Quest for the Nautilus

by Jason Henderson

  Next the captain and I lifted from the ground a heavy lead box and set this on the table. And this we filled with the silver box, then shut the leaden one.

  Is this locked? asked I.

  Nay, not locked, said he, just closed, but the silver box will take a minute to open—giving anyone who seeks to open it time to think whether they mean to or not.

  A few flecks of paint fell on the table, and I looked up to see that the ceiling of the laboratory was burnt, a great stain spread across the paint on the metal there.

  The captain retired to his library, there to think as the rest of us wait for further orders.

  OCTOBER 28, 1910

  Still no decision, but the crew is distracted, for several have taken ill.

  OCTOBER 29, 1910

  The captain has changed our orders, and we are not to go to Brazil but are bound for Gilbert V important we arrive in three days.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1910

  Arrive Gilbert. Seven of my mates are abed, and their mysterious illness is impossible to understand. They swell like men stung; thirst cannot be sated.

  NOVEMBER 3, 1910

  A new pl—

  There was no more. Beyond that, flecks of burnt paper. “That’s it?” Gabriel turned back to the journal and picked it up. Indeed, the coded words ended suddenly. Beyond that were blank pages, long ago waterlogged and dried. One of the pages broke in his hand, flecks of paper drifting to the floor.

  Peter nodded. “But we know a lot.”

  “Yeah.” Misty went to one of the large windows of the library and swept her hand over the glass in a large, curving W formation. The glass instantly went white and opaque. She looked back, and Peter tossed her a marker that he pulled off Gabriel’s desk.

  “So. First, the Dakkar’s Eye. What do we know?”

  Gabriel rattled off the way the sailor had described the device and Misty wrote:

  ENCASED IN SILVER

  BLOCKED WITH LEAD

  “And there was a burn stain over the experiment,” Misty said. “Meaning some energy escaped. And then…” She went quiet and wrote:

  SICK CREW

  SWELLING

  “So,” Peter said, “that kinda sounds like it was radioactive.”

  “Is that even possible?” Gabriel held up a hand. “You really think the Nautilus was carrying a nuclear experiment in 1910?”

  “Absolutely,” Misty said. “By 1910, Madame Curie had already won a Nobel Prize.”

  “I mean, the things you know,” Peter said.

  “So could that be why the Nautilus sank? A nuclear accident?” Gabriel asked. He rubbed his forehead. “If that were the case…”

  “We’ll leave it alone,” Misty said. “We have Geiger counters. If we find it and it’s radioactive, you have your answer.”

  “Yeah.” Gabriel dropped into a chair.

  “Hey,” Peter said. “I want to know you’re listening. Don’t kid yourself. If it’s deadly, you can’t get it. We’d find it and mark it—”

  “Because we found the Nautilus—” said Gabriel.

  “Right. But you wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. Like Misty says, we have Geiger counters. They’ll tell us if there are dangerous levels of radiation.”

  “Okay, so…”

  Misty turned around and wrote another word.

  GILBERT

  “Gilbert,” Peter read. “The diary says…”

  “Bound for Gilbert,” Gabriel recalled. “And then Arrive Gilbert.”

  Peter propped his tablet on the table and tapped. “Gilbert. There are two. One is a small chain of islands and it’s not called Gilbert anymore; it’s Kiribati now. In the South Pacific. The other is a trench in Antarctica off the Weddell Sea.”

  Gabriel thought about the clock ticking away. “What are the odds they went to Antarctica?”

  “It depends on how far they got. They were headed to Brazil, so they would have gotten down by Antarctica on the way. But if the calamity happened earlier, they would have stayed in the Pacific,” Misty said. “And of course, what was true for them is true for us. We can reach the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific in—what, Peter?”

  “Forty-three hours.”

  “And the Antarctica spot?”

  “Would take about one hundred and five hours,” Peter answered. “We wouldn’t have time for it even if it were right.”

  Gabriel studied the whiteboard and picked the journal up off the table, weighing it in his hand. “Gilbert Islands. Let’s go.”

  17

  42:36:01

  SUNDAY EVENING, FORTY-THREE hours later, the Obscure pointed its nose at the surface of the ocean and rose steadily until it leveled off, sixty feet under water.

  “Let’s see it,” Gabriel said into his headset as he ran up from the passenger compartment. He had been antsy for the last two days, his body a bundle of frazzled nerves. They had caught up on sleep, but now they were running short on time.

  “There’s a lot of activity,” Peter said as Gabriel entered the bridge.

  “What is it?” Gabriel grabbed two nectarines from a cooler next to the captain’s chair and tossed one to Peter. Peter caught the fruit with one hand as he pushed up his glasses with the other. Gabriel followed Peter’s eyes to the sonar screen.

  “The large masses are the islands, though you can see our sonar labels them by the current name Kiribati, like I said. There are sixteen little islands that make up the Kiribati group called Gilbert. None of these islands are very big, but there’s a lot of activity around the biggest one, the atoll Tabiteuea.” An atoll was a ring-shaped island around a body of water.

  “What do you mean, activity?”

  He saw a large square mass off the southern coast of the atoll. Oil platform, most likely. A number of craft darted around the platform. So, it was a heavy drilling location now. That wasn’t useful for understanding why the Nautilus would have headed this way when it was in trouble.

  “Why would Nemo have come here?” Gabriel mumbled aloud.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Misty said.

  “Well, I got a better question.” Peter picked up a laser pointer and swept it around the squarish building in the water. Multiple smaller dots, midsize craft, were slowly moving around the platform. “Apparently Tabiteuea is a place where the locals do a lot of fishing. So I should see some small fishing boats. But who are these guys?”

  “Slow your approach,” Gabriel said. This didn’t feel right. They were supposed to be following a clue to a nearly empty atoll, and he hadn’t expected to encounter traffic. “Okay. So, who are they?”

  “Deploying periscope,” Misty said. A portion of the screen opened as a camera came online and a manta-shaped disc shot out of a small housing on the side of the Obscure, floating upward. Gabriel watched the color of the water on the screen change from black to soft green until the light filtered brightly through the water, and finally they broke through. The camera flipped forward, and they could see now.

  The Gilbert Islands looked like the very model of a South Pacific paradise, a tiny haven of volcanic hills and gorgeous green trees. Misty used a joystick to spin the camera around slowly until the platform came into sight.

  The first thing they saw was not the platform but a fat, tall, white craft outfitted with countless antennae and cranes for moving equipment. A science vessel. The ship was moving swiftly out of camera range, but Misty shifted the camera briefly so that for a moment they caught the writing on the boat’s prow.

  USS ARTHUR LYMAN, it read.

  “The US Navy is here? What in…,” Gabriel started as he noticed the American flag hanging from the floating platform. Here and there, naval officers walked purposefully along railings and into offices. The platform was a floating city, a command post for a small fleet.

  “Okay, that makes no sense,” Misty said. “We come to the Gilbert Islands, and they just happen to be here, too?”

  “Could they have followed us?” Gabriel asked.

  “They are
already here,” Peter pointed out.

  “So, for some reason these guys decided to come to these islands on their own.”

  Misty turned the joystick, and they saw the first boat moving away and four others anchored at intervals around the immediate area.

  “Why don’t we listen?” Gabriel asked.

  “Thinking the same thing.” Peter fiddled with the controls on his screen. He held his headphones to his ear, then flipped the sound to the speakers. Instantly a cacophony of voices filled the bridge.

  “Can we get a feed?” a woman was saying. “Lyman to Dive Team Seven, are you filming?”

  “Copy, we are entering the fence,” a man replied.

  “Fence?” Misty repeated. “What would that mean?”

  Gabriel wasn’t sure and shrugged.

  Another man spoke. “Tower, Engineering, we’ve been running the blowers for an hour. Recommend we stop so Dive Team can show us what we’ve got.”

  Gabriel turned to Peter. “What do we have on the Arthur Lyman?”

  Peter tapped away. “Lyman was part of a carrier group on patrol in the North Pacific … Looks like they were redeployed here … ten hours ago.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “There’s a reference to salvage. I think they got wind of the Maelstrom looking for the Eye, and they’re trying to get ahead of it,” Peter said. The Nemotech databases kept tabs on navy ships, but the information was far from complete. “There’s a file reference. Nothing I can open.”

  “Okay, let’s see it,” a man said on the radio.

  “What’s it called?” Gabriel asked urgently.

  Peter looked up. “Operation DeepCap.”

  “Yes, let’s see it,” the woman on the radio from the Lyman said.

  “Can you get that feed?”

  “Watch the screen.” Peter pointed, and the view screen filled with static. A row of numbers displayed as a line swept across the static. Once, and again.

  “Can you…”

  “Working on it.”

  Suddenly an image popped into view.

  The first thing they saw was the nose of a submersible, a small submarine, a beam of light shining from the nose. They were watching the video from a camera mounted on the submersible’s hull. Another diver in a one-person submersible swooped down from the right. Before them, just below them, the smaller submersible dropped over the edge of a latticework of metal in an enormous circle, a high fence that must run all the way to the ocean floor. Then the camera and the submersible they were “riding” on crossed the fence and began to drop, down and down.

  Sea silt and mud were billowing like thick smoke, then began to clear, and the particles of mud showed yellowish as they descended. In the thick billows, Gabriel began to make out a shape. A shadow of something cigarlike with a long, tapered nose. He made out a cubelike structure sticking from the top.

  The mud settled and the image cleared.

  “Hoooooly mother,” the woman from the Arthur Lyman said.

  Gabriel felt himself stagger, and Misty gasped.

  Protruding from the silt was the nose of a very old craft with an armored horn at the front and a square housing on the roof where the craft began to curve. The housing had rivets and glass windows caked in mud. The rest of the craft was buried.

  “Is it possible?” Peter asked.

  Gabriel didn’t dare answer. But at the end of the nose, just below the windows, was a single letter in a swirl.

  N.

  18

  42:25:47

  “THEY’VE FOUND IT,” Gabriel said. “I mean, I think. Look at it.”

  “Is that it?” Misty asked. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “This is where we’re supposed to look.” He was trying to picture the whole of the ship, extrapolating from how much was exposed on the ocean floor. He had seen models of the Nautilus his whole life, but he had no idea how accurate they really were. “The pilothouse is different from what I thought.” He looked back. “It’s square—the one on the model was sort of pyramid shaped.”

  “If it is the Nautilus,” Misty said, “and not some other ship … we have to warn them.”

  “Because of the Dakkar’s Eye,” Gabriel said. “Though they’ve got to be working from the same diary we are … They must have digitized it.”

  “You can’t assume.” Misty shook her head. “If they send divers down and it’s radioactive…”

  “I’d like to switch out submersibles,” the woman from the Lyman said. “Team Two, prepare to deploy.”

  “Ahead full,” Gabriel said. “Hail them.”

  “Ahead full,” Peter said. The ship was moving, water thundering against the body of the Obscure. “You can talk.” The loudspeakers chirped.

  “Arthur Lyman.” Gabriel felt the Obscure picking up speed. “Arthur Lyman, this is Nemoship Obscure, do you copy?”

  There was a flurry of voices on the radio. Someone sounded a horn. The radio crackled again. “Don’t come any closer, Obscure. You are entering a naval operation.”

  “I’m here to warn you,” Gabriel came back. “That ship could be dangerous.”

  “I advise you to stop your motion,” she said.

  “Slow to one third,” Gabriel said. “I repeat…”

  “It’s been there for a hundred years,” she said.

  “If you’ve got the same data we have, you’ll know that ship was carrying an experiment that may still be radioactive,” Gabriel insisted.

  “Based on what?” the woman answered.

  “Stand by … Peter,” Gabriel said, “can you send them a scan of the journal page that mentions the lead box?”

  Peter flipped through screens of scans on his tablet and nodded. Gabriel heard the screen whoosh.

  “There’s only one reason they would have encased the experiment in lead, and it’s because they were afraid it was dangerously radioactive.”

  The woman scoffed. “I’m waiting for this to make sense. If it’s dangerous for us, it’s gonna be dangerous for you.”

  “But it belongs to the Nemos. It’s our responsibility,” Gabriel said. “If it is radioactive, our Geiger counters will tell us. But if it’s not … ma’am, it’s family.” He laid on a lot of earnestness with that last sentence.

  Peter smirked. What?

  Gabriel whispered, “I’m trying to suggest that if there are, you know, bodies aboard, we should have a right to see them first.” He waggled his hands. “There won’t be, not after a hundred years.”

  Misty shook her head. “There might be.”

  “Then … it’s the truth.” Gabriel tried not to think about it. He wanted the idea as an argument, not a creepy coming attraction in his brain. He’d never even seen a dead body.

  “It’s six hundred feet,” the woman said. By which she meant, It’s too deep to dive.

  Not for us. “Oh, I’ve thought about that,” Gabriel responded. “We have aboard a pair of deep-sea diving suits. Nemotech. If you look at your notes on the Nemos, you’ll find a reference to them. We would very much like to go down and look at this ship.” He glanced back at Peter and Misty.

  “Ma’am,” Gabriel went on, “we’ll have to cross that fence you put up, which is why I’m asking. We can share the feed we send back to our ship. I’ll have my navigator send you the passcode.”

  There was no answer. On the screen, a sailor on the prow of the Lyman was sweeping the surface with a pair of binoculars.

  “We have a deadline,” Gabriel said. “If you let us look, you can get your answers now. If you don’t, assuming you don’t have the same equipment, you’ll have to wait.” Gabriel thought. Of course they weren’t in the kind of hurry he was.

  After a moment, the woman came back. “All right. It’s your ship. But this is still a naval operation, and right now I am forbidding you to remove anything from that vessel until the government of the United States releases it.”

  Gabriel looked back. “We don’t have much choice.”

  Peter whispered, “How are
you going to smuggle it out?”

  “One thing at a time,” Gabriel muttered, then called back to the captain of the Lyman. “Stand by. Our navigator will send you the feed, and we’ll make the preparations.”

  Misty used her palm to open a large locker in the passenger compartment, and a rod extended out instantly with a pair of Nemotech deep-sea suits. They were deep blue and semirigid, with Nemoglass-windowed helmets and servos in the joints that made the whole thing almost hold its shape. “Oh, I love these things,” she said, and Gabriel could tell she meant it.

  They started pulling the suits over their regular uniforms, snug fits. Gabriel tugged the helmet forward, and it formed to the shape of his head. Then he swiveled a ring on his wrist and felt oxygen begin to flow as the whole thing came online.

  Misty performed a skater’s lunge, jumping to the side and dropping one knee as her other leg extended behind. The boots clapped the floor as she did so, and the servos in the joints hummed brightly. The suit was designed for walking under tremendous water pressure. “I feel like I weigh five pounds.” Her voice sounded in his helmet. “Man, I want to walk on the moon in this.”

  “Never know.” Gabriel stood on his toes, and the action in the heel joints of his boots shot him up several inches. “Gotta admit, Dad is good … Peter, could you prep the escape dinghy?” The escape dinghy was a small sub that carried two people—three if they were willing to be uncomfortable. It was there for exactly what it sounded like: escaping if everything went wrong. It had its own Nemotech engines, its own oxygen, sonar, everything they could need. They could cover the distance down to the sub quickly in the dinghy, then do their exploring in the dive suits.