Beyond the Ice Limit

15

OUT HIS RIGHT and left viewports, Gideon could see the yellow gleam of lights from his two companion DSVs, drifting down at approximately the same rate. He could hear the faint hiss of the air tanks and CO₂ scrubbers. During the forty-minute trip to the bottom, he eventually lost them in the blackness. After a long, boring ride he picked up their lights again as they slowed, nearing the bottom.

His first waypoint was a spot fifty meters from the split hull of the Rolvaag, at an altitude of thirty feet off the ocean floor. The autopilot gently brought him to the waypoint, the sub coming to rest. Gideon looked about, rotating the sub and peering into the gloom. He could see, a few hundred yards to his left, the blurry cluster of lights from Alex’s DSV, Paul, also hovering thirty feet above the seabed. Through the forward viewport he saw a similar cluster of lights from George.

Following protocol, he made contact using the UQC. “John, at waypoint one, calling Paul.”

“Paul here, I read you. At waypoint two.”

“John, calling George.”

“George here, I read you. At waypoint three.”

These names, Gideon thought, were starting to feel a little silly.

Glinn’s voice came in, from control, inflected with digital distortion. They were all on the same channel, and they now made their way through a set of safety checklists and review of the search protocols.

“Commence the mission,” said Glinn at last.

Gideon moved the central joystick, aiming the autopilot toward the Rolvaag. The engines hummed and the craft moved forward, approaching the wreck, headlights illuminating the gaping, petaled hull. Inside, he could see what looked like a forest of twisted metal beams.

He felt not a little twinge of claustrophobia at the thought of going in there.

On a flat-panel to his right, there was a schematic of the wrecked ship. This was overlaid by a blinking red dot, indicating his location. The black boxes appeared on the panel as a small orange target. The ship was huge; judging from the schematic, he would have to travel almost two hundred yards from the point of entry.

As he moved toward the gaping hull, the little red dot moved on the screen. In the background, he could hear Alex on the common frequency, speaking to mission control while she maneuvered Paul toward the Baobab. Manuel’s voice came through as well as he circled the area, surveying the ship and surrounding debris field.

Gideon, Glinn had told him, when you’re inside the Rolvaag, you’ll be temporarily cut off—not just from mission control, but from the other DSVs.

During the briefing, Gideon had learned that the normally open hull of the former supertanker, the Rolvaag, had been modified: it was webbed with struts and beams that braced the so-called cradle intended to hold the twenty-five-thousand-ton meteorite. Some of the beams, and the cradle itself, had been made of wood, because wood was a more flexible and giving material than steel, and the EES engineers had determined it would hold up better to the rolling of the ship in a storm, should they encounter one. They had indeed encountered a storm, a terrible one, made worse by the lack of engine power and damage to the ship inflicted by the pursuing Chilean destroyer. The rocking of the meteorite had eventually weakened the cradle and caused it to break loose, followed by an explosion that split the ship in two just as it was starting to sink. The source of this explosion had never been determined, but the theory was that the meteorite had reacted with the seawater.

As he moved toward the vast, wrecked area of the gigantic hold, the voices of George and Paul began to dissolve into digital static.

Gideon paused at the hull opening and used his controls to shine the spotlight around, probing the recesses ahead. It was a mess. He saw what he believed must be a portion of the former cradle, a huge, sled-like object, mangled and splintered, jammed up against a broken bulkhead. The forward part of the hull offered a relatively clear pathway for his DSV, but deeper in he saw a tangle of cables and struts that would have to be dealt with.

“Control, this is John. Entering the hull.”

The briefest of pauses over the low-baud UQC. Then, full of static: “John, we read you. Report back as soon as you can.”

He eased the stick forward; the DSV hummed as it entered the wrecked space. Skirting a massive, torn edge of slab steel, he moved deeper into the hold. Without any effort on his part, the sub smoothly avoided some hanging cables and a strut. The hiss of UQC now ceased entirely and a message appeared on the screen, indicating he had lost communications. Bubbles rose in front of the main viewport. A layer of silt lay over everything, softening the contours. He would have to take great care not to stir it up.

He was moving at the pace of a walk. Orange blobs of rust grew from the iron struts and particles drifted in the water, dancing sluggishly through his light. Below, the side of the hull was littered with splintered beams and struts, torn to pieces by the violence of the explosion. The splintered wood, while waterlogged and sunken, looked fresh. Clearly, this had been a massive explosion, strong enough to bulge out the iron hull plates, pop the rivets.

There was another body here: wearing a mechanic’s uniform, head torn away, crushed torso held in place by two broken beams.

Averting his eyes, Gideon checked the schematic; the red dot that represented his sub was now a third of the way to the access point inside the hull space.

A tangle of I-beams loomed ahead. The autopilot slowed and he moved the joystick, looking for a way around. There was a space between two girders that looked big enough, and he aimed for it, the autopilot easing through with finesse. But it was beginning to feel as if he were in a shattered forest after a battle, the girders like warped, broken trees. He probed this way and that through the maze-like jungle, each time finding a hole just wide enough to get through.

As he penetrated deeper into the wreck, it grew increasingly difficult to shake off the feeling of claustrophobia. The radio silence didn’t help; Gideon began to feel very much alone.

…Or was he? Because, strange as it seemed, he was also aware of a sense of being watched. Followed. He dismissed this as best he could: it was the sort of anxiety that occurred when walking in a dark forest at night, he told himself, and it dated back to the early days when humans were, in fact, hunted. And hadn’t he compared this environment to a forest—albeit a wrecked one?

And now, quite suddenly, he reached a point through which there seemed no way to pass. He maneuvered forward, slowly, until he was blocked. He turned one way, then another, and then another. There seemed no passage forward. Hovering in place like this, his engines stirred up the silt; he could no longer tell from which direction he’d come.

Jesus, what was I thinking—agreeing to pilot my way through hundreds of yards of wreckage, miles below the surface? No way do I have the experience to do this. And now I’ve gotten myself trapped—and can’t call for help. He started to panic, then quickly forced himself to calm down; the autopilot would, of course, know the way out. But to go farther, he’d have to do some cutting.

Doing his best to breathe slowly and deeply, he centered his attention on the beam blocking his way and raised the robotic arm, activating the underwater acetylene torch. It had its own set of controls and, to his relief, was surprisingly easy to use; the arm seeming to know exactly what he wanted it to do. Another example of a quasi-AI automatic control.

The torch popped to life, sending up a stream of bubbles and a white pinpoint flare. He maneuvered it toward the beam and began cutting, careful to make the cut slanted so the beam would fall away from him. But the AI software of the arm already knew that. In a few minutes, with a muffled snap, the beam toppled away and he was able to proceed.

He continued maneuvering, this time to the left, and paused to cut through another beam. Now his spotlight shone on the bulkhead of the forecastle deck. Because the ship was lying on its side, the deck was a vertical wall of steel, which made it much easier to deal with. His screen schematic showed him exactly where he was supposed to cut in order to reach the electronics hub, where the two black boxes—actually orange in color—were stored. A second flat-panel contained a diagram of the hub’s interior, indicating the exact location of the boxes. They should be easy to get at, as they were supposedly designed for ready access in a wrecked ship at depth.

He maneuvered the DSV to align it with the pre-programmed cutting lines, and then, with a mere touch of the controls, the arm flared once again into life. The protocol called for cutting the access opening in five stages: removing five smaller plates of steel, each cut designed so that the plates would drop away and not present a further obstacle.

Practically by rote, the mech arm cut the plates with unerring precision, and one by one they fell away. In ten minutes, the hole was big enough for the DSV to pass through. But still impeding the opening was a forest of pipes between the decking, and he had to cut through each pipe in turn. They, too, fell away cleanly.

Gideon positioned the sub and probed the space ahead with the spotlight before entering. It was an utter mess. The cabinets that once held computers and electronics had burst open, spewing their guts everywhere; the space was a tangle of wires, bundles, cables, and fiber optic.

As if that weren’t enough, beyond the tangle of wires was a body, arms and legs splayed, slowly drifting about, neutrally buoyant. Long blond hair floated in the silty cloud—it was the body of a woman. It was clothed in a uniform. Four bars: a captain. What was the name of the Rolvaag’s captain? Britton. Sally Britton.

So this was her. Gideon felt a strange mixture of regret and horror.

The corpse had its back to him and floated in the middle of the room, turning ever so slowly in what seemed a slow-motion ballet.

Behind the corpse, on the far wall, were two bright orange cubes, each about eighteen inches square, affixed to the wall with easily removable bolts, and with nothing nearby to impede access.

Except the floating body.

Gideon eased forward, extending the robotic arm. He lit the torch and cut his way through the cables. In a few minutes he had cleared a path and eased into it, approaching the corpse. With the arm extended he gently touched its torso, attempting to nudge it to a far corner; the push was uneven and caused the body to rotate more, turning to face him as it drifted away, arms outstretched as if yearning to be rescued.

Gideon stared in fascinated horror. The face was perfectly preserved, the blue eyes flashing in the intensity of the headlights, the mouth partly open, just a bit of pink tongue visible, the blond hair swirling into a coil of gold: a woman of about forty, attractive even in death.

Perhaps harder than he intended, he pushed the joystick forward and the DSV surged past the body. Reaching the orange boxes, he used the arm to pull the emergency bolts and put each box into the science basket in turn, securing them with tie-downs designed for the purpose.

Now to get the hell out.

Twisting the joystick, the sub made a one-eighty—and once again the body came into view, drifting toward him as if to block his way.

“Son of a bitch,” Gideon muttered, maneuvering around it and heading for the hole he’d cut in the bulkhead. A few keystrokes on the control board and the sub’s autopilot was retracing its route, with no input from him—and doing it perfectly.

In ten minutes he could see the ragged edges of the hull, and in another two he was outside the ship. He found himself taking deep gulps of air, as if emerging from a cave. The vise-like feeling of claustrophobia ebbed, and he mopped his brow, trying to get his heart rate back to normal. The UQC crackled back into life, the voices of mission control and the other two subs resuming. Thank God.

He radioed up. “Control, this is John. Mission accomplished. Black boxes retrieved.”

“Very good,” came Glinn’s voice. “Proceed to waypoint one and commence transmitting your data and the video feeds. You’re the first to complete your mission, so hold tight at the waypoint until all three of you are ready to ascend together.”

“Roger that.” He entered the pre-programmed waypoint into his control stack and the mini sub glided back to the location, about a hundred yards from the wreck, then came to a hovering stop. Gazing through the forward viewport, he saw a single tentacle from the anomalous life-form wandering across the mud. It looked like a thin snake or a worm of endless length. He thought of the huge Baobab-like thing towering above them all, and felt a shiver of both disgust and dread.

Then, shaking these feelings away, he settled in, preparing to transmit his datastream while waiting for the others to complete their assignments.