Deep Time

by Rob Sangster

  “There are about forty others. You can see them after we get back from your next dive.” He hoped Drake wouldn’t have his crew grab the camera and discover the rest.

  “Are you saying you won’t give me those photos unless I take you with me?”

  Jack knew that was meant as a challenge so he didn’t answer.

  “All right, goddamn it, but I make every decision. No discussion. I have my agenda for this dive. You have a different one. If they conflict while we’re down there or after we get back, I still get the photos. And you keep my interest in this site secret, agreed?”

  “Of course.” Drake might get what he wanted without Jack, but without Drake, Jack would never reach Barbas’s operation on the seafloor.

  “If I make the discoveries I hope to, I’ll be a very big deal in the history books. That means everything to me, and I won’t let Renatus beat me out of it. If Barbas is only mining minerals and doesn’t bother the HTV itself, he’s no threat to me. If he is harming the HTV, I’ll make him regret it. Make sure you’re not a problem either.”

  Jack decided to let the threat pass. “We’ll just follow the yellow brick road and see where it takes us.” He didn’t need a prophet to tell him that there was a collision coming up.

  “Challenger will get underway at noon. Be back here at 1100 hours.”

  He was going to be totally dependent on this guy while crammed into a tiny sub thousands of feet under the surface of the ocean. What’s more, he could already feel the claustrophobia snake crawling in his veins.

  Chapter 17

  July 23

  5:00 a.m.

  Northeast Pacific Ocean

  JACK FELT PEGASUS sway side to side beneath the A-frame as Challenger’s winch slowly lowered them to begin their journey to the seabed. First contact with the ocean was gentle. For a few seconds, waves churned around the portholes, and then they entered a new realm. His heart was beating fast. Could be excitement. Could be his old nemesis, claustrophobia.

  He’d expected silence inside the sub. Instead, there was a background hum of motors and the whine of the blower forcing exhaled air through a filter that absorbed CO2 and made the air safe to breathe again.

  Drake spoke quietly in his raspy voice into a headset microphone. “Challenger, checklist complete. Everything A-1 here. Commencing dive now.”

  As they descended, Jack was surprised by the density of plankton and other minute marine life that surrounded the sub. He didn’t recognize most of the fish species he saw, but they were abundant. When light from above grew fainter, he felt a chill and zipped up his fleece vest.

  Pegasus’s sleek titanium-carbon fiber hull and tight cockpit made him feel like he was sitting in a Formula 1 McLaren-Mercedes race car, except that Pegasus had an elongated quartz dome and four short wings instead of wheels. The design was so futuristic, Pegasus could have brought an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth.

  He and Drake sat inside separate loops of the M-shaped instrument panel with a console between them. The space was barely adequate for Drake’s small frame, so Jack’s right shoulder was pressed hard against the fuselage, his knees halfway to his chest. The tight quarters gave him a feeling of profound unease, but he would put up with that and more. He had to. This dive was his only way of answering two questions. Was Barbas’s mining creating an ecological disaster on the seabed? And what was he doing in addition to mining that justified the size and expense of the Chaos Project?

  The only interior lights were red and extremely dim to maintain night vision. Drake seemed unaffected by the darkness as he played the backlit touchscreen in front of him like Ray Charles at his keyboard. He tapped in adjustments almost continuously. The screen was so complex that if something happened to Drake, say a heart attack, neither of them would ever reach the surface.

  “Computer,” Drake said, “what is our depth?”

  “Two thousand one hundred and seven feet,” came the answer from beneath the screen.

  “Good voice recognition,” Jack said, impressed.

  “Saves time and prevents mistakes if things get hairy,” Drake said. “Jack, look to your right.”

  Out of the darkness, a wall materialized yards away. Then he saw an unblinking eye gliding beside the sub. It took several seconds to realize it was imbedded in a massive, block-shaped head. The creature was more than three times the length of the sub.

  “Sperm whale,” Drake whispered. “Computer. Outside audio,” and they heard bursts of staccato clicking sounds.

  Is that a greeting or is it threatening trespassers?

  “Don’t worry about him, Jack. They’ve flipped many a whaleboat and sometimes ram small ships until they sink, but I think this one’s just curious.”

  The whale symbolized the new world they’d entered, where he and Drake were no longer at the top of the food chain.

  “But if something attacked Pegasus, do you have any weapons?”

  “Two torpedo launch tubes, six torpedoes. They pack a hell of a punch, but I can’t guide them after the launch. Two are ready to go, and the others reload automatically in seconds, so make damn sure you don’t touch this firing mechanism.” He pointed to two red-tipped buttons on a small pedestal on the console between them.

  Jack made a mental note of that warning. The idea of having to use torpedoes to defend the sub reminded him of how alien this environment was. He had no experience to rely on. Even worse, he had no control of the sub. He was completely in Drake’s hands.

  “How long before we reach the seabed?”

  “Depends on several variables. Because Challenger had to stay far away from Barbas’s platform, it will take quite a while to cover the horizontal distance. If we find what I hope when we get there, I guarantee time will pass like super fast-forward. An hour on the bottom should be enough for this dive.”

  “I guess you had plenty of time to test Pegasus, I mean for safety.”

  “I keep her in a secluded waterfront hangar in the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Seattle, and every time I slip her out for sea trials, something new goes wrong. Real pain in the ass.”

  “But you fixed everything.”

  “No guarantees in this business. If anything goes wrong, no rescue team could reach us in time, so I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think she was seaworthy. Mathematically, she’s designed to withstand the pressure to at least forty thousand feet down. Today, we’ll bottom out at around seventy-two hundred. Of course, even at that depth a microscopic failure in hull integrity would crush us in an instant.” He offered what seemed to be a smile. “No suffering at all.”

  That was definitely not reassuring. He sensed there were more mechanical uncertainties than Drake was admitting.

  When the sub’s powerful searchlights were off, they were immersed in absolute blackness. Then suddenly they entered a haze of lights, bioluminescence from unseen creatures.

  Long minutes later, Drake said, “This is where the treasure hunt begins. We’re hovering sixty feet above the seabed, more or less under Barbas’s platform. Put on the glasses I gave you. I’m going to turn on the globe lights and see what’s out there. I assume Barbas’s operations are monitored by external cameras, but they have very limited range down here. They’ll be on the seafloor, so I’m staying above them and out of sight . . . I hope.”

  The exterior lights came on silently, flooding 360 degrees around them.

  “I’ll be damned!” Drake exclaimed. Both hands went to the touchscreen, maybe to retreat, but when he recognized what he saw, he paused.

  The seabed in front of them was alive with machines. Some were only a couple of feet tall, several at least eight feet. They’d been operating in the pitch black and paid no attention to the light or to the sub. Their methodical movements explained everything.

  “My God, they’re all robots,” Drake said.

&n
bsp; “Those small tractor-like things have sensors that identify different types of metallic nodules,” Jack replied. “The tall ones are pile drivers. The crawlers send them a signal to come over and smash up the seafloor. Then those backhoes drag the rocks to a suction tube—there’s one over there—that leads to a grinder. It will break them up, separate out the worthless rock and wash it away. What’s left will be suctioned to the surface.”

  Drake’s head snapped in his direction. “How do you know all that? Have you been conning me?”

  “I learned a lot when I was on Barbas’s platform, including how this part of his system works.”

  The robots moved in programmed patterns that evolved and adapted as they progressed relentlessly into new areas of the seabed. He saw them as a cross between locusts and whirling dervishes, or maybe weird ballet dancers.

  “Can you maneuver in that direction to follow the tubes?”

  “Huh! I can make Pegasus dance the tango.”

  “There it is.” The grinder plant emerged from the darkness, a steel box about thirty by fifty feet that resembled a storage container for a cargo ship. Tubes running along the seafloor entered its side, and another set of tubes left its front end and rose toward the surface. From its rear, a steady jet of water flushed crushed rock, sand, and mud back to the seabed. A plume of muck rose about twenty feet and then spread out, forming a canopy thicker than Los Angeles smog.

  “It took world-class engineers to create all this,” Drake said. “Every bit of this was put into place from the platform, and orders to the machines come from there. It’s like a space station.”

  “Look at where the robots have already mined.” Jack pointed to their left. “It looks like the Mojave Desert. And the grinder is leaving behind a huge ridge of tailings. No living organism could survive there.” This was part of what he’d come to see, proof that Barbas’s mining wasn’t ecologically benign.

  While they hovered, watching the tireless robots perform their tasks, Jack got an eerie feeling. “I wonder if Barbas knows we’re here.”

  “No lights were triggered when Pegasus showed up, but he could have other kinds of sensors reporting our presence back to the surface. I’m more worried he might have some sort of weapons that attack trespassers.”

  That’s great. And here we are crammed inside an eggshell.

  “Steve, this mining operation is much more sophisticated than I expected, but I knew it was here. Let’s move on and see if we can find something I hope isn’t here.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Evidence that Barbas is doing more down here than what we’ve seen.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “In other words, a wild goose chase when you don’t know what a goose looks like,” Drake scoffed. “Well, I do know what an HTV looks like, and finding mine is the only reason I’m here. One thing for sure, it took an HTV to produce the metals Barbas is mining. Judging from the number of robots, there must be megatons of the stuff. That means it’s one hell of a big HTV.”

  Drake eased Pegasus slowly forward, pausing every fifteen seconds to turn on the lights and look around. By the fourth pause, each dark interval seemed like five minutes to Jack.

  When the lights flooded the area around them, Drake said, “Something there.” He put the sub in reverse briefly, then climbed about fifty feet. “Staying out of camera range.”

  Jack saw something he’d seen diagrammed in a research paper. It was what he’d feared he would find. “That has to be what I’m looking for.”

  Lying flat on the seafloor ahead of them was a grid like a great waffle made of poles connecting five boxes. He recognized it as a template lowered into position from the platform. Each box represented a separate location for drilling below the seabed. As the drills went deeper, they would diverge to serve sites far apart. On top of each box was a blowout preventer that, in theory, would enable a technician on the platform to cut off the upward flow if the system started to run wild. From the center of each preventer rose a flexible marine riser, a tube that held a drill bit, and the drill string that connected the template to Chaos. There were no robots here. This had nothing to do with mining minerals.

  “You know what that is?” he asked Drake.

  “It looks like the kind of oil drilling rig used by ExxonMobil and the others.” Then he pointed to the right. “But I have no idea what that thing is.”

  “That thing” was a metal cylinder lying on its side. It was about twenty feet long, six feet in diameter. Cables ran from the cylinder to each of the marine risers. A larger cable rose up out of sight above the cylinder. Could be cables for transmitting electricity, but for what purpose?

  “Can you tell from that equipment whether Barbas is after oil?” Jack asked.

  “No oil drilling rig I’ve heard of has anything like that cylinder and all those cables. Take a last look. I’ve wasted too much time here already. There’s a monster HTV around here. I can smell it.”

  While Drake studied the readings that he hoped would lead him to the HTV, Jack sat back, overwhelmed. His belief that Barbas had a project more important than mining had been based on a little reasoning and a lot of speculation. Seeing the reality changed everything. It was the proof he’d come after. Now he knew for sure that Barbas was seeking something that justified the mammoth expenditures he’d made. Something worth keeping top secret and protecting with attack helicopters. He’d find out what that was. And if it had to be stopped? That was a mountain so high he’d take it a step at a time.

  A soft bump on the hull behind his right shoulder interrupted his thoughts, then a bump on the dome above. He looked up. Some kind of creature that resembled a three-foot long lobster with a fat belly seemed to be sitting on the dome. “What’s that?”

  Drake looked up and immediately said, “Uh oh.” He pointed out two more of the creatures moving in their direction. Their most prominent features were eyes whose large lenses had hundreds of facets. They had overlapping scales, seven pairs of legs, and four sets of jaws. Their quivering antennae were stretching out to experience Pegasus.

  “Those are giant isopods,” Drake said grimly.

  “As giants go, they’re not much.”

  “It’s one of the most dangerous life forms down here. They’re carnivores that gorge until they can’t move.”

  “They don’t look big enough to make a scratch on Pegasus.”

  Drake shot him a pained look. “Forget about scratches. They’re like cockroaches. When you see one isopod, there are hundreds or thousands not far away.” Drake swung the searchlights in all directions. They were there, converging on what they thought was their next big feast. “Those two have attached themselves to our hull with an underwater adhesive stronger than anything we have on land. If enough of them get to us, their weight will keep Pegasus from rising to the surface . . . ever.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know how fast they can move, but I’ll try to outrun them.”

  As Drake got Pegasus moving, Jack felt two more bumps, one directly over his head. The creature looked like it was sitting in a pool of mucus. He realized he was gripping the console with both hands, senses vibrating in anticipation of feeling more bumps. As the entire swarm of isopods turned to face Pegasus, Drake steered away from them, but they sped up and moved in fast.

  Chapter 18

  July 23

  3:00 p.m.

  Northeast Pacific Ocean

  BUMB, BUMP. MORE isopods struck the dome—bump—but Pegasus was moving too fast for them to attach themselves to the hull. Jack saw dozens fall back. In less than a minute, they, except for the ones still locked on to the hull, had disappeared behind the sub.

  “Close call,” he said. He tried to sound casual, but he felt even more compressed by the cramped space. They
’d come damned close to being pinned to the seabed, and he’d been powerless to prevent it. Having no control was stressing him out.

  Drake made more adjustments with his fingertips. “When I got serious about discovering HTVs, that meant I’d have to go to them, whether that was three thousand feet or twenty-three thousand feet. If something bad happens, I’ll die. So a close call counts for nothing.”

  Fine for Drake, but the isopod attack still seemed like a damned close call.

  Drake went on. “The sunken ships and the gold trinkets I’ve located don’t mean shit in the long run. My real contribution will be based on what I learn from exploring hydrothermal vents. That’s why I’ll take big risks and run over anyone in my way.”

  “Does that include Barbas?” He knew it did and said it to provoke Drake.

  “Damn straight. To me, this HTV is a shrine. It generates life forms that I think will transform the world. If Barbas’s robot wrecking balls damage this HTV, I’ll stop him or die trying.”

  “What about Renatus?”

  “He worries me for a different reason. He must have found this HTV for Barbas. My interest is in the HTV for itself. His interest in it may be only as it relates to the mining operation. If it’s more than that, we’re going to lock horns. I know he’s aboard the platform and, because they spotted Challenger, he knows I’m in the vicinity, but he doesn’t know why—yet. I’m ready to get it on.”

  Drake sounded combative but, despite his big talk, he had no chance against the Barbas-Renatus juggernaut. Besides, Drake was worried about small potatoes compared to the danger that drill rig, or whatever it was, could mean. And Jack had no more chance than Drake unless he could figure out what was going on.

  That meant he and Gano had to get onto Ironbound Island and see what they could uncover. Barbas had a powerful reason for choosing such a remote place and protecting it with concertina wire. He needed to know what that reason was.

  Suddenly the cockpit was filled with repeated beeps. Jack saw bars spiking on one of the displays. “What the hell is it this time?”