by Ralph Kern
Unfathomed - Preorder
The Locus Series, Volume 1
Ralph Kern
Published by Ralph Kern, 2016.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
UNFATHOMED - PREORDER
First edition. October 19, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Ralph Kern.
Written by Ralph Kern.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1 - Day 1
Chapter 2 – Day 2
Chapter 3 – Day 2
Chapter 4 – Day 2
Chapter 5 – Day 2
Chapter 6 – Day 2
Chapter 7 – Day 3
Chapter 8 – Day 3
Chapter 9 – Day 3
Chapter 10 – Day 3
Chapter 11 – Day 3
Chapter 12 – Day 3
Chapter 13 – Day 3
Chapter 14 – Day 3
Chapter 15 – Day 4
Chapter 16 – Day 4
Chapter 17 – Day 4
Chapter 18 – Day 5
Chapter 19 – Day 6
Chapter 20 – Day 6
Chapter 21 – Day 6
Chapter 22 – Day 7
Chapter 23 – Day 8
Chapter 24 – Day 9
Chapter 25 – Day 9
Chapter 26 – Day 9
Chapter 27 – Day 10
Chapter 28 – Day 11
Chapter 29 – Day 12
Chapter 30 – Day 13
Chapter 31 – Day 13
Chapter 32 – Day 13
Chapter 33 – Day 14
Chapter 34 – Day 14
Chapter 35 – Day 15
Chapter 36 – Day 15
Chapter 37 – Day 16
Chapter 38 – Day 16
Chapter 39 – Day 17
Chapter 40 – Day 17
Chapter 41 – Day 17
Chapter 42 – Day 17
Chapter 43 – Day 17
Chapter 44 – Day 17
Chapter 45 – Day 17
Chapter 46 – Day 18
Chapter 47 – Day 18
Chapter 48 – Day 18
Chapter 49 – Day 18
Chapter 50 – day 19
Chapter 51 – Day 20
Chapter 52 – Day 20
Chapter 53 – Day 20
Chapter 54 – Day 21
Chapter 55 – Day 22
Chapter 56 – Day 23
Chapter 57 – Day 23
Chapter 58 – Day 23
Chapter 59 – Day 24
Chapter 60 – Day 24
Chapter 61 – Day 24
Chapter 62 – Day 24
Chapter 63 – Day 24
Chapter 64 – Day 24
Chapter 65 – Day 24
Chapter 66 – Day 25
Chapter 67 – Day 25
Chapter 68 – Day 26
Chapter 69 – Day 26
Chapter 70 – Day 27
Epilogue
Authors Note
Other Works
Acknowledgements
Caroline, for helping me come up with the concept for this book, and for her patience in putting up with a writer. I can’t imagine how frustrating we must be!
Shay, for her wonderful editorial input.
Tom, for the amazing cover. He really is one of the greatest digital painters on the planet.
Nathan, Josh, Rob, Scott, Jacob, Andy – without your support, this wouldn’t have been possible.
The many beta readers who have given invaluable feedback for this novel.
The indie community as a whole.
And finally, my biggest thanks is to you, the reader.
Please subscribe to my mailing list here:
www.scifiexplorations.com
Or email / add me to Facebook here:
[email protected]
Prologue
The mainsail had been ripped away in a storm a week before, leaving no respite from the unrelenting sun.
Eric could have gone below deck, he supposed, but why? The shade wouldn’t save him. It hadn’t saved Lucille, whose decaying body even now lay on a bunk within the sloop.
No, Eric thought through the buzzing in his dehydrated head, the heat will soon take me. Maybe I’ll just drift off to sleep and not wake up.
He felt strangely restless, wanting to give up but also to move his body. Perhaps it was the knowledge that soon, the ability would be beyond him. He twisted weakly on the sun lounger, wanting a better view of the turquoise ocean beyond the low rail surrounding the sloop’s white hull.
He gave a bitter, croaking chuckle. Miles away he could see storm clouds on the horizon shedding dark columns of rain down to the surface. The winds already carried them away from the sloop. If only they’d thought to store some of the water from the last deluge which had pounded the boat. But then, they’d still held the vain hope that rescue would come.
Giving a slow shake of his head, Eric let his heavy eyelids close and sleep take him...
...To be awakened by a noise. Eric cracked open his crusted eyes. How many hours later was it? Night had fallen and stars dusted the blackness. He could feel a presence on the sloop, moving around. A figure appeared in his line of sight, silhouetted against the stars.
“He’s dead, leave him. Let’s see what salvage we can take.”
With a grunt, the person standing over him moved away and Eric heard the sound of the hatch leading below decks creaking open.
“Este es un barco hermoso. ¿Cree que podemos mantenerlo?” someone out of Eric’s view said.
“You wish. The boss will want the boat for himself.” A gagging noise came from below. “Jesus, what the hell is that smell?”
“He...” Eric croaked, the word catching in his parched mouth. “Help.”
“He’s alive!” The silhouette reappeared, then was joined by another.
“Really? That shrivelled corpse? More than can be said for the chick below deck.” The figure turned and barked, “Boss, we’ve got a live one.”
“Wat... water,” Eric gasped dryly.
“Let’s see what the man says first, shall we.”
Eric’s brain was slow and sluggish, but surely, these people should be helping him? He heard the sound of footsteps and he let his head loll to the side. A third figure, an athletic man stepped into Eric’s line of sight and hunkered down next to the lounger. He cocked his head, giving the impression of intensely scrutinizing Eric.
“What do you reckon, Urbano?” one of the other figures asked.
The man, Urbano, looked in Eric’s eyes for a long moment before standing.
“Toss him overboard.”
“Wait,” Eric gasped. What the hell was going on? He felt himself being pulled out of the lounger, his body a dead weight held in a firm grip. They began half-dragging, half-carrying the confused Eric to the side of the ship.
“Money. Have money,” Eric rasped.
“Money don’t mean shit to us.” a straining voice said as Eric found himself forced double over the railing.
Eric gripped the railing as he felt hands move down his torso, their intention obvious—to lift him over and let him plunge into the dark sea. The adrenaline that seeped through his system was starting to activate his body, giving strength where seconds earlier there was none.
“What do... you want?” Eric grated out, kicking at the arms.
“I want a lot of things, friend. But I doubt you can give them.” The hands grasped at his thighs, inexorably lifting him.
“I... can give.” Eric’
s voice rose in volume, becoming firmer as he twisted around in his struggles.
“Stop.” The leader—what was his name? Urbano?—held up his hand. “There is more life to this one than I thought.” Urbano stepped closer. “How?”
“What?” Eric asked.
“How will you give us all we want?” Urbano’s eyes flicked down toward the dark lapping water below. “And talk fast.”
Synapses in Eric’s brain which had previously started shutting down began sputtering, then firing again.
“I make things happen,” Eric croaked. His instincts, which had gotten him so far in life as a senior executive of Fenton Oil, kicked in. He met Urbano’s eyes. He knew it was vital he put just the right intonation into his next few words. It couldn’t be a plea; it had to be a promise. “Trust me and I can help your organization, whatever it may be.”
Urbano glanced left and right at the figures on either side of Eric before theatrically raising his arm and looking at his watch. “You have precisely two minutes to convince me.”
Chapter 1 - Day 1
“Four billion dollars’ worth of ship and equipment, and we’re lost,” Walter Grissom muttered.
On hearing the exasperation in the young officer’s voice, Staff Captain Liam Kendricks lowered his tablet and looked over at him. Grissom stared at the monitor with an expression that matched his tone. The bright touchscreen displays lit his clean-shaven face, contrasting it with the low lighting of the rest of the bridge. “What’s up, Walt?”
“I’ve lost our positioning fix, sir.” The officer began jabbing at the screens which made up his workstation. “I’m showing the GPS system is completely down.”
Placing his tablet on top of his own console, Kendricks stood from his leather command seat and walked across Atlantica’s dimly lit bridge to the navigator’s station.
“It’ll probably come up in a moment, son.” Kendricks looked over the young man’s shoulder at the mapping display. Stubbornly in the center of the blue expanse, a stylized satellite icon with a line struck through blinked, indicating they had lost the GPS lock.
“The whole system is down. We can lose one or two satellite links and it just degrades our positional accuracy. We’ve lost every last one of ‘em. I’m getting nothing,” Grissom continued tapping ineffectually at the screen in a vain attempt to work around the problem.
“Okay...” Kendricks looked out of the bridge’s huge windows, as if he could divine what had happened to the satellite link by mere sight.
One of Kendricks’s least favorite jobs as the executive officer of the M/S Atlantica was mentoring young-in-service officers. He found it frustrating, although he did admit to himself at times, also satisfying when he found someone with potential and helped develop them into a valuable part of the crew.
Grissom was one of those, for the most part. But like Captain Solberg, he didn’t like it when things went off-piste and was quick to show his annoyance.
Still, this could be a training opportunity, Kendricks thought. “If we’ve lost all the NAVSTAR GNSS satellite locks, what does that suggest to you, son?”
“That the problem is probably at our end, sir,” Grissom responded quickly, as he should with such a basic issue.
“Good, and in the interest of bringing your staff captain solutions and not problems, what’s the SOP for this situation?” Kendricks said, wanting to gently tease the answer from Grissom.
“We perform a self-diagnostic following a reset on the NAVSTAR program. If that doesn’t show any errors, then we should do a full restart of the system itself with a level two diagnostic,” Grissom replied, as if reading from a checklist.
Kendricks nodded, and gave Grissom a light pat on the shoulder before walking back to his seat. “Sounds simple enough to me. Get to it. And in the future, Walt, when I’m in the chair, don’t wait for permission on the basics. My expectation is that you will go ahead and fix the problem, then inform me.”
Reclining back in his chair, Kendricks looked out of the window. Far ahead of the bow of the vast cruise ship, Atlantica, he could see flashing electrical forks of lightning lancing down through the dark mass of cloud obscuring the stars off the port bow. He couldn’t recall seeing any storm warnings on the meteorological report, but it wouldn’t be the first time it had been wrong. We have the most high tech cruise ship in the world, yet we can’t even maintain a GPS lock and miss a goddamn storm. It was far enough off their heading they would easily avoid it, but still...
“Sir, I’ve reset the NAVSTAR. Still nothing.” Grissom looked at Kendricks.
“Very well.” Kendricks rolled his eyes; this problem had just become more irritating, but it was still minor enough that Grissom really should have sorted it out and then let him know. He was far beyond the point where he needed to have his hand held through every stage of a problem. Captain Solberg was not nearly as easygoing as he was, and would likely tear a strip off the young man. Publicly. “Go to the level two diagnostic and be so good as to pull up the notifications feed, too. Let’s see if an unexpected service outage has been announced.”
“Already done. The coms link is down, too.” Grissom gave a grunt as the vast ship nosed over a wave, plummeting down the other side.
Kendricks was a seasoned seafarer and more than used to rough weather, but the drop felt extreme, even to him. He wondered if it was the harbinger of choppier water due to the storm system ahead. When a second wave didn’t come, he refocused his attention on the problem at hand.
“Okay.” Kendricks released his grip on the console’s edge. “Switch to LORAN Radio Direction Finding. We still have places to be and a schedule to keep. Captain Solberg will shit if we wander off course.”
“RDF...” Grissom said hesitantly as he stared at his console, “is down, too.”
“Say what?” Kendricks exclaimed. The ship had multiple means of navigating the seas, but the two main ones being offline at the same time was a hell of a coincidence. “Very well, I presume we’re not picking up the land-based radar-nav towers this far out to sea. Let’s get old fashioned about this. We’ll go off simple dead reckoning and get IT to do a full-fault find.”
If anything, Grissom’s expression became even more confused.
“Walt, can you wake up, please?”
Grissom gestured helplessly at his screen, before looking across at Kendricks. “Sir, the compass?”
Kendricks frowned at the digital compass displayed on his command screen. Standing again, he walked to the front of the bridge and squinted at the old-fashioned brass compass situated on a pedestal. The antique device was a vestigial part of a modern cruise ship’s navigation suite, although this one in particular was more an ornament than ever actually having been intended for use. It was showing west-south-west. An almost perfect opposite of Atlantica’s original heading.
“I think it’s time to interrupt the captain’s dinner,” Kendricks said slowly.
***
“She is certainly a most beautiful ship,” Rear Admiral Sir John Reynolds, Retired, said, his deep voice richly cultured. “Or at least she shows up my former seagoing experiences.”
The gentle clink and murmur from around the wood-paneled, traditionally appointed dining room had resumed after the wave had briefly upset the sedentary atmosphere. The ten people who had been invited to dine at the Captain’s Table were dressed in their finest clothing—tuxedos for the men and glorious evening gowns for the women were the standard.
“Thank you, Admiral.” Captain Lars Solberg nodded, his Norwegian accent giving his voice a singsong lilt. “I would certainly hope our accommodation is somewhat better than a warship, even one of His Majesty’s Royal Navy vessels.”
“There was nothing nice about your old quarters, daddy.” Laurie Reynolds flashed a smile to her father. “I was horrified at that floating metal shoebox you called a home away from home.”
“Quite.” Reynolds nodded. “I must admit to being somewhat jealous when one of my former colleagues decided to jump ship
and join the lines. Although, not quite jealous enough to have ever made that jump myself.”
The waiter quickly and efficiently served the appetizer, a salmon roulade, his presence near unnoticed by the chatting diners of the stately room. The chamber was large, and the murmur of conversation washed out from the three tiers of tables and chairs which created an amphitheater surrounding the round Captain’s Table in the center. It was one of the few spaces on the ship that had a quaint appearance, with brass fittings and beautiful maritime-inspired watercolors adorning the walls—a stark contrast to the rest of the advanced vessel.
One of the roles of the passenger service director was to go through the passenger manifest and assign seating based on age, an old tactic of the cruise lines to ensure people got along and bonded, forming a community for the short time they would be guests on a vessel.
The Captain’s Table was different, though. To be seated there was by invitation only. Different captains had different criteria. Some chose their fellow diners randomly and some by lottery. Captain Solberg chose his dinner companions with consideration to networking and what was in it for him. A former admiral and his daughter, a town mayor and his wife, a couple who were investment bankers, and a rather attractive pair of young ladies who were traveling together were among Solberg’s choice for this meal.
“I always wondered,” Denise Heller, one of the young ladies, said as she gestured with an open hand encompassing the whole of the tiered dining room, “what one of these things actually costs.”
“The Atlantica,” Captain Solberg steepled his hands over the appetizer, “didn’t come cheap, my dear, and that’s before her not inconsiderable running costs. I’m sure you can imagine, filling her up costs a pretty penny, too.”
“And what’s the return on investment?” Brett Jenson asked, before giving a theatrical “Ouch” as his wife playfully punched him in the side.
“Not tonight, sweetie,” Miranda said. “I’m sure Captain Solberg doesn’t want to talk shop.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.” Solberg smiled, and indeed he didn’t. Maritime affairs and ships were as much a passion for him as young women, and of those ships, none more so than the Atlantica, the new flagship of Crystal Ocean lines. “But yes, it does take more than a few years of operation to recoup the line’s costs.”
