he was surprised. Arco was hated by the people it governed, and he was tolerated as a necessity at best by those within Arco. They finished their task in sullen silence.

When they reconvened the situation looked even more dire than before.

‘The bathyscaphe took little damage, all things considered. Some of the controls aren’t too responsive and we are descending slower than I’d like -’ Aurelie began.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Tuva demanded.

‘The hull has taken some damage, but we should be safe to descend. I can’t really say more than that – it’s not like we can go outside to check. Other than that a couple of the batteries don’t seem to be working. I’ll see what I can do from in here.’

‘Until then we’ll keep power usage to a minimum. Vash, Jan, what’s our supply situation?’ she inquired.

‘The previous list of inventory looks largely aspirational,’ said Vash grimly, handing Aurelie a piece of paper with about half of the items crossed out.

‘The food and water supplies are going to be a problem,’ Jan continued. ‘Some must have been lost when we had to separate from the catamaran.’

Aurelie scanned over the list.

‘We’ll ration it as much as we can.’

‘Medical supplies could also be an issue… ’ Jan added, not having to say why.

‘We’ll manage,’ insisted Aurelie. Vash imagined that even if they had half as many supplies she would say the same, but he kept quiet. The mood was already poisonous enough.

It was Tuva who finally blew.

‘If nobody else is gonna say anything then I guess I’ll have to be the one to ask the obvious question. We’re out here to find something, something worth all the shit we’ve been through, right? So, will we even be able to get there? How far do we have to go?’ she demanded.

‘Roughly nine-hundred kilometres,’ said Aurelie. A direct answer to a direct question.

‘Roughly nine-hundred kilometres?’ Tuva asked. ‘Is that eight-hundred and ninety-nine? Or nine-hundred and one? As if that makes the slightest difference. All this quibbling about power and supplies is literally a waste of breath. We’ll have suffocated before we cover even a tenth of that distance. Over fifty people died on that beach, we’re going to die down here and you’re still trying to pretend your plan is all going to work out just fine!’

‘I’ll cut back the oxygen supply as much as I can -’ Aurelie began. Tuva didn’t even let her finish.

‘That’s fiddling at the margins and you know it,’ she said, jabbing an accusing finger. ‘The catamaran was supposed to take us way out there, over our target, with just enough air for the descent, some time at the bottom, and the ascent, right? There’s no way we can make the kind of journey you’re talking about.’ The words poured from her; better to be angry than to despair.

‘And although I’m sure you’ve already considered it, I’m going to say it out loud ‘cos I think it’s worth making really bloody clear, Aurelie, you wouldn’t be able to make it even if you were the only one breathing the air.’

‘We need to resurface, it’s the only choice.’ Pao agreed, although Vash noticed that Jan remained curiously quiet throughout the exchange.

A fit of coughing from Christo silenced them. Aurelie was immediately by his side, moving to lift his mask and wipe the bloody spittle from his lips. He waved her away. She started to say something about saving his strength but he cut her off.

‘Tuva, if we release the ballast, that’s it, that’s the end of the Revolution,’ he said, his voice barely above a strained whisper. He took a deep, shuddering drag from the oxygen mask. ‘All those who sacrificed everything to get us this far will have died for nothing.’

‘We could resupply, make another attempt… ’ Tuva offered lamely.

‘How long do you give the six of us once we resurface? The Dyn will find us, and they will not hesitate this time.’

‘Then what do we do? I’d rather take my chances at the surface.’

‘We have another option,’ Christo managed, before another coughing fit cut him short.

‘We use the deep sound channel,’ Aurelie explained for him. ‘It’s an oceanographic phenomenon. A burst of sound at the right depth will propagate like light in an optical fibre; internal reflection. It will spread outward, not upward or downward. Low frequency sound waves within the channel can travel thousands of kilometres before dissipating.’

‘Those charges you had me attach to the hull…’ wondered Pao.

‘Exactly. By detonating them in sequence we can encode a message that should be readable across a vast distance. So we keep submerged for as long as we possibly can and hope that that which we seek comes looking for us,’

‘Well, it’s a better plan than anything I’ve got,’ conceded Tuva. She looked more defeated than convinced. Vash glanced at the others. Jan was impressed, he could see, though he was retaining his scepticism. Finally, he spoke up.

‘I don’t understand – you said there was a weapon down there, left behind by those before. Left for us so that we could fight back, right? How does a weapon understand a message? How does it come looking for us?’

Aurelie hesitated, as though unsure how much to say. Vash understood that. Spend long enough carefully managing people’s perceptions and eventually just telling the truth took conscious effort. But Jan knew what questions to ask, and Vash felt he was owed a proper explanation. They all were.

‘If Aurelie’s… if we’re right about what’s down there, then it’s not a weapon in the sense you’re imagining,’ he said.

‘What are you on about?’ demanded Pao. Vash tried to fit the concepts to words they might understand.

‘To call it a weapon is a simplification. What Christo and Aurelie seek is a warseed. In itself it’s not a weapon, but a machine designed to grow into one. Given sufficient time it can create copies of itself that will take root and blossom, just as a plant does. And like a plant it can adapt to its surroundings. In the same way Dynic plants jostle for sunlight without having to understand what it is they do or why they do it, so the warseed can respond to our message – it’s just following its programming and doing what it was designed to do.’

Jan chewed that over for a moment.

‘But how can its designers have known? My daughter once told me that she thought many of the Dynic plants were able to move because they were adapted to a world where the sun was fixed in the sky – they had to be able to fight for position. But here they are…’ Jan struggled to remember the word. ‘Maladapted. They waste their energy constantly trying to chase the sun, fighting the same battles day after day. How can you know the warseed isn’t also maladapted? That this world isn’t the right fit for it anymore?’

It was Aurelie’s turn to look impressed.

‘Your daughter was a remarkable girl, to realise so much. But the analogy isn’t perfect. Dynic life was shaped by blind evolutionary forces. The warseed was designed,’ she said.

‘Still sounds like faith to me,’ Jan muttered.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you understood the nature of its designer. The Utilitaria will have already anticipated anything I could conceive of. It will have had contingency plans for every outcome, no matter how faint the possibility.’

‘The Utilitaria… we’ve all heard the stories. But what you’re describing sounds like God. It designs living things. It protects its flock. It knows everything you’re going to do, even before you know to do it. And the whole sorry world ticks along to its plan, not that it ever sees fit to explain itself to lowly humans,’ Jan laughed bitterly. ‘The only difference is the evangelistas demand a leap of faith, whilst you insist it’s not necessary.’

‘Call it whatever you like,’ Aurelie snapped.

‘You know why I never believed in God, Aurelie?’ asked Jan, his voice hardening. ‘Cos if this was His plan, the bastard’s got a sick sense of humour.’

Christo laughed at that, unable to help himself, though clearly it pained him. Aurelie’s face remained serious.

‘Listen,’ she said, growing insistent. ‘Imagine the scenario. You outmatch your enemy in every way, but your weapons can only be brought to use after a lengthy delay. Your mind is so fast that you can experience a subjective decade in the moments it takes a single impulse to travel along a single neuron in your enemy’s mind. But they have moved first. They can kill billions of people in minutes, and they threaten to do so immediately if you do not obliterate yourself. A billion people have already died, a demonstration of their resolve. If you had a week, they would be no threat at all, but you do not have five minutes. What do you do?’

‘You fake your own death. Then you hide, and arm yourself in secret. You return with overwhelming force and strike before they can retaliate,’ Christo replied as though speaking from a well-rehearsed script. His eyes glinted.

‘But where to hide? Space is empty, and vacuum is permeable to radiation. They will spot the heat from your construction anywhere in space or the Earth’s surface. They will certainly spot the heat of your engines. So where do you hide your secret weapon? Somewhere that can be reached in minutes without engines or drills, with plentiful energy and an easy way to stealthily dissipate heat.’

‘Underwater,’ said Vash, picking up on Aurelie’s chain of reasoning. ‘But it could be anywhere.’

‘I suspect,’ said Aurelie. ‘That it can be here, if it needs to be.’

‘But why you?’ Jan blurted out. ‘That’s what I’m asking. If the Utilitaria was all-powerful, why would it not simply build its weapons in secrecy, then wipe out the Dyn? Why hasn’t it done that already? What does it need you and Vash for?’

‘It’s gone,’ said Vash and Aurelie together. They glanced at one another, sharing a look of mutual recognition. By silent accord, Aurelie spoke up.

‘The Utilitaria was designed to make unbreakable promises. Precommitment, they called it. It was a safety measure born of harsh experience. The Dyn forced it into a binding promise to annihilate itself and so it self-destructed, totally. Like a calculator adding numbers, it couldn’t disobey once the command was given. It sacrificed itself and gave us a fighting chance. There is a machine waiting down there, but there’s nothing controlling it.’

‘And so, you deduced their grand plan, based on nothing but memories and whispers,’ Christo smiled fondly.

‘No voice of God, no prophecy or chosen one,’ Aurelie said.

Tuva looked as though she might be about to say something dismissive, but the words died in her throat. Pao looked blank; he seemed to have checked out of the conversation long ago.

‘It will either be true, or a beautiful dream. I’m glad to have been a part of it, either way,’ Christo said. Then, summoning up as much strength as he could muster, he turned to address them collectively.

‘Comrades, I’d be lying if I said this is how I wanted things to turn out. But hope remains. You must trust each other, you must become the bridge between -’ he paused to take a breath. ‘Between what is and what should be. Find the warseed. Bring down the heavens, save the future. Trust each other. And above all, trust Aurelie.’

Aurelie wrapped a foil blanket round the dying Christo’s shoulders and curled up against him. Her eyes glistened in the dim blue light. Vash moved to look out the porthole, his back turned so that he might grant them what little privacy the cramped conditions allowed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he heard Aurelie whisper, her voice breaking, barely audible above Christo’s rasping breath and the quiet hum of the bathyscaphe around them. ‘I’m sorry. All this had to be done. I regret none of it. But I’m still sorry. I sold you a vision that you’ll never live to see. I made you complicit in leading others to their deaths. I -’

‘I’m no fool, Aurelie. I chose this’ Christo reassured her. A sudden grin lit up his face. ‘Besides, I’m not letting you take all the credit.’

They had been descending for about twenty minutes when Aurelie silently brushed past Vash, taking a seat beside him in what passed for the control room. Behind them, Pao had taken over from Tuva in guarding the Dyn and Jan had dozed off in his seat besides Christo, exhausted by the day’s events.

Aurelie began tapping at what looked like an old computer keyboard bolted to the console, then glanced briefly up at a narrow LED display on which new commands appeared. The low rumble of the engine shifted tone slightly. One of the analogue displays on the console flipped from red to green. Vash thought it was a dial that represented buoyancy fluid pressure. After a moment he turned and spoke to Aurelie, his voice low.

‘Tell me Aurelie, why did you need me? Because I still don’t know why you risked it. I asked you on the beach but you didn’t answer.’

‘Insurance. Two is better than one,’ she said. ‘And we only have one chance.’

Despite everything, Vash smiled. It was obvious. Indeed, he’d suspected as much ever since he’d met her.

‘I wasn’t the only survivor,’ he said. Aurelie nodded. Her own smile was sadder, more wistful.

‘I have had a very long time to consider this plan. I had to grasp at every advantage I could reach for.’

‘I could have sabotaged everything,’ Vash said. ‘I could have betrayed your symbol’s meaning to the Dyn, or to Arco.’

‘I know who you are, Vash. You don’t work like that.’

Her answer only served to unsettle him. Vash heard a certainty in her tone that he had never truly felt. There was an ineffable brightness in her eyes that he’d never see reflected in his own. He asked another question.

‘And that figure, nine hundred kilometers; where did it come from?’

‘An ocean trench is the logical place to deploy the warseed; maximum depth provides maximum stealth. As I said, I have had a very long time to consider this.’

Vash paused. It went entirely without saying that this hardly narrowed the scope of their search, but she had just admitted as much. This was a logical place to look. It could be here if it needed to be.

‘Your plan, it makes sense when you look at it in the broadest terms… ’ Vash conceded. ‘But how can you be sure of the details? How can you know that the warseed will be there, now, as you expect? Perhaps it came up with a plan even more subtle and even more assured of success.’

‘It won’t have done so. As I must attempt to predict what the Utilitaria did, it will have modelled what someone in my position is likely to be capable of doing. Maybe there is a better strategy, but its plan can’t work if there is nobody to set it in motion. It left something for us to find, so it must have expected us to look for it. Since we are here, it must have expected us to be here.’

Did any of that actually make sense? Vash paused, measuring his next words carefully.

‘I fear Jan is right, Aurelie, in spite of what I know of the Utilitaria. It can’t hear our prayers. It can’t have known that you’d try this precise plan nearly two centuries before you formulated it.’

‘Perhaps it didn’t know every detail, but it knew enough. Now we just have to complete the final step.’

‘A final leap of faith?’

‘If you like.’

Aurelie turned back to the console, entering another sequence of commands. For a moment, it seemed as though nothing had happened. Then, there was a soft clang, then a pair of muffled cracks like gunshots. Then two in sequence, drumming a rapid tattoo on the hull. It was Morse Code; a letter ‘D’, if you assumed the simultaneous implosions represented dashes. As the sequence of snapping sounds continued, either one charge detonating or two at once, Vash mentally pieced it together: DRAGONS TEETH. Then there was silence once more, engulfing them like the black ocean pressing down on the hull.

Vash wondered if anything was listening. He stared out into the void beyond the porthole and imagined the sounds from their charges echoing endlessly beneath the waves.