CHAPTER 43
At his request, Penny met Andrew in his cabin to fill him in on the latest developments. They were now waiting for Chiffrey, who was supposed to have joined them twenty minutes ago.
“Do you really want to take a bullet for this guy’s agenda?” she said. “I don’t like the way he’s herding us into doing his work.”
“We’d do about the same even if no one else was involved,” Andrew said.
“But there is real risk here.”
“That’s always true.” He looked down as if waiting for his thoughts to clear, like silt from muddy water. “Have a feeling. Can’t explain it, don’t understand it yet, but somehow all my life’s tied up in this.”
“That’s quite a statement. What about everyone else?”
“Can’t demand anyone stay, won’t demand they leave. Door’s still open.” He put the full force of his personality and will behind his next words. “We’ll still have enough crew, but if it comes to it, I’ll go on alone.”
She had no idea he felt so strongly about it and was about to say something when Chiffrey finally knocked. Andrew called him in and he entered, his usual saunter absent. He smiled, but she could feel the tension behind those gleaming teeth. Now what, she wondered?
“Sorry. I was on the horn. Bad news. One of our ships on the perimeter has been disabled.”
Penny raised an eyebrow, ever so slightly. “Propeller sheared off again?”
“No, all the electrical systems are out, including the ones needed to keep the engines going. They’ve increased the perimeter another five kilometers as a result, but they’re not taking it well.”
“So they got the message this time,” she said. “And now?”
“I talked them into waiting until we send the minisub down.” He looked at Andrew. “It’s a go.”
“And how did you manage that?” she asked.
“Simple. We are virtually dead center over the object and we’re fine. One of their ships gets a little too close, but still miles from here, and zing, it’s out of action. I couldn’t begin to explain just why we have an edge, but we are absolutely their best shot and they all know it, now.”
“I don’t like this at all,” Penny said. “We get dangled down there like bait, and they lurk outside and see what happens.”
Chiffrey threw up his hands and looked upwards as if beseeching the gods. “What is it with you? First you want us to wait until you get here and give you a clear field, and now you’re mad because you get your wish. Feels like I’m damned if I do and—”
“We get the point, Lieutenant,” Andrew said. “Another ship disabled, so the situation has changed. And?”
Chiffrey nodded. “We have our chance. We’re cleared and will have any backup we require. But if we don’t act now, the only other option is that the Navy and other forces will take over completely.”
“How we go is still our call,” Andrew said.
“Of course. But keep the fact close at hand that if their ships keep getting disabled, eventually they’ll see no other option except to try to soften up the target.”
“Wait,” Penny said. “You told us before we had a clear field!”
“I know what I told you, but things changed, and I don’t make all the decisions. We’re not operating in a vacuum, and not everyone has your priorities. Truth to tell, probably no one else has.” He smiled. “Listen, isn’t this the chance you’ve been waiting for? If we can pry open that clam down there, even just a little, maybe we can find out what we’re dealing with, and then maybe no one will get hurt. We all want to see what’s underneath that last wet rock, now don’t we? Hopefully it’s just innocence itself.”
“And what if it’s not?” she asked.
“If it is dangerous, and even if it doesn’t mean to be, just leaving it there to wreak mayhem later is not an option. The word from higher up is that this is now considered a threat until proven otherwise. They’re giving us a chance to supply the ‘otherwise.’ If we can’t, they will have to respond in a way commensurate with the situation. Not necessarily with force, but that will probably become their only option, in my opinion. I need to tell them you will go down there.”
“We already agreed on that,” Andrew said.
“Good. From what I hear, the Bluedrop is one of the best deep-sea minisubs around. And the depths here are well within its specs.”
“It still seems far too risky,” Penny said, “especially after what happened to yet another of your invincible Navy ships.”
“Sugar, they don’t belong to me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Drop the goddamn banter.”
He shrugged up his eyebrows as if giving her the stage, so she took it.
“I want this to succeed as much as you, but I don’t want anyone to get hurt because we rushed in to appease some panic-stricken, clueless decision maker at a desk somewhere.”
“And your alternative?”
“We should use remote devices exclusively. Go out and get replacement parts for our ROVs, even if it does take a little longer. The Navy must have excellent ROVs. Why can’t we use theirs? Sending people down there is insane.”
“There is a risk to going back out of the circle,” Chiffrey said. “We don’t know if we could get back in, and we’ve just seen they can’t come to us. We don’t know if Navy ROVs, which I am sure are excellent, would violate the immunity we seem to have. They might have the wrong scent, so to speak.”
Penny laughed out loud. “Are you serious? ‘Scent?’ You have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Correct, almost. I don’t know why the Valentina has, for lack of a better term, immunity, although I strongly suspect the transceiver has something to do with it, though as far as I can tell, no one here has been able to discover a single thing about it. For our immediate purposes, it doesn’t matter if we know why, we should not risk compromising it. You remember what happened when the Navy used their gear? Everything toast. Maybe even repairing your own gear with new parts would mess things up. Who knows?”
“You’re stretching too far,” she said.
“The less we change, the better, and you know that’s true. It’s the same reasoning that was used, by you among others, to not bring any of my people on board here. We don’t want to wake a sleeping dragon.”
“Well, you might, if you go down there.”
Andrew smiled at her. Yet, she realized, he was not opposed to using the Bluedrop.
“Look,” Chiffrey said, “we don’t have weeks to repair, and replace, and reconfigure. Malcolm tells me the parts to fix your own ROVs are mostly custom, one of a kind. And guess what? We sent a message to your institute, the Point. Your people tell us that their spare parts have also been pilfered. The ones we need are gone, all of them. According to them, it would take weeks to make replacements. Weeks, in my experience, usually translates as months.”
“Where did you get this?” Andrew asked.
“The reason I was late. The Point contacted my people. We have a good liaison now. There probably will be a message waiting for you on the bridge. Sorry to drop it on you out of the blue. Unfortunately, Captain, there’s more.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Mary Sims took leave of Jack for a day and paid a visit to the Point. Just before the parts went missing. We have witnesses that place her in the area where the spares and supplies for the Bluedrop were kept. She spoke with someone there, someone she knew, and stayed there after that person went to lunch.”
“She stole them?” Penny asked. It all started to make a warped kind of sense.
“Not proven yet,” Chiffrey said, “but looks that way. We have to think she disabled the ROVs here before she left. Probably just dumped the parts overboard.” He sighed, slowly letting out his breath. “I got to know her a little. Sweet girl, but it soon became clear she was carrying a torch for Ripler. And after the incident, that torch seemed to burn a little brighter and a lot stranger. Right? She would have done anything for him. No surprise when she elec
ted to return to help with his care.”
“She’s not the type to steal and scheme,” Andrew said.
“I agree.” Chiffrey said. “The only thing that makes sense to me is that Mary was manipulated by Ripler. Even after he went crackers, he could be extremely persuasive and compelling. In some ways, more than ever. I believe he has a kind of hold on her.”
“Works for me,” Penny said, “but why disable the ROVs? Jack championed them at the expense of the Bluedrop every chance he got.”
“So I heard,” Chiffrey said. “Maybe it was sort of a ‘if I can’t have them, no one will’ kind of thing. He broke his own toys rather than let someone else have them. Where is Matthew these days, by the way?”
“He’s keeping busy, but still recovering,” Penny said. “Leave him be.”
“If you hear anything new,” Andrew said to Chiffrey, “update me immediately.”
“You have my word. But we do need to step it up. We don’t have spares here, we don’t have them back at the Point. We don’t have time to make new ones. The Bluedrop is our only ride. We go with what we have now, or we go home.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” Andrew said.
“It’s me, Malcolm. Um, news, Captain.”
“The missing parts?”
“Ah, no, but more.”
“Come in,” Andrew said. “What’s happened?
Malcolm glanced around the small cabin as if looking for something. His gaze finally alighted on the deck, but as if he were looking straight through it, down into the sea. “The sonar works again,” he said.
“Didn’t know it was broken.”
“I mean the dome. We can see it now. It’s…perfect.”
The was a brief silence when no one even seemed to breathe, then Chiffrey quietly asked, “You can see the whole thing?”
“Perfectly round. Huge. Four hundred and ninety-six meters in diameter, about three hundred high.”
Chiffrey made no attempt to hide his elation and almost hugged Malcolm, but instead announced, “The welcome mat is out.”
“You’re a fool to count on that,” Penny said.
“Sorry, can’t argue with you now. There are some people I need to contact. First, I’m going to have a quick look of my own at this thing on sonar. If you’ll excuse me.” As he was leaving, however, he turned and said, “Sure, I don’t know for sure, but this thing becoming visible just as we arrive will lend us even more credibility with the leash holders up the line. So let’s use the opportunity while we can.”
Penny made no attempt at an answer. She had none. It was time to talk to her father.
She found him in C-lab where Emory was giving him a commentary as they viewed the sonar. The image was striking. It seemed too symmetrical, too perfect in shape.
“Amazing,” her father said, and finally looked up at her. “Don’t you think?”
“I think you need to tell me how you are going to keep them safe down there.”
He glanced at Emory who, after some hesitation, said, “I’ll explain. For one thing, we’re going to use a dead-man switch.”
“Charming name,” she said, “but I was speaking to my father.”
“Emory can explain this better than I can.”
She looked at her father a moment more, then turned to Emory. She made her face as impassive as she could. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“No problem. It’s called a dead-man switch because even a dead-man can activate it.”
“Now I feel so much better.”
“Hey, it’s just a fail-safe device to bring the Bluedrop up even if everything is non-operative. A solid clockwork mechanism, no wires or circuits, just gears and springs, tough and reliable.”
“Nothing is reliable anymore,” she couldn’t help saying.
“Well, it doesn’t depend on electrical power, so that should give it an edge. I’ll rig it so if the switch is not manually reset every twenty minutes, there’ll be a warning and then some explosive bolts—”
“Explosive!”
“They’re small,” Emory said. “Used for years, extremely reliable. On the first manned spacecraft, for instance. They blow by producing gas from the reaction of chemical agents. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, so safe. The gas flows into ballistic-rated membranes that force water out of the ballast tanks. The Bluedrop becomes buoyant and up she comes, at a safe rate, not too fast. Divers can meet it and adjust as necessary.”
“Even from outside?” she said.
“Sure. And we have high intensity underwater flares, so they can see if the electric lights go out and mechanical cameras on board that can work without electricity as well. Even if we have power problems, we’ll still get something. Just about anything can go wrong, and the crew will still be good. Multiple backups throughout.”
Penny smiled as best she could. Emory was trying to reassure her, but his near religious faith in technology made him sound less, rather than more, convincing.
“Emory, that’s all marvelous, but you don’t really know that the Bluedrop will not be disabled in some other way you can’t anticipate. Remember the Navy cruisers? What happens if the Bluedrop gets a hole punched through it? Everyone would drown.”
“I doubt it. The pressure would crush them first.”
“Well, silly me, then there’s no worry at all!”
She raced out of the room in a fury and out to the deck. Footsteps sounded after her. She walked as fast as she could, then abruptly turned and shouted, “What?” But it wasn’t Emory. It was her father.
“Dear,” he said. “No one will be harmed.”
“But you don’t know that! What do we have to go on, to really make an assessment? Nothing!”
“I don’t agree, and I’m surprised to hear you say this. Violence does not fit in with what we have seen so far. No one has been hurt physically.” He paused for a moment. “In any case, we won’t be free diving. There will be a cable, both for added security and to allow video and data connections. It will hamper our maneuverability somewhat, but it seems prudent. The dead-man switch is redundant. If worst comes to worst, they can just haul us up. Although you are right in saying we don’t understand what we are dealing with, we have been getting a wealth of information on its character, if you like. I don’t see anything to indicate that we will be harmed, and Chiffrey has the Navy and his people going along with this, but we don’t know for how long. Right now, they are willing to let us have a go.”
“How kind of them.”
“The longer we wait, the more likely it is that they will insist on pushing, and who knows what the consequences of that would be?”
“We don’t know what the consequences of our actions will be.”
“Ultimately you can say that about every breath we take, but it’s hardly fair to suggest we shouldn’t explore the unknown until we know all about it first.”
Penny considered. Opposing her father now would be like trying to stop time.
“When do you launch?”
“The day after tomorrow.”