But Susan saw the woman was shaken with the realization. For she knew the reaction of explosive force.
“I think they blew her up. Blew the entrance. Blew the fucking vent off: My God they blew it up! We, we have no egress. We have no way to back out.”
They looked at each other, then, as dead women and men. For now they knew their pathway back had been sealed off, the enemy was closing in, they were inside the belly of the beast, and their element more precious than fine jewels, their element of air, exhausted in ten minutes.
A skeleton, hand-picked crew, an old Navy vessel stripped down to make way for scientific equipment and science personnel: The old warship would be no match for anything with respectable complement of armament. Once there had been five inch guns, harpoon ship to ship missiles, Tow missiles launched from her helicopters, Tomahawks with ranges and satellite-guided targeting in excess of 1,500 miles, helicopters with 30mm cannon and Arrow anti-missile missiles. They weren’t here now.
Now there was largely only grey peeling paint. She was becoming a rust bucket. More was the pity.
He had gone below. He wasn’t sure he had seen the ship out there, or had sensed something was wrong. But he had gone below for some reason. Maybe he was still mad at her. He wasn’t even sure what he looked for. He had run engines before. Maybe he wanted to talk things over with the wrenches down below. But the experienced sailor and intel officer in him took over. He began taking inventory of the military equipment below. He found the armory had some weapons left. An AK-47, 2 M16’s, an M-60, all short on ammo.
He returned to the poop deck. It took him only a second to see what happened. He saw her leap over. Even in her chosen desperate act of escape, she looked beautiful in her dive. He had his own 9mm. The M16 he lifted from the near-deserted armory had only one clip. He was no match against the group of terrorists, and she was already enfolded deep into the waves of the sea.
Desperate, it seemed an eternity before they returned to the bridge and prow. He skulked up the side. There were only two. But another ship was heaving-to along side. They were busy with the ropes ship-to-ship. It was what gave him his opportunity. That same damn vessel they fought before, no doubt. Soon more armed men and women would scurry about on their ship. They were about to be boarded.
He had received his briefing at Langley. He knew what they wanted. The sea spray sprinkled over the bulwark and washed his head and neck, but he sweated none the same. He sneaked back to the stern, away from bow and bridge. They would be busy for a while with the tie-up, and boson’s chair transfers, but sooner or later they’d come this way.
He gazed over the bulwark where she had dived twenty feet to the ocean. Only the waves of the sea gazed back at him, sparkling and foaming in the sun. Then it dawned on him. Maybe, somehow, like a soldier running low across the field against an enemy machine gun nest, she made it to the other side without being seen. He ran, low against the wind over the rear deck. Taking a chance, he glanced down.
And she was there!
Her blonde tresses floated on the surface spreading out, like tendrils of a gossamer jellyfish, opening and closing, seeking any living form by chance. She was close enough to the rear ladder. Praying none of them looked back this way, he scampered down. He thought not of the risk. He leapt into the foam. Her left hand reached up just above the surface, as though she waved good-bye to the world. He stretched out his hand. He grasped her fingers, her hand, her wrist, her forearm
He had her!
He pulled her to the ship. Somehow he grasped the last rung with his right hand. He pulled her up to him with his left. He prayed he wouldn’t dislocate her shoulder. He prayed he would not tear his own rotator cuff of his shoulder. She was no starved skin and bone super model. She was tall, muscular, with considerable avoirdupois. Somehow, he managed, rung by rung to get up to the rear, lower deck.
A moment to make sure they hadn’t come back yet. Good God, she was almost dead weight. It was a herculean task. But he finally got her high enough on the rungs to get under her legs with some leverage, and, at last, over they went, plopping and flopping on the deck. In time, he removed her wet clothes, for she vomited and shivered and bled. In spite of the effluent of the ocean and her guts and blood, he was still in awe of her beauty. Then he saw the wound. He had to stop the bleeding. She started to heave again. In horror, he saw the wound froth when she heaved. He did not tell her of the frothing of her bodily fluids. There was a first aid kit across from the armory, a room he figured had been the dispensary. He had to get them down there.
Somehow he carried her. Then she began half to walk, moaning and weeping and looking half dead. She was his woman now. He would never desert her. Never again in his life would he abandon her.
He was astonished she never lost her grip on the thing she had carried when she executed her swan dive, her leap of life into the sea.
Mitch Corvales had a room he entered. It wasn’t on any ship, or land station. It was his room he visited when all else failed and there was nothing more to do but go on. He knew he would soon have to go to his special room. He had been leery of this mission from the get-go. That was the fucking damn problem. There was no clear-cut military mission. A virtual set-up for a SNAFU, another Custer fuck.
He despised supporting scientific, civilian missions. And an unfamiliar ocean besides. The currents, the caverns of the Atlantic he knew as well as the route from his house to his office. But this stuff. Of course he had been informed of the military potential. Even with everything to it, the parameters of the mission were so ill-defined. If there is a biological weapon to be found, then so much the better.
But my God, fusion! That search, of course, made the mission worthwhile. Nonetheless, it was so vague, as if not even theory but mere hypothetical guesswork.
Ah, the first Persian Gulf War: There was a mission! There were clear-cut pathways and waterways for glory. There was victory in sight and in achievement. There was a clear-cut mission.
In the end, though, even that mission had been compromised. That idiot former CIA director calling the whole thing off just when we had the son of bitch in our sights. Then the man’s half-wit son his commander-in-chief out of a stolen election. And this Commander-in-Chief has the balls to order the Seal team to get bin Laden, then wimps out when they were all ready to bring an end to that toady’s chemical arsenal.
When he retired he planned to voice all these concerns. Maybe sooner than later. Now he could help defeat ISIS, for they needed to be defeated, utterly; but here on a damn fool’s errand instead.
He never dreamed that roach out there would head into the vent to escape his fish. What the hell! Any sane person would have engaged a deep underwater escape maneuver with as much empty sea around, fired decoys and headed into the oblique. Corvales wanted to scare him the hell away and his torpedoes couldn’t last longer than a few seconds anyway. No doubt they thought we also had the miniaturized depth-pressure defiant rockets. By the time they realized their own miscalculation, they were trapped within the vortex. The rest was inevitable. Now it was over.
Now he needed to repair to his special room. For he had literally sealed the fate of the Ex-Gee’s crew. Still, he knew eventually the XO was right. Forty-five minutes down there it was over anyway. It had been over ninety minutes at the impact time. Well he’d visit his room later. Now, he could still protect the people above.
“Commander, X0.”
“Go.”
“Approaching surface, sir. In, mark, 100 seconds.”
“Notify SEAL Commander.”
“Sonar, bridge.”
“Sonar, aye.”
“Any indication they’ve spotted our signature?”
“Bridge, Sonar. Negative. As far as I can tell. All looks copacetic.”
I say again. Negative to hostile sight.”
“Copy that. Note coordinates. Navigation.”
“Navigation, aye.”
“I want an over-the-horizon surface. We’ve kept ourselves off their screens so far. I don’t want them to make a visual. We’ll launch all attack boats in four minutes. On your mark, X0.”
“Roger that, Captain. All hands prepare to surface. I say again, prepare to surface. SEAL Team: Equipment check. Prepare launch all attack vessels four minutes on my mark. Mark. Steady as she goes. Surface in 48 seconds. Switch out of red. I say again. White light gradual illume.”
“Switching out of red; white light gradient illume at this time, aye.”
They had nine minutes of oxygen, less than ten minutes of sweet life and Dr. Susan Arthknott decided to deliver to them another of her classroom lectures. He was captivated by her, thought he loved her, but he considered at that moment cutting her life expectancy short by 7 or 8 minutes.
He had always been a big man, not so popular with the girls. Because of his appearance they hadn’t thought him intelligent. But he got things faster than most and knew he was smart. He loved the military. It was the one place he had known they thought him equal and capable and treated him well. He always considered it would be an honor to die for his comrades, for his mission, for his country. He always knew it might come to this. It appeared at last he was about to get his chance.
He never dreamed a woman like that could go for him. Thin, slight, brainy as hell. He knew others could not see her beauty. But he knew how that must feel. He saw it. He saw it from the beginning. He thought her partner, that classic blonde beauty, must know it too. He liked Jennifer, as all men and some women probably did; but he was fully captivated, besotted by Susan. The way she moved, the way she talked, the way she looked at him over her glasses, but mostly when they fell off her nose upon her chest, then gave that especial, enchanting giggle, a girl-woman after all.
When she came to him he had been proved right. She was scared and confident at once, like a scientist careful with her experiment at first, then relaxing and giving herself to it, to him, totally. He understood that also.
She had a large freckle on her right shoulder just under where her hair came down. When her hair came down, he lost all thought of the freckle as she came on top of him. What the hell, let her prattle on. There would be worse ways to go out than hearing the harmony and the melody of Susan Arthknott’s voice.
“Look here. Do you see? Those strands there.” Susan hit the main console screen playback. The console streamed the visuals again, as dazzling and vivid as the first transmissions from the two lateral cameras, the split image playing in glory and glory on the console once more.
“Those single strands of DNA. Usually they’re microscopic, coiled completely to fit in the nucleus of a cell. These are fully uncoiled. Amazing! They are macroscopic, more than a meter long. Look at their shapes. That alpha-helix there, the one that looks like a grappling hook, or that, very possibly a primitive myoglobin involving oxygen transport. Maybe it reminds you of a Swiss Army Knife with all the blades open and the handle missing. And, and, there, look, I, I can’t describe them all. But these they are!”
“The birth of life!”
“Somehow they, how? How? Ah! Of course! They break. They recombine. Then repeat. Then again and again reinsert.
See how huge that one is. You see, the genome of the salamander contains more than 10 times the quantity of DNA of the human; but we have only 25 times more genes than the lowly E. coli bacteria. So the non-coding parts explain this apparent contradiction, that is, lots of junk, but very few good combinations. Somehow the structure of the useful segments becomes coding sequences for proteins, repeating and repeating, inserting, into the machinery of life. All the variations, combining, forming, and then bubbling out, exploding out, coiling, diffusing. They swim. They maneuver. They transcend. They evolve, practically at once or over millennia, to creatures finding their way all over the world, sea world, land world, ice, desert, soil, sky.
This is it! We have it! With this life-directed soup, we can format cures to every metabolic process gone awry. We can cure every disease. We can save the whole world, the whole God blessed and cursed world! I, I’ve got to get samples. Our samples in the lab will grow. Yes, that’s it. They’ll grow and they’ll provide the basic cure for practically any dis—for any illn—”
Her eyes flashed those flames he had come to see, to know, to expect. He had seen them at the heaviest moment of their love-making. She was wild then. Nothing else existed. She was mad now. He knew it. They all were.
“What’s the matter with you people? Don’t you see it? The beginning, primitive molecules forming the coding regions for the most fundamental proteins, protein combinations before any flaws, mutations. This soup is the key. The key is the code unaltered. The code unaltered is the life. Hearken to this herald:
This is the original blueprint, blown forth upon the firmament from the breath-spirit of God Almighty!”
“Susan,” Delores said.
“You must see it. You, you mus—” But the scientist’s eyes began to flicker down, to appear a bit more normal. The flares in her irises ebbed to embers. Her nostrils seemed to retreat from flaring. But only for a moment. Following Delores’s next admonition, the scientist who held in her hand the key to the end of suffering and misery re-generated her fervent gaze and attitude, nearly as profound redux as it had been before.
“It’s practically the temperature of the sun. You can’t collect samples. We have eight minutes of air.”
They did not think they could be shocked the more. The scientist shocked them yet again, for she said her next sentence with full calmness, with nonchalance, in a matter-of-fact tone. She could have said, “Well, then, let us brush our teeth each morning, floss, mind our manners, and always look left and right before crossing the street.”
“Well then, let us get out. Launch robot sample trays port side.”
“Susan.”
“Delores, listen to me. We’ve only got about four minutes to get out of this thing and to these coordinates. Look. Wait now. Wait. Come on. Come on. There! Do you have them?”
“Hodges.”
“Got it. But … OK, got it.”
“Now the sample tray may soon explode or may capture some elements on the spent uranium wall as we go forth. The tiles are all but gone. It’s going to get damn hot in here in a few seconds, and I don’t have time for arguing.”
“OK. I’ll trust you. Sample tray robot arm launched. It’s holding in here of course. Got one.”
“It’ll hold. Or the thing will stay with us. It is what it does. It be that it be.”
Hodges had never seen a look on a woman’s face or anyone’s face as the look Dr. Susan Arthknott had on her face in that creature’s cooling womb in the star-heat of the interior of the earth. Her eyes were dark, deep set, aflame with fire at the same time. Her hair frizzed everywhere. They had stripped to their underwear, or even less, and he would always swear he observed his favorite shoulder freckle quiver.
“Hodges.”
“Weapons aye. Nav aye.”
“That hostile vessel.”
“Approaching. What’s left of it.”
“I think we need to get her in here with us before she burns up. If we can give our womb-monster-creature here a good jolt, I think that will create enough electromagnetic wave force to give nature, as it is here, a hand. Is our bulkhead electro-shock array operative?”
“Affirmative. Operative, at least some of it. Enough for her to know there’s something else inside her. But how will that help?”
“For God’s sake and all the love in the world. Everyone. I haven’t time. Please just trust me. For the dearest love of God, trust me. Charge now.”
“Charge on. Whoa. She felt something she’s never felt before.”
“Come on baby. Be a good mama. Take it in.” Delores and Hodges looked at each other, then at Susan. They knew it was over
. Dr. Susan Arthknott was mad as a hatter, as a March hare.
“What are you—”
“It took me a while,” Susan said. “I should have seen it all along. You see the answer is so simple, really. So terribly simple. It is not osmosis at the interface event line. Or rather it is, in a fashion, but it isn’t. Nature abhors a vacuum. What is here and isn’t there must be there. Don’t you see? You see it all now, don’t you? It is symmetrical energy harmonic reversal. One of a similar or equal weight comes in …”
Susan’s voice trailed off. She stopped speaking. But her mind moved in a time and space that existed only for her, only for the sentient vibrations not yet present in this moment, or perhaps full of awe always and she did not know it. Until now. “But if …” her mind continued to itself, in that deep place not yet here and not yet there.
“. . . if the exchange is between substantially different molecular densities there would be a net energy differential, an energy gradient gained strictly from the energy differential of the two.”
Dr. Susan Arthknott’s mind swelled with the emotion of the thought. There was a whole new Universe being born in her mind, displacing at least for this split second, which may have been a millennia or a million millennia in the Universe’s birthing so long ago, her mind holding the rhythm of the womb they were in. The idea awesome and orgasmic would return later, but not now. For Hodges’s mind now, trailing far behind, had caught a glimpse of where Susan had been.
“My God,” Hodges said. For he had it all now. “One comes in … another goes out. That’s why you needed the other ship in here. And the energy charge to equalize the gravity density. But will it work? And if it does, what of us out there? Where? Where can we go now?”
“You know Old Faithful don’t you?”
“The geyser,” Delores said.
“When we came in, we passed a caldron. OK, many of them. But this one explodes in less of a random chaos sequence than the others. At least that’s what Alfred tells us. It entered the algorithms three times, and they always came back within two per cent. Well, discounting the two per cent chance that we could be wrong, she’s due to blow in 3 minutes; 3 minutes 27 to 30 seconds, that is. Ninety-eight per cent’s not bad, unless our calculations are wrong, and the heat has compromised the integrity of the chronometer chip. But it’s a chance. Hell, it’s our only chance.”
Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire Page 20