“Sam, you haven’t brought me anything I could use in years. Not since that…that expedition to wherever it was. Bring me something good and I’ll pay you well, really well—”
“I told you never to mention that expedition!” McFarlane said, rage finally breaking through the dam. He swept the box off the counter to the floor, the meteorites flying and rattling everywhere.
Culp rose. “I’m sorry, Sam, but I think you should leave now.”
“With pleasure. And you can go ahead and keep that shit on the floor, I don’t want it. Give it away to your rich fucking clients or use it for fucking paperweights. Jesus, what a ripoff artist!”
McFarlane seized his suitcase and climbed the stairs in a fury, emerging onto the street. But the sudden bright light dazed him, and already he felt his fury subsiding. Son of a bitch, he needed those meteorites he’d left scattered on the floor—those were his best. He didn’t even have enough money to buy a cup of coffee. He felt a sudden overwhelming shame for his outburst. The guy wasn’t in the charity business. And McFarlane knew, underneath it all, that Joe was right: the meteorites he had were run-of-the-mill specimens. The trip to Russia had been a bust—other meteorite hunters had already cleaned out the good stuff, and he was left buying the shit everyone else had rejected. Joe had helped him before, advanced him money, financed his trips…He owed the guy five thousand dollars and Joe hadn’t even brought it up.
After a long, burning hesitation, McFarlane turned and headed back down into the shop. Joe was just putting the last of the meteorites back into the shoe box. He silently handed it to McFarlane.
“Joe, I’m really sorry, I don’t know what got into me—”
“Sam, I’m your friend. I think you need to get some help.”
“I know. I’m a mess.”
“You need a place to stay tonight?”
“No, I’m good, don’t worry about it.” McFarlane put the shoe box back into his roller bag, zipped it up, and manhandled it back up the stairs, mumbling a good-bye. Back in the street he wondered where he was going to get the money for a meal and a place to spend the night. Maybe he could get away with sleeping in Cathedral Park again.
He felt a vibration and realized his cell phone was ringing. He pulled it out, wondering who was calling him. He hadn’t had a call in days.
The caller ID said DEARBORNE PARK. Where the hell was that?
“Hello?”
“Is this Dr. Samuel McFarlane?” came the voice on the other end.
“Yes.”
“Please hold the line a moment. There’s someone here who’d like to speak with you.”
20
EVENING LIGHT RAKED the deck of the R/V Batavia, casting golden lines and shadows. An iceberg, drifting past the ship, was lit from behind by the setting sun, its edges glittering in fractures of turquoise and gold. The surface of the ocean was like a polished sheet, the air utterly still. The peacefulness of the scene, knowing how Alex would have appreciated it, struck Gideon as grotesque as he walked through the double doors into the fluorescent-lit darkness of the DSV hangar.
The entire ship’s complement had gathered in the cavernous hangar, oddly empty with the two DSVs from the morning dive still on deck for maintenance—while of course the third was gone. The hangar was necessary, because there was no conference room big enough to accommodate everyone.
Wordlessly, Gideon took up a position next to Glinn and Garza, standing and facing the group. The silence was absolute, but the atmosphere was anything but calm: the air was electric with tension. Gideon himself was numb with shock, unable to process what had happened on an emotional level, although—intellectually—it was all too horribly clear. He scanned the sea of faces, looking angrily for Lennart, who had overridden his attempted rescue of Alex. The chief officer was standing with Captain Tulley, Chief of Security Bettances, and a clump of other senior officers, staring carefully at nothing. He knew she had done the right thing—his actions were impulsive, self-destructive—but he nevertheless felt impotent rage mingling with the grief.
Beside him, Glinn stood motionless, more of a cipher than ever. According to the scuttlebutt among the officers, he had apparently had a breakdown in mission control upon seeing the video of Captain Britton; he had been below in sick bay when the accident occurred. But he’d quickly recovered and now looked normal—or rather, normal for him, with his face having resumed its mask-like detachment. He was dressed in khaki pants and a beige short-sleeved shirt, his gray eyes looking out from underneath a smooth, seemingly untroubled brow.
Gideon glanced at his watch: five PM sharp. As usual, Glinn began the meeting on the very second, stepping forward.
“I want to apologize for my temporary incapacitation,” he said, his voice cool.
This was met with an intense silence.
“More important: I am terribly, terribly sorry about what happened to Alex Lispenard. I know you all liked and respected her, and that you all share my grief. It is a tragedy for this ship and for this mission. But right now, the best way we can honor her memory is by pushing ahead with our work.”
Another silence.
“Her death was not in vain. We successfully retrieved the black boxes from the Rolvaag. The boxes were hardened against many kinds of potential damage, including explosion and extreme water pressure. Unfortunately, it appears that at the moment of sinking, something caused a massive EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—to course through the ship. The boxes were electromagnetically shielded, but that EMP blew through the shielding and the storage media was compromised. The data is salvageable, at least most of it, but it will be a delicate, painstaking process. Hank Nishimura is handling data recovery.”
Nishimura, a tall, thin, and alarmingly young-looking fellow, wearing a white lab coat over a loud Hawaiian shirt, gave a little nod.
“I’ll now turn the floor over to Dr. Garza, who will provide a postmortem on the loss of Paul.”
Garza stepped forward, his dark face furrowed with controlled emotion. “I won’t sugarcoat things. This is tough for all of us. We’re going to show you the footage we were able to recover from Alex Lispenard’s DSV, which wasn’t much: only the low-res video feed had been uploaded before the sub was lost. In addition, all the LiDAR data was lost. We have some footage of the last moments of Paul taken from the camera of John, which was nearby, piloted by Dr. Crew. My own DSV, George, was too far away to capture anything beyond the UQC audio feed. Dr. Nishimura is going to run this video and audio now, without comment. Discussion will follow.”
He turned and a two-hundred-inch UHC flat-screen monitor, commandeered from mission control, flickered into life.
Gideon turned to watch reluctantly. The trunk of the Baobab appeared, in low resolution, translucent in the spectral light, giving off a greenish glow. The vantage point was from the Paul as it circled the upper part of the trunk, shining its headlights at the entity. The light disclosed a dark object enclosed in a jelly-like sac, perhaps a foot and a half long, but with a strange, convoluted surface, wrapped by what looked like engorged veins. But the resolution was low and the object blurry and pixelated, and he could make out no specific details.
Now Alex’s voice broke in. Control, this is Paul. I see something unusual at the fork of the trunk. Something dark.
Okay, we see it, too, came the voice of Chief Officer Lennart.
Nishimura froze the video, showing the object encased near the fork of the trunk, digitally enhanced.