Ultra Deep (6 page)

Taylor nodded his approval. “Mr. Covey, make your depth seventy-five feet. I want a heading of two-seven-five and tell engineering we want top turns.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Covey’s tone carried a new excitement.

Garrison stood upright. “At least we’ll shake off a little of the boredom, Skipper.”

The constant regimen of training, meant to keep them alert and on edge, often dulled the edges.

“We may at that, Neil.”

*

0608 HOURS LOCAL, 33° 11' NORTH, 118° 27' WEST

Each dome was two hundred feet in diameter and one hundred feet high, and there were three domes. They rested on steel piers driven deeply into the seabed and were connected by twelve-foot-long cylindrical tunnels. Each of the end domes had an airlock and a docking facility for the transportation submersibles.

From thirty yards away, Kim Otsuka thought that they looked like spider plants. That was because the top, central hub of each dome was composed of an olive-colored plastic embedded with carbon fiber. The superstrong carbon fiber material was also used in the curved beams that radiated from the tops down to the bases of the domes. There were four horizontal rows of thinner structural beams, and the spaces between the structural members was filled with a translucent plastic that had also been strengthened with carbon.

The domes appeared fragile, but she knew better. The construction and materials used were based on those tested for over two years on Harbor One.

Kaylene Thomas called the complex Disneyland West, but the official name was Ocean Deep. It was not actually very deep, however. Located thirty miles west of San Diego and about thirty-five miles southwest of Los Angeles, the complex was two hundred feet below the surface, its foundation embedded in the Patton Escarpment. Dane Brande was not going to put the tourists at extreme risk.

Eventually, one dome would house marine-theme rides aimed at a younger audience, one would contain museums and galleries, and one would focus on marine life. Marine Visions would own the complex, the transportation system, and the operating systems, but subcontractors would operate the amusement rides, galleries, and fast-food outlets. At the moment, the domes were vacant except for construction materials and a hodgepodge of tools spread over the upper deck.

The vacancy was obvious. The interior lighting made the domes stand out prominently against the darkness of the sea as the
Voyager
made its approach. The fact that the lights were on was a minor satisfaction for Kim Otsuka, for the lighting was one system controlled by the Ocean Deep computers, and Otsuka was the Director of Computer Systems for MVU. She designed the hardware and software systems, often in conjunction with other engineers and scientists.

Otsuka was a Japanese national. She had grown up in Tokyo and had been schooled there. For her doctoral program, she had selected Stanford University. For her career, she had thought she might work for a Hewlett-Packard or a Sony or a Panasonic. That goal lasted until the day after her graduation from Stanford, when Dane Brande called her upon someone’s recommendation. She had never thought she would spend so much of her life on, and in, the ocean. Eight years had elapsed now, gone with such speed she had barely noticed them.

She could not now imagine working in an environment that required business suits or laboratory smocks. Her working wardrobe consisted of jeans and blouses, shorts and halter tops, and occasionally a swim suit or scuba gear. Her short blue-black hair was frequently damp. She was five-two, lithe, and lively, and her brown eyes had learned to laugh a lot. The casual atmosphere surrounding Marine Visions had brought out a humorous aspect in her personality that she had suppressed for the first twenty-four years of her life. She loved what she was doing, and she loved Dane Brande for letting her do it without interference.

The domes became larger and more wavery in the triplethick porthole beside Otsuka’s seat as the
Voyager
closed on its destination. Around her, the others made morning talk and sipped from insulated mugs of coffee. Svetlana Polodka, the Russian fiber-optics engineer, was flirting with Bob Mayberry, who was director of electronic technology, and who was married, anyway, and had three kids. Ingrid Roskens, chief structural engineer, was bent over blueprints spread out on the deck, pointing out her concerns to one of the technicians.

The
Voyager
was the first of four planned transport submersibles. Based on the configuration of the submersible
Ben
Franklin
, she was seventy feet long, and almost all of her operating systems were below the passenger deck. Water, trim, ballast, and waste tanks took up the most space, followed by four sets of battery banks. Twin electric motors provided the propulsion. In an aft compartment were the liquid oxygen tanks and the electronics. Forward, on the other side of a bulkhead, was the control cabin and the forward hatch, located on top of the hull in a small sail. The main cabin could seat thirty-two people, and each set of two seats had its own porthole, the better to view the trip through southern California seas. Since she was designed for transportation purposes at relatively shallow depths of less than 2,000 feet, the
Voyager
had been given a much thinner hull than other submersibles, as well as a sleeker shape in order to increase her speed.

The interior had not yet been finished to the specifications expected by the ticket-paying public. Electrical and hydraulic conduits were exposed along the sides and ceiling. The floor was steel. The seats were covered in canvas. Everything was finished in gray-speckled paint. The utilitarian decor did not bother the work crews who were transported daily to Ocean Deep, however. They had other things on their minds.

The
Voyager’s
first trip this morning was reserved for the chief supervisors of the project, who would make their weekly combined inspection. The submersible left Commerce Basin at 5 A.M., an ungodly hour, but one selected by the group for its lack of interference in the rest of their day. The hour did not bother Kim Otsuka, for she was an early riser, a believer in dawn.

The first leg of the trip, out of San Diego Bay, was accomplished on the surface and was generally rough. Once into open sea, however, the
Voyager
dove to a hundred feet, and most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersible could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip took about an hour.

Outside her porthole, Otsuka saw the domes rise to meet her, then slip overhead as the submersible dove below them. The base of the first dome was sixty feet above the seabed, allowing ample room for the submersible to wend its way to the interlock on the floor of the dome.

A pair of steel legs drifted past. She felt herself pushed forward in her seat as the propellers went into reverse, slowing the forward momentum. Pumps moaned as water ballast was forced from tanks below the deck. The
Voyager
rose slowly toward the underside of the dome.

Clank!

The forward hatch mated with the lock.

Hiss of air as water was forced from the lock.

People rose from their chairs, gathering notebooks, briefcases, palm-sized computers. They began to file forward toward the control compartment and the ladder that would take them up to work.

Kim Otsuka had never thought, either, that she would commute to work by submarine.

*

0847 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 8' NORTH, 92° 32' WEST

Brande and Okey Dokey sat in the two controllers seats located side by side in the manned submersible
DepthFinder
II
. Her sister submersible,
DepthFinder
, was operated from the
Orion
in the Pacific.

In the single seat behind them, at a right angle to the way they faced, Brandie Anderson took care of the communications and systems monitoring chores. This was her fifth dive in
DepthFinder
. This was the way student interns became lifelong oceanographers.

The three of them were in relatively cramped quarters. The main pressure hull had an interior diameter of eight feet. It was one big ball made of titanium alloy, the only way to design a life-supporting environment that would withstand the pressures at 20,000 feet of depth.

Directly overhead was the ten-inch-thick circular hatchway. In front of them were three five-inch-diameter portholes, one forward, and one each angled to port and starboard. Those were the only direct visual accesses to the outside world. Below the portholes were three video screens.

Encasing the three crew members, and further depriving them of space, were dozens of flat panels in square, hexagonal, and triangular shapes, to fit into the inside curvature of the pressure hull. The panels contained gauges, digital readouts, cathode ray tubes, switches, rheostats, and circuit breakers. They monitored and controlled such systems as the central processing computer, power routing, graphic recorders, the tracking transponder transceiver, liquid coolant, alarms, various sonar components, the navigation depth plotter, the doppler transceiver, the main propulsion, the manipulator control electronics, and the altitude/depth transceiver, among others.

Taking a dive in the ocean was not as simple as it sometimes seemed to outsiders.

In front of Brande was a control panel with two joysticks protruding from it. He was piloting the
DepthFinder
, using the joysticks to control propulsion and velocity in six different directions. He had managed to bring them to a depth of 5,000 feet in slightly over an hour, not that he had much control over it. Achieving depth was a consequence of the amount of weight added to the exterior hull. Unlike submarines, deep submersibles did not change buoyancy through the use of air and water ballast tanks, although
DepthFinder
II
could pump water in and out of small ballast tanks to stabilize her depth. Taking a dive was not as quickly accomplished as it sometimes seemed that it ought to be.

It was dark inside the hull. Exterior and interior lights were left off during the long descents in order to conserve electrical power. Only red, amber, blue, and green light emitting diodes and digital readouts provided illumination. On the outside, total darkness had been achieved at 1,200 feet. Sunlight did not penetrate beyond that depth.

In front of Dokey was a control panel similar to that of Brande, but the joysticks there were used to control the remotely-operated vehicles which could be attached to the
DepthFinder
on 250-foot cables.

The air was stale, a consequence of the lithium hydroxide blower which recirculated the air to remove carbon dioxide. Pure oxygen providing life-support was slowly bled into the sphere from tanks located outside the pressure hull.

“I think you’re taking up too much room, Dane,” Brandie Anderson said.“Iʼd like to stretch my legs out, but you’re in the way.”

Once inside the sphere, no one stretched anything. There was no room to stand up.

“You can walk next time,” Brande told her.

“It’s okay,” Dokey told her. “I’ll walk with you. We can hold hands and things.”

“Keep your things to yourself, Okey,” Anderson said.

“It’s your things I was thinking about. Hup! Here we go, Dane.”

Dokey had the side-looking sonar powered up and displaying an image on the port video screen, though the sound was turned down. Now, he increased the volume, and dozens of tiny pings could be heard on the speaker. The screen showed the sonar returns as they bounced off a few dozen metallic objects. The cliff was not outlined since they were well below its top.

Nothing could be seen through the portholes. Pure blackness.

Brande leaned forward and cut in the magnetometer, which measured anomalies in the earth’s electromagnetic field. It, too, displayed several dozen targets.

“All right, Okey. Let’s power up.”

Brande hit a pump switch and pumped off enough water ballast to slow, then stop, the descent.

Dokey used a rheostat to increase the interior lighting a trifle, then turned on the big halogen exterior lights. There were four of them, but six million candlepower only cut into the darkness ahead of them by thirty feet.

There was nothing out there.

Brande checked the gyro-compass and saw that their heading was 166 degrees.

“We want about fifty degrees, don’t we, Okey?”

“If we’re where we think we are, that’s what we want, Chief.”

Twisting the knob on top of the right joystick counterclockwise, Brande activated the bow thruster, and the sub revolved to the left.

Nothing appeared in the porthole, and Dokey activated the exterior video camera, putting the image on the center screen. Nice clear picture of black.

Brande eased in some forward speed with the left joystick and watched the screen. Slowly, out of the blackness, came nodules of rock, veined with cracks, appearing blue-white under the halogen lights.

“Cliff face,” Dokey said.

Brande hit reverse for a second, then centered the stick. The
DepthFinder
stabilized. There was a current, but a mild one. The sub drifted southward minutely.