The Seventh Angel - Страница 4

Charlie had read the research proposals and goals for this project. He’d been to the pre-dive briefings, and studied the mission plans carefully. This was their seventh dive, so he knew the plan inside and out. He had the navigational waypoints all programmed into the Nereus’s computers. He knew the currents in the Aleutian trench, and he knew how to compensate for the drift they’d try to put on his boat. He could put the submersible within inches of every sampling site on the Dive Plan. But the real work on this project was up to Gabriella. Charlie was just the bus driver.

He glanced at the glide angle indicator, and eased back on the control yoke to slow the boat’s rate of descent. Outside of the pressure hull, the submersible’s four propulsor pods rotated slightly, canceling some of the vessel’s negative buoyancy with vectored jets of water.

“Forty meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie suppressed another shiver. Gabriella’s bottom was considerably closer than forty meters, but it was not a good idea to think about that.

Charlie nodded again. “Forty meters. Thanks.”

He was just sneaking another peek at Gabriella’s reflection when a different voice came from behind him.

“So, what color is it?”

Charlie flinched. He’d almost forgotten that Steve was even there.

Steve Harper, the other permanent member of the Nereus crew, sat at the engineering station, behind Charlie and to his right. Steve was a good guy. He could be a jackass when the mood struck him, but he was usually pretty easy to be around. He was also a skilled technician and an excellent button masher. Charlie liked working with him, at least when Steve wasn’t startling the hell out of him.

Charlie cocked his head. “Huh?”

“I asked you what color it is,” Steve said.

“What color is what?” Charlie asked.

“The Porsche,” Steve said. “Didn’t you just buy a new Porsche?”

“Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Well, it’s not new. But it’s in really good shape.”

“You’ve got a Porsche?” That was Gabriella.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a ninety-eight Turbo Carrera. Low mileage. It’s pretty nice. Good paint. Nice interior. Excellent mechanical condition.”

“I like the nineties-models better too,” Gabriella said. “I think they changed the suspension in the new ones. I don’t like the way they handle as much.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that Charlie’s decision to buy a used model was a matter of preference rather than finance.

“What color is it?” Steve asked again.

Charlie grimaced. “It’s — uh, red. Sort of a light red.”

Steve whistled through his teeth. “Dude, you got a red Porsche turbo? You are sooooo set!”

“What’s our distance to bottom?” Charlie asked. It was time to derail this conversation. He did not want to talk about the Porsche.

“Thirty-two meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie nodded. “Thanks.” He eased back on the yoke a little more. They were still a little too far away from the bottom to see anything, but this was as good a time as any to heat up the exterior lights. “Floods coming on,” he said, and he flipped three switches near the top of his console.

Outside the hull, three banks of sealed halogen floodlights flared to life, casting a sphere of light around the little submersible. The darkness was not banished; it hung just beyond the reach of the floods, like an impenetrable curtain of blackness. This was where night lived. On the surface, the sun ruled half of the planet at any given time. But down here, night was always master.

The thought gave Charlie a mild case of the creeps, despite the fact that it had occurred to him a hundred times before. It was a little creepy. But it was also cool. Because this was Charlie’s domain. Anywhere else in the world, he was just a geeky looking guy with a spare tire around his waist. But down here, Charlie flew like Icarus through the secret realms of darkness. He’d had that thought before too, but it never failed to bring a smile to his lips.

He dimmed the cabin lights, to make it easier to see through the view port. Gabriella’s reflection faded with the interior illumination.

Steve snorted. “What exactly is a light red? Is it like a candy apple red? Or a fire engine red?”

Damn it. He wasn’t going to let it drop. “No,” Charlie said with a sigh. “It’s more of a whitish red.”

“A whitish red?” Steve’s voice was incredulous. “You mean like a pink?”

“It’s not pink!” Charlie snapped. He stopped and corrected himself. “I don’t like to think of it as pink, okay?”

Steve’s laugh sounded like the cackle of a hen. “Dude! You bought a pink Porsche?”

Charlie tapped a pressure gauge with unnecessary force. “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

“Aye-aye, sir!” Steve said it in a theatrically-formal voice. “Shutting the hell up as ordered, sir!”

If past behavior was anything to judge by, it was a fair guess that Steve had accompanied the words with a brisk simulation of a salute, pointed in the direction of Charlie’s back.

A laugh from Gabriella confirmed the suspicion.

Charlie opened his mouth to call Steve an asshole, when the control yoke gave a strange twitch. All thoughts of playful banter vanished instantly from his mind. “Steve, did you feel that?”

“Did I feel what, Porsche Boy?”

“I just felt some kind of a jerk in the control yoke,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, yeah … Let me guess, it was me, right? I’m the jerk?”

“Knock it off,” Charlie snapped. “I’m not joking!”

The control yoke twitched again, harder this time — an abrupt twist to the right that nearly wrenched the pistol-shaped grips out of his hands. The submersible rolled about ten degrees to starboard, in instant response to the movement of the controls.

Charlie snatched the yoke back to the left, and then centered up quickly, compensating for the sudden roll. The sub righted itself, but he could feel a definite starboard drag.

“I’ve got some kind of steering casualty,” Charlie said. “Switch me to backup, now!”

“I’m on it,” Steve said. “Switching to backup steering now!” He punched a button and relays clicked softly.

“Thanks,” Charlie said. The drag on the control yoke vanished as the backup steering circuits kicked in. For a half-second, he considered trying to finish the dive on backup steering. But the deep ocean is unforgiving. When something went wrong a half mile under water, the smart thing to do was head for the surface before a little problem could become a big problem.

He checked the dive clock on the instrument panel above his head. “I’m declaring a mission abort at time zero-nine-five-seven. Call it in.”

“Got it,” Steve said. “Mission abort, time zero-nine-five-seven. Is this an emergency abort, or a deliberate abort?”

Charlie thought about that for a few seconds. An emergency abort meant releasing the fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible. The boat would instantly gain three-quarters of a ton of positive buoyancy. They’d shoot for the surface like a cork. Their assent would not be easily controllable, and there was the possibility of ramming into their tender ship as they broke the surface. Charlie was a good pilot, and he was pretty certain that he could steer clear of the Otis Barton, but there was a degree of risk.

A deliberate abort would allow him to control the Nereus’s assent. It would also save the expense of the lead ballast plate; those things were custom-manufactured to excruciatingly fine technical tolerances, and they were not cheap. A deliberate abort also meant a lot less hassle once they got to the surface.

If he declared an emergency, formal investigations would follow. They would be required by law. Everyone associated with the project would be interviewed within an inch of their lives. Every nut and bolt on the submersible would be removed and inspected. The Nereus would be decertified for diving operations for weeks, or even months. Gabriella’s research project would be over the second Charlie spoke the word ‘emergency.’

If he called for a deliberate abort due to minor technical issues, the troubleshooting and repair of the steering problem would go down in the logs as routine corrective maintenance. They might be able to resume the diving schedule tomorrow, or the day after.

His fingers tightened on the controls. “Deliberate abort,” he said. “I am not declaring an emergency.”

“Understood,” Steve said. “Deliberate abort.”

Charlie heard him lift the handset for the underwater telephone. Like all other forms of electromagnetic energy, radio waves are rapidly absorbed by water. Within a hundred feet of the surface, they could talk to their mother ship, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, by radio. But even the most powerful radios can’t penetrate a thousand feet of water. When the Nereus was this deep, all communications had to be carried out via the underwater telephone, a two-way acoustic transponder system that could transmit and receive amplified voice signals.

Steve began his report. “Otis Barton, this is Nereus. We are declaring a deliberate mission abort. I say again — deliberate mission abort.” He spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable with great deliberation. Amplified acoustic voice signals had a tendency to become garbled as they propagated through the water. He paused to give his message time to stop reverberating through the water.