Wormholes (11 page)

“Hope you’re all happy.”

“Yeah, K.C., you were adequate,” said Cooper.

“Well, then you three can go topside with me and help get my baby back on board.”

“Sure.” Cooper checked the video recorder and other instruments to make sure all the data were secure.

Wang shut down the robot’s maneuvering systems and began to pull on rain gear, preparing to go topside. He handed gear to the other three. “Okay, so you got any theories?” he asked them.

“No,” said Togani quietly. “That portside hull looked like it had been blast-furnaced like nothing I’ve seen.”

“And that slag on the bottom looked volcanic, but I bet it wasn’t,” said Gerald.

“It’s sure beyond anything to do with ocean currents,” said Cooper.

“So, what’re you saying, guys?” asked Wang.

“Well, we need to survey that area,” said Gerald. “And we need a geologist onboard. I know somebody who’s working on something that may be related.” He smiled slightly as he put on the rain slicker. He’d soon see Dacey Livingstone again.

“Fine, great,” said Wang. “But for now you’re just going to get real wet.” He pushed open the control-room door and led them lurching unsteadily along the heaving cargo hold deck toward the stairway.

“S
o, where’s this submersible?” Dacey stood on the broad deck of the Acorn in magnificently rolling seas, with the sunlit ocean highlighting each gleaming wave. She had just emerged from the oil company helicopter that had flown her from Tenerife in the Canary Islands to meet Gerald, oceanographer Brendan Cooper and the submersible pilot and diving expert K.C. Wang. She had met the oil company structural engineer, Philippe Togani, briefly, when he took the same helicopter out with a portable hard drive with the video data and the metal sample, off to Shell headquarters.

Squinting and windblown, she greeted Cooper and Wang as Gerald introduced them. She repeated her question louder to be heard over the departing helicopter and the wind and waves.

Wang laughed showing white teeth and said, “You’re standing beside it, Doctor.”

Dacey was undaunted. “This is an airplane,” she insisted. Indeed, the thirty-foot-long streamlined, white craft did look like a jet airplane, except with stubby sawed-off wings and a v-shaped tail with small side fins. It even possessed what appeared to be jet engines built into the rear, their intakes a series of gill-like slits on top of and below the fuselage.

“It’s called Deep Flight Six,” said Wang. “It does fly, but underwater.” He walked down the sleek body of the craft, patting it like a used car salesman. “The wings can be angled to give reverse lift to take us down, so we don’t need ballast tanks. When we’re finished with the dive, we just stand her on her tail, aim upward and she powers to the surface. Aluminum hull, fuel-cell power, electric motors. She can go to eleven thousand meters and withstand sixteen thousand pounds per square inch.”

After the inspection, Cooper motioned them inside the Acorn’s aft cabin and into the small wardroom. For the next two hours, they drank coffee and viewed videotapes of the SeaProbe robot’s dive on the Castile and were briefed on the findings so far. Dacey examined the seismic records from the area, finding them similar to the ones taken near the holes in Oklahoma and San Francisco. She decided this adventure would likely be worth it, like the San Francisco trip, even though that episode had her hanging from a wire on the side of a bridge. She needed all the information she could get. She was certainly no closer to an answer in Gillard, so it was worth leaving the seismic profiling work there to her graduate students and flying off on another of Gerald’s invitations. Gerald was right, bless him. Somehow all these strange events seemed to fit together. She looked over at him and smiled, and he smiled back.

Cooper also showed infrared satellite images of the ocean off Africa. The images from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration revealed a light blotch marking the region of heated water that they sat in the middle of now.

“The
NOAA
people said this wasn’t the first time they’d gotten such an area of heated water, but they never could get off their butts and get out to the areas in time.” He gave a wry smile. “Now we’re going to do some of their work for them.”

Finally, Cooper played for them the hydrophone recordings taken from the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System in the area. For decades the extensive network of underwater listening posts had lain in the ocean depths listening for Soviet submarines and surface ships. What it recorded the day of the Castile’s destruction was far stranger.

“I’ve been listening to hydrophone recordings for fifteen years and I’ve never heard anything like this,” said Cooper, as the hissing, gurgling sounds filled the small room.

“Sounds like a cross between a boiling teakettle and a big hissing radiator,” said Dacey.

“We’ve done frequency and trajectory analysis and that’s about what it is. Water being boiled into steam, at immense depth and by a point source.” He paused and looked at the other four. “A
moving
point source.”

“Well, let’s just go see where that point source started from,” said Wang.

They filed out to the Deep Flight Six and crawled into the narrow cockpit through the nose, which was a large, clear acrylic bubble that swung open. Wang and Cooper settled into the two front seats, and Dacey and Gerald into the back seats. In front of them were binocular viewing ports for the three-
D
high-definition video cameras mounted in the craft’s belly. For closer viewing of the bottom, the aluminum seats could be swung out of the way, and the rear observers could lie prone on the vessel’s deck, peering through thick, acrylic windows in the belly.

Once they were settled, Wang spoke into his microphone to the crane operator, and with a gentle lurch, the sleek vessel became airborne, hoisted by the Acorn’s huge crane off the deck.

Dacey and Gerald watched the ship fall away beneath them and the heaving ocean rise to slap the submarine’s bottom. They rested on the surface, the waves tossing them up and down like a cork. Dacey found herself looking up at waves that would slam onto the top of the vessel, driving it down, only to see it pop up again, as if challenging the next wave.

“This is the worst,” said Wang. “Just hold on for a few minutes and we’ll be under, where it’s calm.” Sure enough, Dacey felt her stomach begin to churn from the jouncing. She glanced at Gerald, whose eyes were determinedly closed.

Wang peered out of the front bubble and once he was sure the vessel was clear of the crane cable, eased the throttle forward. A deep whine filled the compartment and the craft accelerated through the waves, which rolled smoothly over the craft. Clutching a joystick between his knees, Wang pushed it forward and the Deep Flight Six angled beneath the waves. The bobbing transitioned into smoothness, the surface receded and all became dead quiet, except for the hum of the electric motors.

Wang switched on the vessel’s sonar, the video recorder and the powerful headlamps aimed to the front and below the craft. Peering down between her knees, Dacey could only see the vague glow of illuminated seawater. She breathed in and smelled the metallic tang of compressed air. She breathed out and saw vapor and realized that the cabin was growing cold as they descended. Wang switched on the heaters and the warmth returned.

“Sorry we can’t offer any sights on the way down, but we’ll be on the bottom in fifteen minutes,” said Wang.

He spent the time studying the bright blotches on the green sonar display. His target, the remains of a thousand-foot supertanker, was easy to spot, but he took great care nevertheless.

Dacey was startled when the wreck abruptly emerged from the gloom below them, a gargantuan twisted steel corpse. They skimmed over the Castile like an airplane flying over a dark fog-shrouded island, its lights illuminating only the section beneath it. They flew the length of the bow and midship section, its deck covered with twisted, ruptured pipes and valves. Then they flew over a debris-strewn section of undisturbed sediment, a respite from the destruction until the stern section came into view, its windows shattered, its paint blackened by oily fire.

Cooper and Wang conferred briefly and Wang banked the submersible into a smooth humming turn.

“It’s around here. You might look out the bottom ports.” Cooper bent over to study the bottom through the bubble. Dacey and Gerald eased off their seats and folded them away, stretching out on the padded deck and peering through the portholes. Dacey became acutely aware of Gerald’s body lying next to her. He glanced at her before looking down, his long dark mop of hair falling forward. She’d noticed him looking at her a lot.

When they rested their foreheads on the padded headrests and looked down through the ports, they could clearly see the silty bottom slide by beneath the gliding craft. Occasionally, a pale deep-sea fish would dash away as they passed over, or a white lobster would raise its spiny antenna, but the bottom was largely an undulating grayish plain of unrelieved monotony.

Then abruptly it appeared, a forty-foot-wide path of melted slag slashing across the bottom. With a triumphant “Hah!” Wang circled to find where the path dissipated and finally ended and ordinary sediment continued.

“Looks like it left the bottom here, whatever it was,” said Cooper. “Let’s see how it started.”

Wang circled again and began to skim along the path of the slag. It narrowed and broadened as they went, but remained basically a furrow of melted rock and sediment material that looked like a mix of oatmeal, dirt and chunks of black glass.

Dacey shook her head. “You know, for some reason, this reminds me of the Gillard tunnel. It’s long and a bit twisty, but the surface looks basically smooth.”

“Well, we’ll damned sure find how it started,” said Cooper. “Maybe it was a torpedo or something and we’ll find a disabled sub. Or maybe it’s the fissure from an undersea volcano and we’ll find a hole—”

“Or maybe we’ll find this,” Wang interrupted. “Nothing.” They saw that the furrow abruptly ended, and the usual silty bottom material resumed.

“What? Go back,” commanded Cooper. “We just missed the hole. We missed the fissure. Hell, we must’ve missed something.”

Wang eased the control stick over and circled the craft back, banking it into a tight continuous turn over the end of the melted trench. Under the lights of the circling vessel, they could see that the trench began in a round depression of melted material, but showed no sign of any opening. “Old buddy, we didn’t miss anything. It just started. It just started right here.”

Gerald pulled back his hair and looked over at Dacey, his expression seeming to be a mixture of puzzlement and determination.

“Something appeared,” he said quietly. “It just appeared.” This was enough, he decided. He’d gathered enough pieces to this puzzle. It was time to start trying to construct the picture. He hoped Dacey would help.

• • •

Encircling the narrow valley in the Lang Shan district of Inner Mongolia, craggy mountains of light gray granite jutted far into the early morning sky. The valley’s floor was a dry, cold grassland, where the herdsmen could profitably graze the shaggy sheep that produced a wool prized for its sturdiness. In the gray, icy dawn, the sheep stood scattered peacefully through the valley among the grassy meadows dotted by sparse scrub trees and shallow rocky washes. The herdsmen sleepily stoked the small campfires outside their hide-covered yurts, preparing their breakfasts of strong tea and fried meat, and smoking the potent tobacco in their clay pipes. A few had already left on early hikes into the mountains to tend their goats, or perhaps to kill one of the small antelope that would provide a relief from their diet of mutton.

The roaring sound burst into life so loudly that it shattered the eardrums of humans and sheep alike, sending blood trickling from their ear canals. The cataclysmic roar drowned out their screaming and bleating. And the blinding light brighter than the sun seared away the eyesight of any who looked at it. The roiling wall of fiery heat that followed instantly flamed into incandescence all living things in the valley. All trees, all grass, all humans, all animals burned into one cloud of ash swept up in the hurricane of boiling flame. Only the rock survived the initial onslaught and it began to glow and slump in defeat.

Those in the mountains saw an intense flare of light at the east end of the valley and the birth of a huge flaming ball that instantly produced a thick eruption of steam that rose to become a monstrous cloud in the sky. It seemed as if a new sun had determined to obscure the old, reserving for itself the honor of being the source of light and heat.

A herdsman far up in a mountain pass was instantly blinded by the light, but despite his searing pain, reached down and clasped his hand over his small son’s eyes, refusing to let go. Together, they stumbled away from the heat that burned their exposed skin and singed their thick coats. Gagging from the sulfurous gases, they staggered blindly along the familiar trails up into the mountains to the pass that would lead to the cool plain beyond. By the time they reached the top, ten miles from the valley center, the roaring monster had completely shrouded itself in its obscuring cloud and was now a vague, brilliantly glowing shape prowling in the distance.

As the shape drifted, blindingly radiant within its vaporous covering, it melted rock into orange-red magma rivers that flowed thickly into glowing pools, covered by the gray ash that only minutes before had been humans, animals and vegetation.

Above the smoking hell, the great boiling cloud rose higher and higher, until its pure white top could be seen by the people far away over the mountains. They wondered at the strange, frightening sight and consulted their elders to understand whether there was any precedent for it.

The incandescent monster floated across the valley, transforming the small haven of life into a blasted melting wasteland. It reached one of the towering granite mountains, but did not stop, eating its way with fiery ease into the mountain’s depths, creating thick streams of magma flowing out of the hole and great avalanches of heated rock that exploded from the slopes.

Then all suddenly stopped. All grew quiet except the crackle of cooling lava, and the periodic rattle of falling rock. The great enveloping cloud thinned and wafted away, and the intense heat yielded slowly to the cold wind blowing through the passes. The wind froze the melted rock into fantastic tortured sculptures and billowy forms that would remind the people for centuries of the evil “second sun” that had visited this day.