‘But at some point?’
‘At some point, the liquid metal carbon of the suit will reconfigure.’
‘Reconfigure?’ It was Lou. He gave Milford a hard look.
‘It changes state… The suit becomes a solid block of carbon.’
6
An hour later they were pulling on thermal suits — the standard uniform while they were aboard the JVs where the temperature and pressure levels were computer-controlled. Jules Verne 1 was ready to power up, the final systems checks almost completed.
The interior of the sub was extremely cramped and utilitarian. Four seats were set out in two pairs of two. The front left was the pilot’s seat; next to that, the copilot. Two passenger seats had been squeezed into the restricted space in the second row. The designers had packed the craft with the latest communications and navigational technology. There were no windows. Instead, visual displays relayed images from a set of cameras mounted on the exterior of the sub. Two large control panels were in front of the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. All the controls were digital, touch-sensitive pads set into flat plastic.
‘You guys didn’t waste money on soft furnishings, did you?’ Lou commented dryly as the four of them buckled up.
Behind the main cabin was the airlock. Through a pair of doors lay a tiny changing room where the crew could don the LMC suits before leaving the sub. Once the integrity of the suits had been triple-checked, the submariners could enter the airlock, and from there emerge onto the ocean floor via a short ladder that extended from the side of the sub. When they were first shown how it all worked, Lou and Kate couldn’t get over how similar it seemed to the famous Apollo lunar modules. And, as the commander had reminded them, the environment 12,600 feet down on the ocean floor was every bit as inhospitable as the lunar surface.
Final checks complete, the main door of the sub was closed and locked from the inside. Commander Milford told the bridge of the Armstrong they were ready. The ship’s hold began to fill with water, the pressure was equalized and the outer door of the Armstrong began to slide open. They all felt JV1 move forward, and they were in open water directly beneath the ship.
Lou and Kate had been on countless dives, but neither of them had gone deeper than a few hundred feet. This was going to be an entirely new experience and one any marine archaeologist would give their eye teeth to have. Little more than twenty-four hours ago, the very concept of actually walking around the Titanic would have been complete fantasy to them. They could still barely believe they were here now.
Milford kept an open-mic link with the ops control room of the Armstrong, sharing constantly updated telemetry figures and receiving instructions to alter course where necessary. Lou and Kate sat in silence, mulling over the task ahead of them.
Lou glanced at Kate, the outline of her features dark against the background of illuminated control panels and swathes of neon. He knew he could never grow tired of that profile. When they were splitting up as a couple there had been times when a part of him had wished he had never applied for the job with Kate’s team. But then he had realized that it was better to have her as a friend than not have a relationship with her at all. In fact, for him that friendship was the most precious thing in the world.
On the screens they could all see the colours change very quickly, shifting from light blue to an inky, bubbling black. By the time they reached a depth of 300 feet, sunlight had been completely absorbed. The only source of illumination came from JV1 ’s powerful lights. At the depth of the Titanic, they knew the water would be absolutely black, blacker than interstellar space. To cope with this, the JVs were equipped with four 100-million candlepower lamps, which in tests piloted by Milford had been capable of lighting up large portions of the wreck.
In this region and for many miles around, the ocean was totally devoid of all life; everything had been wiped out by the radiation still leaking from the ship.
They quickly reached a comfortable cruising speed of twenty-five knots, and at 6,000 feet, they began to slow. Derham scanned the seabed with deep-ocean sonar. Images appeared on the monitors — a poorly defined shape about 6,500 feet beneath them. Milford pulled back the speed a little more and manoeuvred the sub to descend towards a point on the ocean floor about fifty yards north of the ship’s bow. The final thousand feet of the descent used the inertia of the sub, and as they approached the wreck Milford applied a quick burst from a set of retro jets that slowed the machine so it could be brought down with minimum disruption.
It really is just like bringing the lunar module in close to the landing site at the Sea of Tranquillity, Kate found herself thinking as she watched the image change on one of the monitors.
Two hundred feet above the ocean floor Derham slowly brought up the lights, and on the screens the outline of the century-old shipwreck began to appear as though a mist was slipping away to reveal a hidden tangle of rusted iron and steel.
They had all seen films of the wreck, read the many books about it and the accounts of other submariners who had travelled there and launched robot probes, but seeing it first-hand was almost overwhelming. The wreck looked utterly surreal, and as they descended and the light beams picked out more details it felt as though they had been transported to a fantasy world. The sense of isolation so far beneath the surface was all consuming. Only Milford had gone so deep before. For Kate, Lou and Derham, this was a completely alien world.
The bow section of the Titanic, almost 500 feet in length and the height of a twelve-storey building, lay buried in the silt and sediment at an angle of about ten degrees. Lou knew from his reading that the bow and stern had separated as the two sections had sunk. The bow dived at about ten knots and followed a descent at an approximate angle of forty-five degrees, hitting the ocean floor with phenomenal force. Pushed from behind by 30,000 tons of ship, the prow had sliced into the ocean floor and scythed the seabed like a plane ploughing through a runway made of butter. Now the hull was buried in almost sixty feet of soil at the anchors, and part of the wreck some hundred feet back from the prow had fallen backwards, distorting the original shape even more. This once glorious expression of man’s ingenuity looked like a dead animal.
Kate glanced round at Lou and was stunned to see a tear slide down his cheek. She quickly turned away and made much of studying the monitor in front of her.
‘This is just… God, I don’t have the words,’ Derham said. He glanced round at Kate and then at Lou, who merely shook his head slowly, looking down.
The final hundred feet of the descent took almost five minutes as Milford used the sonar to find a spot close enough to the wreck but without disturbing it. They all felt the vehicle make contact with the ocean floor, and for a few minutes the monitors showed the silt and sand being kicked up. Milford and Derham manipulated the controls on the panels in front of them, keeping their eyes glued to the monitors. Then the sound of the engines quietened and stopped.
‘I think this is the weirdest moment so far,’ Kate said, her voice filled with a blend of terror and excitement. ‘Listen to that.’
‘What?’
‘Precisely. There is no sound down here. No sound whatsoever, except for the noises we make, the noises the JV makes.’
They fell utterly silent, holding their breath. The only sounds were non-human ones — from the computers and the engines cooling, their metal casings contracting.