26.
Panthalassa Sea
The Manta Ray moves out from the hole, hovering beneath a vast, seemingly endless ceiling of ancient rock, its geology dating back more than 225 million years. An influx of current sweeps nutrients down from the chute and across the ceiling in all directions, feeding an inverted sea floor crawling with tens of thousands of trilobites, the albino arthropods gathered en masse around their abyssal Mecca to feed.
David powers on the sub’s exterior high beams. The light casts a spectral radiance across the subterranean roof, illuminating the solid crystalline eyes of crabs and lobsters, snails and sea scorpions, their alabaster exoskeletons covered in spikes and spindly claws, the largest of the horde crawling over the smallest, the oldest as long as seven feet from front pincers to barbed, poisonous tails.
A chill creeps through the cockpit, the water temperature outside barely registering above freezing. Kaylie adjusts the thermostat then leans over and kisses David softly on the lips. “That’s for luck.”
“Check the time. I want to be back in this very spot in two hours.” Pushing down on both joysticks and pedals, he sends the sub accelerating downward in a steep dive, the depth gauge spinning past 9,000 feet.
They ride in silence, the bantering gone, the quiet essential now for Kaylie to listen to the surrounding sea through her sonar headphones. The water is crystal clear and bone-chilling cold, the sub’s wings moaning every so often, protesting the increasing weight of the ocean.
Two miles . . .
Three.
Particles appear in the water—more marine snow, only different. Composed of hydrogen sulfide and methane, the debris is blowing upward from the bottom, originating from countless cold seeps purging their life-giving emissions from beneath the planet’s crust.
The marine snow grows heavier, forcing David to extinguish his exterior lights. They pass 20,000 feet, the water pressure approaching 9,000 pounds per square inch.
Stay focused . . . you’re doing fine . . . everything’s fine. Don’t think about how much ocean is above you . . . everything’s good.
The sudden jolt causes his heart to flutter, sweat breaking out across his body as red lights bloom across his command center.
Kaylie grips his right arm. “What was that?”
“I’m not sure.” The sub shudders and shakes beneath them, the turbulence unnerving. David eases back on the left pedal, then the right, isolating the problem. “It’s the starboard prop, feels like something’s caught on the shaft. I’ve got to shut it down before I lose my boss nut.” He slows the sub, decreasing his angle of descent. He glances at Kaylie, who’s gripping her seat as if paralyzed, her face deathly pale in the LED’s glow, her eyes filled with terror.
Oh, shit, she’s bugging out . . . “Kaylie? Hey—” He shakes her by the shoulder, inducing hyperventilation.
“Take me back! Take me back, David, please!”
“You’re okay. Just breathe.”
“I can’t! I can’t breathe! Just get me back to the chute! Just a few minutes back at the hole—”
“Kaylie, calm down.” Reaching behind her seat, he grabs a bottled water. “Here, drink this. Slow sips. Wet your face.”
She struggles to unseal the cap. Takes a sloppy swig, her quivering hands spilling water down her sweatshirt—
—her eyes locking on to the depth gauge as it flips past 21,500 feet. “Oh God, oh my God, oh God . . . ten thousand more feet . . . that’s nearly two miles! David, I can’t go down another two miles. What was I thinking!” She clutches his right arm in both hands, her fingernails digging into his flesh. “Take me back, now! Now, David, take me—
“—ahhhhhhhh!”
With a vertigo-inducing lurch, the sub is flung sideways, flipping wing over bow.
David squeezes his eyes shut as his limbs pump at the controls, his stomach queasy, the propellers useless against a force of nature too powerful to challenge.
G-forces drive Kaylie’s body into the contours of her bucket seat, the burning vomit rising in her throat, her eyes squeezed shut, her fingers knotted around the edges of her seat, her mind drowning in fear, blotting out all rational thoughts, time reduced to a final few precious particles of sand in the hourglass of her life as she holds her breath and waits to die . . . waits for that final moment, the moment the cockpit implodes, the moment her brain matter splatters inside her skull, the anticipation of the moment far worse than the actual event.
Her body coils, her lungs ready to deliver one final scream as the moment arrives . . . only it never does. Just as suddenly as it came, the turbulence is gone, the ride level and smooth, as if they’ve entered the hurricane’s eye.
Still hyperventilating, she opens her eyes, her mind fighting to resurface from the panic, a seed of thought telling her the sub has indeed stopped spinning, that she’s still alive!
The sensation of relief comes with a price. Fumbling for an air-sick bag, she leans forward and pukes, her blood pressure blasting through every vessel in her head like a cleansing wave.
When she’s done she seals the bag and lays her head back, adjusting the air vent so it blows on her sweaty, pale face.
David hands her the water bottle. “You okay?”
She nods. “What . . . happened?”
“Bad current. Must have been a half mile wide, running like a flooding river through this entire depth. Real bitch.”
“How—”
“My father taught me to treat currents like riptides. Best thing to do when you’re caught is to ride it out—swim parallel to shore.”
“About a mile east of where we need to be.”
“David?”
“Shh. Close your eyes and rest.”
She awakens with a start. David has changed course, dropping them once more into a vertical descent, his almond eyes harsh as he focuses on piloting the sub while listening in on sonar.
She glances at the depth gauge: 29,265 feet. A hot flash of panic shoots through her, but she forces it aside, too exhausted to deal with it again.
“Kaylie, listen to me. Forget those numbers, they mean nothing. You want to be topside? Get your headphones on and find the bottom so we can finish the job and get the hell out of here.”
She nods. Wiping away her tears, she traces the missing headgear by its wire then repositions it over her ears. “I’m going active.” Before he can object, she releases the loud, echoing sound wave—
Ping!
The reverberation races outward in all directions, reflecting off every inanimate and organic object in the surrounding sea.
“Got it. Four hundred seventy feet. Found the barracuda, too. Come to course zero-eight-five, thirty-five-degree down angle.”
He adjusts his course, reducing their forward speed to fifteen knots. “Kaylie, next time ask me before you ping. The sound travels—”
“Shh! I’ve got a fix on the lab. Five degrees to starboard, then two hundred twenty yards due west.”
David adjusts his course. The Manta Ray moves ahead slowly, coming to within forty feet of the volatile sea floor. Clouds of methane gas disburse like steam from a city sewer grate in winter, releasing a timeless outpouring of cold, sulfurous chemicals that seep from countless crevice-like vents.
“I’m activating the docking station.” Kaylie presses the green button on the newly installed control switch by her right knee. Seconds later, she hears a low rumble over her headphones—
—as a dull yellow sliver of light appears out of the darkness ahead, growing larger, illuminating the silty bottom.
“I see it.” David aims for the bulbous shape and slows the sub, allowing it to hover fifty feet away.
“David, what are you waiting for?”
“We have a guest.”
Silhouetted between the Manta Ray and the luminous artificial yellow hue is a dark shadow—a morphing organic blob nearly as large as the lab. A pair of sinister bioluminescent-blue, demonic eyes stare back at them in the darkness, unblinking.
David dims the control console’s LED lights to see better. “What the hell is that?”
Kaylie whispers, “It’s watching us.”
“Something’s not right.” David feels for the exterior light control switch. Dialing from standard white lights to red, he powers on the external beacons—
—illuminating a puffy gelatinous mass, possessing tentacles covered in seven-inch, needle-like spikes.
“Wow. It’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis—the ‘vampire squid from hell.’ ”
“It can’t be a vampire squid. Vampire squids are less than a foot long. This thing must be twenty-five feet across.”
“And great whites only grow to twenty-feet, only my family owns one that’s as big as two tractor trailers. It’s probably some prehistoric cousin. And those blue lights—they aren’t even eyes, they’re light organs—photophores. It turned itself inside-out. It’s a defense mechanism.”
“God, if we could only capture it.”
“Thirty minutes ago you couldn’t wait to leave, now you want to capture it? I just want to move it out of the way. Let’s see how it likes bright light.” David switches the red lights back to white.
Blinded by the strange creature, the squid turns itself right-side out, its deep reddish-brown tentacles instantaneously pursing together as it propels away into the darkness.
“They got the ‘hell’ part right when they named that thing. Let’s take a look at this lab.” David flies the Manta Ray toward the lab’s spherical hull, the sub’s lights revealing a titanium shell covered in crusty barnacles and silt. Beneath the nearly unrecognizable habitat is an oval structure, its flat bottom hidden beneath four titanium legs, the docking station yawning open like an alien two-car garage.
The barracuda hovers close by—a robotic sentry.
Now it is David who registers waves of panic as he positions the Manta Ray directly beneath the lab’s flooded docking chamber. Peering up through the sub’s cockpit, he inspects the interior of the illuminated hanger, his eyes searching for any telltale signs of problems.
“David?”
“Shh. Headphones. Listen!”
“What am I listening for?”
“Metal fatigue. Instability.”
She presses her headphones to her ears. “Some groaning and creaks, nothing worse than the sub. David, if we’re going in let’s go. Hovering along the bottom’s freaking me out.”
Thirty-one thousand feet above the submersible, Brian Suits operates the ROV from its laptop inside the Dubai Land I’s wheel house. He can see the Manta Ray on the barracuda’s night vision camera, the sub hovering below the flooded docking station, refusing to enter. “Come on, Taylor. What the hell are you waiting for?”
The other pilots huddle close by and watch, Jason Montgomery among them. Monty had come aboard an hour after David and Kaylie had departed. The Iraq war vet wonders if he will ever see his naive young friend again.
Brian yells over to the pilot manning the trawler radio. “Marcus, call down to Spiderman. Tell him to relay a message: The longer Taylor waits—”
“—the bigger the strain on the open dock hangar.”
“Roger that, James.” Kaylie stares at David, her pulse pounding in her slender neck. “David . . . yes or no?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then go with your gut. I trust you.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” David increases the air pressure within the sub’s cockpit, adding enough positive buoyancy to cause the Manta Ray to float straight up into the hangar.
Surrounded by thick titanium oval walls, they stare at their bizarre surroundings, praying it will not become their tomb.
Kaylie presses the red switch on the docking station controls, holding her breath.
Rusty metal grinds against barnacle traces scattered along the docking station’s titanium tracks as the horizontal doors seal shut beneath the submersible.
The internal lights flicker, then extinguish.
Darkness.
Silence, save for their heavy breathing.
David and Kaylie hold hands in the claustrophobic pitch, waiting for something, anything to happen. David’s skin tingles, beads of sweat trickling down his face, the tiny hairs along the back of his neck standing on end.
Come on . . . come on!
A heavy generator jumps to life . . . then dies.
A yellow warning light flashes on the docking station’s remote control.
Kaylie flicks it with her index finger. Presses the green button. No response. Presses the red button . . . nothing. “Shit! It’s jammed!”
The blood rushes from David’s face. “The system’s stuck in the middle of its cycle.”
“Then how do we get out of here?”
We don’t. We’re going to die down here, trapped in this titanium coffin. “Give the generator a chance,” he rasps.
Long minutes pass.
Sweat pours down David’s face, his pounding heart shaking his entire body. Was it a set-up? Allison Petrucci’s revenge against dad for killing Maren? Why the hell did you trust them? Dad said not to go, he said it was a suicide mission. Why didn’t you fucking listen!
Clunky mechanical noises echo all around them as the backup generator kicks in. The lights return, the walls humming with life as powerful pumps activate, causing the titanium oval walls to shudder.
Water drains from the chamber.
The Manta Ray comes to rest on a porous secondary floor.
David is about to begin the process of unsealing the cockpit when Kaylie grabs his arm. “Not yet.” She points to a red warning light in the hangar, indicating the docking station has not pressurized.
They unhook their harnesses and stretch, the two of them shaken from the harrowing descent and what may lie ahead.
“No telling if the life support systems in Maren’s lab are functioning. Kaylie, reach under your seat. You’ll find a pony bottle and breather.”
A loud humming sound fills their ears as pressurized air is pumped inside the chamber.
The docking station’s warning lights turn green.
David holds his breath, his hand trembling over the cockpit release control. Please God, don’t splatter our brains across the windshield.
The hatch pops open twenty seconds later with a suction-like hiss.
David lies back in his seat. “Let’s make this fast.”
Gently, they climb out of the cockpit, sliding down the sub’s wings to the wet floor. Situated overhead and welded to the oval hangar is the lab’s immense titanium sphere, its rounded bottom serving as the docking station’s ceiling.
Kaylie ascends the ladder and begins turning the hand wheel to open the watertight door—
—while David inspects the damaged starboard propulsion unit, surprised to find the deflector tunnel protecting the drive shaft and prop has cracked, wedging a section of the four-inch shattered acrylic against the prop blades.
Kaylie loosens the hand wheel and tugs open the hatch—
—the pressure differential between the docking station and the interior of the lab causing the chamber’s titanium oval walls to shudder.
David and Kaylie stare at one another as if caught in an earthquake. “Go! Do what you have to do. I’m needed here!”
She nods. Fixing the pony bottle’s mask over her face, she crawls up into the lab, sealing the hatch behind her.
The docking station stops trembling.
David sets to work on the propeller.
Motion sensors activate the lab’s interior lights and life support system. A whoosh of stale air pushes out from dozens of vents, filling the habitat.
Kaylie peels off her mask and looks around.
The sphere is divided into two floors, the lower level containing two bunk beds, a port-o-potty and shower, kitchen area, water heater and cooling system, and a life support system plumbed into a large water tank and two generators. Lights on the backup unit indicate it is functioning.
Living quarters. Keep going. She climbs an aluminum ladder to the upper deck.
Work stations divide the area into a lab, sonar station, radio, and a computer. Shelves are lined with books, the walls covered in maps and drawings of assorted prehistoric sea creatures. She glances at a few then pauses to look out the dark viewport.
Come on, you’re wasting precious time. . . .
Opening a file cabinet, she searches for Maren’s charts of the Panthalassa Sea.
David squats by the starboard prop, using a monkey wrench to pry loose the damaged acrylic housing—
—pausing as he feels a low, rumbling tremor. Standing, he reaches out to touch the oval wall, his bones registering the thick double layers of titanium as they buckle within their structural frame.
“Jesus.”
He rushes back to the prop, tearing and twisting the hunk of shrapnel with every ounce of strength. Two minutes . . . three tops . . . or maybe seconds! Make it a minute . . . finish in one minute before these walls crush you like a beer can.
Kaylie locates two charts in a bottom filing cabinet. She rolls them up, turns to leave, then feels the low rumble coming from inside the docking station, building like an approaching tsunami.
David tears off the loosened debris. Climbs the ladder. Bangs on the lab’s hull with his wrench. “Kaylie! Now!”
The hatch pops open, causing the chamber floor to rumble, the porous secondary floor twisting beneath the sub. Kaylie tosses him the charts and slides down the ladder.
David hurtles over the Manta Ray’s wing, falling feet-first into the cockpit. He shoves the charts behind Kaylie’s seat as she flops inside, pressing the green switch on the docking station control. Nothing happens.
The infuriating yellow warning light blinks.
Metal groans. The oval wall before them indents for a frightening second then pops back into place, the depths demanding entry.
“David, we need to get inside the lab!”
He turns to look at the sphere, his mind debating—
—his eyes spotting the open hatch. A trip switch?
“Wait here!” He leaps out of the cockpit, races up the ladder and slams the hatch shut, spinning its hand wheel tight—
—causing the yellow light to cease blinking.
Kaylie presses the green button, sending fountains of seawater shooting up from the floor, soaking David as he leaps back inside the cockpit. She seals the hatch and they wait, the process taking a good twenty seconds—
—the titanium walls bowing inward, then out again, the battle tenuous, the chamber lights blinking, the water level rising fast over the Manta Ray.
David powers up the submersible, the two of them quickly strapping in as the chamber goes dark and the water level kisses the ceiling—
—opening the horizontal doors, offering the sea’s 14,031 pounds per square inch of pressure a toe-hold that crushes the titanium docking station as if it were made of aluminum.
The flooded chamber minimizes the pressure differential between the abyss and the hangar, staving off the implosion—
—the temperature differential inhaling ocean like a vacuum.
David jams both feet to the pedals, empowering the Manta Ray’s twin propellers. For a frozen moment technology battles Nature to a draw, the sub held in place against the incoming torrent—
—the propulsion units cavitating, creating its own vacuum.
The stressed titanium buckles, the chamber walls collapsing around them—
—the sudden shift in volume equalizing the pressure, releasing the sub.
The revving propellers catch the sea, hurtling the vessel down into the darkness! The sea floor leaps at them. David pulls back hard on both joysticks too late.
The burst of forward thrust burying the submersible bow-first in the silty bottom in bone-jarring silence.