CHAPTER SEVEN
Kim Otsuka was beginning to feel tired, unlike her fellow diners in the wardroom. The buzz of their overlapping conversations was loud, expectant, and cheerful. They were excited about their prospects.
Not that she wasn’t eager, but she was, and always had been, an early riser. Four or five in the morning was when she felt really fresh, ready to attack problems and concepts. As a result, she was also ready for bed earlier in the evening than most of her colleagues.
Her sleep cycles did not match Dokey’s because, so far as she could tell, he did not have a definable cycle. He could nap at the most inopportune moments. On the hours-long descents or ascents in a submersible, if someone mentioned the word sleep, he was gone. On the other hand, he might also stay awake for seventy hours, pursuing some elusive glitch in a computer program, machining a prototype part, or designing a dozen or so of his T-shirt messages.
Tonight, they had dined later than usual after a long workday. Brande had insisted upon double- and triple-checking every electronic, hydraulic, and mechanical system. The sea was insidious, and moisture creeped into supposedly sealed chambers, attacking sensitive circuits, seals, and bearings. An unstable, salt-encrusted circuit board might fail just at the time it was most needed. Consequently, practically everyone aboard had been assigned to opening the compartments of Depthfinder, Sarscan, and the two Sneaky Petes and searching for faults with the naked eye, with cotton swabs, or with the probes of digital and analog test instruments.
And after that, they had examined every corresponding system aboard Orion which had any major or minor connection with the diving program. Computers, fiber-optic cables, communications systems, and even the deck-mounted mechanical winches had been thoroughly probed.
Her job with MVU had provided her with skills she had never planned on having as well as a number she had never desired to have. Since everyone did everything, she had learned to be, not only a computer scientist, but also a mechanic, a plumber, and an electrician. She took her turns in the galley. She swabbed decks, and she polished brass fittings. Her resume could list experiences in geology, mapping, and oceanography. She could operate the remote vehicles, and she felt comfortable in the pilot’s seat of Depthfinder. It was wonderful!
It was also fatiguing. The preparation for a dive was more time-consuming than the dive itself, and not only in safety and equipment checks, for which Brande was notoriously overzealous. Every minute of the dive was planned beforehand. Larry Emry had been engaged with his computer terminal all day, drawing information from databases around the world, via the satellite communications link.
Emry now had listings, graphs, or charts of prevailing weather for the dive site, expected current strength and direction at several of the known depths, and the known temperature variants. His on-board database now contained whatever maps of the seabed terrain he had been able to locate from government and private sources.
Emry and Brande had spent the late afternoon preparing a schedule of diving times and locations, and she, along with everyone else, was waiting for it to be divulged.
Paco Suarez, who had drawn duty as chef for the evening, and who had presented them with surprisingly delicious beef chimichangas, smothered under lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and spicy green chili, was moving among the tables, delivering sopapillas when Brande stood up at the table next to hers.
“Here we go,” Dokey said from his seat across the table from her.
“All right,” Brande said, “Larry and I thought we had this thing figured out, but just after lunch, I had a call from Hampstead. We’re now going to investigate an additional three sites, for a total of six. For mapping and reporting purposes, we have ingenuously decided to call them Site Number One through Site Number Six. Since we want to allow plenty of time on each site for exploration and mapping, we’re going to divide the program into two dives.”
“All right!” Mayberry yelped. “Do I get a shot?”
Brande grinned at him. “Yup, Bob, you do. On the first descent, I will be the dive commander, Kim will pilot, and you’ll do the monitoring.”
Otsuka could not resist a smile. She had been certain she would not have a chance to dive on this trip, especially since she had more or less forced Kaylene to add her name to the manifest.
“On the second descent,” Brande went on, “Rae will be in command, with Okey piloting, and Svetlana monitoring.”
Polodka, sitting next to her, poked her in the ribs with her elbow. She was smiling in anticipation. Dokey grinned at the Russian woman. Otsuka suspected, of course, that Brande had assigned himself and Dokey to the two different dives because of the long-time experience each of them had had. Not that Brande didn’t trust each of them, but he trusted Dokey more.
So did she.
Brande said, “Larry, fill us in on surface conditions, will you?”
Emry did not stand. He leaned back in his chair, wiped a dab of salsa from his moustache with his napkin, and said, “Fortunately, the winter storm pattern is not yet in place. Still, it’s not going to be balmy. We can expect seas running at six or seven feet, temperatures in the low forties, and wind out of the northwest fairly steady at ten knots. Dress warmly, kiddies.”
“And subsurface?” Brande asked.
“We’re not going into a fully explored region. Our charts will show the major seamounts and some damned rugged terrain, but there are still some canyons with depths that are only estimated. Dane and I expect that we’ll be operating in a range of seventeen to twenty thousand feet of depth.”
Otsuka knew the dangers of those depths. At only three hundred feet, about the maximum for a diver unprotected by a pressurized suit, the pressure was around 150 pounds per square inch. On an average man, it was similar to stacking 30,000 pounds on him. Twenty thousand feet down, an unprotected human body would exist for perhaps a millisecond.
Of some consolation was the fact that Depthfinder had successfully achieved over 23,000 feet during the Russian missile crisis, though not without some strain on her systems and on her crew.
Brande then briefed them on the timing, geographical coordinates, and expected depths. He outlined the responsibilities of those remaining aboard the ship. During the question-and-answer session after his briefing, they pinned down the equipment to be used as well as the types of video, film, and sonar recordings that would be made.
Brande finished by saying, “Now, we all know we have never, ever completed a project the way we planned it. Something always goes wrong, or the schedule goes haywire. The most important chore, then, is to be prepared for the unexpected. Let’s stay on our toes, and let’s all get plenty of sleep. And by the way, Paco, dinner was superb.”
Suarez beamed.
Otsuka finished the last of her milk, and then pushed her plate away.
Dokey asked, “Going up to the cabin, Kim?”
They had given up any pretense of keeping their relationship private a couple months before and were sharing a stateroom. When she had broached the subject of quarters with Kaylene, Kaylene had only said the arrangement was certainly more cost-effective.
“Not just yet. Half an hour.”
He smiled. Dokey was good at giving her the time she needed to be alone.
She left the wardroom and climbed the companionway to the bridge. Fred Boberg was tending the helm, which did not require much tending when they were on autopilot. He was also monitoring the radar repeater screen and the fathometer on the instrument panel.