Raines nodded then added, “And perhaps we all should have heeded those isopods when they tried to stop us from crossing, as well.”
Jake looked at him. “Are you saying that you think they knew about the device?”
Raines shook his head. “I guess that’s rather unlikely. Just a coincidence.”
“Quite a coincidence,” Jake added.
“Indeed.”
Jake looked at the man for a few seconds then asked, “So, what is your plan to get us moving again?”
Raines raised his eyebrows. “Are you feeling all right, Captain?”
Jake shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“Because I told you that we are completely out of power. Without electricity, there is no way to power the thrusters. No way to ‘get us moving again,’ as you put it.”
Despite his back pain and the direness of the situation, Jake smiled. “You know, Captain Coal would have never accepted his chief engineer giving up, and neither will I. We are not going to die out here. There has to be a way. I need you to find it. That’s an order.”
“Forgive me, Captain, but ordering me to fix the ship is really quite easy. Coming up with a viable solution is not.”
“There is a way.”
Raines shook his head. “I’m afraid I have to disagree with you, Jake. Do you think I haven’t been racking my brain? Do you think I haven’t already gone over every system on the ship looking for a solution?”
“There is a way,” Jake repeated.
“With all due respect, Captain, I have spent more hours aboard ships like this than you have been alive. Trust me when I tell you that there is no way to power the thrusters with what we have aboard this ship.”
Jake stared at Raines and wondered if maybe the older man was correct after all. Did he really think he was smarter than an experienced engineer who was twice his age? How was it that he had no clear idea of how to fix the ship, while at the same time, he absolutely knew a solution would be found if they kept looking for it. “Do you know what it takes to be a good captain?” he asked.
“Is it the ability to go off on strange tangents while discussing the fate of the ship and crew?” Raines asked.
“Sarcasm aside,” he began, “it takes something my former captain called an ‘adaptive unconscious.’ Do you know what that is?”
“I understand the basic theory. It’s a set of mental processes that influence judgment and decision making in a way that is inaccessible to one’s conscious mind. But how does that tie in to our current predicament?”
“For a captain, or anyone who is forced to make split-second decisions, it would be beneficial to have an unconscious mind that is always working, solving problems that our conscious mind can’t. That way, when an emergency arises, that person has a solution waiting there for them.”
Raines shook his head. “Are you telling me that you already have the answer? You know how to power the thrusters without energy? This I would love to hear.”
“Sarcasm again?” Jake asked.
“You would think so, but considering that my granddaughter is on this ship, I am open to any and all solutions that will help her stay alive. So what is your unconsciously-created fix?”
Jake sighed. “You know, I’ve just used the word ‘unconscious’ more times in the last two minutes than I have in my entire life before today. But to answer your question, I actually don’t have a solution just yet, but I know, for a fact, that there is one.”
Raines jumped to his feet, looking quite agitated. “I’m afraid that Dr. Wood might have given you too many pain pills, Captain. I’ll speak to you once the—”
“There is absolutely no electricity left in the batteries, correct?” Jake interrupted, forcing his engineer to turn away from the door.
“That is what I said.”
Jake turned his head to the side to look at the wall. “Then what is powering the emergency lights?”
“You know as well as I do. They are powered by a low-level conductive current generated by the outer hull’s contact with seawater. I know where you’re going with this, but it’s only a trickle, not a hundredth of the energy required to drive the engines.”
“Okay, but what else can we run off of this trickle?”
“It’s enough to give us emergency lights and power our air scrubbers, but we can no longer pull oxygen from the water to replenish what is being used up by the crew.” He paused for a second. “The only other low power thing I can think of is that we could technically slide the battery sleds forward or backward, but that doesn’t help us since we’re resting on the seafloor.”
“But it’s something. I think our solution is buried in these small details.”
“Is this your adaptive unconscious talking?”
“No, it’s me talking, but I know there is a solution to our situation, and I am pretty sure it has to do with the trickle charge. Moreover, I also know it has nothing to do with our thrusters.” He looked back up at the ceiling. “Tell me other ways we can move the ship. Forget about how fast or in what direction. Just tell me how to move it a few centimeters.”
Raines walked back and pulled up a chair. Finally, he was getting into the right frame of mind. “Well, the only way we can physically move the ship without a large amount of electricity, is by pumping compressed nitrogen in and out of our ballast tanks, but it only moves us straight up and down. It doesn’t help with moving us forward.”
“That’s it!” Jake almost screamed. “We use the ballast tanks and the battery sleds.”
Raines looked blankly at him, and then his eyes lit up. “You’re talking about a glider, aren’t you?”
“We blow the ballast tanks and climb straight up, as high as we can go, maybe all the way to the surface ice, then add water back in, making us heavy again. As we descend, we move the battery sleds forward to tilt the ship’s bow down, and move forward like a glider. It certainly won’t be fast, but it should get us moving again. In fact, we should be able to get a forward glide during both ascent and descent.”
Raines scratched his chin. “We do have a plentiful nitrogen supply for pushing water out of the tanks,” he said, almost to himself. “And since we don’t plan to do any deep-water lockouts, we should have enough to last for several hundred uses.” He patted Jake on the shoulder. “Son, you may have just given us a fighting chance to live.”
Jake faced the ceiling again and closed his eyes. “That’s my job, you know. Now I think the drugs are starting to kick in, so I’ll let you tell the rest of the crew the news, and you people can work out all of the details. I’m just going to go to sleep now.” Then he did.
“What day is it?” Jake asked when he sat up in the bed in his ship’s med bay.
“Since we’ve given up any respectable form of time keeping, I will tell you that it is day fourteen of our descent into Hades,” Dr. Wood replied as he stared at a medical slate in his hand.
Jake stretched and tried to pretend that he knew what, or where, Hades was. Wood was behaving himself, for the most part, and was fitting in with the crew, again, for the most part. However, he did seem to enjoy reminding everyone that he was more educated than nearly everyone aboard whenever possible. AJ simply ignored him, but sometimes he got under Jake’s skin.
“So, I’ve been asleep for a whole day?”
Wood smacked the slate against the wall several times then tossed it towards the chair on the other side of the room. It bounced off the cushion and clattered to the floor. “My mistake, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t replace a valuable piece of equipment.”
“Slates are cheap. Plus, it was out of power—like nearly everything else on this ship.”
“Cheap for you, maybe, but not us. We can’t just go out and buy replacements, you know.”
“Look, Captain Stone, I’ll buy you a dozen slates if you can bring me safely back to Civica. Will this idea of yours work?”
Jake had almost forgotten about his earlier conversation with his
engineer about turning the Rogue Wave into a large glider. Apparently, Raines hadn’t informed Wood that they were still planning to go forward and not use it to return to the colony.
He was just about to ask how the plan was coming along, when Ash poked his head in the door. “Captain! Good to see you back among the living. We’re just about to head outside. Want to come along?”
“Outside? Outside for what?”
Ash looked confused. “I thought this was your brilliant plan. Raines said—”
Jake slid off the bed and stood up. His back was stiff, but whatever Dr. Wood had given him for the pain, seemed to be working. “The glider idea was mine, but I don’t remember saying anything about doing an EVA.”
“Oh, that,” Raines said as he passed by the door then stopped to peek inside. “I did some thinking while you were asleep and figured out a way to increase our forward velocity during both ascent and descent.”
“We’re putting wings on the ship,” Ash said with a wide grin.
“Fins, to be more precise,” AJ said from across the staging area.
Jake stepped through the door to see her entering the dive locker. “How...how are you doing?” he mumbled.
She glanced back over her shoulder, eyes darting between Ash and Raines. “Fine. And you?”
“Fine,” he said. They hadn’t talked since the crash. Hadn’t discussed the kiss. He felt the distance between them filling up with unanswered questions, raw emotions that couldn’t be expressed, let alone talked about with other crewmembers nearby. He fought to sound normal as he walked towards her. “So, what’s this about bolting wings onto my boat?”
She shook her head. “They are fins, not wings, and obviously, we’re not bolting anything to the hull.” She pulled two metal devices out of a bag and held them up to him. “Norman built these. We’re going to use them to reshape the hull.”
Jake suddenly realized what she was talking about. The hull of the Wave was alive, in a sense, in that it was made of billions of cells that were formed as one piece when constructed. Like all ship hulls, it had the ability to repair damage and even reshape itself at different speeds to reduce drag. What AJ was planning was more complicated: using an electric current to grow “wings” out of the existing hull. “You do know that no one has ever tried reshaping a hull underwater. It’s always done in dry dock, in a controlled environment.”
Ash patted him on the shoulder as he walked past. “Don’t worry. We’ll be careful.”
“I’m not worried about you being careful,” he said. “I’m worried that there’s not enough cellular material available to stretch into wings. If we have to go deep at some point, I don’t want any thin spots on the hull preventing that.”
AJ looked at him. “This was your idea, remember? I double checked Norman’s calculations and I agree that we need this modification to make your idea work.”
Jake looked at the wall and counted four hardsuits. “Then I’m coming with you.”
AJ sighed. “All right then, let’s get suited up.”
A half hour later, they dropped one by one out of the bottom lockout hatch. Raines had put enough nitrogen into the ballast tanks to raise them a hundred meters off the seabed. This was actually Jake’s first EVA outside the Rogue Wave, and he was taken aback by how huge his ship looked from underneath. “Is everyone’s comm working?” he asked.
“We tested our communications while suiting up, remember,” AJ said.
“I know,” he replied, looking around at the vast ocean surrounding him, “but we’re all alone out here. We need to be extra careful.”
“You’re not alone, remember?” Jessie’s voice whispered in Jake’s earphones. “Our isopod friends are probably out there watching you guys right now.”
Ash growled. “Thanks for reminding me, sis.”
She giggled. “You’re welcome.”
“Speaking of our friends,” AJ said. “I assume that you’re monitoring the area?”
“I’ll let you know if anything comes towards us. So far, the only sounds I am picking up on acoustics are your four heartbeats.”
“You can hear our hearts beating?” Jake asked.
“I can even hear my brother passing gas right now.”
“I am not!” Ash yelled.
“Please, everyone,” Raines said, “can we just get on with this?”
“I forgot,” AJ said, “Norman doesn’t like open spaces.”
“Well, I like open spaces,” Jake said, “but I’m all for getting this done as fast as possible. So, where are we putting these wings?”
Raines’ suited figure began moving to the port side of the ship. “Midsection, directly off the thrusters. And they’re not wings, just fins to give our vertical motion a stronger horizontal component.”
“I’m still going to call them wings,” Ash said as he followed. AJ went next, with Jake taking up the rear.
“I still think we should have tied ourselves together,” Jake said.
“Don’t trust your hardsuit’s buoyancy compensator?”
Jake looked down at the blackness below him. “I don’t trust anything automated when my life is dependent upon it.”
Fortunately, the portside hull modification took less than a half hour. Raines and Ash placed the two devices against the hull about ten meters apart, and then AJ entered a command from a remote she was carrying. The hull between the devices immediately began to bulge then stretched away from the ship, forming a perfect wing, or fin, as Raines called it. When they removed the devices, the fin remained behind. Even though Jake understood the physics of the process, he still couldn’t resist reaching out and knocking on the fin to insure that it was solid.
They formed a single line again and headed underneath the ship to the starboard side. When they reached it, Jake was about to inform Jessie of their progress, when her voice yelled in his ears. “I just picked up a signal.”
“I’m not farting,” Ash said.
“No joke,” Jessie said. “I’ve got a large signal moving directly towards us.”
“Is it an isopod?” AJ asked.
“Based on the signature, I would say yes, although it’s a very small one. Less than fifty meters.”
“That’s not very small,” Jake said. “How long?”
“ETA, fifteen minutes, if it doesn’t change speed.”
Jake looked at Raines. “If we can’t do this one faster, we have to abandon it.”
Raines looked at Ash. “We’ll make it work.”
Ash swam quickly to his position while Raines placed his device on the hull. When they both gave thumbs up, AJ activated her remote. As before, the hull began to deform. Ten minutes later, it was less than half the size it needed to be.
“This is taking too long,” Jake said, looking at the clock on his heads-up display.
“Power’s at maximum,” AJ said. “Maybe we should abort.”
“Pull on it, Ash,” Raines said.
“What?”
“You can coax it out faster by pulling on the midsection of the fin.”
Ash left his device behind and moved to the middle. When he tried to grab the fin, his hands slipped off. “I can’t get a grip. The surface is too—”
A piece of the fin suddenly shot out from the hull, knocking Ash backwards.
“Power surge,” AJ yelled. “Sorry, Ash.” She looked at Jake. “We need to abort.”
“We are aborting, Jessie,” Jake said. “How long until the...” He saw Ash’s body floating steadily away from the ship, no movement from his arms or legs. “Ash, are you okay?” No response. “Ash!”
“Might have knocked the wind out of him,” AJ said.
Raines was already moving towards him, trying to reach out to him. “He’s wearing a high-pressure hardsuit. Nothing could knock the wind—oh my!”
Jake saw what Raines did: a growing cloud of blood floating in front of Ash’s chest. “Let’s get him inside!” he yelled, even though he knew his navigator was dead. Hardsuits were like s
hip hulls: one crack at depth and they implode. Most likely, there would be nothing recognizable inside Ash’s suit when they opened it.
Still, they had to do something. He grabbed the fin in order to pull himself towards Ash’s location, but then a sudden burst of light from behind made him stop and spin around. There, floating not more than twenty meters away, was an isopod. It was far larger than he imagined, glowing red like a lantern, and its huge black eyes seemed to be looking right at him.
“What do we do?” AJ’s voice whispered in his ear. Before he could answer, the isopod shot one of its smaller, front legs right past him, grabbing Ash by the torso.
“Stop it!” Raines yelled, grabbing hold of Ash’s arm. Without thinking, Jake tried to grab the creature’s outstretched leg, but it was too late. Ash was yanked away from Raines’ grasp so fast his boot struck Jake’s helmet, knocking him to the side.
“Ash!” AJ yelled, but just as quickly as it had appeared, the monster backed away into the darkness, pulling Ash’s lifeless body with it.
Rubicon 06
Jake was the last to climb the ladder up into the narrow dive lockout. When he sealed the lower hatch and watched the pressure reading on the wall display drop back to one atmosphere, he closed his eyes and tried to think of what he was going to say to Jessie.
“Captain?” AJ asked.
“I’m all right,” he sighed. “I just...”
“I’ll tell Jessie,” she said.
“No. I’m the captain. It’s...it’s my responsibility.”
“I’m your first mate,” she said. “And on a Guild ship, alerting next-of-kin is my responsibility.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t a Guild ship, so it’s my job. Besides, I owe Ash that much.”
When the top hatch finally opened, Vee was there to help them out.
“Where’s Jessie?” AJ asked when she removed her helmet.
Vee shook her head. “On the bridge, of course. Why?” Then she looked down and saw no one else coming out of the lockout. “Where’s Ash?”
Jake removed his helmet next. “I’m afraid there was—”
“Thank goodness you guys are back,” Jessie said as she jogged down the stairs. “That isopod-thing knocked out the bridge power again. I couldn’t see or hear you—” She froze when she reached the bottom of the steps. “Where’s my brother?”
Novum Chronicles: A Dystopian Undersea Saga Page 21