Quest for the Nautilus

by Jason Henderson

  Peter took off the headphones and unplugged them, and the sounds of the ocean filled the room.

  They heard the swish of the water, slow and steady, like the current of blood through the body. Peter turned a knob, focusing the microphones, and held up a finger.

  They heard pulsing now, the thudding of enormous turbines, muffled but distinct.

  There she is, Peter mouthed.

  Gabriel listened closer. The engines sounded … doubled.

  Peter tapped so that his thoughts were echoed onscreen for both the Obscure crew and the Institute. STRANGE … ENGINE SOUND HAS AN ECHO—TWO SCREWS? Screws were the enormous engine propellers at the back of a submarine. So possibly the sub had two engines, which wasn’t preposterous.

  The engines grew louder, closer.

  And then stopped.

  Gabriel looked from Misty to Peter, both of whom craned their heads up as if yanked by the sudden quiet. This was far from good. It meant the unknown sub had gone silent as well.

  This part of life on a sub hadn’t changed since the creation of submerged craft during the American Civil War. You functioned by listening. By feeling with whatever instruments you had. Even now, Gabriel had cameras, and they could add all kinds of new equipment. But eventually cameras didn’t see anything useful and you were left exactly where submarine captains had been in World War II or the Civil War or anytime: listening. Reaching out with your imagination, as though you could use your mind as a special kind of sonar and use your guts and your vision to imagine another person, standing on another ship, asking: What are they thinking, and why? If I were them, what would they be doing next?

  Gabriel realized he was hunching over and stood straight, rolling his shoulders and letting his breath calm.

  The Obscure and its counterpart were standing still now: two subs feeling in the dark for each other.

  They heard a ping, a high-pitched tone, as it bounced and echoed in the water. It rose in pitch and died.

  “Can you trace that?” Gabriel whispered.

  Peter shook his head, whispering back, “It seemed to come from two places. I don’t know how.”

  Gabriel shook his head in frustration. If the sub out there had sent out a ping and they on the Obscure had heard it, then possibly—likely?—the Obscure had been made visible by it, outlined by the bouncing of the sound along the hull of the Nemoship. Even now he could envision the captain, getting a signal that the Obscure had just come alive on their screen. Or maybe they had failed to get a solid lock on the Obscure. In which case the stranger would be scratching his head. Wondering if he should try again.

  It didn’t matter—Gabriel’s job was to stop the strange sub. He must not only avoid attack—he must attack first. He needed to get the sub up on the screen. He turned to Peter when he was certain the sub had missed them. “Prepare to send a ping.”

  Peter nodded in silence. Gabriel breathed and listened. For a second.

  But it was too late.

  A howl like a foghorn shot through the water, making the bulkheads hum. It was a sonar sounding, huge, meant to capture lots of detail. They were lit up like a Christmas tree on the strangers’ screens now. The sound of the mysterious ship’s engines cut on.

  They see us.

  4

  “THEY SEE US,” Gabriel said urgently and aloud this time. “Battle stations. Start engines. Floodlights. Cameras?”

  The bridge lit up as the four views came onscreen. Gabriel spotted the lights of a ship in the starboard view as Peter brought that up to the whole screen.

  “Magnify.” The camera zoomed.

  “What the heck is that?” Misty walked forward.

  The ship onscreen was unlike any they had ever seen. It was built in two sections—two long bodies, each the size of a large sub and attached to the other by a sleek, shining, ladderlike bridge of metal that ran between the two sub sections. Great engines at the back of each of the sections drove the contraption forward, but Gabriel could make out multiple little platforms at every corner of the exoskeleton, each sending out a wake that indicated these were adding to the power of the vast machine’s engines.

  “It’s a double sub,” Gabriel summed up.

  “See any markings?” Misty asked.

  “No, so let’s call it … uh … the Twin. Time for them to reach us?”

  “Two minutes.”

  “Engines slow. Prepare to engage.”

  “Gabe. They’re really close.”

  And before Gabriel could say I know, they heard two sounds in rapid succession. The grating noise on the microphones of torpedo bay doors opening on the Twin and the sharp whir of a small engine starting up.

  On camera, a missile with a long bubbling trail blew out the front of the two sections.

  “Torpedo in the water!” Peter shouted.

  Gabriel’s mind raced. The Twin was shooting at them. Now what? “Evasive maneuvers, Peter. Arm pincer torpedoes, Misty.”

  The Obscure lurched upward. For a moment, Gabriel thought the torpedo had no guidance system at all. But no sooner had they moved their bulk up out of its path than it curved its path itself, following them fast.

  Gabriel’s mind echoed with the odd request from the Institute: Don’t destroy it. As if that were even an option: They were about to get blown out of the water. A torpedo—a bomb, basically, a bomb that flew like a dart toward a county fair balloon—was coming straight for them. The result would be the same: A submarine is a hard balloon full of air that moves through the ocean at such depths that any rupture will make it collapse into itself, suddenly and violently.

  Gabriel had been in one submarine battle before—one—and it wasn’t something he ever wanted to experience again. And he shouldn’t—the Obscure was an exploration and rescue vessel, not a warship. And yet the strange enemy ship had fired, and the deadly missile was coming their way.

  “Time to impact?” Gabriel called.

  “Seven seconds.”

  “Countermeasures.” Gabriel looked away from the intercom and spoke to Misty. “Open torpedo bay doors and prepare to fire.”

  A submarine couldn’t hit a torpedo with a torpedo; it wasn’t even worth trying. There were only a few things you could do with a torpedo: Let it hit you, get out of the way, or put up something for it to hit instead. The first was almost never a happy ending, but it happened from time to time. The second—getting out of the way—was something they were already doing. Evasive maneuvers. But a submarine can’t turn on a dime, and the torpedo kept coming. The third option, putting up something else for the torpedo to hit, had a name: countermeasures. Targets they would throw out to draw the enemy torpedo away.

  “Countermeasures, aye,” Misty repeated. “Preparing to fire.”

  Onscreen, he saw the countermeasures going. From housings on the left and right side of the Obscure, small barrels fired off and propelled themselves into the water. Each one had a loud, rattling screw, kicking up clouds of bubbles as they shot out, putting themselves into the path of the oncoming missile.

  The torpedo sliced through the top of the cloud of the first countermeasure but caught the second like a scent, turning to charge. It closed on the barrel.

  An explosion split open the water and rocked the Obscure. The Twin was still coming.

  Peter spat, “We need to move out of the way, Gabriel. We shouldn’t be getting into a battle.”

  “I know,” Gabriel said. “But Dorn said…”

  “To stop them? A gigantic submarine? The only way we’re stopping them is if our debris chokes them off after they blow us up.”

  Gabriel’s mind raced through the Obscure’s options as the ship closed in. They had two torpedo tubes that he could use. He felt sure his weapons—Nemotech pincer-energy torpedoes—wouldn’t destroy the ship. But a direct hit could damage the sub, even cripple it.

  It was time to use them.

  “Fine. Fire,” Gabriel said.

  “Fire,” Misty echoed. Gabriel felt a slight tremor as one of the Obscure�
��s torpedoes shot forward into the water from their right side. It closed quickly on the strange doubled vessel.

  “Hang on, hang on, the Twin is turning,” Peter reported.

  Gabriel looked up. No. It wasn’t just turning. It was doing something odd. The pair of subs and the housing around them turned sideways toward the Obscure. He studied the ship as Peter magnified the image.

  The exoskeleton shell that held the two subs together had its own gun turrets located at the corners of the metal latticework. The turrets turned, and rockets fired—at first Gabriel thought they were firing missiles, but no.

  The rockets were there to make the housing move, apparently. The whole yellow-covered latticework lifted off with the thrust of the rockets, pulling away from the twin subs. The torpedo followed it instead of the subs.

  Small holes in the corners of the exoskeleton belched clouds of bubbles as inflatable canisters erupted from the holes, tumbling into the water. They were countermeasures. Amazing. As the exoskeleton maneuvered away from the subs, the canisters drew Gabriel’s torpedo toward them.

  The Obscure’s torpedo burst against the inflatable barrels, sending enormous bubbles into the water around it.

  The two actual subs, though, were intact and now sped up, falling in line side by side.

  The twin sub configuration was brilliant, Gabriel thought. Each sub could house a crew, but if the crews were rightly sized, they could use the connector complex to evacuate one into the other if needed. Even now the connector powered on like a third ship on its own rotors. It looked like an empty car trailer, tumbling slowly in the water. It was falling behind the subs and trailing slowly after them. He wondered if the shell had its own weapons.

  Peter called out, “Gabriel, we did have a double sub, and … now we still have two subs coming our way.”

  “Okay, label them Twin A and Twin B.”

  “Which one do I target?” Misty asked. “Maybe the pincer torpedoes will scramble their systems.”

  “Twin A,” Gabriel decided aloud. “That’s the one on our starboard side.” The red targeting circle on the screen swiveled and moved over to the smaller sub on the right side.

  “Fire torpedo.”

  “Torpedo away,” Misty answered, and a silvery missile that glowed with shimmering mother-of-pearl spun like a bullet through the water.

  Twin A saw it coming and dove, firing countermeasures as it did. The Obscure’s missile curved and hit a countermeasure. But it went off close to the sub, and furious arcs of energy swept from the explosion along the hull of the sub. The sub rolled hard to its port.

  “They’re firing!” Peter called as another torpedo burst from the rolling Twin A. But the sub’s torpedo got caught up in the pincer arcs and flared, rocking Twin A again. The submarine swung wildly in the water.

  Pete whistled. “That must have been rough.”

  Gabriel pictured it. The captain—maybe there was a captain on each of the Twin subs—was probably hanging on, trying not to fall over as he or she shouted commands. Guess what, I’m not supposed to destroy you. It’s your lucky day. As if he would ever just blow a ship out of the water.

  Gabriel decided they’d rattled the first Twin enough. “Okay, aim for Twin B. Ready both tubes,” Gabriel said. “Half-capacity.” He had to avoid hitting them too hard, even with pincers. A full-capacity torpedo might well break up the ship, and Dorn had said to just stop them, certainly not rupture them.

  “Double shot, half-capacity, aye,” Misty said. Two more missiles shot out.

  Twin B was under a barrage from the Obscure now, two torpedoes coming their way. One of them narrowly missed as it reared up, the torpedo sliding alongside the yellow hull. Gabriel heard the scraping of metal on the Obscure’s mics.

  Gabriel turned back to Twin A. “Fire.”

  A bleating alarm rose, and Misty shook her head. “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?”

  She looked at him. “Torpedo Tube Two is malfunctioning.”

  “Another torpedo in the water!” Peter shouted. “Twin B fired this time, time to impact twelve seconds.” The strangers weren’t letting up.

  Gabriel ordered them hard to starboard. The whole bridge banked, and he hung on as they leaned at a forty-five-degree angle. “Countermeasures.”

  “Aye,” Misty cried, and the barrels shot out. He saw the missile disappear under the camera on the screen.

  He breathed.

  “Keep evading the Twin,” Gabriel said. “Institute, we’ve shot our last torpedoes. We have to break off.” He sighed. “Whatever you’re looking for will have to wait.”

  Mr. Dorn paused for a moment. “Copy. What’s your plan?”

  “Flank speed, move off.” Flank speed was the sub’s slowest speed, the basic movement to shift from place to place.

  “Torpedo in the water!” Peter shouted. Gabriel felt the ship turning as Peter steered them, but there was a missile curving its way through the water toward them.

  “Countermeasures.” Gabriel looked up at the intercom.

  The torpedo cracked up against their countermeasures, and the blast rolled the Obscure again.

  “That was the last of our countermeasures.” Misty threw her hands up. The torpedo found a countermeasure close to the Obscure’s starboard side.

  The blast shook Gabriel to his knees, and he scrambled back up to see a sea full of bubbles. Without more countermeasures, they couldn’t afford to be around for another volley. “We need to move off. Set a course for the school—”

  Peter shouted, “Wait wait wait—the Twins are diving!” The bubbles began to clear. The water beyond was empty. Even the exoskeleton shell had taken the opportunity to disappear. Nothing appeared on the scope. The Obscure was alone.

  The last shot had provided a distraction while the twin subs made their escape. They were probably just deep enough to be below sonar. Gabriel could chase them, of course … but not without defenses.

  “Institute,” Gabriel said, “we’ve lost them.”

  There was a long pause. “Then I’m very sorry,” Mr. Dorn came back. “We all are.”

  Gabriel frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry to have to—”

  “Cut it out and tell me,” Gabriel growled.

  “Your mother. Dr. Nemo was taken captive. She was on that sub.”

  5

  VERTIGO. GABRIEL FELT the blood drain from his face as he took in what Mr. Dorn had said. He felt unsteady on his feet as he cleared his throat. He didn’t hear that. It wasn’t possible.

  “Mr. Dorn, what did you say?” He tried to sound in command, even cool. But it didn’t work, and the fear in his own voice frightened him even more.

  “Are you ready to receive images?” Mr. Dorn asked. After a pause he followed up. “Gabriel?”

  Gabriel shook himself awake. “Yes. Yes, what do you want to show me?”

  “All right,” Mr. Dorn said.

  A beep sounded behind Gabriel, and Misty said, “Putting it up.”

  On the screen were the same twin subs coming out of the depths toward the school. “This is shortly after you went on your rescue mission,” Mr. Dorn said.

  “There has to be some mistake,” Gabriel said. “How could they get in?”

  “They got in right through the wall,” Mr. Dorn said. “While Dr. Nemo was in her lab, a small vessel from the sub docked and sawed a hole through the wall, and a team swept her out.”

  “Swept her out?” Gabriel gasped.

  “A small team of commandos came aboard, grabbed her, and exited. The flooding you see was from when these guys left.”

  Gabriel felt his chest constrict as three men in dark gray suits emerged from a hole blown in the wall of the lab and took Mom by the shoulders. Mom was looking back at the camera as they led her out almost calmly, as if to say, I know you’re seeing this.

  And I expect you to follow.

  And then she was gone, and water poured into the lab, lifting papers and overturning beakers
.

  “Are you sure she didn’t go in the water?” Gabriel shouted.

  “We’re sure,” Mr. Dorn said. “They went straight through to a hatch and then pulled away. We had to seal the lab to stop the flooding.”

  “Whuh…” Gabriel tried to find words. He’d just seen the sub, he’d just been knocking one of them over with torpedoes. And then he’d let it get away. “Why didn’t you tell me she was aboard the Twin when we were facing it?”

  “Because it might have compromised your decision-making, and you were the best chance at stopping the sub.”

  Gabriel blinked. He didn’t have an argument. But he had no idea what to do next. “We’re nearly to school,” he told Mr. Dorn. “But we need to turn around. We need to go get her. Peter?”

  “On it,” Peter said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Slow to flank speed and prepare to come about.”

  “Gabriel,” Misty said. “We’re out of defenses and we have a jammed torpedo bay door. Plus that last blast knocked us pretty hard.”

  Gabriel slammed his hand down. “No, of course. We have to…”

  On the screen, the underwater entrance to the Nemo Institute resolved itself from the gray depths.

  Someone had his mother.

  Someone— Oh, holy mackerel, what am I thinking?

  “My father!” Gabriel shouted suddenly. “And my sister, do we know if Nerissa and Dad are okay?”

  “I’ve gotten responses,” Dorn said. “If you wanna head up to the control room in the tower as soon as you’ve docked, I think we should all talk.”

  “You’ve heard from them?” Gabriel wanted to be sure.

  “What your sister said wasn’t very friendly, but yes,” Dorn said. “We have a call in just a few minutes.”

  Gabriel nodded. He felt so frustrated. If they hadn’t been damaged, he could have headed out right now and taken the call from the water. He turned to Misty and Peter. “As soon as we’re docked, can you guys restock us and make sure the hull is good to go?”