‘How close are we to the planned landing site?’ Lou asked.
‘Bang on,’ Milford responded. ‘Look.’
She pointed to a monitor. It showed a schematic of the surrounding area. ‘There’s the hold.’ She indicated a small rectangle on the right of the screen. ‘We’re here.’ Milford ran her finger down to a spot about five hundred feet south-east of their destination. Back there is the bow section of the Titanic.’ Then she indicated with her thumb and nodded to port. ‘On the schematic, it’s here.’ She stabbed at a large white shape.
‘This is the fissure?’ Lou said, tracing a jagged line down the monitor. Magnified, it appeared irregular, a random gash in the ocean floor.
‘Unfortunately it’s between eighty and one hundred feet across. It doesn’t narrow very much anywhere along this stretch.’ Milford ran her finger over the ragged line covering about ten miles within the dimensions of the schematic.
‘Sod’s Law.’
‘Yeah, maybe. But let’s hope Sod’s Law has played out enough for this mission. The problems have been stacking up. We deserve some good luck.’
Milford turned towards the locker room and the LMC suits.
36
JV1’s massive lights illuminated the ocean floor in a pool of radiance that extended some two hundred feet in every direction. But even these, the three knew, would not produce much light beyond that circle, so that by the time they reached the crevasse the only visible illumination would come from the powerful torches on the arms of their suits and built into their helmets.
They stood outside the hatch for a few moments to get their bearings.
‘Armstrong?’ Milford called through the comms. ‘We have left JV1. We’re on the surface.’
‘Wilco, commander.’
‘Let’s go,’ she said to Kate and Lou. ‘Not a second to waste.’
Milford had the nano-carbon bridge in a pack on her back, her oxygen tank tucked between it and her body. Lou was carrying a pack containing cutting equipment in case they needed to break into the hold. In Kate’s pack she had a specially designed device for retrieving the documents they hoped to find.
The ground was firm underfoot, but they were constantly aware of the fragility of this region of the ocean floor.
The light from JV1 dimmed gradually as they progressed and after ten minutes they had reached the point where the light began to give way to darkness.
‘Time to put on the headlamps,’ said Milford.
On the right arm of their suits was a control panel. They tapped in a code and immediately the lights came on, nine between them, producing about one tenth of the luminescence they had close to JV1.
The ocean was devoid of all marine life, just as it had been on their earlier visit. The only sign that anything had once lived here in this vast stretch of ocean was the sprinkling of dead and rotting creatures caught in the lights.
Milford stopped suddenly and put a hand up. Lou and Kate halted immediately. ‘There,’ the commander said flatly, ‘the crevasse. About fifty feet directly ahead. See it?’
Kate and Lou strained their eyes and could just make out a deeper blackness in the void ahead of them. It was the leading edge of the chasm.
‘Got it,’ Lou said.
‘We must proceed very carefully now.’
From the left sleeve of her suit Milford withdrew a miniature sonar device similar to the one Jerry Derham had used on the mission inside the Titanic. It produced a steady pulse audible in all their headsets; a beat that would change if they encountered any subterranean irregularity close to the surface of the ocean floor.
They took it slowly, the sonar keeping up its regular comforting rhythm. As they approached the crevasse their light beams lit it up. They could barely see the other side.
‘Believe it or not, this is the narrowest point for miles,’ Milford said through the comms. She tapped the panel on her right sleeve. ‘83.67 feet.’
Lou peered over the edge and saw nothing but uninterrupted blackness; no sign of light or shade, no movement, nothing. It was like a crack leading to Hell itself. It filled him with a nameless terror. It wasn’t just a physical fear, it was existential. Here, at the bottom of the ocean in the region marine scientists called the ‘abyssal zone’, or simply ‘the abyss’, lay a massive crack in the earth.
He recalled the stats from the briefing. The chasm was fifty-two miles in length, and varied in width between thirty and two hundred feet. And its depth? Well, no one could be sure. Researchers had stopped measuring after their sensors, stretched to the limit, had given up at a depth of over eleven miles.
He couldn’t help himself — he imagined falling over the edge, falling, falling for what would feel like an eternity, until something happened. What? The pressure would grow so intense his suit would be overwhelmed and he would be crushed in an instant. Or else he would become snagged on something and die slowly. Or perhaps he would puncture his suit and simply implode.
He shuddered, forcing the thoughts away, stepped back and glanced round at Kate. She was still staring down into the chasm. Maybe, he thought, she was as obsessed with it as he was. In fact, he knew she was. She had the most powerful imagination of anyone he had ever met.
‘Let’s get started,’ Milford’s voice cut through the comms. She slipped the container off her back, opened the clasps and pulled out a cylinder about three feet long. She found a zip and pulled it back to expose an odd-shaped contraption. It was spindly and shimmered in the light from the torches.
‘This,’ Milford added, ‘is the business end.’ She pointed to a small box attached to the main body then placed the nano-carbon ladder flat on the ground two yards back from the edge of the crevasse.
‘Lou, could you secure the end for me, please? Just lean on it. I’ll set the controls.’
He crouched down and held the ladder in place as Jane Milford ran her fingers over a keypad on the rectangular box. She straightened. ‘Stand back.’
Lou and Kate complied and they heard a cracking sound. Metal bolts shot from the base of the rectangle, punching through the sand and into the bedrock beneath.
Milford ran the sonar over the box and studied the screen. ‘Excellent. Worked like a dream.’ The anchors went down three feet and now they are probing further under the surface, the nanobots biting their way through the rock. They’ll stop at about — here they go — seven feet.’
She leaned forward and gripped the box at the end of the nano-carbon ladder, trying to dislodge it, but it was as solid as an anchor cemented into a dozen feet of concrete.
‘Now… stage two,’ she muttered, touching the screen on the box again and pulling herself upright. The other two just watched expectantly.
For a few seconds nothing happened. Then a chunk of solid material levered up from the strange contraption. It swept through the air, growing as it moved. In a moment it was extending over the edge of the crevasse.
Kate and Lou looked on astonished.
‘Nanotechnology is a wonderful thing,’ Milford commented dryly.
The ladder grew before their eyes, stretching rapidly across the opening. After a few moments it stopped extending and lowered slowly into place on the ocean floor beyond the far side of the crevasse. The end of it was just out of sight.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that!’ Kate exclaimed.
‘It’s pretty cool,’ Milford replied. ‘You two ready to crawl across?’
‘I guess,’ Lou responded.
‘Think of it as a normal ladder laid flat. Don’t look down. Just keep focused on the far end.’