Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  Sometimes, Thomas thought Brande was like a little kid in a well-stocked hobby shop. He kept buying all the toys and models in sight. And not once, but twice. He could not slight the Gemini. If Orion got a new system, so did the Caribbean ship.

  Paco Suarez was seated at the console. He was a Mexican national attending USC, majoring in communications electronics, and Mel Sorenson had taken him on for a four-month internship. He had been one of the first to raise his hand when Sorenson asked for volunteers for this voyage.

  “Paco, I need to make a call.”

  He climbed out of his padded chair. “Si! Senõrita Thomas.ˮ

  ‘‘What’s this? I’m still Kaylene.”

  “Ah, no, senõrita. You are now presidente.ˮ

  “Believe me, Paco, I’m still Kaylene.”

  Still, she was not certain. As the word spread through the ship, she had detected slight differences in the way people reacted to her. There was nothing overt, but there was a subtle difference. She suspected that the scientists had more confidence in her than did the ship’s crew. They might be fearful of changes, or just of a woman in a leadership position. So what else was new in the world?

  Suarez went out to the bridge, and Thomas surveyed the numbers jotted on a goosenecked clipboard attached to the radio panel. She found the number for the operations room at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, picked up a handset, dialed 6, then dialed the number.

  The call was answered on the first ring. She identified herself and asked for Avery Hampstead.

  He picked up right away. “Hello, Kaylene! I’m glad to hear from you.”

  “Hi, Avery.”

  “I can see you on our big board here. You’re a yellow blip. Moving right along, too.”

  “Mel is pushing her at top turns,” she agreed. “Avery, the reason I’m calling is that I need a memorandum of understanding from you.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. I realize that this operation isn’t the typical one, where we respond to requests for proposals and you select the low bidder, but you chose us for this, and I want something in writing.”

  “Uh, yes. Well, sometimes Dane and I are a little informal, I agree. Is Dane handy?”

  “He’s busy. Besides, Avery, I’m now president of Marine Visions.”

  The hesitation was only momentary, but it was there. “I offer my congratulations, Kaylene. Iʼm sure you’ll do very well.”

  “Thank you. In the meantime, about that memo…”

  “You aren’t going to hold me up, are you?”

  “Avery.”

  “Well, I mean, given the situation…”

  “I’m just covering my costs.”

  “I don’t have a lot of discretionary money, Kaylene.”

  “You just got your appropriation for the fiscal year,” she insisted.

  “Still, there’s not a lot of leeway. Dane and I were going to work…”

  “I want to help out as much as we can, you know that. Still, I’m taking my job seriously, and I’m not about to let us founder. Do you have a pen or pencil?”

  “Got it”

  “Start date, September first. The Orion and crew, forty-five hundred a day. Professional personnel, seven thousand a day. Equi…”

  “Seven thousand!”

  “We have every one of our top people aboard, Avery. You wanted the best, and you’ve got it.”

  “Seven thousand?”

  “That’s right. Specialized equipment — that’s the ROVs — two thousand a day. Miscellaneous, not to exceed fifteen thousand for the project.”

  “Jesus, Kaylene. What’s in miscellaneous?”

  “You just wait, Avery. I’d give odds that the Navy is going to charge us for their C-130, for flotation equipment, and for parachutes.”

  “Ah, come on. This is an emergency.”

  “But it’s an emergency run by computers. Everyone charges off their costs these days. We’re not going to be any different than anyone else.”

  “Thirteen-five a day.”

  “Plus the miscellaneous. I’d like the memo faxed to me as soon as possible.”

  “When this is over, Kaylene, I want you to meet my sister. You two will get along fabulously.”

  *

  1420 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 20' NORTH, 176° 10' EAST

  “It’s a fucking carnival,” Wilson Overton told his seagoing guide and helmsman.

  “Carnivals are supposed to be fun,” the dour, acne-faced man told him.

  Overton had flown to Midway Island on a chartered light-twin, then promised to pay the owner of the twenty-six-foot Maika Lyn three times his normal charter rate to bring him out here.

  The twenty-six-footer was the largest boat available by the time he had arrived at Midway. Its captain, Lenny Lu, was Hawaiian by birth, nearly mute by inclination, and a reincarnation of Midas by philosophy. He was turning a small fishing business into gold.

  With the seas running at four feet or more, the small boat bobbed up and down mightily as they slowly threaded their way through the fleet gathered at the site where the Soviet rocket had gone down. The motion was slowly getting to him, and Overton was feeling ill.

  He almost regretted having told Ned Nelson to fuck off — he was not going to share any boat with five or ten newspapermen, half-a-dozen radio reporters, and three television crews. And he almost regretted exceeding the limits on his Master-Card and Visa credit cards by renting his own aircraft and boat.

  Nelson probably would not honor his expense voucher.

  Unless he landed a whopper of a story. Exclusive.

  He did not even know how to file an exclusive report from the middle of the Pacific. There would be 10,000 ears listening to any radio channel. ABC and NBC ears. CBS and CNN. They were everywhere.

  The Maika Lyn sat so low in the water that the boats and ships around them seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other. The people aboard them waited like hawks for something to attack. They waited in relative comfort, though. He saw people stretched out in deck chairs on a small cruise ship, sipping cold drinks. He thought about a martini, but Lenny Lu did not stock liquor. A trawler with her nets stowed passed by, her crew gathered along a gunwale, drinking beer, staring at him with some degree of malevolence.

  He thought about a Michelob.

  Overton looked at the swarthy fishermen and had a momentary flash of negative image. Forty-two varicolored cats waiting to pounce on a single rat. He snapped a few shots of the cats with the Nikon he had also charged to Visa. He was required to be his own photographer.

  There was no sign of the CIS submarine that had been reported earlier. There was no sign, either, of the one that had imploded.

  Just the self-created thought of the Tashkentʼs demise was sickening.

  They rose and fell with the sea, creeping along at ten miles per hour.

  Overton’s stomach threatened rebellion.

  “Shit. Where is it?”

  Lu pointed a finger downward. “Down there. You ain’t gonna see it.”

  “Not the rocket, Lenny. The Navy ship.”

  After twenty agonizing minutes, Overton saw the frigate cruising on the fringe and pointed it out to Lenny Lu. The captain advanced the throttles and the increase in speed helped to steady the boat, if not his stomach.

  The massive, white, and squared-off numerals on the bow of the ship, 1037, slipped by, and Lenny Lu made a 360-degree turn and pulled alongside.

  A seaman with a loud hailer came to the edge of the deck. “Ahoy the cruiser!” he chanted. “You are to remain one hundred yards away from this ship!”

  Overton stood up, holding his press card high. He yelled, “I’m with the Post! I want to come aboard.”

  “Oh, shit!” the sailor said before he realized his loud hailer was still on. “Stand by.”

  *

  2212 HOURS LOCAL, 30° 45' NORTH, 157° 20' WEST

  “How’s our insurance? You pay the premiums lately?” Dokey asked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Bran
de said.

  “I mean, if this hummer — meaning Orion — went down right now, we’d lose most of our inventory of exotic and very expensive playthings.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time with Valeri. Next thing I know, you two will be jet-skiing around San Diego Bay with ʻEnd of the Worldʼ signs.

  Dokey was right, though. Marine Visions’ major robotic creations were all snugged down across the fantail of the Orion. The research vessel had been designed to accept large increases of weight on her stern, but still she was a little lower in the water than usual.

  In terms of research and development costs, as well as the cost of materials, the Orion at that moment was probably worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Not counting the personnel, whose education and intellect was probably incalculable.

  Brande was certain the insurance coverage was inadequate. Loss of the Orion would surely plunge the company into irretrievable bankruptcy.

  The fantail was brightly lit by floodlights. Recesses and crannies stood out in stark, black relief. Overhead, the stars were clear. To the east, behind them, Brande saw the running lights of two watercraft appear from time to time.

  He and Dokey watched as Bob Mayberry and Svetland Polodka snugged a yellow tarp over Gargantua. All of his systems had been fully examined, and all had performed flawlessly. One of his three hands had been removed and replaced with a cutting torch. The specialized oxygen and acetylene bottles attached to the arm were composed of extra-thick titanium. Dokey had practiced with the torch by cutting an hourglass-shaped figure from a piece of quarter-inch steel, the same design one frequently saw on the mud flaps of semitrucks. One of the ship’s crewmen had confiscated the result, spray-painted it pink, and hung it in his cabin.

  Dokey thought his art would undoubtedly increase in value over time.

  Gargantua’s mass somewhat overwhelmed Turtle, who was tied to the deck just ahead of him. Turtle’s tracks had been cleaned and lubricated, his arms and hands fine-tuned, and his electronics thoroughly probed.

  DepthFinder was also ready for work. Her hull had been scrubbed down and waxed. Diving weights had already been installed in their receptacles on the underside of the hull. The wire cage basket under the bow now contained Atlas, whose operating systems, though proven by four years of continuous usage, had also been subjected to intense scrutiny. A towing hook and fiber-optic cable receptacle, for connecting SARSCAN, had been installed just aft of the sheath and ahead of the weights. This would be the first time the submersible was to be used as the towing vehicle for the sonar array.

  Except for her battery trays, the submersible was complete. Every computer, sonar, oxygen, propulsion, and communications system had been signed off on by Dokey, Otsuka, Mayberry and finally, Brande. If there was any paperwork in the company that Brande insisted be accurate and complete, it was that associated with safety checklists.

  While he knew that DepthFinderʼs outer hull was sleeker and prettier than really necessary, Brande was still pleased with the way she looked. The ungainly appearing pressure hull was disguised, and the sub gave the impression of being fully capable of whatever was demanded of her.

  He hoped it was true.

  He and Dokey made yet one more trip around the sub, opening access doors and visually checking equipment that had been examined with microscopic intensity by digital and analog probes. Neither of them mentioned the fact that they probably would not see an infinitesimal crack in a silicon chip. The personal examination was still reassuring.

  Under tarpaulins near the sub’s bow were two Sneaky Petes, ready to be installed if needed. A technician had just loaded film canisters for the still cameras in Sneaky, Atlas, and DepthFinder.

  The big twin doors to the lab, ahead of the sub, were both propped open to the night. In the center of the lab, resting on a low bench and surrounded by five people, was SARSCAN.

  The sonar platform was similar in appearance to Atlas, an oversized American Flyer sled with a bulky body on it. It was twelve feet long and almost four feet wide, but unlike Atlas, it did not have robotic arms, floodlights, or cameras. SARSCAN II, still on the design table, was destined to have cameras, combining the sonar and visual search functions. The next generation of SARSCAN would also have self-contained propulsion systems. It would make Sneaky Pete obsolete, lovable as he was.

  At the moment, all of the white and yellow fiberglass panels had been removed from SARSCAN and were stacked on a side bench. Revealed was the open grid work that supported the panels, the sonar antennas, and the miniature pressure hulls containing computers, batteries, and transducers. One reinforced ball housed the solenoids that controlled the stubby rudder and the diving planes on the aft end. Near the front end, on top, was the heavy-duty connector that coupled SARSCAN to the Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable that towed the platform through the water as well as sending the collected sonar signals to the towing vessel.

  The fiber-optic cable used by Marine Visions was of the single-mode fiber type. The diameter of the filament was small enough to force a single beam of light to stay on a direct path. Lasers generated light signals in binary code — pulsing on for 1 and off for 2 — that zipped along the fiber at tremendous speeds. The high frequency of light waves allowed the transmission of thousands of times more information than was permitted by current flowing in a wire. The speed and data capacity of fiber-optic cables immensely reduced the thickness of the cable required. A quarter-inch-thick fiber-optic cable could handle telecommunications, computer data transfer, electronic mail, and image transfer with ease, and with space left over.

  It was highly important that the laser light generators and receivers on both ends of the cable be correctly linked. A cable inserted into a connector with a V64-inch twist would scramble all communications between the host vehicle and the robot. Triple checks were made on the connectors and the synchronization of remote systems.

  SARSCAN had never been towed by DepthFinder before, and modifications had been made to the submersible’s sonar readouts and recorders to accept the data transmitted by the deep sea sonar. A new black box had been installed under the third crew member’s seat, and a cable had been connected between the module and one of the computers. Two of Mayberry’s computer programmers were busy reprogramming SARSCAN’s memory in order to integrate it with the submersible.

  Mayberry and Polodka came in from the side deck. Mayberry’s cornstalk hair was mussed by the wind, and his skinny body looked more emaciated than usual. Brande could not understand how the man shed calories. He was always first pig at the trough, and he put away rich, double helpings of desserts like they were gumdrops.

  Polodka carried a name that was much larger than she was. At less than five feet of height, she might have been described as petite, except for the voluptuousness of the curves that could not be hidden by MVU jumpsuits. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, but did not have any other traits that would lump her with Russian stereotypes. Back when she and Dankelov had been involved with each other, Brande had been semi-jealous in the physical sense.

  Not that he would have made a move on her. He believed in maintaining professional distances.

  “Put that ratchet down, Dokey!” Mayberry commanded.

  Dokey grinned at him. “You’ve got a loose rudder connection, Bob.”

  “I loosened it, to adjust dead-center, asshole. Go find your own machine to screw up.”

  Brande decided to stay out of it. Mayberry had been a little testy in the last two days, but he was under a lot of pressure, responsible for the electronics of not only SARSCAN, but all of the robots. And he would be thinking also about his family in San Diego and a runaway nuclear reactor.

  Brande thought that maybe Thomas’s insistence on reviewing personnel policies and benefits — like life insurance — might be a good idea. He did not really know what kind of coverage existed for his people. The Mayberrys of San Diego might just be in trouble if something happened to Bob.

  Brande tapped Dokey’s elbow and the two
of them went forward to the wardroom. It was becoming a center of operations since the sonar/chart room was too small to accept more than four or five people.

  Dokey headed directly for the galley.

  Larry Emry had moved one of the computer stations into the lounge, and its screen had been alive since its transfer. He was playing with it then, adjusting the search grid over the undersea chart displayed on the cathode ray tube.

  Brande came up behind him and looked over his shoulder. “You can’t do much more until we have additional data, Larry. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  Brande had issued orders for people to load up on as much sleep as possible. The time was fast approaching when they would not get much.

  “I wish we knew more about the sea floor here,” Emry said, ignoring the suggestion.

  “We may know more than we want to know soon.”

  “Look at this”

  Emry keyed in a command, and blue lines and swirls superimposed themselves on the chart. Brande did not like the looks of the low pressure cell.

  “Weather?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got a winter storm predicted by the meteorologists. This is what I predict it will look like by the time we reach the area.”

  “Rain. How about wind?”

  “The experts say gusts to thirty knots. We’ll have heavy seas.”

  “Anything to really worry about, though?”

  “For us, I don’t think so. The cycloidal propellers should keep us stable enough. But the reports we’re getting say there’s a bunch of nuts sailing around in the region. No telling what they’ll do.”

  “Go home,” Brande said.

  “I wish.”

  Dokey came back from the galley, taking bites from a piece of cherry pie in one hand. Emry moved over to the wardroom table, and he and Dokey discussed the possibility of a chess match.

  Brande told them he was going to bed.

  He almost made it.

  Rae Thomas was on the bridge, sharing the vigil with Connie Alvarez-Sorenson. Fred Bober was handling the helm. A variety of low-volume babble issued from the open doorway of the radio shack.