Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep

by Jason Henderson

  “Seepage?” Misty rubbed her elbow and stretched her arms. Just moments before they had been running for their lives, and now they were expected to look at whatever Nerissa found interesting.

  “Petroleum seepage. Down here in the cold deep, there are lots of naturally occurring oil wells, basically. Oil just seeps into the water. Some of the creatures live on it.” She switched the image to the ocean floor, dark and shadowy and dotted with tree-sized weeds.

  “Really? There are creatures that live on oil?”

  “Petroleum is a fossil liquid. It’s biological. So like everything else, something out there eats it.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Okay, but what was it—”

  And then they turned on the floodlights. Gabriel saw movement that he could barely make out amid the flowing weeds. But then he saw tentacles and a squidlike body dart up and then down along the bottom, chasing after—something.

  Nerissa swept her hand. “Our Lodger friends are on a rich petroleum vein.”

  Gabriel spotted another and another. Not as big as the ones they’d seen up above, but on the way. The size of cars, some of them wearing old shells on parts of their bodies.

  “How many are there?” Gabriel asked.

  “I see hundreds,” Misty whispered. “Not as big, not grown, but … You know what this is?”

  Gabriel did. “It’s a Lodger nursery.”

  22

  BACK AT NEMOLAB, Gabriel took the marker to the whiteboard as his crew and his family gathered in the biosynthetics lab.

  “So what do we know?”

  “Hang on.” Gabriel’s mom held Peter and Misty at arm’s length. “A little rough?”

  “We made it,” Gabriel said. “Everyone performed at the top of their capability.”

  “Rough, though?”

  Misty took Mom’s hands. “If I stopped to think about that, I think I’d go hide in my room.”

  “Is everyone done congratulating themselves?” Nerissa asked. “Gabe, get on with it.”

  Misty let Mom’s hands go and looked toward Gabriel. “Start with the Lodgers.”

  Gabriel wrote down LODGERS.

  Peter hung back, opposite Nerissa, and Gabriel thought both of them looked disturbed. Dark clouds of guilt covered Peter’s face. It wasn’t your fault that it was hard to get the hatch open, Gabriel wanted to say, but he was sure it would only sound insulting.

  “Crustacean, with hermit tendencies. They take on shells,” Nerissa said.

  BIG SHELLS

  “Draw an arrow to ‘worms,’” Gabriel’s mom suggested.

  → WORMS

  Gabriel looked at the word WORMS and wrote SYMBIOTIC over the arrow. “Peter?”

  “Well, now we know they eat oil.”

  PETROLEUM EATING

  “So.” Misty folded one arm across her body as she put her other hand under her chin. “The Lodgers are born in the valley of oil we saw. And they look for shells. But they’re big, so they wind up scrounging and finding old mechanical stuff.”

  “They probably started working with the tube worms years ago. Maybe hundreds of years,” Gabriel’s dad said. “I mean, strictly speaking, it’s a new species of worm. Superficially it looks like a tube worm, white with the reddish head, but there’s a very curious adaptation where it can produce great heat, enough to burn other matter.”

  Gabriel nodded. “It seems like it should be impossible, but we’ve seen it happen.” They’d left a handful of the worms in the back of the rover, and everyone was treating the worms with great care now.

  Misty squinted. “It’s not that impossible. Fireflies create a chemical reaction that burns on a very small scale. This is much the same.”

  Mom went to the whiteboard. “So we begin to have a picture of their life cycle. These develop as the worms, and they match up with the Lodgers, but … why are they coming up now?”

  “Something would have to have changed,” Misty answered.

  “Remember the turtles we learned about in school?” Peter asked.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel said. “Sea turtles in California lay their eggs in the sand of the beach. When the babies are born, instinct tells them to travel toward the flashing lights—the sun on the ocean. But at night, the highway flashes, too, so they can crawl the wrong way.”

  “And die,” Misty said.

  “What if…” Gabriel began, and then paused to collect his thoughts. “What if they’re swimming up to the Garbage Patch because there’s so much oil there?” He drew a line at the bottom of the board to represent the seafloor and a bunch of ovals to represent the Lodgers. Then he drew a mess of dots up top—the garbage—and an arrow pointing from the Lodgers to the garbage.

  Nerissa nodded. “The garbage would be very rich in petroleum. Like power pellets, they could sweep them up in their teeth the way whales do plankton.”

  “And once they have a taste for it,” Gabriel added, “it’s their new food source. Maybe a stronger source, better than seeping petroleum.”

  “That also explains a lot more about all the ships they take on.” Peter got up, excited. “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is gathered by the North Pacific Gyre. That’s a current strong enough to slowly gather everything in the ocean—it’ll push all those wrecks together—” Peter took the marker from Gabriel. “Right here.” He drew an arrow straight down from the Garbage Patch to the seafloor.

  “So they have everything they need. Food and Lodging.”

  “And the navy,” said Nerissa.

  Gabriel took back the marker and drew a little ship near the Garbage Patch. “Yeah. They’ve found the perfect habitat, except that it’s the most dangerous place in the world for them. They’re gonna keep going there today, and tomorrow, and the next day. Forever, until the navy blows them out of the water.”

  Nerissa raised a hand. “That’s another problem. They’re eating petroleum? Filled with oil? It could be very bad to blow one up.”

  “What are you saying?” Misty asked.

  “I’m saying US Navy carrier groups don’t just use torpedoes; they use missiles three, four times stronger,” Nerissa said. “If they hit one of the Lodgers, one of the big ones … the explosion could be enormous. Dangerous for every ship around.”

  Gabriel let that sink in. “And they don’t know.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” Misty said. “We’re running out of time. Tomorrow is Saturday.”

  “Then we’ve got to meet them before they reach the ships.” Gabriel capped the marker. “If we’re going to save both the Lodgers and the navy, we have to draw the Lodgers away to a new habitat.”

  Gabriel’s dad looked at the whiteboard. “Then let that be where we come in. You bring the herd. We’ll make a pasture.”

  A sound emanated from the walls. Fwoooooowwwwww. So loud the walls shook. Gabriel looked up in shock. “That wasn’t from any speaker.”

  “Doctors!” came the voice of the officer at the observation post. “We have visitors!”

  Then they heard an answering sound, the Lodger down the corridor letting burst a trilling fwowowowwowowow.

  Then the walls shook again, different and harder this time.

  Dad looked up. “Something hit us.”

  Nerissa broke into a run immediately, and they all followed.

  They reached the observation deck and looked out at the dome, where a World War II battleship was trying to bite its way into the city under the sea.

  23

  “HOW MANY OF them are there?” Gabriel shouted. He could see the battleship, bigger than the Nebula and broken into sections that twisted like a great barracuda, its teeth gnawing close to the dome. There were others behind it, but he couldn’t see how many. A German submarine, tentacles swimming under it, swooped and nearly collided with the Obscure, still parked at its spot on the pad. Silver Lodger jet planes zipped up and over the battleship and under a wooden frigate with its masts and sails trailing behind it.

  Fwoooowwwooow. The battleship reared back and thrummed, s
haking the whole of the dome, and then it whipped its tentacles and bashed the Nemoglass.

  “Can we withstand that?” Gabriel’s dad asked.

  The officer turned to a console. “Structural integrity at ninety-six. It’s cracking the dome.”

  That was incredible. The domes were built of the same Nemoglass that made up the windows of the Obscure.

  “How did it hear?” Gabriel asked.

  Nerissa considered. “There’s no telling. Sea creatures can hear one another from miles away. It’s even possible that thing you rigged up sends an even stronger pulse.”

  “What does it want?”

  “We know what they want,” Gabriel said. “The Lodger.”

  Now a cloud of dust whipped up outside on the ocean floor, beyond the pads where the Nebula and the Obscure sat, and a wave of new creatures began to arrive, thrumming one and all, the vibration filling Gabriel’s ears. A living Russian MiG plane bounced along the hull of the Nebula and went over the side, crawling on the seabed toward a structure near the dome. When it reached it, it started hammering the walls with its landing gear.

  “Security!” Dad called into a console. “Submersibles deploy to main dome and repel attackers.”

  “You have security?” Misty asked. “I thought there were only a few people here.”

  Nerissa scoffed. “Drones. We don’t have an army. All we have are a few robots with small weapons.”

  Gabriel looked at his sister. “We have to let the Lodger go.”

  Down below the observation deck, drone submersibles were coming around the dome as Gabriel and his sister ran. The cloud of dust began to kick up, obscuring the whole area. They were in a storm of sea dust now as another ram from the battleship sent shocks through the dome.

  Gabriel looked back as he ran with Nerissa. “Misty and Peter—uh, you should head for the landing pad tube, for the Obscure. We may need to move the ship.”

  “Do you want us to wait for you?” Misty asked.

  “I don’t know—get her started and I’ll try to get there as soon as I can.”

  “Wait,” Peter said as he chased after Gabriel.

  Misty stopped at the turn at the end of the corridor. “Are you coming?”

  “In a second. We left the Crabsiren by the window. Maybe we can use it,” Peter said insistently as Misty disappeared. They reached the one-way mirror and found the Lodger flying through the water in its tank-dome, feeling along the sides.

  Peter picked up the Crabsiren. “Where do we aim it? The Lodger’s in the dome, but maybe we could lead it somewhere.”

  Gabriel looked at the device in Peter’s hand and wasn’t sure they should be using it at all, now. It seemed to have called a bunch of those things right to them. “Why doesn’t it just burn through?”

  Nerissa shook her head. “Even if it can, I think it doesn’t recognize glass.”

  “We have to get it out of there,” Peter said, pointing at the Lodger’s dome on the other side of the mirror. The lab shook as more Lodgers bashed against the buildings. Through the Lodger’s dome, they could see a battleship Lodger battering against the Nemoglass. “Even if that thing breaks through the Lodger’s dome, you still have all the others trying to wreck the place.”

  “Is there an air lock to this dome?” Gabriel asked.

  “No,” Nerissa said. “The only way in was where the drones sealed it off.” This one was special and expanded in a hurry.

  Gabriel called into his mic, “Mom, can you send the welder drones to open the Lodger’s dome?”

  “Negative,” his dad’s voice came back. “All the drones are out on defense.”

  “Okay.” Gabriel tapped the mirror. “We have to go through here.”

  Peter sputtered. “What?”

  “We get suits, you go back and seal this corridor, and we break this mirror open. It should be the weakest point. We swim out … uh, avoid the Lodger, we use welding torches…”

  Nerissa waved her hand insistently as if to shush him. “And you’ll be instantly crushed by water pressure. You’re on the floor of the ocean, remember?”

  Gabriel slammed the glass with his fists. “I did this. Our invention did this—it called them.”

  “You don’t know that,” Nerissa said. “Gabriel, think. Next?”

  “Use a torpedo, from the Obscure. That could bust a hole in the dome.”

  “And likely destroy the Lodger in the process.”

  “No, no, no,” Gabriel said. “Pincer torpedoes. Electricity. We shoot the dome with a pincer charge; my torpedoes are built on the same principles that those Nemoglass panels are. We hit it, and reverse the charge that’s holding them together.”

  Peter nodded. “Just like the magnets in the nets.”

  Gabriel spoke into his earpiece. “Misty, you there?”

  Misty came on. “Copy. Obscure.” She was on the bridge. Gabriel looked through the mirror and past the Lodger, out to where the Obscure lay moored on the floor. “I just got here. Peter, you’re supposed to be here.”

  “Dad, you in the control room?”

  “Here,” came Dad’s voice.

  Gabriel thought. “Send Misty the exact frequency of the charges the welders use to lock the Nemoglass panels into place. We’re gonna have to shoot it.”

  “Whoa, whoa!” Misty shouted. “These aren’t guided missiles, Gabriel. If it destroys that dome…”

  “No, he’s right.” Gabriel’s mom was talking and typing at the same time. “I’m sending the information to the Obscure.”

  “Bring torpedoes online,” Gabriel ordered.

  “Uh … torpedoes, aye.” Misty sounded unsure.

  “Does she know where the torpedoes are?” Nerissa asked.

  “I know where they are!” Misty snarled. “I’m just not crazy about shooting one toward you.” Her voice dropped. “Though I don’t know why.”

  “You’ll need to lift off the landing pad,” Peter said. “And then swing left to point the ship at the dome.”

  “Bringing engines and torpedoes online.” Blue-and-white lights began to glow along the hull of the ship.

  “Did you get the info?”

  “Got it. I’m entering that into the torpedo-control packets.”

  “We just took a hit in the dining hall,” Gabriel’s dad reported. “Sealing off galley and dining corridors.”

  “So much for the golden napkins,” Nerissa said dryly.

  “Argh!” Misty shouted.

  “What?” Gabriel asked. He saw a Lodger shaped like a submarine pass over the Obscure, but it was headed for the domes.

  “I can’t lift off.”

  “You’re still attached to the personnel tube!” Peter shouted. “Disengage the hull iris.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  After a moment they saw the Obscure lift off the floor of the ocean, exterior lights bathing the area beneath the ship as dust swirled in the water.

  “Forty-five degrees left rudder,” Gabriel ordered, and the ship began to turn. “Do you see the lower wall at the bottom of the other side of the dome?”

  “I see a mirror down there.”

  “That’s us.” Gabriel tapped the glass and turned to Nerissa. “Do you think this wall—”

  “Will keep standing when we blow up the dome?” Nerissa grabbed Gabriel and Peter and started walking them toward the door. “No, I do not.”

  “Fire!” Gabriel shouted as they ran down the corridor.

  They reached the next door and swung it open as they heard Misty shout, “Torpedo away!”

  Gabriel ran with Nerissa and Peter up a flight of stairs. As they reached the top, they felt a concussive force shake the walls. They poured into another corridor and kept running, stopping at the end to look through a window outside.

  A ball of crackling arcs of energy was spreading along the far edge of the dome, bunching up where the dome was connected to the rest of the complex. Lights began to flicker all across the lab.

  “Are you guys okay?”

  “
Okay,” Gabriel said.

  “Do you want to fire a second—”

  And then it happened: Great tiles of Nemoglass began to fall from the study dome, shedding themselves like old skin.

  “Yes!” Gabriel shouted. Then he remembered Misty had just asked a question. “I mean no! No second torpedo.” A second one would come right through the lab wall, which Misty probably knew, but still.

  The Lodger inside whipped its tentacles and soared into the ocean, nuzzling against a battleship Lodger that turned away from the main dome to run its tentacles over it.

  “Now. Now you’ve got him, go.”

  But the attack did not let up. “I think they’re mad.” Gabriel looked down at Peter’s hands, which still held the Crabsiren.

  Okay.

  “Peter, do you think we can put that thing to use on a lot of them?”

  Peter’s eyes grew wide and he shrugged. “I mean, I think we can try.”

  “Misty, can you re-engage with the iris and pick us up?”

  Nerissa ran past him. “I’m headed for the Nebula.” She disappeared down the hall.

  They ran hundreds of yards down a corridor and heard an explosion as they reached the hangar. “That was a rocket-propelled grenade,” Gabriel told Peter. “We shouldn’t be shooting at them.”

  But that’s the problem. They get themselves into situations where we have to defend ourselves.

  Right?

  They reached the tube into the Obscure and hurried onto the bridge, where Misty was standing next to Peter’s station.

  “Come on!” Misty shouted. “Here, Peter, helm’s yours.”

  Peter sat immediately. “Disengaging iris. All engines online. We should thank your engineer guy.”

  Gabriel could feel the ship lifting away from the landing tube already, the whole onscreen front camera view obscured with kicked-up silt. They were spinning around, heading out toward the ocean. A smaller screen showed sonar thick with moving creatures.

  Peter twisted the joystick. “Brace.” The underside of an old ship came into view as they spun and soared under it. As the Obscure shot past, a passenger jet with teeth reared into the camera’s view and bit at the lens, missed, and disappeared as they picked up speed.