Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep

by Jason Henderson

  “Search and rescue.”

  “Okay,” Nerissa grumbled. “Gabe, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “You sent me on this mission.” Gabriel smirked. “And by the way, Nerissa, you haven’t told us. Why are you here? This was supposed to be—”

  “A Gabriel thing, I know.” She rubbed her forehead. “But it’s gotten worse.”

  “Gabe?” Peter’s voice came in Gabriel’s earpiece, and he held up a hand as Misty indicated with a nod that she was getting the same message. Gabriel touched a button on his earpiece and set it on the table, and Peter’s voice burst from a small speaker. “Are you there?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve picked up a … straggler.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We got one of those things chewing on the starboard forward camera gear. I think it’s … I think it was the biplane.”

  “Comms,” Nerissa called to her bridge. “Release a Bubo and send it to the starboard prow of the Obscure. Let me see it in the OS.”

  “Bubo?” Misty asked. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a drone,” Gabriel said. “It has cameras.”

  “She calls the drones Bubo?”

  “Clash of the Titans,” both the Nemos answered. That was one of the mythology movies they had watched a lot. The hero had a robot owl that came in pretty handy.

  An image flickered on the screen in the Sanctum and they were in the little drone, flying through water toward the Obscure.

  “There it is.” On the screen, a creature that looked vaguely like a squid with the head of a crawfish had grabbed onto the camera gear sticking out of the Obscure’s side. The creature was about twenty feet long, with tentacles up and down its length—and dangling off the end were the battered remains of the biplane, the landing gear and a piece of the wing.

  “It must have been damaged when you came up, Nerissa,” Gabriel said. He stared at it. “But now what is it up to?”

  The final piece of the biplane fell away as the creature slapped itself up against the hull of the Obscure. Two of its tentacles extended frond hands and began to glow, sending gaseous bubbles in the water.

  “No no no!” Gabriel found himself reaching out toward the screen. “It’s gonna try to burn through the hull.”

  Misty clapped a hand over her mouth. “We need to get if off the ship. Peter’s still on board; it could tear the ship apart.”

  “Peter, are you seeing this?” Gabriel asked.

  “Heck yes, I’m seeing it.”

  “Options.” Gabriel looked around the room, but he was including Peter as well. “I’ll start. We can’t shoot it with a torpedo, even a nonlethal one. Mine wouldn’t be able to hit my own hull and even if they did, one mistake and I could accidentally punch a hole through the Obscure.”

  “Hull integrity ninety-eight percent,” Peter reported. “It’s burning slowly, but it’s burning.”

  “Peter, if there’s a breach I need you down there to shore it up double-time.”

  Peter paused. “Aye.”

  “We won’t let it come to that, though. More options.”

  “We can just … yank it off,” Nerissa offered. “I can send a team in a small craft with spades and hooks and physically pull it away.”

  “No, no.” Gabriel watched the creature. “No. If we’re pulling it away it’ll just grab us again.” He thought. It was true it would try to grab onto the hull again. But he realized that maybe they had gotten lucky after all. At least if they moved fast enough to avoid too much damage. “I think we have an opportunity here.” He turned to Misty. “Let’s go fishing.”

  “Fishing?” Nerissa asked. “You’re talking about capturing it?”

  “Absolutely. You said yourself that we need to know more about them. We could…”

  “Eatin’ away at the hull over here, guys.” Peter sounded alarmed now.

  “Where are you going to put it?” Nerissa demanded. “It’s twenty feet long. You’d need a tank thirty feet by, what, fifteen? Even I can’t fit that. You gonna put it in your passenger compartment?”

  “No, come on.” This could work. Gabriel started walking, Misty following him out of the captain’s study and into the corridor toward the ladder they’d used to get in. “We encase the Lodger in nets, hard metal nets. We’ve both got them. And then we haul it.”

  “Haul it where?” Nerissa demanded.

  “You know where.”

  “Now you come on.” Nerissa stopped him, her eyes wide and imploring. He wasn’t used to his sister showing any kind of vulnerability, and even this hint of it made him desperately sorry and uncomfortable. “You know I can’t go back there,” she said.

  He liked thinking of his sister as a kind of brilliant tyrant who had been telling him what to do for as long as he could remember. He wasn’t ready for vulnerable Nerissa. And he knew that if it were him whining like that, she’d bite his head off.

  “Okay,” Gabriel said. “Well, you do what you need to. I’ve got a ship in trouble. Peter? Misty and I are coming back so we can prepare some nets.”

  “I already told you I could use a team to save your ship.” Nerissa’s voice returned to its flat, hard insistence. “This is absolutely not what I asked you to do. You’re going to risk your middle schooler friends again?”

  Gabriel held up a defiant finger. “We’re a crew. It’s my ship. If anyone’s doing this operation, we are.”

  “Do you have,” Nerissa growled, turning to Misty, “any idea what you’re doing? Has he given you the training that you need to go capture a twenty-foot sea creature? Because I’m betting there’s no amount of training that can ready you for all of this.”

  Misty seemed brought up short by that—she made as if to speak and then looked away.

  “She’s trained.” Gabriel got between them. “Now come on, this is wasting time. Are you going to help us, or am I running all the way back to my ship to get my own equipment?”

  “Guys?” Peter squawked. “As awesome as the Nemo Family Reality Show is, that thing won’t be stopped by the outer hull for long.”

  Nerissa scowled. “All right. Helm? Deploy towing cable, one hundred yards, slack.” She turned to Gabriel. “Let’s get some nets.”

  Nerissa’s dive room was situated at the bottom of the Nebula roughly halfway to the tail. She stopped them as they reached a dimly lit room with a series of lockers. Nerissa found the locker she was looking for and used her palm to open it. After it swung open, Nerissa grabbed three harpoon guns, two of which she rapidly handed to Gabriel and Misty, keeping one for herself. Next she handed out three special, round harpoon heads about the size of cantaloupes.

  “Fasten these to the harpoons.” Nerissa locked the harpoon head she held onto the end of her harpoon gun. They copied her movements. She tossed them rebreathers. They put the cords around their necks, and Nerissa turned to Misty. “You ever use these?”

  “All the time.” Misty’s voice sounded slightly cold.

  Nerissa shook her head and muttered something, then opened another locker and pulled out three thick diving hoods and goggles. “Hoods. Keep your goggles secure to your hood, because just a few meters down and it gets really cold out here. You’ll go blind and very probably die.”

  “I’ve actually heard that speech,” Misty called as they ran into the dive room.

  “I don’t care if you’ve heard it.” Nerissa hit a switch on the wall, and the dive room began to fill with water. She glared at Gabriel. “I care if you listen.”

  Gabriel breathed. He wanted to scream at his sister. And he would. Just not now. Not now. She seemed to be letting her own anger get in the way of the mission in a way she’d never forgive someone else for. He’d never seen her so angry.

  “Nerissa. This is my op. It’s my ship we’re saving, so when we hit the water, we follow my calls. All right?” Gabriel spoke through his mic calmly, going a little overboard to provide the opposite of Nerissa’s mood. Cold water came up past his neck. “W
e’ll have one shot.”

  The Nemo suits kept their skin warm as Gabriel started swimming away from the body of the Nebula toward the forward hull of the Obscure. Hooked to a belt around his waist was a heavy metal hook attached to a slack cable that extended all the way back to the Nebula. Misty and Nerissa swam not far on either side of him, holding their harpoon rifles before them and kicking steadily.

  Up ahead they could see the cone of bright yellow-white light from the exterior lamps. Below that they saw the creature, partially wrapped under the hull. They hung in the water for a moment watching it.

  Gabriel wondered how the former biplane creature had lost its shell. Maybe the whale-of-war had collided with it when Nerissa knocked into it. It was still giant, as long as a full-grown whale, its crawfishlike head the size of a refrigerator. The burning little appendages on the fronds of its tentacles gave off a warm red glow against the Obscure’s hull.

  “Try not to touch it.” They swam closer as slowly as possible, barely kicking. Gabriel had no idea how sensitive the creature was, whether it could smell them like a shark or sense vibrations a mile away—it was a long column of unknown-unknown-unknown in the checklist of aquatic capabilities.

  “Dive team, I see you,” Peter said in his ear.

  “Copy. Team, you ready to move?”

  “Ready,” they responded.

  The first thing Gabriel noticed as they got closer to the creature was the humming.

  As it swayed slowly, it made a sound similar to the screeching he had heard on the trawler, but less angry, more a hum, almost like singing. Gabriel couldn’t help but think of the noise as plaintive. For a brief moment he felt guilt over capturing the thing. But it needed to be done.

  “You go around.” Gabriel pointed to Nerissa. “Get on the other side. I’ll go under toward its head. Misty, stay on this side. Box it in.”

  Nerissa started swimming, using slow, tiny strokes, moving out beyond the creature, who was sticking close to the cone of light. After she’d gone far past the creature’s position, she checked in with an “Okay.”

  Gabriel meanwhile was moving below it, down and close to the skin of the Obscure.

  “Okay,” Gabriel said. “Go.”

  Misty pulled her trigger. There was a little explosion of air at the end of her gun, and the harpoon traveled faster than the eye could follow, but he could see the silvery line trailing it. The harpoon traveled about twenty yards over the top of the creature until it was beyond it. Then the ball head on the harpoon burst in the water, hundreds of little weights spreading out in a spiderweb pattern and falling over the creature.

  Gabriel swam below the creature and pointed up. He needed the net to explode upward, to get the net to expand around as much of the Lodger from below as possible, because the creature was still working away and attached to the hull. He pulled the trigger and fired, the harpoon traveling past the head and exploding, the netting flying away around the head.

  Nerissa, on the other side, fired toward Misty’s side, the net falling around the back half of the creature.

  “Fall back!” Gabriel shouted.

  As soon as the nets started to fall, the creature began to warble loudly. Its cry shot through the water and it reared up, the whole squidlike body twisting. Gabriel swam backward, moving aside as hundreds of small magnetic ends from all three nets fell down through the water and found one another, encasing the creature like a mummy. The Lodger began flailing and getting caught in the netting. Gabriel felt pretty confident it would hold. The netting was reinforced with steel and would not break unless the Lodger could burn through the whole thing.

  Pretty confident. The creature turned its head toward him, a head bigger than Gabriel’s body, its teeth glimmering inside its working mandibles. Its stalk eyes locked onto him through the netting, and its tentacles began to whip fast as it tried to swim straight for him.

  “Gyahh, it’s trying to grab me!” he cried. Even with those teeth behind a metal net, he didn’t like being snapped at. “I’m gonna attach the line and then we’re out of here.”

  Gabriel swam away from the head as the creature reached through the net with a tentacle, chasing him as he held out the shiny hook. He reached a point halfway down its body and lunged with the hook.

  The thing bucked, whipping against him, and the cable fell away. “I dropped it!”

  “Going after it.” Misty dove for the cable as it fell toward her. Past the lunging creature, he saw Misty dart down, chasing the silver line.

  “I’m loading a trawling line,” Nerissa said. On the other side of the creature, she slid a harpoon into her gun and fired.

  “Don’t shoot it!”

  “Trust me.” The harpoon flew right underneath the netting over the creature’s back and snagged in the net, and instantly Nerissa was yanked in the water by the line at the end. She held on to the gun as it twisted in the water.

  The creature dipped its head down, the stalk eyes finding Gabriel again, and it tried to bite him through the net, lunging.

  “Where’s the line?” Nerissa shouted.

  “Coming.” Misty swam fast toward her.

  Gabriel swam back as rapidly as he could as the teeth lunged at him through the net, and he heard a mechanical humming sound. Nerissa was using the reel on her harpoon gun, trying to pull at it, to no effect.

  Gabriel swam up around the head, trying to get away from the teeth. He saw the burning appendages on the frond hand that had been on the hull come away and swipe at Nerissa. It snagged her right on the goggles, and she yelped.

  “Argh. I can’t see.” Nerissa swam back, cursing as she yanked the burning goggles away.

  “Hang on, hang on!” Gabriel called, swimming toward her.

  “I’ve got the line,” Misty’s voice crackled, and in his peripheral view he saw her hook the silver line into the net at the back of the creature. “Nerissa, are you all right?”

  “Keep your eyes closed!” Gabriel called as he swam. “Everyone get clear. Nerissa, I’m coming.” His sister was in trouble. He reached out his hands, begging himself to close the gap faster.

  Nerissa kicked toward her ship with her hand over her eyes, dropping the harpoon gun and shouting as she went. “Nebula, take in the slack, three hundred yards and hold!”

  “Copy,” came a voice from the Nebula.

  Gabriel reached Nerissa, putting his arm under hers. The creature started moving fast as the line reeled it back. The slack was gone. “Come on, we’re going,” he said to Nerissa. “I’ve got you.”

  They started to swim along the line, away from the creature that was still screaming and pulling, for naught. Misty fell in next to them.

  “Let’s get inside.” He guided his sister by the shoulder as she kicked, her eyes closed the whole time. “Don’t look now. But that’s a heck of a ship you’ve got there.”

  “Yeah, you’re loving this.”

  “You know he is,” Misty agreed.

  Gabriel kept swimming with his arm around Nerissa. Misty looked over at him and gave him a silent thumbs-up as they reached the iris into the Nebula’s dive room.

  They had captured a Lodger.

  14

  IN THE DIMLY lit engine room tucked below the passenger compartment of the Obscure, Gabriel lay on his back and opened up one panel after another. Misty crouched next to him with a flashlight as Gabriel used a brush to scrape mounds of plastic pellets out of the machinery.

  “Ugh,” Gabriel said. “Hand me that skinnier brush.”

  Misty handed him a different brush as she spoke to the bridge. “Peter, how’s the Lodger?”

  Peter came back, “Stuck pretty well. If he’s figuring out how to escape, he hasn’t let us know yet.”

  “Hey, we have no idea if it’s a he,” Gabriel said as he dislodged a bunch of pellets and let them drop in a thick mound next to his head.

  Right now the creature was suspended between the two ships in its net, and as soon as the Obscure had cleaned out its engines, they woul
d all be on their way. He had already poured a thinner into the system that should keep it from fouling up again—if they were lucky and didn’t overtax the engines. But the garbage in the Obscure’s gears still meant that Gabriel had to spend an hour on his back under a choked machine.

  “How come your sister’s engines didn’t get clogged up?”

  Gabriel shut the panel before him and worked his shoulders, sliding over a foot and a half to open another. He peered in, seeing more masses of wet, goopy plastic. He sighed and started brushing it out. “We’re just smaller. The Obscure converts seawater into energy, but the filters aren’t fine enough to deal with this stuff, and our engines are small enough that they get choked. The Nebula doesn’t have that problem.” He looked up at Misty, who kept the flashlight trained on the panel. “But then, who knows, maybe they did get fouled up and she didn’t mention it to us.”

  “So would your sister be stuck mucking out her own engine?”

  Gabriel laughed. “She has people for everything.”

  Misty shifted her weight from one heel to the other. “Where does she get them all? Her crew, I mean.”

  “I have no idea.” It was the truth. “The original Captain Nemo built his crew from guys who knew the sea and were sick of their own navies. I guess she’s pretty much the same.”

  “Can there really be hundreds of people ready to pledge to follow to one woman on a wanted ship?”

  “That ship and that woman?” He shrugged. “People follow crazy.”

  “That’s gotta be true,” Misty said. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.” He closed the panel. He was about to call for Peter to test the engines when he looked up to see concern on Misty’s face. “What is it?”

  “Do you trust my opinion?”

  “I … of course I do. What kinda question is that?”

  “I just wonder.”

  “Okay,” he said. He knew he’d lost her respect. It served him right. “I didn’t know all this plastic would clog up the engines. But we’re gonna get going.”

  “I get it. You call the shots. You line them up, we throw out ideas, and you pick one. We throw out ideas; you call the shots. That’s how we do it.”