“Copy.”
They hurried forward and up a ladder, the suits making it feel like they were flying. Peter came back with, “Escape dinghy online” as they reached the wall of the starboard shoulder of the Obscure, and Gabriel used his glove to spring the lock. The door shot open, and they stepped into the compartment. The escape dinghy was black like the Obscure, suspended in its little room and just waiting for water to rush in so it could go out. Gabriel’s and Misty’s reflections in the curved Nemoglass around the dinghy grew as they moved toward the side door. They looked like astronauts.
Gabriel unlocked the side door and stepped back as it came up like a gull wing. “You want to drive?”
“Absolutely,” she said, and Gabriel crawled over the driver’s seat and a pair of joysticks, and dropped into the passenger side, bonking his head on the ceiling because the suit kept overcompensating for his muscles. Misty got in, and the door came down as soon as she put her thumb on the joystick. The engines of the dinghy started to throb. “Peter, we’re going to flood the compartment.”
“Aye, you have the dinghy con,” Peter said, meaning Misty was now in complete control of the dinghy. Water began to stream in, and the craft began to lift. After a moment they were surrounded by the water, and the right and front panels of the compartment swung up and away.
“Here we go.” Misty pulled back on the directional stick as she pushed forward the throttle. The dinghy swept out into the ocean, and they were free.
They traveled for several minutes, fishes flickering around them, until the hulls of the navy ships were visible above and below the fence.
Gabriel turned on a heads-up display using a tablet he unfastened from the dashboard in front of him. On the windshield, a smaller window showed the fencing. It was a great sort of barrel in the water, metal poles at intervals to form a circle some fifty feet wide. He couldn’t see the bottom through the mesh.
“We’re approaching the fence,” Gabriel said.
“Copy,” came back the captain of the Lyman.
They were coming in about twenty feet too low, and Misty pulled back so that they soared up toward the lip of the barrel. Then as they came across the top, she pitched the dinghy forward, and they looked down and saw the waiting buried sub.
19
42:11:23
GABRIEL STARED, WIDE-EYED, as though the shipwreck growing closer could be made clearer, could give out more information if he just focused harder. The Nautilus, a ship lost over a century ago. Sought by his family for every generation since. And just maybe the solution that would free his mother. Right here. Maybe. If his luck could hold for just one more day.
“Breathe,” Misty said. “If I don’t hear you breathing, I get worried, and I gotta drive this thing.”
She was right. He exhaled as they reached the bottom, sweeping the searchlight on the front of the dinghy toward the half-buried hulk. The ship was enormous—the part they could see sticking out of the mud was just about thirty feet in length, already half the size of the Obscure, but another several hundred feet would have to extend beyond.
They could make out several portholes in the side of the ship as Misty swept along the side and came around again toward the nose of the old sub. They swept past the N symbol, and Gabriel’s heart did a flip.
The mud-smeared pilothouse just behind the prow of the ship dully reflected their lights. The pilothouse was a square about seven feet by seven feet, with windows all around. That would be where a crewman could look out and steer the ship if they needed to move carefully among other ships or obstacles. “There should be a hatch forward of the pilothouse.” Gabriel pointed, and they swept along until Misty’s beam lit up a long door with a swiveling lock. As they passed, Gabriel saw something that made his stomach ache. One of the windows was broken, water flowing freely in and out. The ship was flooded.
“Breach,” Gabriel said. “One of the pilothouse windows is busted.”
“More than a hundred years old,” Misty said. “I’m setting down.” They swiveled again. The searchlight swept along the fencing around them as the craft dropped down next to the old ship.
“Okay, flooding,” Gabriel said, hurriedly finding the right controls on the tablet. Water began to fill the dinghy, and when it was done, he sprang the right-side door.
Gabriel swam out and dropped to the ocean floor, silt and mud exploding up around his boots. He began to move as fast as he could for the ship, listening to the sound of his mechanical knees.
Misty caught up to him as he reached the hull and touched it. “Is it Nemo metal?”
“I can’t tell.” Gabriel looked around and found a small, curved handhold and grabbed on, finding another a few feet above. The scurried up the side of the ship until they were standing on the nose, Gabriel’s foot next to the pilothouse.
The hatch was about the length and width of a normal door laid down, and Gabriel reached down to see if he could turn the inset handle, a curved hole about a foot wide. He reached his hand into the slot and had begun to feel for a handle when something bit him.
“Yahh!” Gabriel yanked his hand back. He wasn’t hurt—the gloves were reinforced—but he had definitely felt something try to take his fingers off through the fabric. Gabriel pounded on the top of the handle, and a large red crab scuttled out, darting to the side and away.
“Are you all right?” Peter asked in his earpiece.
“I’m fine; it’s a crab.”
Misty scoffed. “It seems like somewhere someone taught us not to stick our fingers…”
“I know.” Gabriel put his hand there again, wincing a little.
“Even I know that,” Peter said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Surely there was only room for one crab in there. He found a bar, the handle. He pulled.
Nothing. “I can’t get the hatch open,” Gabriel said.
“It’s flooded, so there’s no pressure to keep it from opening,” Misty said. “It’s probably just rusted shut.”
“Nemotech doesn’t rust,” Gabriel said. “I mean … usually. But it could be locked from the inside.” That didn’t bode well for the crew, though. Had the ship gone down with all hands, no one—except the journal writer Mickey Land—even making it out the hatch? Grandfather, what did you do? Finally, he looked back at the pilothouse’s broken window. It was wide enough. “We’ll have to shimmy through the window.”
Gabriel stepped to the pilothouse and kicked with his mechanical heel all around, loosening thick shards of glass that came loose in chunks. Finally the window was clear, and they knelt next to it. Misty turned on a lamp on her wrist.
A white shape burst forth, teeth gleaming, and Gabriel registered fins and jaws and called “Shark!” as he fell back. Misty rolled sideways as a six-foot tiger shark, its mottled spots sailing right past Gabriel’s nose, whipped its way out of the window. Gabriel landed on his back, and he froze for a split second even as his father spoke in his mind, Don’t freeze; have a plan and use it. He punched out and smacked the shark on its side, and it kept going, swimming away.
“Gyahhh!” Peter said in his ear.
“Tiger shark,” Misty said.
“You say that like it won’t eat you,” Peter came back.
“It doesn’t like the odds.” Gabriel watched the shark go. Sharks were not inclined to fight with humans generally. Most times they will bite if they mistake you for something smaller, like when they see your foot dangling and think it might be a fish. “Anyway, I don’t think it could bite through the suit. I don’t think.”
“Uh…” Misty got to her knees and shone her light toward the window.
“It’s okay,” Gabriel said. “Tiger sharks are loners; there probably won’t be another one.”
“I know that,” she said evenly. “Marine biology.” Her breathing was slowing.
“Unless it’s mating season,” Gabriel said aloud, although he wished he’d kept it to himself.
“Is it tiger shark mating season?”
“You’re
asking me?”
She scoffed, crawling back to the window to shine her light in. “Well, I thought you knew everything. I see … a bulkhead.”
Gabriel looked in to see an empty area where the pilot would stand. There was a half-open door beyond. “Okay,” he said. He swam forward, flipping as his body moved through the window and down, and when he came around and landed, his mind registered it as history. Aboard the Nautilus.
Misty dropped down behind him, and together they grabbed the open door. Its rivets were caked in mud and rust, and it took both of them and their augmented strength to scrape it along the floor.
Beyond the door was a large flooded room, all in shadow until they aimed their wrist lights, sweeping them around.
Gabriel saw dust flickering in the light, and chairs bolted to the floor. The chairs lined the room at intervals, each with a wooden switchboard before it, the wood a rotted ghost of itself.
They swept left to right, taking it in. They lit up a central pole with a hood and handles—where the captain would look through the periscope. And past, and then a shape loomed in the light and both of them gasped.
Seated in a chair, wearing an enormous diving suit with a giant shell-shaped breathing apparatus on his back, with his arms at the switchboard, was a man.
“Oh, man,” Peter whispered in Gabriel’s ear. “It’s him, it’s him, it’s him.”
“We don’t know that,” Gabriel said, frozen in place. Move. He took a step, the light bobbing and causing cascades of dust particles to blaze like a halo around the diving suit. His mind was already shooting through scenarios. In a disastrous emergency the captain scuttles the Nautilus. Ushers everyone out and locks the hatch and brings it to its resting place of mud. And he remains, alone … perhaps dying already, surrounded by the ship he loved, the only thing he’s loved since the loss of his wife and child.
He was getting ahead of himself. He breathed. Stepped again across rusted deck plates.
“Gabriel, if it’s your great-great-great grandfather, I … Do you want me to look first?” Misty was just behind him.
He turned to her, the lights on his helmet making little stripes across her face. “Let’s go together.”
They approached the chair slowly, as though the man might suddenly jerk to life, startled. Reached it. The man’s gloved hand was resting on a console with his hand on a large switch.
Underneath it were written the words NAUTILUS—POWER—MAIN.
Gabriel began to lean forward as Misty went around to the other side, both of them craning their heads to look inside the helmet. Gabriel was prepared. A skull. I’m going to see a skull. I’m going to see—
The helmet was empty.
“Hunh.” Gabriel expelled air, almost delirious. “It’s empty. There’s nothing here. Ha!” He was incredibly relieved. He stood up straight, clapping his hand on the shoulder of the suit. “But why would it be right here…”
The suit and the chair crumpled backward, the glove ripping away. The chair toppled over, its base ripping out of the floor in strips of rusted metal and wood.
They both gasped and then steadied themselves. “We’re getting spooked.” Gabriel moved his hand, and the light flashed across a ribbon of white sticking out of the sleeve of the suit. A strip with writing on it.
Gabriel knelt forward and reached for it, pulling it closer. The words were in French. They blared in his mind as he thrust it toward Misty to read.
Propriété de Altamont Productions
Por
20,000 leagues under the sea
“No. Way,” Misty said.
Gabriel felt sick. He dropped to his knees, silt lifting in clouds. “20,000 leagues … No no no, no, this can’t … We don’t have time for this.”
“What is it?” Peter shouted in his ear, and the captain of the Lyman shouted the same thing.
“It’s a prop!” Gabriel cried. “It’s a prop, this is all a … a model, for a movie.” Gabriel had never watched a movie based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne’s famous novel inspired by the writings of Professor Arronax about Gabriel’s ancestor, Captain Nemo. Gabriel hadn’t wanted to see the movies, convinced that he would be annoyed by everything that they got wrong—and now he was determined to never watch one. His voice dripped with disappointment as he read the name. “Altamont … Altamont Productions, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”
Peter was typing far away. “Yes. Uh, sort of. Altamont was a French movie studio. They made a Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”
“When?” Misty asked, kicking the rusted metal.
“1929 … It was to be the most expensive version of the book, but it was a failure because no one wanted silent pictures the year it came out.”
“The most expensive movie got an expensive prop,” Gabriel spat. “That explains what it looks like. And the rust. The pilothouse is wrong, the metal is wrong, because it’s not real; they didn’t have the models.”
He rose to his feet. “Lyman,” he called, “I’m afraid you’ve wasted a perimeter fence.” He shook his head, staring down at the husk of the diving suit. “Let’s go.”
20
41:56:19
MISTY PUT A comforting hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and led him back to the escape dinghy. Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to talk as she piloted them to the Obscure and they removed their suits. It wasn’t until they were all the way to the bridge and Gabriel sat down in his chair that he was able to clear the lump in his throat enough to speak.
“Get us about sixty miles from here. I don’t want the navy stumbling across us or vice versa again. Sixty miles north-northeast.”
“Sixty miles north-northeast, setting course, aye,” Peter echoed. “You got some kimbap in the fridge if you’re hungry. I defrosted it.”
Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair. The moment Peter said hungry, his stomach grumbled and he acknowledged it dully. Gabriel found in his little cooler a foil package that was soft to the touch and opened it to find several rolls of seaweed around rice and seafood, a Korean dish he had come to love. But right now it was just food. “Thanks.” He took a small hunk of kimbap and chewed it. The salt tasted fantastic, and the rice was perfect for his hunger.
“So what are we thinking? The real Nautilus was here, but it’s long gone? Like it fell apart?” Peter offered.
Gabriel knew what his friend was doing. Trying to lift him up again, like rekindling a pilot light that’s gone out. Not cheer him up—bring him back to thinking. Okay. “No. The Nautilus wouldn’t have fallen apart, not yet.”
Misty said, “I know Nemoships are strong…”
“It’s not strength or lack of it,” Gabriel said. “It’s that a hundred years is just not that long. We find thousand-year-old ships all the time. We found that thing, and it’s nearly as old.”
“Why was the prop here at the Gilbert Islands?” Misty asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Peter said. “I did a little research. The director was a Nemo nut. He said he had secret knowledge about the real Nautilus and was using it to give the people the best version ever. In other words…”
“He had the journal,” Gabriel said. “And put his underwater prop at the Gilbert Islands.”
“Lotta work for a massive failure,” Peter said.
“Yeah.” Gabriel was thinking that could describe him right about now.
“So.” Misty nodded and held up her thumb and index finger. “Second possibility: If it hasn’t crumbled, why isn’t it here? Maybe the ship was swept away.”
“Possible, but I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. “Even a hurricane wouldn’t much disturb a submarine at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Idea three,” Peter offered. “The Nautilus exploded due to something about the Dakkar’s Eye.”
“Land’s diary doesn’t mention it exploding, unless he got out before it did,” Misty said. “And we don’t have the burnt half.”
“Maybe. So, idea four,” Gabriel said. “The diary lied. The s
hip didn’t head for the Gilbert Islands.”
They all sat at their stations and stared at the center of the bridge as though the proposition were a statue they could spin around and measure.
“Well,” Gabriel said, moving his eyes from the space in the center of the bridge to his own hands, “I have to admit that might be the most likely scenario.”
Peter sighed and tapped a few buttons, bringing the pages of the diary up on the screen. “Okay, what did it say? I want the actual words.”
The sentence hung on the screen.
We are not to go to Brazil but are bound for Gilbert V important we arrive in three days.
“Where were they before?” Gabriel asked, turning back.
Peter reached into a leather bag next to his station and brought up the diary. “They had been in the South Pacific, headed for Brazil.”
“And yet the journal says bound for Gilbert—which would mean turning and going a thousand miles north. Why would they do that?”
“Maybe Nemo had something he needed or wanted here, and it was worth the trip.”
“Even if he was crippled?” Misty asked. “The ship, I mean?”
Gabriel nodded. The idea that the journal lied was looking more likely.
Gabriel read the line aloud. “Bound for Gilbert V important we arrive in three days…” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Why is it so important?”
“Either something outside, waiting for them, or inside, like time left for the engines to keep running.”
“V important,” Peter said. “I mean, if they had to get somewhere before they exploded, that would be very important.”
Gabriel closed his eyes and opened them, and started to read from another page at random. He was looking for numbers and symbols.
“We crossed the thirty-fifth = and now…” He touched his lip. “What is that equal sign?”
“Well, we know he’s talking about the thirty-fifth parallel, the latitude,” Misty said.
“So why not abbreviate it as Lat?”
Quest for the Nautilus Page 11