Unruh was always less-than-impressed with optimistic people who didn’t see the world in the same realities that were forced upon him.
“For lack of a chair,” Delecourt said, “let me make some suggestions. We need to know more about AquaGeo and Deride, and whether or not they’re involved. Carl, could CIA undertake that?”
Unruh nodded.
“And Mr. Porter, how about Commerce looking into Deride’s business dealings, here and internationally?”
“Certainly, Admiral.”
“State might make inquiries into his activities in Australia and determine what his relationship to the government there is. And some preparation might be initiated in the way of forming a complaint to the United Nations.”
Gilliland said, “I’ll do that.”
“Miss Anstett, I would recommend that both the Vice President and the President be briefed on this. The President may want to set up a task force.”
“All right, Admiral.”
“I’ll inform the Joint Chiefs and set up a liaison with Brande.”
That would make Brande ecstatic, Unruh thought. Brande didn’t care for some Navy protocols, such as the chain of command.
“What about Justice, Admiral?” Pamela Stroh asked.
“If it were me, I’d get about ten lawyers busy on a brief for the World Court.”
Which was just about the way Unruh thought this thing would unravel.
Bureaucrats and lawyers.
Brande had opted, without consulting Washington, to skip sites four, five, and six, and go right for the location of the seventh detonation, a position Hampstead had verified through the Earthquake Information Center.
He, Dokey, and Mayberry were manning the submersible, over the objections of the female members of the team. They were also wearing radiation protective gear, environmental suits that had become standard equipment on the Orion after the Russian missile fiasco.
He and Dokey had switched jobs four hours after deployment, to relieve the tedium. Dokey was controlling the sonar vehicle, and Brande was piloting DepthFinder. He kept his hands lightly on the joysticks, properly called the translation hand controller and the rotational hand controller. Directly ahead of the joysticks, beneath the port cathode ray tube (CRT), were the primary piloting instruments, duplicates of the set in front of Dokey.
The compasses, both magnetic and gyro, defined the horizontal direction. The depth readouts kept him oriented vertically, providing distance to surface, altitude above bottom, and the rate of change. The speed was defined in knots, and tachometers monitored the speed of both electric motors.
The view through the portholes might as well have been into the black hole of space. On the center CRT was Sarscan’s video view, into the same black hole even though the floodlights were activated. The port and starboard screens displayed the submersible’s sonar and the ROV’s sonar respectively.
Brande shifted around in his protective suit, which was bulky. He was both cold and uncomfortable, even though none of them were wearing the hoods to the suits. They had yet to run into high areas of radiation.
He felt the sub slither to the left, and he corrected with the rotational stick.
“Current shift,” he said.
“And radiation,” Mayberry added. “It jumped about six percent.”
“Getting close, then,” Dokey said.
Two minutes later, Dokey added, “Son of a bitch! I’ve got a moving target.”
Brande glanced across at the ROV sonar screen. A heavy mass was moving across the seabed. It appeared to be part of the sea floor.
“What’s the distance, Okey?”
“Twelve hundred yards.”
“Bearing?”
“Hold on… two-six-four degrees. It’s making about six knots.”
“Take her down,” Mayberry commanded. “We’re right on the coordinates.”
“Don’t lose that target,” Brande said.
“Not in a million years, Chief.”
Brande eased the control stick forward and the submersible nosed downward.
Altitude above bottom, 450 feet. Depth, 16,286 feet.
Minutes later, Sarscan’s video lens picked up the excavation site. It appeared to be the same as the previous three. Organic rubble was strewn about the floor of the sea to the limits of the video camera. If they took time to investigate, he thought it would be like the previous sites: rubble for nearly half-a-mile. Tiny glints of some mineral reflected the floodlights back at the camera.
“Hoods, gentlemen,” Mayberry said. “We’re getting a healthy dose.”
Brande found his hood at the side of his seat and pulled it over his head. He hated it. The loose folds felt cold on his neck and the visor restricted his vision.
“There’s nothing new here,” Dokey said. “Let’s chase the floor crawler.”
Brande eased into a left turn.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked from the surface.
“Exploring an anomaly,” Brande said. “I’d like radio and acoustic silence, please.”
“Why?” she asked.
“No telling who’s listening.”
Mayberry switched the communications systems to passive, though Brande suspected that, if there were another acoustic system in the area, it would probably be operating on a different frequency. They had not yet heard anything interfering with their own communications.
“Bob, try scanning some of the frequencies.”
“We don’t have an automatic scanner,” Mayberry said.
“Try it manually.”
“God, what a cheap outfit.”
“An acoustic scanner,” Dokey said, “is something you won’t find in your catalogs of electronic toys.”
“We’ll have to build one.”
“In our spare time?” Dokey asked.
“Distance to target?”
“Six-two-four yards, four hundred feet down. Hold this level, Chief; the floor is rising on us. I’m bringing Sarscan up a trifle.”
With only occasional glances at his instruments, Brande kept his attention on the video screen. The other two were doing the same.
“Come right a tad,” Dokey said.
“What’s a tad?”
“Scientific talk for one degree.”
He changed heading by one degree.
The view from the ROV’s video was of a mildly undulating seabed. Fissures marked the surface, and a few giant boulders appeared now and then.
There was also a dual set of tracks, like a farm road across the desert.
“Tracked vehicle,” Dokey said.
“Steel treads, I’d guess,” Brande told him. Each set has about a four-foot span.”
“Big mother, then.”
And it was big, when they slowly drifted up behind it. The massive tracks were raising a cloud of silt behind it, and a bank of floodlights lit the seafloor ahead of it. Above the moving tracks was a huge spherical pressure hull with a variety of appendages — manipulator arms, remote-controlled cameras, drills, and other unexplained objects. There were no marking on it.
“Do we stop and say ‘howdy’?” Dokey asked.
“I don’t think so,” Brande said. “That hummer’s going somewhere, and that’s where we want to go.”
“Do you suppose they go straight home when mother calls them?”
“Let’s hope so. We’ll stay on this course.”
“Come up a few hundred, then. Let’s give these guys some clearance.”
“They probably know we’re here,” Mayberry said. “They wouldn’t dare operate down here without sonar gear.”
“Which means mother already knows about us,” Brande told him.
Brande increased his altitude and his speed, and they cruised on in silence except for the drone of the electric motors. The floor crawler disappeared from the ROV’s camera, sliding off the bottom of the screen.