by Greig Beck
Mironov took his hands off his wheel. “Safe at 3500, implosion risk at 4500, but I doubt we’ll ever see 5000.” He shrugged. “Without a cavitation sleeve, we’re just another air-filled tin can on its way to be pulverized.”
“At 3400 feet,” Brenner said morosely.
Valery Mironov steepled his fingers under his chin and his brow furrowed deeply. He seemed to retreat into his own thoughts.
“Now at 3800 feet,” Brenner intoned.
“What do we do – there must be something?” Cate felt a rising panic.
Mironov looked up from his fugue state. “I’m afraid this is out of my hands.”
Jack turned in his seat to Cate, his face flushed, but his strong chin held a devilish smile. “Well, you can at least come over and join me here.”
Even with the rush of impending death, she couldn’t help shaking her head and smiling. She quickly unstrapped and he reached out to grab her extended arm and then pulled her toward him. Jack then lengthened his belt and wrapped it around both of them.
He hugged her on his lap. “Hey, there are worse ways to go.” He looked up into her face.
Cate leaned down and kissed him, hard, but the juddering of the Nautilus meant their lips and teeth bashed into each other’s.
“At 3900!” Brenner yelled. “Accelerating.”
There was no doubt that they were picking up speed on their way down to the abyss. Jack hugged her so hard she felt her back pop. He pulled back, and looked up at her. “Wanna know a secret?”
She nodded.
“I was going to ask you to marry me when we got back.” He grinned.
“Oh sure, promise the girl about to be killed anything.” She grabbed both sides of his face, and leaned closer. “Prove it.”
He kissed her again. “You do know the captain of a ship can marry people, right?”
She raised her eyebrows. She turned. “Valery, did you know that?”
“Four thousand feet; crush depth imminent.” Brenner’s face was covered in perspiration.
Overhead they heard squeals of protesting steel, and from somewhere behind the bulkhead, they heard something rupture and begin to hiss.
“Valery!” Cate called.
The Russian billionaire looked distracted. Not frightened or even resigned, but more like he was still working something through in his head.
“Passing 4500, crush barrier reached.” Brenner slumped in his seat.
Cate swallowed hard, waiting for the windows, or the walls, to implode in on them.
“At 4800,” Brenner’s voice was little more than a whisper.
Mironov turned. “And how is that possible?” He looked at the back of his hands and frowned. “And I’m hot. What is the external temperature now, Dr. Williams?”
Williams read some numbers and his chin jerked back. “Forty-eight degrees.”
Jack’s head snapped around. “What? It should be ice-cold out there.”
“Now fifty degrees,” Williams said.
“Five thousand feet,” Brenner added.
Valery Mironov’s brows were up. “External pressure, quickly, man.”
“Ah.” Williams hurriedly read information. “At 5000 feet it should be 166 atmospheres and 2425 pounds per square inch, but …” His mouth dropped open. “I don’t get it.”
Mironov swung to him. “What is it?”
Williams shook his head. “It’s only sixty-seven atmospheres – just over 970 pounds per square inch.”
Mironov grunted. “And the equivalent pressure of around 2000 feet of water.”
“Not crush depth pressure,” Jack observed.
“Hey, that proposal still stands. Rain check.” Cate went back to her chair and strapped in. “I’ve never heard of this phenomenon.”
“At 6200 feet,” Brenner added. “Speed of descent still increasing.”
Mironov leaned forward, looking out through the glass. “There may be a precedent – there’s a deep vent theory that postulates that where there are volcanic vents, that are also expelling raw magma into the ocean, the heat would create significant thermal turbulence. As well as a temperature differential of course.” He leaned forward. “We’ve seen vents in deep water, but never as deep as this trench, so the theory could never really be proved.”
“Now at 8000 feet,” Brenner added.
They stared out through the window at the huge form of the ship dragging them down. They were like remora fish adhering to the body of a dying whale as it plummeted to the seabed, still some 10,000 feet below them.
Cate could see the small faces of Sam and Andy still in their little bubble pressed up against them.
“Twelve thousand feet – this is insane.” Brenner’s voice was incredulous.
“And temperature still increasing,” Williams said. “While pressure being maintained at 970 ppi – we are back within safe crush tolerance.”
“Small mercies,” Mironov said. “How much further until we reach the bottom?”
“We’re now at 15,000 feet, and we have 6880 feet to go.” Williams grimaced. “If the pressure stays the way it is, we may just survive these depths. But a few seconds of what the real pressure should be and we’re toast.”
Williams pursed his lips. “We’ll hit bottom in a few minutes, better buckle up; it’s going to be one helluva impact.”
“Jesus, that’s an understatement – we’re traveling at the equivalent of thirty miles per hour. Lashed to the Archimedes it’s going to be like a semitrailer crash,” Jack said.
“Surviving the landing might be the least of our worries if the Archimedes decides to come down on top of us,” Mironov observed.
“Oh great, thank you for that,” Cate said.
“Eighteen thousand feet – phew – the water outside is becoming near tropical.” Williams stared at his screens.
Jack craned forward. “Hey, you see what I’m seeing?”
“Yes, I do; a light source, I believe,” Mironov said. “We should have expected it. With this amount of heat, there must be significant vents or perhaps an exposed magma source. These trenches are, after all, places where the tectonic plates are rubbing up against each other and compressing, or being ripped apart.”
“What will it mean for us?” Cate asked.
“I don’t know yet. But worst case is there is a significant magma source, and we break through into it. Magma can be around 2000 degrees.” He turned to grin. “A little above what the Nautilus can withstand, I’m afraid.”
“Out of the implosion fire and into the magma frying pan,” Jack said.
“Everything’s red outside,” Cate observed.
“Amazing. I always wondered about this,” Jack said. “The ocean only looks blue because red, orange and yellow light are absorbed more strongly by water than is blue light. So when white light from the sun enters the ocean, it is mostly the blue that gets returned.”
“Same reason the sky is blue,” Cate added.
“Correct.” Jack nodded. “However, without the insertion of the white light, the spectrum can be shifted toward the green or red spectrum.”
“It is probably heavily tinted by the magma glow as well, or it may be fully green; still, it’s quite distinct.” Mironov seemed enrapt.
“Nineteen thousand feet!” Brenner yelled.
“Brace.” Mironov lay both hands flat on his console.
Cate quickly opened her comm. link to the Alvin. “Sam, Andy, you have to brace yourself. We’re about to hit bottom – hard.”
She saw her bewildered-looking friend nod and yell something to her partner, and then both strapped in and wrapped their arms around anything they could.
“Twenty-one thousand feet,” Brenner yelled. “Here it comes.”
The Archimedes struck the bottom. The impact was hard, but not as hard as it could have been, as it entered an area of sponginess that allowed the bow of the ship to spear into the deep seabed to around thirty feet.
Like some sort of giant javelin, the massive ship nosed in and
stuck upright, as the crew of both submersibles held on tight as their craft swung and then smashed into the huge ship’s vertical deck.
They waited for the inevitable – and it soon came.
Like a toppling giant, the Archimedes began to tip over. The bow lifted tons of silt up to cloud their vision. Thankfully it seemed to be falling backwards; as long as it didn’t roll toward them, they just might survive.
There came a sound like the banging on a metal drum as the keel hit the trench wall, and stuck.
There they stayed.
Once again the two groups waited, not speaking, hanging on tight. Cate was the first to break the silence.
“Are we there yet?”
“For now, maybe,” Mironov said. “We won’t know what we have to deal with until all the silt settles around us.” He turned. “Give me some readings, Mr. Brenner.”
Brenner’s hands flew. “External temperature a tropical seventy-two degrees, pressure constant at 975 pounds per square inch, slight turbulence in the water, and ambient light is 10.8 lumens – equivalent to a late twilight.”
Cate heard the scratchy sound of their comm. coming to life. “Cate, are you there?” She grinned. “We’re here, and we’re all right for now, Sam. How are you two holding up?”
“Fine, okay.” There was a muted conversation. “Can’t see you guys.”
“Yeah, we kicked up some mud when we hit. It’ll settle.”
“Okay, but hey, why are we still here? We’re at 21,880 feet. We should be nothing but peanut butter by now.”
Cate snorted. “Nice image. Yeah, weird, I know. We think there are some exposed magma vents down here somewhere that are affecting the temperature, pressure and also the light. But we’re here and alive, for now.”
Sam exhaled long and slow. “One more question: where is here?”
“I can answer that,” Mironov said evenly. “Here seems to be in some sort of thermocline. Except this seems to be an inversion of the normal cold/warm layering. Usually the warm water is at the surface, and can be a distinct layer above colder water. The obvious answer is that the magma has turned that on its head, and above us is a slab of cold and heavy water that’s keeping a lid on it, and us, so to speak.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Jack said. “Light, heat, and lower pressure; that’s going to mean one thing – life.”
“Indeed it is.” Mironov turned to the window.
The curtains of silt fell away.
Jack slowly rose to his feet. “Oh my god.”
CHAPTER 32
The Anastasia
Sonya Borashev stood at the bridge railing and held field glasses to her eyes. Behind her, inside the bridge command center, the captain and his team pushed the Anastasia to her limits, working to rendezvous with Valery when the Nautilus surfaced.
She smiled – they pushed the Anastasia, and she pushed them. Nothing would stop her drive to meet him. Valery Konstantin Mironov had started out as her boss, but ended up being her world.
She hated that he’d boarded the Nautilus without her, and hated the sense of impatience that gnawed away inside her now. She’d been with him for over five years, and every one of them had been like a gift. She’d never met a man so strong, forthright and intelligent. Part of her job was to act as his bodyguard, and she would die for him, just as she had killed for him. She smiled wryly; it wasn’t her job that bound her to him now, but her love.
Sonya had the odd sensation of being watched, and lowered the glasses in time to see one of the Anastasia crewmembers looking up at her. Oddly, his expression carried a mix of scorn and disdain.
She stared back. She didn’t recognize the man, but that didn’t mean anything, as she didn’t know all of the crew. She hardened her stare, and after another moment the man gave her a small salute, and vanished inside.
CHAPTER 33
Bottom of the Middle America Trench, 21,880 feet down
The silt settled, and Jack and Cate were now both on their feet. The Nautilus and Alvin were hung up about eighty feet from the bottom, and with the billowing clouds of silt clearing the crew were now afforded a view of a world that no human had probably ever seen before.
“Welcome to hell,” Williams whispered.
Everything was red. Giant sea fans brushed at the blood red water, opening and closing their three-foot wide nets, probably in response to the silt being kicked up and in the hope of netting all sorts of detritus swirling in the water around them.
Sightless eels, like lampreys, circled for a moment and then hit the mud and burrowed in. There were also crabs with long spindly legs hanging onto rock faces and lifting themselves up like hard-shelled alien tripods from the War of the Worlds.
“Japanese spider crabs, Macrocheira kaempferi, I think.” Jack whistled. “Those guys are big. In fact, the biggest have a leg span of nearly twenty feet, and weigh in at over forty pounds. But this guy looks huge, even by those standards.”
Brenner fiddled with his console, and aligned a scale up onto the window next to the crustacean.
“Fifty-two feet.” He snorted softly. “And I’m betting that bad boy weighs much more than forty pounds.”
“Remember how oversized the viperfish and the fangtooth we saw were?” Cate said. “I think this is where they had come from.”
Jack squinted as he stared. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore.”
In the silt, things that could have been fish, but looked like three-foot long blobs of gray mush, swam and slithered. They had no eyes, but had circular mouths and ventral fins that they also used to waddle along the bottom.
“Some sort of new species, I bet.” Cate smiled. “And that one.”
A rolling ball of spikes stopped, unfurled for a moment, waving feelers, and then curled up and rolled on.
“Yikes.”
“Hey.”
“Huh?” Jack turned.
“Hey, remember us?” Sam waved at them through their glass bubble.
“Oops.” Cate grinned sheepishly.
Mironov got to his feet. “We’ll come back here one day. But today is not the day for sightseeing.”
Cate clasped her hands together. “Sam, this is important. We’re both hung up, but we need to know how much time we have … and by that, I mean how much time you guys have.”
“Got it.” They watched as Sam turned to Andy, who looked down at his console and then slumped back, running one hand up through his orange hair.
“That doesn’t look good,” Jack whispered.
“Under four hours oxygen. Power is fine, but who cares if the lights stay on and we can’t breathe, right?” Sam lifted her shoulders in a half shrug.
Mironov turned to Cate. “They’ll use most of that in our slow ascent. We’ll need to brainstorm this.” He turned to the window. “And so will you, Samantha, and you too, Andy. We need to buy ourselves some time. Lateral thinking everyone.”
Mironov then faced Brenner and drew a line across his neck. Brenner nodded and immediately cut the communications.
Mironov then stood with hands on hips. “They’ll be dead long before they make it to the surface. Frankly, if they still had an ADS suit, we might be able to walk one of them over here. Maybe even use one of the Nautilus’ suits to then walk the empty suit back for the next passenger. But they don’t, and even then, the Nautilus ADS suit would be incompatible with the Alvin suit dock – they could never enter it.”
Mironov rubbed his chin. “Though the thermoclinic blanket is keeping us warm and reducing the crushing pressure, it is still at 2000 feet, equivalent 970 ppi.”
“So no free diving,” Jack said.
“Their soft tissues would crumble like paper.” Mironov sighed.
“Forget the ADS then; is there anything else that’s pressure-tight we can use? Anything at all?” Cate was on her feet.
Mironov steepled his fingers under his chin for a moment. He clicked on the comms to Thomas Andrews back in weapons. “Mr. Andrews, what is the exact diameter size
of the Mark 48 torpedo tubes?”
The answer came back immediately. “Launch tubes are eighteen inches, Mr. Mironov.”
Mironov nodded. “Could a six feet length be cut out and sealed? And I mean fully sealed against air and pressure?”
“Repeat that, sir. Ah, did you just say cut it out? You mean remove it completely?” Andrews’ voice was confused.
“That’s exactly what I said.” Mironov pursed his lips.
“Well, that might mean, um …” Andrews seemed to be thinking as he spoke.
“Damn it, man.” Cate spun. “He means cut out a section, open it up and then make it safe for someone to be transported from the Alvin to here, alive.”
“Oh, wow, okay.” Andrews seemed to gather his thoughts. “Well, sure it could be done. We have basic cutting and welding equipment. And then we—”
“How long?” Mironov cut across him.
“This is high-grade metal we’d be working with, so a minimum of four hours untested, five hours tested, and perhaps even more if we find it fails and therefore needs reworking.”
Mironov’s eyes slid to Cate. She sat down slowly.
“Even untested, we’d never make it.”
Mironov swung back. “Is there anything else we can use, Mr. Andrews? To speed things up a little.”
“Well, I could cannibalize some of the flooring panels and weld them together, but they’re also heavy grade steel so same problem – time. We’re not just walking it across the park in the noonday sun; we’re walking it across an environment that will be pressing down on every square inch of the capsule with deadly force. One small flaw, and it’ll crush the occupant like a bug in a press.” He sighed. “Sorry.”
Jack ran both hands up through his sweat-slicked hair. “It’s okay, Thomas. We’re just trying to put everything on the table and see what we’ve got to work with.”
They all sat in silence for several seconds, working over their own thoughts. In another moment, Mironov clicked his fingers and then pointed to the comms. system. Brenner turned the mic back on to Alvin.
“Hello?” Sam’s voice was immediately there. “Anything, guys?”