“Okay.”
“Even if you’re wrong.”
“I mean, that’s how a chain of command works, but … what are you saying?”
She touched her chin with her hand, still holding the flashlight, so that the beam lost its place for a moment before she brought it back. “I want to say something is wrong. It was something Nerissa said, which I’ve been thinking about.”
“Listen, I grew up with her, and I’d throw myself in a volcano for her, but don’t let her get in your head.”
“I think you only say that because you know what Nerissa said was true,” Misty said. “I have to tell you. I think this is it for me.”
A moment of panic flooded through him and caught him off guard. “What?”
“Gabriel, we’re lying, outright lying, to our parents. And it has been amazing. We saved all those people on the burning ship and didn’t tell anyone. It was fun. And I get that it was dangerous. But this…”
“Look, I know the creature on the ship was a surprise.”
“You have literally no idea what you sound like to us.” Her bushy brows furrowed. “You expect to throw yourself into danger like it’s your life’s calling, and I guess it is. And you don’t know that that’s a lot to ask of us.”
“I … I get that.” That made sense. Of course. He was asking these people to risk their lives. For a good cause, one he himself had been serving his whole life. “Maybe it’s too much to ask.”
“No, I’m not afraid for myself. I mean, I am, but I’m an action girl. But the thing is, I could have died out there on the boat when you saved me, and no one would have known where I was. My parents would never know that I was thousands of miles away in open sea. That’s what’s not fair. You’ve taken us on the most dangerous mission we’ve ever done, and if you don’t mind me saying so, probably the most dangerous mission you’ve ever done.”
“We can make sure you don’t do anything you can’t handle.”
“Who decides that? You and me and Peter, who can’t swim?”
He had to surrender. There was no way around what she was saying. This was more dangerous than he’d suggested at first, and she wasn’t even being cowardly about it. She was being loyal. Loyal to her family. He had to respect that. “Okay. I hear you.”
“Then hear this: Your sister is right. I’ll help you get this creature somewhere we can study it. But this is it. This is my last secret.”
Gabriel nodded. “I don’t mean for you to…” But he didn’t know where to go with that. “I understand.” He shut the panel before him. It would probably do for now.
He wanted to carry on the conversation with Misty, but what was he going to say? No, I promise, everything from here on out will be a snap. Or what was really under all of that: I can’t do this alone. I can’t go back to that little house and be alone.
He called Peter. “Okay, let’s start her up.”
Soon enough, the engines started humming and Gabriel stood, following Misty up a short ladder into the passenger compartment. He was glad to be moving. It was as though Misty had pushed him to the edge of his ability to converse.
He looked out a porthole at the net suspended between the two subs. The creature occupied a mass of netting in the center, looking rather like an egg. It had stopped fighting.
“Now I guess we gotta take it home,” he said.
“Home?” Misty asked.
“My home. We have to take it to Nemolab.”
15
“NEBULA?” GABRIEL RAISED his head, looking at the intercom in the ceiling.
“Plotting course for the Dakkar Curtain,” Nerissa answered.
Peter looked up. “The what?”
“It’s the gateway to the valley where you’ll find Nemolab.” Gabriel gave him the coordinates. “Keep us steady with the Nebula so that the net remains suspended safely between us.”
“Aye. Okay, time to arrival twelve hours.”
“Copy.” Gabriel looked at Misty and Peter. “You’ve never come this far. But Nemolab is hidden for a reason. The good thing is once we’re underway, I think we should divide the time up into miniwatches and everyone can get a few hours’ sleep. Uh … is everyone good with that?”
“You’re asking us now?” Peter smirked.
“I know I could use some sleep,” Misty said. “And you two could, too.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “No kidding. Okay, let’s mind our stations. Peter?”
“Aye.”
“Prepare to dive. Next stop, Nemolab.”
The two ships dove deep in caravan, the Nebula in the lead and the Obscure off her starboard side. Schools of fish darted like clouds in the distance, and occasionally they saw the edge of great pods of whales.
Deeper and farther the Nemoships flew.
Over the next half day, the crew of the Obscure slept, and watched, and slept. They saw flickering fields of half-buried jewelry lost to ancient crews. They saw sculptures of guardians hewn by unknown hands, standing at unremembered caverns measureless to man. They saw a mound of tombstones that had slid from a cargo ship in 1972 and landed on the seafloor, many of the stones upright, forming an instant and undiscovered graveyard. They saw waves of jellyfish and glowing silver creatures, spindly unnamable things and ancient turtles. They saw mountain after mountain as they dove and traveled and discovered.
And then Gabriel told Peter to be wary, because the trench was drawing near.
They dropped into a new cavern with mountains on either side.
“This is the Dakkar Trench.” Gabriel pointed to the wall of rock on their right and waited for a thin crack to pass. Dakkar, after the original name of his ancestor. As they passed the crack in the wall, Gabriel could see a tiny red light shimmering in the shadows. “And we just passed a perimeter alarm.”
They moved on for miles in the shadows of the undersea mountains until finally they saw a natural rock formation, a series of very high columns: the Dakkar Curtain. It rose like a rocky grate across the trench, seventy feet high, seven pillars separated by about thirty feet of clearance.
“Nerissa, go ahead and detach the net on your side. We’ll haul the creature ourselves the rest of the way.” It wasn’t far now.
“Detaching net,” Nerissa replied. Outside, the Nebula let go of its end of the net, and the creature slid in the water until it was trailing behind the Obscure as the Nebula continued ahead of them.
* * *
“How is Nerissa going to get through that?” Misty stood next to Gabriel at the view screen. Up ahead, the Nebula had slowed.
“Watch,” Gabriel said.
“Approaching curtain.” Nerissa’s voice crackled on the intercom, and they saw the Nebula begin to tilt, farther and farther on its starboard side.
The Nebula moved forward, tilted almost to ninety degrees, and sailed in, rock sliding by the silvery skin of the submarine, close enough to kiss.
“I’ll bet everyone’s hanging off their seats,” Peter said.
“Sometimes.” Gabriel watched as the Nebula cleared the curtain. “Our turn. Tilt a little just to be safe.”
Peter slowed the Obscure and they entered the Dakkar Curtain, the high gray columns greeting them on each side. Once they were through, a choice lay ahead—they could stay up to travel in the canyon that seemed to go on forever, or they could dip and dive down into the wide mouth of a tunnel.
Gabriel said, “Dive into the tunnel.” Up ahead, the Nebula dove first, slipping down and disappearing into darkness.
“Diving, aye,” Peter repeated, and they dipped, slipping after the Nebula into the hole in the bottom of the ocean. Soon they leveled into a long natural tunnel under the floor of the canyon. On the view screen, the tunnel ceiling groped for them with stalactites.
“Steady as she goes, Peter. Keep at least fifty feet between us and the top or the bottom.”
Misty was looking at her screen. “I’ve got a visual on the Lodger. He’s wriggling around but not really veering anywhere. Steady.”
“Visual zero percent.” Peter looked at Gabriel. “It might be a little dangerous to maintain this course. Even sonar won’t work.”
“Push through.”
The Obscure proceeded, and then the ship rumbled with the pressure of hydraulic nozzles kicking up silt from the ocean floor.
Gabriel felt his chest tightening with anticipation. He could feel it now, before he could even see it. They moved through the cloud blind and, when they emerged on the other side, Gabriel was home.
The billows of sand drifted away, and Gabriel’s heart caught in his throat. The shelf they flew over ran another hundred yards, and then as they slipped over the edge, a great valley opened up below. Mountains rose on both sides, teeming with deepwater reefs and schools of manta rays. And in between the two mountains, filling a flat expanse four thousand feet wide, was the complex known as Nemolab.
The Obscure dropped off the shelf and leveled out as a circular landing strip began pulsing with bright, faintly pink-and-green strobes. The Nebula would not fit there and would need to anchor near the other landing pad now lighting up at the far-right end of the complex.
“Steady as she goes, Peter,” said Gabriel.
Peter stared, then shook his head, turning back to the controls. “Steady, aye, headed for the landing pad.”
Misty’s voice came from over Gabriel’s shoulder. “Goodness.”
After the strobing landing pad, the next thing to catch the eye was the Central Tower. At the tower’s base was a geodesic dome a thousand feet across, nearly the size of the Pentagon, a perfect half globe of Nemoglass and mother-of-pearl. Inside, he could see familiar robots scurrying down corridors and leafy vegetables swaying in artificial winds in his mother’s greenhouse.
From the top of the dome, a tower rose fifty feet wide and two hundred feet high, up to a sloped and flattened structure at the top from which a nest of antennae erupted. The tower was called the Manta, after the ray.
Protruding from the bottom, where manta rays dipped and dived around the glass, long tubes ran to other, smaller structures. There were domes of glass and shining mineral like the main one, smaller domes of shimmering metal, and a wide, long tentlike structure where vehicles were stored and repaired, as well as tubes in the landing path where ships could be attached and accessed by repair crews.
“I can’t believe you grew up here.” Misty seemed enraptured by the vision of the domes.
“Sometimes I can’t, either.”
Now, as the Obscure approached, Gabriel could see a ring of light around the tower.
“Obscure.” A new voice came on the loudspeaker. Gabriel looked and found a vaulted window at the very front of the dome, facing them, where two people stood. His mother and father, little figures in white smocks, waved at him, and he once again felt that throat-catching feeling. In fact, it had not gone away, and now he wondered if it ever would.
His mom was speaking. “Welcome home.” His mom! He’d had no idea how much he missed them.
“I see you!” Gabriel spoke into the intercom, the one that would come online between any two Nemo receivers. He waved excitedly before realizing he was practically jumping up and down. He stole a glance at Peter, who was grinning at him. He laughed. Sue him; he was happy to be back here.
Then he thought of the net they were trailing. They needed to deal with the captured Lodger before anything else. He scanned across Nemolab until he saw an enormous dome at the edge of the biosynthetics lab that they used for treating schools of giant fish and other large creatures.
“Mom!” he shouted. “We’ve got a sample. A big one. Request permission to dock and then get right to setting it up in the large study dome.”
“Absolutely,” came her voice, with its slight, partly French lilt.
“We’ll need drones,” Nerissa said.
16
IT SEEMED TO take forever to get the Lodger situated, though it was really only about thirty minutes. But Gabriel was aching to see his parents, to smell their clothes and feel their hugs, and every minute crept by painfully. Moving the netted Lodger into place required a small vessel similar to the Obscure’s escape dinghy to haul it into the vast dome. They used drones to create an entry point by removing seventeen large Nemoglass panels that connected to one another on one side of the dome and slotted together so smoothly that the seams were invisible. When the Lodger rested on the silt at the bottom of the dome, it had thirty feet of clearance all around. Then drones flew up with the Nemoglass sections, closing the creature in except for one small exit slot for Gabriel and Nerissa.
Then came the hardest part. Nerissa and Gabriel swam around the great creature and touched special poles to the net, and with an electric pop, the magnets holding the net together reversed themselves, and the net dropped like a curtain to the dome floor. The Lodger, instantly free, swung around slowly and locked its great stalk eyes on Gabriel as he swam down toward the last open panel in the dome.
The Lodger was sluggish at first, as if its captivity had lulled it into a kind of trance, which was something Gabriel had seen in other large creatures. But now it began to swim toward them as they hurried out through the panel, past floating drones that zipped around the Nemo siblings, fastening the panel in place.
Nerissa swam ahead around the dome until she was a shape beyond the refraction of the glass curve. Gabriel stopped and turned around, looking through the glass. The creature swam back and forth like a shark. Gabriel swam around the dome, giving a little wave to the Obscure where it rested clamped to the access tube on the landing pad.
He spoke into his mask. Finally! “Guys,” he said, “let’s meet my parents.”
* * *
Once, when Gabriel was eight years old, a Nobel Prize winner had come to Nemolab. An African with a closely trimmed white beard and a dark suit, the man had arrived in a Swedish UN science submarine to talk about oceanic environmental issues with his parents. Gabriel had stayed in the corner of the room when the man arrived, but he watched intently. He remembered most the way the man moved—smoothly, dolphinlike, with a minimum of fuss. He had shaken each of their hands with a nod and a practiced, perfectly polite but not overly excited smile.
Gabriel wanted to be like that. He had really intended to play it cool. To meet his parents and shake their hands like a visiting Nobel Prize winner, big enough for all this, big enough for anything that came along. Hello, he would say. Cool like that.
All of that melted away the moment he heard the tube from the landing pad attach itself to the dive room hatch.
Gabriel turned to Misty and Peter. “Follow me.” He slid down the metal tube before the locks were finished whirring into place.
He ran past the engineers at the bottom of the ladder and along the corridor, his feet echoing in the underground tunnel. He bounded up a wide flight of stairs where the corridor to the other pad was emptying out, hearing rapid footsteps from that direction as well. Up through an iris that opened as soon as the circuitry in his collar came close, and up another flight.
He leapt into the receiving room with the big glass window, a wide wall of glass that looked out on the whole valley and its creatures, as well as the Obscure and the Nebula.
Before the glass were a man and a woman, both with jet-black hair and white coveralls, the man only a few inches taller than the woman.
The Drs. Yasmeen and David Nemo. His parents.
Gabriel threw himself into his mother’s arms as his father wrapped himself around both of them somehow.
His mom ran her fingers through his hair and held him at a distance for a second, then repeated, “Welcome home.”
He cleared his throat. He felt giddy being able to see her in person. Sure, he realized, that sounded like something a much smaller kid would feel. But he didn’t care
. He was even giddy at the smell of the air, which was slightly scented with rose petals. That was a touch from his mother. She had grown up on land before marrying his father, and she had brought new ideas and textures—and smells—to the Life Obscure.
“And who’s this?” his father asked. Unlike his mom, his dad’s accent was neutral, a little odd, as if he came from nowhere. Which was in fact the case.
Gabriel turned around to see Misty and Peter at the bottom of the wide staircase.
“Oh, yeah, sure.” How stupid, he’d forgotten to introduce them. He still felt like he was bouncing out of his boots. He gestured crazily, waving his arms for his crew to come up. “Misty Jensen, she’s my second and systems. Peter Kosydar, navigation.”
“You’re both welcome! We have plenty of room.” Mom looked at them, and there was a little bit of a laugh in her voice. As if she were a little shocked that he had actually brought a couple of land-dwelling middle schoolers to the bottom of the ocean. Then she grew more serious. “But I know this isn’t really a social visit.”
Can’t it be? thought Gabriel. Can’t we drop the experiment for a week or two, can’t we go walking on the seafloor and study the volcanic vents, camp out under living mushrooms the size of football stadiums, watch the iridescent colors of creatures unknown to man as they parade past our faceplates? Can’t it be social?
“It’s not,” came the voice of Nerissa, and now the whole crew looked down to see her standing at the base of the entry stairs. Once more she had materialized like a ghost.
Mom sighed and opened her hands. Her eyes crinkled and misted.
Nerissa stood with her feet planted squarely, her arms held at her sides as though she wasn’t sure what to do with them. “It’s not social. Mom, please understand I wouldn’t have risked your lab by bringing the Nebula here unless it was vital. The thing is, there’s been a development,” Nerissa explained. “We’ve intercepted calls from the US Navy. They’re planning a large operation to find and destroy the Lodgers. This is planned for two days from now.”
Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep Page 11