(eng) Jonathan Green - Pax Britannia 01 by Unnatural History # (v5.0)

Author:Unnatural History # (v5.0) [#, Unnatural History]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HE HAD NO idea for how long he had been exploring the dark tunnels. His watch had a luminous dial but it had rather uncharacteristically stopped working. He suspected that his dunking hadn’t done the usually reliable timepiece much good. It hadn’t done much for his communicator either.

Steadily, through the nigh on impenetrable black murk, the broken edges of a patch of deeper darkness could be discerned in the gloom. It was ahead of Ulysses and slightly to the right. Cautiously he made this his focus and approached the hole in the darkness. As he neared the space his straining eyes were able to discern depth to the darkness too. Reaching out a hand, he ran his fingers over the broken, angular edges of bricks. Something in the past had caused part of the sewer wall to collapse. The current diverged at this juncture. Most of the stinking water continued on its way along the brick pipe, but some swirled out through the hole mixing with a second subterranean watercourse.

Ulysses paused, listening. At first he could hear nothing beyond the rush and churn of the sewer and the ripple of water lapping against the wall. There was an echoing quality to the watery sounds coming from the other side of the hole, suggesting that the dimensions of the space beyond were of more cavernous proportions than the tunnel in which he now stood.

Then he heard another sound, muffled by distance. It sounded like the clanking of machinery, a rhythmic tattoo, the beating of a mechanical heart.

For a moment Ulysses considered the sewer passage ahead of him but then felt compelled to enter the larger tunnel, beyond the hole, and follow the sound to its source. With no other beacon to direct his way through the fetid darkness, Ulysses concentrated on the distant, echoed clanking.

Clambering through the half-submerged rupture in the tunnel wall, Ulysses immediately felt the floor drop away beneath him and started treading water. The water filling this new tunnel was just as bone numbing as that of the sewer but, although it smelt old and stale, it was like the scent of roses compared to the stench that he had just had to wade through.

Ulysses let his senses adjust to this new space, hearing the rippling waves his swimming sent out rebound from a barrier only a matter of a few feet away. Light-excreting blankets of moss grew in irregular patches on the curving walls and ceiling here too, so that gradually Ulysses was able to make sense of the puzzle and realised that the space he was in now was much larger, but just as tube-like, as the sewer passage he had emerged from.

The tunnel was flooded but the water here was more or less still; there was no restless current pulling him one way or another. Instead he directed himself towards the distant, rhythmic clanking that sounded like the echoing hubbub of a factory production line. He moved with a strong breaststroke. Ulysses followed the gradual

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