Genevieve smiled at him. It was seductive and removed any doubt about who was in control. She then stepped towards him.
“If you tell a soul about this, I will kill you.”
Chapter Eighty Two
At 2 a.m. Tom found himself halfway between asleep and ideal contentment. If he let himself go, he’d be unconscious in seconds, but the joy of holding Genevieve’s naked body was almost too delicious to waste. He could feel his heartbeat against her naked breasts. Her scent was divine. Tom wished the moment could go on forever.
Luck however, had different plans.
There was only one knock at the door. “Vacation’s over. Veyron just found the hive’s nest.”
Tom sat upright. He switched his bed side light on, and looked at Genevieve. Surprised to discover her languid body appeared even sexier than he remembered. She woke up immediately. “Good morning Sam. Where do you want me?” he asked.
“Dive room. Veyron’s come up with a plan. We dive in fifteen minutes.”
“Okay. See you there.”
Genevieve ran her hands down his arms until they linked with his. “Good morning,” she whispered.
Tom smiled at her. Glad she was still there. He mouthed the words, “Morning.” He rolled slightly on top of her and slid down the bed until their eyes were at the same height. Her blue eyes simply watched him in silence. Tom kissed her lips. Slow at first. Soft and gently. Tenderness then gave way to desire. She opened her mouth and his tongue explored her eagerly. His right hand let go of hers and he ran it down to the hollow of her lower back.
He then stopped. “I have to go.”
“Wait. One more kiss,” she demanded, wrapping her free arm around his neck.
He kissed her again. Long, passionate. She finished by biting the very side of his lip firmly, but with not quite enough force to draw blood.
He drew back in surprise. “What the fuck?”
She smiled. “If you tell anyone about this, I really will kill you. No matter how much I adore your beautiful hazel eyes.”
Chapter Eighty Three
Sea Witch II was a bright yellow Triton 36 000/3 submarine. It stood next to the moon pool on its twin hulls. It reminded Sam of a futuristic hovercraft. It had twin yellow hulls and a large borosilicate glass dome in the middle that housed up to three divers. Two pilot seats at the front of the bubble, and one passenger crammed behind to form the shape of a V. The dome provided 270 degree visualization. The unique glass had been slowly built over nearly eight months, using boron instead of soda-lime, which gave it the unusual property of compressing upon itself while it dives. The benefit of which, meant the bubble dome increases in durability the deeper it goes. On paper, this submarine was capable of reaching depths of 36, 000 feet – the same depths of the Mariana Trench.
Tonight, Sam had little need for such extreme hull strength. Their depth would max out at around 70 feet. Their mission was to locate the hive of deadly nanobot hybrid plankton. Once certain they had found the dangerous nest, they would implement Veyron’s plan to destroy it – he just hoped Veyron was right about his theory.
The cables and hooks were attached to the submarine, ready to maneuver the sub into the water for launch. Sam felt the sub shift as he strapped himself into the pilot seat. To his left, in the copilot’s chair, Tom had commenced the startup procedure. Behind them both, Veyron was double checking his calculations for his theory by hand. Sam looked at the two other men. “Are we ready to get this sub in the water?”
“I’m good,” Veyron said.
Tom flicked the running lights to on. “Systems all check out well. We’re good to go.”
Sam depressed the radio transmitter. “Maria Helena, this is Sea Witch II, we’re good for launch.”
“Copy that Sea Witch, safe journey and good hunting.” It was Matthew who replied, his professional monotone voice comforting in its familiarity.
Sam shifted slightly in his seat as the Sea Witch II rocked lightly in the seawater. He braced himself on the joystick, which was still set in a locked position.
“Maria Helena, we’re ready to release the tether and commence our dive,” Sam said.
“Copy that. Releasing the tether,” Matthew replied.
“Oh, and Matthew, make certain Elise is tracking the area. If the hive makes a run for it, I want her ready to track. It’s taken too long to find it, only to lose it now.”
“She’s on top of it. Good luck.”
Sam flicked the ballast switch. Water began flooding into the tanks, while air bubbles gurgled to the surface. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s do this.”
The Sea Witch II dived to a depth of 60 feet. Sam stopped the water intake and leveled her into neutral buoyancy. In a heads-up display across the front of the dome, a GPS screen overlapped the Sonar maps of the seafloor. The location of the cave had already been entered and marked with the word cave. It was approximately 1500 feet away, nearly directly north of their current position. Sam didn’t want to risk bringing the Maria Helena any closer, in case it startled the hive into running before they were in a position to do anything about it. He then started the forward propellers, located at each end of the twin hulls. They whirred quietly as they moved towards the cave.
Tom grinned. “You’re certain that’s where they are?”
“Pretty certain,” Sam replied. “Elise found the entrance to this cave in our database from our Sonar study of the area a month back. The entrance is nearly thirty feet wide by ten feet high. It’s rectangular and almost looks manmade. We believe it might be the entrance to a massive underwater cavern. How far it goes, we’re about to find out.”
Veyron flicked on three separate switches at the back of the submarine. The switches were green and had been recently retrofitted to the Sea Witch II. A new sound started. It was an electrical hum. Soft at first, then progressively increasing in decibels.
Both Sam and Tom looked back at him.
Veyron smiled back at them, apologetically. “Sorry, had to be done.”
Sam shrugged his shoulders. Engineers could do anything they wanted to his submarine so long as they were inside it too. And Veyron wasn’t just any engineer. He was a world leader in mechatronics and submersibles.
Tom pointed at the seafloor ahead. It gradually sloped upwards. “Any reason you took us to 60 feet when we’re aiming for 30? What? Are you afraid they’ll see us coming?”
“Yeah, we are.”
Tom sighed. They were dealing with an unknown weapon they couldn’t necessarily see. No one had any idea how much it knew about its surrounding environment. The only thing for certain was that, up until now, they kept on underestimating it. “Say, just out of interest. Once we do find the hive’s nest, what’s your plan to destroy it?”
Sam increased their depth by 10 feet to match the natural contours of the seabed. “Veyron came up with the solution.”
“Well don’t hold out on me. What have we got?”
“When Veyron and I were onboard the Global Star, we heard a story from the foreman at the scrap metal salvage site. The man told us about how one of the workers fell into the bilge which contained the bioluminescent plankton. The worker complained that the plankton tried to kill him. He developed a rash. Soon he was unconscious. When the doctors put him through a magnetic resonance imaging machine he started to have a fit. When they tried it later, they couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary, with the exception of a brain tumor he didn’t know he had.”
Tom shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “That’s right, I remember you telling me the story. I thought it turned out to be nothing. The guy had a brain injury or epilepsy or something.”
Veyron shifted in his seat. “Yeah, it was a brain tumor.”
“Okay, so what’s the relevance?” Tom asked.
“Well, it wasn’t until we discovered that there were nanobots living symbiotically with the plankton that Veyron realized what happened,” Sam said.
Tom took a deep breath. “Of course, the MRI is a super mag
net. It would have stripped and killed each of the nanobots. The guy probably metabolized them and pissed them out over the next few days.”
“Exactly.” Sam flicked through a series of paper. Searching for something. “So, what we really needed was a really big, portable MRI machine.”
Veyron grinned. “I believe it’s called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP for short. And I’ve had one attached to the front of Sea Witch II.”
Chapter Eighty Four
The mouth of the cave opened up in front of them and Sam piloted the Sea Witch II inside. “Now we just have to see if your theory’s right.”
The cavern was completely dark. It felt like the walls sucked away the small amount of light at the front of Sea Witch II.
Tom maneuvered a floodlight towards the cave floor. The light reflected straight back at him. It was as though he was shining it towards a mirror. Then his eyes settled as he pointed the light slightly to the side so it wasn’t reflecting directly off the metallic seabed. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is?”
Veyron moved towards the front of the submarine. “No. They’re not living nanobots. You can’t see them, remember. Even in great numbers, you see the plankton not the microscopic machines.”
“Then what the hell is that?” Sam asked pointing towards the silvery floor below the cave.
Veyron swallowed. Hard. “Do you remember when we tested the most stable colony in a Petri dish? What we found was that one out of every hundred plankton cells fail to divide correctly, resulting in the death of the nanobot.”
Tom scanned the light along the seafloor. The metallic surface appeared to continue forever. He dug a mechanical arm into the seafloor. It was covered in millions of small metallic spheres. Small enough to fit in the palm of a person’s hand. The entire seafloor inside the cavern was filled with them. And the cavern was massive. He followed it to the end and even then, it stretched his eyesight to see if it really finished there. “Are you saying those spheres are dead nanobots?”
“Yes,” Veyron replied. “For some reason they seem to bind together as spheres. There must be a few thousand of them joined to form each sphere.”
Tom looked up – into the dark void above. The ceiling seemed to suck the light away from it. “If it takes thousands of dead nanobots to make a sphere and only every hundred or so nanobot dies, are you telling me there are at least a million times these fucking creatures above us?”
Sam flicked on the massive flood lights. “Holy shit! Where did they all go?”
Chapter Eighty Five
The entire roof of the monstrous cavern was completely empty. Not a single glow of bioluminescence could be seen. The seafloor glistened as it reflected the powerful lights. Sam gave the motors in the left hull a slight burst of power. Sea Witch II turned slowly to the right. Somehow the entire place now appeared more frightening than when they were certain it contained their enemy.
No one spoke.
On the far side of the cavern the roof height reached further upwards. At the top of it and above the water, Sam could make out a steel deck. It was as though someone had been coming here from the surface. If nothing else, it provided the means for a person to view the nest close up without the requirement of SCUBA equipment.
Veyron removed the plastic safety cover over a red switch then flicked the switch downwards. The pitch of the intense hum changed to a much sharper howl, followed by a series of wavelike echoes that hurt their ears. The electromagnetic pulse activated. The floodlights at the front of the submersible along with the rest of their instruments went completely blank And the cavern was once more filled with darkness.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Sam asked.
The submarine bubble was completely dark, but Sam could hear Veyron’s voice. “In case it was a trap. I didn’t want to get caught out in here. Besides, I wanted to be certain there weren’t any stragglers who were going to repopulate the colony.”
“Okay, so now what do we do about the lights?” Sam asked.
Veyron patted him on his shoulder. “Relax. The EMP wave lasts less than a minute.”
“Then the power comes back on?”
“Should do.”
Next to him, Tom shuffled in the copilot seat. “And until then we’re sitting blind ducks.”
Veyron laughed. “Do you see any green glow outside our bubble?”
Sam silently looked around in a world devoid of all light. A moment later the power returned to his controls. The backlighting in a series of instruments started up. The headlights flickered on. He carefully powered the craft around to face the entrance.
Where the light from outside the cavern glowed green.
Chapter Eighty Six
Sam pushed the electric motors to their top speed and Sea Witch II sped towards the opening. He reached it and his eyes began to adjust to the strange color. It was similar to the green bioluminescence, but not quite the same.
“What is that?” he asked.
Veyron shuffled forwards in his seat. “That, my friend, is another submarine.”
Sam approached it. The entire thing glowed green. Tom gritted his teeth. “Is this wise? I mean, we were set up to fight a gazillion microscopic machines, not another submarine.”
“It’s all right Tom, I doubt very much they are either,” Sam replied.
“Right, so what are you planning on doing? Going right up to it and then asking the pilot to the surface for some coffee and a chat?”
Sam moved in close to the submarine. “Not a bad idea. Why not?”
It was a similar shaped submarine to the Sea Witch II with two small hulls and a bubble like dome that protected the pilot. Only the one in front of them was only just big enough for its single occupant.
They were no more than twenty feet away and Sam could quite clearly see the man in the pilot seat. There was something familiar about him. Using the diver’s thumbs up signal, he asked the other submariner to surface. The man acknowledged in return and slowly raised his submarine to the surface.
Sam expelled the remaining water from the Sea Witch’s ballast and began to surface. “See Tom, that wasn’t too hard.”
Tom shook his head. “This will be good to see.”
The Sea Witch broke the surface of the calm waters. Sam popped the hatch and climbed on to the left hull of the submarine. Tom and Veyron followed him. They waited less than a minute for the man from the second submersible to climb out. He was tall. Brown hair. A kind smile and a thick cleft chin that some women would consider attractive.
Sam smiled. It had been a long time. “It’s good to see you Luke. You’re looking a lot better than I was led to believe. You’d better come aboard. There’s a lot to explain.”
Chapter Eighty Seven
Sam stepped on board the side of Luke’s submarine. He shook his old high school friend’s hand and then passed him a rope to tie the two hulls of the submarines together. “It’s good to see you. And you’re alive!”
Luke took the rope. “It’s good to see you too.”
“This is Tom Bower my Deep Sea Projects Director. And this is Veyron Blanc. No relationship to the supercar –he’s my chief engineer.”
“Pleased to meet you both.” Luke shook their hands warmly. “I hear you’ve been busy, Sam. Found a lost Nazi aircraft or something? Then, found the remains of some old ship in a country somewhere on the other side of the planet – where was it… Austria?”
“Australia,” Sam corrected him.
“That’s it.” Luke smiled warmly. “Located Atlantis… and then lost it again. Oops. It’s good to see you’ve been using that keen mind of yours, and not just using it to squander your father’s fortune.”
“Thanks. On that subject. I hear you’ve been busy too. Do you want to tell me your story and what you were doing here tonight?”
“Of course. It might take some time.”
Tom looked curiously at the glowing paint covering the submarine. It looked like an off colored phosphorescence. “Lu
ke, I have to ask, what’s with the paint job?”
“You mean, why’s my submarine glowing?” A childish grin came across his face.
Tom nodded his head. “Yeah.”
“It puts the plankton at ease.” Luke wrapped up the loose rope.
“No. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam complained. “Plankton doesn’t glow to make itself feel good. It glows as a deterrent to would be predators.”
“Yes, I agree. I don’t know why this works. But I do know that before we lost control over them, they would literally destroy any yellow submarine that entered the cavern. I don’t know why, but they did. We stopped losing submarines when we made them glow with phosphorescence. Weird huh?”
“Yeah, little about these creatures seem to make sense,” Sam agreed.
Veyron began climbing back down into the Sea Witch’s cockpit. “I’m going to call for the Maria Helena. We still have to find where the hive went.”
“I can tell you that.” Luke said.
They all looked at him.
“If the cavern’s empty, it means they’ve gone out to hunt.”
Chapter Eighty Eight
A bright light heralded the arrival of the Maria Helena. Sam brought Luke aboard to talk in depth. “We can bring your submarine on board if you like.”
“No thank you, I have to return to the cavern to gather some more evidence. It will be necessary if we’re ever to win this.”
“Suit yourself. You can tie up alongside the Maria Helena and at least have a meal while we work out what’s going on.”
Luke squatted down on the side deck of the Maria Helena and tied his submarine to its side. “Where do you want to talk?”
“We can go to the back deck. It’s private and you can talk freely. Do you want a beer?”
Rogue Wave Page 20