In the meantime, she tried sending the messages that the decoders in the city had thought might work in speaking to humans. A message of good intentions, explaining how the builders would try to speak to them, by introducing chemical messages into his brain. But all he seemed to do was breath more shallowly and rapidly, and then he opened his mouth and caused powerful high-pitched vibrations inside the vessel that enclosed his head. She did not understand. Apparently it was impossible to communicate with these creatures - or perhaps she had done it badly.
At least she could salvage something from the botched attempt at contact. She made a rapid scan of Jammer's brain-state, then quickly analyzed his body functions. This could be important, since Jammer was the first living human they had examined. At that moment he turned and ran, when he struggled to get free of a snag that caught at his pack harness, and finally when he broke loose and rammed his breathing regulator against the ceiling. She could tell at once that he was in a life-threatening condition, with bad air coming into the lungs, and it was all the worse because of his rapid, panicked breathing. Immediately she did what the city had suggested might have prolonged the lives of the men in the submarine - she introduced chemical changes in some of the molecules in his brain, causing him to drop immediately into a deep, relaxed sleep. It would last for several hours, causing much less stress on his body.
Despite her best efforts, the human had obviously misinterpreted her actions and had tried to flee. No doubt others would do the same until a new contact strategy - and, perhaps, a better contact vocabulary - was developed. So the best thing she could do at the moment was leave the sub until the humans were gone. This one human would be all right until the others came to restore his equipment to proper functioning. She could already feel the new currents and taste the stronger flavor in the water, clear signals that one of them was approaching. She sank back down into the depths of the sub, then linked with her porter and found her way out of the missile chamber.
Just as Bud got near to where he had left Jammer, his lights brightened again, and from Jammer's panicked gasping he could tell that his speaker was alive again - UQC instead of F-O, but it was good enough at this range. He spotted Jammer almost immediately, thrashing violently where he lay on the floor. A seizure. Something was wrong with his breathing mix. "Jammer!" he cried. "Jammer! Hang on!"
Bud knew he had to get to the regulator, find out what was wrong, but with Jammer casting his huge arms violently around him it was impossible to get in close enough. Then Catfish and Finler arrived, brought by Bud's cries on the UQC.
"He's convulsing!". cried Bud. Immediately they started grappling with the big man, trying to get him under control.
Catfish was the first to see a gauge clearly. "It's his mixture!" he shouted. "Too much oxygen."
It was Bud who got his hands on the controls. Finler and Catfish held onto Jammer while Bud tried to adjust the valve.
Finler shouted at him. "Crank it down, man!"
"Shit, it's stuck," said Bud. "Goddammit!"
"You're losing him! Have you got it? Have you got it?"
The control gave way, sluggishly. It still worked. "OK," said Bud as he cranked it down. "OK."
The moment the mix reached its proper level of oxygen, the seizure stopped. Jammer's body went slack. But he was definitely not OK. A seizure like that could cause permanent brain damage. Some guys ended up as vegetables, kept alive by machines, their brains turned off forever. And even if it hadn't done that much damage, Jammer wasn't going to be doing anything on his own for quite a while.
"Let's get him out of here," said Bud. "Come on! Move it! Move it! Move it!"
Coffey heard all this on the speaker in his helmet - or hat, as the civilian divers called it. He could tell that Brigman had it under control, that he was doing what had to be done. Coffey wouldn't have done it any differently - you get your man out alive, if you can. Protect your men first.
What worried Coffey was the way the speakers had gone dead for a while. The slight dimming of the lights. That was no failure of equipment - not when it happened to several men at once, not when all the equipment came back to full function at the same time. It scared him, right to the bone. If somebody had a weapon that could do that, could dampen their power supply from a distance, they were in deep shit. They'd be helpless against something like that. He imagined the same thing in the air - some American fighter pilot getting set to lock onto a MiG, and suddenly his power damps down, his computers blink, and when he fires his missile it goes anywhere, nowhere. All our advantage over the Russians was in high-tech stuff that absolutely depended on electrical current. If they could screw that up, then we had nothing to offset their huge advantage in raw force, brute quantity.
The question was, Were they down here? Had they noticed the increased activity at GITMO, guessed what was happening, and found some way to crawl in under the storm? Who knew what kind of secret weapons they might have? They could do anything, anything. How could Coffey deal with them if they were everywhere, if they could do anything they wanted?
Lindsey had spent the whole time cruising the length of the Montana, taking close-up videos so that the full extent of the damage could be assessed. Her pictures would be essential, she knew, in order to plan an eventual raising of the hulk. Probably the Montana would have to be raised in two sections, the nearly-broken-off bow and the main part of the boat.
Lindsey was nearing the bow when she heard some confusion over the speakers. Because she couldn't see what was happening, the voices made no sense. Somebody was in convulsions. Bad stuff, but she didn't know what was going on and so she couldn't take any useful action. She could hear Bud's voice among the others. "Bud, do you read? Bud?"
But the only answer she got was from One Night in Flatbed. "Do you see the divers? Are they out yet?" Which meant that One Night didn't know any more than she did.
Lindsey would have answered, but at that moment her lights went dim and her thrusters lost power. Cab One drifted in the water, no longer responding to her controls. She tried to check the fuses and throw switches, but nothing helped. Then she saw something through the dome window that made her forget everything else for a moment. A bright light was making a corona around the Montana's sail, and then from the light there emerged . . . something. Something laced with light and moving unbelievably fast through the water, right toward her.
And then it was past her, before she could comprehend its structure or even its size. Now it was only a dazzling light with something hard and glassy at its core. Magenta and purple, colors so dim they usually couldn't be seen more than a few feet underwater. She was seeing light of that color, dozens, hundreds of yards away from its source. Whatever it was, it was bright. Lindsey crammed her head into an awkward angle in the front bubble of Cab One, trying to follow it with her eyes. But in a moment it was too far off. There was nothing to see.
She knew - knew - that it wasn't made by any human hand. Wasn't designed by any human mind. She had caught only a glimpse of it, but she knew there was no material, no structure, no engine, no light-source ever conceived by the human mind that could do what this had done. Move so fast, drain Cab One's power, give off so much high-frequency light. This was something new, strange, impossible. Yet she had seen it with her own eyes.
As she strained to see it, Cab One bumped into the leading edge of the sail; her momentum was enough to slam her around inside. Silt rose up from the seafloor, obscuring her view. She should immediately check on hull integrity, buoyancy, make sure there was no damage she knew that, but she couldn't take her eyes off the thing as it dropped away, down into the chasm.
Bud's voice came loud over the speaker. "Cab One! Cab One! Meet me at Flatbed. This is a diver emergency! Do you copy? Lindsey?"
Whatever it was, it had to wait. Diver emergencies came before everything. Even before visions and miracles. "Copy you, Bud. On my way." If I can.
She could. Now that the thing was gone, she had power again. Cab One responded no
rmally, none the worse for a little bumping. She headed off through the water as fast as the submersible could take her. It had always seemed quite fast to her. But after the thing she had seen rush past her, it felt unbearably slow.
Chapter 9
International Incident
It took time to get Jammer out to Cab One and more time to bring everyone back to Deepcore. Fortunately, they didn't have to waste much time on decompression - when you're already at sixty atmospheres, the few meters down from Deepcore to the Montana and the brief time the divers were there made little difference. A much harder problem was Jammer's size. He was big. He was heavy. Getting him out of his suit and into the infirmary took a lot of effort, especially considering how tired everyone was.
The infirmary was in the same trimodule as the mess and the lounge. Everybody hovered around outside as Monk and Bud examined Jammer, partly because they were worried, partly because this was where they normally went when they were off duty.
"What do you think?" Bud asked.
Monk refused to overpromise. "I'm a medic, which is mostly about patching holes." That wasn't strictly true, of course. He had trained exceptionally well in hyperbaric medicine because it intrigued him. He wasn't licensed to hang out a shingle as a doctor, but he had prepared himself well enough that the rest of the SEALS on his team could trust him to do the right thing.
So Monk knew that whatever caused the accident, the result was a coma from oxygen poisoning. He knew - and mentally reviewed - all the possible consequences. Jammer might stay unconscious for a few hours or days, and then come back to consciousness little the worse for wear - with no more brain damage than from a drunken weekend or a few hours at very high altitude. Or he might stay in a coma forever, or emerge from it hopelessly brain damaged. Or he might die.
However, since they had no way of knowing how long or how badly Jammer's regulator was improperly adjusted, Monk couldn't predict which of the possible outcomes might actually happen. He didn't want to promise anything. But it would be just as bad to put too bad a face on it and hurt morale among the other civilians. "This type of thing - there's not much I can do. The coma could last hours or days."
Monk looked at Brigman. How was he taking it? Hard to tell. Just stood there, looking down at Jammer. Monk tried to put himself in the same situation. Jammer had been teamed with Brigman; Brigman decided to separate. If Jammer suffered permanent consequences, Brigman would blame himself. I would, in his situation, thought Monk. But I'm not in his situation, so from the outside I can see the truth: Jammer was the one who panicked. Jammer was the one whose personal weakness had brought him to this. There was no blame in it. Jammer's systems malfunctioned and now his body would do its best to restore itself. They could keep him on I.V. so he didn't die of shock or thirst or hunger while he slept. It's out of my hands, out of your hands, out of everybody's hands.
But that doesn't change how you feel when it's your man. Monk looked at Brigman and felt a little of his pain. He also felt: Thank God it isn't me.
Coffey debriefed everybody and made his report to DeMarco. The toughest part was what the Brigman woman told him. A vehicle of some kind, moving incredibly fast, giving off a lot of light, heading toward deeper water. How seriously was he supposed to take this? She seemed edgy as she told him. Reluctant to tell what she saw. Why? Because she didn't trust her own observations? Or because she did, but didn't think she'd be believed? Or was she holding something back?
One thing was certain - she was emotionally upset, and he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Jammer. She didn't hover around him like the others. Instead she seemed distracted, off in her own thoughts. That was hardly a surprise. She wasn't exactly a loyal or compassionate person, as far as Coffey could tell - she was a loose cannon, always off in her own thoughts, working on her own projects, and to hell with anybody else's problems. But something about this had engaged her emotions. Because of that, he didn't know what to make of her report. Was she concealing something? Was she unreliable by her own estimation?
Certain or not, Coffey had to say something about it to DeMarco. The on-site commander, even if he was a couple of thousand feet up on the Explorer, had to know all the available information in order to make the best decisions. So Coffey had to sit there in front of the video and explain that some unidentified vehicle had been sighted near the sub at precisely the time a civilian diver panicked and nearly killed himself.
DeMarco was as confused about what to do with the information as Coffey. "Did any of you see it?" By which he meant, and Coffey understood, Did any of you SEALS, any of you trained observers, see it?
"No sir," said Coffey. "The Brigman woman saw it." DeMarco had met her topside. Let him reach his own conclusions about the reliability of the observer. But if she actually saw something - and the power had dimmed - then there could only be one nation with the technical capability to make such a vehicle and the political will to deploy it here without informing the U.S. "It could have been a Russian bogey," said Coffey. That was the primary danger right now that the Russians might be competing for access to the sub.
"CINCLANTFLT's going to go apeshit," said DeMarco. "Two Russian attack subs, a Tango and a Victor, they've been tracked within fifty miles of here. And now we don't know where the hell they are."
Russian attack subs were known to piggyback submersibles in order to carry them unobserved into an area where they were needed for underwater operations. So they both knew the situation: There were Soviet attack subs in the area, a strange unidentified vehicle had possibly been sighted near the sub, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet - CINCLANTFLT - was very tense about the whole situation. No time for the Glomar Explorer to come and raise the sub at leisure.
"OK," said DeMarco. "I don't have any choice, I'm confirming you to go to Phase Two."
There it was. Coffey heard it. He had just been assigned to retrieve a nuclear warhead and arm it, so he'd be prepared at a moment's notice to set off the first nuclear weapon the U.S. had exploded outside of tests since Nagasaki. It was a bad assignment. Too many things could go wrong. And the worst possibility was that they'd have to go to Phase Three - set the detonator, then evacuate to a safe distance before the warhead went off.
In the middle of a hurricane a nuclear explosion probably wouldn't cause much damage to commercial shipping, since everybody was already in port if they could help it. But who was to say the Russians wouldn't regard it as a provocation, especially if they had a vehicle in the area that might be damaged? This was the kind of dangerous situation where things could fall in any direction. Yet there was no time or opportunity to ask for Washington to decide. The storm was coming too fast, the potential danger was too immediate. DeMarco had fulfilled the responsibility he was given to make the decision on-site if it seemed necessary to go to Phase Two. It wasn't Coffey's choice. But it was still Coffey's act to perform. His job to carry out flawlessly, with perfect judgment at every moment. And once he had accomplished Phase Two, he'd have a live nuclear warhead in his possession, under his sole control. Not even the President had that.
DeMarco responded to Coffey's silence. "Is there a problem?"
"Yes." But that wasn't what Coffey meant to say, was it? What had he been thinking at that moment? Did he have some problem in mind? No, he was answering yes to the original order, that's all. "I mean, no sir. Negative, sir."
DeMarco stayed on the screen for a moment, perhaps to see if Coffey meant to modify his answer. Then he switched off. Coffey took a deep breath. As if he had just averted a serious problem. But he hadn't, he knew it. He now had about the biggest problem in the whole world on his shoulders.
One thing was certain. Phase Two could not be explained to the civilians. Hippy probably wasn't the only one who'd panic at the idea of being under the same ocean with a nuke. And none of these people had security clearance. Who could trust them if they knew there was a live warhead on board Deepcore? Who could guess where their loyalties lay?
Ther
e wasn't a space on Deepcore that couldn't be used for about five different things. So Lindsey was in the photo workstation which also doubled as a maintenance room. The adjoining head was the only darkroom. It was pretty good, even if it was cramped. Light-tight, had a sink, and you didn't have to go very far to take a leak.
But Lindsey was pretty glum as she reassembled Cab One's camera housings. She had seen the way Coffey looked as he listened to her. It was obvious he didn't really trust her. For that matter, did she trust herself? She saw it, but she couldn't make much sense of it. She only knew that whatever she saw was strange. So strange that she, an engineer who had memorized every deep-sea structure ever made, didn't have the vocabulary to describe it.
She was as helpless as a layman trying to talk about a structure - "Why do you use those roundy things instead of triangles?" "What's that thingummy for?" Her descriptions were at the same level. "It was kind of round like an arched turbine, and it might have flexed in the water a little." Yeah, that'll get you an A in structural engineering. Hear that level of precision and you know they'll offer you a job designing airplanes, you can bet on it.
She could only describe what it wasn't. "It didn't seem to be propelled by backward thrust, like a rocket or a jet. But it didn't undulate enough to be swimming, and it was going so fast it could have been flying through air." Coffey had nodded wisely when she said that. She wondered if that was his private way of saying, Bullshit, ma'am. And then he starts talking about how maybe it's a new Russian submersible. Did he think she was so dumb she couldn't have seen for herself if it looked like a submersible craft?
The Abyss Page 17