Flood (18 page)

Lily said to Lammockson,“So this
Trieste
is named as a tribute to that pioneer.”

“Not exactly,” Lammockson said. “Lily, she
is
the
Trieste
, the original. Or what’s become of her, in the years since.”

After her jaunt into the Challenger Deep the
Trieste
was retired, but her pressure sphere, the most advanced bit of engineering, was incorporated into a new DSV called the
Trieste II
. The new boat was used as a test vehicle for the Navy’s deep-submergence program, and qualified four “hydronauts.”
Trieste
kept working until 1980, when she was made obsolescent by the Alvin-class subs.

“Which everybody’s heard of, because Alvin went to the
Titanic
,” Lammockson said. “While they stuck the
Trieste
in a naval museum at Keyport,Washington.”

“And that’s about where the engineering development stopped,” Gordo said. “Last decade there was talk of replacing Alvin with a new breed of DSVs but it came to nothing.”

“And the Navy won’t even release Alvin for this project,” Lammockson said bitterly. “Nor will Woods Hole.”

Gordo said,“Woods Hole is a major oceanographic institute in Massachusetts. They operate Alvin.”

“More like ‘Arse Hole’ if you ask me,” Lammockson said.“The Russians have deep-diving submarines too, that they call Mir. Two of them touched bottom of the North Polar Ocean a few years back. But I can’t get hold of those either. I blame the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow for
that
.”

Lily nodded. “So you liberated the
Trieste
from her museum.”

Lammockson snorted. “What choice was there? There’s no time to redevelop a whole technology from scratch. The Iceland Glaciological Society is formally sponsoring us here, and God bless them. But I’ve had nothing but minimal cooperation, if you can call it cooperation at all, from agencies who should know better.” He railed about other organizations and eminent individuals who, he claimed, had done their best to impede his project. There was a widespread denial of the reality of the ocean rise, because it didn’t fit any of the old models of likely climate change, which themselves were still at the center of intense disputes.“But you just have to deal with them all,” Nathan said.

“Well, that’s what you’re good at, Nathan,” Gordo murmured.

“Yeah, I spend my life sucking off bureaucrats, lucky me. Anyhow I think we ended up with the right tub for Thandie’s work. I’m happy with the
Trieste
. But of course it’s not me who’s got to fly the thing. Just think,” he said, goading, “you’re getting to see the deep ocean bed, Gordo. Exploring landscapes nobody’s ever seen before. A consolation for not walking on Mars, hey?”

“You take what you can get,” Gordo said. “For sure I’d rather be doing this than working with the rest of the guys, mothballing Johnson and Canaveral, or working on the panic launches.” This was NASA-speak for a series of rapid-turnaround launches in which the inventory of vehicles at Canaveral was being fired off to Earth orbit, delivering whatever useful payload could be placed up there, mostly weather satellites and Comsats, before the launch facilities were finally lost to the flooding.

Lammockson laughed at him. “Firing off those antiquated old birds before you turn into a museum piece yourself, eh, Gordo?”

Gordo shrugged. “You can’t change your luck.”

They were leaving the Reykjavik suburbs behind now, and the traffic was clearing. Lily saw that the road ran over fields of hard black rock, sheets of it, all but free of vegetation. It was like bulldozed tarmac. This was lava, she supposed, frozen in the air, some of the youngest rock on the planet—the stuff that built seabeds and pushed continents aside. But the lava soon gave way to a landscape that was very European, farmland and grass, save for the lack of trees. Sheep watched incuriously as they sped by, a released hostage, a stranded astronaut, and one of the richest men in the world.

26

T
he
Endurance
was a modern European research vessel, constructed in Italy and fitted out in dockyards in northeast England and Scotland. Her superstructure was studded with sensors, radar dishes and comms domes, and an ungainly drill derrick that towered over the hull. She was solid, sleek, streamlined, as gray and anonymous as the sea itself. Now she was serving as a support ship for the
Trieste
, which would be strapped to the deck during the cruise like a geeky toy submarine in a theme-park exhibit.

Endurance
sailed roughly south from Iceland, following the line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—which, once Iceland was out of sight, would be invisible until they reached the next Ridge islands to protrude from the ocean, the Azores. The crew, many of them recruited by AxysCorp from the oil companies, kept working throughout the cruise. The purpose of the expedition was to explore the deep subsurface of the ocean, the layers beneath the seabed. So they had sonar and radar which probed at sub-sediment layers, and periodically they launched overboard a device like a mechanical porpoise packed with more sonar gear.

The most interesting work was the drilling. The ship would halt, held in place against the current by a computer-controlled array of propellers, and the oilmen all turned into roughnecks, adopting roles like “tool pusher” and “drill superintendent.” They used their drilling derrick to sample the deep subsurface directly, hauling up meter after meter of mud, cores replete with data for the sedimentologists. They got on with this work on a sea that surged constantly, restless, its turbid gray flecked with mud drawn up from the deep ooze below, a sea that was troubled even when the weather was calm.

And down in the science lab, under the foredeck, the sedimentologists swore as they sleeved their layered cores in Mylar, sliced them in two, used electromagnetic wands to test water concentrations, and picked out minute samples of rock types and living things, fine, unrepeatable work performed in conditions like a funfair ride.

Lily had crossed the Channel a few times, caught ferries to the Isle of Wight, Arran. She was no sailor, save for some dinghy work during her survival training with the USAF. The surging North Atlantic was a shock to her. None of the five “hydronauts”—Lily and Gordo, Thandie, Gary Boyle and a thirty-year-old meteorologist pal of Thandie’s called Sanjay McDonald—was ever at ease, even Thandie who was the specialized oceanographer among them. You couldn’t rest, you slept badly, and when you ate you couldn’t always keep it down. Mostly they used up their time helping out the roughnecks with their drilling.

In fact, Gordo told Lily, it would be a relief to take the
Trieste
down into the depths; at least beneath the waves you could get a little peace for a few hours.

Once they were away from Reykjavik and out of Nathan Lammockson’s direct control, Gordo took it on himself to draw up a manning rota for
Trieste
to reflect the science priorities and the need to rotate the crews to give them a break. Thandie and Gary were actually both capable of driving the
Trieste
themselves, so there were overlapping pools of four pilots and three scientists to make up each dive crew’s complement of two, a pilot plus a scientist. As a result it wasn’t until the fourth dive that Lily was to pilot the
Trieste
, and Gordo paired her with Thandie; tactfully he didn’t explain his reasoning, but as Thandie was the most experienced of the scientist-pilots it made sense.

On her designated day, Lily went up on deck. It was a warm, blustery morning, under a blanket of rolled-up gray cloud; in fact they had arrived not too far north of the Azores, at around forty degrees north. But Lily, like Thandie, was bundled up warm in her AxysCorp-issue thermal underwear, coverall and parka, with a Mae West over the top; she had a Russian fur hat and gloves tucked in her pockets. Where she was going, she was assured, it was cold.

She watched as cables were attached to the
Trieste
, and a derrick raised her into the air to swing her out over the ocean. Roughnecks working in pairs hauled on cables fore and aft to steady the boat. And Lily got her first good look at the ship that was about to become hers.

Around fifteen meters long, the
Trieste
had a stubby, roughly streamlined shape something like a conventional submarine. At either end were air-filled ballast tanks. But most of her hull was filled with flotation tanks full of gasoline, a hundred thousand liters of it, and Lily could see the release outlets of the heavy iron-ballast hoppers protruding from her keel. Her propellers were fixed to her upper deck.

And under the main hull hung the observation gondola, the pressurized sphere within which Lily and Thandie would be descending kilometers into the ocean.

Thandie approached Lily, waddling in her own Mae West. She was grinning. “So, virgin, you OK with this?”

“Ready to do it right.”

“Christ, you sound like the space cadet. You’ll love it, believe me.”

Awkward in their life jackets, they clambered down a steel ladder to an orange inflatable, manned by a single crewman, waiting for them on the ocean surface. The crewman gunned his engine to take them the few meters to the bathyscaphe.

When they reached the
Trieste
she was rolling alarmingly, and the boat bobbed just as vigorously. Thandie showed off. She just stood up, got her balance, and stepped over the half-meter or so to the bathyscaphe. Lily, sooner safe than spectacular, was happy to grab hold of the crewman’s hand, then Thandie’s, as she made her own way across.

And then, as the mooring arm was released and the ship bobbed free, they gave a last wave to the watching crew and scientists on the deck of the
Endurance
. Gordo gave them a crisp salute. Gary stood beside him, watching silently. It struck Lily how odd it was to see that familiar face here, in circumstances that could hardly be more different from their long confinement in Barcelona.

Lily and Thandie climbed down through the access tunnel to the gondola. The tunnel ran vertically through the body of the bathyscaphe, cutting between two of the gasoline tanks. Lily had gone through this during her training with Gordo, and knew the drill. At the bottom of the tunnel she had to lower herself feet-first through a hatch into the gondola itself. The hatch more than any other component showed the bathyscaphe’s age, its handles rubbed smooth by decades of wear.

Once they were both in, Thandie pulled the hatch closed. “Christ,” she said. “This tub always stinks of gasoline. Let’s get it done.”

They shucked off their Mae Wests, settled at their stations and ran through a quick checklist of their essential systems. They would be kept alive by oxygen cylinders and a modern carbon dioxide scrubbing system, cylinders, fans, pumps, filters, derived from similar technology used on the Space Station. When the scrubbing system started up there was a wheezing noise, like the hum of the fan on an old-fashioned desktop computer. Lily confirmed that the propulsion system, the steerable propellers set on the upper hull, was functional. And Thandie checked that the external sensors were working, the TV cameras, a sample-collection pump system, a pod of down-pointing sonar and radar to explore the deep subsurface. There was a kind of robot arm which could be used to manipulate objects outside the hull.

As they worked, the gondola, fixed to the keel of the rolling hull, swung sharply back and forth. The bucket seats had harnesses, and Lily strapped herself in. But the rolling made it hard to work the controls, even to read the display screens, and her stomach churned. But she was most definitely not going to throw up in here. Thandie whistled as she checked over her equipment, deliberately nonchalant.

The gondola was a sphere only about two meters across, equipped with a couple of bucket seats, a small chemical toilet and a provisions bag. Opposite the hatch, looking downwards, was the single window, a solid block of Plexiglas set into the ten-centimeter-thick steel walls. There was actually a lot more useful room in here than there had been back in the 1950s. The interior had been stripped out and remodeled with modern instruments and controls; the scuffed walls were plastered with foldable screens.

But still the gondola felt very cramped to Lily. She could see why Gordo had taken to the work so easily; spacecraft like the Soyuz were just as confining. Lily was a flier, used to small cabins maybe but usually surrounded by infinite space. She wondered how well she was going to cope with the containment inside this steel coffin with kilometers of ocean piling up above her, and absolutely no way out.

Finally Lily tested the comms system. Gordo was acting as what he called “capcom” today; it was reassuring to hear his voice. They had a long-wavelength radio link, and also a backup hydrophone link, although at the depths they would reach it would take several seconds for a sound wave to pass through the water to the support ship on the surface above.

All was confirmed ready, by Lily, Thandie, Gordo and the
Endurance
crew. Lily tapped a screen.

The ballast tanks fore and aft flooded, and the
Trieste
dropped. Just for a moment there was a surge, like a fast elevator descending. But that soon smoothed out, and so did the rolling; already they had left the surface waves behind them. Lily glanced through the window. Looking down she saw nothing but a bluish glow, and random particles of murk.

27

T
handie looked over Lily’s shoulder at the pilot’s display. It was centered on a schematic of the ship, the hull sliced up into the floats and ballast tanks, the blister of the gondola suspended beneath, the image covered with status numbers. “Looks nominal to me.”

“Yes . . .”

The principle of the bathyscaphe was pretty simple. She was like a hot air balloon, laden with ballast. Gasoline was used as the float material, the “air” in the balloon, because it was lighter than water but incompressible even at extreme pressures, and so retained its buoyant properties. The ballast was heavy iron shot. Right now the
Trieste
was heavier than the sea water she displaced, just, and so she sank steadily. The descent would be a powered dive, with Lily directing their fall to points of interest with the steerable propellers.