Operation: Siberia

Hugo Navikov PREHISTORIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIGHT THEM (An Except)

One of Katherine Muir’s favorite things about taking a panoramic submersible down was watching the bubbling waterline crawl up the viewing windows, letting her see the old, familiar world get replaced by the new, exciting one under the surface. But that was about the only thing she regretted about the design of her new vehicle, this sleek and solid lozenge built with viewports that were much stronger than those of any panoramic-view vessel, but much smaller, too.

Those bubble subs were wonderful for examining coral reefs, fish, and other sea life. Watching the amazing octopus as it changed its color, pattern, everything to make itself completely invisible to predators. The times she had watched them deploy such camouflage, the only way she even knew they were there was because she followed silently behind them and waited until they felt a threat. Then they slapped themselves against whatever surface was nearby… and disappeared. Truly, studying ocean life in the panoramic submersibles was a joy.

But this new vessel, Deep Thoughts, was made not to explore ocean creatures, but the ocean itself. Katherine and her husband, Sean, had designed the submersible, working hand in glove with some of the most innovative subaquatic transport engineers in the world. It had been a difficult decision whether to create a one-person vessel or one more like the bubble subs, with room for two. She and her husband wrestled with how cool it would be to explore together, but a submersible meant to reach the floor of the benthic depths 20,000 feet below the surface couldn’t be very big. So it came down to either giving up the amount of scientific and observational equipment that would allow a second passenger to ride or giving up the fun of doing it as a couple.

They decided in favor of more science. It was to be a research vessel, after all, funded by a variety of philanthropic and academic sources to expand the frontiers of human knowledge about the still little understood landscape and biome at the bottom of some of the deepest water on the planet. Benthic was as far down as one could go and still investigate “normal” undersea terrain. There were deeper fissures and channels, but the deepest average real estate on Earth was benthic, and scientists still knew near to nothing of what went on in the complete darkness at the bottom of this zone.

This wasn’t an expedition, despite the fact that they had a small documentary and communications ship, The Moaning Mermaid, along with their main launch and support vessel, Sea Legs. This was the second of four tests to make sure the submersible—christened D-Plus by the whole smart-aleck crew (because it was “below C level,” har dee har )—could handle the greater pressure and harsher environment it would encounter the farther it descended.

Katherine took the first test run, this to “just” 5,000 feet. Not terribly deep, but deep enough that a major malfunction would force the crew on Sea Legs to get the winch going and haul her back up by D-Plus’s tether, which also included data lines and fiber optics for communications. At a crisis point, however, the high-tech tether would just be a rope everybody needed to yank on immediately if they wanted to rescue the researcher tasked with making sure everybody got their paychecks.

As expected, however, the first test went off without a hitch, and she and Sean were pleased. Any major hiccups would have been obvious—or at least detectable—at 5,000 feet, so each of the next two tests would be to make sure the things they designed on land worked under the stresses of the deep ocean. Also, going to 10,000 feet exposed the submersible to double the pressure of 5,000 feet, and 20,000 feet would double the pressure again. The second test, with Sean at the controls, would venture almost two miles into the black depths; and the third, this time piloted by Katherine, would dive to 15,000. If D-Plus didn’t exhibit any major issues during the third dive, then the final test would touch down on the seafloor at roughly 20,000 feet and come back up almost immediately. If everything worked the way it had been designed to work—or most everything; no exploration went off perfectly—then the first real mission would spend a few hours at the bottom and see what there was to be seen. Take sediment samples, look at creatures that somehow made a life at four tons of pressure on every square inch, and perform a preplanned battery of observations and measurements. This particular area of the ocean bottom had never been explored, and many in the oceanographic community were watching the Muir mission with great interest.

Katherine took the first dive, and they were supposed to take turns, but somehow her klutz of a husband—they named their boat Sea Legs in honor of his many times he almost fell over on any size of watercraft—had managed to run afoul of a line on board the launch ship and dislocated three fingers on his right hand just that morning as they were setting up the winch for the next test. It was 2016, for the love of God! They weren’t sailing with Blackbeard here—who got caught up in rigging anymore?

Nevertheless, there it was: if a second test was to be performed, it would be Katherine Muir, not Sean, who would take D-Plus down. Piloting the submersible, even a deep-sea vessel going on what was essentially a controlled drop, required both hands and all ten of the pilot’s digits. But they told only their crew chief, Mickey Luch, about the change, since professional mariners, like those who worked the boats while scientists did their science-ing, were still a superstitious lot. Changes in plans made them antsy, to say the least. So she and Mickey just secured her in the sub without any announcement. Once she was in place, he told the crew they were making a switch—never you bunch mind why—and Katherine would be executing Test No. 2.

There was a small murmur of protest—the winch greaser (a job title that always elicited snickers but was quite important) and the camera specialist on deck were especially superstitious and vociferous—but Mickey just helped Katherine into D-Plus, and the assistants got it locked up tight and ready to go. This crew had overseen 10,000-foot dives many times, and that’s why they were hired as a team by the Muirs.

“Let’s move ’er out and get ’er down!” their chief shouted, and the A-frame winch structure slowly stretched its long crane out over the water. With a thumbs-up between Katherine and Mickey, the winch whined and the submersible was lowered into the choppy sea.

This would be a very awkward and dangerous point to stop the operation, so it wasn’t until that moment that Sean Muir stepped out onto the deck, his first three fingers wrapped in a splint. The next test dive wouldn’t be for two days, and he’d work through the pain if necessary—he was no stranger to the sea, and he had “played hurt” through worse than this. The crew was preoccupied with the task at hand, but when they saw the researcher on the deck, they took a moment to bust his balls and laugh at his “horrible” accident.

Some of them weren’t laughing, though. Sean knew that this switch—obviously due to the injury they could see with one glance at his right hand—would initiate rituals of touching wood (where they could find it) and prayers to Saint Michael, not to mention whispered oaths and grumblings about the expedition leader at the mariners’ table come chow time. Slipjack and Toro and Vanessa—the winch team—looked especially upset, although obviously trying to hide it so as not to visibly challenge Sean.

He nodded at all of them and released them to work on the dive. He and Katherine exchanged “See you soon! Love you!” through the interior camera feed and monitor as she was lowered into the water. Once in the water, she started testing instrumentation and such while Sean supervised the support crew on the surface.

The winch would be turning for an hour or so, meaning relatively little to do for the boat crew but help the scientists, if needed. Sean took the opportunity to motion for the three shaken-looking members of the winch crew to join him on the lee side of the huge spool, where it made enough noise to render eavesdropping impossible. When they had assembled, Sean said, “So what’s the rumpus here, guys? I know it’s considered bad luck to change things at the last minute, but—”

“It isn’t superstition, Doctor Muir,” Vanessa said, and just from that Sean knew she was trying not to be a nuisance but truly was upset. After their first meeting, he had asked the solid, sun-leathered woman to call him “Sean,” and she always had. But calling him by his title and surname was like her filing an official complaint. “Last-minute changes mean other last-minute changes, and those make for mistakes. We should’ve put off this dive until you were recovered from… did you break your fingers?”

“No, just dislocated them. Should be fine in a day or two.”

“Well, then, what I’m saying is even more true—we’ve had to wait days before because of rough seas, Sean… Doctor Muir. Why risk everything now? That’s your wife down there! How can you tempt fate with her under the water?”

Sean listened intently and respectfully, and she was right about last-minute changes often leading to mistakes, but the words “tempt fate” told him everything he needed to know about her objection. “Fate is what it is, Van, and by definition, we can’t change it. But you know that Kat and I are equally trained to pilot the sub, and we had equal hands in designing it. Really, it barely counts as a change at all. The weather gives us the chance to do things on schedule—we have to take advantage of that.”

Vanessa didn’t look thrilled with what he said, but she nodded and even gave him an “Aye, sir.” Formal, indeed, but he hoped that its vestigial tone of worry would vanish once plans returned to normal and his wife and he got back into the correct rotation. He didn’t like to “pull rank” or tell hard-working people such as these to fall in line or start swimming home. They were professionals upon whom he relied, and he treated them that way. But they had to respect his decisions, too, and he had decided operating D-Plus without the use of three of his favorite fingers was not going to get this expedition where it needed to go, not on schedule.

“Thank you, Vanessa, that’s all.” He said to Slipjack and Toro, “You guys stay here for a second, okay? I need to check on Kat. On the descent, I mean.”

He rushed over to the video feed and radio comm, swept up the transceiver and pushed the black button with his left hand’s thumb. “How are you doing down there, my dear?”

Katherine’s grin on the video was infectious. “I believe you mean ‘How are you doing down there, Professor Muir?’”

“Of course.”

She laughed. “All is well. We’re at almost 2,500 feet. Everything is humming along just right. The next 7,500 should be a breeze. How’re your poor fingers?”

Sean couldn’t help hoping the others on deck didn’t hear. “Um, they’re great. So, seen any new friends down there?” That was a weird and stupid question, he realized, but he was anxious.

“Well, we’re deep in the dysphotic zone, almost to aphotic, so if anything wants to be seen, it has to make the first move and get in front of my lights. All I have is darkness… as you’d well know if you’d been paying attention. What have you been doing up there while I’m down here? Looking for clues?”

Clues? What the shit? He let out a strained exhalation that sounded more like he was choking on something than laughing. “What are you… clues to what?” he said, looking around like a paranoid wino at the crew on deck, a crew of which every single member spontaneously and assiduously looked anywhere else than at him. At charts, maybe, or out to sea, or just moving their eyes off of him and onto something, anything, else. His heart pounded in his ears.

“No, silly, I mean clues about what be around the thermal vents. About your theory. You know, the whole reason we’re doing this thing?”

The crew members laughed, but not very loudly. More of a smiling and shaking-their-heads kind of reaction. Katherine Muir was a firecracker, as the old sea dogs would say. There were other labels that might fit her, too, but Sean wasn’t about to get into it when they were supposed to be running diagnostics and such on the submersible. Besides, she was right. They were here to gather evidence that would either keep his theories afloat or sink them for good. It was a big leap to make on not much evidence, but if they could confirm it or even just find an indication he was on the right track, it would shake up all of oceanography, marine biology, land-based biology, maybe xenobiology, possibly even evolutionary-development biology. There was a lot at stake, and he couldn’t let worries about rumors and loose talk aboard ship distract him from a career-making discovery.

He took in and let out a long breath, getting his mind back in the game. He depressed the button and said to his wife, “Right, the theory, duh. Sorry. So what do you say to giving us some readings and telling us how our little sinker is doing?”

“Ha! Nice. All right, Sea Legs, as we continue the descent, we are now one hundred percent in the aphotic zone. It’s completely pitch-black outside. Running lighting-system test in three… two…”

Sean remained at the monitor until his wife had thoroughly gone down the checklist, told her “Good job, Kat,” and returned to where the two crewmen were to still be waiting for him.

Except they weren’t.

“Goddamnit— Toro! Slipjack! Get back here now, if you please.”

Slipjack was just around the corner, looking at the video feed where Sean himself had been standing just a moment earlier. Sean caught him in the first glance he took to look for his fugitives, then barked at him to find Toro and for both of them to get back to their earlier place of “conversation.” Less than a minute later, the two crewmen stood before him again, Toro looking a bit sulky and Slipjack just nervous.

“Gentlemen, the decision to have my wife take the second test instead of myself was ours, mine and hers, once we knew what had happened to my hand. I couldn’t do it for now, and she knew it needed to be done, knew the job well enough to take the reins and do it herself. Okay? I understand mariners’ beliefs and superstitions; I’ve spent half my life on boats. So, as far as Kat going in place of me, you know I would never let…” He trailed off as everybody’s attention was drawn to the sound at the winch spool. “What the hell is that?”

A tremendous slow ripping sound erupted from the winch, and all hands close enough could see that it was caused by a stripped length of iron-shrouded tether cable on the giant spool, a length that had apparently taken more abuse than it could bear. Their armored support unwoven, the fiber-optic cables were the only part of the tether holding one end to the next, and when that section moved to the top of the wheel in about fifteen seconds, those thin plastic lines would snap at the first pull of the submersible’s weight.

Sean rushed to the controls and tried to figure out which levers and buttons would stop the spool from letting out the damaged length of cable. But it was hopeless. The half of his life he had spent on boats was as an oceanographer, not the operation of this equipment. “Where the hell are my winch men?” he shouted, hoping one of the other crew members would locate—

“Aw, goddamnit,” Sean moaned when he remembered that his winch crew consisted of Vanessa, Toro, and Slipjack, the last two of whom he had just told not to move from their useless positions behind the winch assembly. Vanessa busted her ass to get at the cable and the winch that was slowly feeding it out, although she plainly had no idea what to do except shut it down. Which she did.

The stripped length stopped two feet from where it would have had to bear the full weight of D-Plus. Vanessa let out a huge breath of relief, and so did Sean.

“Toro, Slipjack,” he was able to say in a normal tone now that the loud winch was stopped, “let’s get to work. And if any of the three of you says ‘I told you so’ to me… well, I know where we keep the harpoons.”

The two men hurried to the spool and immediately saw the issue. As long as they didn’t let any more cable out, it was possible that the line wouldn’t break. It still could, and easily, but it was also possible that it would not, and they had to be grateful for that.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that they couldn’t reverse the winch to haul Kat back up, because in its present position, that would put too much strain on the weak area and snap it like a piece of uncooked spaghetti. They were lucky that Vanessa got the winch stopped in time at all, but the next thing to do—if there was anything to be done—was going to prove much more daunting a task.

There was emergency scuba gear on board D-Plus, but Kat was more than 2,800 feet down. That meant over one thousand pounds of pressure per square inch pressed on the sub. Kat had a wetsuit inside the submersible, but her hatch had all that pressure keeping it closed—and besides, she’d freeze to death even as every atom of air in her body was compressed to the point of complete organ failure. She wasn’t getting out, and even if she could, she would die within 30 seconds.

No one could dive down in scuba gear to rescue her, either, and for the same reasons. Another sub could perhaps couple with D-Plus, but they didn’t have another sub and they were too far out to request one before Kat ran out of oxygen or that cable snapped.

However, there was little risk of crushing: the submersible was rated for the entire 20,000 feet down. And there was a chance the whole works could be attached to a new cable and “carried” back to the surface by another submersible device.

Sea Legs carried an old but trustworthy Johnson Sea Link knockoff that could, in an emergency, possibly go that deep. The JSL was essentially human-shaped, with a clear-mask helmet for the human occupant’s head, and then controlled external arms and hooks that could perhaps slip a sturdier cable (one without any communication lines or fiber optics) onto D-Plus, and haul her up.

The problem—and of course there was a problem—was that the JSL had a crush depth of 3,000 feet. It used to be the vehicle for “deep-sea” exploration, but as exploration technology had improved dramatically since the mid-70s, when the university’s robotic-looking spare submersible JSL was built, the definition of “deep-sea” had also changed, or at least what it meant to science and technology.

Two researchers had touched the bottom of Challenger Deep in 1960, but that was funded by the deep, deep pockets of several sovereign governments and wasn’t intended to do any science; it was a Cold War demonstration by the United States and France, just like the race to land on the moon. The Muir expedition could buy only what they could afford with their academic funding—barely enough for the present mission, let alone getting down to the very bottom of the entire ocean. Besides, there were no hydrothermal vents believed to be that deep, so it wouldn’t have fallen under the mission parameters anyway.

The Muirs’ D-Plus could go to 20,000 feet (theoretically, anyway; that was what they were currently trying to test before committing to using the sub for exploration), and they were extremely lucky to have been able to afford that. Although not lucky enough, apparently, to have anticipated the need for a backup cable system.

“Guys?” Katherine called from the radio. “What’s the holdup? Traffic? Is there too much—?”

Sean swept up the mic. “Kat, we have a situation here.”

“Oh. I do not like situations.”

“We read you at about 2,800 feet, sound about right?”

“You guys are letting out the cable, you tell me,” she said with a laugh. “Yeah, looks like 2,840. The descent felt very smooth until we… well, you stopped. I have hours of air left, and I won’t try to go outside, I promise. Can we start up again? What’s the rumpus, like you always say?”

Sean couldn’t help but look at the spool with its almost bare-naked two-foot-long stretch of cable. “We’re having some trouble with the winch—or the cable—actually, it’s both. The winch can’t move it forward or back without, um, complications.”

“Forward or back? Those are pretty much the only options, right?” A note of concern had entered her voice, the playfulness sounding strained now. “Seriously, talk to me, honey. What’s happening?”

“The cable,” he said. “It’s stripped almost bare in one section.”

“I see. Boy am I really glad that’s impossible. But, just for fun, let me ask: one ‘problematic’ section is all you… we… I need to be completely screwed, isn’t it?” She was without levity in her voice now. “Sean, a thick-ass cable like that doesn’t get stripped by… I don’t even know how you could ‘strip’ that accidentally. You’d have to know a lot about how we do things and have a lot of time around the cable.”

Without conscious intention, Sean looked over at Vanessa, Toro, and Slipjack. They were all looking at him the same way, blankly but with uncertainty in their eyes.

Or maybe with certainty in them.

“So, Sean, babe, what’s the plan here? The cable’s magically stripped, fine. What are we going to do about it? Can the bare area be patched?”

Sean shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him, and said flatly, “No.”

“Well, shit.”

“I mean, it could, but that would take equipment, supplies, and room we don’t have. Not to mention time—that’d be a two-hour process before we even moved it onto the spool. If you weren’t attached to the other end of it, we could use the blow torch to just cut the cable off before the break and then reattach it. No worries. If we had all that, and we don’t.”

“So helpful, thanks.”

He loudly mumbled a string of angry-sounding almost-words; then, more clearly not much less loudly, shouted into the comm link with his wife, “These goddamn cables never just get stripped like this! They’re indestructible!”

Kat didn’t say anything.

He calmed himself. He took a big breath in and let it out. Then he could say with honesty, “Honey? We’ve got options. Don’t worry.”

When she spoke, it was clear from her voice that she had gone into shock. It was almost a whisper, as if she were talking to herself: “Someone’s trying to murder me.”

“What? No, that’s not…” He wanted to say it wasn’t possible, but she would give him the same retort as always when he said that: It doesn’t have to be possible anymore. It’s actual. “Listen, let’s just focus on getting this FUBAR situation fixed up, okay?”

Kat had head-mounted headphones with a microphone, so her scarcely audible mumbling of “… murder… someone’s trying to murder me… someone’s trying to murder me…” continued on the radio on deck where everyone could hear it, even though she clearly was no longer conversing with her husband.

He called to Toro: “How long do you need to get the JSL ready to launch?”

The big Hispanic mariner looked up at where the knockoff was secured. “If I bust my ass, it could be in the water in forty-five minutes. And you bet your ass I’m gonna bust my ass, jefe.”

“But what are we supposed to do when we get down there?” Vanessa asked, not as a challenge but as a consequence of her overflowing anxiety. “Okay, yeah, the JSL isn’t a tethered submersible, so we don’t need to use the cable on that. But the whole point would be to pull D-Plus and Kat up to the surface, and that would require the bad cable to be cut or separated, and a new one to be slipped into the place of the bad one.

“But even if we had another three thousand feet of cable—which we don’t, since all our cable for the whole mother-loving mission is on this one useless spool because this cable is practically indestructible unless you’re trying to damage it—how would we attach it? You can’t do detail work like that with those JSL claws, Sean. And God knows it’s too damn deep for an out-of-vessel excursion. Three thousand feet in just a wetsuit isn’t even close to possible, and that means we can’t attach another cable and we can’t just spring Kat out of there and into our sub—her lungs and heart would collapse instantly.”

Sean’s gaze remained on the deck, which is what he did when he was trying to think deeply, or when he was listening intently, or both. He nodded at everything Vanessa was saying, and it wasn’t much different from what he was already thinking. For a moment a hope came to him and he said, “What if we went down in the JSL and clamped onto the cable holding D-Plus and just dragged it back up to where she could get out? That would keep there from being any pull on the compromised cable, and the slack as she was brought up could be used to wrap the exposed cable under several more layers on the spool.”

“That could work, but what’s the operational depth of the JSL? Didn’t it get discontinued because those poor bastards got caught on some sunken ship, and they were stuck there until they ran out of air? How deep was that?” Slipjack asked in his hint of a western-by-way-of-New Jersey drawl that usually seemed homey and ominous in equal measure but seemed neither at the moment, more like on the edge of panic as he tried to run through all the possibilities in his mind. The winch, after all, was his responsibility. Only he and Sean Muir had official access to it around the clock. The others had to be wondering how he’d let this happen right under his nose.

Vanessa said, “That had nothing to do with crush depth, Slip.”

“No, but I’m wondering how deep that was, ’cause obviously that dive must’ve been inside their depth comfort zone, y’know? I think its deepest rating is in the neighborhood of three thousand feet. And she’s at, what’d you say earlier, 2,800 feet? So you’d have some wiggle room to save her, boss!”

Sean nodded. That accident killed two submariners and got the original JSL discontinued, but they lived long enough as the carbon dioxide scrubbers became inoperable that they knew they would die down there. All they could do was wait for the oxygen to run out. Vanessa was right: it was an oxygen thing, not a crush depth thing.

But those memories came and went like vapor. Slipjack’s words barely stuck, although he understood his winch man perfectly. All he could focus on right then was his wife still repeating that she was being murdered, someone was trying to murder her. Only now she was leaving the “trying” part out: “… someone’s murdering me… why are they murdering me?… someone is murdering me…”

“I think you got to go for it, boss,” Slipjack said, looking ill. “You got to save her somehow. She’s in danger because of you—”

“All right. Enough!” Sean snapped at him. “You think I don’t know that, goddamnit? You and Toro break out the JSL—use the launch crane—and make it ready.”

Slipjack and Toro moved as fast as Sean had ever seen them move. Vanessa stayed with Sean, since two deckhands with a hook and Sea Legs’ smaller winch would be enough to get the JSL down where they could prep it for a dive and get the pilot situated. An additional person would only get in the way.

“This could work, boss,” she said as the two men wrestled the hook onto the goddamn museum piece that was their counterfeit JSL. Young oceanographers from the Institute liked to use the thing to spend some time near coral reefs or where they could set down in a couple dozen feet of water and observe turtles and interesting fish do their thing in the light of the euphotic zone. But the Muirs had it on Sea Legs because it was always stowed on Sea Legs, the boat being used currently by the Muirs but actually the property of the Institute and thus used also by their colleagues and students. He was very glad right then that no one had ever thought it necessary to go through the pain in the ass of taking it off the boat and storing it somewhere else, just to have to haul it out and load it on the boat again the next time a grad student or postdoc wanted to use it.

Moving to help them, Vanessa stopped next to Sean and asked quietly, “Listen, Cap—even if they can get it down and prepped in forty-five minutes, how long will it take to get it down three thousand feet? Another forty?”

Sean looked pale but didn’t let his fear get the best of him. No effective mission leader could let anything, even something like this, get that deep under his skin. “Could be an hour.”

Vanessa looked at the green-screen on-deck computer monitor. “She’s been down there an hour and a half, Sean. Those scrubbers work how long? I don’t know this shit, boss, you got to help me here.”

“She’s got five hours in the sub. More than that and her brain dies from lack of oxygen.” He swallowed, shaken from listening to his wife go dissociative with talk of getting “murdered” while sitting in what could soon be her own coffin.

“Shit. So an hour and a half, plus, let’s say, an hour to get the JSL down to D-Plus and get a good hold on her cable. How long’s it gonna take for our little JSL to pull our chunky sub to the point where Kat can get out and free swim to the surface?”

“I have no idea, Van. I’ve never done this before. No one has. These armored cables do not—”

“I know, Sean, I know. But there’s plenty of time for figuring that out once we have your wife back and safe. Give me a ballpark: How long?”

“The JSL isn’t really made for towing, but since we’re pressing it into service, if I had to venture a guess—”

“Which you do.”

“—I’d say at least two hours with that heavy load and the limited thrust of the JSL. Maybe more.”

“That maybe is straddling the line between saving your wife and losing her, Sean. You’ve done, what, a hundred dives in this thing? You have to be the one to go down and get her—you always find a way to keep us going. We haven’t lost a crew member yet, so let’s not start today, all right?”

He allowed himself a very small smirk and said, “When did I promote you to first mate?”

“When you lost your shit listening to Katherine. Besides, who do you want right now? Mickey is a boat chief, not a submersible expert. I’m not saying he can’t learn, but now seems an inopportune time for rookie training.

“Slipjack doesn’t dive, but he could be your right-hand man on the surface once we get the JSL ready to go. And that should be soon, once they get the batteries installed and run through the checklist.”

“Has Toro ever piloted a submersible?”

“No. He’s purely a member of the boat crew, promoted to winch team. And I’ve dived a few times, just not in the pilot’s seat.”

“Vanessa, I know all this. What are you getting at, already?”

“I’m telling you that you need to get suited up, and you need to do this. Not because she’s your wife, but because she’s part of your research crew. Your skills and experience are the only things that can save her.”

Sean took all of this in, sucked in a deep breath, then let it go. He shouted to Toro and Slipjack, “Let’s go, gentlemen! Time is short!”

“Twenty minutes,” Toro said without looking up from his work.

“Screw that. Fifteen at the most and I want this in the water.”

Slipjack muttered under his breath, but it was plenty loud enough for Toro to hear, and laugh.

“It’s a suicide mission, ese. You don’t want it. Like Van said, you don’t dive.”

“No, I don’t. But I could. I want to be the hero for once, save the woman who…”

“Who… who what?”

“Who is really friggin’ important to this expedition! I want to be her hero instead of just a guy on the boat.”

“What, you got a crush on Mrs. Muir? Ha ha, that is muy adorable!” Toro said with a sympathetic smile. “She is easy on the eyes, man, but come on. And you want to be a hero… or a martyr, maybe, you mean? ’Cause that’s what el jefe is gonna be in a few minutes, man. Ain’t no way this thing can drag up a full-size submersible.”

“This ain’t right. The whole thing stinks like rotten fish covered with dog shit,” Slipjack said when they turned back to keep prepping the rickety-ass sub that was less likely to rescue the wonderful Kitty Muir than to send Sean and his wife to the bottom forever.

He just hoped his check got signed before Sean Muir left on his mission to be the center of attention once again. And the Muirs would be at the center, all right. He could see the headlines: OCEAN RESEARCHERS DIE IN ‘ACCIDENT.’

Except this bullshit is no accident, Slipjack thought, but kept it to himself. He had a job to do here, and doing it well and swiftly could mean rescuing Katherine instead of letting her die, even if the whole situation was Sean Muir’s doing, or if not his fault, then at least definitely his responsibility. But he shook that out of his mind and got the JSL ready as quickly as he and Toro could.

“Sean… ?” It was Katherine’s voice, still sounding distant but much more cogent. “Come in, babe…”

Sean spun around from watching them work with the JSL (just far away enough that he couldn’t hear what Slipjack was saying to Toro) and practically hurled himself the six feet to the mic and started talking almost before he had depressed the button: “Kat! Thank God! I thought you had gone off the deep end!” He winced at his own choice of words.

“I’m okay. I’m alive. Had me a little freak-out there.” She sounded more with it, but hardly one hundred percent. “Honey, I’m just hanging in the dark. There’s nothing to see, not even dinosaurs… and directly below, there’s the vents. Maybe the dinos are nearby, maybe they can sense me…”

“Don’t worry about that, honey—you’re not deep enough to give off a heat signature strong enough to attract them, anyway. So just forget about anything except my words, okay?”

“Okay.” With that one-word response, she sounded again like the researcher who had first gone down in the submersible.

“Okay, excellent. The cable is… not operational. We can’t haul you up with the winch, and we can’t even get you any deeper—not that we would—but never mind—I’m coming down to get you.”

“Sean, it’s okay. I know the risks every time I go down.”

“Jesus, honey, no—I said, I’m coming down right now.”

“I’m at three thousand feet, Sean! What are you going to do, put on some swim fins and a snorkel? I can still get some data, even if we can’t find your prehistoric beasts—”

“No! Just hang tight”—again he regretted his turn of phrase—“and I’ll be there in plenty of time. I’m using the JSL.”

“That piece of [buzz]? Don’t you dare, Doctor Muir—we don’t both need to die! Somebody on the ship sabotaged the cable. Don’t give them a chance to mess with the JSL and murder you, too.”

“Don’t say murder, Kat. Number one, you’re not going to die; and number two, I’m coming to get you and bring you up. Just keep your mind on that, okay? You’ve got to have two hours of oxygen left. I’ll make it in plenty of time.”

“I love you, Sean. I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. We got this. And I love you, too, so much. And if I have to die to save you, that’s a fair deal to me.”

“Well, it’s not to me!”

“All right, then, we’ll both live. How’s that?”

“Roger that. Okay, fine, go suit up and get down here already.”

“On it.” He motioned for Mickey to come off the bridge. “Mick, you’ve got the comm, all right? Talk to her, keep her calm, and keep reminding her that I’m on my way.”

“You got it, boss. And good luck—we know you can do it.”

Sean nodded at that and got his ass over to the winch crew setting up the submersible, which looked like nothing more than a 1950s science-fiction robot. He squeezed into his wetsuit and stowed his air tank and regulator inside the JSL. There was no real reason he’d need them—or be able to use them—unless and until he got Kat near the surface and opened D-Plus to get her out. The extra equipment was fine, anyway; he’d take a load of anvils on board if it would help him get down there. He froze. Why in God’s name didn’t I think of this earlier?

“Holy shit! Mickey, tell her to jettison her ballast, every bit of it, right away!” He literally couldn’t believe he hadn’t remembered to tell her to do that in the first place. Everybody on board must have thought he was a complete shithead who didn’t care whether his wife lived or died. Not that he cared much about that right now.

Mickey relayed the message, and the last thing Sean heard before Slipjack helped him into the JSL was her response of “Roger that.” It gave him the tiniest peace of mind, which was better than nothing.

Slipjack got him ready and was about to screw the hatch shut but stopped and looked Sean in the eyes. “Go save your wife. Save our Kat.”

Our Kat? But Sean nodded, holding back the desire to say, Why in the hell do you think I’m sitting in this thing? but he could hardly blame the crew for loving her. She was so good to everyone, always smiling and working as hard as anyone else. Sean saw her occasional tantrums and tears, but that was the difference between a husband and a coworker on a research vessel.

Slipjack screwed on the hatch and stepped back. He and Toro and Vanessa exchanged thumbs-ups with Sean and then with one another when each of them took their assigned positions to deploy the A-frame and crane to lower the submersible into the sea.

Excruciatingly slowly, they lowered the JSL. So slowly he would surely never get down in time to Kat, who was breathing the last of her air, waiting for him, so far away.

Inside D-Plus, Katherine quickly hit the necessary switches and buttons to release the ballast. She’d done it a hundred times in submersibles; the ballast was just seawater, but water actually made for better ballast than any other material, and it didn’t shoot a lot of garbage into the ocean they all loved, like the old-school kind did.

But neither of the hatches on the sides of the submersible opened to release the ballast. D-Plus was still as weighted down as she was at launch, when the hatch worked perfectly to let the seawater in and allow the dive to happen in the first place.

She didn’t panic, though, didn’t enter any kind of fugue state like before. She just went through the steps again, more slowly and carefully this time.

It didn’t make any difference.

The hatch wouldn’t open, and of course there was no way for her to get out at this depth and open them manually with the fail-safe tool. “You’re just going to have to lift me with my ballast,” she said into her headset.

She kept in contact with Mickey up on the surface, but radio waves traveled more slowly the deeper one went—which was why a deep-sea submersible like D-Plus was connected to fiber optics for data and video and lines for voice and other communications. These lines were encased in armored steel and were supposed to be as close to indestructible as possible. That was because fail-proof systems were essential in extreme environments like those Sean and Kat were aiming for with this expedition. Supposed to be indestructible. At least, that was if no one with specialized knowledge—and some kind of motivation, obviously—got to them when no one was looking.

But delay or not, saboteur on the loose or not, Mickey on Piranha II kept the video and other sensors tightly focused on the line that was all that was keeping Kat on D-Plus from sinking, fatally, to the bottom. If she had been able to jettison the ballast—which was done with the push of exactly two buttons and a switch—it would have made Sean’s job of grabbing hold of the cable just above D-Plus with the JSL’s clamp-like “hands” and bringing her up much easier.

Easy wasn’t happening in this FUBAR situation anyway, but trying to bring up D-Plus loaded down with ballast might be impossible for an ancient gadget like the JSL. Sean would jettison his own ballast when he got to her, so at least he would retain some buoyancy.

As was always the case in their line of work, they’d just have to go with what was even infinitesimally possible and make it a dead-certain reality.

It was obvious that rescue of D-Plus—and, more importantly, Katherine—fell into this category. No one could blame him for failing, but everyone still would. He still would. He needed to show everyone that he could do this, save the day. Mariners were an odd lot who might call off the next dive “because of weather,” since they were empowered to make the final decision. Theoretically, this took into consideration the science team’s input, of course; but the professional sailors on board knew that, outside of a storm forcing waves over the deck, the scientists would always choose to dive. Thus, oftentimes the “consideration” of the scientists’ opinions meant “seeming to listen and then doing what real men and women of the sea thought right and proper.” So it was best to avoid discomfort in the sailing crew.

Also, of course, if they lost this submersible—even if it during an unmanned test—it would render funding for of his any further dives highly unlikely. His and Kat’s funding, that was. She wasn’t dead yet. He had to not think like that, Jesus.

Not yet, anyway.

D-Plus and similar research submersibles were designed to be pulled up by the same cable that guided them down. That would make it a hell of a lot easier to drag it back up with the JSL, which was built for exploration mostly in the euphotic zone, not for its gripping or lifting power. Of course, there never would have been a problem like this if the deep-sea sub dived and rose under its own power. But that’s just not how it worked anymore, the cable being needed for heavy data and communications demands if not for lowering and lifting the submersible.

Mickey told him which ways to activate the JSL’s small water jets to keep the vessel the right distance from the cable. Not that this was in any way a “normal” operation, but the usual and much less difficult way of approaching would have been for Sean in the JSL to loop onto the cable itself and just slide down to the research sub. However, that option wasn’t available to them since it was a flaw in the cable itself (Ha! That’s the understatement of the year, Sean scoffed despite himself) that had put the submersible in peril in the first place. One strong tug on that line and it would snap up on the boat and that would be that for his wife; the ballast-weighted D-Plus would be much too heavy for the smaller and lighter JSL to hold.

They had gotten extremely lucky—or less unlucky, he guessed, because this was not a lucky day—that the surface was almost mirror-calm that day. Choppy or “confused” seas, when you couldn’t tell which way the water was going to take you, put a lot more stress on the cable.

And that stress was exactly what the damaged cable couldn’t take.

The JSL’s descent went smoothly, Mickey letting him know how things looked and also relaying any messages from Kat and doing the same for Sean’s messages to his wife.

In fact, it went so smoothly that his mind drifted.

Diving to just three thousand feet wasn’t going to be any help with the expedition’s goals, but they had been on the path to the benthic zone, where they’d found evidence that a line of hydrothermal vents stretched for several thousand miles from just north of Hawaii right up to the Marianas Trench. Maybe continued in the Marianas Trench, so little had those extreme depths been explored in any detail.

Heat was at the center of his theories. When the oceans cooled and put the Permian Extinction into motion, most aquatic dinosaurs died off—actually, 95 percent of everything in the oceans and a huge percentage of things living on land, including dinosaurs. But where the ocean remained warm, even hot, was at the bottom, near the network of hydrothermal sulfur vents.

The idea came to Sean Muir five years earlier, when he was a graduate student in oceanography with a specialty in undersea geology at UCSD. He went on a deep-sea expedition with his advisor and two other grad students the professor was mentoring. It wasn’t some kind of historic outing, diving in a well-explored area just off the California coast, but it was deep enough that there was no light except for the glow around their four-person submersible caused by the sub’s own floods.

Looking at the constant snowy fall of organic material destined for the ocean floor could hold one’s interest for only so long, but they weren’t underwater for an hour when his advisor said, “Do you see that? This is a fount of life, lady and gentlemen!”

The submersible had many viewports, and they all got a look at the odd orange-yellow light coming from the ocean floor. It was only about 1,500 feet down, but it presented a completely alien world. The vent had things all around it, things that looked like those giant inflatable men at car dealerships and such, beckoning buyers just by random movement catching their eyes: tube worms.

It was the same principle at work here—all four of them were mesmerized by the giant sea worms, securely attached to the seafloor but being blown around by the sulfur-rich, superheated water coming from the tectonic rip.

“I wish we could get closer, but that heat would overpower the sub and boil all of us faster than trout in a steam basket,” he said. “But look—it’s an ecosystem like none other. These worms—and amoebas so large they’re visible to the human eye—thrive directly on the chemicals pouring out, and then there are predators even down here ready to eat them, starting a food chain without the slightest thing to do with sunlight.”

“Predators?” Sean asked in a dreamy voice.

“Oh, yes, there are albino squid down here, octopoids, jumbo shrimp relatives, and there are signs of even more complex life. Even vertebrates.”

One of the other grad students spoke up: “Wouldn’t their bones get crushed at this depth?”

“No, indeed. That’s what one would worry about, isn’t it? Your rib cage being flattened and your head caving in? But, in fact, you would die of capillary damage and organ failure at much shallower depths than those required to destroy the calcium in your bones. This is because water is incompressible. Not just the water in the ocean, but the water in the human body! This presses against all of the body’s systems, including the skin, and meets the incompressible water contained in your organs. They reach a stasis rather quickly, but stasis is not how organs keep us alive! A stopped heart may be perfectly balanced with the water pressure outside it, but that doesn’t do its owner much good if all the oxygen has been rendered immobile.”

A chuckle went through the submersible, then the third grad student asked, “Then how can anything with organs live down here? I mean, tube worms are pretty simple, and octopoids are incredibly elastic, I know. But things that would eat them? I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“But you’re working on your doctorate in marine biology! Surely you know that, as Jeff Goldblum so succinctly put it in that dinosaur movie, ‘Life finds a way.’”

“Jurassic Park,” Sean said almost automatically. It and its sequels were favorites of his since he was a kid. But paleontology was a field with precious few positions available, and professors retired very late, if at all; the joke was “Old paleontologists never die. They just turn into fossils.”

“Just so. The way the concept was used in that story was a bit silly, but the statement remains valid in a general sense, and is definitely applicable down here. And Sean, since you’re a dinosaur aficionado, you see how, with the oceans growing colder after the Cretaceous event, some marine lizards could evolve to take advantage of heat sources far deeper than those they had earlier thrived in.”

Sean said lightly but with respect, “That’s pretty speculative.”

His advisor laughed. “Indeed, it is. But something balances the ecosystem down here, and aquatic dinosaurs have had a long time to adapt. I mean, the water didn’t turn cold overnight, and maybe the deeper one went at that point—and remember, there was a lot more going on volcanically and such down here during that period—the warmer it would be. Yes, they’d have had to evolve structures other than bones and organs that would work in ways we probably aren’t even able to conceptualize at this point… unless one were researching it full-time, say.” He gave Sean a meaningful glance. “Also, the giant lizards ruled the earth for 165 million years—you think they’d all just give up without a fight?”

They laughed, but Sean was struck by the idea. Being a graduate student was a time for learning what could be reasonably speculated upon and what was better not to waste one’s time with, because the thesis and dissertation were what mattered most. The fortunate few, however, were able to develop something new, something at least different, about which they could publish, and publish papers on every change of nuance as their research developed. Sean and every other student in any graduate program anywhere needed something real, and possibly dramatic, upon which to create a reputation and thus become very attractive to those seeking to fill empty tenure-track lines at Carnegie I research institutions.

However, he also had heard many cautionary tales of grad students who went awry trying to prove some pet theory of their advisors’—drinking the academic Kool-Aid, as it were. Embarrassment and wasted time were the least of it. No, the worst was a career up in smoke, one’s world-changing dissertation given up for something mundane, something just to get the degree so he could accept the first community-college job offered to him. If any were offered. Life as an adjunct earth sciences “professor” was worse than embarrassing to someone like Sean; it would be humiliating and would remain humiliating until the day he retired. Or killed himself. Which would be preferable was a coin toss.

In other words, Sean Muir needed to find something attractive and unusual, maybe even slightly groundbreaking, but nothing so off the wall that it would come crashing down around him and ruin his life. (Any advisor he had would be tenured already and thus wouldn’t be affected professionally in the slightest by such a disaster. If he or she were a human being, the professor in question might feel terrible about the whole thing, but pity or even heartfelt regret didn’t open doors to academic careers.)

But God, dinosaurs still existing near the ocean floor! Evolved and adapted, of course, just like every other living thing, but perhaps in the same way that sharks and alligators had evolved—almost unchanged through the millennia, so what you had now was almost identical to what you would have had 300 million years ago. And even if it weren’t dinosaurs, finding whatever was at the top of the sea-vent chemosynthesis food chain would attract a lot of welcome attention.

It was a risk; but no risk, no reward. Sean had a long talk with his advisor the day after their undersea excursion, during which each argued for and against the idea of building on this speculation as a real program of research. Finally, they agreed the best course of action would be for Sean to change his concentration from oceanography and tectonic geology to marine biology and—thank God he was at San Diego, where this wouldn’t get him laughed out of the room—paleoichthyology. Even if he didn’t find the predators that just had to be there (life finds a way), he would certainly discover enough about deep-sea hydrothermal vents to write a dissertation that still broke new ground, so to speak.

A voice snapped him back to reality, the present, where he was in the rickety JSL submersible surrounded by black water.

“Sean? Copy? Sean.” It was crew chief Mickey’s voice, and he must have been calling for a while. “Sean, tell me you’re not dead. Sean, do you copy?”

He said into the comm, a bit sheepishly, “Copy here, Sea Legs. Sorry, I was having trouble with something.”

“Sure, okay,” Mickey said in the tone Sean would have used himself if he had been on the other end. “Listen, do you still have the sub’s cable in view?”

Fortunately, despite his sudden mental walkabout, he did.

“You’ve got about twenty feet to go, by your instruments. Can you get a visual on D-Plus? She should be just below you, dead cen—right in the middle.”

He leaned against the viewport and saw the lights that adorned the submersible. “Affirmative, I see it. If I can get down to Kat—”

“No, Sean, there’s no time. You need to extend the JSL claw in front of you and open the claw, then ease yourself forward until you can get a tight grasp on the cable. Keep descending, too—get as close as you can to the sub, but stay above her. Nobody blames you for wanting to see your lovely bride after all this, but first we need to get her out of danger by you clamping on. You copy that?”

“Roger. Moving toward the cable—”

“Did you extend the arm and open the claw?”

Dammit. A few seconds later, he called up, “Affirmative. Centering JSL to position the claw around the cable… got it.” He could hear a small background cheer from Mickey’s microphone.