Three others, Seamen Jonson, Camarillo, and Billy Shank, worked with him, but they went about their duties with disciplined efficiency and did little to relieve the boredom on this long and particularly uneventful shift.
Finally, mercifully, a voice dispelled the solitude.
“Unbelievable,” Billy Shank muttered. “Come see this.”
But even as Del rose from his chair, a loud peal blasted out of Camarillo’s sonic equipment and spun the others on their heels in surprise.
His visage locked in a contortion of shock and terror, Camarillo could not answer their questioning stares. Unblinking, he toppled facedown to the floor, not even extending his arms to break the fall.
The three men scrambled to him. “Back to your station!” Del told Billy. “And full stop! Get the captain and Doc!”
Del rolled Camarillo’s body over, his stare answered by dull unseeing orbs. He removed the headphones and found the speaker cloth torn wide and wet from the blood that still trickled out of Camarillo’s ears. He and Jonson went to work immediately, Jonson rhythmically pushing on Camarillo’s chest, Del trying to breathe life into the man.
A moment later Ray Corbin and Doc Brady rushed in, followed closely by Mitchell and Martin Reinheiser, the civilian physicist who had earned the dubious distinction of becoming Mitchell’s right-hand man. They ran to DelGiudice, now working furiously on the body.
“I’ve got him,” Doc Brady told Del.
“He’s dead,” Del whispered as he rose. He felt his own pulse pounding as he watched helplessly.
“What happened?” Mitchell demanded.
From across the room, Billy Shank answered. “The indicators on my panel started jumping beyond the range of the gauges, and these gauges extend well beyond the limits of anything we ever expected to measure. I’ve never seen anything like it. And then there was a loud noise and Camarillo just fell over.”
Mitchell glared at Del, who couldn’t meet his accusing gaze, too vulnerable to argue with the captain this time. Though Del wasn’t at fault, the fact remained that he had been in command at the time.
Secure in his victory as Del’s head dropped, Mitchell turned to Reinheiser. “What could it be?”
Reinheiser snorted at the absurd request. “I believe I should examine the data before I make any guesses.
Doc Brady shook his head and closed Camarillo’s eyes.
A dead crewman. Mitchell fumed at the thought, at the implications to his record. “Put the ship on alert!” he roared. “And get me a damage report!” He rushed over to the security of his command seat, all the more angry at the lack of focus for his ire.
Within moments the alarms sounded and the crew scrambled, but even the commotion could not ease Mitchell’s impatience.
“The rest of the ship reports no damage or casualties, sir,” Jonson called out.
Mitchell glanced at Del.
“Just one speaker,” the junior officer explained. “It’ll still work.”
“Only minor damage here, too,” Billy Shank called.
Martin Reinheiser, at a terminal to the side of the room, overlapped files with a gridded reference chart. “I believe the disturbance came from right about here,” he said, moving his mouse pointer to a spot on the grid and giving a click so the indicated area expanded to fill the screen. “About a quarter mile dead ahead.”
“Get us there, but keep it slow,” Mitchell snapped at Billy. “I want to know what killed my crewman.”
Del eyed the viewing screen, now perceiving the beacon of the searchlight as an unwelcome invader of this secret and suddenly hostile darkness. We’re heading right into something that killed Camarillo from a quarter mile away, he thought, and he was not the only one in the room troubled by that fact.
Billy Shank’s indicator needles flickered in warning.
“Captain …” Billy began, but his voice trailed off when he noticed the astounded expressions on the faces around him. He looked to the screen and, following a waving command from Mitchell, brought the sub to a halt.
Blackness. The searchlight knifed down and abruptly disappeared. It didn’t reflect back; it simply stopped.
“What is it?” Mitchell asked.
“A cavern?” Reinheiser questioned rhetorically, certainly not expecting answers from the men around him.
“My indicators are dancing again,” Billy remarked loudly, but they seemed not to notice him.
“We have to get a closer look,” Reinheiser declared, unconsciously leaning toward the screen.
“Move us in,” Mitchell ordered flatly.
“But, sir,” Billy replied, “my instruments aren’t functional. I’ll have to guide us manually.”
“Take it nice and slow then,” Mitchell said. “DelGiudice, have you got that speaker fixed yet?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get us a replacement for Camarillo.”
“I can take it,” Del offered, thinking his act of bravery might earn him some grudging respect from Mitchell. It didn’t. Gingerly, suddenly not so sure of his offer, he slid the headphones over his head.
The sub inched downward. Still the light could not penetrate the void before them. The sonic equipment issued its signals out from the sub, but they, too, were absorbed into the blackness, never to return.
“We must be within twenty feet,” Billy said nervously. “I don’t know how much closer I can get.”
“Stop her, then,” Mitchell said. Then to Del, “Have you got anything?”
“Nothing,” Del replied. “The equipment seems to be working, but I’m not getting any signals at all.”
“Damn!” Mitchell growled under his breath.
“We should back off and study the situation,” Ray Corbin suggested. “We don’t know what we’re up against.”
“It would seem prudent,” Reinheiser agreed, realizing the futility of a visual examination without supporting information from their instruments. He clicked away at the computer as he spoke, but that system wasn’t receiving enough information from the exterior sensors to offer back any answers.
Mitchell closed his eyes and rubbed his hands over his face. “Take us up a hundred feet.”
Del’s sigh of relief was audible.
“Mr. Corbin,” Mitchell continued, “have everything inspected and bring me a complete status report as soon as possible.” He turned to Reinheiser. “I’d like your evaluation the minute you get a chance to study all of the data.”
And so the Unicorn hovered in the eternal gloom, a mere forty yards above the unexplained void. On the surface, a mighty electrical storm vented its fury in spasms of untempered violence, but the men of the Unicorn couldn’t know that.
Not yet.
The ship came off alert before an hour had passed. Del found himself in command of the helm again as Mitchell and Corbin held a conference with the scientists. Most of the crew went to their barracks, trading rumors and trying to get what they figured might be their last rest for quite a while.
“These indicators are acting strange again,” Billy said to Del a short time later, using the informal tone that marked their friendship. As the only black man on the Unicorn, Billy’s own hesitance prevented him from having many friends on board. He had heard the quiet references to “NUSET’s token black,” an insidious thought that often crept into the back of his own mind. Del knew better, though, and his sincerity toward Billy had proven a great comfort to the man.
“It acts like there’s something going on just above us,” Billy explained as Del approached. The needles jumped and a blip appeared on the tracking grid for just a second, then was gone. “See? There it goes again!”
“Can we get a look above?”
“We can try.” Billy clicked on the camera icon, then dragged the mouse to the indicated point on the grid. The forward viewing screen darkened as its camera turned away from the illumination of the forward searchlight.
“That should be about right,” Billy said, moving the pointer to another icon, one for the
floodlights. “Now, if I can get some light up there …” As he began the drag, a bright arc cut a blinding line across the forward screen. Seaman McKinney, working the sonic booth, cried out and flung the crackling headphones to the floor. The screen flashed again.
“Jesus, it looks like a thunderstorm!” Jonson cried.
“Sounds like one, too,” McKinney added, rubbing his ear.
“Yeah, but underwater?” Billy questioned. He looked blankly at Del. “I think you’d better get the captain.”
But before Del could move, the lights, the screen, even the hum of the reactor, shut down. Dread drifted in with the silence and blackness, inundating all aboard in the knowledge that they were utterly helpless, freezing them with the certainty that something terrible was about to happen.
Then the storm hit.
It struck amidship, by the crew’s quarters, attacking with a raw power that mocked the sophistication of the Unicorn. Steel beams and hydraulics that had held back the pressure of thirty thousand feet of water bent like rubber in the face of its strength. Bolt after bolt of lightning blasted against the sub, scorching and searing her sides. Currents wild with might wrenched mercilessly at the hull, tearing apart metal and splitting welded seams with unrelenting fury.
And through the holes, death streamed in, oblivious to the screams and pleas of the doomed crew.
Battered, but still conscious, Del clung desperately to the bolted chair. His mind spun with the turnings of the sub, whirling around then over, again and again. His terror heightened as he sensed that they were falling, hurtling uncontrollably toward the ocean floor, into the maw of the perverse blackness that had defied the intrusions of light or sound. Del tightened his hand on the arm of the chair, its tangible material his only grip on reality. Metal groaned in protest of the wrenching impact as the sub pummeled into and then through the black barrier.
And DelGiudice knew no more.
Chapter 2
Riddles Beyond the Blackness
BILLY SHANK’S EYES opened upon a surrealistic scene of destruction. The glow of the emergency light reddened the misty shroud of steam and smoke that wafted through the air and distorted his perceptions of familiar images. He recognized Del, stretched out facedown on the floor, somehow still having managed to hook his arm around the support of the captain’s chair. Billy watched mesmerized as a dark liquid flowed out from under Del and made its way toward the wall.
“Listing?” he heard himself whisper, and then he looked again at the liquid and wondered if its blackish hue was another trick of the light.
Perhaps it was red—red like blood.
The realization that Del was dying before his eyes shook the grogginess from Billy, but when he tried to sit up, he found that a support pole had been folded right over him, pinning his shoulders. He struggled with all his strength but had no leverage to push the pole away. “Damn!” he screamed, raising his eyes to an unmerciful God. “You would make me watch him die?” Ignoring the protests of his flesh as the metal cut a deep line across his upper back, he twisted and jerked wildly.
Then a sickly sweet odor filled his nostrils, demanding his attention. He twisted again, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a charred body lying on top of a shorted-out electrical panel.
McKinney.
“Jonson!” Billy called frantically.
No answer. Billy scanned the room, searching for some hint of the remaining crewmen, squinting to penetrate the steam and smoke and the tears that welled in his dark eyes. He saw something, perhaps it was a foot, sticking out from under a toppled computer bay. Yes, it was a foot. A moan escaped Billy’s lips as he imagined Jonson’s body squashed under the heavy case.
“And so it ends,” he said softly, and giving in to the pain and weariness that hammered dully at his senses, put his head down and closed his eyes.
And wondered what death would be like.
In his dazed state Billy could not track the minutes as they passed. Delirium swept over him and he could not react when the door crashed open and four wraithlike forms drifted in. Couriers to escort him to the land of the dead?
Never had he imagined that the sound of Mitchell’s shouting could bring him comfort.
“What the hell happened?!” the captain screamed. He stormed across the slanted room to the intercom, apparently taking no notice of his injured crewmen.
Doc Brady didn’t hesitate when he saw Del’s lifeblood streaming out. He tore a makeshift bandage from his shirt and dove down to stem the flow.
“This one’s gone,” Reinheiser declared as he peered under the cabinet at Jonson’s crushed body. “And I don’t think there’s much hope for that one,” he added callously, pointing to McKinney’s smoldering corpse.
“Nasty cut,” Brady chided with a wink and a calming smile. He pressed the shirt hard against Del’s neck and helped the injured man to sit up. “Might need a tourniquet.”
But Del hardly heard the doc; his eyes focused on Billy.
Ray Corbin answered the concerned look evenly. “He’ll be fine,” he assured Del, turning the bent support aside. Billy moved to rise, but Corbin held him down. “Just you relax. Doc’ll be with you in a minute.”
Mitchell stared blankly at the dead indicator panel, at the blank screens, not even a cursor flicking on them. “Something very big hit us,” he growled. “And we didn’t react. We just took it!” He kicked at a nearby piece of wreckage. “Someone up here, in command of the bridge, did nothing!” he fumed. “Not even a goddamn warning!” Of course, Mitchell, like all the others, had to realize that what happened had been unpreventable, and with such quick and complete devastation that no one could have changed the course.
But Del, who knew Mitchell so well, realized that he needed a release, a scapegoat, someone to blame so he could rid his personal feelings of vulnerability. If this was no one’s fault, then it could just as easily have happened to Mitchell, but if Del had somehow failed …
Mitchell whirled about and charged at Del. But Corbin and Brady, like Del, saw it coming well in advance and easily intercepted him.
“You did nothing!” Mitchell screamed from behind the wall of the two men. “Not a goddamned thing!”
“There was nothing to do,” Del snapped back, but he had to repeat himself several times as a litany against the guilt Mitchell had just laid upon his shoulders.
“Stop it! Listen!” Reinheiser shouted, and the others quieted, surprised by the physicist’s uncharacteristic outburst. “Listen,” he said.
A few seconds passed, the only sound an occasional creak of settling metal.
“I don’t hear anything,” Doc Brady said.
“Not a thing. Nothing at all,” Reinheiser emphasized. “Not even the hydraulic system.” In the span of a couple of seconds, Reinheiser’s words sinking in, terror seized all of the men with the expectation that they would be instantly crushed, as if they believed that death, in a final stroke of cruelty, had waited patiently for them fully to realize their doom.
Reinheiser was the one to break the silence.
“Why aren’t we dead?” he asked, echoing the thought that reverberated in all their minds.
They remained silent, trying to sort out a rational answer to the question. And if they weren’t perplexed enough, the main lights suddenly brightened, indicator needles jumped to life, a couple of computers beeped and began their reboot, and, most amazing of all, the familiar hum of the Unicorn’s mighty turbines returned. The men jumped in unison when a shaky voice crackled over the intercom.
“Hello … anybody,” it pleaded, balancing precariously on the edge of hysteria. “This is Thompson. Can anybody hear? Oh, God, please don’t make me be alone!”
Mitchell ran to the com. “What’s going on back there?”
“Captain?” Thompson cried.
“Where are you?”
“Auxiliary power with Sinclair,” came the reply. “He’s pretty bad off. I don’t think he’s going to …” Again the voice trailed away.
“On my way,” Doc Brady called, and he headed for the door.
“No!” came the shrieking reply from Thompson. “You can’t!” Doc turned back to his companions, all of them frozen by the sheer desperation of the wail.
The prospect of one of his men, reputably the finest crew ever assembled, losing control, enraged Mitchell. “You had better explain yourself!” he barked into the microphone.
“Flood, sir,” Thompson answered evenly. “Everything between the gym and auxiliary power is underwater. You crack the hatch to forward barracks and you’ll flood the front of the ship, too.”
“The crew!” Mitchell cried. “What about my crew?”
Thompson’s inevitable response stuck like a dagger in Mitchell’s heart. “Dead, sir. Everyone’s dead—they’ve got to be—except for me and Sinclair and you guys in front.”
Once again the survivors were reminded of the hopelessness of their situation. Eight men, six on the bridge up front, two in back, with fifty feet of flooded rooms between them.
“Seems we’re in trouble,” Corbin said offhandedly.
But Mitchell couldn’t view things that way. He put this situation into the perspective of one more challenge, probably the greatest he would ever face. His entire life, from city streets to the merchant marine to his naval commission, had been one continuous fight. He had done more than survive, he had become a leader. “Stow it, Corbin!” he growled. “We’ve got a job to do.” He motioned at Billy and Del. “I want those two ready to work tomorrow.”
“That’s impos—” Doc Brady began.
“Tomorrow!” Mitchell bellowed. “Set up the conference room as an infirmary.” He turned to Reinheiser. “See what you can do about cleaning up this air.” He looked at Corbin. “You and I will get this room back in order. I want those forward viewing screens working as soon as possible.”
Mitchell didn’t slow the pace of his growing momentum. “Thompson,” he called, “what’s your situation?”
“I’m a little banged up, sir. I sprained my wrist pretty bad, but I can work.” He sounded a bit steadier.
“Then get the damn engine room back in shape and give me as much power as you can!” Mitchell ordered, using just the right timbre of anger in his voice to convey two messages: that he had faith in Thompson’s ability and that he held Thompson solely responsible for getting the job done.