The submarines made their ways out of San Diego Bay on the surface, and the first leg was generally rough. Once into open sea, and submerged to a level of one hundred feet, most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersibles could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip to Ocean Deep was usually accomplished in about an hour. Out of Los Angeles, whenever they arranged for porting facilities, it would be seventy minutes.
He and Dokey flopped into seats on the opposite sides of the narrow aisle as Zendl took on ballast and the sub began to settle into the sea. The relatively mild wave motion decreased, and Voyager II felt increasingly stable.
“The trouble with this job,” Dokey said, “is the more we accomplish, the less we get to do.”
“Agreed, Okey. Figure out another project for us.”
“Done.”
Dokey liked to get his hands dirty, delving into the innards of robots or diving on the sea’s treasures. In that respect, he and Brande were exactly alike. Brande had, at one time or another, fulfilled his wish list for sky diving, race car driving, scuba diving, and a few other adrenaline producing pursuits.
One of the benefits, he had learned, of relinquishing the president’s position in favor of Rae Thomas was more freedom to pursue the on site activities of MVU’s mining, agricultural, and seabed living experiments. Still, many of those projects were manned by experts in the fields, and Brande didn’t want to encroach on their territories.
The deck tilted forward, and the sunlight filtering through the water dimmed. Humming lightly, the electric motors drove them downward as Zendl added to his ballast load.
Voyager descended in a wide spiral, finding the sea bottom several minutes later.
Zendl called back through the open hatchway, “They’ve deployed Turtle.”
“Give us a look, will you, Ron?” Brande said.
The submarine drifted to a stop, and Brande leaned close to his porthole. Dokey crossed the aisle to the seat behind him.
Neptune’s Daughter was just rising from the sandy seabed after deploying the robot from the sheath beneath her hull. A gaggle of silver and orange fished darted across her path, and a lazy sea bass looked on with disapproval.
The two man mini submarine, devised and built in MVU’s San Diego shops was intended only for tasks that could be accomplished at depths of less than one thousand feet. In side by side lounge seats, her two operators had a fair view of their environment from within an aircraft like canopy. Less than twenty feet long, the sub was normally used as the control platform for tethered robots, in this case, Turtle.
Turtle had never been given a more exotic title. Like Gargantua, the heavy mover, Turtle had come to be known by a male appellation. Most sea craft were provided with feminine pronouns, but Turtle had always been Turtle, possibly in deference to his squat, solid physique.
He had a heavy metal body and two sets of rubber cleated tracks, giving him the image of a down sized battlefield tank. Guided by the operator in the sub through the Kevlar shielded fibre optic cable, he crawled along the bottom, waving his hands in front of him. A small rotatable housing on the top of the body contained cameras for remote viewing of the work performed by his three manipulator arms, also attached to the movable housing. Each arm had a reach of twelve feet and a specific duty cutting and welding operations, gripping and lifting, and spinning. The spinnable wrist simplified the task of installing bolts and nuts. Seabed crawling robots had leverage; they had footing. Robots suspended in the water relied on the power of their thrusters for leverage, and frequently they were found wanting.
Leverage was a basic principal that Brande had learned, or re learned, in agony when he had been unable to pry the crane boom away from Janelle and had been forced to watch her drown.
Now he watched Turtle trundle across the uneven seabed, skirting some deep depressions and swirling the leaves of a clump of seaweed as he passed. His control tether trailed after him like an exotic sea snake, and his three manipulator arms were folded in front of him like those of a mutant praying mantis.
When he reached the anchor fitting attached midway down the buoy’s line, he stopped, and his central arm extended. The hand, composed of two curving fingers at the top and one opposed thumb at the bottom, gently closed on the fitting and raised it from the sea floor. The tracks dug in and began to spin, raising a mini cloud of particulates. Turtle started moving again, dragging the fitting and its attached cable toward the anchoring pier, which was seventy yards away.
The mini sub trailed along behind the robot, providing the brains and the guidance for the operation.
“Love that guy,” Dokey said.
Brande did, too. Now, after two years of nearly glitch free trials with Turtle, the San Diego shops were producing his brothers on order for sale to mining and drilling operations. The cost of his development had already been recovered, and the profit column on that particular project was beginning to show positive numbers.
Revenue production was one of Marine Visions’ shortfalls. In the nearly nine years of their existence, they hadn’t yet reported a profit on total operations.
They watched Turtle at work for a few more minutes, then Brande called to Zendl, “Take us on in, Ron.”
“On the way, Chief.”
Voyager II slipped into forward motion, and Brande leaned closer to the porthole to get a glimpse of what Rae Thomas called Disneyland West. Brande thought of it as a revenue producer, designed and built solely to compete with tourist attractions like Sea World and Universal Studios. He didn’t particularly want to be in the entertainment business, and he thought of the project as one which, first, demonstrated MVU’s capabilities and, second, created income to support the loftier goals of exploration and scientific experimentation.
The domes came into view.
There were three of them, oversized and connected by twelve foot long cylindrical tunnels. Each of the domes rose one hundred feet above steel piers imbedded in the sea floor, and each was two hundred feet in diameter. The two end domes had airlocks and docking facilities on their lower sides, between the stabilizing legs.
Kim Otsuka had told him that she thought they looked like spider plants. An olive colored plastic imbedded with carbon fiber made up the hub, at the top of each dome. The super strong carbon fiber material was also used in the curved beams that radiated from the tops down to the bases of the domes. There were four horizontal rows of thinner structural beams, and the spaces between the structural members was filled with a translucent plastic that had also been strengthened with carbon.
The design, the construction, and the materials used had been tested for over four years on Harbor One, MVU’s first sealab, and Brande had utter confidence in the reliability of the engineering.
The official name of the complex, a separate corporation owned by Marine Visions, was Ocean Deep, though it was not actually very deep. Located thirty miles west of San Diego and about thirty five miles south-southwest of Los Angeles, the complex was two hundred feet below the surface, its foundation legs embedded in the Patton Escarpment. The tourists were to be given a thrill, not put at extreme risk.
The domes had been designed for specific functions. One would house marine theme amusement rides aimed at youngsters, one would contain museums and galleries, and one would focus on marine life. And still, Brande would avoid direct contact with the entertainment aspects. The company would own the complex, the transportation system, and the operating systems, but subcontractors would operate the internal businesses. The sub-leases were slowly being finalized, since the insurance underwriters had agreed to terms two months before.