Peter rolled his eyes and settled back in his seat. “Yeah, sure. Next time.” He flipped a few more switches. “I hope you know I was planning to go home and watch a Johnny Mullet marathon after the auction.”
“How can you watch those things?” Gabriel asked, zipping up the front of the wet suit.
“Your real question should be how I can pass it up to spend time in a tin can with you.” Peter tapped a button. “Engines engaged. And anyway, you know I’m not gonna get scratched up because I never leave the boat.”
Gabriel held up his hands. “Preparation is all I’m saying.”
But Peter was generally right. The submarine didn’t trigger Peter, in the same way that being up in a plane might not bother those who were afraid of heights. But with his fear of water, Peter would not go on any excursion outside the Obscure.
The floor began to vibrate slightly, humming as the engines came online.
“Why were you with the sharks, anyway? Wasn’t there anything you wanted to bid on?” Misty called from her changing room.
“I think he just got bored,” Peter said.
“I don’t get bored,” Gabriel insisted, tapping buttons. He might get homesick and lonely, but never bored. He had all the brilliance of the sea to entertain him and vessels in distress to rescue. Plus tonight he’d actually made an effort to show up at an event. Who could be bored with all that?
Right?
“What kind of ship is it?” Misty asked from her changing room.
Gabriel remembered. “It’s a pleasure vessel called the Dandelion.”
“Oh yeah! My cousin had a wedding reception on that.”
Gabriel thought about the implications of a boat used for wedding receptions. Party barge, then. Passengers, some drinking, possibly kids and babies. Possibly people who couldn’t swim.
Misty continued. “And by the way, I’m the one who’s supposed to monitor communications.”
“I can get you a Nemotech receiver if you really want one, but the hard part is ignoring it.” Gabriel found his seat and grabbed a bottle of soda out of a small refrigerator he kept underneath a hatch next to the captain’s chair. The soda was of his family’s own recipe, made of sweetened kelp.
Peter made a gagging sound. “You want to talk about taste—I can’t believe you drink that stuff.”
“We like kelp.” Gabriel shrugged.
The whole bridge, from its bulkheads to the frames of its hatches and portholes, shone with mother-of-pearl and the dark, mysterious metal crafted by the Nemos for all their ships. It made Gabriel feel warm inside. This was what he needed to be doing. He should have been sorry to take his friends away on a Friday, but surely a rescue mission would beat … whatever it was people did when they didn’t have this.
Because that’s what you’re telling yourself to push away the truth, came an unwanted voice inside him. That you are bored, and lonely, and who needs you and your—
“Misty, what did you tell your parents, anyway?” Gabriel called.
“I said I forgot we had a night rescue-swimming practice that I couldn’t be late for,” came her reply.
Misty competed on the middle school swim team and had nearly completed her certification in water rescue and emergency response. The certification was part of a checklist that Misty had put together when she was eleven years old, a list that currently filled several pages in a notebook she decorated in strange, fractured swirls. The list included, among other things, water rescue, rock climbing, conversational Chinese, negotiations, shooting, archery, and public speaking. She had already made her way through about a quarter of the original list, so she kept adding more things to it. She had a rough term for what she wanted to be—an “action girl.” As far as Gabriel could tell, she was trying to become a superhero.
“Won’t they be … um … worried or something?” Gabriel asked.
Misty’s laugh sounded from the other room. “Hey, Peter, listen to Gabriel ask about parents like they’re some alien race he’s unfamiliar with. But no, you’re lucky. I just gotta be home by ten.”
“Speaking of parents … my mom was leaning kind of hard on wanting to meet yours,” Peter said from across the bridge.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
“My mom,” Peter repeated, “still wants to meet your parents.”
“My parents do, too!” Misty came out wearing a red diving suit and dropped into a swivel chair in front of a bank of communications and sonar equipment that would have been bewildering to anyone but her or Gabriel, who had designed it. “Especially now that you scared my sister half to death with your Shark Week talk.”
“Not gonna happen unless they want to go to the bottom of the ocean.” That was true. His father rarely set foot on land, certainly not in Gabriel’s memory. And his mom had adopted the same rule when she’d married his dad. “Let’s focus, okay?”
“Right, right. So those are the coordinates? Scanning now.” Misty ran her eyes over the screen. “Seriously, though, I don’t know how long we can go on like this.”
“It’s worked for—”
“Six months,” Misty answered, “and I’m glad the experiment is going well, but how much longer is Hey, I have to run to a sudden swim practice really a viable—”
“Can we pl—”
Peter interrupted. “Rescue first, folks. Gabriel, I got a craft on radar about forty miles east-southeast of here, standing still. Could be the one.”
“All right, then.” Gabriel smiled. Misty and Peter weren’t like anyone else. He was lucky to have them in his life. They knew how to live obscure.
I am willing to live obscure. That was what he, Gabriel’s ancestor, technically his great-great-great-grandfather, had proclaimed. To live in service to the sea and count all else as distraction. That was what drove Gabriel forward, what pushed away the loneliness and the doubt.
Peter and Misty were the two people who had caught a glimpse of that creed and seized it.
No matter how they might complain, Gabriel could count on them. “Take us out, Peter.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
3
THIRTY-EIGHT MILES FROM shore, the dinner ship Dandelion was in trouble. Panicked passengers had gathered hopelessly on the deck when the Obscure, sixty-five feet long and looking like a strange, tapered alien creature from the deep, broke the surface and approached.
Gabriel and Misty appeared on a catwalklike platform above the water as floodlights mounted on the nose and tail of the Obscure shone toward the boat.
All around them the black waves reflected moonlight and fire.
“Ahoy!” Gabriel cried through a bullhorn shaped like a conch shell. He had fashioned the bullhorn himself. He liked to think that the original Captain Nemo, who took energy from the sea and moved through it like a natural part of it, would approve of how Gabriel had tried to bring that respect for the sea to every detail.
“Ahoy there! We’re going to come alongside! Please try to keep clear.”
Misty leaned on the mother-of-pearl-inlaid iron bars of the platform at the top of the Obscure. “Oh, she’s in bad shape.” The Dandelion was beginning to dip its deck close to the water. There was still a fire spewing out of one of the forward hatches from what Gabriel assumed was the kitchen.
Gabriel thumbed the joystick and D-pad on the silvery controller in his hand, guiding the Obscure closer. For close-up positioning like this, he couldn’t ask Peter down in the bridge to move the entire sub a few yards forward and back by voice commands only. Better to do it by sight, so he’d worked with his family to perfect the controller. The truth was, though, this was only the third time he’d used it outside of testing.
When he was at last satisfied that the two vessels were perfectly parallel, Gabriel tapped a button and felt a throb in the deck plates as satellite-guided stabilizer rotors kicked in to hold the Obscure in place. “Plank.”
Misty kicked a lever near her foot, and a long metal walkway began to unroll and fasten itself together as it went
. Lined with floatation material, it bobbed on the water as it extended out about twenty feet. Gabriel watched as a woman treading water grabbed onto it.
“Where’s the captain?” Gabriel shouted, dropping the bullhorn now that they were closer.
Gabriel heard the sound of a fire extinguisher and saw a woman in a uniform with gold epaulettes wielding it. The woman called, “Someone! Grab that plank and lift it onto the deck!” She looked out to the Obscure, squinting as if to make out Gabriel’s form. “I’m the captain.”
“How many on board?”
“We’re twenty-three souls. Can you take that many?”
One of the passengers had already placed the plank onto the sinking vessel, and passengers began to scramble across. As they climbed onto the submarine, Misty pointed down through the open hatch toward the ladder. Gabriel heard her saying, “Be careful, watch your head, take a seat in the long room through the hatch.”
“We can take sixty-four if we need to.” The Dandelion was taking on water fast.
One by one the passengers came aboard, stumbling along the plank and then down the hatch. Gabriel thanked the forces of all oceanic chaos that there was no one who needed carrying.
The captain of the Dandelion waited until the last person was on the platform before she came across. When she drew close she saw Gabriel clearly. She furrowed her brow as if confused. “You’re a kid.”
“Well, the coast guard had a thing.”
She looked at the Obscure. “What in the world is this … vessel?”
Gabriel smiled. “This is my home.”
As Gabriel retracted the plank, a massive explosion of bubbles burst from the Dandelion as the cabin met the water. He heard the fire in the front hiss out as the electric lights flickered and died. Then, lit only by the moon and the Obscure’s floodlights, the boat shifted sideways like a dolphin turning over to dive. In a moment, the last panels of whitewashed wood slipped under and out of sight.
Amazing how fast they go at the last moment.
Down below, inside the Obscure, a woman screamed. “Jacob! Jacob! Where’s my son?”
Gabriel came down the ladder behind the captain of the Dandelion into the long room of benches where the passengers were buckling themselves in. Little portholes along the wall let in light from the outside hull, lighting up fish and speckles of debris. Many of the passengers craned their necks to look out, and on the port side, the Dandelion dropped past like a ghost in the darkness.
Pacing up and down the length of the room, a woman was visibly agitated.
Gabriel asked, “What is it?”
Misty ran up to him. “A boy. There was a little boy. He’s missing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” the woman snarled. “He’s not here.”
“Okay.” Gabriel surveyed the passengers anyway, looking for any sign of someone hiding. People under stress don’t have full use of their eyes. Their field of vision narrows and the light gets weird. Tunnel vision, his mother had called it. People in a panic miss things.
And more: They’re high on adrenaline. Don’t let it infect you, because one of you has to be the one who’s not infected.
Gabriel didn’t see anyone. Oh, no.
The captain put her arms on the woman’s shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “Mrs. McNally, where was he?”
“I think…” Mrs. McNally shook her hands as if to clear her head. “I think he was in the bathroom.”
“How old is he?” Gabriel asked.
“Jacob is seven.” Her voice was choked with uncontrollable sobs.
Misty stared at Gabriel, clearly thinking the same thing he was. Gabriel felt the blood drain from his face. “That boat just sank,” he whispered.
Think. Was it possible? Could someone still be alive…?
He looked at Mrs. McNally. Only one way to find out. Gabriel slapped a button on a com panel. “Peter, fill the tanks, tilt hydroplane levers. Dive.”
“Aye, aye,” came the answer, and in the walls Gabriel heard a rushing sound, water coming into the double hull.
“Everyone grab on,” Gabriel ordered as the Obscure began to tilt forward. “Remain seated. There are seat belts—I urge you to use them.”
“What are you doing?” asked the captain of the Dandelion.
Gabriel ran forward and distinctly downhill through the next hatch. “I’m going after your boat.”
Gabriel and Misty shot into the bridge, and they saw the Dandelion racing ahead of them, a great gray, fire-blackened hulk that filled the view screen of the bridge as it sank. “Catch it!”
Peter looked back. “Gabriel, what are you talking about?”
“There’s a kid on board. There may still be time to save him,” Gabriel replied, gripping the console.
“How, alive how?” Peter demanded.
“There could be an air pocket,” Gabriel reasoned.
“If there is then it will burst before the ship hits the bottom.”
“Then we need to catch it, Peter.”
Peter wasn’t having it. “It’s heavier than us. It’s sinking faster than we can move.”
Gabriel thought. He wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Engines.”
“I’m using them.”
“Try something else, then,” Misty demanded. “We have to save him, and we’re running out of time.”
“We could pull it back with the winch.” Gabriel tapped a screen furiously as he brought up the control panel for the towing cables. While the harpoons weren’t often used, the heavy cables located on the fore and aft sides of the sub had assisted in more than one rescue mission. He glanced at Peter and Misty. “What do you think?”
Misty nodded. “It’ll take a lucky shot, but it might work.”
“Are you two insane?” Peter shook his head in disbelief. “Gabriel, you’ve already gotten twenty-something people off a sinking ship. If you use the cables to grab onto that boat, it will drag us to the bottom of the ocean.”
“It won’t,” Gabriel insisted. “Not if we’re moving in reverse, pulling back on it.”
“It’s full of water!” Peter shot back. “That thing is a hundred tons if it’s an ounce; it is as heavy as we are and it’s sinking like a stone, Gabe. It’s ballast, it’s dead weight, it’s too much, and it will drag us down.”
“We can handle depths way deeper than this.”
“Not with that kind of stress on our prow. It’ll weaken the whole frame and make us susceptible to rupture. Doing this could kill everyone.”
Misty didn’t say another word, but he could read her thoughts on her face.
The argument was taking time they didn’t have. He had a split second to make a decision. His mother had been walking Gabriel through situations like this since before he could walk. He felt the anxiety drain out as he found a distant spot on which to concentrate his mind.
Yeah.
He made his voice calm and firm. “Cable it.”
Peter didn’t protest again. That was their way. Debate with me. Challenge me. But when we choose a course, debate is done. “Cables away.”
Gabriel heard a distant shunk and watched as two long, silvery cables with harpoon tips shot out from below the prow of the Obscure.
It took three seconds.
Wham. The harpoons stuck in the hide of the falling vessel. Immediately Gabriel was thrown off balance as the Obscure thrust forward and down, picking up speed and sinking.
“Blow all ballast tanks. Make us into a balloon, Peter.” They had to get lighter, quickly, and start heading up toward the surface. “Reverse engines full. Drag it up with us.”
Peter pulled back on the joystick at his console, and Gabriel could see it was slow going. The weight was fighting with him. “Reverse engines full. You will note that we are still sinking.”
“Just”—Gabriel wrung his hands—“bear with me, okay?” He turned to Misty. “Come on, we’re going out.”
“DPVs?”
“Aye.”
Gabriel and Misty ran uphill, up the long center of the Obscure, pushing past the passengers and the agonized mother. The captain of the Dandelion called out, “You need help?”
As Misty unlocked the rear hatch, Gabriel turned back. “Just keep everybody calm. We’re working on it.”
“With what?”
“Driver propulsion vehicles,” Misty answered. “We’re gonna turn ourselves into submarines.”
Misty slammed the hatch shut behind them as Gabriel started filling the dive room, turning a wheel that was, like everything else, inlaid with shells. The dive room was about eight feet wide and shaped like a pinecone turned on its side. As the room filled with water, Gabriel opened a locker and drew out devices that looked like thick green markers. He handed the first one to Misty and kept the other for himself, hooking it to his mask so he couldn’t lose it. Short-term rebreathers.
Nemotech, of course.
Peter came over the intercom when the water was up to Gabriel’s chest. “Gabriel, we’ve stopped sinking.”
“Good!” Gabriel shouted. He and Misty pulled on diving masks. Thumbs-up.
Peter sounded unsure. “But … we don’t have long.”
“Why?”
“I’m doing everything I can—the ballast tanks are empty, the engines are on full reverse—but we are going to burn them out if we keep straining like this.”
Gabriel looked around him, feeling the tug of the Obscure against itself. “How long?”
“I give it ten minutes.”
Misty and Gabriel locked eyes through their diving masks. The kid—any kid on that boat—probably wouldn’t even last that long. It might be too late already. They didn’t say this, but Gabriel knew they were both thinking it. They gave each other the thumbs-up sign again as the water reached the ceiling.
The irislike hatch in the floor opened silently, and Gabriel inhaled through the rebreather and peered into the open ocean below.
4
TEN MINUTES, GABRIEL reminded himself, then quickly set a timer on his wristband. Ten minutes, that was all Peter could give them.
Misty went first, sinking down out of the submarine, and Gabriel didn’t even wait the usual nine seconds before following. He nearly hit her on the head as he dropped away from the ship, and she opened her hands in a gesture that said, Watch it.
Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep Page 3
