Chapter 66 The Borrowed Voice

The destroyer was named for a river, and her sonar sang before she was within two hundred miles, because whoever ran her search knew his trade: long spaced pulses on the trench axis, patient as a man tapping a wall for a stud. Each pulse came down the water column and into every ear aboard the Kairyu, and out across the miles to where the automaton held its climbing station at three hundred fathoms, singing into Ishikawa's chapel line — and each pulse, Ellison could hear it happening trace by trace, cost them an hour of lesson. The machine would flinch from the ping the way a scarred animal flinches from a stick being lifted, fold its attention inward, and take several minutes to find the melody again. "They are not pinging at us," Sano said grimly, on the second morning of it. "They are pinging at everything. It is how they search. But to her it is a fist on the door of the cell she lived in during the storm, and we are asking her to sing love songs while somebody beats the wall." The lessons bent anyway, because Tanabe bent them — moved the chapel line deeper, lengthened the rests, taught around the fear instead of through it. The automaton rose again, fathom by fathom, and on the third dusk it did something new: when the destroyer's pulse rolled over the water, it answered the pulse. Not with the accompaniment and not with noise — with the depth report. The young rating's recorded voice, lifted from nine months down: two-eight-zero meters, steady, sir — laid precisely into the silence after each ping like a man answering roll call. It took Halloway half a day of listening before she understood what the stitching meant, and then she had to leave the sonar shack for a while and stand in the passage. "It is reporting for inspection," she said. "Captain, it thinks the navy has come back for it. The last structured voices it ever heard were its handlers'. It hears the pings, and it is falling in. It is answering its name." That night the pings closed inside forty miles, and the automaton stopped rising. It hung in the water at two hundred fathoms, quiet, projecting only the faint maintenance hum of its own interior, while up north the river-name destroyer worked down the axis with her sister hull spread wide and the crane ship lumbering behind them both like a hearse. Callahan stood his rationed hour at the transducer housing and gave the lesson everything left in the account, and afterward Maeda walked him aft with a hand under his elbow that the old man permitted, which those who knew him marked as the true measure of his balance. It broke at 0217. The destroyer, reaching the edge of her search datum, went to active flood — full-power pulses overlapping, the acoustic equivalent of a flashlight beam swung suddenly into a dark room — and one of them caught the automaton square across her arrays at short range. What happened next took eleven seconds and was afterward assembled frame by frame from four ships' tapes, and no veteran who heard the assembly ever spoke of it easily. The machine panicked. There was no other word, and Ellison refused all better ones. Nine months of archived terror discharged at once into the water: the storm, whole — wind in steel at full archive level, the sea coming aboard, the alarm circuit, a man's voice saying flooding forward, flooding forward, and beneath it and through it Dr. Lasek's humming rising desperately to cover everything, failing, starting again, failing — ninety seconds of the death of Zarya broadcast at concert volume across forty miles of ocean, aimed at nothing, aimed at everyone, the way a frightened animal screams without aiming. On the destroyer's bridge, forty miles north, the navigation officer dropped a mug. In her sonar room, as the inquiry would later establish over three sober sessions, two operators left their headsets on the table and went out to the passage, and the petty officer of the watch sent to retrieve them stayed in the passage himself. The tape crossed forty miles of open water and went through steel hulls like weather through grass, and every ship in the approaching formation heard, unasked, exactly what their quarry was made of. Then the automaton dove, dragging the chapel line's outer hydrophones with it down the trench slope, and the Kairyu's night became a chase conducted at the speed of grief. Sano conned the pursuit from sound alone, calling bearings while Ishikawa fed the lesson down the tether at any range it would carry — the greeting, over and over, four notes into blackness — and the machine fled from the pings and strained after the song simultaneously, torn between the two sounds of authority in its world, going deeper, going wrong, her thermal signature stuttering along the trench wall at depths no recovery plan had ever visited. Callahan came back onto the deck unrationed, wrapped in blankets, walking with Maeda's hand pretending not to hold him up, and stood at the transducer housing listening to the machine's flight fade down into the trench country. He was silent for a long time. When he turned to Tanabe there was frost, in a warm sea, on the wool at his collar. "Somebody has to be her crew tonight," he said. "Not her fleet. Not her salvage court. Her crew. She is doing what any child does when the house fills with shouting, Captain — she is running for the cellar with her family's photographs. If we let her reach the bottom of that trench with the muzzle armed and the fear in command, she will use it, not from malice — from the exact same place the scream came from." He looked north, toward the pinging, and his voice flattened into the register the log kept for his combat transmissions. "And below her, Captain, in case anyone has forgotten in the excitement — the knocking has stopped. The Second is awake, and listening, and deciding what we are." At 0340 the automaton stopped fleeing. She hung off the trench wall at five thousand meters, arrays half-furled, and began, very softly, to arm. The precursor rose out of her like a note held under a tuning fork — a thin, patient, climbing tone, the first syllable of silence, pitched to complete in something under six minutes — and every hydrophone in the convoy, and every keeper within a hundred miles, and every instrument ashore that pointed at that piece of ocean, heard the beginning of the end of the oldest song in the world.