Beyond the Ice Limit

52

GIDEON LEFT HIS cabin and headed for mission control, where he knew he would find Glinn. As he walked down the corridor, he heard, as he passed through crew quarters, voices raised in querulous complaint. A man came careening down the hall, smelling of alcohol, bumped into him, gave him an elaborate bow, and staggered on. As he passed the open door to the crew’s mess, he saw that a crowd had gathered, talking urgently among themselves.

He hurried on. Glinn was right: they had very little time before things fell apart on the ship, if they weren’t beginning to already. He wondered how the man would react to the news he was carrying.

The door to mission control was locked, but after identifying himself on the intercom he entered. Glinn was there, along with McFarlane. Both were hunched over a monitor. It was a view of the Baobab from the stationary camera. It was horribly active, the mouth extruding and swelling, then retracting, as if it were exercising some grotesque sex organ.

“The simulation is finished,” said Gideon.

They both looked up.

Gideon had been debating in his mind the best way to say it, but when actually faced with the task his carefully crafted explanation vanished. “It won’t work,” he said simply.

“Won’t work?” McFarlane repeated sharply.

“Not even close. The sediments act like a blanket. The shock wave won’t reach that cluster of brains.”

“I don’t believe it,” McFarlane said harshly. “Bury the nuke in the mud and set it off there. That’ll excavate a crater down to them.”

Gideon shook his head. “I already considered that. The simulation looked at various detonation altitudes above and within the seafloor. The best location is about two hundred meters above the bottom. The water pressure would propagate the shock wave to a larger area of seafloor, where it would penetrate the farthest. But not far enough.”

“Let’s see those simulations,” said Glinn.

“They’re on the ship’s network.” Gideon turned to the monitor, pulled up a keyboard, logged on, and ran the video simulation with all its various permutations, starting with the nuke exploding at the level of the seafloor, and then working up to a detonation half a mile above the Baobab. Each simulation showed the shock wave moving in slow motion through the water, hitting the ground, and continuing on—damping down and petering out in five to six hundred feet of depth. None of them reached the cluster of eggs, at a thousand feet deep.

“I can’t believe it,” McFarlane exploded. “This is a fucking nuclear weapon! You’ve set the parameters wrong.”

“No,” Gideon said. “The problem is, these deep-sea pelagic sediments are like a wet blanket. If it were solid rock it would be totally different. But it’s not—it’s like Jell-O.”

“So what’s the answer?” McFarlane asked furiously. “What have we got more powerful than a nuke? Can we go get an H-bomb? What else can we do? This is fucked up. Why wasn’t this simulation done six months ago?”

He halted his tirade, breathing heavily. Gideon looked at him. He felt utterly defeated. And to think he’d seriously considered reprogramming the nuke’s onboard computer so he could override an abort code, just in case the others got cold feet. What a joke. Now there was no question: everyone wanted to use the nuke. And every hour counted. But the damned thing wouldn’t be enough to kill the entity.

Glinn spoke quietly. “Are there any options, Gideon?”

Gideon shook his head. “One nuke. One shot.”