Gideon took a deep breath. “They told me it would be rough.”
“There’ll be plenty of that, don’t worry.”
The ship had now slowed to almost a stop, and Gideon could feel the faint vibration of the deck as the engines began to work first one way, then another.
“Feel that?” Alex asked. “That’s the dynamic positioning system being activated. We’ve arrived. The ship will hold a steady position from now on, right here, no matter what the currents or winds do. You’ll feel the azimuthing jet stopping and starting from time to time.”
Gideon nodded. Staring down at the cold, blue-black water he felt a shiver, thinking of what lay beneath his feet, thinking that he’d be going down there—almost two miles. It filled him with dread.
“Yeah,” said Alex, “it’s right below us now, I guess.”
“Not exactly below,” said Gideon. “We’re about half a mile offset—for safety’s sake.” He knew this from all the cramming he’d been doing in his briefing book. He had also dined a few times at the captain’s table, where Glinn and Garza also frequently sat, and he had picked up a lot of information about the project that way as well. But he still felt uninformed, and it annoyed him.
He checked his watch. “Walk you down to the briefing?” he asked.
“Sure.” He felt her body moving next to his as they descended the companionway to mission control, the electronic nerve-center of the ship.
They were early, but Glinn was already waiting on the briefing platform, flipping through a sheaf of papers. During the voyage south, the man had continued to heal, almost miraculously, before Gideon’s very eyes. Far from the once-crippled figure in a wheelchair, now he no longer needed even a cane to support himself.
Glinn motioned for Gideon to join him on the platform. Reluctantly disengaging himself from Alex’s warm grasp, he stepped up.
“What is it?” he murmured.
“I might need some assistance in this briefing from the EES slacker in chief,” Glinn replied.
“How do you know about that?” Gideon demanded. But Glinn’s only reply was a wintry smile.
The seating area in the center of the room began to fill with the more senior members of the ship’s crew and scientific personnel. It was an impressive space, oval in shape, crammed with high technology. The walls were covered with giant LCD screens, most of which were now dark. These screens could supposedly display feeds from a host of underwater cameras, Deep Submersible Vehicles, ROVs, satellite downlinks, shipboard radar and sonar, GPS and chartplotters. There were rows of computer workstations and large, sweeping consoles festooned with dials, buttons, keypads, and small LCDs, along with so much else that Gideon could hardly keep it straight. Mission control looked like it came straight out of a science-fiction movie.
The meeting hour arrived and a hush fell over the murmuring group. Looking out, Gideon recognized many faces: Captain Tulley, as colorless, respectable, and duty-bound as they came, sitting in the front wearing an impeccably pressed uniform; and next to him Chief Officer Lennart. Gideon had come to like her quite a bit: she reminded him of a Nordic goddess, a giant blonde, but with a down-to-earth personality, someone who, when off duty, appreciated dirty jokes and seemed to have an endless store of them. She had a low, resonant laugh that was truly infectious and a subversive, bad-girl attitude. At the same time, she had a distinct Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, becoming scarily professional when on duty and projecting an almost supernatural level of competence. Directly behind the captain and chief officer sat the ship’s chief engineer, Moncton, and the security chief, Eduardo Bettances.
And then, sitting in the back behind a scattering of scientists and technicians, was Prothero. He had forgotten Prothero’s first name, because nobody used it, especially Prothero himself. The man slouched in his chair in his usual faded T-shirt and jeans, Keds propped up on the chair in front, face partially hidden under an unruly mop of black curly hair. A tall, pretty Asian woman sat next to him. Prothero’s pale, moon-like face and receding chin with a silly tuft of hair seemed to float in the dim light of the instrumentation, his large eyes and lips glistening with excessive moisture. In every way, Gideon found Prothero to be an off-putting dude. Normally Gideon was attracted to nonconformists, but Prothero had met his friendly overtures with complaints about his berth, the ship’s lack of computing power, the lousy speed of the satellite Internet connection, and a host of other grievances, almost as if Gideon were the responsible party. Prothero was the expedition’s sonar specialist, said to have the largest collection of recorded cetacean communications and “songs” in existence. He was rumored to be deciphering their language. He never, however, spoke of this to anyone—at least, not so far as Gideon knew.
Glinn cleared his throat. “Greetings,” he said in a cool voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived on the target area. Let me welcome all of you to the Ice Limit.”
He paused for a smattering of applause.
“To be precise, we are at the shifting boundary of floating ice that surrounds the Antarctic Continent, at the edge of the Scotia Sea, about two hundred and fifty miles northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The wreck of the Rolvaag and the target object both lie in about thirty-five hundred meters of water more or less below us, in an area of the seafloor called the Hesperides Deep. Our position is 61°32′14″ South, 59°30′10″ West.”
Nobody was taking notes; it was all in their briefing books.
“As the Antarctic spring progresses, we will begin to see more and more icebergs start to calve in the warming waters. They offer much spectacle and little or no danger. The true danger here is the weather. We are in the Screaming Sixties, and even though it is spring, we will probably experience high winds and heavy seas from time to time.”
He walked slowly across the platform, then turned. “Our mission objectives are simple. We will study this alien life-form with the single goal of identifying how it is vulnerable in order to destroy it.” He paused, the emphasis on the last phrase hanging in the air. “We are not here to satisfy our own curiosity, to benefit science, or to enlarge our knowledge. We’re here to kill it.”
Another dramatic pause.
“Our first objective in the coming days will be to recover the two black boxes from the Rolvaag, which will contain vital information about the sinking of the ship, as well as video feeds of the meteorite in the hold and the actions of personnel on the bridge and other spaces in the last minutes of the ship’s existence. We will also map and survey the wreck—and the entity itself.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Gideon saw Prothero shift in his chair, flinging one leg over the other, his face propped up by one hand.
“The fact is, since arriving, we have already come face-to-face with a confounding mystery.” Glinn turned to one side and an LCD panel behind him popped into life, displaying a false-color image. “Here is a sonar image of the wreck of the Rolvaag, which we have just scanned in twenty-five-meter resolution. It’s rough, but you can see the ship is in two pieces on the seafloor, about fifty yards from each other. Tomorrow we will undertake an initial survey dive in a DSV.”
He turned.
“Now here is another sonar image of the area, two hundred yards to the south.”
Another image appeared on the LCD panel. This one was odd—blurry, a vague, almost fog-like swirl of colors.
“This is a sonar image of the life-form that we believe has grown from the so-called meteorite seed dropped on the seafloor.”
A silence.
“But there’s nothing there,” said a technician.