Samantha Smart (31 page)

“Did you, um–did you see my dad?” Samantha asked in a hopeful tone. Suki had met her father on one occasion when he had visited New York a couple of years ago.

“Yeah–he said to say ‘Hi’ to you, and that he misses you. He said he’d call soon.”

Samantha nodded. That was her father’s way; maybe he would actually call. “Thanks, Suki.” She smiled slightly.

Brianna was, of course, covered from head to toe in new clothes and jewelry, sporting the latest smart phone and a faux-snake-skin handbag that was simply to-die-for. She seemed to be in a wonderful mood, and insisted she be allowed to photograph the team with her new toy. It was a fairly nice phone-camera, and so even allowed Brianna to be in the picture thanks to its automatic timer function. It was funny how it came out, and they all had a good laugh looking at Marvin’s mischievous devil-horn-thumbs that he had ungraciously (and unbeknownst to her), embellished Suki’s head with, and the caught-in-action Polly who had just squirmed free of Samantha’s grip. They decided to keep it, and Suki downloaded it onto all the computers as background wallpaper, adding some neat 3-D text in a photo-editing program that said “Alpha Team,” like something from a comic book or cartoon that made them look like super-heroes.

Marvin had had the hardest time getting away on this, Christmas morning. He came from a very large, very Catholic family, and so after going to church and then back home to prepare for a day of extreme feasting, he had slipped out his bedroom window after changing his clothes. He had evidently been the most active team member, however, and killed some time by relating to the girls how he had helped The Professor move their base of operations to this wondrous dome.

They feasted on apples and granola bars that Suki had had the aforethought to stock the place with, and she had even remembered dog food and a water bowl in the event that Polly would be joining them. The hours ticked by, everything around them and even they themselves occasionally flickering as the time machine projected itself and them backward in time, recording over, as it were, their previous existence in that spot in space and time. At some point they all grew tired and fell asleep on mats that Marvin and The Professor had brought along with the equipment.

After a day and a half had passed, the desk unit communicator crackled.

“Marvin?” The Professor’s voice came through.

“Right here,” the Brooklyn Bandit answered after scrambling to his feet to answer the thing. “Any time now... ”

“Okay. Hang on a minute, Professor,” Marvin concentrated, remembering the sequence of obsidian placement, hoping he wouldn’t screw up and transport their leader into the Spanish Civil War or something. Alpha Team all looked at each other knowingly, as the machine was set to bring The Professor back to a minute after he had left, effectively rendering their last thirty-five hours non-existent, an alternate timeline with a dead end. Marvin sighed and finished the operation, still a bit apprehensive.

There was no need to worry. In a crackle of blue energy, The Professor appeared, holding a very heavy-looking piece of technology. No one was aware that he’d been gone for more than a minute.

“Help me out here, would you, mate?” Smythe’s voice was strained, though he was smiling. Marvin ran over and helped The Professor with his burden. Together they managed to place the thing on a large, flat table. It was about five feet long and perhaps two feet wide, made of shiny yellow metal with black rubber seals all over it. It was outfitted with wires as well, which were all covered with black, waterproof-looking insulation, and had two cameras like eyes that stuck out from its main body on firm steel stems, giving it the overall appearance of a giant metal bug or frog. At its rear end were four sturdy-looking propellers, mounted independently so as to enable their individual movement for turning, diving and such.

“The mighty UD476,” The Professor grinned, obviously eager to educate them as to the machine’s capabilities. “Compliments of Dr. Thor Stevenson, marine archeologist. Functional to a depth of ten thousand meters–er–theoretically, anyway. Stereoscopic camera imaging with ten watt light amplification. Shielded, multi-layered stereo microphone and a transmitter I modified myself using the wrist-communicator technology.” He beamed, looking proud of himself. “That’s what took me so long.”

Everyone stared at him, a bit confused. Finally, Brianna spoke.

“You were only gone for a minute, Professor.” Smythe stared at her for a moment.

“Puttering Paradoxes!” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry. I forgot–you all must have no memory of the last day or two. My mistake.” Alpha Team looked at each other and shrugged.

“Anyway,” Smythe continued, “we should be able to transport this unit to the proper coordinates, underwater, and have it transmit sound and images back to here–er, now. It also has a temperature sensor and something of a primitive capability for water analysis–er–salt and mineral density and those sort of things.”

“Well,” Samantha said after assessing the faces around her, “let’s get crackin’.”

*

The images on the computer screen were faint at first, but The Professor cranked up the power on the light-amplification module to “high,” and a crisp, deep-green-tinted world began to materialize before their eyes. The probe was clearly zipping through some beautiful undersea canyon, the bottom of which could only be guessed at; the Mariana Trench was the deepest, most remote part of the Pacific Ocean’s floor. The temperature sensors were reading very cold, only thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees above freezing.

As it progressed through the rift, however, the graphed bars on the computer screen began to rise. There was also a noticeable increase in the sulfur content of the water, which The Professor had predicted.

“The Slanes’ base must be located close to an underwater volcano,” he observed. “Sulfur is leaking out of some fissures somewhere–cracks in the volcano’s cone. The water will become much warmer as well. We’ll likely see bubbles of sulfurous smoke escaping from a steep slope around here somewhere.”

As usual, Smythe was correct. As he guided the probe from its remote control unit, it rounded a bend in the chasm and encountered a massive, steep-sloped undersea mountain, belching steady streams of smoky bubbles from several cracks in its sides.

“Cool.” Suki stared, mesmerized.

“Bear left,” Marvin chimed in; he had been put in charge of watching the GPS map on the other computer screen which showed the probe’s proximity to the proper coordinates.

The Professor edged the probe around, appearing a bit nervous as it passed through one of the columns of smoke bubbles.

“Hot stuff, volcanic gas,” he grinned uneasily. “Not too hot, I hope.”

The probe seemed to withstand the temperature change with little effort. The bar graphs on the screen went haywire, at one point reaching some two hundred fifty degrees, but the little drone held, emerging on the gas plume’s opposite side into a sea of other, smaller ones. The Professor tried his best to maneuver the thing in-between the pillars of undersea fire, taking navigational cues from Marvin as necessary.

“You’re almost there, Professor,” Marvin said excitedly. “Just edge upward and a little bit to the, uh, west.”

The next few moments were spectacular. The probe skimmed up the slope of the volcano and through another, almost sheet-like wall of escaping gas, rounded a ridge and–there it was.

“Amazing,” The Professor whispered.

There, built five thousand meters below sea level, into the side of an active underwater volcano, was the Slanes’ base of operations. It was pearly white and donut-shaped, perhaps two hundred feet in diameter, though half of it was enveloped by the volcano’s rocky slope. It had several long, oval-shaped windows in its bulging upper section, and its lower half was smaller and more of a flat-walled cylinder, with what looked like bay doors in two or three places. The temperature of the surrounding water read at eighty-nine degrees, and dozens of sharks were in evidence, swimming around the place as if it were some sort of nest to them. Alpha Team looked at each other with fear in their eyes–this was where they would have to go to stop the Slanes.

“All right,” The Professor said. “I’m going to plant the markers.”

“What? What does that mean?” Samantha questioned, getting a little antsy.

“The markers,” Marvin explained, letting The Professor concentrate on piloting the probe. “We need to place three markers on the shell of the base so we can triangulate a position to transport to.”

“It’s got to be a little more precise than the Mexican desert, you know,” Smythe volunteered, inching the probe next to a window and releasing a magnetic marker that stuck to the base’s outer surface. “You wouldn’t want to wind up outside here, would you?” He steered the probe a ways around the donut-shaped upper half of the building and released another marker, at the same depth as the last. “The water’s warm enough here, I suppose–you’d be very comfortable, in fact, if you had some scuba gear, if it wasn’t for the immense pressure.”

“Pressure?” Brianna asked innocently.

“Why, yes, my dear,” Smythe chuckled. “Some fifteen thousand pounds per square inch or so. There’s an awful lot of water above this place, enough to crush any of your bones to jelly, or... ” he looked up with a somewhat devious smile, “perhaps more of a tapioca pudding. Mmm, quite likely.” He nodded, returning to his piloting.

Two sharks had, unfortunately, taken an interest in their probe and were occasionally smashing their heads into it, causing the images to shake violently and short out for split-seconds here and there. The Professor tried to dodge the animals, swerving, looping and changing course, and eventually managed to get them into a fight with one another and slip the probe away, back on track to place the last magnetic marker. This was executed with relative ease.

“Marvin, test the markers,” Smythe barked orders to the most mediocre rapper in Brooklyn, who shot him something of a sour, ‘yo, don’t order me around’ look, but did as his mentor had asked. On his computer screen, which showed the GPS imaging, he could see the three points that represented the markers. He tapped a few keys and coordinates appeared onscreen above each point. He then moved his mouse and clicked an onscreen button that triangulated them, that is, by doing some fancy math at speeds that only a computer can, gave Marvin the exact point in the center between the three dots, along with its coordinates. This point stood for, hopefully, a spot inside the base on a nice floor somewhere that they could transport Alpha Team to.

“Got it,” said Marvin, hitting the print button. The printer spit out a sheet of paper with all the necessary information, and Marvin leaned back in his chair and sighed. The Professor piloted the probe around again, collecting all the markers it had just placed so as not to leave any evidence that someone had been poking around the base. He then guided the remote-controlled drone away from the structure, down, deeper into the almost bottomless trench, until he found something of a cave that he could park it in. He edged the little machine in far enough so that it was not likely to be discovered, but not so far that it would be impossible to get out. It was not within their power to transport it back the way it had come–just like the hang-glider and speedboat in the Yucatan, there had been no way to trace its entrance point with the special Mayan chalk, still the only method they knew of to return things, or people, to their point of origin. They would have to retrieve it with a boat, later.

“Well,” Samantha said as Professor Smythe turned off the probe’s ‘eyes’ and ‘ears,’ “I guess we’ve got some planning to do.”

*

Alpha team stood, together, staring over the odd printouts before them. They were patterns that represented the strange, ancient controls of the time machine, black ovals standing for the pieces of obsidian glass that had to be arranged exactly for the machine to function properly. Marvin paid special attention, as he was to be in charge of programming the Slanes’ version of the machine for self-destruction.

“This must
be done in the proper sequence,” Professor Smythe was insisting. “According to my calculations, these patterns, arranged in this exact order, should set up a
time-hole
effect, sucking the entire apparatus into its own dead-end timeline where no one should be able to access it again, even from our machine.” He looked up with a deadly serious expression on his face. “Needless to say, you should all keep well clear of their machine after the reaction has begun, if you don’t want to be sucked into limbo with it.”

Samantha swallowed hard and the team members all looked at each other and nodded, preparing themselves mentally for the tasks ahead.

“Brianna and Suki,” Smythe continued his instructions, “You two are in charge of accessing the base’s central computer and transmitting its vital information back to me through these modified wrist-communicators.” He handed them the devices and explained how to use them. “These firewire attachments should hook into compatible ports on their computer. Find the ports, attach the communicators and hit the talk buttons. I’ve installed certain software in them that should automatically access their information and start transmitting it to my computer here, with the most recent files being transmitted first. If the Slanes are up to any new mischief, hopefully we can derail their plans. Understood?”

The girls nodded.

“Samantha,” The Professor smiled a grim smile. “I’m afraid that leaves you with the toughest job. I’m counting on your absolute level-headedness and general bravery for this, Alpha Prime. I’m putting you in charge of security.”

Samantha did her best to look calm and soldierly, though she became inwardly uneasy when The Professor opened up the mysterious, tall metal cabinet that had occupied a spot near the perimeter of their headquarters and retrieved what looked to be a fearsome weapon of some sort.

“This, Samantha, is a NEPTUNE-60 explosive-tipped spear-gun. It has twenty spears, each tipped with an explosive head that will make mincemeat out of any creature smaller than a large orca–er, killer whale, that is. The spears travel almost as fast through water as they do through air, though hopefully you won’t have to worry about that.” He showed her how to hold the thing, which was extremely heavy, though a shoulder strap took most of the weight off her arms. “There’s a safety switch here,” Smythe indicated a slider on the weapon’s side. “Red means ‘safety on;’ it won’t fire like this.” He slid the switch. “Green means ‘safety off’–this will allow you to pull the trigger.” The trigger was fairly self-evident, and she nodded that she understood the rest of the process, though he helped her with aiming as well.