“No lie?” Dokey said.
“No lie, Okey. It’s a convenient and nicely portable source of energy for powering the station and recharging the battery packs for submersibles and floor crawlers.”
“I’ll buy that,” Brande said. “I’ve often thought we should develop something similar for our own use.”
Thomas noticed that Mayberry wrote himself a quick note. She could anticipate that, at the next shore-side meeting, he’d have a proposal for a nuclear reactor power plant. She made her own mental note — somehow, she’d have to come up with the money for it.
Thomas saw that Dokey’s face had tightened up, a sure sign that he also saw nuclear power as a challenge.
“At the top of the station is a large winch and cable reel,” Emry continued. “All I saw was a thin cable headed upward, but I’d suspect it leads to a buoy that is probably retracted beneath the surface until they let it rise. It’ll be their communications link.”
“How about communications?” Brande asked. “You listen to the audio tapes?”
“Bucky and Paco helped me out, there. We didn’t find anything on the recording tapes for the UHF or VHF scanners, but we think they’re using a low-end acoustic transceiver for sub-surface communications and possibly telemetry. The channel is, however, scrambled.”
“Why would they encrypt the dialogue between the station and the vehicles?” Thomas asked.
“Maybe they don’t want to reveal company secrets,” Bob Mayberry put in. “Let’s keep in mind that they can probably hear us, however, on the frequencies we use.”
“They would not be able to read our telemetry, however,” Polodka said. “Our transponders digitize the data utilizing our own codes.”
Polodka and Otsuka had worked out the encoding.
“True,” Brande agreed. “It keeps them from getting readouts on altitude and position directly from DepthFinder. They can’t plot exactly where we are.”
“Which may be,” Mayberry said, “the reason they’ve encrypted their transmissions. If we could tap into their telemetry, we could pretty well follow every sub or crawler they have.”
“Back to the submersible,” Emry said, “It is larger than DepthFinder, but doesn’t have her streamlining. It’s a pressure hull with numerous appendages, but no outer hull. There’s a pair of skids on the bottom, and between the skids is a parking sheath for ROVs. In fact, I’m damned certain that the ROV in place is Sneaky Pete. I’ll vote along with Okey on this outfit being AquaGeo.”
“Told you,” Dokey said.
“What else?” Brande asked.
“The floor crawler. She’s a monster with a sixteen-foot diameter pressure hull. Each track is four feet wide, with steel cleats that are about a foot long. The length of the surface contact for each tread is twenty-five feet, and the treads are twenty feet wide, from side to side. This baby is designed to not tip over when she’s lifting a load. There is one big manipulator arm, capable of, I’d judge, ten tons of lift, and a smaller arm for tool deployment. Both the one you photographed enroute and the one at the station are similar and are well-used, if I go by the scratches and dings. They both had drills mounted on the tool arm, and there were additional drilling rods clipped to the side of the hull. I’d guess they could drill a forty-foot hole.”
“Do you have any ideas about the size of the personnel complement, Larry?” Thomas asked.
“Difficult to tell at this point, Kaylene. If it’s just an exploratory venture, they could get by with minimal manpower. That means four people for the station and two each for the crawlers and the submersible. That’s ten. We don’t know if there are more subs or crawlers around.”
“That’s what we’ll try to determine today,” Brande said. “We’ll dive on Site Number Eight, and then circle it in ever-widening circles, and see if we can’t pinpoint some more of their inventory.”
Following Emry’s recommendation, they had started numbering the locations of the exploratory excavations.
“And who’s going today?” Thomas asked.
“Dokey and….”
“No.”
“What?”
“You two and Bob were down for over twelve hours yesterday. Let’s spread the load.”
“I am well-rested and well-fed, Kaylene,” Dokey said.
“We don’t know what Washington and tomorrow will bring,” she argued.
Brande looked disappointed. When he was on a project, he wanted to do everything himself.
Finally, he said, “I’m afraid you’re probably right, Rae.”
“Not even probably.”
“I haven’t been down in over a year,” Emry said. “I need some sea time.”
“All right, then,” Brande said. “Rae, Svetlana, and Larry get the ride.”
“Who’s in command?” Emry asked.
“Flip a coin,” Brande said.
Svetlana Polodka drew the right-hand seat as pilot, and that pleased her. She did not have many operational hours in DepthFinder, far less than she had in the Neptune class of MVU’s submersibles.
She had bundled herself in two sets of long johns and a jumpsuit, and she carried two sweaters, but she was still cold. A light drizzle was falling from the skies when they boarded the submersible, but the wind, which was gusting to thirty knots, turned it into pelting droplets that stung the face and dampened clothing. By the time they were in their seats, with the hatch closed, the three of them were mildly soggy.
Larry Emry was in the seat behind her. He had in fact won the coin toss, but declined the commander’s seat since, as he said, his submersible skills were a little rusty from lack of use.
With her wrists resting on the padded ledge in front of her, Polodka kept her thumbs and forefingers lightly clamped to the joysticks. The sticks were self-centering, and very little pressure was needed to affect changes in the submersible’s attitude. It was like the power steering on her car, but much more efficient.
The depth readout read 112 feet, and she was already headed into the proper direction. They were not diving directly on the site, but aiming toward it during the descent, like a glider falling.
Mel Sorenson’s voice came over the Loudspeaker acoustic system. “All right, DepthFinder, your sonar tow is deployed. Bon voyage.”
Kaylene Thomas shifted in the seat beside her. “I have Sarscan under control. Take up the slack, Svetlana.”
She used the twin slide switches for trim at the base of the left stick to ease in power on the electric motors, and followed that by trimming the diving planes downward. A few minutes later, she felt the tug as the towline came taut, and cut off the power. They were in free fall, now.
“Great,” Thomas said. “We’re on the way.”
“Orion,” Emry said on the acoustic transmitter, “all systems one hundred percent. We’re going mute.”
Brande had decided, until they knew more about who might be listening to them, to avoid chatter on the communications networks. That order was immediately void when safety was at stake.
Emry put a tape of Frank Sinatra into the cassette deck. Emry was of that era. He talked of “rat packs,” and “chairman of the board,” and other things she didn’t understand. He had told her to rent the video Ocean’s Eleven, which she did, but she still didn’t understand. Robbing a Las Vegas casino seemed to have no relationship to the song, “New York, New York.”
The rate-of-change readout reported that DepthFinder was falling at a rate of one hundred feet per minute. Physically, she was not aware of it, but mentally, she thought of herself as a fallen leaf, wafting downward from the tree. It was much like her dreams of late.