“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.