Maybe it was the city, maybe it was what had built it, but it was there and he could not free himself of it.

He wasn’t really worried about some nameless creature attacking them.

The Exosuits could withstand intense pressure and abuse and it would have taken quite a beastie to damage them. They were known as Atmospheric Diving Suits or ADS. They were self-contained and self-propelled, had pan-and-tilt video cameras, exterior halogen lights, color imaging sonar, and wireless radio connectivity through water. You could grasp and maneuver objects with robotic manipulators and move in any direction with vertical and horizontal thrusters. Out of the water, they were large, bulbous, and clunky like robots from an old Saturday afternoon serial. But in the water, they were something else. They could handle depths of 2000 feet while maintaining an internal pressure of one atmosphere. What that meant was that they eliminated the usual compression/decompression hazards of typical ambient pressure dives such as decompression sickness and nitrogen narcosis, a.k.a. the bends. This allowed the divers to enter and leave the habitat without hours of decompression. The life-support systems had air for eight hours and emergency support for forty-eight.

The suits were essentially anthropomorphic one-man robot submersibles. A suit of armor for the most extreme depths and conditions.

Yet, for all that hardware, Bell could not help feeling vulnerable like the suit was nothing but a tin can waiting to be crushed.

“Coming up on the vents,” Murphy said.

A chasm opened up before them now, the SDV’s lights picking it out foot by foot. There were dozens and dozens of tall, narrow chimney-like structures which were the remains of dormant hydrothermal smoker vents. They rose up fifty and sixty feet from the floor of the chasm, great craggy black spouts amongst which long, translucent, ribbon-shaped fish swam lazily like unfurled tapeworms. Being eyeless, the lights of the SDV had no effect on them. They were rather silly and harmless things that routinely bumped into the vents and each other. The SDV knocked a few aside and passed on, the vents climbing to all sides.

Bell found the place unpleasant, like some prehistoric cemetery of jutting monoliths.

But as eerie as they were, what came next was far worse.

12
THE CITY

Bell felt something in his stomach tighten like a screw. He could feel the city coming at them out of the gloom—its immensity and weight bearing down on him. Though he certainly could not smell it, in his mind it carried a vaporous, rotten odor like a violated tomb filled with moldering coffins. This was the effect its nearness had on him. A souring and rancid psychic effluvium that made his jaws lock tight.

And then…the outskirts, as revealed by the halogen lamps.