Deep Storm

  “The Doodlebug’s malfunctioning—we’re making an emergency ascent.”

  Adkinson gripped his seat, desperately trying to keep himself under control. He could sense them ascending now with painful slowness. His eyes were riveted to Horst’s screens. Hurry up, goddamn it, hurry up…

  “Collision imminent,” said the silky female voice. “Collision imminent.”

  “Ten!” Horst almost screamed. “Oh, Christ!”

  “Brace for impact!” yelled Grove.

  Adkinson hurled himself over his console, grasping the reinforcing bulkhead as tightly as he could. He clenched his jaw. For a strange moment, it seemed that all the furious noise within the Marble—the wail of the proximity warning, Grove’s shouts—were muted in a suspended agony of waiting. Then from below came a wrenching impact; the Marble bucked, yawed sideways, metal squealing and shearing; a sudden, furious, uncontrolled ascent; Adkinson’s skull banged violently against the floor…and then darkness closed in over all.

  29

  Crane trotted along the labyrinthine corridors of deck 3, accompanied by a young marine with close-cropped blond hair.

  “What is it?” Crane asked. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” the marine said. “My orders were to escort you to the Drilling Complex. On the double.”

  The marine stopped to open an unmarked door, which gave onto a narrow service stairwell. They took the metal steps downward, two at a time, until they reached deck 1. The marine threw open another door, and they ran through another warren of passageways. As he ran, Crane noticed that the walls of this—the lowest level of the Facility—were painted a dull red.

  Ahead now lay a large set of double doors. As Crane approached, the marines stationed outside pulled the doors open for him. Beyond lay the Drilling Complex, the large equipment hanger he had seen from above the day before. Equipment bulkheads and racks of instrumentation lined three of the walls. Numerous open hatchways led to labs, equipment bays, monitoring stations, and breakout rooms. The ceiling—two levels high in this space—was festooned with cranes, gantries, heavy chains, and hydraulic equipment. Technicians hurried here and there, speaking in low tones, their faces drawn and worried. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm was sounding.

  In the center of the hanger, people stood clustered around what was clearly the upper seal of a water lock. Among them was Admiral Spartan. Crane walked quickly over to them.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Spartan.

  The admiral glanced at him for a moment before returning his gaze to the water lock. “There’s been some kind of accident with Marble One.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “We’ve lost communication with the crew inside, there’s no way to know for sure. Apparently, the robotic mechanism that pulls the Marble down the dig shaft malfunctioned. Rammed the Marble. And now, Marble One is rising out of control.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Did they lose pressure?”

  “Exceedingly unlikely. Any injuries are more likely to result from…impact.”

  “Blunt trauma,” Crane muttered. He glanced around, thinking quickly. “You said the Marble has a crew complement of three?”

  “Correct.”

  “I don’t have any medical equipment on hand.”

  “Emergency field kits are being brought as we speak.”

  A loudspeaker rasped, “Estimated time until impact, two minutes.”

  “A field kit’s not enough, Admiral,” Crane said. “I’m going to need to prep the site for emergency treatment. And I’ll need Dr. Bishop to assist. Especially if there’s triage to be done.”

  Spartan turned to look at him again. “Not in the Drilling Complex.”

  “But—” Crane began.

  “You can use the temporary infirmary on deck four. I’ll have Dr. Bishop brought there.” Spartan beckoned to one of the numerous marines stationed nearby. “Locate Dr. Bishop and escort her to deck four,” he ordered.

  The marine saluted, then moved briskly away.

  “What if there are neck injuries?” Crane demanded. “We can’t just move those crewmen…” He fell silent when he saw the expression on the admiral’s face.

  A lab technician looked up from the nearby control console. “Admiral,” he said. “Marble One’s rate of ascent is slowing slightly.”

  “What’s the current rate?”

  “Thirty-four feet per second, sir.”

  “Equilibrium’s off,” said Spartan. “That’s still too damn fast.”

  Crane waited, going over the stabilization procedures he’d need to follow once the Marble was secured. For all his specialized training, it would come down to the same procedure any trauma paramedic would follow. ABC: airway, breathing, circulation. If the collision with the robotic digger had been violent enough, there might be lacerations, contusions, possible concussions. Since he had to move the crew to deck 4, he’d need to get cervical collars fixed, place the men on short boards as a precaution against—

  “Estimated time until impact, sixty seconds,” came the disembodied voice from the loudspeaker.

  “Isn’t there any way to slow it?” Crane asked.

  “Just before it impacts the water lock, we’re going to discharge a cushion of CO2” Spartan said. “Theoretically, that will reduce the impact. But the timing has to be exact.”

  He walked over to the lab technician. “Release the gas at minus five seconds.”

  “Very good, sir.” The tech looked pale.

  Crane glanced around the large hangar. The frantic activity had ceased, and a hush had descended. Everybody was standing still—waiting.

  “Thirty seconds,” came the voice from the loudspeaker. “Pressure seal deactivated.”

  Spartan plucked a radio from the console. “All hands, brace for impact!”

  Crane stepped over to a nearby bulkhead, took hold with both hands.

  “Rate of ascent?” Spartan asked the tech.

  “Steady at thirty-two feet per second, sir.”

  The loudspeaker crackled. “Fifteen seconds.”

  Spartan looked quickly around the Drilling Complex, pinning everyone in turn with a brief gaze, as if assuring himself all the necessary players were in place. Then he turned back to the tech. “Release the CO2.”

  The tech snapped a series of buttons. “Released, sir—”

  At that moment, Crane felt a sharp thump beneath his feet. The Facility shuddered slightly.

  It was as if an electrical circuit had abruptly been completed. Instantly, the Complex leapt back into activity. Orders were shouted; technicians in white lab coats and marines in fatigues ran to their stations. The metal floor rang with the sound of heavy footsteps.

  “Water lock integrity?” Spartan asked the tech.

  “One hundred percent, sir.”

  Spartan picked up the radio, punched in a frequency. “Open the hatch,” he snapped. “Get my men up here.”

  “Outer water lock doors opening now,” said the tech at the control console.

  Crane saw three workers wheeling a bizarre-looking contraption into place beside the water lock: a steel scaffold about seven feet tall, onto which was set a large metal ring with a toothed circumference. What looked like a pair of industrial-strength lasers had been fastened onto the ring, in 180-degree opposition to each other. Clearly, this was the device that would cut a circular hole into the side of the Marble, creating an exit hatch and releasing the crew inside.

  “Marble One’s in the lock now,” the tech said. “Closing outer doors.”

  “How long will it take the laser to cut an exit hatch?” Crane asked.

  “Eight minutes,” Spartan said. “That’s at two hundred percent normal operating speed.”

  Crane’s attention was distracted from the laser gantry by a commotion at the main entrance. Three marines entered, pushing makeshift gurneys ahead of them; another followed in their wake, medical field kits slung over his shoulder. Spartan looked over at Crane, made the slightest nod
of his head in the direction of the Marble. You’re on, the nod told him.

  Crane walked over to the laser gantry, gesturing for the marines to wheel the gurneys and trauma equipment up behind him. He busied himself prepping the gurneys, opening the kits, and laying out instruments, readying the C collars and short boards for the upcoming extraction, running down mental checklists, preparing for the injuries that likely awaited.

  “Lock sealed,” said the tech. “Equalizing pressure.”

  “Bring the retractor into place,” Spartan ordered.

  There was a whirring noise, and Crane looked up to see a large robotic clamp being dollied into position over the water lock.

  “Pressure equalized,” said the tech.

  “Open the lock,” said Spartan.

  For a moment, all fell silent again. Then Crane felt a rumbling beneath his feet. The two panels of the water lock drew back from the floor, revealing a surface of dark water. The clamp slowly descended with a mechanical whir, swaying back and forth beneath the heavy cable, jaws yawning wide. It reached the water and kept descending until fully submerged. The whirring noise ceased. Crane heard a muffled clunk. The cable began to rise again, more slowly this time. He saw the top of the clamp break the water’s surface. Inch by inch it rose, revealing its webbing of hydraulics, its heavy jaws…and at last, very slowly, Marble One itself came into view, suspended between them.

  There was a collective gasp from the assembled group; groans; a suppressed cry. Someone behind Crane started to weep.

  He barely heard.

  What lay between the jaws of the robotic clamp was not a shiny, gleaming sphere of transcendent beauty. It was a shrunken tangle of metal, horribly imploded, transformed by the appalling pressure into an unrecognizable grayish wad barely a third its former size. One section of the hull had been split apart explosively and petaled back against itself, exposing countless spike-like struts resembling the quills of a porcupine. Other sections had been compressed so violently they seemed almost to have melted. Not one of the torn and twisted lines was distinguishable as the Marble he’d seen before.

  An awful pall of silence settled over the hanger, broken only by weeping. For a long moment, the clamp hung there, suspended over the water lock, the operator too shocked to act.

  “Cut it down,” Spartan ordered in a savage voice. Crane glanced over at him, but the expression on the admiral’s face was too terrible to contemplate, and he returned his eyes to the Marble.

  With a shriek of protesting metal and a clank of chains, the remains of Marble One were steered to one side of the water lock, where it sat suspended a foot over the floor of the Drilling Complex, seawater running from it in heavy streams. And not only seawater, Crane noticed with a visceral twinge of dismay: some of the streams that poured from the tangled ruin were thick and red.

  It was obvious—all too obvious—that there would be no need for the cervical collars, the short boards…or anything else. Crane turned toward the marines, ready to tell them to secure the medical equipment.

  But even as he did so, he saw a familiar face among the horror-struck crowd that watched from the perimeter of the Drilling Complex. A short man in faded bib overalls, with piercing blue eyes and an unruly cloud of silvery hair. It was Flyte, the strange old man who had approached him in his cabin. He was barely visible behind two technicians, staring at the scene with an expression of pity and almost childlike sorrow. Then he turned toward Crane, catching him with his intense gaze. Slowly, deliberately, he mouthed silently the same words he had uttered before, standing uninvited in Crane’s stateroom:

  Everything is broken.

  30

  Howard Asher had two laboratories on the Deep Storm Facility: a cramped cubbyhole on deck 8 and a somewhat larger space on deck 4. They were very different. While the deck 8 lab had a lived-in, eclectic, inviting feel, the lab in the classified section was spare, businesslike, and clinical. He was in this lab—head in his hands, pondering a complex series of charts and equations that lay before him—when the door opened and Admiral Spartan stepped in.

  For a moment, the two men stared at each other like sparring partners. Then Asher’s tense, drawn face relaxed a little.

  “Seat?” he said in a sad, quiet voice.

  Spartan shook his head. “The Magnetic Descent Unit—the Doodlebug—is in poor shape. We plan to use the spare while Fabrication does an overhaul.”

  “So you plan to continue the dives?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t we?”

  Asher looked at him in disbelief. “Admiral, three men just died.”

  “I’m aware of that. Have your engineers come to any conclusions?”

  “About what caused the Doodlebug to malfunction? Nothing definite.”

  “What about ensuring it doesn’t recur?”

  For a moment, Asher stared appraisingly at the admiral. Then he sighed. “Doubling—or, better still, tripling—the strength of the electromagnetic field should guarantee the link remains stable on future dives.”

  Spartan nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Shut down all robotic or automatic processes that aren’t absolutely necessary to the construction of the shaft. That goes for the remaining two Marbles as well as the Doodlebug: operate with a bare minimum of instrumentation. And critical instrumentation should use redundant packets, with checksums for validity.”

  “That’s your recommendation?”

  Asher frowned. “My recommendation is that we cease all operations until we have a thorough understanding of what caused this disaster and why.”

  “That’s not an option, Dr. Asher. There’s no telling how long it would take to arrive at such an understanding.”

  “But the deaths—”

  “A tragic mishap. Grove, Adkinson, Horst—they knew the inherent danger of the work when they signed up. So did you, for that matter.”

  Asher tried again. “Admiral, listen—”

  “No, Dr. Asher. You listen for a minute. Haven’t people always been willing to die in the name of discovery and knowledge? Isn’t that why we’re all here? Look at Robert Falcon Scott, Amelia Earhart, the crew of the Challenger. We’re all putting our lives on the line here to push the envelope, to better mankind.”

  Asher sighed, rubbed at his eyes with a weary hand. “There’s the empirical evidence to consider.”

  “What evidence might that be?”

  “Marble One just penetrated into the third, the lowest, level of the crust—the oceanic layer. Is it coincidence that this aberrant behavior occurred at the deepest depth we’ve achieved?”

  “Pressure would not cause a malfunction like that.”

  “I’m not talking about pressure. I’m talking about getting closer to whatever’s down there. The oceanic layer is the thinnest of all. Even if we put these deaths aside for a moment, don’t all these strange sicknesses trouble you? Doesn’t it bother you that people are beginning to whisper, that there are serious morale issues?”

  When Spartan did not reply, Asher rose and began to pace the room restlessly. “Thanks to Dr. Crane, we’ve made a huge leap forward.”

  “Dr. Crane should stick to his assignment,” Spartan said.

  “He’s provided us with the biggest break yet. Admiral, those sentinels aren’t transmitting a signal on one wavelength anymore. They’re transmitting different signals now, on thousands of wavelengths. Probably millions. In fact, it seems they’re transmitting on every single band in the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet—you name it.”

  “And in so doing, they are disrupting our instruments and wireless networks,” Spartan said. “If it’s anything, it’s probably a welcome of some sort.”

  “That’s possible. But it could be something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. But what they have to say is so important they’re exhausting all available bandwidths to broadcast it.” Asher hesitated. “It’s my strong opinion we should stop digging unt
il we’ve translated the message. You’ve got more than your share of Naval Intelligence spooks aboard. If I could tap them, pool our efforts, we could decrypt this message faster.”

  “They have other tasks at present. And besides, you don’t have proof there are any messages.”

  Asher threw up his hands in exasperation. “What do you think, then? They’re broadcasting the top forty hits of Alpha Centauri?” And he began pacing again.

  Spartan watched him for a moment. “Very well, Dr. Asher. Let’s assume there are messages. As I said, chances are they’re welcoming us. Or perhaps they are transmitting user manuals for whatever we’re digging toward. Am I curious about that? Very. But am I going to drop everything, stop work, until you discover what they’re trying to say? No. For one thing, you can’t give me an estimate for cracking the code. Can you?”

  “I…” Asher stopped, gave his head an angry shake.

  “And for another, it doesn’t matter what the message is. As you pointed out, we’re into the oceanic layer now. We’re only a week away from reaching the Moho, maybe less. Whatever is down there, we’re going to extract its contents and study them—before anybody else can.”

  Asher opened his mouth to respond. But before he could speak, the floor trembled: first gently, then violently. Manuals and binders fell from the shelves, and there was a crash of breaking glass as a tray of lab equipment slid off the nearby worktable. Confused voices sounded from the hall, and an alarm sounded in the distance. Spartan leapt to his feet, running to Asher’s phone and dialing as another shudder shook the Facility.

  “This is Admiral Spartan,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Determine the source of that. If there’s any damage, I want instant reports.”

  He turned to look at Asher. The chief scientist had grasped the edge of the worktable for support. Now he stood quite still, head cocked as if listening. “Just aftershocks now,” he murmured.

  “What the hell was that, Dr. Asher?”

  “The price we pay for working in an oceanic ridge. The upside is, the crust of the earth is shallow here—the Moho is less than five miles deep. The downside is, ocean ridges are prone to earthquakes.”