“Anybody have any ideas on how we might get out of here before we drown?” Glinn asked.
“No,” said McFarlane in a low voice.
“I do,” said Wong.
“Now’s the time to tell us.”
“We find out how the worms got in here. And we go out that way.”
“That’s right,” said Garza. “And we know how the worms got in here: through the ventilation shafts. Even a hold as deep as this one—especially one this deep—has to have serious ventilation.”
Glinn heard Garza rise and begin feeling along the slanted bulkhead of the lazarette, tapping the walls. There was a hollow bang.
“Here it is,” he said. “And here’s a gasket. Just follow the sound of my voice. We’ll crawl out of here.”
69
GIDEON SWAM BACK from unconsciousness, racked with pain. It took a few minutes for him to think through what had happened and realize he wasn’t dead.
The DSV was still floating on the surface of the ocean, but it was now upside down. His chair was on the ceiling, its straps loose and dangling. Something was wrong with his arm, and when he examined it he saw the ugly, shocking sight of a bone sticking out of his forearm, oozing blood. The interior of the sphere was wrecked, glass and wire everywhere, the acrid smell of smoke hovering in the dead air. The only light came in through the viewports.
But…the shell was intact and he was alive.
The sub had been battered severely by the shock wave, but the titanium hadn’t been breached. He could see, outside the starboard viewport, the R/V Batavia, about two miles away. It was listing in the water, no longer moving. Even as he watched, the list grew more pronounced and he could see that the ship was launching orange lifeboats.
Dead air. He took a deep breath, felt a wave of dizziness. As he surveyed the interior wreckage of the sub, he saw that all life-support systems were dead. His only air was what was already inside the shell, and he’d been breathing it now for several minutes, perhaps even longer. It felt like the oxygen levels were dropping, as he was panting—or maybe that was due to the horrible pain of his broken arm.
He needed to get out. And that meant climbing down and exiting from below; since the DSV was floating upside down, its only hatch was on the bottom. He hoped to God the force of the explosion hadn’t warped the hatch, trapping him inside…
Pushing aside all thoughts of anything but escape, he tried to move. His head was splitting, he was bruised and cut all over; glass was in his hair, blood was trickling into his eyes, and his arm was a fright. Every movement was excruciating.
He had to immobilize that arm if he hoped to be able to do anything. And he had to do it quickly, before he fainted from shock. Using his good arm, he managed to unbutton, then pull off his shirt. Gasping through the pain, he lashed the broken arm against his abdomen, keeping it in place. Clearing away debris with his good arm, he unsealed the hatch and—thank God—managed to open it. Water did not rush in—the air in the personnel sphere had nowhere to escape, and it formed a sort of bubble. The water was going to be cold, around fifty degrees.
So be it.
He eased himself down into the water until it was chest-deep. The shock of the cold took away some of the pain in his arm. The upper, flimsier personnel hatch was gone—lost in the shock wave. All he had to do was hold his breath, dive down and out, and then surface.
Which he did.
He came up next to the mangled, half-submerged DSV. He grasped a projecting piece of metal and managed to crawl up out of the frigid water, where he stretched out atop the wrecked mini sub. There were plenty of handholds, which was good, because the seas were heavy and the sky scudding with dark clouds, the storm wind rising. God, he was cold.
But as he lay atop the bobbing Pete, shivering, he marveled that he was alive at all. It would be a shame if he died now. And just as he had that thought, he heard a sound, and a plane flew overhead, waggling its wings at the sinking Batavia and dropping flares and signal buoys.
He didn’t know if the blast had destroyed the Baobab. Chances were, the force of the detonation—impeded as it was from inside the Rolvaag’s hull—hadn’t been sufficient for the liquid-liquid explosion. But he did know one thing: they were all going to be rescued. And he had survived—at least, for the time being.
And then Gideon passed out.
Epilogue
GIDEON CREW, ONE arm in a cast fitted with a sling, strolled down Little West 12th Street in the now chic Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan. Arriving at the nondescript main entrance to Effective Engineering Solutions, he waited under the eye of the security camera until he was buzzed through the outer door. He walked along a drab, painstakingly monochromatic exterior hallway, and was buzzed through the inner door and into the building proper.
Ahead of him lay the cavernous space he knew so welclass="underline" a vast room, four stories high, with catwalks running around various levels of its periphery. Its main floor was taken up with a wide assortment of 3-D models, whiteboards, computers, bioelectric and biomechanical setups, and freestanding clean rooms draped with plastic. Technicians in lab coats walked here and there, making notes on tablet computers or speaking together in small groups.
Only one thing was missing, and Gideon knew what it was. The huge display of the Baobab and its surrounding ocean bed—which previously had taken up a good deal of the central section of the floor—was gone. In fact, everything related to the project seemed to have disappeared—completely.
“Dr. Crew?” A man in a business suit came up to him. “They’re waiting for you upstairs. Please follow me.”
Gideon followed the man to a nearby elevator, and they rode to the sixth floor. The man led the way through various white-painted corridors to an unmarked door, then opened it and ushered him through.
Gideon found himself in a large, tall space he had not been in before. It appeared to be a lecture hall, with a dozen curved rows of seats stretching up and back—in the form of a Greek amphitheater—from a low platform that stood at the front. Small skylights, set into the high ceiling, afforded views of the blue December sky. Behind the front platform lay a long wall of electronic and mechanical equipment, discreetly housed behind panels of smoked glass. A large model sat on a table atop the platform.
The man closed the door behind him and Gideon made his way down the aisle. Ranged around in the chairs of the two-hundred-seat hall were several familiar faces: Manuel Garza; Rosemarie Wong, the sonar and marine acoustics assistant—and Sam McFarlane. McFarlane was seated in the front row, stretched out, ankles crossed in front of him. Seeing Gideon approach, the meteorite hunter gestured at him, whether in greeting or dismissal Gideon couldn’t be sure.
He had of course seen all of these people, one-on-one and in passing, during their recovery from injury and exposure, and at the various debriefings that had taken place. But this was the first time he had seen all of them together since the dramatic rescue, complicated by heavy seas, of the survivors of the Batavia.
Taking a seat in the second row beside Rosemarie, Gideon looked more closely at the model on the table. It appeared to be another re-creation of the seabed: the site of the Rolvaag’s sinking and the sprouting of the Baobab. However, this one was quite different from the initial model. Instead of the horrible, sprouting thing, there was a massive, ragged hole in the seafloor, as if it had suffered the impact of a giant’s fist. It reminded Gideon of Aklavik, the unusual meteorite crater McFarlane had described witnessing in northern Canada: except on a far larger, indeed gigantic scale.