Gabriel was about to say what, but something in her staring made him stop. Misty treaded water but seemed unable to speak, her eyes aimed past his shoulder. Slowly, Gabriel turned until the rest of the cavern filled his vision.
There before him, resting on the surface of the water, was the Nautilus.
23
21:44:39
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to take it in all at once. Gabriel treaded water, backing up toward the icy ledge of the cavern, and gulped, unable to convince himself it was real.
The first things he saw were the scales, large black sheets of specially forged metal very like that on the hull of the Obscure. These sheets were big, some six feet long and twelve feet high.
And the scales went back and back along the hull. He knew without having to wonder how big the Nemoship Nautilus was—two hundred and ten feet long, about four times the size of the Obscure. It lay partly submerged in what Gabriel now saw was an enormous hangar. All along the walls, he could see rows of orbs of light giving a warm glow to the whole place.
“I…,” was all he could say.
Was it real? It was here, it had to be, but all the disappointment of the search spun through his brain, and he couldn’t place two thoughts together. He bumped into the ice ledge behind him and turned to climb up onto the path that ran along the wall. Without him hearing, Misty had already climbed out and was offering him a hand. He glanced quickly at her and took her hand, climbing out, barely controlling his limbs, his attention still on the submarine.
Standing on the ice ledge, he now took it in—the ice cavern hundreds of feet long to accommodate the hidden ship. “I can’t believe it!” He jumped in place, and even though he slipped a bit, he still wanted to jump again. He hugged Misty in a great bear hug as he called the Obscure. “Peter, we’ve found it.”
“What?” Peter’s voice came back in almost a croak, as if Peter could hardly believe it, either.
“Yes. The Nautilus is here, it’s in a … a giant sort of ice garage. I mean, looking around, I think a crew went to work enlarging this thing.” He scanned the ceiling, seeing traces of tooled carvings and endless cables of shell lights. “There are lights, hundreds of them.”
Gabriel looked down. “Did that cave seem big enough…”
She read his mind. “For the dinghy? Yes.”
“Peter,” Gabriel said, “you got us this far. Get up here.”
Less than ten minutes later, the dinghy surfaced in the ice hangar, and Gabriel was still running back and forth on the ledge. His need to get inside the ship was killing him, but he wanted Peter to be a part of it.
Peter brought the dinghy to the ledge and climbed out with Misty’s help. No sooner had she dragged him up by the arm than he turned and let out a whoop. Gabriel ran between them, and they locked arms.
They spent what must have been a minute hooting and jumping, hugging, saying again and again, We found it. I can’t believe we found it.
Peter stared past Gabriel at the long ship—not as giant as Nerissa’s Nebula but still a pretty big sub—and said, “It’s amazing, it really does look like the model.” Gabriel had shown them the Nautilus among a collection of models at Nemolab not long ago. “Way better than the prop.”
“Look at the scales,” Misty said.
“Yeah!” Gabriel ran along the ice ledge. They were alongside the middle of the ship, and he ran toward the front, seeing the hull curving until the nose came into view. “Look at the prow—it’s true, it’s a corkscrew prow.”
“Just like a narwhal’s horn,” said Misty. That was why newspapers had first thought Captain Nemo’s ship was a monster, because when it attacked ships, it punched holes in them. The professor who had investigated Captain Nemo had thought that it was more likely not a monster but a giant narwhal, which was essentially a whale with a unicornlike horn on its head. Surfaced here, the Nautilus resembled a black narwhal at rest.
“Gabriel, do you have your—”
Gabriel gasped. “I can see the insignia on—the shoulder!” He ran along the walkway, coming around to see the forward starboard bow. There was the crest of the family, etched into the bow and lightened so that the N shimmered in the light.
“Misty.” Peter cleared his throat. “You have your Geiger counter, right?”
She did, and Gabriel distractedly saw Misty pull out the device, which was about the size of a TV remote, and sweep it in the air. “Normal,” she said. “Of course, we haven’t been inside.”
“Inside,” Gabriel said aloud. He could barely get the word out. Inside, he had to get inside. He wanted to call his sister, though he couldn’t do it from deep inside this cavern. But she had to know. They had found it. The words kept repeating in his head.
He looked far down toward the rear of the ship. The propeller, which he knew to be twenty feet in diameter, was not visible but lay below the water.
Nearer him, all the way forward on the part of the Nautilus that was visible above water, was the pilothouse, correctly trapezoid shaped. He was struck by the height of the real one. The little housing rose about five feet from the hull of the Nautilus, with long, frost-caked windows along it for the crew to see out if they were moving close to something else and needed to watch the hull. Behind the housing was a platform where the crew could gather atop the sub.
At the end of the ice ledge was a metal catwalk that extended to the platform and the little window house of the Nautilus. Gabriel gestured to Misty, who scurried after him as he stepped on the catwalk, trying its sturdiness a few times by stamping his foot on it while he kept his other foot on the ledge.
He was shaking. Literally shaking. “I—”
“Hey, man,” Peter said. “It’s a Nemoship. You belong on there.”
Gabriel took a step and set his foot on the platform right next to the window structure.
He bent down and used his elbow to scuff some of the ice away but could see nothing inside. But as he went around the rear window of the pilothouse, he saw a recessed handle in the metal next to the glass. He put his hand on it and looked back at Misty and Peter. “You ready for this?”
Misty came and crouched next to him, then handed him the Geiger counter. “If you’re going first, I want you to carry this.”
Gabriel took the Geiger counter, whose little LED display still read NORMAL, and gripped the handle. He turned it and pulled, expecting the panel with the window to open up.
But it didn’t—instead, as he stepped back, the platform he was standing on began to slope down, folding into stairs. He had just revealed a staircase that went down into the ship.
“This whole section can retract,” Gabriel said aloud. Remembering what he knew from the models, even if they weren’t wholly accurate, helped him regain his composure. Still, he heard a slight rattle in his voice, and his skin was tingling. “The pilot windows there, that whole structure, it can pull down into the hull so it’s just a big gray cigar.” He hadn’t set foot on the stairs yet. Clearly—incredibly, after over a hundred years!—the ship still had power, allowing the stairs to form. He could make out dim light inside. He looked back at the crew. “Let’s go.”
“Heck yeah.” Peter came in behind Misty.
They stepped down the stairs into a wide room—twenty-four feet wide, he knew—with several metal seats that protruded from the walls like an octopus’s tentacles. A wide cylinder extended from the roof down to a hooded visor, and next to it a pipe that ended in a splayed-out shell design. “This is the bridge,” Gabriel said. “Periscope and, uh, command megaphone.” He reached out and gingerly touched the periscope tube, then looked up at the wall. A large map of the South Pacific lay under glass, with marks of grease pencil on the glass itself. He could see that several other maps had been retracted—you could slide them out and display wherever the Nautilus was.
Peter ran to one of the consoles. “Navs. It’s funny, it looks almost like ours, just … wood, and there’s more handles.”
Gabriel laughed. Then he swept around in a
circle. “Okay,” he said. “You know what the question is, right?”
“Yeah.” Misty sounded a little distracted herself as she looked around. “Where is everybody?”
They began to search the Nautilus—through the galley, which was spick-and-span and devoid of food. Through the bunks of the crew, which looked to Gabriel like the separated gills of a fish.
They came across a set of red curtains separating off a section of the ship, and Gabriel froze in place. “Oh, wow.”
“What?” Peter asked, coming up behind him.
“Do you know what this is?” Gabriel’s voice croaked. He held out a hand and found he was shaking. He pushed back the curtain.
He looked back at Misty and Peter, unable to speak as he stepped inside. He looked around, taking it in, extending his arms as though he could absorb it through his fingers. The room felt large, even though he knew he was on a sub. Wood panels curved to the ceiling behind delicate, Victorian furniture with cushions of red velvet. A solid gold globe sat on a great oak desk and turned of its own accord, still run by some eternal Nemotech battery, as though spun by a ghost. Beyond the desk was a pipe organ that gleamed with silver, its ivory keys dusty and tan with age.
It was the great salon of Captain Nemo.
“Wow.” It was all he could say. He put his hand on the globe, feeling the tiny carvings of continents slide under his fingers.
“What is this?” Misty asked.
“This is where he…” Gabriel shook his head. Was himself? Was what we all think of? “This is his sanctum.”
Peter cleared his throat. “We gotta search.”
Gabriel was still shaking. Yes. Right. “Right!”
“You can stay here.”
“No.” Gabriel took his hand away from the globe. “If I do, I’ll never leave.” To the laboratory next. The lead wall they’d read about was there, and beyond it, making no register on the Geiger counter, a wooden table that was only partly visible as they stood in the doorway.
And there was no one. Not a soul.
“A hundred and ten years,” Gabriel said. “There would be…”
“If they were here,” Misty said, “they would still be here.” Meaning their skeletons would be, most likely.
Gabriel couldn’t wrap his head around it. And then he saw his own wristwatch, and it all came flooding back: He was being a fool, he had a mission, and it wasn’t to find the missing Nautilus crew or to gawk at this ship. No matter that it felt practically alive. They had a goal. An urgent one.
Gabriel held out the Geiger counter, and it gave no response as they stepped to the lead wall, which was about five feet tall. He looked around it to see more of the table.
There, on the table, lay a lead cask. It was bigger than he had expected, about three feet long and half as wide. On the sides and on the top were carved a symbol:
“Whatever you do,” Misty said, “don’t open it.”
Gabriel ran his hand along the lead to the simple latch at the top. If the journal was correct, the silver cask would be inside this. “How do we know if the inner cask is still here?”
“I don’t know, but the silver cask is likely to be radioactive if the device was,” she said. Then the eye on the top of the cask caught the light just so that it glimmered. Gabriel realized it was slightly raised and dared to slide it to the side. Below the eye was a thick layer of Nemoglass, a window.
He saw the glint of silver, and a circular seal in the top that looked like a machine gear. “It’s there,” Gabriel said.
“So—it’s a yard-long box,” Peter said. “A lead box.”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be heavy.”
“I don’t think you can fit that thing in the dinghy, not with us,” Peter mused. “I don’t know how we get this out of here.”
Gabriel shrugged. “We’ll float it,” he said. “There’s bound to be buoys on this sub.”
A loud slamming sound cut through the air near the table, and Gabriel jumped, looking to the bulkhead. The wall curved up and was probably several feet thick, so whatever it was must have been large or have hit them hard. “Did you hear that?”
Wham. Something dull colliding with the hull outside.
Peter’s eyes grew wide. “What if it’s ice?” he asked. “What if the cavern is breaking up and chunks of ice are falling?”
“Hang tight.” Gabriel and Misty began to jog through the ship, down the main corridor, to the bridge where the staircase still lay open. There were no chunks of ice on the stairs, but Gabriel had to agree that Peter’s theory was sound. What if they’d triggered something in the engines of the ship, and that change, the first in a hundred years, had caused the cavern to fall apart?
But as they stuck their head out, no broken ice revealed itself.
They climbed out onto the platform, looking around. The strange lights still hung there, lighting up the enormous hangar, large enough to hold a lagoon that could house a two-hundred-foot submarine. But that wasn’t his concern just yet. Gabriel stepped to the edge of the platform, looking into the black water, perfectly still against the metal hull.
Misty gasped from the other side of the platform, and he looked back.
Whump, another heavy sound of something slamming into the metal, and now something slipped from the water, showed itself, and disappeared. Gabriel felt his skin crawl.
It was the long-finned tail of what appeared to be a moray eel. He saw it again for a moment, silvery white and disappearing in the clear water, sliding along the hull of the ship. And then another came up, moving in the opposite direction. On and on it slid past them, and Gabriel watched as its mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, flexed as it went.
“Is that a moray?” Gabriel asked.
Misty pursed her lips. “If so it’s a long way from home. And it’s silver-white like it belongs in a cave. So I don’t know. Antarctic cousin?”
“So … a moray,” Gabriel concluded. They were not friendly fish—the moray eel is a hungry and resilient snakelike fish that can extend its jaws, alienlike, and is eager to remove your thumb or your foot, whatever is convenient.
“That’s got to be…”
“Twelve feet long,” Misty replied. Gabriel was shocked to hear a tremble in her voice, because he had never heard her scared. “Oh,” she said. He followed her eyes. There were more. Many more. He heard the water sputtering as they flipped through the surface and down.
“Where did they come from?” Gabriel watched a bunch of the eels swarming around the dinghy as well. Like they smelled dinner.
“They’re silver. I think they’re not even used to light. I think we let them in here,” Misty said. “They probably followed us.”
“I felt something bump my leg when we were treading water,” Gabriel said. “Do you think…”
A glurge sound smacked in the air, and Gabriel looked over to see an eel come out of the water and slither along the hull and back.
“Oh, nope nope nope,” Misty said.
“You said it. Peter?” Gabriel asked. “It’s not going to matter whether we can fit the box on the dinghy.”
“Why’s that?” Peter came back. “What’s going on?”
“Because we can’t get to the dinghy.” As Gabriel and Misty slowly spun on the platform, the water of the cavern teemed with what must have been hundreds of eels.
Gabriel looked at Misty. “You think maybe we can pilot the Nautilus?”
24
20:57:12
GABRIEL RAN HIS hand along the instrument panel in front of him, upsetting a coat of dust. The instruments were made of polished wood, the panels ringed with metal and padded with a dark gray leather. As Peter had said, it looked like earlier, less-digital versions of the controls they used every day. The soft amber glow of the instruments in the bridge meant one thing.
“This ship has power,” Gabriel said. “At least enough to keep these lights on, and the lights on the walls in the hangar. Let’s see what else we have.”
“I can’t believe th
ey’ve got sonar.” Misty slid into a chair in front of what appeared to be a sonar screen.
Peter found a wheel about the size of his palm with a diagram that indicated it twisted clockwise, increasing power as it went. “I think this is the throttle,” he said. “I’ve seen a design like this on some old equipment at Nemolab.”
“We don’t have a diagram of the whole bridge?” Misty smirked.
“I’ll get right on that after we start the ship. Wait.” Gabriel’s attention was caught by a small amber lamp with a switch, AUX and MAIN, right next to where Peter was sitting. “Wait. Main power.” He put his finger on the switch. “You guys concur?”
“Oh, yeah,” Peter said.
Misty was looking under the panel at her own feet and looked back up at him. “You’re asking me?”
Peter flicked his hand. “You go take your post next to the megaphone; this is Navs.”
Gabriel said, “Look, I like the idea of driving this ship. But I gotta be honest, it might be unstable after all this time. With that in mind, you can say no.” Please don’t say no.
Misty’s eyes told him she wanted to drive the ship as much as he did. “Hey, it’s this or the eels.”
Gabriel nodded at Peter, who flipped the MAIN switch.
All around them, the ship began to thrum, vibrating softly through the walls and deck.
Misty gasped as she sat back up in her seat. “Sonar is online!” Gabriel looked over to the circular glass display in front of Misty—it showed the sweep of an arm and the shape of the cave they were in—essentially a cigar inside a much larger cigar. “There’s not enough room to turn around in this cavern,” she said. “Can you pilot it backward?”
“I don’t know if I can pilot it at all.” Peter found another switch marked AFT and hit it, and a new amber light glowed. He hit FORE, and Gabriel felt that, as the vibration intensified below their feet.
“Life support?” Gabriel scanned the ceiling.
Misty got up, looking along the other positions in the bridge. “Life, life, life support, got it,” she said. “There’s a gauge here with a needle, reads normal.”
Quest for the Nautilus Page 14
