Beyond the Ice Limit

31

THE NUCLEAR WEAPON had been broken down in a most ingenious way, Gideon thought, so as to form six easily assembled pieces. Five of them were on racks, sealed and ready to go; the sixth, the gold-plated plutonium “pit,” had been housed elsewhere and would have to be loaded last, using special equipment.

The room was deep in the bowels of the ship, the close air smelling faintly of diesel fuel. Gideon gazed at the deadly pieces and considered the situation. The main body of the nuke was like two halves of a giant beach ball, already sporting slow and fast high-explosive lenses. The initiator was in a separate package, smaller than a golf ball and sealed in heavy lead foil. The detonators were in the fourth package, attached to wires, ready to be inserted into the brass chimney sleeves. The fifth package contained the small computer into which the detonator wires would be plugged and would—ultimately—send out the detonation signal.

Garza would soon be delivering, at Glinn’s orders, the final package containing the plutonium. Once he’d done that, the assembly sequence was simple. And then the bomb would be ready for arming.

The racks had been specially engineered to allow a single person, using computer-controlled mechanical assists and a ceiling winch, to assemble the bomb in about an hour. Testing would take another hour. Gideon was amazed at the elegant, beautifully simple engineering work Garza had done. As long as you knew what you were doing, it was almost as simple as putting together a set of shelves from Ikea.

Stuff like this didn’t exactly grow on trees. He wondered once again just how much EES had spent in order to procure it.

The actual arming of the bomb wouldn’t happen until just before it was to be used. It would be armed with a code, nicknamed ARM, to be entered into the computer by keypad. Only Glinn, Gideon, and Garza knew the code. The countdown to detonation could then be started with a simple keypress on that same keypad—or by a remote-located computer in mission control.

But the nuke—as Glinn had previously explained—had a fail-safe mechanism built into it. This was a second code, ABORT, that would immediately stop the countdown.

Again, only the three of them knew the abort code.

Gideon frowned. The more he thought about this arrangement, the less he liked it. His dislike was due in part to Lispenard’s horrible death. But it was also a result of the rumors swirling about the ship: that the sonic signals emitted by the creature were a form of communication; that, in its years sitting on the bottom of the sea, it had learned the only language it heard—whale-speak—and was now trying to communicate with them. If that were the case, it meant the Baobab was intelligent. It wasn’t some unthinking life-form operating on instinct, like a shark. It knew what it was doing.

It was evil. And yet it was—or might be—sentient. Even intelligent.

He did not like the idea that Garza or Glinn had the opportunity to stop the countdown and abort the bomb at the mere stroke of a key. Glinn did not particularly worry him: even though he was the one who’d refused to use the dead man’s switch on the Rolvaag, Gideon understood this time around the man’s deep animus toward the creature, his obsessive, Ahab-like desire to kill it. But he didn’t trust Garza. While he knew they all shared the same goal, the death of Lispenard and the creature’s attempt at communication had transformed Gideon’s view of the life-form growing underneath them. He was a different man from the one who had begun this mission, deeply concerned at the idea of setting off a nuclear explosion. He understood now the threat the entire planet faced if this malevolent thing was allowed to reproduce and spread. There could be no hesitation or pusillanimity in killing it.

And that was the problem. He had yet to complete the complex computer simulations modeling what would happen when a hundred-kiloton nuke was detonated two miles deep, either directly under or within triggering distance from the ship. Would the water diminish the effects of the blast—or magnify them? Air was a forgiving and flexible medium that allowed the force of such a blast to expand and disperse. But what would happen in an incompressible medium such as water under the pressure of four hundred atmospheres? And how would that affect the Batavia? It seemed to him that, at the very least, a gigantic eruption of steam would break the surface. The P-wave, traveling through water perhaps dozens of miles, could easily rupture the hull. And he was pretty sure it would generate a tsunami-type disturbance on the surface that might swamp or overturn the ship. When all the effects became known—and he would soon have to provide them with the results of his simulations—Gideon didn’t want Garza chickening out. He wanted to make sure that, once he assembled the bomb, he could arm and detonate it—and that no one could stop it.

No: he wasn’t worried about Glinn. The man had nerves of steel. But Garza…he was the cautious one. Even after the device was armed and the countdown started, the man might change his mind about the whole plan, decide it was too dicey, and code in ABORT before Gideon could stop him.

That could not be allowed to happen.

Gideon reached out and picked up the computer controller, peeling off its metallicized plastic wrap. He hefted it. It was a stainless-steel box about three by three by six inches, with a keypad, plus input and output ports. Inside was a single-function computer. Nothing overly complex. Nothing that couldn’t be reprogrammed.

Gideon had to smile.