The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online

brilliant whiteness of the tetrahedron was so striking that it looked like a belated iceberg turned up too late for the sinking.
    So fascinated was I by this object that I let myself drift toward it, only to be checked by Sztephen, who seized my arm and drew me back. There was an expression of horror on his face.
    I decided that Sztephen had a point. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t in our dive plan, and it might be in some way hostile.
    It occurred to me to wonder whether it was a surprise that Fidel Perugachi had left for us.
    I made a careful circuit of the after hatch to judge the object’s size— a proper estimate was difficult, as the tetrahedron’s base was in the darkness of the hold, but it seemed about eight or nine meters per side. Then my heart lurched as I saw another, tiny tetrahedron— about the size of my palm— on the deck near the rail. I drifted downward to get a look at it, and this time saw a number of even smaller pyramids on the ship’s hull, leading down to a cluster of them on the muddy bottom, none of them larger than my fingernail.
    I began to have a feeling that all of them would be Giza-sized, given time.
    I made a circuit of Goldfish Fairy in order to see how far the pyramid plague had spread and found a smaller number of the four-sided items on the other side of the barge. I checked the forward hold, and there I saw the cause of it all. Fidel Perugachi’s crew, when they realized that the forehold didn’t have what they were looking for, and that they didn’t have time to open the rear hold, had tried to break into the after hold through a hatch high in the bulkhead. But the hatch hadn’t opened because the cargo in the aft hold had been thrown forward when the Goldfish Fairy hit the bottom, and Perugachi’s raiders had tried to force it open with the jacks they’d brought to shift the fallen mast.
    They’d ended up opening more than the hatch, I thought. Their attempt to shove the hatch open had broken whatever contained Jesse’s biotech.
    It wasn’t Fidel Perugachi who had created these objects. These pyramids now growing silently beneath the sea were what we’d been hired to prevent.
    I reckoned I’d seen enough, so I signaled to Sztephen that it was time to head for the surface, and he agreed with wide-eyed relief.
    It took some time to rise, as we had to pause every three meters or so for a decompression stop, and at certain intervals we had to shift to a different gas mixture, first to Nitrox 36 and then to O 2 , making use of the cylinders we’d tethered to our line. Sztephen assisted with the unfamiliar procedures, and I managed them without trouble.
    We were at a depth of twenty meters, hovering at our decompression stop while juggling a formidable number of depleted cylinders, when we heard the rumble of a boat approaching and looked up to see the twin hulls of a catamaran cutting the water toward our launch.
    My overtaxed nerves gave a sustained quaver as the jet-powered catamaran cut its impellers and drifted up to the launch. I could only imagine what was happening on the surface— Pearl River pirates slitting the throats of everyone aboard; water police from the People’s Republic putting everyone under arrest for disturbing the wreck; Fidel Perugachi sneering as he brandished automatic weapons at the hapless Apollos of the water ballet; ninjas feathering everyone aboard with blowgun darts …
    Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I probably wouldn’t actually die if I bolted to the surface from a depth of twenty meters, but ere long I’d be damned sick with a case of the bends, and hardly in a condition to aid my cause.
    So Sztephen and I sat in the heavy silence, both our imaginations and our nerves running amok, while we made our regulation number of decompression stops, the last being at ten meters. A myriad of schemes whirled through my mind, all of them useless until I actually knew what was going on above our heads.
    The last