Quest for the Nautilus

by Jason Henderson

  “We’re moving at thirty knots, but we’re not vibrating a tenth of what we would be normally. And we’ve stopped shaking.”

  They were sailing along through the water. The reading said thirty knots, but … “Can you gauge our actual speed?” Gabriel said.

  “I can.” Misty brought up the sonar on her own tablet. She saw the shadow of a whale in the distance and tapped it. “Blue whale, two miles away.”

  The shadow of the whale grew as the sonar beeped, and they suddenly passed it, the beeping dying.

  The ship was nearly silent, cutting through the water in its bubble as the ocean slicked around them. “Guys,” Misty said. “We’re doing two hundred and fifty knots.”

  “Hoooooly mackerel,” Gabriel said, suddenly unable to suppress a laugh. Two hundred and fifty knots! That was almost three hundred miles an hour.

  Peter had a smile the size of Kansas as he hovered his hand over the throttle control. “Captain, we have a ship with no oxygen but a heck of an engine. You ready?”

  “Yeah,” Gabriel said. “Set course for Antarctica. Full speed.”

  Peter slid the accelerator on the tablet far to the right, and at five hundred knots, the Obscure shot through the water like a sunken jet.

  21

  37:13:29

  THE ESCAPE DINGHY was a strange craft to spend a long time in. It was surrounded by Nemoglass windows, so normally if you were riding in it, at least you could look out at the sea or at the choppy surface of the water. But riding in the pocket where it was kept, using it essentially as a life-support chamber from which to control the ship, the only thing to see was the black inside of the Obscure’s hull. There wasn’t even the usual feel of the waves, because the Obscure was flying along inside a pocket of air—to Gabriel the ride felt like a voyage in a coffin.

  “Okay, guys.” Peter hauled up his backpack. “What is the one thing you have both forgotten that I never forget?”

  Misty put her elbow on the back of the driver’s seat and glanced at Gabriel in the back. She shrugged. “What?”

  Peter opened his pack. “Food. Seriously, you two must run on adrenaline or something.”

  Gabriel laughed as Peter hauled out everything he had grabbed from the coolers next to each of their stations. Peter handed Gabriel a seaweed-wrapped package of kimbap and a banana.

  “Misty, I found you another banana, and I guess this is a veggie wrap.” Peter fished out her veggie meal and handed it to her. It was also wrapped in dry seaweed.

  “What did you bring?”

  Peter looked in a bag on his lap. “I have some Jordan almonds and some chocolate-covered espresso beans.”

  “So, candy,” Misty replied. “You run on candy.”

  “And to drink…” Peter hauled out a pair of water bottles. “Water. I didn’t have any cola, except I did bring”—and here he handed Gabriel another bottle—“some of your weird kelp soda. We always have plenty of that. It will never run out.” He muttered, “Never, ever.”

  Misty happily tore into the veggie wrap. “You’re amazing, Peter.”

  “Yeah, just wait.” Peter reached in and brought out one last item, brushing it off and sticking it to the dashboard of the dinghy. It was Misty’s Troll doll.

  As they watched the bubbles race by, Gabriel devoured the lunch Peter had packed—it was close to half past three in the morning, but he still thought of this as a lunch—and felt his energy rise again. The three of them chattered like monkeys, seeming to agree to put the present emergency aside without even saying it. They talked about the Obscure. They relived every moment they’d had on the ship, the fiery rescue of the sinking pleasure barge and the chase by an enormous sea creature that had put on the skin of an old English warship. And finally they rested.

  After some silence, Gabriel said, “There is a possible problem.”

  “What now?” Peter harrumphed.

  “Antarctica is very different from what it was a century ago. One thing the Nemos never pictured was global warming.”

  “You’re worried the trench might be different?” Peter said.

  “I’m worried the way the Nautilus went might not even be there. Antarctica is melting and shrinking. Dumping, what?”

  Misty nodded. “Losing about two hundred forty billion tons of ice every year. It’s changing.”

  “Okay,” Peter said. “So, there’s that. We follow our maps and hope for the best.”

  Finally, traveling at a depth of three hundred feet, the Obscure began to run out of air. Gabriel looked over at Peter’s tablet as an alarm flashed. “What do we have?”

  “Oxygen generators are nearly depleted.”

  “I mean, they’d have to be,” Gabriel said. They had been traveling for thirteen hours in the cramped dinghy.

  Misty showed him the sonar from the front seat. “Gabe, we’re just a few miles off the entrance to the Weddell Sea.”

  Gabriel looked at the sonar. A shaded land mass—really an ice mass—indicated the vast sheet of thick ice over very—very—cold water.

  “Good,” Gabriel said. “Let’s surface for air and then proceed under the shelf.”

  “Surfacing,” Peter said, and the ship around them began to quake. The air bubble had dissipated to just a few bubbles here and there, and now sunlight turned the water green as they rose to the surface. When they emerged, they were looking at a landmass of ice that stretched across the horizon as the Obscure rested on a slick mirror of water dotted by icebergs.

  For a moment, Gabriel stared at the glimmering blue-and-white landscape. “It makes you want to get out and run around.” He was the only one who could dare say it because he was the only one who absolutely couldn’t, not with just twenty-four hours to go. The bladders of air in the ship filled quickly, even running fresh air to the dinghy. They waited only the ten minutes it took to be sure they were pumping air again and then submerged.

  Peter had to be careful now that they were closer to ice—the engines ran roughly ten times faster than expected, so he needed to keep the ship at what amounted to flank speed to maneuver, so perfectly did it slide through the water with the air cavity.

  “Dive to one hundred feet,” Gabriel said.

  “Diving, aye,” Peter echoed. They sailed down, sliding under the shelf, under rolling mountains of blue ice that made their ceiling.

  “Gilbert Trench,” Misty mused. “That has to be just a target, a general area. It’s mostly ice itself—it’s a big cavern, and by big, I mean Grand Canyon big. There would be liquid parts, but I have to think the Nautilus wouldn’t have been able to get through the ice to it.”

  They traveled through the water for an hour until they reached the far edge of the shelf, where suddenly the ice of the ceiling and the floor came up to walls that ran for miles. Peter flipped on the outer lights, and they watched the great floodlights of the Obscure sweep across the ice walls as they tugged smoothly along. Peter looked back. “Now what?”

  Gabriel didn’t know. The wall they were looking at was practically endless, and they didn’t have any hints beyond this. They all stared at the ice. “Options?”

  Misty shook her head. “You’re thinking it’s in a cavern beyond the wall.”

  “Of course,” Gabriel answered.

  “There’s volcanic activity all around underneath us. That plus global warming changes the ice, too. How much it would change in a hundred years, I have no idea.”

  “Was there an option in there?” Gabriel stared at the ice, a great blank waiting for him to come up with something.

  “Sonar,” Peter said. “Bounce sound off the ice walls. When we find something that has a different depth of ice it’ll sound different.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel said.

  They swept along the ice wall for an hour and listened, keeping their sweep within the five miles of the wall that was closest to the Gilbert Trench, on the assumption that that was the most likely place the Nautilus had gone into an ice cavern.

  Ping. Ping. The sound bounced back
dully.

  Then, a slight change. The ping came back faster and had tonally changed half an octave. “What’s that?”

  Peter brought the Obscure closer to the wall and they continued the ping.

  “It’s definitely something.”

  Misty brought up a NOAA map of the shelf and shook her head. “No, no, this”—she indicated the coordinates—“this is the entrance to a volcano. It probably stretches miles off to the right and down.”

  Gabriel realized he had been gripping the seat and now sat back.

  They passed over the next two miles seeing little fluctuation. “Okay,” he said finally.

  “Look, it’s…,” Misty said.

  “I know,” Gabriel said. “If the ship went into a cavern, it might have been walled off a long time ago.”

  “Well … it’s metal, right?” Misty said.

  “What?”

  “The Nautilus, it’s a metal ship. I mean it’s this magic Nemo metallurgical geegaw stuff, but in the end it’s a big hunk of metal, right?”

  Gabriel said, “Yeah?”

  “Uh, well, radio detects magnetic field fluctuations,” she offered. “We could use the radio and the sonar to sweep and see if we detect any change in the sound of the static.”

  “Boy, is that a sentence,” Peter said. “Are you suggesting…”

  “We make the Obscure into a metal detector.”

  Gabriel watched as a tiny, hot rivulet of hope crept across the glacier of hopelessness. “Try it.”

  Peter brought the radio online, saying, “We don’t use this much. I think the last time was when we were playing chicken with the Alaska.”

  He turned up the volume so that static filled the tiny dinghy, pulsing in their ears. Misty turned on the sonar, and they heard the pings again, bouncing back close because they were less than a quarter mile from the ice.

  They began at the edge of their search area, moving across the wall, the static reverberating, fluctuating here and there but essentially changeless.

  They heard the sonar change when they slid past the underwater volcano and swept on.

  And then, a mile and a half from the end, the static changed. The sonar altered slightly, only slightly, but the static ripped higher.

  “Volcano?” Gabriel asked.

  Misty looked on the maps. “Down underneath, but not right here.”

  “Gabriel,” Peter said, “there’s metal beyond that wall.”

  Gabriel wanted desperately to have them all be right and say we’ve found it, but he had been wrong before. “All right. Then let’s figure out how to look at what’s there.”

  22

  22:14:09

  ALONG DIM, RED-FILTERED corridors, Gabriel and Misty hurried through the Obscure. The refreshed air they’d brought in from the outside was sweet, but Gabriel knew it was flowing out again with every breath. They made it to the passenger compartment in forty-five seconds and donned their deep-sea suits. They would need them here, not for depth but because the water outside was deadly cold and the suits were built for that contingency.

  They armed themselves with pincer sticks—clublike wands with rubber handles and heads that could spark with energy, for close-up use—and a flare or two each, clasping the gear to their belts.

  Misty didn’t jump around this time. “It already feels like the moon,” she murmured, the lights from her mask casting streaks of white in the compartment.

  They moved in augmented steps toward the bridge. Its door was hanging open, and Gabriel was struck by its desolation, the sonar map still up on the screen, the rest of the bridge in shadow. They hurried down the ladder to the torpedo room.

  “I guess I spoke too soon. We’re going to need these after all.” Misty knelt by a stack of pincer torpedoes.

  Normally she would set the power of the missile through a series of menus at her station, but that wasn’t feasible here. The torpedo tubes had been rejiggered to work the air bubble. And without the tubes, the menus on the bridge were useless. Luckily, they could arm them directly through a series of collars on the torpedoes themselves.

  “You sure you can fire those by hand?” Peter asked in Gabriel’s ear. “You could try to undo what we did to the torpedo tubes.”

  “We’re going to need the supercavitation drive,” Gabriel said. “And we won’t have time to rebuild it.”

  Misty hefted one of the torpedoes. It was about seven feet long, roughly the width of a large coffee can, and capable of delivering arcs of energy powerful enough to cripple a small ship. “We can’t just fire them out of our hands,” she said. “Not even in the suits. But if we set it, it should drop as we swim away. It’ll fire by itself.”

  “So all we have to do is aim.” Gabriel nodded. “And hope it’s enough.”

  Half an hour later, Gabriel and Misty floated in ice-cold water three hundred feet from the spot on the ice wall where their metal detector had lit up.

  Gabriel listened to his own breathing through the apparatus at his mouth, and he could see condensation inside Misty’s mask.

  Like Misty, Gabriel held a torpedo in front of him in the water. It was taking everything he had not to drop it. Misty’s torpedo was about three feet from his as she struggled to hold hers. The suits worked—he could barely feel the cold. But he found it tougher to do little movements and strained to get his elbows to bend enough in the thick material.

  He just hoped they would deliver enough heat to punch a hole in the ice wall.

  Gabriel waited with his torpedo while Misty cranked a series of raised bands around hers, sliding numbers on the band until the one she wanted rested against an arrow on the torpedo. “Maximum,” she said. She looked up and handed the torpedo over. Gabriel let it roll across the one he was holding, then dropped his original one into Misty’s outstretched arms. She made quick work of setting it as well.

  Gabriel looked past Misty through five hundred yards of dark water to the Obscure, which floated with its lights dim except for the one flood lamp trained on a specific spot on the ice wall. That spot was the target.

  “Okay,” she said. “Peter, we’re gonna fire.”

  “You’re swimmin’ around with missiles,” Peter said. “Seems a waste not to.”

  Gabriel looked at the wall and held the torpedo to his side, and Misty was the perfect mirror image. “Aim.”

  “Aim,” she said. “You think we’re far enough back?”

  That actually made him laugh. Every little thing was dangerous.

  “I think so.” He thumbed a rubbery button and felt a click through his heavy gloves. “Arm.”

  “Arm.”

  “I set a six-second delay,” Misty said. “Swim fast when you drop it.”

  “Copy,” he said. “On three?”

  She nodded, and he saw her wince through her mask as she held out the torpedo in the water. They counted.

  “… Three.”

  Each thumbed the last button.

  “Fire.”

  The torpedo came alive in his hands and rumbled, and Gabriel swam backward, whipping his arms fast as the missile quickly dropped ten or eleven feet.

  Suddenly the torpedo lurched like something coming alive, bobbing for a second before the engines in its aft section burst with blue flame and shot away. Its fellow left the water in front of Misty and the two missiles traveled together, at one point along the way trading places, long trails of gas bubbles hissing behind them.

  A blinding flash lit up the wall of ice as the torpedoes hit. Arcs of blue energy crackled and crept along the wall as the ice exploded. Enormous bubbles of steam erupted, shaking the water all the way back to them.

  The arcs of energy kept flowing for a full minute, as they were programmed to do, in theory able to sweep through a ship, turning its engines and radios to slag.

  Then all went dark except for the floodlights from the Obscure. Gabriel didn’t want to breathe as they swam the distance, whipping their legs until they reached the wall. But he could already see one thing that mad
e his heart soar.

  Before them lay a jagged hole in the ice wall, about three feet in diameter, and beyond that, the black darkness of a cavern.

  “We opened a cave!” he shouted. Yes. Yes. They swam in. The lights on their masks lit up the rocky ice, and then they could see almost nothing as they entered a reservoir of water whose dimensions Gabriel could not determine.

  Misty thumbed the flashlight on her shoulder, and it lit up the cavern more as she swept around. “I see hints of the wall over there.” She pointed to her right. “Man, it’s dark.”

  Gabriel swore he felt something bump along his right leg, but nothing was visible. He decided it was his mind playing tricks on him—probably just the belt on his left boot—and put his mind on the cave.

  They floated a few yards when Misty stopped, looking up. “Do you see what I see?”

  Gabriel followed her eyes, which were deep behind the condensation in her mask. “It’s light.” Above them he saw glowing brilliance, like you might see as you neared the surface of the ocean in daylight. Except that was impossible, because they were deep under a glacier.

  “How could there be light above us?” Misty asked.

  “It could be a crevasse that goes all the way to the top of the ice shelf,” he offered. “Let’s go.”

  Kicking their legs and swimming steadily but slowly, they rose, ten yards, then twenty. The light grew. They were approaching a surface, a pocket of air, and now he could see orbs of light, blurry through the water but distinct from one another. Multiple light sources. They were nearly there.

  Wherever there was.

  The water gave way as his head popped over it, his arms splaying out, treading as he looked up. Misty’s head bobbed a few feet away.

  It was a cave of glimmering ice, the water black in comparison. But what amazed Gabriel most was a metal lattice strung across the sparkling frozen wall, from which were hung at intervals amber blocks in the shape of familiar swirling shells, which glowed and lit up the cavern. Were they really in the right place?

  “What in the world?” Misty looked along the wall. “Is this…” She spun in the water and looked at him, throwing back her diving mask, and then she fell silent.