26

“We’ve tracked down around a dozen or so people who saw the vid broadcast,” said Tanner. He’d managed to get a few hours of sleep, though his head still ached and he felt like his eyes had been rubbed with sandpaper. “Of those, about half got mostly static. The others got more. Of those, about half recorded it. But we knew that already as we used their recordings to augment our own.”

“Besides you and the technicians in DredgerCorp, who else has seen the version you showed me?”

“Nobody,” said Tanner. “I’m sure of it.”

The Colonel furrowed his brow. “Take a look at this.”

He spun the holofile to Tanner. It was a communication sent from someone with the alias “Watchdog.” DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings in Chicxulub, the caption read. The body of the message consisted of a short bit of typed text—Last Words from a Submarine Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater. Retrieval Mission Gone Wrong—and a vid.

He opened the vid, saw Hennessy’s blood-covered body and face, watched his strange smile and brief speech. Oh, shit, he thought. The worst has finally happened.

“Who sent it?” he asked.

“This copy was sent to Lenny Small,” the Colonel said. “The list of other recipients is several pages long, mostly scientists in Chicxulub, but a few others as well.”

“That vid’s originally from Sigmund Bennett,” said Tanner. “He recorded it.”

“Do you think he’s the one disseminating it?”

Tanner shook his head. “He’s not the type. One of my men talked to him—it was pretty clear he thought it was a hoax. He probably didn’t even think twice about it, probably just sent it to someone else because he thought it was interesting or weird. I’ll have someone speak to him and find out who else he showed it to.”

“Don’t bother,” said the Colonel.

“Don’t bother? But you said—”

“Too many people have seen it already,” he said. “There’s no point in killing anybody now. That’s more likely to hurt than help.”

Tanner let out a deep breath. He was glad to know he wouldn’t be asked to kill anybody. “What do we do, then?”

“We come clean,” said the Colonel.

“We come clean?” Tanner felt his stomach drop out. “That’s not what DredgerCorp does. Shouldn’t we run this by Small?”

“Small’s not running the show,” said the Colonel. “I am.”

“This is a disaster. I’ll tell you now,” Tanner said, face flushing red. “I’m not going down with the ship. I’m not willing to swallow the blame on this one. I’ll fight it all the way.”

“Calm down, Tanner,” the Colonel said. “We don’t actually come clean; we just pretend. If we release the story to the press, then we’re the ones to spin it. We play it right and we’ll be in a better position than we were in before.”

“How do we do that?” said Tanner.

“Simple,” said the Colonel. “Call a press conference. Claim that you’ve seen the video that’s been making the rounds and heard the rumors and that you thought it was time to set the story straight. You give the press all the footage you have and ask them to broadcast it. You’re not losing much there, since lots of people have seen bits and pieces of it—anybody gets curious enough and they’ll be able to put together a good chunk of it, just like you did.”

“How does that help?”

“What matters is what you say about it,” said the Colonel. “You can’t say that it’s a hoax, because that just gives the conspiracy junkies fuel for their fire. So tell as much of the truth as you can without damaging us.”

“How much is that?”

The Colonel’s lips tightened. “You need me to spell it out for you? Where’s your imagination, man?

“First, you say Hennessy went crazy. Not too hard a proposition to make stick once people see the vid. You say you had brought him down to Chicxulub because you were interested in testing an experimental new bathyscaphe, a borer, a vessel that can at least in theory, dig down through rock while underwater. It’s something which you’re certain will change the future of undersea mining, assuming that you can get all the bugs worked out. Got it so far?”

“Yes,” said Tanner.

“Anyway, you chose Hennessy because of his experience with submarines and because he was a company man, someone who was reliable and who could keep a secret. Obviously, technology like this, the last thing you want is for information about it to be leaked. You came to test it in Chicxulub. . . . Why?”

Tanner thought for a moment. “Because Chicxulub is out of the way,” he offered. “We have a little more privacy here than we might have had in other places, and it’s possible here to test how a bathyscaphe would respond boring through a variety of strata.”

“Good enough for now,” said the Colonel. “Polish it a little for your answer. I’ll arrange for a few testing permits to be filed retroactively to cover us. So, you did a series of test runs along the coast in shallow water, with Hennessy and another experienced submarine pilot, Dantec. Everything went fine, no problems whatsoever. Then you decided, after consulting with President Small, that it was time to test the bathyscaphe in deep water.

“What happened after that, you don’t know for certain. When you asked the crew to prepare the craft for a dive, they informed you that it wasn’t there. When you tried to find Dantec and Hennessy, they were missing as well. You concluded that they had taken the submarine without authorization, perhaps to steal it. You looked for it, but to no avail: it was either out of sonar range or they had their engines off. You started a search, you tried to contact them repeatedly, but there was never any response.”

The Colonel’s lips curled back in a way that showed his teeth.

“The next evidence of them you had, you tell the press, was the transmission you intercepted. You don’t know what happened, but it’s clear that Hennessy came unhinged. You’ve managed to figure out the location of the sub: it’s buried deep within the rock in the crater. So now you’ve contacted the military, asking them for help retrieving the bathyscaphe. If they’re able to retrieve it, you say that you’re committed to letting the press know what happened inside in those last fatal hours.”

“The military,” said Tanner. “Is that wise?”

“It’s not only wise, it’s brilliant. It gives us an excuse to change the scale of the operation. We don’t have to work covertly anymore.”

“But who do we contact?” asked Tanner. “Won’t we end up losing the object to them?”

The Colonel gave another predatory smile. “You’ve already contacted them,” he said, and pointed both thumbs at his own chest. “You’re already working with them.”