Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  A few more minutes, they would reach the circle of ships and could turn back to facing the waves.

  Damn, if the weather had not turned so crappy, he could be in the center of those ships, spreading the word.

  The closer they got, the brighter the blips looked.

  Aaron sat back away from the radar hood and rotated the tension out of his shoulders.

  The Queen of Liberty was rocking violently, threatening to heel over. Aaron had to keep a firm grasp on the side of his seat to avoid being spilled onto the deck.

  He was mad as hell, trying not to show it to Dawn.

  Nothing worked out the way he wanted. The world was going to hell in a handmade basket, and no one wanted to recognize it, to listen to the solutions. These jackasses kept screwing around with it, kept altering it, kept ignoring the signs.

  They had to be stopped.

  No getting around that.

  Jacobs had scooted for Midway Island.

  And that left Aaron on his own.

  All he could do was his best.

  *

  1208 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 49" NORTH, 176° 10' 30" EAST

  The CIS and U.S. cordon of warships had drifted south and slightly west in anticipation of sending the submersibles into the trench.

  Oberstev, partially protected from the hard rain by a gray slicker, stood on the fantail of the Timofey Olʼyantsev and watched the harried activity of the crew as they serviced the Sea Lion.

  It was noon, and yet it was dark enough to require floodlights. Pyotr Rastonov scurried about, slipping on the deck, examining connections, antennas, transponders, access doors. He called for more grease for the hatch seal.

  A figure clad in yellow rubber pants and shirt exited the superstructure and approached Oberstev.

  “I believe I am ready, General Oberstev.”

  Gennadi Drozdov was so fatigued, he appeared emaciated. His thin dark hair was plastered to his skull by the rain, and his eyes were sunken holes.

  “Are you up to this?” Oberstev asked.

  “Yes. Pyotr is correct, General. We must share if we hope to complete the recovery.”

  “You are optimistic?”

  “Very optimistic.”

  Oberstev’s own pessimism had grown. It had taken days to get this far, and they had yet to discover the site of the reactor. He was also leery of what might come out of his unilateral decision to cooperate with the Americans, much less give them access to the Loudspeaker system.

  He had no doubts that Chairman Vladimir Yevgeni, and perhaps Admiral Orlov, would take him to task during the subsequent hearings. And there would be hearings; there always were.

  He might be relieved of his command of Red Star and forced into retirement.

  And yet Red Star and enforced retirement seemed less important now. There was more at stake on his own planet. Why seek Mars when Earth was so close to hand?

  “Go then, Gennadi Drozdov, and luck go with you.”

  Drozdov nodded, then turned and crossed the deck uneasily, headed for the work party that had set up the breeches buoy. Two men helped the scientist up into it and secured straps over his lap. Then they loaded two medium-size, aluminum, watertight cases onto his lap and strapped them to his body.

  With a signal from one of the sailors, the breeches buoy abruptly lifted off the deck, and Gennadi Drozdov went over the railing, sliding toward the sea.

  Oberstev almost felt like going with him.

  *

  1440 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 49" NORTH, 176° 10' 30" EAST

  Valeri Dankelov, Svetlana Polodka, Kim Otsuka and Gennadi Drozdov had been working together for over two hours. Robert Mayberry assisted whenever he was called.

  Brande kept coming over to check on their progress, and Dankelov would say, “Not yet,” and Mayberry would say “Fuck off, Chief.”

  Mayberry was tired.

  They were all tired, Dankelov thought. Little mistakes had been made, mistakes that when discovered required subsequent disassembly and reassembly of components.

  Installing the physical components had been simple. One of the Loudspeaker transceivers was mounted on the workbench in the laboratory, and the other was cushioned with foam rubber and strapped to the rear seat in the submersible.

  Bypassing the existing equipment, the new components had been connected to the hull-mounted transmission and receiving antennas of the research vessel and the submersible. Even tuning the antennas to the new equipment had not been difficult.

  One of the drawbacks, of course, was that if one or the other of the CIS systems failed, with the MVU systems disconnected, all communication between the DepthFinder and the Orion or Sea Lion would be cut off.

  With the voice subsystem operational, the trying part had been the hard wire and computer-controlled connections between telemetry and video devices and the acoustic transceivers.

  Polodka and Otsuka had loaded the Russian software into the computers, then begun the struggle to work out the quirks. It helped that the Russians used an IBM clone programming language, but the conversion was tedious.

  Brande came over again, this time bringing a coffeepot and styrofoam mugs. Otsuka was outside, in the submersible, but the others stopped what they were doing to drink.

  Brande said, “No matter what, we’re launching at three o’clock.”

  Dankelov nodded his acceptance.

  Brande walked away and Drozdov looked after him.

  “He is a hard taskmaster, Valeri?”

  “No, Gennadi, he is not. There is a lot of pressure now, on all of us.”

  As they went back to work — the two of them were refitting an integrated circuit in a signal translator box that Mayberry had concocted — Drozdov asked, “Do you like your work in America?”

  “Yes, I like it very much.”

  “You are a lucky man, Valeri. I envy you.”

  “But I miss my home,” Dankelov said. “Perhaps I will return with you.”

  “To what?” Drozdov asked. “There is much chaos.”

  “But shouldn’t one be working for one’s own country? There is much to be done, and I feel that I am shirking my responsibility, Gennadi.”

  “Does Svetlana feel the same?”

  “No. She is happy with what she has. She would like to keep it.”

  “I once assumed the two of you would marry.”

  “It was not to be,” Dankelov said.

  “I know you are serious about our profession, Valeri, but you should not be so serious all of the time.”

  “It is my nature.”

  “Your nature needs revamping,” Drozdov observed.

  *

  1505 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 49" NORTH, 176° 10' 30" EAST

  For fear it would drift in the wind, the Navy had dropped its package without a parachute ten minutes before. The C-141 transport had come in low out of the overcast, its landing lights brightly illuminated, kicked the bright orange box out of a side door, and then disappeared into the cloud cover as quickly as possible.

  Thomas did not blame them for not wanting to stick around.

  It took the Orion twenty minutes to chase down the floating box, hook it with a line, and raise it from the sea.

  Two crewmen hauled it into the laboratory and broke the seals on the aluminum case.

  “Two suits? That’s all?” she said.

  “That’s all we need,” Brande said.

  “Bullshit! You asked for every suit they could find.”

  “Maybe Hawaii isn’t a major candidate for radiation contamination,” Brande told her.

  She tried to stare him down.

  It did not work.

  “I’m going on this dive,” she said.

  “No. Just Dokey and me.”

  Dokey had been sleeping for the last couple of hours, and Otsuka had gone to waken him.

  “You sonovabitch! You can’t stop me.”

  “You’re tired, Rae. We don’t want accidents.”

  “I’m the damned president!”

>   Everyone in the lab was watching the exchange, some with amusement.

  Most with amusement.

  “You need a third-seater,” she said.

  “The Loudspeaker is using the third seat. Besides, with video transmission, everyone gets to participate.”

  “Don’t pamper me.”

  Brande reached out, took her shoulders, and pulled her close to him. Bending over, he whispered in her ear, “I’m supposed to, Rae. I love you.”

  She pulled her head back to look in his eyes. “Mean it?”

  “Sure do?”

  “But no pampering, all right?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Go, then. Get out of here.”

  “Is this what’s known as an executive conference?” Dokey asked, coming through the door with Otsuka.

  No one answered him.

  “I’m glad I’m not an executive.”

  Thomas backed away from Brande, reluctantly pulling from the grasp of his hands, and looked at Dokey. He was wearing a sweatshirt over his jumpsuit featuring a boy turtle in a baseball cap and a girl turtle in blond curls. The caption was, I CAN MAKE IT LAST!

  “You’ll never be mistaken for one, Okey,” she told him.

  Dankelov stepped forward. “I should go, Dane.”

  “No, Valeri, you’ve done what you’re supposed to do,” Brande told him.

  Ingrid Roskens said, “You’re going to need a structural person when you find it.”

  “That’s why we’ve got video transmission, Ingrid. You get your own CRT.”

  Everyone had a last comment or suggestion for Brande and Dokey.

  It was almost a wake, Thomas thought. As if they did not expect to see him again. She felt like crying. And laughing. Her emotions capsized, then righted themselves, back and forth.

  Brande and Dokey dressed in the radiation-protection suits, pants and overblouses, and carried the hoods with them. They were a silvery gray, shiny material, and gave them a spacey appearance.

  Emry opened the door to the afterdeck, and crew members began to file out. They wore yellow slickers and hung onto the lifelines that had been stretched over the deck.

  Brande and Dokey tromped out in their oversized suits, astronauts headed for the launch complex.

  Thomas wanted to run after Dane, throw her arms around him, and drag him back.

  The alarm clock was about to ring.

  She might not see him again.

  She held onto the door jamb, ignoring the rain and spray splashing her, and watched them gingerly climb the scaffold.

  Dane was the last one down the hatch, and he gave her a thumbs-up and a wink.

  Then he was gone.

  *

  1520 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 49" NORTH, 176° 10' 30" EAST

  They did not even try to lower from the deck with the hatch open. Brande sealed it and dogged it tight, then slipped down into the left seat. It was dark inside, with only the outside light coming through the three portholes.

  The thickness of the pressure hull dampened the sound of the storm, but the fury was noticeable in the tilt and bounce of the sub.

  “Well, compadre, here we go.”

  “You sure you got enough sleep, Okey?”

  “I plan to get another couple hours on the descent. That is, if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Brand said. “Besides, you’re not sleeping.”

  “Damn me, I forgot. Got to fly Gargantua.”

  The robot was too large to be attached to DepthFinder, and like SARSCAN, would be towed to the bottom.

  Together, they powered up the systems. Brande concentrated on environmental systems first, making sure that pressures and blower speeds were acceptable. Oxygen, lithium oxide.

  He felt clumsy in the protection suit. Taking the hood from his lap, he stashed it on the floor under his legs.

  Turning awkwardly in his seat, he reached back and turned on the new acoustical system. It had a microphone, rather than a telephone, and he parked the mike between his and Dokey’s seats.

  With the propulsion systems checked out, and the sonar and gyros activated, Dokey initiated power for the remote-control panel. When he had green LEDs, he turned on the UHF set and contacted Mel Sorenson on deck.

  “Kick his butt overboard, Mel.”

  “On the way, Okey.”

  A crane operator hoisted the ROV from the deck, swung it out over the side, and lowered it into the tossing sea.

  Dokey turned on the video camera, and they saw Gargantua’s view of the surface for a few minutes before he began to sink.

  “Okay, Mel, we’ve got greens.”

  “Luck,” Sorenson said.

  Brande felt the sub rolling backward on her tracks, then the lift from the deck. Because of the rolling deck of the Orion, they started into a pendulum movement, but the arc of the swing was not too great because of the sub’s weight.

  There was an elevatorlike sensation of falling, until they hit the sea with an abrupt stop. The crane operator released the hook by remote control.

  “Hit reverse, Chief!” Sorenson called.

  Brande pulled back hard on the left joystick while leaning forward to look out the porthole. The left catamaran hull was sliding toward him. Or he toward it.

  He tugged on the stick, but it was already at the back stop.

  The motors whined.

  The sub gained momentum, and pulled out of the path of the hull.

  She was already sinking, and within moments, the world was darkening, a trade-off for the smooth ride.

  Brande brought up the interior lights to dim, then settled back in his seat. Dokey was diddling with his control sticks, putting Gargantua into a steep glide, using as little power as possible.

  At 200 feet, Brande tried the Loudspeaker system.

  “Anyone there?”

  “Right here,” Rae said. Her voice seemed clearer on the Commonwealth acoustic system.

  “You want to try a picture?”

  “Damn right.”

  He activated DepthFinder’s camera, put it on the center screen, and then flipped the toggle switch that Mayberry had jury-rigged to the side of the power panel.

  “We’ve got a picture!” Rae said.

  “Is it any good?”

  “Not too clear, but clear enough. Like a slightly off-tuned TV set.”

  “We’ll give you Gargantua.”

  Brande slapped the toggle to the off position, then hit a second switch.

  “We’ve got that, too.”

  “All right, good,” Brande said. “We’re going passive, now.”

  They curtailed the power consumption for all of the systems they could in order to reduce the drain on the batteries aboard both the submersible and the robot.

  In the next three-and-a-half hours, they talked to Rastonov a couple times — the Sea Lion was already in the canyon at 22,000 feet-no radiation readings — alternately dozed, told some old jokes, and predicted San Diego Chargers outcomes against the Raiders, Broncos, and Seahawks. The projected results were dismal, given the outcome of the first game of the season.

  At 900 feet, they lost what daylight the cloud cover had allowed to penetrate.

  At 2,000 feet, most of the active sealife disappeared.

  Sinking steadily into the abyss at 100 feet per minute.

  At 15,000 feet of depth, with the thermostat at full up, it was still cold. Brande wished he had worn a sweatshirt, too.

  At 20,000 feet, Brande dumped a little water ballast to slow the descent.

  “Dane?” Rae Thomas said.

  “Still here.” He gave her an oral report on their status.

  “That agrees with what we’re seeing,” she said.

  Not all of the monitoring systems had been connected through the Loudspeaker acoustic system, but some data was shown on a separate video display terminal on the operations desk via telemetry. The depth, altitude above ground, heading, inertial navigation readings, battery charges and oxygen supply
could be monitored without verbal reports.

  Dokey put the sonar waterfall display on the port video screen.

  “There’s the canyon rim, Chief. Three hundred yards behind us.”

  “I guess we keep going down, then.”

  “Until something stops us.”

  “Like the Atlantic Ocean?” Brande asked.

  Brande used the acoustic microphone. “Pyotr?”

  “I am here, Dane.”

  “How about some coordinates?”

  They did not have the luxury of Emry’s search program on screen, so Brande had to form his own mental pictures. The CIS submersible was nearly a mile west of them and 800 yards south. It had found a slanting bottom at 23,500 feet of depth. The terrain was rugged and steep, and according to Rastonov, looked fragile where they had seen it in their video relay from Seeker.

  When the depth readout read 23,675, the altitude indicator kicked in, showing 56 feet.

  “Easy up,” Dokey said.

  Brande blew off more ballast, and the sub slowed its descent.

  “Where’s Gargantua?” Brande asked.

  “Two hundred feet in front of us, and about thirty feet lower.”

  “Let’s watch the movies.”

  They routed power to the cameras and floodlights on both vehicles.

  There was nothing to be seen.

  “All right, Okey, you do the snooping, and I’ll follow you around.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Using DepthFinderʼs downward-looking sonar as his guide, Dokey began making wide sweeps to the left and right with Gargantua, moving down toward the slope of the canyon until they had a picture on the starboard VDT.

  It was a bleak, dull gray place, a steep slope with rocky outcroppings and what could have once been a lava flow. There was no life that could be seen.

  “This is as deep as we’ve ever been,” Brande said.

  “Better report it, then.”

  “They’re supposed to be able to see it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a new system,” Dokey said.

  Brande reported to the surface.

  “Is Dokey awake yet?” Rae asked. Trying to be light about it, Brande was sure.

  “I’ll pinch him in a minute and find out.”

  Emry broke in, “Dane, why don’t you head out west for a bit?”

  “You think so, Larry? That would be a hell of a curve for the rocket to take.”

  “I’m the one who said it didn’t rotate. You gave me fifty-fifty on that, remember?”