Bobby blushed at the accusation, a quick surge of angry color coming into his pale face. "I... I didn't know," he said quickly. Too quickly. Jenny's mouth quirked downward in silent disgust. It was just an excuse, like all the other times. An apology would have been just too much to hope for. "I—"
Jenny pressed the earpiece of the headset closer and silenced him with a quick wave of her free hand. She had heard all Bobby's reasons before and, if she lived long enough, would probably hear them all again. But just now she was hearing something else—something that put a question mark against long life for anyone down here.
"What? What is it?"
"It's those two that chased you," Jenny said softly, trying to coax better reception from the outpost's elderly communication system. Earl had done his best with what they had, but Jenny knew well enough that what this radio needed wasn't so much regular maintenance as a few thousand extra dollars spent on upgrading it. Even so, lack of money or repair hadn't caused what she had just heard, and she needed to make sure that the words were real and accurate, instead of just a product of her scared imagination. Static whined and sizzled for a few seconds more. Then abruptly the signal cleared, a sure sign that it was being boosted through a commsat. Jenny flinched at what that might mean.
"They're on the satellite link," she said quietly, "calling their home base...” Register a formal complaint, damn you, she thought at them. Ask for advice. Legal enforcement. Sue us. Just don't do anything else. Don't...
The hornets didn't listen.
Oh God…!
Jenny MacLaine felt a jolt in her chest as though her heart had stumbled against her ribs, and her eyes closed for an instant. It had been fine last checkup, but she knew that after a life with a lot of effort and little enough comfort in it, she was already at the age when a sudden shock might... And then it went right on beating as if nothing had happened. She opened her eyes again, knowing now that things could get so bad that you were sure they couldn't get any worse. That was the stage when calm stepped in.
"They're asking for military intervention."
Bobby's eyes went wide, and he looked as though he were going to faint. Or throw up. Jenny watched him, feeling strangely detached from everything—from the young idiot who probably hadn't really started all this, because now it seemed as inevitable as winter after fall; from the frantic transmissions as everyone else along the Livingston Trench reacted to what she and they had heard; even from Earl, somewhere out there in the cold dark.
"What're we gonna do…?" Fear and shock seemed to have driven Bobby's voice up an octave, so that he sounded more like the son she and Earl had always regarded him as and less like the thoughtless young roughneck he had become.
Jenny flipped switches on the console, opening her own channel up and out to another cold dark one and the satellite hanging there waiting for her message, and summoned up the most reassuring smile she could manage.
"I guess," she said as the system came on-line, "say a prayer .."
* * *
The initial response took almost eleven hours, and it was impossible to tell whose military backup was first to arrive on the scene; but they had not been first by more than a few minutes. Four submarines now waited above the disputed zone of the Livingston Trench, nose to nose in a rough circle only a few hundred meters across. It was a range more suited to fighting with knives than with torpedoes, but it was the accepted face-off procedure that had developed over a score of pointless encounters in every commercially viable area of every ocean of the world. There were no visible markings on the black anechoic cladding of their hulls, and little enough difference in their outlines. Fifty years of sub design had seen to that. It was the same coincident evolution that had created similarities of shape for the dolphins, the killer whales, and the great pelagic sharks. In design as in nature, form followed function—and the function here was to hunt and kill others of their own kind.
These warrior subs had many ancestors, vessels which in their time had been considered the best in the world: the Alfa, the Victor and the Ak'yula PLAs of the long-gone Soviet Union, and the Advanced-Albacore hullforms used by SSN attack boats in the old United States Navy and its allies. Some of those old boats had high, squared-off sails, others had lower and more streamlined fins like the cetacean shapes developed by the Russian subs, but all of their descendants were huge, rakish things. Menacingly sleek, sinister black shapes hanging deceptively placid in the water, steel sharks waiting for a feeding frenzy to begin.
And like a feeding frenzy, all it needed was blood in the water. A single wrong move would be enough for that. It was no comfort that it hadn't happened yet. It only had to happen once.
* * *
Bobby leaned against the plastiform wall and watched the worried faces that filled the control room. Not one of them had an expression that might have reassured him, and the only comfort was that not a one had looked at him with anything more than regret. At least there had been no blame. Not yet; and whether there would ever be depended very much on whether anyone survived to make the accusation that all this had been his fault. It probably wasn't. He was just the excuse, not the reason. That was reckoned in territory and in money value, the way it always had been.
The mining outpost was as crowded now as it ever got. Earl was back, and with him half a dozen other mine workers with nowhere better to go. They were single men and women, gathered together here for some sort of comfort while the outside world decided their fate. Without, as usual, consulting them about it. That had been the fate of the little people all through history. Bobby shook his head. It was a bit late for philosophy, a course he had flunked anyway, in favor of auto shop.
The most worried face in the entire room was one well away from ground zero: the EarthNet news anchor on the control-room TV monitor was doing a good job of whipping up the tension for all the other lucky people watching it from a safe distance. Though if this thing really blew, there might be no such thing as a safe distance anywhere on the planet...
"… Repeating once again—information has reached our Earthcast News studios in Greenwich that warrior submarines from several of the world's economic confederations are converging on the Livingston Trench—a deep ocean canyon in the mid North Atlantic—and the threat of armed combat is suddenly dangerously real..."
The too-dramatic voice continued over a quick succession of military submarine schematics, world politico-economic graphics and a slightly out-of-date Oceanographic Institute map of where all the action was. The monitor's video-verité image shifted to a group of worried-looking people scrambling out of a shuttle on the helipad of the old United Nations Building in New York, and as Bobby looked at them, he thought callously that if they really wanted to know what worried was, they should have been down here.
"... Representatives from various confederations are frantically meeting, trying to keep the situation from escalating, but..."
Bobby could see that Jenny was ignoring it. There was nothing she could do except continue to scan the radio bands for information, and considering how cluttered with information those bands were at the minute, she was doing so with consummate skill. Then she muttered something under her breath and her hands on the monitor board closed to fists. She straightened a little and looked up at Earl. Just Earl; not Bobby, or anybody else. Right now for Jenny there probably was nobody else. "The subs're all trying to reach their upworld bases," she announced to the room in general, and though her voice was quiet, it cut through the excited chatter from the monitor. "They're trying to get the green light to open fire..."
The other miners looked at one another, fear visible on weathered features that didn't know how to wear such a harsh emotion well. It was one thing to be scared by an equipment malfunction out in the mining fields, but at least that was something they knew how to handle. There wasn't a man or woman in the room who hadn't field-stripped unreliable digging gear and then put it back together, who didn't know what an out-of-place noise might mean and how to
fix it. But this was different. Not all the expertise in the world could fix this situation, or make those subs go away— not without direct instructions from their surface command centers. It was the helplessness that was scary, even more than the threat.
"... Undersea territorial skirmishes have of course been occurring for years, but tensions seem to have reached the breaking point now at this very mineral-rich deep ocean trench. Observers have long pegged this region, where mining out posts from several different confederations coexist in dangerous proximity to one another, as a potential tinderbox..."
None of which helped a damn. Bobby looked around him, at the faces of his friends, his workmates, at all the family he had, and not a one of them would meet his eye. Fear, like grief, was a private thing. He tried to filter out the ominous words of the broadcast, and for want of anything better to do, he stared at the bank of external monitors. Passive sonar, magnetic anomaly detection, sound velocity—all of it was hardware that had been a military secret thirty years ago, and all that it could tell him was that nothing had changed. The four warrior subs were still out there in their standoff circle, not moving from their positions in case that might give one of the others a tactical advantage. The mining fields were dead; nothing was moving. Nobody would be so suicidal as to produce an echo trace that might be mistaken for a hostile. Except...
Bobby frowned. There was a trace on one of the scanners that was indicating movement, but in a location where no movement should be. Grateful for something to do to take his mind off useless fretting, he walked over to the readout and stared at it for a few seconds; then he rapped the screen with his knuckle. The sharp sound made heads turn all over the control room, and Bobby colored slightly at being the focus of attention. He waved vaguely at the scanner screen.
"Hey, uh, um, this reading is really screwy."
His statement didn't deflect attention; rather the reverse, as a few other miners wandered over to see what was going on. A system glitch was something they knew how to deal with, which was more than could be said about the situation outside, and working on the notoriously quirky MacLaine systems was at least better than standing helpless while the world's newspeople started some sort of countdown.
"It's the perimeter monitoring system," said Bobby, rapping at it again. The trace jumped slightly, then steadied, and the digital scale of its echo return began climbing for the first time. It shouldn't have been doing that. "According to—" Bobby paused, looked again and shook his head. "No, this can't be right. According to this, there's nomething down in the trench."
That was impossible. The Livingston Trench wasn't as deep as some of the Pacific abysses, but it was deep enough that any manned vessel apart from a bathyscaphe would only go into it one way. Down, right to the bottom, crushed flat as a dead beer can. Except that the source of this echo said otherwise. The scale readout began to tick over more quickly as the passive monitors picked up additional data; then it jumped to a blur of glowing numerals, slowed again and held steady. Bobby stared, blinked and for just an instant refused outright to believe what it was telling him.
"Something... huge," he said at last, in an awestruck voice. "And it's coming up..."
He saw Jenny turn to stare at him, and saw the doubt in her eyes. "What kinda 'something'?" Her voice was sharp, as skeptical as if she had caught him making excuses again. "A ship?"
Bobby shook his head. He had no excuses this time, and no fake sincerity to get him off yet another hook. He didn't need them. The instruments said so. "No ship I know gives off readings like this." Then he looked from the instrument monitors to the low-light camera display, and his jaw dropped in disbelief. The news broadcast forgotten, everyone in the control room crowded in to see.
It was something black, but glittering with lights; something moving, but so big that it seemed to stand still; something that none of them had ever seen out there before. Bobby took a step back from the monitors, and then another, as if scared the thing was going to come through them after him once they gave it a shape.
"Wait a minute," he said, and pointed at the bank of monitors as their computers enhanced the image and projected it on-screen. He had seen this thing before, bright with flags during its commissioning ceremony, but it was small wonder he hadn't recognized it. There were no flags now, just an aura of leashed-in power that he could almost feel. "It was on the news. You remember...!" They stared at him for a few seconds as though he had taken leave of his senses, then someone laughed with pure relief.
Bobby stared at the great dark shape, the monster from the depths that had saved all their necks. He didn't laugh. All he could do was smile... But now he felt like it. Because he knew the monster's name.
"seaQuest!"
CHAPTER 2
A somber leviathan rose out of the Livingston Trench.
On this vessel there was no dorsal sail, no cylindrical hull, no control empennage. Instead the sleek, flattened bow and the sweeping curves of the main body looked... not so much unfamiliar as unearthly, an alien shape that echoed hair-raisingly of the giant squid. And not just any squid, but an abyssal kraken, the whale-killing nightmare of the deep dark. In a slow, arrogant display of size and power, it glided effortlessly upward into the center of the face-off circle and hovered there, dwarfing the four warrior submarines, defying them to challenge, confident they would not dare.
This was seaQuest DSV. It had been designed to fulfill a single function: to be the best. The most efficient, the fastest and the deadliest military submarine on Earth. There was a certain grim curiosity, both among those who had designed and built it and those who now crewed it into yet another state of near-but-never war, about how good that design was; about what it could really do. But until someone gave the proper orders, there was no way to find out...
* * *
The atmosphere on seaQuest's bridge jangled with tension. This situation, and all the others like them, had been going on for fifteen years, ever since the first attempt to register a territorial claim to areas of the ocean floor had backed up by force. Some of the crew had been involved since the beginning; others were young enough that all their experience had been aboard this boat.
It made very little difference either way. She had been at sea for almost two years, a vessel designed to be so much better than all the rest that some sort of an end might be put to this endless bickering. And in those two years, no one in the North Pacific Confederation had dared pass on the command to fire. A century and a half ago, the hand-cranked CSS Hunley had been more dangerous than seaQuest was now, because that crew had at least been granted clearance to do something with their weapons. And the superiors who had authorized that clearance had been able to transmit their message...
"Captain! Nor-Pac Command is trying to get through! But it's breaking up. There's heavy sat-link interference!"
Captain Marilyn Stark glanced at the communications station, but said nothing at first. She spent a few more seconds studying Chief Maxwell's sensor displays before bothering to answer, then said, "Keep trying, Lieutenant."
That was all. Confidence in her crew had been Stark's trademark all through her career. She had spent half her life in the service, both on and under the surface, and it took more than a cranky radio to crack her glacial calm. Communications Officer Mack O'Neill had learned his trade on comms boards that had been the cutting edge of military technology, and they had been archaic by comparison with the equipment aboard seaQuest. Stark knew that even if it weren't working properly, it would be telling him why not: and that way a good comms officer could start doing something about it.
She was aware that seaQuest was right at the limit for Nor-Pac's geostationary relay satellite, and that was where most of the problem lay. Its boosted laser-optical transmission was barely able to penetrate the deep layer of water between submarine and surface, and what signal managed to leak through was being degraded both by depth and by the active jamming of the other four warrior subs. But there were ways around that. As she looked
at him again, O'Neill was already feeding in the sequence that would deploy seaQuest's half-kilometer ELF antenna; at seven minutes for a three-letter code group, the Extremely-Low-Frequency unit's data transfer rate was incredibly slow, but it was reliable—and almost impossible to jam. Stark turned back to Maxwell.
"Deploy Whiskers," she told the sensor chief, with no more change in her voice than if she had ordered a cup of coffee, and reached out to indicate points on the main WSKR screen. "Narrow cone sweeps." She straightened and pressed both hands into the small of her back, easing away a kink and stretching her spine like a lazy cat waiting for a mouse. Then she tapped a secondary board on the sensor console. "Feed all data directly to fire control."
That was unexpected, and not one of the accepted moves in the game. Maxwell looked at her, and she saw him lick his lips nervously before risking a reply. "Aye-aye, Captain." He worked over his console. "Whiskers out—feeding data now."
The sound of the acknowledgment was shaky. Stark gave him a hard smile and a reassuring pat on the shoulder, made a mental note to keep an eye on him, then turned toward her command chair.
"Four plasma torpedoes charged and loaded," Phillips, the weapons officer, said. Stark favored him with a quick, approving glance, because he spoke in a briskly efficient tone that Stark recognized as an unconscious echo of her own. At another time, in another place, she might have been amused. Now it simply reassured her that he would carry out her orders without question. At this time, in this place, any hesitation could kill them all.
"Thank you, Mr. Phillips." She didn't ask for any other information; on any vessel under Marilyn Stark's command, there was never any need for the Captain to waste breath. If her crew had something to say, they said it—otherwise they got back to their duties.
Halfway to the chair she met her executive officer, and automatically looked him over for traces of the same strain she had detected in Maxwell. She could see none. Though Jonathan Ford was as weary as everyone else on the seaQuest's bridge, and hadn't bothered to hide the fact, he was managing to keep all other concerns and emotions bottled up inside. That control was one of the reasons why he had made the rank of lieutenant commander so fast, and his present position as the youngest exec in the fleet. Not bad for a poor black kid from East Chicago, an escapee from the dreadful and violent life of the gangs. Her own reports had been partially responsible for his swift ascent through the ranks—Captain Stark did not hand out such commendations light-ly—but the rest of it had been thanks to Ford's own abilities. Without them there would have been no commendations anyway.