Blink: Leviathan (Book 2)

22

Darien could feel his nerves beginning to jangle as the door to the Coring Well rolled open in front of them. Between whatever it was that was stalking them through the city depths and the prospect of what they might find within, he could feel the control he'd been exerting over his mind and emotions beginning to slip.

The sight that awaited them didn't help.

The Coring Well was vast, shaped like an enormous dome that could have housed the whole of Blink Headquarters with room to spare. Gargantuan ribs of solid stone rose up like the spokes of a wheel to meet in the centre of the ceiling a hundred feet overhead. A central sphere held the whole structure together: a solid black globe the size of a house.

Directly below it lay an immense circle of water ringed with dozens of ramps, each one wide enough to drive a cargo freighter down. The whole chamber seemed to be designed like a gigantic diving bell but Darien found his attention drawn away from the architecture, instead focusing on the tremendous debris field that surrounded the well itself. There were more bodies, dozens – maybe hundreds – scattered all around the dry-dock area, as well as the wreckage of several vessels that he assumed had once been submersibles.

As long as a colonial frigate, each of the massive subs was shaped like a triangular prism, with a flattened out nose-cone where long bands of opaque glass provided windows. While a couple had survived mostly intact, others lay broken in half or worse, spilling their innards and crew over the floor of the Coring Well. Their thick plates of brass-coloured metal hadn't been enough to withstand whatever force had torn through the place and flung their huge structures around like leaves in the wind.

"Looks like a war zone," Hekket commented quietly.

Darien shook his head. "More like a tomb."

"I guess their plan to get out didn't work," Idas said, instinctively raising the barrel of his new weapon to scan the area. "What do you wanna do?"

"What we came to do," he replied. "Come on." He led his companions on, carefully picking his way through the millennia old graveyard.

These corpses were not as well preserved as those they'd encountered before, and instead of decay the air had a salty, metallic tang to it. Darien placed his feet carefully, stepping over limbs and around debris, giving the bodies a wide berth. Something about them still made him uneasy.

Upon closer examination he could see that some of them sported the same circular puncture marks as the other unfortunate group. The cause of death for many of them, however, looked much simpler. Limbs were bent at unnatural angles and spurs of broken bone could be seen through the last vestiges of flesh and leathery skin. The force that had wrecked the transports had inflicted that same fury on their comparatively fragile bodies.

Skirting around the carcass of one of the ships, Darien glanced inside at its interior mechanisms. Like the city itself, the passages contained within it were constructed with high arching roofs, packed together in a honeycomb arrangement. More bodies lay within.

He looked away, gingerly stepping over a particularly mangled corpse and coming to the edge of the Well itself. His sharp eyes quickly noted the small cracks in the stone that emanated out from the water ring – small in comparison to what they'd seen before, but still large in their own right. They snaked out dozens of feet like oily tendrils. Even the hugely reinforced structure of this place hadn't completely withstood the seismic forces at work.

There were no lights in the water. All Darien could see when he shone his torch into it was a seemingly bottomless black hole. An uncomfortable feeling settled in the base of his stomach. Beside him Hekket leaned forward, holding his mapper in one hand out over the water. The machine pulsed and the other boy looked at the display.