The Swarm by Frank Schätzing

eyes ache,’ she said. ‘Alban’s taken over for a while.’
    Her gaze wandered over to the cheese and the open bottle of Bordeaux. ‘I should have guessed.’ She laughed. ‘So that’s why you rushed off.’
    Johanson had left the control room thirty minutes earlier.
    â€˜Brie de Meaux, Taleggio, Munster, a mature goat’s cheese and some Fontina from the mountains in Piedmont,’ he said. ‘Plus a baguette and some butter. Would you like a glass of wine?’
    â€˜Do you need to ask? What is it?’
    â€˜A Pauillac. You’ll have to forgive me for not decanting it. The Thorvaldson doesn’t have any respectable crystal. Did you see anything interesting?’
    He handed her a glass, and she took a gulp. ‘The bloody things have set up camp on the hydrates. They’re everywhere.’
    Johanson sat down opposite her on the edge of the bed and buttered a piece of baguette. ‘Remarkable.’
    Lund helped herself to some cheese. ‘The others are starting to think we should be worried. Especially Alban.’
    â€˜So there weren’t as many last time?’
    â€˜No. I mean, more than enough for my liking - but that put me in a minority of one.’
    Johanson smiled at her. ‘People with good taste are always outnumbered.’
    â€˜Tomorrow morning Victor will be back on board with some specimens. You’re welcome to have a look at them.’ She stood up, chewing, and peered out of the porthole. The sky had cleared. A ray of moonlight shone on the water, illuminating the rolling waves. ‘I’ve looked at the video sequence hundreds of times, trying to work out what we saw. Alban’s convinced it was a fish…and if it was, it must have been a manta or something even bigger. But it didn’t seem to have a shape.’
    â€˜Maybe it was a reflection,’ Johanson suggested.
    â€˜It can’t have been - it was just a few metres away, right on the edge of the beam, and it disappeared in a flash, as thought it couldn’t stand the light or was afraid.’
    â€˜A shoal can twitch away like that. When fish swim close together they can look like a—’
    â€˜It wasn’t a shoal, Sigur. It was practically flat. It was a wide two-dimensional thing, sort of…glassy. Like a giant jellyfish.’
    â€˜There you are, then.’
    â€˜But it wasn’t a jellyfish.’
    They ate in silence for a while.
    â€˜You lied to Jörensen,’ Johanson said suddenly. ‘You’re not going to build a SWOP. Whatever it is you’re developing, you won’t need any workers.’
    Lund lifted her glass, took a sip and put it down carefully. ‘True.’
    â€˜So why lie to him? Were you worried it would break his heart?’
    â€˜Maybe.’
    â€˜You’ll do that anyway. You’ve no use for oil workers, have you?’
    â€˜Listen, Sigur, I don’t like lying to him but, hell, this whole industry is having to adapt and jobs will be lost. Jörensen knows that the workforce on Gullfaks C will be cut by nine-tenths. It costs less torefit an entire platform than it does to pay so many people. Statoil is toying with the idea of getting rid of all the workers on Gullfaks B. We could operate it from another platform, but it’s scarcely worthwhile.’
    â€˜Surely you’re not trying to tell me that your business isn’t worth running?’
    â€˜The offshore business was only really worth running at the beginning of the seventies when OPEC sent oil prices soaring. Since the mid-eighties the yield has fallen. Things’ll get tough for northern Europe when the North Sea wells run dry, so that’s why we’re drilling further out, using ROV’s like Victor, and AUVs.’
    The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle functioned in much the same way as Victor, but without an umbilical cord of cable to connect it to the ship. It was like a planetary scout, able to