Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep

by Jason Henderson

  “This is the great spring migration!” Misty looked at him with a matching smile. “I’ve only read about it. They’ll travel all the way past Washington State, two thousand miles from Mexico.”

  “Turn on the mics,” said Gabriel excitedly. “Let’s hear them.”

  “Aye.” Peter hit a switch on the wall. “Here we go.”

  At first there was static, and then the external mics came online and they heard it: what sounded like a forest of drums, beating steadily, boom-boom-boom, rising up and falling down, hundreds of higher and lower drumbeats sounding away as the whales passed around them. Around that sound were other percussive sounds: watery pops and gurgles, rhythmic and slow and mixed amid the drumbeats.

  “I thought whales sang.” Peter wrinkled his brow.

  Misty nodded. “Some do. Gray whales communicate with this drumming sound.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “No one knows. We don’t even know how they do it.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes, listening to the burbling noises, the drums, and the brush of the water against the microphones. We live on a world of mostly water, he thought, and we don’t understand its kings at all.

  He looked at Misty. “You know what these whales used to be called? Devil Fish. Because when they were attacked by whalers, they put up a fight. We attacked them, and we blamed the whales for the violence that followed. We’ve nearly erased them from existence, and we don’t even know why they sound like drums. We do it again and again. We’re doing it now.” Gabriel opened his eyes and looked back. “We have a responsibility. To figure out what to do before the same thing happens to the Lodgers.”

  10

  LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Peter was on watch again while Misty slept in her bunk off the dive room and Gabriel exercised in the passenger room. Peter called with the news. “Gabe? We’re reaching the Garbage Patch.”

  “Really?” Gabriel reached the bridge a minute or two ahead of Misty, who rubbed her face and shook off whatever sleep she’d had as she reached her console. The Obscure was running along the surface as Gabriel gazed at the view screen, which still showed endless Pacific blue ahead.

  “Yep.” Peter threw the sonar up, and it took over half the screen. As the sonar line swept around in clocklike circles, countless speckles flickered dully. “It covers the ocean up ahead. And it’ll keep going.”

  “But I can’t see anything at all.” Misty watched the waves on camera.

  “I think the plastic beads float just under the water, basically,” Peter said.

  A new ping appeared at the top edge of the sonar screen—a thick mass that indicated something with a lot of weight. “Hello,” Gabriel said. “What’s that?”

  Peter touched his headphones. “It’s not making any noise. If it’s a craft, it’s not running. In fact it’s not moving.”

  “Could it be a fishing vessel?” Gabriel asked. “Maybe they’re anchored.”

  “If so, I’d be hearing all kinds of things. Tools, machinery, generators.”

  “Besides,” added Misty, “would a fishing boat be all the way out here?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Could it be a whale?”

  “Like a dead whale?” Misty asked. “Maybe a small one.”

  “About thirty feet long, yeah,” Peter agreed. “Do dead whales float?”

  It was Misty’s turn to shrug.

  “Okay, how far is that?” Gabriel asked. It was still not visible onscreen, but they were moving toward it at twenty-six knots.

  “Just over the horizon,” Peter said. “About twenty-five miles.”

  Gabriel scratched his head. “Prepare to dive to sixty-five feet.”

  “What do you want to do?” Misty asked. “Are we going around it?”

  “Nah. I want to get a closer look.”

  Peter said, “Dive sixty-five feet, aye.” Water started pounding inside the walls as they dropped below the surface, and the front cameras filled with what looked like snow in the froth of the waves. In fact the snow was garbage, millions of clumps of white, gray, blue, and green beads battering softly against the front of the ship.

  “There’s your garbage.” Peter nodded toward the screen.

  “Pellets,” Gabriel observed.

  “It’s amazing.” Misty sounded angry. “You take a soda bottle and grind it for years, and it turns to a bunch of BBs.”

  “It’s disgusting.” Gabriel had seen too many images of fish cut open, their bodies filled with plastic waste. “People are killing the ocean and they don’t even know it.”

  The sound of the pellets created a constant patter on the hull, and Gabriel had to raise his voice slightly. “How far down does this stuff go?”

  “Reaching sixty-five feet,” Peter reported. “And we’re still in it.”

  “Ugh. Steady as she goes.”

  As they moved along below the waves, Peter called out the distance to the strange whale or boat or whatever it was. Gabriel watched the sonar screen as the shape got closer to the center. It still lay motionless on the surface.

  “Come to about a hundred yards from its position and full stop.”

  “Aye.” A few minutes later, Peter announced that they were there. “Full stop.”

  “Periscope depth.”

  “We’re gonna use the periscope?” Misty asked. “I love that.”

  Gabriel felt the ship rising as water rushed out of the walls and tanks, and something caught his ear. “What’s that noise?”

  Peter frowned. “If I had to guess, I think there’s a lot of sludge in the water moving in and out of the ballast tanks. Garbage. It’s making the water pump out a little slower.”

  “Huh. Efficiency?”

  “Ninety-four percent. Just slows the tanks down a little.”

  “Wait,” Misty said with concern. “That doesn’t sound good. How do you know it won’t get worse?”

  “Ninety-four percent is pretty good,” Gabriel insisted, but in the back of his head he didn’t feel so sure. “Don’t worry. I built this thing.” But that isn’t saying as much as you’d like, is it? You don’t know everything that can happen to these engines.

  Misty looked at him for a second and nodded.

  “Periscope depth, Captain,” Peter reported.

  “Deploy periscope.”

  “Deploy periscope, aye.”

  “Onscreen.”

  They heard a ratcheting as a metallic cable shot from the body of the Obscure and the view screen filled with a camera image—the camera was shooting through teeming masses of plastic muck for a moment, and then the sun broke through and the camera splashed out onto the surface. The periscope camera was atop a Frisbeelike disc that rested on the water. They were still staring up at the sky when the end of the cable straightened above the disc, popping the camera down into position. Now they were looking out across the ocean.

  Misty’s tone brightened as she watched the new image. “See, I like this because you get to see the ocean as though you’re not there at all, just a floating you and all that blue.”

  “Beats the heck out of a pipe with mirrors,” Peter agreed. That was the way old periscopes worked.

  “Don’t knock a pipe with mirrors; we have that too in case this thing doesn’t work,” Gabriel said. “Show us the object.”

  Peter turned a tiny joystick on the right of his console, and the camera slowly swept across the horizon clockwise, then stopped.

  Floating on the surface was a boat with blue walls and a small white pilot house, which was where the captain would stand and steer the vessel and, if needed, radio for help. Yep. Gabriel sighed. “It’s a fishing trawler.”

  Peter clicked his tongue. “Anybody else disappointed it’s not an unknown creature?”

  “Not me.” Misty looked relieved. “I’m just glad it’s not a dead whale.”

  “Can you make out markings?” Gabriel asked.

  Peter magnified the image until they could see the boat, floating loose. They saw a series of markings on the side and A
GIMARK INDUSTRIES written in white letters.

  Misty turned to her station and tapped the name into a search engine. “Well, that’s a fishing company. Of course.” She looked back. “I don’t find anything on this particular boat. What do you want to do?”

  “So … you come across a dead ship.” Gabriel rubbed his hands, thinking through the problem. “What if they had engine trouble? If they were blown off course, there could be people on it. Except…”

  He was thinking about the story his sister had told him about the fake whaling vessel.

  “Except what?” Misty asked. “Are you afraid of what we might find?”

  “Ugh. I’m not afraid,” he said. “I’m just wondering, what if it’s a decoy?”

  She raised her eyebrows as if he were insane.

  “Look, my sister said that someone deliberately drew her to a boat that turned out to be a trap.”

  “Okay.” Misty smirked. “So your many enemies are so good, they know just where you’re going to be coming, down to fifty or so miles? In thousands of miles of ocean?”

  He had to admit that Misty was right. Nerissa’s paranoia was contagious. He had to watch to not pick it up. “Nah, you’re right. And anyway, if there could be people who need help…”

  “Then we do what we do.”

  But he was afraid of something else that was a lot more likely. Gabriel didn’t want to think about how the odds were that those stranded people had been out here too long and it was already too late. And besides that, they were silent. He had a sick feeling that they were about to see something awful.

  He nodded. “Peter, bring the dinghy online.”

  “Aye.” He brought up a diagram of the Obscure onscreen, and Gabriel saw a compartment on the starboard-side rear, near the dive room, light up.

  “Away we go.” He turned and gestured to Misty as he headed to the door of the bridge.

  At the back of the bridge before they entered the corridor, Gabriel put his thumb to a biometric scanner and unlocked a locker next to the door. He drew out a pair of long green composite-plastic rifles. Because of the red, clawlike stinger on the end, they called them pincer guns.

  He handed one to Misty and took the other.

  “You sure we need these?” She pulled back a cocking slide, and a pair of pincers at the end of her rifle began to crackle with energy. She kept the barrel pointed at the deck. It wasn’t supposed to be lethal—none of Gabriel’s weapons were—but they were both sticklers about keeping anything remotely dangerous pointed away from people, including yourself, unless you meant it.

  “Only if it’s a trap.”

  Gabriel held up his rifle with his finger at the selector switch, a small knob next to the trigger that looked like the horn of a narwhal, the unicorn of the sea. “Keep it set for local. That way it’s like…”

  Misty held hers out. “Like a Taser.” She nodded and cocked the pincer.

  They moved quickly down the corridor, through the passenger compartment to the end where a porthole blinked with red lights from top to bottom. Gabriel touched the scanner and the door flew open.

  The Nemotech escape dinghy, a small craft that Gabriel rarely used, was about the size of a small fishing boat, with two forward chairs and bench seats of metal in the back. It had huge forward windows but, of course, all they could see as they strapped in was a bare metal wall. Gabriel and Misty put in earpieces as Gabriel reached up and toggled a switch labeled HOUSING.

  The wall in front of them, part of the side hull of the Obscure, slid back, and the dinghy was enveloped in water and garbage pellets. He could barely see out the window for the swirling of tiny bits of plastic. He yanked down a handle in the roof labeled DEPLOY. “Here we go.”

  Clamps on the side of the dinghy drew back, and they dropped like a stone into the ocean below. “Engines?”

  Misty hit a button. “Engines, aye,” and the small rear engines cut on, shuddering and causing the whole craft to vibrate. Gabriel grabbed a joystick in front of him and drew back, and they sailed below the Obscure. Through the garbage beads he saw the nose of the Obscure come into view and disappear as they shot into the water beyond, and then he pushed the stick forward and they rose.

  They bobbed up onto the surface, and bits of plastic clung to the windows. He hit another switch and the sunshields drew back, leaving the entire top half of the dinghy clear. It was like floating in a Nemoglass bubble.

  “Good grief, it’s bright.” Misty squinted and spread her palm over her face.

  “Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to be able to see all around.”

  The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly, creating blinding flashes off the ocean. The ship bobbed slightly on temperate waves. He couldn’t have asked for a calmer sea.

  Gabriel drew them closer to the fishing vessel, which still looked dead.

  “Watch out for trawling nets.” Misty pointed at the cranelike apparatus on the back of the boat, from which long fishing nets dangled loose into the water. He nodded and piloted the dinghy around to the fore of the fishing vessel.

  “There’s a ladder.” Gabriel drew them close to a metal structure that ran down the side of the boat. He deployed a grabber cable from the side of the dinghy, and it latched on to the ladder. “Okay?”

  “Looks good to me.”

  “Peter,” Gabriel called. Peter was still on the bridge. “We’re boarding.”

  They unstrapped, grabbed their pincers, and went to the back of the dinghy, where Misty twisted a pair of handles on the starboard side. She swung the dinghy’s door open and stood on the threshold. She stepped from the dinghy, put her foot on the ladder, and started to climb, and he followed her.

  Gabriel waited to grab the ladder until Misty had poked her head over the top of the bulwark, the little wall that ran around the deck of the ship. Misty looked around, then back down to Gabriel. “Nothing yet.” She climbed over the top of the ladder and he heard her drop to the deck on the other side, and in a moment he had landed there as well.

  The gray metal deck was filmed over with beads of plastic that squished under their feet as they stepped through. Obviously the boat had been here long enough to be hit by a few really big waves that had sent beads of plastic sloshing across the deck. Speaking of big waves, the bulwark around the deck only came up to Gabriel’s hips, so he could easily see someone being swept over if they weren’t being careful.

  Here and there ropes and equipment fastened to poles along the inside of the bulwark swayed gently with the boat. The pilot house stood at the back, next to a small unused escape dinghy still tied to the deck.

  “Getting that little boat into the water is easy.” Misty pointed to a series of ropes and pulleys attached to the escape dinghy. “You just lift it and drop it over the side. So why is it still here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s not a good sign. This whole boat looks empty. Hellooo?” he shouted.

  The fishing boat was as silent as a tomb. If anyone was here, they must be too sick or exhausted to move. He and Misty would have to look for them. The two exchanged glances, caught up in the eerie quiet.

  “Hellooo?” Misty called as she stepped farther across the deck. “Hull first, or the pilot house?”

  “I think it’s empty,” Gabriel said. And at this point he was hoping so. He spoke into the microphone at his throat. “Peter, we’re looking around.” He gestured across the deck and shrugged at Misty. “Let’s check out the pilot house.”

  They squished through the beads of plastic until they reached the pilot house, its windows bare except for sludgy streaks of plastic beads where waves had whipped up and struck them.

  The door was open, and Gabriel went in first. The emergency telephone was off its hook, the handset dangling against the floor. A metal cover for a notebook sat next to the steering column, and he went to open it as Misty came in behind him.

  He unlatched the metal and found a paper notebook inside. “It’s the captain’s log.”

  “What does it
say?”

  Gabriel flipped the pages and scanned the writing before him.

  • 0300 13 MARCH, ENGINE TROUBLE …

  • 1500 13 MARCH, HEART ATTACK AND SOS

  • 2300 15 MARCH …

  “They were rescued. These guys had engine trouble and a medical emergency. Looks like they got rescued by someone else from the fishing company.”

  Peter’s voice came back through Gabriel’s earpiece. “Okay.”

  “So that’s that,” Gabriel said, relieved.

  Misty visibly relaxed. “Okay. But why leave the boat?”

  “They were in a hurry—maybe they planned to come back and just haven’t yet. Anyway, there’s nothing for us to do.” Gabriel looked at the beads of plastic. “I really don’t like being here.”

  “I’m glad you said it.”

  “Captain?” Peter’s voice had an urgent sound.

  “Yes?”

  “Something just appeared on the scope!” Peter said quickly. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s big. I think it came from deep down.”

  “What do you mean, big?”

  “Big like a whale,” Peter said. “But the shape is wrong.”

  Gabriel spun around, scanning the water, but what good was that when he couldn’t see under the boat they were standing on? “Where is it now?”

  “It’s coming your—”

  And then the boat rocked hard, and Gabriel and Misty went flying.

  11

  GABRIEL’S SHOULDER SANG with pain as he slammed into a pole. He grunted and rolled over, standing up. Misty had collided with a coil of ropes and got up just as quickly, no worse for the wear. They ran to the bulwark around the deck, looking out.

  “What hit us?” Misty asked.

  “What do you see, Peter?” Gabriel scanned across the water, but all he saw were undisturbed waves. He rubbed his sore shoulder. He was lucky he hadn’t broken a collarbone. Boy, that would be great, to be all the way out here with no doctor. He didn’t even want to think about the pain, or the fact that they’d have to turn back. He could have lost the whole assignment from his sister just by being clumsy. He should know how to roll better. Misty knew how to roll.