She was relieved to see that Boberg had the watch. Kenji Nagasaka had yet to fully understand what was happening between her and Dokey, and he could be so dotish.
“Hi, Kim.”
“Hello, Fred.” She pointed to his windbreaker hanging on a hook on the back bulkhead. “May I borrow your coat?”
“Go right ahead.”
She pulled it on, then opened the door and went out on the port bridge extension.
Gripping the railing with both hands, she leaned into it and into the stiff breeze. The stars were countless, vivid points of light in which she could become lost. Blotting them out to the east, the moon at three-quarter strength had just cleared the horizon.
The dark sea appeared smooth, but she estimated that the waves were about four feet high between troughs. The twin hulls of the Orion cut through them with no noticeable effect on her stability. A fan-shaped spray of phosphorescence curved out from the bow wave of the port hull, below her. Watching the patterns formed could be mesmerizing, a hypnotic soothing of the soul and the mind.
In the back of her mind, however, she was still scanning through rows and rows of computer programming lines, an after-effect of the two hours she had spent debugging a program for Loudspeaker, the acoustic communications system. Leaving her work behind was not all that simple; sometimes it stayed with her for hours.
She tried to suppress the numbers and the programming phrases and just enjoy the beauty and the serenity of the night.
But her effort was interrupted when she noticed the lights low on the horizon ahead. She could see both red and green navigation lights, which meant the ship was coming directly at them, bow on.
Stepping back, she pulled the door to the bridge open.
“Fred, do you see that ship?”
“Yeah, Kim, I’ve been following it on radar for awhile. She’s about six miles off, now.”
“Shouldn’t we go around?”
“I pulled off a couple points, earlier, but she turned with us. We’ll just wait a little, and see what she decides to do. Nothing to worry about.”
Penny Glenn was aware of the bright blip on the matte green background of her radar screen. She had watched it alter course toward the north, and on impulse, she had shut down her autopilot and eased the helm to the left, keeping her bow directed toward it.
“You should give them a wider berth, Miss Penny,” Captain Billy Embers had said. He was sitting in the companion seat on the other side of the flying bridge, sipping from a steaming mug of coffee and taking bites out of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. She was certain Enders hated having her aboard, usurping up his control of her boat. He didn’t watch her like a hawk, but perhaps like an owl.
“You don’t have any adventure in your soul, Captain Billy. Here we are, a thousand miles from anywhere, in the middle of a big, beautiful ocean, and we see fellow humans. Don’t you want to know who they are?”
“I’d guess a freighter,” Enders said.
“Ah, Billy, guesses are no fun. Knowing for certain is what counts.”
That was one of the ways in which she assessed her job and her job performance.
The two vessels closed rapidly, and she estimated that the unknown ship was making over thirty knots, close to what her Mercedes diesels were putting out. It wasn’t a freighter or a tanker. Enders, who had been watching the radar screen along with her, had known that. He was probably leery of pirates or smugglers, both of which were still strong possibilities in the twentieth century.
Once again, the unknown ship made a course correction, aiming to pass her to the north. Her running lights were clearer now, perhaps a half-mile away. Glenn watched her approach and did not turn again. There was no sense in totally alarming the foreign captain. Or Billy Enders, for that matter.
The moon was higher in the sky, and visibility had improved a trifle, but not sufficiently to make an identification. In the rack at her right were binoculars and a military surplus Starscope. She lifted the Starscope out of the holder, held it to her eye, and leaned over the helm to train it on the other boat.
The nightscope gathered ambient light and used it to enhance images. With the clear sky and the available starlight, the image that suddenly appeared for her was clearly that of a fair-sized ship, with a greenish-tinged hull, the green tint the product of the Starscope.
No. Closer inspection revealed that there were two hulls. A catamaran. While the nightscope didn’t reveal true colors, she noted that a dim band of color ran diagonally up the superstructure.
Glenn smiled for herself. She knew the ship. That is, she had seen pictures of it.
She waited until it had passed abeam, half-a-mile off her port side, then spun the helm to the left, to pass behind it, cutting her wake.
“Miss Penny?” Billy Enders said, some alarm edging his voice.
“Don’t you want to meet our neighbors, Captain Billy?”
Brande was back in the first booth with Emry, scanning the map that Emry had composed from all of his sources and loaded into the computer. There had been some earlier concern on Brande’s part that Emry’s requests for information from the wide range of universities and institutes might make some people curious about their intentions when he didn’t want curious bystanders. Emry, however, had worded his requests to include a much larger region than they actually needed. No one would pinpoint their destination.
After compiling one master map with the details from previous explorations of the area, Emry had scanned it electronically and loaded it into the ship’s computers, making a backup copy via satellite link on the mainframe computer at MVU headquarters in San Diego. The geographical coordinates Hampstead had obtained from the seismic people were indicated with red crosses and he had labeled them for the site numbers the two of them had assigned.
To the southeast was their own blip — a ship-shaped yellow symbol, imposed by a data link between Emry’s system and the ship’s navigation computers. Using the provided information, the computer provided calculated information in a small box in the upper right corner of the screen:
DISTANCE TO TARGET:276 nm
TIME TO TARGET:09:17:46
“With the progress we’re making, let’s call it 0900 hours in the morning for the first dive, Dane. We’re going to be about an hour ahead of projections, but let’s use the hour for preparation.”
“That’s good for me, Larry.”
The intercom buzzed, and Brande lifted the receiver from its cradle on the bulkhead. “Brande.”
“It’s Connie, Dane. Fred called me to the bridge because we have a visitor.”
“They didn’t phone first? How rude,” Brande said.
“She just now called on the radio, and she wants to meet you. Your fame is international.”
Alvarez-Sorenson’s tone suggested that this was not a good idea.
“Who is she?”
“Penelope Glenn, from New Zealand. That’s all she said. Do you know her?”
“Never heard of… wait a minute.” Brande flushed his memory, caught a glimmer of recognition, then framed the name, though he could not put a face with it.
“I’ve seen the name on some oceanographic papers delivered to conferences, Connie. I think her background is geology. Hold on, and I’ll come up.”
By the time he reached the bridge, Brande had also remembered that Penelope Glenn worked for AquaGeo, and was in fact a high-ranking executive with Deride’s company. He was less certain he wanted to make her acquaintance.