The noise in here is astonishing. Seventy-two bodies serve on the Gate, and all of them seem to be having lunch at the same time. Whoever said the sea was silent never spent time here.
“Yo, Martin!” Leggo calls my name as he sees us, but whatever else he says is lost in the din. He tries to yell again, but his tablemates, still listening to the talking head reporting the latest movements from the African front, take offense. Leggo rolls his eyes, makes a silent come-hither motion with his arm. I shake my head, point toward the salad bar, then tap my watch.
“You still pissed at him?”
“Nah.” And I wasn’t. Much. So what if he’d managed to snag a date with Gretchen, who was only the most delectable hotshot to ever come down the Slide? He was too good a tech manager to begrudge a little nookie. When Leggo was happy, my techs were happy. When my techs were happy, Gateway hummed. Anyway, she dumped him a week later, and got tapped for a Topside position in Houston a couple of months after that. “There are some calculations on the OTEC expansion they want finished before next shift comes on.”
“You’re not the only brain down here, pal. Let someone else carry some of the workload.” She’s said it before, as friend and as psychologist. I just shrug. So I obsess. Every Mariner worth their patch does the same. This is our baby. Our dream.
“I promise I’ll chew five times for every bite,” I tell her seriously, and am rewarded with a long-suffering sigh.
“I should put you on report,” she says, also not for the first time. “It’s the only way I can make sure you’ll get downtime.”
I make a rude gesture, and escape before she has time to reply.
The taco salad is crisp, crunchy, and colorful. It also tastes like different flavors of desalinated water, but you can’t have everything. I put the empty dish on the tray on the floor, shove it with my foot until it’s out of the way. I’ll drop it off in the recycling bin later, when I get up.
We don’t have real offices here, just prefabricated half-wall cubicles you have to back out of, but the illusion of privacy is everything. The carpeting is thicker here than in the hallways, so our chairs slide over it without squeaking, and it absorbs conversations that are held at a low pitch. If you yell, everyone on-shift hears you.
As shift commander, I rate something double the size, which means I can turn around and pick something up off the floor without hitting my head, if I want to, and I don’t have to share with my swing-shift equivalents. There are three of us—Marcie, Seth, and myself—and we each have a slice of office that’s all our own.
I pull the keypad back out toward me, letting it hang for a moment while I consider the figures scrolling down on my screen. A tap of the space bar, and the numbers freeze in place until the thought clicks in my brain, then I start the flow up again with another tap of the keyboard. I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m hunting it down. Something in the OTEC configuration isn’t working at peak efficiency, and that bothers me almost as much as it bothers the folk Topside. But for them, it’s a matter of professional pride. For me, it’s a question of comfort. Be damned if I’m going to let them build any extraneous slack into the system.
“If not perfect, Lord, let me be both fast and accurate.” The Mariner tech prayer, hammered into you from hour one. OTEC powers everything we do at Gateway, from the lights to the computers to the pressure in our showers. Only our toilets and our air pressure are outside the system—we have chemicals for the former, and a nice, secure, double-blind system directed from Topside for the latter.
A ping sounds from the console built into my desk, interrupting my mental progress. “Ping yourself. What’s up?”
Gary’s voice comes through clear as a bell, his usual academic precision softened by the hint of laughter. In the background I hear a weird wa-waaaing noise that means there are other people in the room, talking just beyond the pickup range. “Kimmie says you were frothing at the bit this afternoon.”
“I was a perfect gentleman.”
The site director snorts at that. “Yeah well, such behavior is rewarded. Just heard from the disjointed chiefs,” our name for the combined brass of Mariner and NEREUS. “They drew names from a pointy cap. You get to lead the parade.”
I don’t think I choked, but something must have escaped because Gary just laughs. “You can thank me by bringing a bottle of the good stuff, not that rotgut they give us in Houston.”
“Deal. Absolutely.” There’s a grin on my face you couldn’t sandblast off. I’d just leapfrogged over a long list of dignitaries and political foofahs to be the first down the Tube when NEREUS Station went live.
Who says brown-nosing and sucking up never worked?
“Of course, all this presupposes our go-live date doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of our brethren in the Armed Services getting some.” Gary’s voice is grim suddenly. “Tension’s climbing again.”
Way to ruin my mood, pal. “Saw that.” Before he can make a crack I add, “Yes, I do catch the news on occasion. Personally, I think we should just go in there and shoot anyone holding a weapon, no matter what side they’re on.”
I can visualize Gary shaking his head, gray eyes rolling up in mock exasperation. “There’s a reason they kept you in the civilian services.”
“Damn straight.” The ocean has her boundaries, but they’re gentler ones of current and tide. And you rarely get shot for holding the wrong opinion on the wrong side. Unless that wrong opinion has to do with pressure per square inch.
“Kim says they almost didn’t let her people come down, that they’re talking about yanking everyone off the floor. For security reasons, they say.” His voice reveals what he thinks of that. A sound in the background, higher-pitched waaa-waaaaaa, is probably Kim adding her own comments.
“So long as they’re talking, we’re working.”
“From your mouth to the president’s ears,” Gary says. “Leave us alone and we’ll get them their damned food sources.” One of the few projects they have going down there that Gary can talk about is sea-harvest: finding a way to use the geothermal vents to force-grow protein. What else they’re doing around the vents, I don’t ask. We may not be—officially—a military organization, but the government’s got its fingers in every pie, and I sleep better at night having lower clearances.
“Anyway, just wanted to make the news official, before you heard it through the gossip train. Congratulations again. We’ll start warming up the welcome band now.”
“You do that. Gateway out.”
I save the file I had been working on before his call interrupted and push the chair back as far as it will go, just enough room for me to put my feet up on the desktop and stretch my arms behind my head; the timeless pose of a soul in contemplative relaxation. But my brain’s going a mile a minute in a completely different direction than before. This kind of acknowledgment might mean I’m in line for a new assignment, something with higher visibility, better retirement levels. Problem is, most of those jobs are Topside, pushing papers and talking to the Press. Christ. I’m a Mariner, I’ll dry out and die if they ground me.
On the other hand, it might also be a sop—sorry we can’t do more, but here’s your moment of fame and glory.
There are pluses and minuses to both, and it’s going to take some weighing to figure out which option I’m hoping for. Still—
“Zweeeeet!”
I’m out of my chair and on my feet before my mind recognizes what’s wrong.
“Zweeeet!” A klaxon bleating in the air, and amber lights flashing along the wall. The floor shakes once underfoot, and the desiccated giant red mysid perched on the top of my monitor falls to the carpet and breaks in two.
A decade’s worth of drills takes over, and my heartbeat settles into something that’s only panic-level. A lifetime of swearwords fight to get out of my throat.
“All hands, all hands. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.”
A failure at Gateway would be intense red lights and a ringing of bells. T
his is a Site failure. Please, God, let it be something small, let it be something repairable. . . .
“Krrrreeeeee! Kreeeeeeeee!”
A second alarm, this one harsher, starts in counterpoint to the first. A particularly pungent curse escapes, and I break into a run. NO! No no no no no. . . .
Gateway seems small when you’re trying to avoid someone, but want to be at point B when you’re at point A, and it can seem like miles of hallways and hatches. I swing over the railing and drop the three steps that separate the living quarters from command. The alarm is muted here, but the amber lights flash as quickly, pulsing with my heartbeat. Worthy—the best-named kid on board—comes around a corner and matches my stride perfectly within two steps.
“We’ve dispatched Sub Three, as it was cruising in that vicinity.”
“They didn’t report anything beforehand?”
“Not a damn thing, sir.” His ruddy skin is blotchy with stress.
“Fuck.”
There’s a sick feeling in my gut like too much seawater swallowed too fast, an elevator in free-fall, cold sweat shriveling my skin and chilling my bones. I’d been a kid when Site Four went to hell. I still remember watching the coverage on television: serious-faced men in suits talking about instantaneous decompression and shock waves and acceptable losses.
There’s no such thing as acceptable loss. Not then, not now. It may be unavoidable, it may be inevitable, but it’s never acceptable.
Control Center is lit in an overdose of marine-greens and -blues, the kind of encompassing darkness that feels good at first, but makes you yearn for the sunroom at the end of your shift. There are too many people already crowded in there, a mass of orange faintly glowing in the darklight like a patch of fluorescent tube worms; I put a shoulder forward and plow through. They move aside like sheep, none of them taking their eyes off the action below. Someone hands me a headset and I clip it to my ear as I step down into the Pit. Seven stations, each one of them manned by some of the best, brightest, and most dedicated minds available to Mariner.
“Talk to me, people, one at a time.” They are the best, but as commander on shift, the fan the shit is hitting is me.
“You on-line, McCarthy?”
“Yessir.” Admiral Gregor Frants, scourge of the underclassmen when he was at the Academy. Mariner Project’s Big Grouper, we call him. The conduit directly to the White House.
“What the hell is going on, Martin?”
“We’re finding that out for you, sir.” He knows that, damn it. He knows and is talking to hear the comfort of his own voice. I tune him out and concentrate on my own people.
There’s a chair the OiC is supposed to sit in, more often used by someone’s jacket, or once, for almost two months, a giant blue stuffed bunny someone had smuggled down for Easter. I pace back and forth instead, touching shoulders, glancing at screens where information flows in a steady stream.
“No reported seismic activity anywhere in the area, the blast was purely localized. Reading came from below and to the left side, traveling outbound.”
“Roger that,” a voice says in my earpiece. “Sats show no geologic movement in your area preceding the blast.”
The satellite program had been a godsend to oceanography, but it wasn’t perfect. No technology could compensate for human intuition and observation. Still, if they didn’t see it, odds were it hadn’t happened.
“Electrical systems are off-line. OTEC’s still pumping, but nothing’s being drawn down. Geothermal likewise.”
Could mean anything. We do failure drills on a regular basis, nobody’s going to panic just because it’s dark. Hell, they sometimes turn off all the lights, interior and exterior, for a day or three, just to see what will go bump against their windows. Fucking scientists.
“Life support still registering, sir. Went to backup the moment of impact.”
I breathe in; hold; out. Slow. Keep it cool. Hope kills, if you let it ride your decisions. That meant only that the backup is still working, not that there’s anyone at the receiving end of it.
“No subs reported to be in your waters.” Another voice from Topside, a cool, competent female voice. Thanks, babe. If there had been anyone prowling our zone, we would have known about it before Topside. Useless, they were all useless up there.
That second klaxon was the one indicating hull breach. Worst case scenario. Hope kills. But hope is all we’ve got right now.
By the time console five chimes in, I’m at the master board, checking the displays in real time. Not that I don’t trust what my people have to say, but they might have missed something, might have overlooked or misread.
“Reports coming in from other research stations.” That female voice again. “Chatter’s jumped, everyone wants to know what’s happened.” She reels off names; scientific outposts and military installations halfway around the world have felt it. The only thing that travels faster than gossip is gossip underwater. The ocean’s a superconductor of disaster.
I can almost feel my brain split into two halves: listening to the clamor from Houston coming into the wire in my ear, sorting out what’s needful and important and discarding the panic—panic filter turned way up high—the other half moving my hands, coaxing instrumentation in a desperate, already—damn it—hopeless effort to raise someone, some way.
“Site Fourteen. Site Fourteen, this is Gateway Control. Site Fourteen, respond. Gary, talk to me.” My jumpsuit sticks to my back when I reach across the board, sweat thickening and stiffening the fabric. The two halves of my brain chatter at each other, trading information, making connections. So damn cold in here, shivers consuming my skin. No time for that now. Don’t waste brain on it. “Fuck. Michaels, what’s your ETA?”
“Three minutes.” The voice from the minisub is hollow, fluted, metallic.
“Too much time.” An impatient voice from Topside: worried, older, male. Not Frants.
“I know that,” I snap. “Let me do my damned job, will you?” Just cut off a general, probably. Screw it. I’ll suck up to him later.
“Come on, people, give me something.” Please. Please, God.
“Sir . . . site pressure’s dropping, fast. Down to—Sir. We’ve lost all readings, sir.”
“Life-support backup has failed.” The red display on the left corner of my screen has already told me that.
“That’s it, then.” Topside, graveled voice of authority dropping and leaving silence in its wake.
“No!” Voices rise around me in protest against that silence. We still believe. We still have to believe. Those are our people down there. Our responsibility.
“Gateway this is Mariner Three. I’m almost on site. Too much silt down here, can’t see for a damn. . . . Oh hell!”
“Michaels?” His voice had been panicked, beyond fright into an awareness of something dire and unavoidable. And then an awful, quiet whoosh in my headset, followed by wet crackling static.
“Michaels!”
Something inside me breaks; very quiet, very gentle. I don’t have time for this, not now.
I hold hope in my lungs for half a second, then: “Allen, send out a warning along the trajectory of the blast. Code it for widest vector—every language of the nations known to be seaworthy. Declare this area off-limits until further notice. All subs, back to dock. I repeat, all subs back to dock. Mission Control, we hereby request an AUSS system be dispatched.” Advanced Unmanned Search System—the janitor of the seas, sent in to clean up where humans no longer go.
I feel the dull-edged stares in my back, and fight the urge to defend myself against them. Hope kills. Whatever’s going on down there—we have no idea what’s happened. It might have been a freak accident. It might have been system failure. In this imperfect, knife’s-edge world, it could also have been human action. It might have been deliberate. It might have been murder. I won’t lose anyone else to find out.
I pace the halls, the sweat of my jumpsuit dried to residue. I probably stink. I can’t bring myself to care. T
he sounds around me are muted, the lights dimmed or shut off.
It’s past midnight Topside, in the halls of Mission Control. I can visualize it, if I try. Lamps still burning over coffee-strewn desks; quiet voices and self-doubt and if-onlies, those who aren’t beating off the press or justifying themselves to the president and God and everyone else with a sudden interest in the fate of NEREUS. The only ones asleep are those who have medicated themselves out of the pain.
I don’t have that option, not yet. Sleep is impossible.
Gateway station is empty: of the seventy-two warm bodies that used to fill the space, only seven remain. They’re the cleanup crew, clearing and scrambling the servers so nobody can take anything from here but memories. Everyone else has gone already, hustled off within hours. Just enough time to stuff a kit bag, knowing you won’t be back.
The last sub comes for us in the morning. Four hours, maybe five. I’ll be the last one to leave. Turn out the last light. My responsibility. My right.
The wheels of investigation are already turning, but there’s only so much you can do. The site is off-limits, my order confirmed by NEREUS Command. You can’t send bomb-sniffing dogs in, or lay the pieces out on a hangar floor, backtracking until you come to the moment it all went wrong. All we have are records, and readouts, and the hope that someday we’ll know what happened.
But that will have to wait. The country’s drifting on other currents now, moving into war. It fights us for space on the news feeds, making reporters’ heads spin with the glorious glut of news.
But all wars end, eventually. They’ll come for Gateway itself then: there’s too much here that can be reused, or worse, used by someone else. No squatters are allowed on our failures. The machinery of progress, the massive claws and levers of industry, will dismantle what can be reused, leave the hull sitting here, the Slide a rooted stem without petals, without a head. Rebuild farther down the ocean floor. Somewhere the orange markers won’t mock us.
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