“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Then you’d better change,” advised Brawley. “Your dress is very pretty, but I don’t think it would do a couple of hundred meters down. I’ll have one of the men provide something more appropriate.”
Ten minutes later Jennifer Red Cloud rejoined them. She was barefoot and wore a tight white T-shirt and a pair of black satin swimming trunks. They belonged to Tulsi Ram Sharma, an oceanographer from Bombay so thin he had to stand twice in the same place to cast a shadow. Captain Brawley sighed and shot a glance at Forte. Some people had all the luck.
The two-man navigation crew, having completed their surface check, opened the hatch and emerged.
“The cabin thermostat is a little temperamental today, sir, but otherwise the Mako’s working fine,” the craft’s skipper reported. “The back-room crew just reported aboard.”
“Very well,” said Brawley. “Recharge the oxygen tanks, check the air scrubbers again, and see that there’s fresh coffee and sandwiches aboard.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“It’s a beauty,” said Steve Brawley to Jennifer Red Cloud, “and you and your engineers deserve high marks for developing such a craft.”
The Raynes Rover was essentially five transparent glass and ceramic spheres, each 315 centimeters in diameter, locked in tandem by a massive steel frame festooned with skids, grabs, probes, air tanks, battery pods, extendable legs, compass dome, sonar housing, whip antennae, crash bars, TV cameras, high-intensity lights, propellers, maneuvering jets, and two long retractable swept-back wings like those on supersonic fighter planes.
The motors and other operating equipment were free-flooded outside the pressure-hull spheres and controlled by titanium-encased fiber-optic cables, the only break in the surfaces of the smooth spheres aside from the personnel hatches and service umbilicals.
Mrs. Red Cloud descended into the Rover, followed by Forte, who reached above his head to dog the water-tight hatch down tight. He was turning to the pilot’s seat when he found it already occupied by Jennifer Red Cloud.
“I’ll drive,” she said, buckling her belt and handing him the clipboard with the getting-underway checkoff list.
The Rover’s controls were very similar to those of an airplane, and they operated analogous control surfaces. The craft could do everything that an aircraft could do– barrel rolls, sideslips, Cuban eights–and it had the added virtue that it could not stall and fall out of the sky.
“Surface communication aerial,” read Forte.
“Deployed,” replied Jennifer Red Cloud, fingering the switch.
“Navigation transponder.”
“On.”
“Emergency flash and flare.”
“Armed.”
“Underwater communications transducer.”
“On standby”
“Ballast tanks.”
“Neutral buoyancy.”
“Ballast tank pumps.”
“Idling–disengaged.”
“Battery charge level.”
“Ninety-seven percent.”
“Autopilot status.”
“Off.”
“Cabin check.”
“That’s your department,” she said.
He looked back at the little toilet, operated the flush mechanism, and put a check after it on his list. The narrow bunk above and behind them had the regulation two pillows and three wool blankets on it, folded neatly. He inspected the small fridge: ten sandwiches, wrapped in foil; twenty bottles of mineral water; ten bars of plain chocolate. Enough to cross the Atlantic on. All interior lights were operating. Ventilating fan and air scrubber ditto.
“Cabin check okay,” Forte reported. “Cabin pressure?”
“Seven hundred sixty millimeters.”
“Temperature.
“Thirty Celsius, even.”
“Intercom.”
“Off.”
“It should be on.”
“Why? said Jennifer Red Cloud, surprised. “Are we carrying crew back there?”
“That’s right. The schedule’s too tight for a joyride. This is a working run. We’ll be down below for nearly ten hours. It’s not too late to change your mind. A reserve nav crew is standing by to take over if need be.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I came here to see what’s going on, and I can’t think of a better way than this.” Tight schedule. Oaf! she thought. No wonder he had never
gotten married: He didn’t need a wife; he needed a mother. At the rate he was dropping bombs, by the time they got back to the Lupe Alien she would have figured out fifty ways to sink his stupid iceberg. She’s make sure he remembered the Alamo.
She flipped on the intercom switch.
“Crew status report.”
“Ready to go,” came a voice through the cabin speakers. “Not raring to go, mind you, but ready. And say, what have you been munching on during your off-duty time, anyway, old buddy, estrogen eclairs?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Jennifer Red Cloud coldly.
“Yep. Just as I thought, I’ve been out to sea too long. I could have sworn you’d become a soprano, Tom.”
“I am not Tom. I am Jennifer–Mrs. Red Cloud to you,” she said, enunciating each word. “I am the captain on this descent, and unless you want to be looking for another job when we surface, don’t you forget it, buster!”
There was a stunned silence while the drivers in the sphere to the rear digested the fact that their ultimate boss had somehow assumed command of the mission.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” replied the one.
The other merely sighed.
In the command sphere, Ripley Forte read off the other items on the checklist, received the appropriate responses, and announced: “Raynes Rover Mako, ready to dive.”
Jennifer Red Cloud reached up and gripped the knurled knob of the flood lever and eased it forward.
“Flooding one and two,” she said.
“Four meters per minute,” reported Forte, his eyes on the speed of descent gauge.
She pushed the lever a notch farther forward.
“Seven meters per minute.”
They dropped past the clamshell hatch of the Lupe Alien into the open sea. Jennifer Red Cloud applied forward power, and the Mako went into a shallow dive.
“Clear to deploy diving planes?” she asked.
“Clear, but do not–repeat do not–deploy,” said Forte, glancing over at her.
“Why not?”
“We’re just beyond the continental shelf. Our target is
only 365 meters deep. Just activate the sonar-tracking device and the autopilot and set the speed for six knots, and we’ll be at our destination in four or five minutes.”
He shucked off his shoulder straps and turned in his seat. He pressed the coffee machine button and waited while coffee beans for a cup were ground to powder, mixed with boiling water, and decanted. He handed her the steaming porcelain cup and repeated the process for himself.
By now, the last vestiges of daylight had disappeared. The sunlight’s reds had been completely absorbed by the water at 20 meters. Beyond 45 the yellow wavelengths could not penetrate. At 100 the green would go, and at 200 the blues. But here, as they passed the 50-meter mark, the light was already so dim that Jennifer Red Cloud had to turn on the high-intensity lights. Even so, the water so effectively absorbed light that in the depths, with the strongest beam, they would not be able to see beyond about ten meters.
What she was supposed to see, Jennifer Red Cloud could only guess. Something that could tow a billion-ton iceberg? Nonsense.
And yet Ripley Forte, however ugly, however infuriating, was no fool. He had not spent literally billions of dollars for something that did not at least have a good chance of pulling an iceberg the nearly ten thousand miles from the Antarctic to Matagorda Bay in the Republic of Texas. It had to be big. Very big.
She sipped her coffee and thought big.
Submarines couldn’t be made big and powerful enough, obviously. But big could mean numbers, not size. How about a thousand whales yoked together? she thought, letting her fancy run wild.
Mermaids?…
23. THREADING THE NEEDLE
15 JANUARY 2008
JENNIFER RED CLOUD POINTED TO THE DOPPLER Distance-to-target indicator. It read 330 meters.
Forte nodded and lay back in his seat, hands folded behind his head.
“Tell me when to slow down,” she said.
“You’re the driver. Use your own judgment.”
“You’re a lot of help.”
At one hundred meters to target she was about to pull back on the throttle, when the submersible began to slow.
“Programmed?”
“Of course. This is a routine operation which will have to be repeated several thousand times without a hitch. We can’t afford pilot error.”
“I see.”
She took her hands off the controls and lifted her eyes from the instrument panel to scan the sea around them. In the bright lights of the high-intensity beams she could make out the fleeting forms of slow-cruising fish, and she knew even without looking at the digital sonar readout that they must be near the bottom. Pelagic species inhabit the hundred meters closest to the surface, where they feed upon sunlight-dependent plankton. Below a hundred meters or so, though, sea life is scarce in the watery desert where neither plants nor animals find sustenance. But near the bottom, where edible debris floats slowly down from the surface, demersal fishes now appear, like the ugly customer with the jutting bony jaw that was crossing their bow.
“But still no mermaids,” she said half to herself.
“How’s that?” asked Forte with an absent air.
“I was just thinking about how krill go for Band-Aids,” she returned smoothly.