Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  “Get some of those into the area,” the President ordered.

  “How large is this reactor?” Hampstead asked.

  Unruh coughed, then said, “It’s a cylinder fifteen feet in diameter by twenty-six feet long.ˮ

  “Weight?”

  “Forty-five hundred pounds.”

  “That includes the payload module?”

  “No, Avery, it doesn’t. Best estimate is that the module is thirty-five feet long by seventeen in diameter. I don’t know about the weight.”

  “So, the whole thing may have to come up? The reactor hasn’t broken loose?”

  “No one knows. And yes, the whole thing may have to be raised.”

  “If it were me,” Hampstead said, “making the decisions, I’d want to have MVU’s recovery robots on-site. They’re the best currently available for heavy-lift, and we don’t know what we’re going to run into.”

  “Ben?” the President asked.

  “The reports I’ve seen support that assessment,” the CNO said, perhaps with some reluctance. “Navy Procurement is requesting funds to buy one.”

  “All right, then. Get Marine Visions’s sonar and robots on the move,” the President said.

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “Try?”

  “I can’t guarantee that Brande will want to move his people into an area that might become radiation-contaminated at any moment. He’s a civilian, after all.”

  The President slumped back in his chair. He looked washed out. “That’s a point, isn’t it? Got any motivators in your pocket, Mr. Hampstead?”

  “Maybe one or two.”

  “Do what you can, then.”

  “Tell him he’s to report to CINCPAC,” Admiral Delecourt said.

  “That may be a problem also, Admiral. Dane Brande doesn’t report to anyone.”

  *

  0221 HOURS LOCAL, 46° 16' NORTH, 160° 12' EAST

  Capt. Mikhail Petrovich Gurevenich ordered his submarine, the NATO-named Sierra-class Winter Storm, to the surface in response to an urgent message recorded by the Extremely Low Frequency receiver. Because of technical restrictions on the ELF band, which could penetrate ocean depths, but which had very poor data transfer capability, elaborate or long transmissions were not normally attempted.

  Sr. Lt. Ivan Mostovets, in charge of the watch, ordered the planesman to increase the climb angle to thirty degrees, and Gurevenich braced himself against the bulkhead of the communications cabin. He reached out with his right hand and pressed the bar on the intercom.

  “Sonar, this is the captain. Report.”

  “Captain, Sonar. No contacts.”

  The bow cleared the surface, and the submarine leveled itself abruptly, tossing Gurevenich upright. He steadied himself by gripping the jamb of the hatchway.

  The intercom blurted with Mostovets’s soprano, “Captain, Control Center. Deploying antennas. I will know about surface traffic momentarily.”

  Gurevenich did not expect to find other ships in the area. They were three hundred kilometers southeast of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

  “All right, Kartashkin, you may transmit.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The radioman leaned into his console, depressed the button that activated the transmit mode on his headset, and said, Seeʼnee-dva-sem-zelyoʼnee.”

  Blue-two-seven-green, the code they had been instructed to use in the ELF message.

  They did not hear the response. Three burst-messages, communications compacted into one-fiftieth of a second bursts, were transmitted by the Molniya satellite, accepted by the data receiver, and recorded. They would play them back at normal speed.

  The radioman scanned his equipment. “I have the transmission recorded, Captain.”

  Gurevenich punched the intercom button. “Lieutenant Mostovets, take the boat back to fifty meters depth and resume course.”

  “Fifty meters, Captain. Proceeding, now.”

  As the deck tilted, Gurevenich wondered what was so important that Fleet headquarters would use military emergency channels to send him a top secret communication.

  He could not imagine that war had broken out, but that did not alleviate the ball of lead that had formed in his stomach.

  *

  0331 HOURS LOCAL, 16° 22' NORTH, 158° 58' WEST

  *

  SECRET MSG 10-4897 l/SEP/0322 HRS ZULU

  FR: CINCPAC

  TO: USS BARTLETT USS KANE USS LOS ANGELES USS PHILADELPHIA USS HOUSTON

  1.CURRENT ORDERS SUSPENDED.

  2.PROCEED AT BEST POSSIBLE SPEED TO 26N 176E.

  3.CAUTION. CIS VESSELS LIKELY IN AREA. DO NOT ENGAGE.

  4.RPT ALL CONTACTS THIS CMD.

  5.DETAILED ORDERS AND COORDINATES TO FOLLOW.

  Cmdr. Alfred Taylor, captain of the nuclear attack submarine (SSN) Los Angeles, read the decoded message, then handed it to his executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Neil Garrison.

  Garrison, a short and lithe man built for earlier submarines, read through it quickly. He asked, “You think this is it?”

  “I wouldn’t have expected it in this political climate, Neil. It’s probably some minor crisis.”

  “With Bartlett and Kane involved, we may have a ship down.”

  “That’s possible.”

  Taylor moved over to the plot and studied it. Taylor had been in submarines for twelve years, but this was his first year as a commander and he was proud of his boat, even if it was almost twenty years old, and he had confidence in his crew. He was a compact man, kept that way by a daily set of exercises in his cabin. The planes of his face had become a little convex in the last couple of years, and his blond hair would have shown more gray if it were longer. He walked with a slight limp, the result of not moving fast enough and catching his leg between a concrete pier and a docking tender.

  “All right, Neil. Plot it and give me a course.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Garrison bent over the plot.

  “Mr. Covey,” he said to the Lieutenant (j.g.) who had the conn, without turning toward him.

  “Sir?”

  “What is your status?”

  “Sir, depth sixty feet, heading zero-one-five, speed one-seven knots.”

  Taylor watched as Garrison drew his line. Garrison looked up at him.

  Taylor nodded his approval. “Mr. Covey, make your depth seventy-five feet. I want a heading of two-seven-five and tell engineering we want top turns.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Covey’s tone carried a new excitement.

  Garrison stood upright. “At least we’ll shake off a little of the boredom, Skipper.”

  The constant regimen of training, meant to keep them alert and on edge, often dulled the edges.

  “We may at that, Neil.”

  *

  0608 HOURS LOCAL, 33° 11' NORTH, 118° 27' WEST

  Each dome was two hundred feet in diameter and one hundred feet high, and there were three domes. They rested on steel piers driven deeply into the seabed and were connected by twelve-foot-long cylindrical tunnels. Each of the end domes had an airlock and a docking facility for the transportation submersibles.

  From thirty yards away, Kim Otsuka thought that they looked like spider plants. That was because the top, central hub of each dome was composed of an olive-colored plastic embedded with carbon fiber. The superstrong carbon fiber material was also used in the curved beams that radiated from the tops down to the bases of the domes. There were four horizontal rows of thinner structural beams, and the spaces between the structural members was filled with a translucent plastic that had also been strengthened with carbon.

  The domes appeared fragile, but she knew better. The construction and materials used were based on those tested for over two years on Harbor One.

  Kaylene Thomas called the complex Disneyland West, but the official name was Ocean Deep. It was not actually very deep, however. Located thirty miles west of San Diego and about thirty-five miles southwest of Los Angeles, the complex was two hundred feet below the surface, its foundation embedded in the Pat
ton Escarpment. Dane Brande was not going to put the tourists at extreme risk.

  Eventually, one dome would house marine-theme rides aimed at a younger audience, one would contain museums and galleries, and one would focus on marine life. Marine Visions would own the complex, the transportation system, and the operating systems, but subcontractors would operate the amusement rides, galleries, and fast-food outlets. At the moment, the domes were vacant except for construction materials and a hodgepodge of tools spread over the upper deck.

  The vacancy was obvious. The interior lighting made the domes stand out prominently against the darkness of the sea as the Voyager made its approach. The fact that the lights were on was a minor satisfaction for Kim Otsuka, for the lighting was one system controlled by the Ocean Deep computers, and Otsuka was the Director of Computer Systems for MVU. She designed the hardware and software systems, often in conjunction with other engineers and scientists.

  Otsuka was a Japanese national. She had grown up in Tokyo and had been schooled there. For her doctoral program, she had selected Stanford University. For her career, she had thought she might work for a Hewlett-Packard or a Sony or a Panasonic. That goal lasted until the day after her graduation from Stanford, when Dane Brande called her upon someone’s recommendation. She had never thought she would spend so much of her life on, and in, the ocean. Eight years had elapsed now, gone with such speed she had barely noticed them.

  She could not now imagine working in an environment that required business suits or laboratory smocks. Her working wardrobe consisted of jeans and blouses, shorts and halter tops, and occasionally a swim suit or scuba gear. Her short blue-black hair was frequently damp. She was five-two, lithe, and lively, and her brown eyes had learned to laugh a lot. The casual atmosphere surrounding Marine Visions had brought out a humorous aspect in her personality that she had suppressed for the first twenty-four years of her life. She loved what she was doing, and she loved Dane Brande for letting her do it without interference.

  The domes became larger and more wavery in the triplethick porthole beside Otsuka’s seat as the Voyager closed on its destination. Around her, the others made morning talk and sipped from insulated mugs of coffee. Svetlana Polodka, the Russian fiber-optics engineer, was flirting with Bob Mayberry, who was director of electronic technology, and who was married, anyway, and had three kids. Ingrid Roskens, chief structural engineer, was bent over blueprints spread out on the deck, pointing out her concerns to one of the technicians.

  The Voyager was the first of four planned transport submersibles. Based on the configuration of the submersible Ben Franklin, she was seventy feet long, and almost all of her operating systems were below the passenger deck. Water, trim, ballast, and waste tanks took up the most space, followed by four sets of battery banks. Twin electric motors provided the propulsion. In an aft compartment were the liquid oxygen tanks and the electronics. Forward, on the other side of a bulkhead, was the control cabin and the forward hatch, located on top of the hull in a small sail. The main cabin could seat thirty-two people, and each set of two seats had its own porthole, the better to view the trip through southern California seas. Since she was designed for transportation purposes at relatively shallow depths of less than 2,000 feet, the Voyager had been given a much thinner hull than other submersibles, as well as a sleeker shape in order to increase her speed.

  The interior had not yet been finished to the specifications expected by the ticket-paying public. Electrical and hydraulic conduits were exposed along the sides and ceiling. The floor was steel. The seats were covered in canvas. Everything was finished in gray-speckled paint. The utilitarian decor did not bother the work crews who were transported daily to Ocean Deep, however. They had other things on their minds.

  The Voyager’s first trip this morning was reserved for the chief supervisors of the project, who would make their weekly combined inspection. The submersible left Commerce Basin at 5 A.M., an ungodly hour, but one selected by the group for its lack of interference in the rest of their day. The hour did not bother Kim Otsuka, for she was an early riser, a believer in dawn.

  The first leg of the trip, out of San Diego Bay, was accomplished on the surface and was generally rough. Once into open sea, however, the Voyager dove to a hundred feet, and most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersible could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip took about an hour.

  Outside her porthole, Otsuka saw the domes rise to meet her, then slip overhead as the submersible dove below them. The base of the first dome was sixty feet above the seabed, allowing ample room for the submersible to wend its way to the interlock on the floor of the dome.

  A pair of steel legs drifted past. She felt herself pushed forward in her seat as the propellers went into reverse, slowing the forward momentum. Pumps moaned as water ballast was forced from tanks below the deck. The Voyager rose slowly toward the underside of the dome.

  Clank!

  The forward hatch mated with the lock.

  Hiss of air as water was forced from the lock.

  People rose from their chairs, gathering notebooks, briefcases, palm-sized computers. They began to file forward toward the control compartment and the ladder that would take them up to work.

  Kim Otsuka had never thought, either, that she would commute to work by submarine.

  *

  0847 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 8' NORTH, 92° 32' WEST

  Brande and Okey Dokey sat in the two controllers seats located side by side in the manned submersible DepthFinder II. Her sister submersible, DepthFinder, was operated from the Orion in the Pacific.

  In the single seat behind them, at a right angle to the way they faced, Brandie Anderson took care of the communications and systems monitoring chores. This was her fifth dive in DepthFinder. This was the way student interns became lifelong oceanographers.

  The three of them were in relatively cramped quarters. The main pressure hull had an interior diameter of eight feet. It was one big ball made of titanium alloy, the only way to design a life-supporting environment that would withstand the pressures at 20,000 feet of depth.

  Directly overhead was the ten-inch-thick circular hatchway. In front of them were three five-inch-diameter portholes, one forward, and one each angled to port and starboard. Those were the only direct visual accesses to the outside world. Below the portholes were three video screens.

  Encasing the three crew members, and further depriving them of space, were dozens of flat panels in square, hexagonal, and triangular shapes, to fit into the inside curvature of the pressure hull. The panels contained gauges, digital readouts, cathode ray tubes, switches, rheostats, and circuit breakers. They monitored and controlled such systems as the central processing computer, power routing, graphic recorders, the tracking transponder transceiver, liquid coolant, alarms, various sonar components, the navigation depth plotter, the doppler transceiver, the main propulsion, the manipulator control electronics, and the altitude/depth transceiver, among others.

  Taking a dive in the ocean was not as simple as it sometimes seemed to outsiders.

  In front of Brande was a control panel with two joysticks protruding from it. He was piloting the DepthFinder, using the joysticks to control propulsion and velocity in six different directions. He had managed to bring them to a depth of 5,000 feet in slightly over an hour, not that he had much control over it. Achieving depth was a consequence of the amount of weight added to the exterior hull. Unlike submarines, deep submersibles did not change buoyancy through the use of air and water ballast tanks, although DepthFinder II could pump water in and out of small ballast tanks to stabilize her depth. Taking a dive was not as quickly accomplished as it sometimes seemed that it ought to be.

  It was dark inside the hull. Exterior and interior lights were left off during the long descents in order to conserve electrical power. Only red, amber, blue, and green light emitting diodes and digital readouts provided illumination. On the outside, total darkness had been achieved at 1,200 feet. Sunlight d
id not penetrate beyond that depth.

  In front of Dokey was a control panel similar to that of Brande, but the joysticks there were used to control the remotely-operated vehicles which could be attached to the DepthFinder on 250-foot cables.

  The air was stale, a consequence of the lithium hydroxide blower which recirculated the air to remove carbon dioxide. Pure oxygen providing life-support was slowly bled into the sphere from tanks located outside the pressure hull.

  “I think you’re taking up too much room, Dane,” Brandie Anderson said.“Iʼd like to stretch my legs out, but you’re in the way.”

  Once inside the sphere, no one stretched anything. There was no room to stand up.

  “You can walk next time,” Brande told her.

  “It’s okay,” Dokey told her. “I’ll walk with you. We can hold hands and things.”

  “Keep your things to yourself, Okey,” Anderson said.

  “It’s your things I was thinking about. Hup! Here we go, Dane.”

  Dokey had the side-looking sonar powered up and displaying an image on the port video screen, though the sound was turned down. Now, he increased the volume, and dozens of tiny pings could be heard on the speaker. The screen showed the sonar returns as they bounced off a few dozen metallic objects. The cliff was not outlined since they were well below its top.

  Nothing could be seen through the portholes. Pure blackness.

  Brande leaned forward and cut in the magnetometer, which measured anomalies in the earth’s electromagnetic field. It, too, displayed several dozen targets.

  “All right, Okey. Let’s power up.”

  Brande hit a pump switch and pumped off enough water ballast to slow, then stop, the descent.

  Dokey used a rheostat to increase the interior lighting a trifle, then turned on the big halogen exterior lights. There were four of them, but six million candlepower only cut into the darkness ahead of them by thirty feet.

  There was nothing out there.

  Brande checked the gyro-compass and saw that their heading was 166 degrees.

  “We want about fifty degrees, don’t we, Okey?”