Seaquest DSV

by Diane Duane

  Table of Contents

  seaQuest DSV Concept Art

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  Rear Cover

  CHAPTER 1

  It is common knowledge to everyone, mariner or not, that the sea can get damnably rough and dangerous when a storm blows up. But it takes a submariner to know how calm that same stormy sea can be, once you drop below the wind-whipped surface and down into the peaceful depths.

  There are mineral mining fields scattered all across the seabeds of every ocean, and those which border the Livingston Trench lie two hundred and fifty fathoms down... fifteen hundred feet below the waves. It can be a very peaceful place indeed: calm, still, dark—and far enough from the concerns of the world and its industrial confederations to let a man get on with scratching a more or less honest living.

  Although that honesty depends a great deal on whether he stays where he belongs, and doesn't wander where he shouldn't. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, so much money is being made from the mining of the ocean floor that the depths have ceased to be peaceful. Territorial borders can be just as sensitive beneath the sea as anywhere on land.

  And just as heavily defended...

  * * *

  Bobby MacLaine crouched over the controls of his pickup truck. His hands were on its control yoke, not lightly, but in a white-knuckled grip so tight that his fingers should have left grooves in the worn plastic bars. Even though it was already running flat out, Bobby needed to squeeze a couple of extra knots out of the truck's hydrojet propulsion system. He would have scrambled out of his seat and kicked the laboring motor if that would have done any good, but from the howling noises it had been making this past five minutes, he already knew that he was getting the best the elderly unit was able to give. And even that might not be enough.

  The truck—a cargo flatbed with a pressurized spherical cab stuck on the front like a Tinkertoy afterthought—had been designed for deep sea transport work. It had not been designed with high-speed chases in mind. Not that twenty knots was high-speed in anybody's language, but it would be more than fast enough if Bobby slapped cab-first into a rock outcrop. At this depth, the pressure pod would crack like an eggshell, and it would all be over in a crushed split second. If the water came slamming in, he wouldn't even live long enough to drown. Bobby was twenty-two years old, and he didn't want to die. Least of all that way. Even though it might be less painful, and certainly quicker, than being caught by—

  Bobby glanced at the mirrors and the video repeater that covered the truck's rear quarter, and swallowed nervously. There was nothing yet, but that didn't mean a thing. If they were running on sonar with their lights doused, they could be right on top of him before he saw anything. Earl's truck had the sonar emitter required by the traffic-safety regulations, but it was strictly directional, and that direction was the one in which the truck was traveling. Nobody had ever bothered with a passive all-round pickup. Nobody had ever seen the need for one. Until now.

  Bobby shoved his scruffy baseball cap back on his head and wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of an equally scruffy flannel shirt, then grabbed the radio mike from its cradle and keyed a home channel.

  "Reef Runner to Home Plate...!" There was no response except for the disinterested hiss of static and the feedback hum of the truck's own electrics. "Come in, Home Plate!" He stared nervously at the mike and keyed it off, then on again. Still no reply, except the frying-fat noise of interference.

  Or could it be jamming?

  No... nobody down here had any of that stuff. At least, nobody he knew about. But had they? He glanced at the rearviews again and felt his shirt beginning to stick to his back. "Come on," he pleaded, "come on, pick it up!"

  The answering voice spoke so very suddenly that though he had desperately wanted to hear it, the sound still made him jump. "Home Plate to Reef Runner—go ahead."

  "Jenny!" he cried, "it's Bobby!"

  “Where the hell have you been?" He could hear the concern in her voice, but it was edged with the weary anger and impatience Bobby had heard often enough before when one of his stunts backfired. That was only to be expected—except that this time Jenny didn't know just how serious the backfire had been.

  No matter that she couldn't see the gesture, Bobby shook his head desperately. The explanations and accusations would have to wait until later, or he might not have a later... "Never mind! Just open up the main airlock quick! I'm comin' in—and I've got company!"

  There was no reply except for the click as she closed the mike at her end, and then the feedback on the open channel changed from a hum to a deep, ominous drone like the warning sound of a swarm of hornets. Bobby swallowed. No single motor could generate that amount of interference, no matter how hard it was being worked. There was more company than he had expected. He looked at the rearview again, and swore under his breath as a yellow glow began to leave flare tracks across the screen.

  The glow brightened, separated, became two sources and kept on coming.

  "Uh-oh, Bobby," he mumbled to himself, grateful for any sympathetic voice, even if only his own. "Look sharp..."

  The pursuing trucks drew closer, and he could tell from its quad light array that one of them was the big three-pod semi variant. That meant it had a heavy-duty hydrojet impeller: more speed if it was unloaded, as it surely was, and more weight if its driver tried to ram him—as he surely would, if he could overhaul Bobby's frantically racing pickup. Collisions were the sort of accidents easily explained, because they happened frequently enough in the often murky water of the mining fields, despite lights and sonar. But because of the deceleration jets automatically cut in by a proximity echo return, they were not usually fatal.

  Not usually.

  Bobby MacLaine knew well enough that if it ever took place, his collision would be fatal. Even if they had to hit him a dozen times to make sure of it. He knew. He had gotten them mad enough. Then he saw the harsh blue light of the Home Plate beacon, and grinned in relief.

  Blink-blink. Blink. Blink. Blink-blink.

  Five hundred yards away the beacon paused, then repeated its patterned signal. Bobby twisted the truck's control yoke that necessary few degrees to bring him into line for the MacLaine outpost's airlock approach. The vehicle yawed ominously as his hastily loaded cargo of ore samples lurched across the cargo bed, then corrected as he fed in a couple of squirts from the maneuvering thrusters. Nearly home, and he wasn't dead in the water yet.

  There had still been no further on-line response from Jenny, probably in case someone was listening in on the same channel, but the ID beacon told him that she was doing the only thing she could. Outpost beacons normally ran white, but the shift to blue meant that the main airlock was cycling open. As he squinted through the undersea gloom, trying to filter out the glow of his own dashboard instruments, Bobby could actually see the massive doors sliding back. All he had to do now was reach them before the two pursuing trucks reached him...

  That was when the pickup's hydrojet unit coughed, then began to make a grinding noise Bobby had never heard before. And he never wanted to hear it again, because it sounded like a garbage disposal digesting broken glass. He didn't need to look at the thrust readout to know that the little truck was losing its way. He felt it. The entire vehicle had faltered as though the water surrounding it had suddenly gone thick, and though the shudder of deceleration had lasted only for an instant before the impeller spooled up again, that instant was long enough for the li
ghts in the rearview screen to come surging closer.

  "C'mon, sweet thing," Bobby crooned, fighting down a renewed desire to kick the engine, and deciding against even swearing at it. "C'mon. You can do it..."

  As if spurred on to greater effort by the encouragement, the waterjet whined thinly and increased its output by another few revs. Not enough for the pursuing trucks to fall back, but at least sufficient to keep them where they were.

  Then the airlock doors stopped momentarily, and just before they started to move again, the beacon light turned red. It confirmed what Bobby's eyes had already told him. The airlock was no longer opening, but closing...

  Bobby's speeding pickup was two hundred yards away, and closing...

  The hornets on his tail were a hundred yards behind, and closing...

  Bobby MacLaine licked his lips and took a deep breath that he knew might soon be crushed out of him by the weight of two hundred atmospheres of water. Rather than running the risk of letting the pursuing trucks follow him into the airlock, Jenny was putting her faith in his ability as a waterjet jockey. It was a faith that might get him killed if she were wrong; but if the men in the trucks behind him got into the outpost, that might get them both killed. This was a notoriously rough territory, and accidents could happen to a pressure dome just as easily as to a truck... Bobby grinned nervously at his own reflection; then he eased off on the pickup's control yoke, stabilized it with the merest fingertip pressure—and aimed the little craft straight for the gap between the doors.

  Too narrow! screamed a panicked voice at the back of his mind. You're gonna smash for sure! He tried to ignore it. He had done this before—once—and both Earl and Jenny had given him an epic bawling out. Why was doing it again, and with permission this time, making him so scared? There wasn't any difference. Except that if he chickened out, there was nowhere else for him to go. The other trucks would catch him, and... Bobby stamped on the rest of the thought.

  One hundred yards, and closing...

  Closing at twenty knots. More than enough to do the business if he fumbled it. At two hundred atmospheres he would barely live long enough to feel the consequences of an error if his cab cracked open. The outer airlock doors were sliding shut like the jaws of a great white shark that Bobby had seen once on an EarthNet educational vid. In slo-mo. But without teeth. These didn't need teeth. Even without its hydraulic motivators, each valve weighed seventeen tons, and whether they crunched into him or he crunched into them would make very little difference.

  Except that it wasn't slo-mo. They were moving in real time, and so was he. "Here we go, Bobby boy," he whispered to himself and the pickup as he dove toward the doors. "Think thin... think thin!" But now, finally, Bobby could see that he had them beaten.

  The pickup shot into the airlock so close and so fast that its pressure wave produced a momentary rumble of cavitation from the steel lips of the doors. They were no more than eight inches away on either side, but even eight inches of clearance was enough. Bobby felt and heard the rumble, saw the rearview screen briefly silvered with swirling skeins of bubbles squeezed from the water by the pickup's passage—and saw his pursuers veer frantically aside to avoid the twin slabs of metal that were already too close together for them to pass.

  He started to laugh, the wild laughter of released tension, and was still laughing when the sonar emitter picked up the back of the outpost's airlock bay and shrieked a collision warning. Its blast of braking thrust shook the pickup like a rat in a terrier's teeth and sent him sliding out of his seat, but even after his butt hit the floor, he was still laughing.

  The laughing was under control when he came into the outpost's control room, even though the grinning was not. Neither was the shaking of his hands, but as usual he wouldn't have admitted that. It was a place like his clothes, like his pickup, like everything here—a little scuffed, a little scruffy, but lovingly maintained and completely functional. He would never have said so aloud, and might have gotten his ears boxed if he had, but Earl and Jenny were all of a piece with the place where they lived.

  * * *

  Jenny was tucked into the outpost's communications bay, leaning over its systems panel as though it were an antique foot-treadle sewing machine. She was a woman somewhere in her forties, with a handsome, strong-featured face that concealed most of the traces of a hard life, and her plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans were a memory of an older time; but the way she wore her hair caught up in a severe bun was an echo of a time still farther back in history. A time when tough middle-aged ladies like her wore poke bonnets and crouched in the shelter of horse-drawn wagons while they loaded rifles as long as their skirts to help keep the bad guys at bay. The wagons might not be horse-drawn anymore, but the frontiers were just as harsh.

  And the bad guys just as bad.

  Jenny wasn't wearing a bonnet, just the fiberoptic headset that linked her to the outpost's comms bay, but her expression was as grave as though an entire gang of rustlers were pouring down on the homestead. As she looked up from the console, Bobby waved at her, not caring that the gesture was ignored, then sagged elaborately against a bulkhead.

  "Wooo-hee!" He pulled off his baseball cap and fanned himself with it. "I thought those hornets had me for sure!"

  Jenny gave him a quick sideways glance and a nod of acknowledgment, then turned her attention back to the comms panel. She toggled a bandwidth switch and fine-tuned the receiver, frowning as she listened to the headset, her ears filtering out anything else he might have said with the ease of long practice, as she hunted for coherence through the squeals of static and the chatter of too many voices on the same wavelength. Whether the attitude was deliberate because of what he had been doing, or accidental because of her own preoccupation, the effect was the same. It was as if Bobby didn't exist, and it served to calm his forced exuberance as effectively as a bucket of cold water. Dusting himself down, he replaced his cap then wandered over to her.

  "Jenny, your timing with the airlock doors was just—"

  "Shhh!"

  The way she shook him off shut Bobby up as sharply as if she had slapped his face, and Jenny might have felt sorry for him. Or then again, maybe not. Enough had changed in the past few hours that she was no longer the easygoing woman he had left behind. Jenny knew there was a severity about her that he hadn't seen before; and hidden behind it, a fear and a helplessness that spread like a chill in the air.

  The Winchesters were down to a handful of shells apiece, and the rustlers were still coming...

  She switched the headset's mike to standby and pushed it to one side, then kicked her chair back from the comms bay and spun it slowly around to better stare at him. He didn't stare back, and that was enough to make Jenny's lips compress into a thin, worried line. All right, not rustlers then. Claim jumpers. And all of a sudden there was a doubt in her mind about whether they were really the bad guys after all. Because if they weren't, who was? Knowing Bobby only too well, she had her suspicions about that.

  "You were prospecting over the territorial line, weren't ya?"

  "No way!" Bobby said—but at the same time, he stared at the control panels and wouldn't meet her eyes. This told her the truth she had already guessed, even before he looked up again and said, "Well... maybe a little . . ."Then as usual he suddenly got all aggressively defensive about it, in the way Jenny had seen a thousand times before. "But, hell, everybody does it!"

  If everybody warmed their backsides by sitting in a fire, would you do that as well? thought Jenny, and she grimaced sourly as she realized he probably would. There was no point in saying anything; over the past few years it had all been said before, too many times, and each time with less and less effect. Furious, she shook her head and, rather than wasting any more time trying to deal with him, went back to scanning the frequencies. At once, and with a rising sense of unease, she noticed that in just the few seconds she'd been off-line, the babble of transmissions had doubled. Bobby must have read something of that concern on her face, becau
se his own expression shifted slowly from penitent truculence. For the first time since he had stepped into the outpost, he began to look worried, and Jenny had an ugly feeling that worry was just the beginning, i For all of them.

  "I, uh, I got some really choice magnesium samples." Bobby spoke not because the magnesium samples were so very important, but because the silence was beginning to jangle his nerves. Jenny shot another sidelong glare at him, not taking her attention from the comms board but knowing from experience what was coming next. No matter what he did, no matter who he had annoyed, irritated, or hurt, Bobby stayed ashamed of Bobby for only so long. Then he went off on another tack and it was all forgotten—at least by him—until the next time. "Where's Earl?"

  Damn the boy! Can't he see what's happening… ? Jenny MacLaine felt the wave of anger rising up through her like a hot tide, but crushed it back again with an effort. There would be time for that later. If they were lucky. Even so, she was unable to completely muffle the snap in her voice.

  "Where d'ya think? With everybody else. Out battenin' down the perimeter."

  As Bobby blinked at her, still not fully understanding the situation, she drew in a deep, calming breath that didn't calm her at all. If he didn't know by now, she'd just have to tell him straight. "There was a skirmish out at the Northern Marker this morning."

  Even Bobby knew what that meant, and the realization hit him hard. Jenny saw the color drain out of his face, saw the way his mouth moved, shaping soundless explanations, excuses, maybe even apologies for the first time in years. And all of them were too late, because nobody was listening anymore. Nobody at all. From the sound of it, it seemed that matters had gone beyond words this time. "What?" he said at last. That was all he could manage.

  "You know better than to go jackrabbit around another confederation's border." At least, he should have known better. The subject had come up often enough. But oh no, not Bobby. "Those hornets have been waiting for an excuse to take over this facility."