The Black

by Paul E. Cooley

  If we make it that far, a voice said in his mind.

  He ignored it. He was not, not, going to let those thoughts control him. He had a job to do and so did everyone else on the rig. With that in mind, he checked the time on the console. In twenty minutes or so, the helo would land. He sipped his coffee and watched as the deck crew inspected the helipad.

  Clockwork, he thought.

  #

  Breakfast had come and gone. Catfish was alone in the drilling office. The man was rapidly going over the diagnostics for each of the remaining AUVs, and, of course, AUV 5 in particular.

  The drill string would start its drop tomorrow. It would punch into the ocean floor, then the crew would drop concrete casing and a blowout preventer. Once that happened, they could put the drill bit into action and start drilling. Time to get all that going? Less than 24 hours. Catfish’s AUVs would already be sweeping the ocean floor, especially around their target drill point.

  Calhoun hoped Shawna’s hunch was right about hitting the deepest point in the survey. The bullshit line she’d fed Vraebel about a possible gas pocket was perfect. The rig chief had looked dubious about her explanation, but didn’t offer any resistance. The man was convinced anywhere in the trench would bring up a ton of oil. At least that meant he’d stay the fuck out of their way.

  When Calhoun logged into his laptop that morning, an email from Simpson had been waiting for him. The engineer had sucked his teeth while he read it, but he didn’t get angry. Simpson wanted to know, in his words, “what the hell is going on out there?” Calhoun wanted an answer to that question too.

  He responded by explaining the concerns in the report and the fact Vraebel didn’t appreciate their conclusions. He also pointed out the possibility that the oil was contaminated, but required further tests in Houston before that was proven. “I’ll work with Vraebel,” he typed, “until such time as my team’s expertise is no longer required. I’ll leave that decision to you.”

  Calhoun was an old hand at dealing with angst-ridden executives. Whether he was an employee or a contractor didn’t matter. Eventually, the execs treated him like an indentured servant regardless of his credentials and reputation. They wanted what they wanted. For some reason, many in the industry still hadn’t learned the lessons from dead rigs, dead wells, and dead people.

  He paused after finishing the email. A quick browse through his bookmarks and seeing the day’s news allowed him time to forget the words he’d written. Back in the old days when writing reports or responding to correspondence, he’d learned that once you typed something up, you should always take a few minutes to forget about it before putting it in the mail. It gave you time to consider your words and decide both the impact and possible ramifications. In the industry, there were always consequences to hasty remarks.

  While Simpson couldn’t destroy his reputation, he could certainly make sure that PPE never hired any of his crew again. Getting blackballed by one company was hardly the end of a career, especially considering every oil company out there had a shortage of staff. But Calhoun didn’t want it to get that far. If PPE was successful here, it meant a lot more work and something he could retire on. That was enough to make him play nice. Or want to.

  He ended up sending the email without changing a single word. Sometimes you just had to stick to your guns. Simpson would cringe when he saw the implied challenge which amounted to “if you think Vraebel can handle everything, then get us the fuck out of here already.” Regardless of the problems Vraebel had with his team and their analyses, Simpson would be smart enough to realize it was a bad idea to remove them while the rig was still drilling holes.

  Harobin might be okay, or even great, with the mud logging, but he wasn’t a geologist or petrochemist. He had no specialties in those disciplines. Replacing Shawna would be impossible on such short notice. And Catfish? Without a pilot, his robots were useless. And while PPE might have paid for the damned things, the code and design was property of both Catfish and Calhoun.

  JP was the only one they could readily replace, but that would leave the rig a diver short. It would only take a few days to get a new face with fins out to the rig, but he imagined the logistics would be a nightmare. Vraebel didn’t like being stuck with people he didn’t pick. Hence the tension in the first place.

  When Calhoun left his room to get some breakfast, he let the thoughts slip away. Instead, he focused on the news. And the weather.

  The storm to the south was moving and not in a friendly direction. It could swing up toward the rig at any time. Once that happened, life would get interesting. Vraebel seemed like a stickler for safety, but when a storm like that bore down on an offshore rig, even the most routine operations became more hazardous than usual.

  With those thoughts in his mind, he entered the drilling office expecting to see Shawna. When all he saw was Catfish, he started to head back to the personnel cabins.

  “Thomas?” Catfish said from his terminal.

  “Yeah?” Calhoun replied.

  “Can you give a look at AUV 3? I need to run more diagnostics and could use a second pair of eyes.”

  Heaving a sigh, Calhoun sat at the workstation next to Catfish. After logging in and capturing the diagnostic reports from the shared drive, he lost himself in the reports. He and Catfish worked side by side for over an hour. They barely spoke to one another as they poured over the information.

  By the time Calhoun heard the helicopter landing on the rig, he’d forgotten all about Shawna and the report. Both he and Catfish rose from their chairs to look out the windows as the huge bird landed.

  In the old days, most rigs had helipads only large enough to take on small helicopters. Since the advent of OSHA rules regarding life-flight and etc., rigs had to be designed with the larger copters in mind. If they had to travel long distances, they had to carry a lot of fuel. That meant larger machines and larger helipads. Calhoun didn’t envy the poor bastards who had to give up another forty feet of space to make room for them. Rigs were packed as tight as they could be and that was a precious amount of real estate.

  The helo was the size of a coast-guard chopper. Its body was blue and white with a large black PPE logo painted on the tail. As the two of them watched, a man dressed in fatigues and a blue helmet slid open the port side hatch.

  Three roughnecks lifted an orange barrel into the helicopter’s open door. Calhoun frowned. “Have you seen Shawna today?”

  Catfish turned from the window. “Uh, no. Kind of odd actually.”

  “Hope she made the changes to the report.”

  “What changes?” Catfish asked.

  Calhoun grunted. “The ones where we warn Houston that barrel might be contaminated with something.”

  Catfish blinked. “You really do believe that, don’t you?”

  The engineer stepped away from the window and walked back to the workstation. He rubbed his eyes before he crumpled in his chair. “Yeah, Craig, I do. This stuff doesn’t act like oil. It doesn’t read like oil. And yet the hydrocarbon concentrations are off the charts.”

  “When I get the reports back from AUV 2,” he said, “Macully should be able to get us a bead on what’s down there. Or at least what she thinks is down there.”

  Calhoun shook his head. “The fucking tube worms. The fucking ocean floor. The oil.” He rapped his knuckles on the desk. “What the hell is going on in lower midnight?”

  A cloud of vapor filled the air above Catfish’s head. He was sucking on the e-cig again. “Maybe we’re just hitting three for three on the weird-shit-o-meter.”

  “I don’t think these are coincidences,” he said. “Have you gone over the footage from AUV 5?”

  Catfish shook his head. “I was so busy looking at the diagnostics and restructuring the program for the next drill string, I completely forgot.”

  “Dammit,” Calhoun said. “I need to find Shawna. We need help if we’re going to get everyone’s eyes on this.”

  “Calhoun to the bridge,” a voice said ov
er the intercom. “Thomas Calhoun to the bridge, please.”

  “Fuck me,” he breathed. “Excuse me, Craig, I have to go deal with Vraebel.”

  “That should be entertaining,” the tech chuckled. “Want me to go find Shawna?”

  Calhoun nodded. “Yeah. Get her ass in here. We need to start going over the footage.”

  #

  When it reached the bottom of the trench, AUV 2 slowly turned toward the largest tube worm bed. During AUV 5’s survey, Catfish had discovered that the animals were not only spread out along the trench, but that the beds were of increasing size as they reached the trench’s middle. He had programmed AUV 2 to head for this specific area.

  The shark-like robot remained 10 meters from the ocean floor as it headed across the darkness to its target. It ignored the lantern fish it disturbed. It also ignored the way the tube worms reached for it. AUV 2 had a single goal—capture a sample.

  When it reached the coordinates, its cameras started taking blue-light pictures and video. The AUV floated two meters away from the bed. The tube worms slowly moved in its direction, but the robot was out of range.

  The AUV paused as it slowly descended to a level just below the approximate height of the worms. It sent a command to the modified sand sampler and the sharpened metal maw opened its jaws. Level and still, the robot’s brain sent a signal to the propellers. They whirred at full speed.

  The worms shivered from the vibration. It was as if they knew what was coming. They tried to move, but they were too slow. The robot crashed into the bed. Its sharpened lower jaw ripped through the flesh of one of the giant stalks. The flat head of one of the worms separated from its long body and slid into the receptacle. The robot’s instruments immediately noticed the weight change and slammed the jaw shut.

  Writhing inside the sample chamber, the head bit and snapped. The robot shuddered and emptied its ballasts. It canted toward the top of the ocean for a split second and then it was stuck.

  The other heads, four of them, had stabbed out. Maws shut on the propeller casings. They held on with incredible strength. The AUV increased power to the propellers. Jets of water slammed down to the center of the bed and the giant open eye that stared upward.

  The eye closed in pain and the “tube worms” let go of their prey. The AUV slipped off course and traveled upward and to the left. Its right propeller had been damaged by the attack and was running at less than half speed.

  AUV 2 compensated by throttling back on the left propeller and managed to return to its course. Below it, the ocean floor shook with anger. The tremor started beneath the bed, but slowly radiated outward across the trench. Clouds of sand and rock vibrated off the floor.

  If lower midnight had had any light, the ocean floor would have been impossible to see. For ten meters above the huge trench, the water was choked with sediment. Every “tube worm” bed had opened its eyes. Their long tentacles snatched at the ocean as if to catch prey, but the movement was from anger instead of hunger.

  AUV 2 sped upward from lower midnight, its seismic sensor tracking the quake. A large bubble of water followed behind it. When the robot reached a depth of eighteen-thousand feet, it squirted a data stream to the closest WiFi receivers. AUV 2 had been programmed to alert the rig if something changed on the ocean floor. AUV 2 was sounding the alarm.

  #

  The hallways were more or less empty. The rig’s thrusters were slowly moving it toward the center of the trench. By nightfall, the crew would no doubt begin dropping the drill string. Tomorrow morning, they’d start drilling all over again. Only this time, it would go faster—PPE didn’t even want a core. They wanted another taste of the black.

  Catfish hurried to Shawna’s room. He hated it when a rig started moving. The larger submersibles weren’t nearly as bad as the small ones. The moment the ballasts started emptying, rigs sometimes rose hundreds of feet. When that happened, he always worried the damned things were going to fall over. All it would take was a large wave to knock it a few degrees. After that, recovery was nearly impossible.

  He felt the rig swaying beneath his feet as it churned northward toward its target. When he reached Shawna’s door, he was nervous and a little seasick. He knocked twice and waited. There was no response. Catfish sighed and double-tapped the door with the flat of his palm.

  “Come on, Shawna. We need you at the drilling office.” He waited another beat and felt stupid. What if she wasn’t in there? Or taking a shit? Or a shower? He’d just be out here talking to himself while—

  The door opened a crack. Shawna peered out at him with red, sleep-deprived eyes and a wild tangle of hair. “What?” she croaked.

  Catfish blinked at her. “Um, you okay?”

  “You woke me up,” she yawned.

  He grunted. “You do know it’s almost noon, right?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “What? It can’t be noon.”

  A grin spread over his face. “Did you hide some hooch and tie one on last night? Because you know you have to share.”

  She shook her head. “Give me a sec. I’ll bet Thomas is on the warpath.”

  Catfish chuckled. “Something like that. See you in the—“

  The rig shook and then swayed. A klaxon alarm began its incessant grind. He steadied himself in the doorway. “What the fuck was that?”

  “All hands. All hands,” Vraebel’s voice said through the intercom, “report to action stations. This is not a drill.”

  “The fuck?” Catfish asked again. That situation he’d been thinking about earlier? Yeah, the rig was listing. He was damned close to pissing his pants. “Get dressed. Calhoun’s going to want to know where his team is.”

  She nodded and closed the door.

  Catfish made himself flush with the wall as three rig crew members went running down the hall toward the rig deck. Leaguer shuddered again. Catfish started running toward the deck stairs. Several crew members were in front of him, their heavy boots clanging on the metal.

  When he reached the bottom, his ears rang with the groan of heavy machinery, the shouts of men close to panic, and the klaxon. When he and JP had first stepped aboard Leaguer, Gomez had shown them the emergency exits for all portions of the rig as well as the location of the lifeboats.

  Catfish had thought that part of the tour rather unnecessary since signs and maps were posted every thirty feet. Now he was glad. Paying no attention to the signs, he jogged toward the non-listing side and grabbed hold of a railing. The red and orange lifeboat was a meter away. He closed his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t be getting in the damned thing.

  “Ballast! Ballast fucking now!” Gomez’ voice screamed from the deck. Catfish tried to see what was going on back there, but he already knew. Gomez wanted the rig crew to refill the ballast. “Port side, goddammit!”

  The rig’s list increased. He knew in his mind it was barely a few degrees, but that didn’t make it less terrifying. Catfish closed his eyes and wished he had a cigarette. Not a goddamned fucking e-cig, but something absolutely stuffed with tar and nicotine.

  A grinding noise vibrated his teeth. His feet moved on the deck and his inner ear twitched. The rig was sinking lower into the ocean on the port side. Leaguer started to right itself.

  “Starboard! NOW!” Gomez shouted.

  The grinding noise increased as the pumps sucked water into the tanks. He had a moment to wonder if JP and the other divers were going to be inspecting the rig’s substructure tomorrow. Assuming there was a tomorrow. And then the rig started to compensate. As it sank further into the water, it became stable. Gomez whooped and Catfish heard other men shouting in victory.

  “All hands,” Vraebel said over the intercom, “Leaguer is safe for now. Remain at action stations until we give the all clear.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at his left hand. The knuckles were white. Fingers aching, he slowly loosened his grip and let out a sigh. They might be safe for now, but he wasn’t moving a goddamned inch until Vraebel gave the all-clear. He stood at the rai
ling and stared at the lifeboat for another hour.

  #

  Night had fallen. The rig was once again underway toward the center of the trench. Instead of emptying the ballasts and riding high in the water, Vraebel had ordered them half-full. It would be at least 3 am before they reached the spot to drill the second well.

  There had been little warning of the bubble. Leaguer had been lucky. Damned lucky. If the bubble had clipped the port ballast instead of merely causing a huge wave, Leaguer would be under water.

  Thankfully Gomez was good at his job. When the rig canted to starboard, filling the port side ballast stabilized the floating town. If not for that, Leaguer would have kept listing and they would have lost her.

  Vraebel had kept everyone at action stations for another hour after the emergency was over. He’d ordered Terrel to man the sensor arrays and start listening for another seismic event. Once there was one earthquake, after shocks were likely. Had the rig’s ballasts been full when the bubble hit, they would have barely noticed.

  He sat in the drilling office while the eggheads poured over the readouts. Once he was sure the rig was in safe hands, he’d handed off the bridge to the XO and headed down to talk to Belmont. He’d ordered the diver to get his crew ready for an inspection trip as soon as Leaguer reached her position. He needed to know if the incident had weakened any part of the substructure.

  Although the underwater cameras didn’t show any bent or warped steel, Vraebel wasn’t going to take any chances. Before they started well two, Leaguer had to have a clean bill of health. An inspection would only delay them by another hour or two. Considering what could have happened, it was a small price to pay. And to be sure the rig wasn’t damaged? PPE couldn’t put a price on that.

  He wrote up an incident report, per regulations, and sent it off to PPE. He expected Simpson was probably freaking out back in Houston. Losing a toy this expensive was every company’s nightmare. As he filled out the report, noting the time the incident began to when it ended, he made sure to give Gomez credit for saving Leaguer. Vraebel had a feeling Gomez’s next check would have a bonus attached to it.