Gabriel shook his head. “If it’s normal, where is everyone?” he asked softly. But finding the crew wasn’t the mission right now. “Good … Okay, what about depth control…” He looked around and spotted it, a wooden handle on a half wheel on the wall marked off in hundreds of feet. “Misty, can you handle elevation while Peter handles direction? Prepare to dive.”
She went over the strange nineteenth-century instrument and grabbed it. “Depth control, ready.”
“Reversing engines.” Peter flipped a switch and swiveled the throttle. “Let’s see if we can move.”
Gabriel felt the ship rumble and grabbed on to the captain’s periscope pole as they began to slide backward. “Are we moving on the sonar?”
Wham. They lurched, the whole ship clanging to a stop and seeming to bounce. Gabriel nearly fell over. “What is it?”
A buzzer was sounding. Peter looked several feet over and saw a glowing light and ran to it. “CHOCKS. Chocks?” Chocks were something used to keep a vehicle from rolling around. He pointed at a metal plate on the wall of the bridge, showing an outline of the Nautilus. It was ringed with little lights, and one was glowing in a spot directly at the bottom of the hull.
“We’re held in place.”
“Probably chains,” Misty said. “Something like that. If they knew they were going to be here a long time, they would not want the ship to start drifting.”
“Options?” Gabriel asked.
“We could try to break them.”
“I don’t recommend that,” Peter said. “We could tear the hull away. Look, it’s probably just a hook, or a pin or something. But if those chains are holding the ship, we don’t want to try to tear them off.”
Misty sighed, crossing her arms. “So…”
“Yeah.” Gabriel was looking at the diagram and picturing the mission at hand. “We gotta dive with some eels.”
25
20:48:06
GABRIEL TAPPED THE button on his pincer stick, and it began to spark at the top, ready to zap anything it touched. He held it at a distance from himself and looked at Misty as they stood on the platform atop the Nautilus. The hangar was louder than it had been before, rumbling with the sound of Nautilus’s engines and the sickening slapping of eels as they swarmed, snaggletoothed mouths snapping.
“Do you think they can chew through the suits?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Remember the worms?”
Misty shuddered. They’d run into worms that blazed at one point, and they’d found out that the suits absolutely were not armor. “Okay. We slide down, we keep back-to-back when we can, and we sweep.”
Gabriel nodded. “You ready?” The snapping mouth of one of the eels seemed to say it was certainly ready. He looked down at the eels. “Guys, I’m not some porpoise or baby seal. I’m another creature entirely.”
“Ready,” Misty said. They nodded and slid along the hull.
For a split second, they were in the air, and then they plunged in the water, eels scattering in momentary confusion. “Drop, drop,” Gabriel said, and they pointed their legs, side by side as they started sweeping the pincer sticks. They began to spin, sweeping the sticks behind them, the plates of the hull flying past. The eels had been startled by their appearance and only now started to come closer as they reached the bottom of the ship.
“Back-to-back,” Misty said, and they went shoulder to shoulder. They left about a foot of space between them, and it was harder to swim now. But back-to-back meant they only had to guard their front. An eel swam close, and Gabriel swatted at it, the pincer stick arcing. It swam away and circled as more swam past.
They scuttled awkwardly sideways, using their legs and arms to move along the underside of the hull. The water burbled with the sounds of the creatures while their joint servos sang out. Gabriel looked up for a moment at the hull as they passed, wishing briefly that he had time to study it. There would be time later.
He felt something brush his boot and yanked his foot up, sweeping down with the stick, an eel squirming back, snapping its jaws.
Misty turned on her forearm lamp and shone a light ahead of them as they swam sideways together and lit up the underside of the ship. Still dark. “Where is it?”
An eel came straight for Gabriel’s mask, and he zapped it right in the side of its bulbous head. Arcs of energy crackled around it, and it spun away.
And then there it was. One moment they were looking at black water and eels, and then suddenly a great chain with links nearly half his height drifted into view.
They had to keep sweeping the sticks as they scuttled toward the chain and took in the attachment to the underside of the ship’s hull. One link appeared to be permanently part of the ship, clearly ready to sweep up and into its own indentation. A golden pin as big as Gabriel’s forearm connected that link to the rest of the chain as it went down out of sight.
A hole had been burrowed into the end of the pin, with a thin cable attached to it that snaked down into the darkness as well. Gabriel grabbed the cable and tried to yank the pin out. “It’s stuck.”
“Yah!” Misty swatted at an eel. “One of them took a chunk out of my fin.”
Enormous pressure, the pressure of a whole ship pulling against the pin, made it impossible to just slide out. Gabriel looked around. “There’s got to be something to make it easier. They would have had to do exactly what we’re doing if they wanted to unhook.” He tested the weight of the cable. “This feels loose but weighted.”
“Haul the cable up,” Misty said urgently, avoiding the eels. More of them were gathering, their teeth shining in the water. “Hurry.”
He put his pincer stick under his arm and began to haul the cable with both hands. After a moment, out of the blackness below them, came a hammer with a thick, metal handle. “Okay, I got it, you have to hammer the pin out.”
He reached for the hammer and then dropped it as an eel appeared, and he swept his pincer stick at the creature. Then he began to haul again. “Sorry. Got it.”
“You get the pin,” Misty said, “I’ll guard.”
Gabriel didn’t wait. He gave her his pincer stick as she got right behind him, sweeping both the sticks.
The hammer was large, slightly bigger than a sledge, and he reared back his hand—swatting an eel in the process—and swung. The pin sang when he hit it and budged slightly.
“Hurry,” Misty said again, zapping another eel. One of them got past her and tried to nibble on Gabriel’s shoulder, and she zapped it next to his head. He could feel the turbulence in the water as they swarmed, and she began moving faster. He hit the pin again.
It moved again, and he felt something click out of place. The pin was suddenly moving freely, sliding through a groove set in the chains. It was almost all the way through. He grabbed the pin on the other side, prepared to hit it on one side and guide it on the other, when he saw writing.
ALL HANDS—
—was carved into the pin.
“There’s writing on it,” Gabriel said.
“What? Would you hurry? Argh,” Misty said. He could hear her zapping and the eels’ excited burbling.
He hit the pin again and jerked his other hand back as it came free. The link attached to the ship snapped into its crevice in the hull. And Gabriel nearly dropped the pin as the chain dropped instantly into the water below. But he managed to hold on and, despite the danger, took a second to look at the writing. On the length of the metal rod, in deep letters, someone had engraved:
ALL HANDS TO THE TIGERS
What?
“Gabriel!” Misty shouted, and he heard a bursting crackle. He looked back as an eel lunged, grabbing one of her sticks and yanking it. Gabriel spun, slipping the pin under his belt and kicking with his fins to move next to her. The eel that had grabbed the pincer stick was bouncing away, shocked, but the stick spun off into the depths.
Misty was down to one stick now. “Fight through them; use your elbows and knees.” Misty swept the stick as she and Gabriel went back-to-
back again, bashing.
Gabriel was moving as fast as he could. His arms were starting to ache. Every moment, another snapping jaw came close.
“Peter, we’re coming back,” Gabriel said. I hope.
They swam, moving as fast as they could, Misty crackling at the eels. Gabriel elbowed one that came at his waist and kneed another. Swim. Any second now. They began to see the light of the surface.
They surfaced and scrambled, Misty handing Gabriel her pincer stick to swat at their pursuers while she hauled herself onto the handholds of the ship. Gabriel hustled up behind her.
The water popped endlessly with the sound of the eels. They got up to the platform and Gabriel looked back at the hangar.
“I never want to do that again,” Misty said.
“You’re telling me.” Along the ice walls, the eternal bulbs glowed on. He pulled the pin out of his belt and scanned the inscription again. All hands to the tigers. What did that mean?
But now wasn’t the time to find out. Not with Mom in danger half a world away.
* * *
They gathered again at the bridge of the Nautilus, and Misty shouted, “Chocks away!” as they found their places again.
“Reverse, one-quarter power,” Gabriel called.
“Aye.” Peter slid a handle. The sub rumbled louder, and once more they felt the ship sliding back. Amazing. After all this time.
“Yes!” Misty looked at the sonar screen. “We’re moving backward in the hangar.”
“When we got in here,” Gabriel remembered, “we swam through a tunnel. Was it wide enough for this ship?”
“Plenty,” she answered. “I’m sure of that. It was probably how the Nautilus got in here in the first place.”
“Plenty?” Peter shouted. “More like barely. But it’ll fit.”
“Dive, one hundred feet,” Gabriel called. “Back through the tunnel.”
The ship was moving smoothly, perfectly balanced.
“Dive, one hundred feet, aye.” Misty yanked the handle down. Now the Nautilus shuddered as ancient caverns in the walls filled with liquid and they began to sink, something that Gabriel could feel in his bones. Misty read out from a gauge next to the handle filled with liquid, a needle sweeping along it. “Seventy-five … one hundred.” Suddenly she whispered, “Whoa.”
“What?”
“Check out the sonar screen.” The line that swept around the sonar screen no longer showed the narrow lagoon they were in, for they had dropped into a much larger reservoir many hundreds of yards wide, a great circle at the end of the tunnel. “I can see the entrance to the tunnel onscreen, but Gabriel, we have plenty of room to turn down here.”
“Good … Peter, one-eighty degrees left rudder.”
“Aye.” Peter looked around, finding a rudder control at the station next to him. He hopped out of his curved metal seat and grabbed a swiveling handle. “Left full rudder.”
The ship was backing up at about five knots and now began to sweep its nose to the left as its aft section swept to the right. Gabriel could feel the weight of the ship, and his body drifted on the deck as they turned the ship around. At 230 feet long, it took several minutes, and Gabriel walked over to the sonar screen to watch it happen. He looked back at Misty and Peter and smiled. Finally, the Nautilus was pointed outward.
“Okay. Peter, straighten out and head for the tunnel. Misty, dive to two hundred feet.”
“Dive, two hundred, aye.” Misty ratcheted the control. “That should put us right at the mouth of the tunnel.”
“Increasing speed,” Peter called. “We need to be doing about forty knots.”
“For what?”
“The Nautilus has a battering nose,” Peter answered, “but I’m betting we need speed for it to work right.”
The ship barely registered the increased speed as they began to move faster. The Nautilus slipped under the lip of the tunnel, and they were moving along the same tunnel Gabriel and Misty had swam through in darkness. Gabriel wished he had cameras and a view screen, because he would have liked to see the tunnel they’d swum in through. Had the crew chosen it because it was a natural phenomenon that would accommodate the Nautilus?
“Sonar reads we’re one hundred feet from the entrance,” Misty said. “I mean, from that hole we blew in the entrance with the torpedoes.”
“It’s okay,” Gabriel said. “This ship was made for punching.” The narwhal horn at the front of the ship was ready for some ice, and they had already drilled a pilot hole for it.
“Collision, eight seconds,” Peter said as the sonar beeped in alarm.
“Peter, full throttle. And hang on,” Gabriel said, and Peter throttled the engine again. They sped up.
The Nautilus shook as the ice gave way. Gabriel could hear chunks breaking off and sliding around the hull.
At full speed, the Nemoship Nautilus, lost for over a hundred years, punched its way out of the ice and rejoined the inhabitants of the sea.
26
20:22:20
PETER USED HIS remote to bring the dinghy and the Obscure back to the surface, and after thirteen minutes, the three vessels—the Nautilus, the Obscure, and the dinghy—lay in the sparkling sun, side by side. He extended the Obscure’s walkway, and it clicked into place on the scaled hull of the original ship.
Gabriel walked out to the middle of the walkway between the two craft. Short, choppy waves lapped at the metal and up over his boots. Two miles away, the water turned to ice, and the horizon was white as far as the eye could see. The wind whipped bitterly cold against his skin. “So what do we do with the Nautilus?” Peter took off his glasses and polished them with his shirt. The wind was so cold that Peter’s teeth were chattering, and Gabriel realized his were, too. They needed to get inside.
That was enough to bring Gabriel back to earth. “We’re gonna have to submerge the Nautilus and rest it against the ice shelf. It’ll keep until we come back for it. I hope.” The odds of someone stumbling across it all the way down here seemed long. It was the best he could do. He couldn’t wait to get it safely back to a safe space, though. He shrugged toward the Nautilus. “This is … I can’t say how great this is, but it’s not really the Nautilus we’re supposed to be finding. We have the cargo. We have to hand it over.”
“Is the Dakkar’s Eye radioactive?” Peter asked.
Misty shrugged. “It’s shielded.”
Peter put his glasses back on and pushed them up his nose. “So … and I don’t mean to be crazy, but assuming it is, are you really going to hand a radioactive box over to a bunch of terrorists?”
Gabriel sighed. He still didn’t know the answer to that. “We have twenty hours until the deadline. Let’s call Nerissa.”
They gathered on the bridge of the Obscure, and the air inside was still thin, the fresh air from outside only starting to replace the foul air that had been circulating. “Open a secure channel.”
Misty tapped at the Nemotech intercom. “Go.”
“Nebula? This is Obscure, come in.”
Nothing for a moment. Then they heard the sound settle into a dull echo. “Obscure?” Nerissa sounded urgent. “Where are you?”
Gabriel didn’t want to answer that, but he rolled his shoulders to release the tension and just said it. “Uh … well, we’re about ten miles off the Gilbert Trench.”
Nerissa paused. “The Gilbert Subglacial Trench? What the— Why are you at the South Pole?”
“Technically we’re still about a thousand miles from the South Pole.”
“Gabriel!” Nerissa hissed. “Technically you’re about seven thousand miles from me, and you know where I am?”
“Don’t you want to know—”
Nerissa cut him off. “Look, it’s coming up time. I’m going to rendezvous with Dad near Midway Island.”
Midway Island lay in middle of the North Pacific, once the landing point for planes headed from California to Hawaii. A helpful dotted line appeared between their current location and Midway. Nerissa had been off a
bit, and the reality was worse: She was nearly nine thousand miles away.
“What are you planning?” Gabriel asked.
“I’m going to catch up to them, and I’m going to board them,” Nerissa said. “We’re going to extract Mom.”
“Oh, no no no,” Gabriel said. That could be incredibly dangerous. He had hated this idea from the moment she’d started talking about it. The Maelstrom would have one chip to play: Mom. They could hide her, they could hurt her, they could even kill her. And all it would take to trigger any of that would be tipping them off. “Don’t do that. It’s too dangerous. Look. I can bargain with them.”
“With what?”
“With the Dakkar’s Eye,” he said. “We have it in a lead box. Or we will as soon as we drag it over the catwalk.”
Nerissa started to say something, then stopped. He heard a thump—an elbow? A fist? Her head?—on a table. Then almost a whisper: “Are you telling me you found the Nautilus?”
“We didn’t just find it,” he said. “We have the Nautilus surfaced at the Weddell Ice Shelf. It’s floating thirty yards off our port bow.”
“I … I want to…” Nerissa sounded like she couldn’t keep her thoughts straight, and Gabriel knew the feeling. “Send me a pict— No.” Then she was silent for a long time. Long enough that for a moment, Gabriel thought maybe they’d lost her signal.
Misty pursed her lips as she folded her arms. “Never thought I’d hear her at a loss for words.”
“Don’t send any pictures,” Nerissa said. “Antarctica, it was in Antarctica?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe you actually found it.” Nerissa was whispering, almost to herself. “What about the crew?”
“It’s strange,” Gabriel said. “There’s no trace. I don’t know. That’s gonna take some figuring out.” All hands to the tigers. Whatever that meant.
“Okay,” Nerissa said. “This changes things. I don’t want to hand over the Eye, but if we have it, we need it in our back pocket. But…” And she swore as she realized again the distance. “You’re days away. Maybe we can bargain.”
Quest for the Nautilus Page 15
