11
AS HE STRODE THROUGH
THE PASSAGEWAY of the NUMA vessel Matador , Paul Trout had to duck each time he came
to a bulkhead and its watertight door. While anyone over six feet
had to crouch at the bulkheads or risk a nasty whack of the head,
Paul was six-foot-eight in bare feet, with wide shoulders and long
limbs. He all but had to contort himself to make it through
unscathed.
An avid fisherman who
preferred the outdoors, Paul was simply not designed for the tight
quarters found inside a modern vessel. Naturally, he spent much of
his time in one ship or another, twisting himself into small
machinery-filled compartments, bending his spine like a pretzel to
fit into submersibles, or even just walking the inner passageways
of the ship.
On another day he
would have detoured outside onto the main deck before walking the
length of the ship, but the Matador was
currently operating off the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
It was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and both the wind and sea
were up already.
Climbing through
another hatch, Paul reached a more spacious compartment. He peered
inside. The dimly lit room was quiet, with most of the light coming
from glowing dials, backlit keyboards, and a trio of
high-definition, flat-screen monitors.
A pair of
scruffy-looking researchers sat in front of the outboard monitors,
while in between them, on a plate of backlit glass marked with a
grid, stood a shapely woman with hands outstretched as if she were
balancing on a tightrope. A visor covered her eyes and held her
wine red hair like a band, while strange-looking gauntlets with
wires running from them encased her hands. On her feet a set of
high-tech boots sprouted wires of their own, all of which ran to a
large computer a few feet behind her.
Paul smiled to
himself as he watched his wife, Gamay. She looked like a robotic
ballerina. She moved her head to the right, and the picture on the
monitors moved similarly, bright lights illuminating a smooth,
sediment-covered surface with a jagged hole in what had once been
the hull of a British naval vessel.
“Gentlemen,” she
said, “there’s the entry point of the Exocet missile that sank your
proud ship.”
“It doesn’t look all
that bad, really,” one of the men said, his English accent as thick
as his beard.
The Sheffield was the first major British casualty of
the Falklands War, hit by a French-made missile that didn’t
detonate but still ignited fires that raged throughout the
ship.
She survived for six
days after the attack before sinking during an attempt to tow her
to port.
“Bloody French,” the
other Englishman said. “Probably just getting back at us for
Waterloo and Trafalgar.”
The bearded man
laughed. “Actually, they went to great lengths to tell us the
weaknesses of these missiles, and that helped us stop them, but I’d
have preferred if they’d been a wee bit more cautious about who
they sold them to in the first place.”
He pointed to the
opening. “Can you take it inside?”
“Sure,” Gamay
said.
She moved her right
hand and closed her fingers on an invisible control knob. A second
later the sediment stirred up a bit, and the camera began to move
closer to the gaping wound on the ship’s hull.
Paul glanced at one
of the displays on the wall. In a visual depiction reminiscent of a
First Person Shooter video game, he saw what Gamay saw in her
visor: a control panel and various gauges measuring depth,
pressure, temperature, and both horizontal and vertical
orientation.
He also saw a second
screen that displayed a view from several feet behind the vessel
she was piloting. Again it looked like a video game on the screen,
as a small, almost human-shaped robotic figure moved forward toward
the shattered hull plating.
“Detaching
umbilical,” Gamay said.
Much smaller than a
standard ROV, and shaped more like a person than an undersea
vessel, the figure was known by the incredibly awkward name Robotic
Advanced Person-shaped Underwater Zero-connection Explorer. Because
the acronym shortened to RAPUNZE, the test team had taken to
calling the little figure Rapunzel. And
this moment, when it disconnected from all surface connectivity,
was considered Rapunzel “letting down
her hair.”
Under normal
circumstances, Rapunzel could release
the mile-long umbilical cord that kept her connected to the
Matador and operate on her own in
environments where cords, wires, and anything else trailing could
be a hazard. Powered by batteries that would last three hours
untethered, she was propelled by an impeller located in what would
have been her belly. Fully gimballed, it could be rotated three
hundred sixty degrees in any direction, allowing her to move up,
down, sideways, backward, or any combination in
between.
Because she was human
shaped, she could bend and move into places a normal ROV could not
go. She could even shrink, retracting her arms and legs so that she
took up no more space than a beach ball with a light and video
camera on top.
By using the virtual
reality setup and force-feedback boots and gloves, the designers
made it possible to operate Rapunzel as
if a human were down there doing the work herself. It was expected
this would be a huge boon to the salvage world, keeping divers out
of dangerous wrecks and allowing exploration into wrecks long
considered too dangerous or too deep to get at.
Exploring the
Sheffield was to be Rapunzel’s coming-out party, but something was
wrong. A red warning light flashed repeatedly on one of the
keyboards and also in the virtual cockpit. The umbilical would not
disconnect.
“Let me try this
again,” Gamay said, resetting the sequence.
Paul stepped in
quietly. “Don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, “but I’m afraid
Rapunzel has to come back home for
dinner.”
“Is that my wonderful
husband out there?” Gamay said, still fiddling with imaginary
controls.
“It is. We have a
storm brewing up,” Paul explained, his northeastern accent turning
the word storm into something that
sounded more like “stahm.” “We need to batten down the ship and
head north before it turns into a full-blown gale.”
Gamay’s shoulders
slumped a bit. It didn’t matter anyway, the umbilical would not
release, and they couldn’t send Rapunzel inside the ship with the cords still
attached. She pressed some other switches. An icon labeled “Auto
Return” popped up on screen, and Gamay’s virtual hand reached out
and touched it.
Rapunzel began to pull away from the Sheffield and then ascend through the depths. The
LEDs on Gamay’s gloves and boots went dark. She took off her visor
and blinked at Paul. She stepped toward him and almost lost her
balance.
Paul caught her. “You
all right?”
“It’s a little
disorienting to come out,” she said. She blinked a few more times
as if trying to refocus on the real world, then smiled at
him.
He smiled back, still
wondering how he’d been lucky enough to find someone so pretty and
perfect for him.
“How was it?” he
asked.
“Just like being down
there,” she said. “Except I’m not wet and cold, and I can go have
lunch with you while Rapunzel makes the
fifteen-minute journey back up from the bottom.”
She reached over and
kissed him.
“Umm-hmm,” one of the
Englishman coughed.
“Sorry,” she said,
turning back to them. “I’d say Rapunzel
is going to be a huge plus for us. We’ll get the bugs worked out
while the storm hits and then drop her down and try it
again.”
“Actually,” Paul
said, “we won’t. At least, not until October.”
“Weather getting too
rough for you, old boy?” the Englishman asked. “When I was a kid,
we’d go through this kind of chop in a motor launch.”
Paul had no doubt the
man was telling the truth—he was a twenty-five-year vet of the RN
before he’d retired a decade ago. He’d been on the Sheffield when it had taken that lethal
hit.
“I guess it is,” Paul
said, going with the thought. “We’re heading north. Once we’re
through the storm, a helicopter will be coming in to pick you guys
up. I guess it’s back to England from there. I’ll be sure they have
tea on board.”
“Ha,” the bearded man
said. “Very good of you.”
The two Englishmen
stood. “I guess we saw what we came to see. Would love an invite
when you come back.”
“Of course,” Gamay
said. They shook her hand and moved off, making their way down the
hall far more easily than Paul had come up minutes
before.
Gamay eyed them.
“Leaving a site because of a storm that will blow over in a few
days?” she said suspiciously.
“Seemed a good excuse
to give our guests,” Paul replied.
“What gives?” she
asked. “And don’t lie to me, you’ll sleep alone
tonight.”
“You know that tanker
that went down the other day? Kurt was there when it happened, even
rescued the captain’s wife.”
“Of course,” she
said. “Trouble finds him.”
Paul laughed. Trouble
did have a way of looking Kurt Austin up and coming to visit. Paul
and Gamay had often been part of whatever followed. Seemed like
this would be no exception.
“Well, there’s more
to the sinking than the press has been told,” he
explained.
“Like?”
“Pirates killing the
crew and deliberately scuttling the ship,” Paul said.
“Doesn’t sound right,
does it?” Gamay said.
“Nope,” he said. “Not
to Kurt or Dirk, or even the insurance company. With their
permission, Dirk has asked us to take Rapunzel over and take a look.”
Gamay took her
robotic gloves off and sat down to undo her boots. “Sounds simple
enough,” she said. “Why do you look concerned?”
“Because Dirk told me
to be concerned,” Paul said. “He figures someone went to great
lengths to hide whatever happened on that ship. And that being the
case, whoever they are, they might get
a little upset with the likes of us poking around.”
She reached out and
took his hand.
“Do you think you can
get Rapunzel inside a sunken ship?” he
asked.
“Would have liked to
finish the test,” she said, “but yes, I think we can get her
inside.”