“I’m just trying to understand,” he said with barely maintained calm. “You see, a good friend died.”
“Look, I get it. I get that you’re freaked out. I’m sorry about what happened. But don’t come in here telling me my job. I’m way ahead of you.”
“Then how about filling me in on where you are? I would appreciate that very much.” Someday he would kick this son of a bitch’s ass all the way to the South Pole—but not just now.
“Thank you.” Prothero scratched his arm again, like an ape. Gideon waited, letting the silence build.
“I’ve been working on the physics of how that message was actually transmitted through the water. And here’s where I’m at.”
He fell silent.
“Go on,” Gideon said after a minute.
“It’s weird as shit.”
“How so?”
“It was digital.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know the difference between analog and digital sound waves? One looks smooth, while the other is made up of individual samples. Time slices. Little steps, like a staircase. This one was digital. And the wave was constructed to pass through water so it would sound normal when it emerged from the speaker, back in the air, the way it did coming out of your hydrophone.”
“But…how?”
Another shrug. “No biological system produces digital sound. Or digital anything. Only electronics do that. And that blue whale vocalization? Also digital. It came from the Baobab—not from above.”
“The Baobab made a blue whale sound? Digitally?”
“Yup.”
“So…this thing isn’t alive? It’s a machine? It’s like—recording audio signals and playing them back at us?”
“Who knows what the hell it is, or what it’s doing?”
Gideon stared at the engineer. “We don’t have to know what it is,” he said slowly, “to kill it.”
24
DEEP WITHIN THE belly of the R/V Batavia, inside an unnamed and unlabeled storage area that was always kept carefully locked, Manuel Garza stood, examining the massive steel racks that held the partially assembled pieces of the bomb. It was all here, everything but the plutonium core, which was in a secret, shielded vault in another location. As he looked over the tidy racks with their components, carefully sealed and vacuum-packed in silvered plastic, and sitting in custom-made Styrofoam cradles, he felt concerned. He did not like the way Gideon, after showing no interest for weeks, had suddenly, angrily, insisted on seeing the nuke. It struck him as primevaclass="underline" the vengeful warrior seeking comfort in the presence of his weapons. Since the death of Lispenard, he knew, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. It had become grim and purposeful. Under ordinary circumstances, that would not necessarily be a bad thing—but Garza was concerned nevertheless. He was deeply suspicious of vengeance as a motive, and he did not believe that the life-form they were going to kill should be thought of as an enemy any more than, say, a grizzly bear or a virus should. The hungry bear did what it did; the virus did what it did. And this thing did what it did, too. There was no intelligence about it, he was sure; just instinct.
The turning of a key; the undogging of the hatch; and then Glinn was in the room, Gideon at his side.
“Here it is,” said Garza. “It’s all sealed up—nothing much to see.”
He watched as Gideon silently moved past him, staring at the bomb. He reached out and touched the plastic. “This looks pretty small for a nuke,” he said after a moment.
“It’s an efficient one,” said Glinn. “Originally the payload for an R7 Semyorka ICBM.”
“Soviet-era.”
“Of course.”
“How did you get it?”
“We already told you all you need to know about that.”
“The yield?”
“About one hundred kilotons.”
“Weight?”
“One forty kilograms.”
“How big is the plutonium pit?”
“Twenty kilograms. Oval.”
He watched Gideon run his hand along the plastic. “What type of trigger?”
“It’s got a polonium-210 initiator.”
“Jesus. I can’t believe you were able to get all this. Makes me worried about where the rest of those old Soviet bombs are ending up.”
“There is much to worry about. But that’s a problem for another day and someone else.”
Gideon withdrew his hand. “Was it expensive?”
“Extremely.”
“And how has it been modified for underwater use?”
“The obvious engineering challenge,” said Glinn, “was dealing with water pressure. We plan to put it inside a small titanium sphere and send it down in an ROV, operated remotely. We have an ROV specifically designed for that task, in fact, standing by in the hangar.”
“I see. And how will the weapon be deployed?”
“That, Gideon, is your department. You’re the expert on modeling nuclear explosions. No one’s ever detonated a bomb two miles deep, in water pressure four hundred times that of the surface. We want to make sure it’s maximally destructive.”
Gideon looked from Glinn to Garza and back again. “You’re talking about a massive computational problem.”
“Yes. And we have the computing power on board to do it. A Q machine.”
Gideon said, “The explosion has to wipe that thing out completely, leaving nothing that could take root and grow again. So we need to know where it’s most vulnerable, where its vital organs are, how its tissue might respond to the bomb’s effects. It wouldn’t do any good to blow it apart if all the pieces just drifted to the seafloor and re-rooted themselves.”
“You clearly understand the problem,” said Glinn. “It might be as simple as killing the brain. On the other hand, it might be as complex as atomizing the entire Baobab.”
Gideon turned to Garza. “I want to start assembling this as soon as possible.”
“Hold on,” said Garza. “We’ve got a long way to go before we’re ready to nuke this thing.”
“We need to put the son of a bitch together and have it ready to go at a moment’s notice. We’ve no idea what that thing’s going to do.”
“As soon as we start opening these packages,” Garza replied, “we’ll be dealing with high explosives, fragile computer components, and a hunk of deadly plutonium. And having an armable nuclear weapon on board the ship for an extended period is dangerous as hell.”
“What’s dangerous as hell is sitting here with a useless nuke, unable to defend ourselves if that thing figures out what we’re up to and decides to take us out.”
“That thing isn’t going to ‘figure out’ anything,” said Garza. “It’s not an intelligent life-form. Probably a plant or some kind of giant anemone.” Garza felt exasperated; this was Gideon letting his emotions take over, letting his thirst for vengeance drive his thinking.
“We’ve no idea what kind of intelligence this thing has,” said Gideon. “If that dark thing I saw is its brain, it’s pretty damned big—bigger than yours,” he added drily.
“Having a live nuke on board the ship,” said Garza, “is insane. What if a storm comes up? What if a component fails? What if the device is jarred or struck by lightning?” He turned to Glinn.
“Gideon wants to assemble it,” Glinn said. “Not arm it. And don’t forget the fail-safe. That should allay your concerns.”
“What fail-safe?” asked Gideon.
“The three of us—and only the three of us—will have the code to arm the nuke and start the detonation sequence. But as a precaution, we also have a code to abort it, should we jointly or singly determine that using the device is an unsound idea.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Garza said. “We’re not on a military base. We’re on a ship full of civilians. The security here is porous. As engineer in chief, I strongly recommend against assembling the nuke until just before we need to use it.”