He took in a long, slow, deliberate breath of the foreign air inside the hovercraft—it was cool, metal-smelling, conditioned and thoroughly man-made, and totally unlike the air he had been breathing on the island—and turned away from the window to see the new world Bill had promised him.
CHAPTER 4
At first, Nathan had been slightly at a loss. He walked around seaQuest feeling rather like a five year old on his first day in kindergarten: abruptly deserted among others, almost all strangers, who looked at him with expressions of uncertainty and unease. That may be the Nathan Bridger, they seemed to be thinking, but he still looks like a goddamn beachcomber...
But he would not let them see his unease for any money—not even Crocker's genuine antique greenbacks—or guess at it either: so finally he went wandering again. He walked from one end of seaQuest to the other, on all her levels, poking his head into labs, peering at staterooms, putting his nose into the engine room, the computer-support and prep rooms, even the galley (which despite its shining newness was like every other sub galley he had ever been in, with a faint, faint smell of frying onions hanging in the air no matter how many times that air went through the scrubbers). Even this non- detailed version of the grand tour took Nathan a good while. As he went, the tiny creaks and movements of the boat around him, different- sounding though they were from subs he had been in before, told Nathan that she was moving fast and slowly coming deep; a few thousand feet now, perhaps, heading away from the precipitous underwater mountains of the Hawaiian Chain toward the deep basin between them and the Line Islands Chain in mid-Pacific. He found it difficult to tear himself away from his exploration of the space around him, but at the same time, the thought of the bridge again, of a look out into the dimness of the great depths, lured him. There would be time enough later to catch that launch.
He headed forward again, through the starboard longitudinal corridor. Crewpeople were still staring at him as he passed, but Nathan had no eyes for them, seeing the flash of silver-blue come down toward him along the tube that ran down through the corridor, under its floor. The sleek shape paused in mid-corridor, looking sideways up at him. I still can't get over it, Bridger thought, and knelt a moment to tap hello on the glass. Darwin gazed at him, rolled in the water, then flourished his tail and swam away to starboard, spiraling, obviously in high spirits. "At least one of us is having a good time," Nathan said softly, and stood up, shaking his head. A crewman passing him glanced at him: Nathan indicated the dolphin, and said, "Isn't that something?"
"Yessir," said the crewman, sounding as if it wasn't something at all: and he went on his way. Then again, Nathan thought, as he ambled forward, shaking his head, I guess they're all pretty much used to it at this point... He found himself wondering about any previous dolphin crew that the boat might have had: how many were there and what had become of them? Odd that none of them should have been on seaQuest, since she was ready to sail.
Unless, of course, Noyce had already known about one particular dolphin—and had removed whatever other dolphin crew there were in its favor—
Nathan shook his head at himself. Paranoia? Or just healthy suspicion...? All the same, it was a pity. He had often worried, on the island, that "Darwin didn't get out enough," didn't see many other dolphins, due to his hanging around the island and working with Nathan. It would have been nice if there had been other dolphins here for him to talk to, creatures that didn't need a translator...
I can't believe this, Nathan thought then. I'm worrying about a cetacean's social life. He made a wry face at himself and continued forward, pausing at one of the wall-mounted "status" panels, slipping his bifocals onto his nose and peering at the settings—they had defaulted to internal pressure and temperature, external pressure and temperature, bathymetrics—all very efficient. He turned away and ambled on toward the bridge again. Ford caught up with him from behind, and fell into step next to him.
"Sir, we just received this message for you," he said, holding out a note. "I think it's from Admiral Noyce."
Nathan resurrected the image of Noyce with a gallon ice-cream carton stuffed down over his head, and took the note, opened it, read it—then laughed softly.
"Good news?" Ford said.
Nathan laughed again. "The Admiral was wondering if, while I'm aboard, I might take a look at the main drive propulsion unit. Seems there's been some 'glitches' in the aqua-return jets." He stuffed the note in his pocket. "And here I was thinking that press-gangs had gone out of style. All the same—the glitches are to be expected. The old girl's been sitting with her feet up for eleven months: this would be when the bugs would naturally come out of the woodwork."
Ford nodded. "Does this mean the Captain won't be returning to the mainland as planned?" he said.
"You can't wait to get me off this boat, can you?" Nathan said, amused.
Ford looked shocked. "No, sir, I just—"
"It's all right, Commander. I'd probably feel the same if I was in your shoes. I assure you, I have no intention of snaking your command."
"Snaking, sir?" Ford's expression was blank— almost carefully blank.
Nathan raised his eyebrows. "Come on... you're not saying that you don't believe this boat should be yours, are you?"
"No, sir," Ford said, very calmly. "I'm not saying that at all. But the fact is, those decisions are out of my control."
Bridger looked at him for a moment. "I guess you're right," he said finally. "I just want you to know that, whatever it is Noyce has in mind, well, it isn't going to work."
"Yes, sir," Ford said: that calm tone again. "Does that mean the Captain is ready to leave the seaQuest?"
Bridger glanced over at the tube: Darwin was back again, curious, he supposed: eavesdropping? Who knew what kind of attitudes a dolphin might have about privacy? Of course, now, he could ask...
"In good time," Nathan said, a single answer to both Ford's question and his own.
And from down the hall, a voice shouted, "Commander! Commander Ford!"
"Oh no..." Ford turned around with the expression of a man presented with one more problem he desperately doesn't want. Nathan shut his mouth and waited to see what happened: in the middle of his own annoyance, he was beginning, in a cockeyed way, to enjoy Ford's discomfiture.
The woman coming toward them now was wearing a science-team uniform: a handsome lady in her mid-forties, very brisk, very businesslike, and at the moment, from the look of her face, very angry indeed. She shouldered past Nathan as if he weren't there, put her face right up to Ford's and said, "That's it! Enough! Let's get something clear, shall we? My people will not be treated like so much—cargo! We are scientists, capable of independent thought—not some mindless military drones—"
Ford didn't give an inch: his eyes narrowed, and right back into the woman scientist's face, he said, "Your point, Doctor?"
"Your people have occupied areas clearly designated as research laboratories. I want them removed immediately!"
"May I remind you, Doctor, that you are aboard a military vessel. And your orders are to—"
The woman's eyes flashed scorn. "Orders? I don't take orders! This is a research and exploration vessel. We outnumber you. One hundred and twenty-four to eighty-eight."
"That sounds like a threat."
"Well, at least you have a grasp of the obvious!"
"Understand this—"
"Don't you point your finger at me—!"
Nathan couldn't keep it in any longer. He had been watching in silent hilarity up until now, but that last bit of business broke the dam. He started to laugh—and immediately the scientist whirled on him, discarding her old argument in favor of a refreshing new one. "You find this amusing?"
"As a matter of fact, I do." Though he tried to make it stop, the laughter kept coming back. "How does anybody expect a lasting world peace when your two teams can't even agree on anything?"
The woman looked Nathan slowly up and down, not bothering to hide her scorn that this scruffy chara
cter should venture such an opinion. I'm getting tired of this reaction, Nathan thought ruefully, I'm really going to have to do something...
"What are you," she demanded. "Some kind of stowaway?"
"My name's Bridger."
That worked, at least, because the sarcasm went away as if someone had flicked a switch. She looked most acceptably taken aback. "You're... Nathan Bridger?"
Nathan nodded. "Last time I checked."
The woman shook her head slowly, a thoughtful expression taking the place of the astonishment. "I... I know your work. Topography and thermal range variances, right? I've read your data... from that island of yours in the Yucatán."
Nathan allowed himself a quick smirk. He never had been sure how much of his material was making it out into the research community: after all, once the rumor gets around that you're behaving oddly, people sometimes begin to call your findings into question, on the grounds that your "mental state" might be contaminating them. "Was it helpful?"
"Very," she said. "I tried to contact you once. They said you were..." She paused, hunting for some neutral word, as her eyes dwelt on him with a curious expression. "... Unreachable." Nathan had nothing to say to that for the moment. "I'm Kristin Westphalen," the woman said after a second. "Medical doctor, physical oceanographer and head of the science team aboard this ship."
"Doctor," Nathan acknowledged, looking at her as he extended his hand. He knew her work as well: hers was an incisive mind, but from the tone of her papers, a humorous one, a mind that considered no fact too small for interested investigation, no problem too big to attack. The entire military establishment of the UEO, for instance. There were traces of that humor and interest in her face, as well as a toughness that surpassed what he might have expected—
And then he noticed that though the handshake had stopped, she was still studying him; no, eyeing him in a way he hadn't seen for a long time. He began wondering what she was looking at, now that she had got past the "beachcomber" level. Deliberately he glanced away—
Westphalen broke the glance as well. "Yes, well, I'm late for a staff meeting. It was—nice—meeting you." She wheeled on Ford again, getting back to business. "I'm not finished with this, Commander—not by a long shot!"
She turned and walked away.
They looked after her. Nathan was just as glad that anger hadn't been turned on him. At close range, it was like a typhoon: violent, but impressive. "She seems very... committed," he said to Ford.
The Commander snorted. "She oughta be committed," he said finally. "Sir—" He nodded to Bridger and took himself away, looking decidedly hot under the collar.
Nathan smiled slightly. It had been a pleasant change to see someone besides himself thrown for a loop. Very pleasant indeed. He glanced at where Westphalen had been standing, raised his eyes toward where she had stalked off so full of righteous wrath, then smiled again, and went on about his explorations.
* * *
The darkness at almost five thousand feet down is nearly total, broken only sporadically by the natural luminescence of the fish and invertebrates passing by. But there are other sources of light, even down that far, scattered here and there in the great depths.
Gedrick Power Station was one of these: a huge facility, spread for miles along the ocean floor over the crust of lava and sand and manganese nodules. At the core of the whole installation stood its central heat exchanger complex, set over the station's main geothermal source, a huge crack in the ocean floor through which, originally, gases and superheated water from the volcanic flow underneath it had vented freely into the open sea.
That energy was free and unlimited. Since there was no point in wasting it, the huge gas-venting crack, buried between two half-mile-long lips of old pillow lava, had been blasted more or less level, its edges sealed with nustone and the remaining main opening capped. Then the drive and exchanger column had been built, a fairly standard turbine arrangement first driven by the pressure of the upward-jetting gases, then extracting heat from the gases after their pressure was exhausted. Other cracks, smaller, had their own vent towers built and sealed to them, and their gases were channeled to the main exchanger column, since the pressure they generated was usually negligible.
Shortly thereafter had come the storage tanks to hold the gas for processing—when cooled, it yielded sulfur and some hydrocarbons, again too good to waste when nature was giving them away—and then more tanks were added to hold the liquids and gases that remained after the processing, both the valuable byproducts and the removable toxic and semitoxic wastes.
All around the main vent, the smaller vent towers of the power station speared upward into the crushing dark; they studded the web of piping that led to the storage tanks, and the industrial buildings that accessed and serviced them—offices, living quarters for the staff and the maintenance crews and their families. The connecting lacework of conduits was of incredible complexity, sheafs of pipes of all shapes and sizes twining among one another, weaving in every direction. Yellow lights glittered through the deep water, delineating the structures and piping. In an earlier day, the power station might have been mistaken for one of the huge petroleum-processing plants of North America's west coast. Such places were no more, though: this facility was their inheritor, cleaner, safer, tapping a form of energy easier to find and far more inexhaustible. Hundreds of stations like it were scattered across the bottoms of the world's oceans, the unseen foundation of the technological and power needs of the new century.
* * *
Other forces moved in those depths, equally unseen. The darkness sheltered the huge, blunt cudgel shape that moved softly through it, a shape of the previous century, but deadly for all its age. With its reactors shut down and its electrical crawl drive producing only enough turns for a slow, silent approach, the Delta-IV studied its prey.
The layout of Gedrick Power Station was spread out like a map on one of its sensor screens, glittering with different kinds of light: lines showing where the hot and cool gases ran, the paths of power conduits, and the great swell of geothermal heat beneath it all, a dull red like the color behind closed eyes.
The crewman bent over the display had eyes for nothing else at the moment. Marilyn Stark paced her cramped, dark bridge and ignored the display, considering her options—for even as easy an operation as this carried with it the possibility of so many things that might go wrong. Spend a while preparing yourself for every imaginable contingency, have your answers ready for the disaster that might happen... and you would come through it on top regardless. Neglect even one possibility, and disaster threatened. Stark paced, thought, frowned.
Maxwell came to her, quietly, not wanting to break her calm: he had seen that happen, occasionally, and it was not something you brought on willingly, not if you wanted peace for the next few days. "We're approaching the Gedrick Power Station, Captain," he said, and waited for any orders.
She nodded, said nothing: merely glanced at Maxwell, wondering how far into her confidence she might dare to take him. With this crew in particular she never unburdened herself too far: her last crew had been a good indication of how mistaken one might be to trust too completely, to let the others know what you were really thinking. Even with Maxwell, the only loyal one, the only one who had so far proved trustworthy... even to him she could not always tell everything. That little voice in the back of her head warned her against confidences, against letting any other human being know too much of her mind. There was always the chance of betrayal, and it was most painful when it came from someone you had made the mistake of trusting...
A sudden lurching blur of motion to one side alerted her, brought her around. It was Pollack, the aft weapons-control officer—if officer were the word she was looking for: a big, blunt-faced, blundering type, who lumbered around the boat like a drunken bull, literally throwing his weight around in an attempt to dominate the others. A pirate all right, Stark thought regretfully as the man came up to her. But a pirate from the old days. Not of
ficer material by half. One of the disadvantages of going... independent... as she had done, was that the available personnel tended to be of much lower quality than she would otherwise have ever tolerated. But it was an occupational hazard of this situation, and one you allowed for. There was, after all, a job to be done, and nothing could be allowed to interfere with that...
Pollack came up now and stood close to her, too close: Stark's nose wrinkled. "I don't get it," Pollack said. "Why do you have us attacking this power station?"
"It's strategic," Stark said rather wearily. If he didn't get the point already, there was hardly any point in explaining it to him again.
"To what? We've got all the fuel we can carry! They haven't got anything worth taking! We should be—"
His head whipped back and around as Stark struck him across the face. He yelped. As if you get a vote, you toad, Stark thought with satisfaction as Pollack reeled back from the blow, then staggered forward again, clutching his face, his eyes still tearing with the pain of the focused strike. Rage was twisting that face now, as he towered over her, but Stark wasn't even slightly concerned about that—she knew quite well that if she had to, she could break him in two. She stared coldly at him.
"Don't ever question my orders," Stark said, low, and let it sink in a moment. "As long as seaQuest is out there, you people will never have the respect you need to be dealt with by the world community. I'll destroy her—but on my own terms."
Pollack looked with utter hatred at her. Stark held his eyes, held them until Pollack couldn't bear it anymore and broke the gaze. He turned and lurched away again, not even cursing under his breath, and sat down hard in his chair again, glaring at his console screen.