Half-lives

Through the infrared view of her suit’s display, Jana saw a flash of something in the water before her. It was very faint, barely more than a shift of shadow. She squinted, turning the dial into the visible, but it was already gone.

At the same moment the click of the Geiger counter sped up, turning into a continuous rush for a few seconds, like pouring dried pellets.

“Jana?” Cal’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “You getting that too?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell was it?”

She shook her head. “No idea. Going to look.”

“I’m behind you.”

“I know.” She was the scout; she went first, with plenty of slack in the tether between them. That was how they always worked best together.

Jana pushed forward. It was slow going in the suit with its lead lining, with the weight of the oxygen tank on her back and the resistance of the water around her. This deep the pressure was high, and it was easy to imagine she was moving through solid darkness, only able to see with the beams from her suit’s head torch. She wasn’t sure whether it was her imagination, or if she was walking into a current.

If she was, that meant water was flowing from somewhere ahead. Maybe they’d found their leak.

Her torch beams flared bright in the visible display, then faded as she checked the ultraviolet. Not much there either, nor in the X-ray wavelengths. It was only when she got into the gamma range that she started to see again.

They were nearing the old reactor now, and there were so many things here that could kill her; the unforgiving ocean, the pressure that could crush her ribcage like a can, not to mention the radioactive waste leaking into the water from somewhere up ahead.

In fairness to the people back then, she thought, they’d tried to wall this place up when it was decommissioned, doing their due diligence to future generations. But this thin, sandy spit hadn’t stood a chance against time and rising sea levels. Saltwater always had its way in the end, eating through steel and concrete.

She could hear her own breathing, very loud in the confined space of her helmet. The Geiger counter clicked faster again, a static burst, followed by another and another. After a while she realised there was a beat to it, the clicks rising and falling rhythmically. It was about the same pace as her heartbeat.

“Cal?” Jana said. “You hearing that?”

“No. What?”

“My counter’s picking up something weird. A repeating pattern.”

“I’m not getting it. I must be too far back. Could be a tidal eddy above, causing turbulence. You might be getting waves of radioactive water.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Jana kept walking, dragging the tether behind her. She could see ghostly shapes glimmering in gamma rays, but nothing useful, so she lifted a hand to switch the view back to visible, and the comforting glow of her torch beams. But before she could turn the dial, she paused.

Something had moved across her field of view, she was sure of it. She tried to squint into the dark, but the suit’s camera ruined her depth perception. She wondered if she being irradiated, and the first sign was a phantom scintillation on her retina. But no, her suit read-out would warn her. More likely just phosphenes, her own mind creating false sensory input after being in the dark so long.

Just in case, she clicked back through the wavelengths to visible. She saw nothing but the beams of light in the water, falling on the cracked concrete walls of the flooded corridor.

The Geiger counter accelerated again. A new pattern this time; two beats, one after the other. Then again, one-two. And again. One-two, one-two.

Jana stared at the empty corridor, absently tapping the same rhythm into her arm. “Hello?”

One-two, came the grainy peaks in the radiation.

She could hear her own heartbeat, loud and fast. “Who’s there?”

“Jana?” Cal’s voice in her comms startled her, almost making her stumble. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know.” Jana thought of the amorphous flash earlier, in the gamma. “I thought I saw–”

“Jana!” Cal interrupted her, voice pitching, saturating the comms. “Turn back. Now!”

“What? But we’re almost–”

“That’s an order!”

She turned around, her beams throwing every crack in the concrete into sharp relief. The tether extended down the corridor, then around the corner the way she’d come.

The cord went taut, just as there was another burst of radiation on her counter, Cal’s voice on her comms swallowed by a surge of interference.

Then the tether went slack again, drifting to the concrete floor.

“Cal?” Jana gasped, tugging on it. It came easily as she reeled in the slack. “Cal, what happened?”

There was no answer, only static.

“Cal, come in!”

Nothing.

“Please! Cal, this isn’t funny, please come in…”

The tether was still coming; no resistance yet. The end came flying around the corner, frayed, not connected to anything.

Jana gasped, trying to control her breathing. She couldn’t panic, she would deplete her oxygen tank too quickly. She held the frayed end in her thickly gloved hand, inspecting the fibres in the glare of her headlamp. She couldn’t tell if it had broken or been cut. Either way, it didn’t make sense. They’d inspected the tethers before they’d begun. Wear and tear was out of the question. Wasn’t it?

“Cal?” Jana whispered. There was no answer. She was alone in the blackness, her body surrounded by lead, a thousand tonnes of radioactive saltwater pressing in on her.

She should go back the way she’d come, she knew. Cal needed her. If he was injured, or… she closed her eyes, trying to calm herself, knowing she was using oxygen too fast. She could pilot the sub. It would be alright. It would be.

She should turn back, she knew. But something made her look over her shoulder, the way she’d been heading, into the current. It had increased into a turbulent gust of water, like walking in a high wind storm. Her counter was running high, clicking almost continuously.

She could hear that one-two beat again, through the noise. Despite herself, she stood and listened, transfixed. The sound seemed to gradually sharpen, until she could almost imagine syllables coalescing from the wordless one-two rhythm.

Turn… back. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back.

Jana stared. It must be her own mind again, reading meaning into things that had none. But she couldn’t make it stop.

“Hello?”

Turn back.

She scanned back through the wavelengths of her suit’s vision, plunging herself into darkness as she left the visible for the ultraviolet. She clicked through to X-rays; still nothing. She looked down at her gloved hand, still holding the broken tether, as she moved into gamma rays. There was a faint glow on the frayed ends. She frowned, looking up again.

There was a human-like figure there, blurred and distorted by interference; they seemed to glow with a surrounding halo, radiant and ionising. Their hands were held out, open to her.

Turn back, they said, in the static clicks of the counter. This is not a place for the living. Turn back!

“I’m here to fix it,” Jana said. “I want to help!”

The apparition flickered in the static of her black and white display. For a moment she thought its shoulders slumped, as though in powerless sorrow. But then its voice rose, saturating the counter as it raised its open hands.

I have a single duty, allocated to me when I was sealed here. To keep the children of the future away. Turn back!

Its body brightened, scintillations whiting out her suit’s cameras. The brightness was in her mind too, and she could feel the water’s current pushing her back down the corridor, the way she had come. The last thing she saw before her vision went white was the outline of the figure, palms open, like burning magnesium across her field of vision. It lingered even after she shut her eyes.

She came to her senses to the sound of her own breathing and heartbeat. And then there was another sound, crackling too loud and close to her ear.

“Jana!” The voice on her comms was familiar, urgent. “Jana, come in, if you can hear me!”

“...Cal?” Jana whispered. She could hardly speak, her vision blurred and her head swimming. She realised she was being held, arms around the torso of her suit from behind.

“Jana! Jana, it’s me… you’re safe. I’m here.”

She let out her breath, wondering how much oxygen they had left. She squeezed her eyes closed, half blind; there was still a faint image there, a burn on her retinas that she couldn’t quite get rid of. “What happened? Did you see anything?”

“Nothing.” If she hadn’t known him quite so well, his hesitation might have been slight enough for her to miss. “But I woke up not where I was.”

She realised they were on the sea floor, where they’d started. Their sub sat nearby like a dim cloud in the water.

Slowly, Jana looked back. Her suit’s camera was still turned to the gamma display, and she was about to switch back to visible, to do a sweep with her beams, when she stopped.

There was the outline of a figure, like an after-image cast by a lamp. Its hands were raised with a stiff solemnity, a sentry from long ago outlined in radiant light.