by Aer-ki Jyr
“Category 4?” Greg asked when Heston walked back over to them.
“Size classification. Whatever this is, it’s bigger than a house. We’ve only had two cat 4s before, both of which were squid.”
“Something new then?”
“Possibly. We’ll get a better sonar image the closer it gets to our sensors, then an EM scan when the escorts get to it.”
“What’s their range?” Leo asked.
“Depends how much dust is in the water. Our equipment keeps it to a minimum, but there’s enough residual particles in the water to keep the sensor range inside of 400 meters on the best days. Their sonar units will provide a decent picture when they get inside a kilometer.”
“Can we get their feeds here?”
“Yes.”
The lead escort vessel motored over the seafloor infrastructure powered by two internal fan blade tube engines, sucking in the water at the bow and shooting it out the back at variable angles to assist in steering as it moved to intercept the target, just now becoming visible at the edge of sonar range. The pilot inside primed the forward stun rod, extending it forward like a long pole and charging the tip, which would hold the energy until physical contact was made, otherwise it would just bleed off into the water uselessly.
Below his sentinel, an elongated submersible designed for its speed and maneuverability, Robert passed over one of the mobile platforms, now firmly attached to the sea bed and drilling core samples in preparation for another possible outpost expansion if the bedrock contained the necessary ores. Seemingly oblivious, the tiny running lights on the gigantic submersible passed by and left the forward view totally dark, with no other Star Force infrastructure before him to mark his passage.
Having worked these waters for more than six years, Robert knew the topography intimately, as well as how a little vertical drift could run one into the ground without the pilot even feeling the shift, so he kept a close watch on his ground sensors and kept a steady 60 meter minimum clearance at all times while watching the target continue to grow larger on his secondary screen.
The sonar image was fuzzy, but Robert now agreed with Davis that it wasn’t a squid, though whatever it was it was huge…far larger than anything he had personally come across. During his usually boring shifts he’d spotted a category 3 sea snake, a pair of category 2 squids, more whales than he could count, and a rare category 2 jelly fish that moved so slow it almost didn’t seem worth chasing.
This current target, however, was moving at a good clip in a diagonal that would just cross the edge of their territory where several small craft were scraping up the silt and sucking it into collection bins where it would be sorted out and the useless material compacted down into cubes for disposal back on the sea floor, all of which kept the dreaded dirt clouds at bay from covering the entire area with a blackening fog.
Not that there was any surface light getting down this far, but the faint, distant glows of outposts and ships gave everything a sense of direction as opposed to the infinite blackness that seemed to defy any orientation stretching out in front of Robert’s sentinel. Only the sonar provided him a crude map of the area until he finally activated the flood lights and search beams.
The flood lights were mainly focused below the ship, while the search beams were odd spectrum lasers used for computer analysis, which would then be displayed in a synthesized map. It offered greater detail at shorter range, so long as the water remained clear. Some frequencies managed to penetrate the haze better than others, but dirt clouds usually rendered the system all but inoperable.
Fortunately the waters were pristine and the sensors were able to get a good silhouette of the creature before Robert came very close, then added detail and depth with every meter he closed. The category 4 target adjusted its swimming direction slightly as he approached, which was the most common response to the sentinels and their primary purpose…to shoo off the critters rather than stun them, which they reserved for close encounters and grapples.
That wasn’t going to be a concern this time, for the creature had no claws or tentacles…rather it had four giant flippers sprouting out from a thick shell. Its head was angled and came to a point, with enough of a jawed beak on it that Robert didn’t want to come anywhere near its mouth for fear of it biting his ship in two. Out the back came a studded, thick tail that flattened out like a rudder, making the monster look very similar to an oversized turtle…a mean, gigantic turtle that didn’t look like it wanted to be messed with.
As he flanked its starboard side, following a parallel path about 300 meters away, two more of the sentinels arrived and stacked into a wall-like formation and eased towards the creature. Luckily it responded by drifting aside as well, allowing them to turn it away from the glowing dome ahead and the dark little rocks on the surface that were powered down scrapers and other silt movers.
Once they were north of the highest latitude of their infrastructure the sentinels turned off, leaving the plated behemoth to its own business and returned to their patrol routes, thankful that it had moved off so willingly.
Robert framed a computer generated picture of the creature and saved it to a special memory file that he kept as a personal scrapbook and tally count of all his close encounters, the first to go under the level 4 category, putting him slightly ahead of some of the other pilots he was in a friendly competition with. The giant turtle had just earned him 4 points and a new bedtime story for his kids when he got back to Atlantis.
Back inside the control room Heston and the four adepts were busy analyzing the image captures and sonar data, trying to sort out exactly what the creature had been. Greg was both impressed and dismayed with its size, never before having realized just how alive the ocean was and grateful to be sitting safely inside the city and not in one of the submersibles out there.
“Looks like we’ve got another entry to make in the catalog,” Heston commented when they couldn’t find a match. “He’s a big one too. Probably could cause a lot of trouble if he wanted.”
“Do you have anything other than the stunners to work with, weapon wise?” Lens asked.
Heston frowned. “Sometimes the lights will scare them off, and some of the braver pilots have gotten in the habit of bumping them away, but the stun rods have been the most effective by far. We considered developing some sort of sonic deterrent but never got very far with the idea.”
Greg glanced at Lens. “You starting to get ideas?”
“A few.”
“Me too,” Greg admitted, pointing to one of the outposts on the wall screen map. “What’s this?”
“Phase 4 outpost, one of our earliest. Used mostly for storage now. The processing units it contained have been moved further out to be nearer the active mining sites.”
“How long would it take you to get us out there?”
“About 20 minutes. Feeling like a sightseeing tour?”
“Something like that,” Greg admitted.
“Alright, let’s head over to the docking module then,” Heston said, heading towards the door. The foursome followed him out and back across the way they had came, passing by the transport platform and walking a long way next to the giant wall on a sidewalk protected by a sturdy railing separating it from a ‘road’ that several dump trucks were traveling about on, hauling heaping loads of crushed rock to and fro amongst the dozens of small mountains blocking the view from the walkway and obscuring the true size of the chamber.
One of the massive trucks rumbled by four meters to their right, rising several meters over Greg’s head, making the railing seem woefully inadequate, but the driver didn’t vary from his course by so much as a foot and passed by harmlessly. A second truck also passed them several minutes later just as they were approaching the docking hub entrance. Large containment doors stood wide open, creating a gap in the western wall even larger than the trucks that could easily pass two wide through them.
An empty truck was returning from the north and ducked into the archway just as
the group made a slight left turn and walked through the cattycorner entrance in the southwest corner of the storage floor…which took them over a minute to pass through. The sheer size of everything in the ‘undercity’ was intimidating, and the docking hub was no exception.
Once through the entrance the hub stretched out in a huge rectangle north and south of their position with several roads spanning the length with half a dozen of the trucks visible at varying distances. Offset from those roads were loading stations where monorail tracks circling about, coming in and out of dozens of huge tunnels heading out the western edge of the hub. There were two trains docked at the moment, both to the north, with a series of cranes and augers emptying the open topped rail cars and filling the much smaller trucks that slowly carried the load into Atlantis.
“Down here,” Heston said after giving them a moment to look around. He stepped into a small alcove and walked down a hidden staircase that brought them down below the floor and into a tunnel that ran underneath the roads the trucks were traveling on. They rose back up on the other side near a smaller monorail station that serviced what looked like tiny tracks in comparison to the cargo lines.
“These are personnel lines,” he explained, checking in with the service desk that oversaw all traffic and kept a number of the automated cars at each location on the grid so that no one would get stranded. “They run through the same tunnels, parallel to the larger trains but in a dedicated system that’s disconnected from the airway in case of flooding. It pretty much runs through the wall, so there’s not much to see,” he said, opening the vertical door and stepping inside the bus-like car capable of seating up to 20 people.
Heston walked up to the front of the transport and keyed in their destination on a control panel then sat down on one of the bench-like seats that ran the perimeter of the rectangular car, leaving the center open to accommodate additional people if necessary, with handholds on the ceiling for balance.
“We shuttle our work crews out and back from Atlantis each day, with the farthest outpost being just under 2 hours away. If and when we continue to expand further, we’re going to have to start building habitats for the workers to live in during long shifts, otherwise half their day will be spent in travel time. We’ve been working with the engineers to design suitable facilities, but so far no plans have been finalized.”
“How big is your workforce in the field?” Roger asked.
“It varies, but usually we have about 4000 people out at any time, with continually rotating shifts. It’s dark down here all day, so there’s no point in keeping to a surface schedule. We’re pretty disconnected from the rest of Atlantis, and run our little realm by a different set of rules.”
“I wouldn’t call this realm ‘little’ by any extent of reasoning,” Leo differed.
“Ha. If you knew how much ocean was out there you’d realize our operations are tiny. Take all the landmasses on the planet and squeeze them together and they’d fit in this ocean with room to spare. Then consider that the average depth is well over a mile, meaning living space higher than any city’s skyscrapers across the entire ocean and the notion that we live on a water world begins to come into perspective a bit, but the sheer size of it all is even hard for me to contemplate. What we have here is just a drop in a drop in a drop of the big bucket…and there are five buckets on the planet.”
“Point taken,” Greg said as the car began to smoothly glide off down the track laterally then took an offshoot to one of the giant tunnels, dipping into a hole in the ‘wall’ of the tunnel and disappearing from view.
6
The tunnel was similar to the transit lines that ran throughout Atlantis…dark, cramped, and with nothing to see but running lights. The inside of the car was much larger though, and allowed the men to walk around during the trip as they talked through the setup operations that enabled the first mining site and the construction of Atlantis’s foundations, which were situated in a cradle that sat on top of the bedrock as opposed to drilling footholds to firmly grip the Earth’s crust.
With the city’s design, they were using the sheer weight of the construct to hold it in place, with no detectable slippage occurring in the years since completion. It was a design motif enabling internal structural integrity, for if the ground were to split beneath them the city wouldn’t be sheered in half by its own ‘legs’ when they were pulled apart, not that they were expecting any such fissures to arise within the area, but it also made the city more resistant to earthquakes, which they did experience on occasion.
The rail tunnels themselves were also designed to ‘float’ on the ground rather than be anchored in place, other than by their weight. The entirety of one line was open air, but the side tunnel that they were traveling in was separate, with its own airway and emergency stoppage points along the pair of tracks that ran one on top of the other to allow for transit in opposite directions simultaneously.
The stoppage points were little more than platforms that connected to a pressurized rescue room that also connected into the main tunnel via pod-like airlocks that would allow personnel to transfer through in a small booth that would swivel about and only allow a few bucketfuls of water into the room along with the person, even if the other side was completely flooded. Same went for the access airlocks from the small line’s side.
To date there had never been a line breach, but they’d designed the tunnels with web-like internal structures that would keep a single hole from collapsing a much larger section, meaning that it would take longer for the ocean water to flow in and fill up the miles long tunnel to the top, thus increasing the survival odds of anyone caught inside, though the train engines were fully pressurized ‘ships’ of their own, capable of surviving and even towing their cargo while completely submerged underwater if need be.
Greg appreciated the safety precautions, especially now that they were only meters away from the ocean through the tunnel walls.
When they arrived at their destination the rail car slowed to a stop as it branched off the main line and entered a dedicated alcove inside a much larger train station. For the first time since they left Atlantis they could see the main monorail line, branching off at a 90 degree angle and heading into the outpost dome that was larger than any sports stadium Greg had ever seen.
“There are watertight doors that can seal off the spur line in case of flooding,” Heston offered as they walked down a wide connective walkway alongside the rail line as it traveled down a stubby tunnel large enough on its own to hold a basketball stadium. “With backups here at the entrance,” he said, pointing ahead to the widening point.
“Automatic or manual?” Lens asked.
“So long as the monitoring systems are live it’s manual, but if they go down it switches over to automated triggers, along with bilge pumps and air lines to replenish lost atmosphere. Each outpost can draw either from Atlantis through the tunnels, dedicated tunnel feeds encased in the walls along with the personnel rail car lines, or by inflatable tethers that will float up to the surface and draw air in directly.”
When they walked into the outpost they saw a widespread flat area rising up several stories beneath a geodesic dome, opaque, but with visible support structures everywhere across the roof connecting to several main support pillars that ran up from the floor. The monorail line ran straight through the center and dead ended three quarters of the way in. Spaced in tiny clumps around the floor were stacks of metallic crates and sporadic pieces of construction and/or mining equipment, but for the most part the outpost was a gigantic empty room.
“So this is just sitting unused right now?” Greg asked.
Heston nodded. “Distance is key to all our operations, and since this one was built several other outposts have taken its place as the closest storage facilities to the active mining sites.”
“You’re not going to turn it into a phase 6 site?” Roger asked.
“We considered it, but the deep deposits under our feet can be reached via nearby sites j
ust as easily once they branch out. This facility is too close to the city and would curtail expansion in that direction since it’s been labeled a mining dead zone. We don’t want to risk subsurface instabilities that might affect the city’s cradle, potentially tipping it off balance. I don’t even have a clue how we’d fix something like that, so we’re not digging anywhere within 10 kilometers of the city.”
Leo looked up at the dome, wondering how strong it actually was. “Any of these ever break?”
“It’s a lot sturdier than you might think,” Heston said, following his line of sight. “It’s made of a new alloy created by Star Force called Herculium. We mine the constituent metals and additives and produce it ourselves. I don’t believe it’s available to the public markets yet, but it’s more than 200 times stronger than basic steel and a third lighter, and there are tons of the stuff up there and below our feet, so don’t worry about any accidental flooding. The dome could take a torpedo hit and not crack.”
“We’re familiar with the material,” Roger told him, “I’ve just never seen it used on this scale before.”
Heston’s face scrunched. “I didn’t think anyone used it aside from us. We have to, to survive the pressure within design standards, which are beyond conservative.”
Greg smiled. “Yes, Davis likes to play things safe with infrastructure. We’re beginning to experiment with Herculium in spacecraft, particularly in the larger designs to keep the structural framework from warping during heavy acceleration burns.”
“Well I hope you guys don’t start using a lot of it. We only get as much as we can make, and our seafloor expansion is dependent on the material. We’d have spread out further by now if not for lack of the necessary building materials.”
“I can’t say for sure, one way or another,” Greg wavered, not informing him of all the military applications that they had planned for the material, “but I think we might have a use for this warehouse. How many others do you have with this much empty space sitting around.”