Jack knew he was atop a drift of sediment at least as deep as the ocean above, immense quantities of silt derived from land run-off mixed with dead marine organisms, natural seabed clays, volcanic debris and brine from the Ice Age evaporation. It was continuously being added to by fallout from above and at any moment could swallow him up like quicksand. And if the quicksand did not get him, an avalanche could. The suspended silt above the wreckage was the result of a turbidity current. IMU scientists had monitored turbidity currents in the Atlantic cascading off the continental shelf at 100 kilometres an hour, carving out submarine canyons and depositing millions of tons of silt. Like snow avalanches, the shock wave from one could trigger another. If he was caught anywhere near an underwater displacement of such magnitude he would be doomed without hope of reprieve.
Even before he tried the engines he knew it was a forlorn hope. The erratic hum as he powered up the unit only confirmed that the water jets were clogged with silt and incapable of shifting the module from the grave it had dug itself. There was no way the IMU engineers could have anticipated that the first deployment of their brainchild would be under twenty metres of ooze at the bottom of an uncharted abyss.
His one remaining option was a double-lock chamber behind him that allowed divers to enter and exit. The casing above was enveloped in a swirling cloud of sediment which might still be sufficiently fluid for escape, though with each passing minute the chances were diminishing as more of the particulate matter came out of solution and buried the module ever deeper in a mass of compacted sediment.
After a final glance at the sonar profile to memorize its features, he made his way to the double-lock chamber. The retaining wheel turned easily and he stepped inside. There were two compartments, each little larger than a closet, the first an equipment storage and kitting-up room and the second the double-lock chamber itself. He pushed his way past a rack of E-suits and trimix regulators until he stood before a metallic monster that looked like something from a science-fiction B movie.
Once again Jack had reason to be grateful to Costas. With the command module as yet untested he had insisted on a one-atmosphere diving suit as a back-up, a measure Jack had only grudgingly accepted because of the extra time needed for installation. In the event he had helped to stow the suit inside the chamber so was closely familiar with the escape procedure they had devised.
He stepped onto the grid in front of the suit and unlocked the coupling ring, pivoting the helmet forward and exposing the control panel inside. After satisfying himself that all systems were operational, he disconnected the belts that secured it to the bulkhead and scanned the exterior to make sure the joints were all fully sealed.
Officially designated Autonomous Deep Sea Anthropod, the suit had more in common with submersibles like the Aquapod than conventional scuba equipment. The Mark 5 ADSA allowed solo penetrations to ocean depths in excess of four hundred metres. The life support system was a rebreather which injected oxygen while scrubbing carbon dioxide from exhaled air to provide safe breathing gas for up to forty-eight hours. Like earlier suits, the ADSA was pressure resistant with liquid-filled joints and an all-metal carapace, though the material used was titanium-reinforced high-tensile steel which gave an unprecedented pressure rating of 2,000 metres water depth.
The ADSA exemplified the great strides made by IMU in deep submersible technology. An ultrasonic multi-directional sonar fed a three-dimensional moving image into a snap-down headset, providing a virtual-reality navigation system in zero visibility. For mid-water mobility the suit was equipped with a computerized variable-buoyancy device and a vectored-thrust water-jet pack, a combination that gave the versatility of an astronaut on a space walk but without the need for a grounding tether.
After uncoupling the suit Jack stepped back into the main compartment and quickly backtracked to the weapons locker. From the top shelf he took a Beretta 9 millimetre handgun to replace the one confiscated by Aslan and shoved it into his flight suit. He then uncoupled an SA80-A2 assault rifle and grabbed three magazines. After slinging the rifle he extracted two small packages of Semtex plastic explosive, normally used for underwater demolition work, and two briefcase-sized boxes each containing a mesh of bubble mines and a detonator transceiver.
Back in the double-lock chamber he hooked the boxes to a pair of carabiners on the front of the ADSA and secured them with a retaining strap. He reached over and slid the rifle and magazines into a pouch under the control panel, the bull-pup SA80 fitting easily inside. After closing the hatch to the chamber and spinning the locking wheel he ascended the metal ladder and clambered into the suit. It was surprisingly spacious, providing room for him to withdraw his hands from the metal arms and operate the console controls. Despite its half-ton weight he was able to flex the leg joints and open and close the pincer-like hands. After checking the oxygen supply, he shut the dome and locked the neck seal, his body now encased in a self-contained life support system and the world outside the viewports suddenly remote and dispensable.
He was about to leave Seaquest for the last time. There was no chance for reflection, only an utter determination that her loss should not be in vain. Any sadness would come later.
He switched on the low-intensity interior lighting, adjusted the thermostat to 20 degrees Celsius and activated the sensor array. After checking the buoyancy and propulsion controls he extended the right-hand pincer against a switch on the door. The fluorescent lighting dimmed and water began to spray down. As the turgid liquid rose above the viewports, Jack felt the damp patch where the blood had oozed from his gunshot wound of the day before. He tried to steady his nerves.
“One small step for a man,” he muttered. “One giant step for mankind.”
When the hatch opened and the elevator raised him above the module, Jack was engulfed in darkness, a black infinity which seemed to imprison him with no hope of escape. He activated the floodlights.
The view was like nothing he had seen before. It was a world lacking all standard points of reference, one where the normal dimensions of space and shape seemed to continuously fold in on each other. The beam lit up luminous clouds of silt that swirled in all directions, slow-motion whirlpools that undulated like a multitude of miniature galaxies. He extended the manipulator arms and watched the silt separate into tendrils and streamers, shapes that soon gathered themselves together again and disappeared. In the harsh glare it seemed deathly white, like a pall of volcanic ash, the beam reflecting off particles a hundred times finer than beach sand.
Jack knew with utter certainty that he was the only living being ever to have penetrated this world. Some of the suspended sediment was biogenic, derived from diatoms and other organisms that had fallen from above, but unlike the abyssal plains of the Atlantic or the Pacific, the depths of the Black Sea lacked even microscopic life. He truly was in an underworld, a lifeless vacuum unparalleled anywhere else on earth.
For a moment it seemed as if the swirling mass would materialize as ghostly faces of long-dead mariners fated to dance a macabre jig for all eternity with the ebb and flow of the silt. Jack forced his mind to concentrate on the task at hand. The sediment was settling much faster than he had anticipated, the particles compacting with the glutinous density of mud in a tidal flat. Already it had buried the top of the command module and was creeping alarmingly up the legs of the ADSA. He had only seconds to act before it became an immovable sarcophagus on the seabed.
He engaged the buoyancy compensator and filled the reservoir on his back with air, quickly reducing the suit to neutral. As the readout turned to positive he pushed the joystick and twisted the throttle. With a lurch he moved upward, the sediment cascading past with increasing rapidity. He switched off the water jet to avoid clogging the intake and continued his ascent using buoyancy alone. For what seemed an eternity he rose through an unrelenting maelstrom. Then almost thirty metres above the wreckage he was free of it. He rose another twenty metres before neutralizing his buoyancy and angling his lights down towar
ds the ooze that now entombed the wreckage of Seaquest.
The scene was impossible to fix to any kind of reality. It was like a satellite image of a vast tropical storm, the eddies of sediment swirling slowly like giant cyclones. He half expected to see flashes of light from electrical storms raging beneath.
He turned his attention to the sonar scanner he had activated moments before. The circular screen revealed the trench-like profile of the chasm, its features more sharply accentuated now the sensor array was clear of silt. He called up the NAVSURV program and tapped in the grid co-ordinates he had memorized for Seaquest’s final surface position and the north shore of the island. With known reference co-ordinates NAVSURV could plot present position, lay in a best-fit course and make continuous modifications as the terrain unfolded on the sonar display.
He flipped on the autopilot and watched as the computer fed data into the propulsion and buoyancy units. As the program finalized, he extracted the headset from its housing and pulled down the visor. The headset was hard-wired to the computer via a flexicord umbilical but still allowed complete freedom of movement, the visor acting as a see-through screen so he could still monitor the viewports.
He activated a control and the visor came to life. His view was filtered through a pale green lattice that changed in shape with every movement of his head. Like a pilot in a flight simulator, he was seeing a virtual-reality image of the topography around him, a three-dimensional version of the sonar display. The softly hued lines were a reassurance that he was not trapped in some eternal nightmare, that this was a finite world with boundaries that could be surmounted if his luck continued to hold.
As the water jets fired up and he began to move forward, Jack saw that the metallic joints of the arms had turned a vivid yellow. He remembered why the depths of the Black Sea were so utterly sterile. It was hydrogen sulphide, a byproduct of bacteria decomposing organic matter that flowed in with the rivers. He was mired in a vat of poison bigger than the world’s entire chemical weapons arsenal, a reeking brew that would destroy his sense of smell at the first whiff and kill him with one breath.
The ADSA had been designed to the latest specifications for chemical and biological exposure as well as extreme pressure environments. But Jack knew it was only a matter of time before sulphur corrosion ate through a joint where the metal was exposed. Even a tiny ingression would prove deadly. He felt a cold wave of certainty pass through him, a sure knowledge he was trespassing in a world where even the dead were unwanted.
After a final systems check he gripped the throttle and stared grimly into the void in front of him.
“Right,” he muttered. “Time to revisit old friends.”
Less than five minutes after emerging from the silt storm Jack had reached the western wall of the canyon. The three-dimensional lattice projected on his visor melded precisely with the contours of the rock face now visible ahead, a colossal precipice that reared four hundred metres above him. As he panned the light over the wall he saw that the rock was as stark as a freshly hewn quarry face, its surface untouched by marine growth since titanic forces had rent the sea floor a million years before.
He powered the transverse stern thruster and brought the ADSA round on a southerly course parallel to the rock face. Twenty metres below him the sediment maelstrom seemed to seethe and boil, a forbidding netherworld halfway between liquid and solid that lapped the wall of the canyon. By maintaining a constant altitude above the slope he was steadily climbing, the depth gauge registering a rise of almost a hundred metres in his first half-kilometre along the canyon wall.
As the gradient angled more sharply, a sector of the canyon floor appeared that was entirely denuded of sediment. Jack guessed it was an area where sediment had accumulated and then avalanched down the slope. He knew this was a danger zone; any disturbance could dislodge sediment further up the slope and engulf him.
The exposed sea floor was covered in a bizarre accretion, a crystalline mass stained a sickly yellow by the hydrogen sulphide that poisoned the water. He bled the buoyancy reservoir and sank down, at the same time extending a vacuum probe to sample the accretion. Moments later the results flashed up on the screen. It was sodium chloride, common salt. He was looking at fallout from the evaporation thousands of years before, at the vast bed of brine that had precipitated into the abyss when the Bosporus had sealed off the Black Sea during the Ice Age. The canyon Jack had christened the Atlantis Rift would have been a sump for the entire south-eastern sector of the sea.
As he jetted forward, the carpet of brine became patchy and gave way to a contorted landscape of shadowy shapes. It was a lava field, a jumble of frozen pirouettes where magma had welled up and solidified as it met the frigid water.
His view was interrupted by an opaque haze that shimmered like a diaphanous veil. The external temperature gauge soared to a horrifying 350 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead. He barely registered the change before he was jolted violently forward and the ADSA spiralled out of control towards the canyon floor. On impulse he switched off the thrusters just as the ADSA bounced and then came to rest facedown, the forward battery pod immobilized between folds of lava and the visor pressed against a jagged eruption of rock.
Jack raised himself on all fours inside the ADSA and crouched low over the control panel. He saw with relief that the LCD screens were still functioning. Once again he had been incredibly lucky. If there had been significant damage he would probably have been dead by now, the external pressure of several tons per square inch bearing down on any weakness and guaranteeing a swift if hideous end.
He put a mental block on the nightmarish world outside and concentrated on extricating himself from the lava folds. The propulsion unit would be of little use as it was mounted on the back and only provided lateral and transverse thrust. He would have to use the buoyancy compensator. The manual override was operated from a two-way trigger on the joystick, backward pressure bleeding air in and forward pressure venting it.
After bracing himself, he squeezed hard. He could hear the burst of air entering the reservoir and watched the dial creep up to maximum capacity. To his dismay there was absolutely no movement. He emptied the reservoir and filled it again, with the same result. He knew he could not repeat the procedure without depleting the air supply beyond safety margins.
His only fallback was to wrest the ADSA physically from the seabed. So far he had only been deploying the ADSA in submersible mode but it was also a true inner-space suit, designed for the underwater equivalent of moon walking. Despite its cumbersome appearance, it was highly mobile, its thirty-kilogramme submerged weight allowing movement that would have been the envy of any astronaut.
He carefully extended his arms and legs until he was spread-eagled. After angling the pincers into the seabed and locking the joints, he wedged his elbows against the upper carapace with his hands splayed below. Everything now depended on his ability to rip the battery pod from the vice of rock that was holding it.
With every fibre in his being Jack heaved upwards. As he arched back into the harness he was convulsed by pain from his gunshot wound. He knew it was now or never, that his body had been pushed to the limit and would soon lose the strength to do his bidding.
He was about to collapse in exhaustion when there was a grinding sound and a barely perceptible upward movement. He threw in all his reserves and strained one last time. Suddenly the ADSA broke free and sprang up on its feet, the jolt throwing him against the console.
He was free.
After flooding the buoyancy reservoir to prevent the ADSA from rocketing upwards, he looked around him. Ahead were undulations where slow-flowing rivers of lava had solidified into bulbous pillows of rock. To his right was a huge lava pillar, a hollow cast five metres high where quick-flowing lava had trapped water which had then boiled and pushed the cooling rock upwards. Next to it was another eruption of igneous rock, this one more like a miniature volcano that showed up yellow and red-brown in the floodlight. Jack guessed t
hat the scorching blast of heat that had jolted him had come from a hydrothermal vent, an open pore in the seabed where superheated water belched up from the magma lake below the rift. As he looked at the miniature volcano, the cone ejected a jet-black plume like a factory chimney. It was what geologists called a black smoker, a cloud laden with minerals that precipitated to blanket the surrounding sea floor. He thought back to the extraordinary entrance chamber to Atlantis, its walls shimmering with minerals which could well have originated in a deep-sea vent thrust upwards as the volcano formed.
Hydrothermal vents should be teeming with life, Jack thought uneasily, each one a miniature oasis that attracted larval organisms drifting down from far above. They were unique ecosystems based on chemicals rather than photosynthesis, on the ability of microbes to metabolize the hydrogen sulphide from the vents and provide the first links in a food chain utterly divorced from the life-giving properties of the sun. But instead of armies of blood-red worms and carpets of organisms, there was nothing; the lava chimneys loomed around him like the blackened stumps of trees after a forest fire. In the poisonous depths of the Black Sea not even the simplest bacteria could survive. It was a wasteland where the wonder of creation seemed to have been eclipsed by the powers of darkness. Jack suddenly wanted to be away from this place that was so utterly devoid of life, that seemed to repudiate all the forces that had brought him into existence.
He tore his gaze away from the bleak scene outside and scanned the instrument display. The sonar showed he was 30 metres from the western face of the chasm and 150 metres shallower than the wreck of Seaquest, his absolute depth now reading just over 300 metres. He was a third of the way to the island, which now lay just over two kilometres due south.
He looked ahead and saw a milky haze like a towering sand dune. It was the leading edge of a drift of unstable sediment, an indication that the area of substrate exposed by the avalanche was coming to an end. All round him were scour marks caused by previous slides. He needed to be above the zone of turbulence in case his motion triggered another avalanche. He closed his left hand round the buoyancy control and his right hand on the thruster stick, at the same time leaning forward for a final look outside.
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