Shadow Zone (3 page)

“Tell me you’re making some kind of sick joke.”

“No joke.”

“Dammit, we shouldn’t even be here. This expedition should have been finished a week ago.”

“You volunteered to stay on. You believed in what we were doing here. We all believed.”

He managed a rueful smile. “Sorry, Hannah. I guess I’m believing a whole lot less right now.”

She glanced around the small compartment, which was illuminated only by the glow of the panels in front of them. Beyond the instrument panels were two forward-facing window ports.

And beyond that, Marinth.

Josh shook his head. “This is my fault. I hit that wall like a bulldozer. I tried to spin away before it came down on us, but I wasn’t fast enough.”

“It wasn’t your fault. There isn’t a soul on earth who’s better at piloting this thing than you are.”

“Except you.”

“I designed it, but that doesn’t mean my reflexes are better than yours.” Hannah flipped a switch that toggled between the minisub’s observation cameras. Three of the six cameras were operational, offering murky views of the right, front, and rear of the sub.

Josh squinted at the carved features that surrounded them. “How far away did the collision carry us?”

“Half a mile, maybe more.”

“The rescue team may have a tough time finding us. If our GPS pulse cut out when the wall first came down . . .”

“I know, Josh. I guess we need to stay positive.” It was all very well to say that, she thought ruefully.

She studied the monitors. The rockslide had kicked up so much silt that visibility was still at only a few yards. She didn’t want to say the words, but she knew that their oxygen would run out long before full visibility was restored.

She had to think of something. Fast.

The diagnostic screen blinked red wherever there was damage on the sub. It scared her to see that warning lights were flashing all over the vessel’s superstructure. Damn.

She pointed to the power indicator. “We’re losing juice.”

“Great. Fuel-cell rupture?”

She nodded and bit her lip. “Those cells are made up of a liquid hydrogen-carbon compound . . . Heavier than water.”

“Yeah? So?”

She leaned forward and pulled a lever that would activate the left retractable arm. The servo motors whined, and the arm lurched from its place beneath the wing.

She slipped her left hand into the controller glove and flexed her fingers. Outside, the mechanical hand vaguely mimicked her motions, as if crippled by arthritis.

“You’re not going to do much with
that,
” Josh said.

“It’s okay. This isn’t exactly a delicate operation.”

“What kind of operation is it?”

Hannah drew back her arm. “I’m sure they sent
Conner Two
down here as soon as they lost touch with us. It can’t be that far away.”

He shook his head. “It could still be a mile. And in this muck, it might as well be a hundred.”

“We need to send up a flare.”

“How are we going to do that?”

Hannah raised her arm, and the mechanical appendage outside struck a stone wall. She made a clawlike motion and dragged the mechanical hand back toward the rear of the pod, where the ruptured fuel cells rested.

“See any sparks?” Hannah said.

“Sparks? Down here? Why would there be—?”

He was interrupted by the blinding, white-hot flash of light, accompanied by a low rumble.

Josh threw himself back in his seat. “Holy shit! What did you do?”

“I ignited the fuel-cell compound.”

“Are you trying to blow us up?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

Sparks flew from the mechanical arm, and yet another flash lit up the ocean floor.

Josh was almost hyperventilating.

Hannah scraped the mechanical hand against the rock wall a few more times. Although sparks flew, there were no more ignitions. “I guess that’s it.” She pulled her hand from the controller glove.

“Dammit, you could have killed us!” Josh said.

“It was a distinct possibility.”

“Then why the hell did you do it?”

“I had a pretty good idea that the compound was diluted enough not to blow apart the entire sub.” She looked out the forward port. “We don’t have time to wait and hope they stumble upon us.”

“Even so, it would be a miracle if they—” He stopped. “Sorry. I know it’s no good being negative. Is there anything else we can do?”

Hannah shook her head. “We wait. We conserve air, we keep movements to a minimum.” She added quietly, “And we try not to stare too hard at the oxygen gauge.”

“It’s been a long time,” Josh said. “They should have been here by now, shouldn’t they?”

“It’s only been fifteen minutes.” It had seemed longer to Hannah too. She had hoped that the rescue ship would have come long before this. “I think we’re both a little on edge. They may be having trouble finding us in all this silt and—”

“Look!”

Another shaft of light shined through the port windows, but this was no explosion.

Hannah leaned forward. “It’s
Conner Two
!”

The minisub descended from above and came to rest less than ten feet in front of them. Matthew Jefferson’s dark, chiseled face appeared in the craft’s forward-right port. He smiled when he saw Hannah. He looked down for a moment, then raised a small whiteboard on which he had scribbled “R U OK?”

Hannah grabbed the whiteboard from underneath the console in front of her. She wrote her response and showed it to him: “BOTH FINE. O2<20 MINS!”

Matthew nodded and backed away from the viewing port. After a few moments,
Conner Two
’s two mechanical arms extended before it. The hands gripped the wall pinning them, then slowly raised it and pushed it away. The mechanical hands, with a dexterity that could only be Matthew’s work, then attached a steel tether cable to
Conner One
.
Conner Two
slowly rose, once again kicking up the silt and totally obliterating Hannah and Josh’s view. Their craft lurched, and they felt themselves being pulled from the ocean floor.

“Thank God,” Josh said fervently.

After a few minutes, they completely cleared the silt and could once again see the intense blue and green lights that accented the underside of
Conner Two
’s pod and wings.

“How’s the oxygen?” Hannah asked.

“Good. Still over ten minutes left.” Josh shook his head. “I still don’t know how in the hell they found us. Even if they were right on top of us when you triggered those fuel-cell blasts, it must have taken them a while to get here. Do you know how lucky we are?”

“I know, Josh. I know.”

After a few minutes, Hannah peered through her port. “You know, I don’t think it was just luck that they knew where to find us.”

Josh smiled. “Are we talking about destiny, Hannah? That’s not at all like you.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Hannah pointed outside. “Look.”

Josh leaned forward to look out his port. “What are—”

Then he saw them. Two sleek dolphins circled the two minisubs, playfully tapping the windows with their snouts.

Hannah smiled and tapped the window with her fingers. “Hello, Pete,” she whispered. “Hello, Susie. Nice to see you . . .”

Thirty minutes later, Hannah and Josh stood with several members of her team on the top deck of the research vessel
Copernicus,
gazing at a twin-masted schooner floating fifty yards away. “When did
Fair Winds
get here?” Hannah asked.

Captain Danbury, a red-haired bear of a man, shrugged. “A couple of hours ago, right after you went down. Melis radioed and said she’d join us for dinner.”

Hannah nodded. “Good thing she brought Pete and Susie with her. I have a feeling we’d still be down there if she hadn’t.”

“You got that right,” Matthew said in his thick Australian accent. “But give credit where it’s due. I was the one who zoomed to save you from the murky deep. Not a bad bit of rescuing, eh, doll?”

She smiled. Matthew was a tall, good-looking black man whose easy charm made many forget that he was one of the best minisub pilots in the business. “I’ll let you get away with calling me ‘doll’ only because you just saved my neck.”

“I know how to pick my moments.” He smiled at the dolphins chirping and turning back flips in the waves between the two boats. “As soon as we hit the water, Pete and Susie bullied and cajoled us until we headed in the direction they wanted us to go. I thought they were way off base, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Kyle Daley, her hydraulics specialist, pulled off his
SEE ROCK CITY
baseball cap and scratched his curly brown hair. “Okay, am I the only one here who doesn’t believe that dolphins are the sea world’s Einsteins? They’re
fish,
people.”

“Mammals,” she corrected.

“Whatever.” He made a face. “I’m happy you’re okay, Hannah, but it’s just as likely that they were leading Matthew to a school of yummy salmon they had their eyes on.”

Hannah shook her head. “You can be a skeptic about a lot of things, but not about Pete and Susie. Not after the things we’ve seen them do in the past few weeks.”

“Right. And next you’ll have them doing your taxes.” Kyle motioned toward the banged-up hull of
Conner One.
“It’s amazing you guys were able to walk away from that thing. Looks like a scene from one of those old driver’s-education films. You know, the ones where you see a mangled car all covered with the blood of a couple of careless teenagers?”

Hannah crouched beneath the left wing. “Thanks for the mental image, Kyle. But I see what you mean. It doesn’t look like something a person could survive.”

Hannah tuned out Kyle as he prattled on in the clichéd deep baritone of a driver’s-ed instructional-film narrator. She usually welcomed the tension-breaking humor he brought to their long weeks at sea. Now, however, she couldn’t focus on anything but the wounded
Conner One
. Josh knelt beside her, examining the twisted plates on the wing’s underside. “Nothing a month back in the machine shop can’t fix.”

“Six weeks. Everything was going so well, too.”

“It’s still going well. If we had been in any other minisub ever built, we’d be dead now. This only proves what an incredible design you’ve given them.”

“I have a feeling Ebersole isn’t going to look at it that way.”

“You’re damn right I’m not,” Sean Ebersole’s raspy voice said from behind them. He gave Kyle a cold glance that stopped his narrative in the middle of the sentence. “You think this is a joke?”

Hannah and Josh stood and turned to face Ebersole, the chief operating officer of AquaCorp. His short, stocky frame was practically bristling. Even in the open air he smelled vaguely of McClelland Dark Star pipe tobacco. He always carried the scent with him even though she almost never saw him puffing on his pipe.

Hannah patted the minisub’s damaged plates. “Yeah, it’s a howler of a joke, Ebersole. You should have seen us laughing down there on the ocean floor. We’re both fine, by the way.”

Ebersole nodded toward
Conner One.
“More than I can say for your vessel.”

Josh stepped forward. “It was my fault. I thought I’d left enough clearance, but I misjudged the distance. I still think this is the best craft I’ve ever piloted.”

“Do you? Hannah, let’s talk inside.”

“Now? I need to run diagnostics and—”

“Your people can take care of it. Let’s go.”

Josh and Matthew moved to follow him, but Ebersole turned and raised his hand. “Just Hannah.”

She turned toward them. “It’s okay, guys. Finish up here.” She followed Ebersole, who was already halfway across the deck. The crew was looking at her as if she had been sent to the principal’s office, and she knew it was taking every ounce of Kyle’s self-control to hold back a taunting “Uh-oh . . .”

They walked downstairs and made their way through the long, narrow corridor to the conference room, which was papered over with schematics for the submersibles.
Conner One
and
Conner Two
were virtually identical, but Hannah had designed subtle variations so as to evaluate the best total design for the final product. Three-foot models of the two vessels were suspended over the long table by almost-invisible strands of wire.

Ebersole closed the door behind him. “I’m shutting the mission down, Hannah.”

She tensed. “Don’t do this.”

“I’m the only reason you’re still here. Corporate wanted it over weeks ago.”

“I know that. But you need to buy us some more time.”

“Every day we’re out here is costing the company a fortune. The rental of this boat, payroll for the crew . . .”

“AquaCorp is all over the Discovery Channel TV special, not to mention a logo placement in every newspaper ad and bus-stop poster. Plus the
National Geographic
spread. The exposure will be huge.”

“It will be. But the Discovery Channel television people are gone, and the National Geographic team has finished. And you’ve completed your trials on the XP38 vessels.”

“
Conner One
and
Conner Two,
” she corrected.

“If you prefer. The point is, AquaCorp has gotten everything out of this mission that it’s going to get. Your creations have performed magnificently, and everyone in the industry knows it. Even more people will know it when the magazine pieces and television profiles hit. We already have a three-year wait list on orders.”

“So doesn’t that entitle me to two more weeks?”

“The company has nothing to gain by keeping us out here and everything to lose. Everyone will know that one of the best underwater pilots in the business cracked up in your sub. That won’t give our potential customers a comforting feeling.”

“It’s still a story without an ending.”

“You mean Marinth.”

“Yes.” Hannah crossed to the far wall, where dozens of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch color printouts had been pieced together to give a complete mosaic of what remained of the ancient city. “We’ve learned so much about the people who lived here. How they ate, worshipped, married, raised their children, governed themselves . . .”