Beyond the Ice Limit

55

IN THE MISSION control room, Glinn replayed, yet again, the nuclear simulation as the others watched in silence. It was as if he was looking for something they had missed. But Gideon knew that nothing had been missed. The explosion would simply not reach the deeply buried seeds, no matter what parameters they changed.

Glinn shut down the monitor, pushed the keyboard away. There was a long silence. Gideon glanced at McFarlane, but his face was dark and inscrutable.

“All right,” said Glinn. “We’ll fire the nuke anyway and pray it works.”

At this, McFarlane issued a low, dark laugh. “Pray,” he said. “Is that where we’re at?”

“What other choice do we have? We’re out of time.” He turned, “Gideon, arm the nuke.”

“You can’t do that,” McFarlane said. “You’re so eaten up with guilt about how you delayed acting on the Rolvaag that now you’re making the opposite mistake—rushing headlong into a foolish, useless action.”

Glinn ignored this. “Gideon? Arm the nuke. And load it on the ROV. I’ll give you all the personnel you need to get this done as fast as possible.”

Gideon once again saw the gleam in Glinn’s normally unexpressive eyes. The man had a point. The nuke was their only option. It was only a matter of time until either they were all infected, or the chain of command aboard ship broke down completely. It could work. It would probably destroy the alien brain, at the very least—and they had no solid evidence that all the brains had to be destroyed in order to kill the entity…

“This is just what Lloyd warned about,” McFarlane said. “You’re too close to this. Your judgment is clouded. You’re going to doom us all.”

“What other options do we have? Unless we act—unless we detonate that bomb—the entire world is doomed.” Glinn turned back to Gideon. “Arm the bomb.”

Gideon took a ragged breath. “No,” he said after a moment. “No. McFarlane’s right. We only have one shot at this. We can’t just detonate and hope for the best—not unless we’re sure it’s going to work. There must be another way.”

“If you won’t arm it, I will.” Glinn got up to leave.

“Wait.”

Gideon glanced over. McFarlane had grasped Glinn’s arm. The meteorite hunter’s face was hollow and dark and beaded in sweat.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“I’m listening,” Glinn said.

“Years ago, I explored Aklavik, an unusual meteorite crater in northern Canada. One in which a very small impactor resulted in a gigantic crater. I wondered: how did this small rock gouge such a large hole?”

“Go on.”

“So I consulted several physicists. The meteorite hit a glacier. It appears the strike caused a phenomenon known as a liquid-liquid explosion.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Glinn, dubiously.

“It’s rare. What happens is two liquids, one cold and one super-hot, are violently mixed together. That in turn creates a huge surface area for immediate heat transfer, and one of the liquids undergoes instantaneous, explosive boiling. It’s a big problem in steel mills, for example, if molten steel breaks out and flows over wet concrete. I ought to know—I worked in just such a mill for a while, three years back.”

“So how did that work with the meteorite and ice?” asked Glinn. “Both are solids.”

“The nickel-iron meteorite liquefied from the shock of impact. That’s common. The ice also liquefied from the shock wave. The two mingled violently, and a vast quantity of water boiled in a millisecond, causing a massive explosion.”

“You think that will happen with our nuke?” Gideon asked. “In the deep ocean?”

“No. The water won’t do it. You need a second liquid—a very hot one—to mix with it.”

“Such as?”

“Metal. Steel. You’d need a large amount of molten metal to mix with the water.”

“So we put the bomb in a metal shell?”

“That’s not nearly enough,” said McFarlane. “You want as much metal as possible. Tons and tons of it.”

“We can’t wrap tons of metal around the bomb,” said Gideon. “We wouldn’t be able to deliver it.”

“You don’t have to wrap the bomb. You could lay sheets of metal on the seafloor. Lay them flat. You do it above where those seeds are growing. That’ll focus the explosion.”

“Sheets of metal?”

“There must be huge amounts of steel plating on this ship. We could cut a bunch of bulkheads out, stack the sheets of steel on the bottom, then detonate the nuke above them. Close enough for the shock wave to liquefy the steel.”

“How much steel are you talking about?” asked Glinn.

“I’d guess a couple hundred tons, at least. The more the better.”

A silence. “How do you propose to stack hundreds of tons of steel two miles down?”

“Lower the plates on cables.”

“We have two deepwater cables and one winch,” said Glinn. “The cables are for emergency lifting of a DSV and are rated to no more than twenty-five hundred pounds displacement mass. It would take hours to lower each plate. Even if we could remove sufficient plating from the ship, we’d never get that much metal down there in time. And will the creature just sit still doing nothing while we stack iron around it?”

“We could dump the metal sheets overboard,” said McFarlane.

“Those sheets would orient themselves as they sank,” Glinn said. “They would end up being driven into the mud vertically. Would that work?”

“No,” said McFarlane.

“Brilliant idea,” Glinn said. “A shame it isn’t feasible.” Again he turned to leave.

Gideon stopped him. “Perhaps this is insane. But isn’t there already a huge amount of metal lying down there?”

Glinn frowned impatiently. “Where?”

“The Rolvaag, of course.”