There was no ladder. And this time the narrow tube of a vertical corridor was clogged with green and blue marine growth, reminding Harman of Daeman’s description of Paris Crater turned into a blue-ice nest.

But this was Earth ocean life that had woven this web, however mutated, and Harman began ripping it apart, pulling out centuries of life’s slow encroachment and advancement in great, grunting handfuls, wishing all the time he had an axe. The water around him became so filled with glop that he couldn’t even see his hands. Something long and slippery—another eel? Some sort of sea snake?—slid along the length of his body and was gone below. He kept pulling away clumps and globs of thick, sludgy, radioactive stuff, fighting his way up through the blinding murk.

He felt as if he was being born again, but this time into a much more terrible world.

It was such a struggle that for several moments after he’d clawed his way up and into the comm room level, he didn’t know he’d arrived. Tendrils of green hung everywhere, the water was so filled with floating particles that his own searchlight beams blinded him, and he lay in the primordial ooze too exhausted to move.

Then—remembering that every moment he spent in this death-hulk meant a greater chance of death to him—Harman got to his knees, pulled vines and tentacles of old plant growth away from his shoulders and back, and began to shuffle aft.

The comm room was still alive.

Harman froze with the knowledge of it. Functions in his body that he hadn’t even catalogued yet picked up the pulsing readiness of machines hidden under the living gray-green carpet of this room to reach and communicate. Not with him. These comm AI’s did not acknowledge his presence—their ability to interact with human beings had long since died away with the shifting quantum core of their computers.

But they wanted to communicate with somebody—most of all to receive orders from somebody, something.

Knowing that he would not find what he needed to know here in the integrated comm room, Harman half-walked, half-swam aft past the encrusted sonar and GPS shack. He didn’t know why his bundle-memories wanted to call the little space a shack and he didn’t want to know.

Had he ever thought about submarines, which he never had, Harman would have probably guessed that such boats were built for traveling under water—he knew that the AI warhead had preferred a translation of the word “boat” to that of “ship”—that such underwater boats would have been made up of many small compartments, each one shut off with a door, a hatch, watertight, separate. This sub was not. The spaces were large in comparison to the volume of the ship itself, not overly capsulized or compartmentalized. If the ocean found a way in—as it obviously had—the deaths of the men and women in this machine would not have been by slow drowning, gasping for air near the ceilings, but in a massive, implosive pressure wave, killing all in seconds. It was almost as if the humans who had worked here had preferred the choice of instant death in larger spaces to slow drowning in smaller ones.

Harman quit swimming and let his feet sink to the deckplates when he realized he was in the middle of the command and control center.

There was less marine growth here, more bare metal. From just the warhead AI’s cartoon schematic, he could make out the torpedo launch and weapons’ control centers—vertical metal columns that would have projected a myriad of holographic virtual controls when the ship was in combat. Harman moved around the space, touching metal and plastic with his thermskinned palm, allowing the dead quantum brains embedded in the material to speak to him.

There was no chair, seat, or throne for the captain. That man had stood here, near the central holgraphic chart table, directly in front of a display console—virtual under the proper conditions, projected from within LCD plastic panels if the virtual system were damaged—into which every one of the ship’s many systems and functions were channeled and shown.

Harman moved his gloved hand through the green murk and imagined sonar displays appearing… here. Tactical displays to his left… there. Several yards back the way from which he’d come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes….

He jerked his hand away. Harman didn’t need to know any of this crap. He needed only to know…

There.

It was a black metal monolith just aft of the captain’s station. No barnacles, mollusks, coral, or slime had attached themselves to it. The thing was so black that Harman’s lamps had not reflected back from it on his first several passes through that part of the command center.

This was the boat’s central AI, built to interface in a hundred ways with the submarine’s captain and crew. Harman knew that a quantum computer, even from this lost age, even one dead for more than two millennia, would be more alive at one percent capacity than most living things on the planet. Quantum artificial minds died hard and died slowly.

Harman knew that he would not have the codes to access the central AI’s banks, perhaps not even the language to understand the codes he did not know, but he also knew that it didn’t matter. His functions were developed and nanogenetically programmed into his DNA long after this machine had died. It would have no secrets from him.

The thought terrified him.

Harman wanted out of this flooded crypt. He wanted to get away from the radiation that must be pinging through his skin, brain, balls, guts, and eyes even as he stood here, frozen in indecision.

But he had to know.

Harman set his palm atop the black metal monolith.

The submarine was named The Sword of Allah. It had left its port on….

Harman skipped the log entries, dates, reasons for the ancient war—he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end, the democracies of the West and Europe were already dead, the New European Union a fiction of gasping vassal states under the rising Khanate….

None of that mattered. What was in the belly of this submarine, as real as the fetus growing in the womb of his wife Ada, was what mattered.

Harman did pause long enough to listen to a fast-forward of the last testament of The Sword of Allah’s twenty-six crew members. The Mohammed-class ballistic-missile submarine was so automated that it required a crew of only eight, but there had been so many volunteers that twenty-six of the Chosen had been allowed to go on its last mission.

They were all men. They were all devout. They all surrendered their souls to Allah as their doom approached—a cordon of Khanate attack submarines, aircraft, spacecraft, and surface ships as far as Harman could tell. The men knew that they had only minutes to live—that the Earth had only minutes before its destruction.

The captain had given the launch command. The primary AI had seconded it and relayed it.

Why hadn’t the missiles launched? Harman searched the AI to its quantum guts and could find no reason why the missiles had not launched. The human command had been given, the four sets of physical keys had been turned, the AI target-package coordinates and individual launch commands had been confirmed and relayed, the missiles had been denoted in the proper launch sequence, the switches—both virtual and literal—had closed. All of the massive-metal missile hatches had been successively opened by redundant hydraulics—only a thin, blue, fiberglass dome had separated the missile tubes from the ocean, and each of these launch tubes had been filled with nitrogen to equalize the pressure to keep that ocean from rushing in until the actual instant of launch. The forty-eight missiles should have been propelled out of their crèches by the nitrogen gas generators, a twenty-five-hundred-volt charge igniting the nitrogen discharge. The gas itself would have produced more than eighty-six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in less than a second, sending the missiles hurtling upward within their own rising bubbles of nitrogen until they popped out of the sea like rising corks, and then the solid rocket propellant in each missile would have been ignited the second the missiles hit open air above. There were redundant and double-redundant launch and ignition initiators. The missiles should have roared and flown to their targets. The AI’s launch indicators were all red. In each of the forty-eight missile silos back in the pregnant belly of The Sword of Allah, the sequence had proceeded properly from HOLD to DENOTE to LAUNCH to SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED.