by Bob Finley
Chapter 19
It was one in the afternoon, Miami time, and they were fifty hours into the mission. Feeling the VIKING begin its climb to shoot the seven thousand foot passage south of the Portuguese Azores island of Sao Miguel, Marc left the pilot's console long enough to key in the command to retrieve data from the EAR they'd dropped as they pulled away from MARS. As she crested the pass, he pressed the left muff of a headset to his ear and triggered the retrieval code. He waited the four seconds it took for the EAR, now eighty-six miles behind them, to finalize its data and fire its digitally compressed file at them in a half-second burst. The CommPuter captured the thirty-three minute recording, processed the signal, and converted it to an audio format.
Marc sensed the deck tilt as the VIKING cleared the passage and began its long glide toward the twelve thousand foot depths of the northern Madeira Abyssal Plain. He paged Kim.
"Whatcha want, bossman?" Kim breezed into the Command sphere.
"I loaded the tape from the EAR. Wanta check it?"
"What am I looking for?" Kim asked as he slid into the chair.
"Don't know. Anything there that's not supposed to be there, I reckon."
Kim slipped on the headset and typed in FILE1 to make sure he was starting at the very beginning of the data. Then he typed SMTE, FSTFWD, and hit Enter. He waited while a time code was laid down on the database in hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths of a second in fast forward mode and the data cycled once more to the beginning. Then he typed SEARCH/MECHANICAL ORIGIN/FSTFWD. In thirty seconds, the CommPuter analyzed the data at high speed, excluding any sound that was non-mechanical in origin according to its exhaustive library. Next, he typed SEARCH/NONMECHANICAL ORIGIN/FSTFWD. The CommPuter zipped through the data again, this time looking for any sound that it couldn't identify as mechanical. In order to exclude totally improbable data and shorten the search string, he ran a SEARCH/BIOLOGICAL/FSTFWD. Finally, Kim typed SEARCH/OTHER/FSTFWD. When the short search ended, Kim typed LIST/ALL:SMTE. The screen quickly filled and scrolled on for nearly half a minute. When he printed the list there were almost nine pages of incidents of recorded sounds. They were numerically listed, with identification as to MECHANICAL, NONMECHANICAL, BIOLOGICAL and OTHER. Each line began with the SMTE time reference, then the CommPuter's identification of the sound. Kim flipped quickly through the printout.
"See anything?" Marc asked.
"Not yet," Kim answered absently as he started back through it more slowly. "You sure you don't know what you’re looking for?"
"What 've you got?"
"Well," Kim flipped back to the first page, "I've got 00:00:00:01 to 00:00:23:44 MECH/VIKING/100%. That would have been the EAR going active when it hit the bottom and picking us up as we pulled away from MARS, with a one hundred percent probability of the acoustic signature being accurate. Then I've got some OTHER for half a minute or so, with a low confidence factor, but that's probably debris rolling around after we burned rubber out of there." He cut a look at Justin but got only a non-reaction reaction. "Then everything quietens down for..." he scanned ahead, "almost eight minutes. Little background noise, probably from maintenance equipment on MARS. Then...here we go...business picks up. At 00:09:33:02, nine and a half minutes into the data, we start getting MECH/MOTOR/ELEC/PUMP/73%, MECH/GYRO/ELEC/94%, OTHER/STRESS/METAL/97%...Ben's obviously cranking up the MARS for liftoff. Okay, here...at 00:16:17:58, he runs up the turbines, lots of metal groaning, lots of OTHER clutter, with junk flying around in the water, and at 00:16:51:03, we've got a MECH/AIRCOMPRESSOR/91%...probably a low confidence factor because of all the other background noise...where he's charging the ballast tanks. And then, finally, at 00:19:42:23 MECH/DEFAULT/00%, the EAR could hear the MARS lift off, but the CommPuter didn't have enough data in its library to identify the signature."
"'S okay," Marc looked down at his left control panel so he could smile, "your baby's allowed to make a mistake once in a while." He got the rise he expected.
"What ‘mistake’? We don't have an audio file on the MARS vehicle. How's it supposed to recognize something it's never heard before? Huh?"
After a moment, Marc asked rhetorically, "So Ben lifted off for the surface nineteen...almost twenty...minutes after we left, then?"
Kim nodded. "Nineteen minutes and forty-two point two-three seconds."
"And we've got, what...thirty-three minutes of tape?"
Kim flipped to the bottom of the last page of the printout. "Thirty-three and a half minutes, roughly," he replied.
"So that leaves...not quite fourteen minutes of tape, is that right?" Marc verified.
"Yeah, about that."
Justin slowly nodded. "That's enough." He was silent for several seconds. Kim knew enough to wait. Abruptly, Marc broke the silence. "Any MECHANICAL on those fourteen minutes?" he asked.
Kim scanned the last three pages, then went back and looked more closely.
"No, not that I can see," he finally answered.
Marc was quiet again for almost a half-minute.
"Whaddaya think that means?" he half-turned to look at his assistant.
Kim laid the printout on the table while he considered. Then his eyes widened, as his gaze rose to meet his boss's.
"No tail," he said.
"Mm-hm," agreed Justin. "No need," he added.
Kim's eyes formed the question.
"Nobody's following us because they don't have to. They have a sheepdog right here, amongst the flock, herding us to where we're supposed to go. We don't even need a compass."
"Cy?"
Marc raised his eyebrows and nodded his head.
"Ohhh, yeah. Cy."
Chapter 20
On the seven hour run from Sao Miguel, Marc slept. Reclined in the pilot's command chair, he'd now and then rouse long enough to glance at the display, then gently slide back just below the surface like a dozing porpoise. Following Kim's orders, VIKING dropped off the seven thousand foot pass at the Azores and planed gradually down the four thousand foot drop over the foothills that ended at the western edge of a spoon-shaped extension of the Madeira Abyssal Plain northwest of the Madeira Islands. At 11,000 feet, with a thousand feet of water still beneath her hull, she burned across the flat plain at two hundred and twenty-three miles an hour, then angled four degrees east-northeast with a thousand-foot-an-hour rise on her bow thrusters. She entered the wide canyon approach to Josephine Seamount, with its low, parallel mountain ridges running the length of the canyon. Running just north of the colossal undersea mountain, VIKING swung to a new heading of nine-oh degrees, dropped down another fifteen hundred feet, dodged a pod of whales, and throttled back to a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour. Using as cover the east-west sub-sea mountain range that pointed straight at Cape St. Vincent on the Portuguese coast, she ran on until the Continental Shelf rose before her. Then, having followed her directions to perfection, she gradually slowed to a sedate forty miles per hour, auto rotated the stabilizer from its high-speed, stowed position back into maneuvering position and dutifully woke up The Boss.
Though his eyes were still closed, Justin had felt the first downgrade in speed and, since the second slowdown, had become fully alert. When the AutoNav chimed him he did a slow stretch and opened his eyes. No telling when there'd be another chance to rest. He popped on the monitors. Janese Cramerton, long legs curled under her on the U-shaped galley booth, looked very relaxed. Her attention was on the monitor in front of her and, from her repetitive eye movements, she was apparently reading.
"Good evening." He spoke quietly so as not to startle her, but she jumped slightly anyway. She looked around but, obviously, didn't see him.
He tapped a key before him and appeared in a head and shoulders window in the lower right corner of her monitor.
"Neat trick," she responded. "Handy for spying on the non-paying baggage."
He smiled gently. "Wasn't spying. Just woke up and was checking to see who else was up. And you shouldn't be hard on yourself...‘baggage' hardly applie
s."
"Thanks...I think. And, what do you mean ‘just woke up'? I thought you were driving?"
"Actually, Yoko was driving. Got any coffee on?"
"Yoko? Who's Yoko? And, yes. A fresh pot."
"Would it...demean you...to bring a cup forward? I'll introduce you to Yoko."
She smiled ruefully, in spite of herself. "How do you want it?" she asked.
With a wee tip of his head and the slightest of smiles, he raised one eyebrow.
She narrowed her eyes and gave him The Look. "Your coffee," she said frostily.
"White, hot, and sweet. Three saccharin."
She shook her head and logged off the computer.
"What were you reading?" he asked as she set the steaming mug on the console before him.
"How do you know I was reading?" she countered.
"Well, you were gazing into a monitor and from your eyeballs, I'd say you were either speed-reading or watching a tennis match."
She laughed. "That's a very impressive library you have on the computer. Books, movies, everything."
"Well, when you're two miles deep and need information, you can't exactly stop by the library. So, I bought the library. We have the entire Library of Congress on file, and they download monthly updates to my home office mainframe. For a fee, of course. The movies and games are for customers who have the time for them."
"Who's Yoko?" she reminded him abruptly.
He took a sip of the hot, strong brew and gave her a contemplative look. She was quick, this one.
"Yoko. You awake?"
"Yes, Master. I never sleep." A woman's voice surrounded them, at once sultry, smooth, soothing.
Janese Cramerton gave him a get-serious look and, dripping with acid, said "Master?!"
He couldn't help but laugh. "One of Kim's jokes," he explained. "I never know what she'll say next."
"She."
"Well...yes and no. Yoko. Are you female?"
"How long have you been at sea, sailor?" the disembodied Yoko chided. Janese grinned in spite of herself.
"Yoko, I'd like you to welcome Doctor Janese Cramerton."
"Welcome aboard, Doctor Cramerton. Are you female?"
Marc laughed aloud again as Janese blushed. Then he explained, "What few stats we had on you were entered into the VIKING's computer before we boarded, along with the other passengers'. But we all assumed...wrongly..." his gaze strayed very deliberately to her coverall zipper, "...very wrongly...that you were...well...other than 'female'."
She looked down, frowned, and pulled the zipper an inch higher.
He laughed again. "Yoko assumes sex based on voice register. So when she compared her files to your voice, she wasn't so much confused as verifying and updating her files. Yoko. Yes, Doctor Cramerton is female."
"Thank you. I've scanned four articles you wrote, Doctor Cramerton. Your logic is commendable."
To Janese Cramerton's confused look, Marc just shrugged and motioned toward the CommPuter console for her to respond. Hesitantly, she turned toward it/her and said in an uncertain voice, "Thank you...Yoko. And, please...just call me Janese, not ‘Doctor Cramerton’."
"You're welcome. Janese. And please feel free to call on me if you need anything. I'm always here." There was an audible and exaggerated sigh.
"Thank you, Yoko. I will." She turned back to Justin. "Was that for real?" she whispered. "I can't believe I'm talking to a computer. Or, is that sacrilege?"
He smiled. "Probably to Kim, yes. Yoko was his mother's name. She was Okinawan. And according to Kim, she was...appropriately...very intelligent. She died when he was ten." He blew on his coffee and took a careful sip. He looked thoughtfully at her for a moment before he continued. "Kim's just 26 years old. But don't be misled by his youth. He holds double doctorates in Computer Technology and Theoretical Mathematics. He'd have a fistful more if he had time for them. He's the most gifted computer jock I've ever met...and in my businesses, I meet a lot of them. I pay him whatever he wants and would double it anytime he says. He's one of a kind." He paused a moment before smiling slightly. "So is Yoko. She's his creation and she's the closest thing to artificial intelligence in the world. And she's getting smarter every day. He could market Yoko right now and be a very, very rich man."
"Then, why doesn't he?"
"Money's important mostly to people who don't have it. Kim has all he needs or wants. Maslow's Theory of Hierarchy says that if your basic needs are assured, you look for other ways to spend your time. Kim creates. He has total creative freedom, with absolutely no restrictions. I see to that. And he enjoys what he does."
"And you...what do you get out of all this?"
"Ah, good. A fellow cynic. What do I get? I market everything he creates. And make lots more money. So I can do what I want to do."
"And what is that?" she asked.
He smiled. "Exactly what I'm doing."
"And what if Kim decides he wants out...wants to own his own creations, get rich, like you?"
"Then he walks."
Her look was a challenge. "You'd let him out of his contracts, just like that?"
"Not exactly."
She smiled.
"There are no contracts," he quietly said.
She stopped smiling.
"By the way..." he said, as she picked up her coffee cup, "...whispering won't help. Yoko sees and hears everything that happens on the ship. It's part of the mission log. In case anything goes wrong."
"What do you mean, if ‘anything goes wrong’?"
He gave her a sober look. "In case the mission recorder is the only thing that survives. So somebody knows what went wrong."
"I’ll bet if I were a paying customer you wouldn't have said that."
He smiled and made a "who knows?" shrug. "Speaking of ‘paying customers’, you, Frank, and Cy need to get strapped in back in Number Three, and I need Kim up here for final approach. Could you pass the word on to everybody as you go back?"
"Sure." She picked up her coffee cup and moved toward the door.
"You never told me what you were reading," he said in a voice that just carried.
She gave him a sleepy look. "No, I didn't, did I?" She turned and stepped across the raised door seal. Then she half-turned back toward him and smiled slightly. "I was reading about you, Captain."
Chapter 21
"Course one-three-eight degrees," Justin murmured. A video microscanner mounted flush into the console in front of him tracked the location and movements of his head, gridded his face, focused on the grid that should include his mouth, and recorded every word he spoke or breath he took. No cumbersome headset was necessary. The data would be available for scrutiny later...if there was a later... by the arm-chair quarterbacks at the Pentagon.
"Depth two-three-one-nine feet, ascending at a rate of one hundred feet per mile. Forward speed," he glanced at the digital gauge, "four-two miles per hour. ETA Centinela Guyot fifteen to twenty minutes."
In Number Three, all three passengers were facing forward now, watching the bank of monitors on the forward bulkhead. Twenty-three high definition cameras discretely stationed throughout the ship allowed passengers to simultaneously see what the pilot saw. According to the Marketing Group, the cameras ‘minimized the sense of claustrophobia inherent in the confined spaces of a submarine environment’. Justin tolerated their rubbernecking over his shoulder as long as the ‘off’ buttons were where he could reach them. At present, with only blackness before them, the Number Three monitor showed only the Control Sphere, looking forward. The back of Marc's head was just visible above the chair's headrest. The red instrument displays among the red glow of the interior running lights created a feeling of safe intimacy. Another camera showed Marc's face in a window inset in the upper right screen quad. The look of tense watchfulness on Justin's face made Janese Cramerton uneasy. She glanced at Frank and Cy but saw no sign of concern. She wondered what Marc knew that he wasn't telling them. She was startled when his face suddenly filled the screen and he
spoke directly to them. The smooth assurance in his voice somehow belied the cold detachment in his eyes.
"Since we're all in this together, let's be sure we're all...equally informed. I have no idea what...if anything...is waiting for us at Centinela Seamount. I only ‘know’ that we're supposed to go there." He frowned and shrugged. "I think I know that. I also think it could be a trap." He shrugged again. "Doesn't matter. If we're being lured there, the only way we can find out what's going on...and what's happened to the MARS's crew...is to take the bait." He paused and sighed. "I don't like it. But I don't know what else to do. Except," he looked straight at Janese Cramerton, "for calling in the Marines." He held her silently in his gaze for several seconds. "So, assuming they're expecting us, instead of barreling in through the front door...on the seaward side...I'm gonna try to sneak up on their blind side by coming in from an unexpected direction."
"By flanking them," Frank interjected.
"Exactly," Marc said. "With any luck, maybe we'll know what they're up to before they know we're there.
"May you be in heaven an hour before the devil knows you're dead," Janese quoted in a heavy Irish brogue.
Justin raised an eyebrow and smiled. "I didn't be knowin' you were of the Irish persuasion, now," he lilted. "But, yes, that's the idea. It isn't much, but it's all I've got. Unless someone else...?" He tilted his head, waited, then shrugged. "Okay. Then here's the plan. They should be expecting us from the west, from the open ocean. So we're coming in from the northeast, around behind them. And the last ten miles, we'll be masked."
"Masked?" Cramerton parroted. "You mean acoustically?"
"Yes," Justin answered, surprised until he remembered her field of expertise. "Stealth technology became commercially available after the end of the Cold War, when defense-based industries had to go public to survive. So we engineered it into the VIKING. It's handy when you wanta sneak up on something."
"Like what?" Sheppard asked.
