At five miles out from the station, they had started seeing the tracks more and more frequently. They testified to the use the crawlers were getting.
“Oooops,” Dokey said. “I got a little close. The seabed’s climbing, Chief.”
“Gotcha.”
Brande eased back on the right control stick and followed the terrain as it increased altitude.
“Let’s back off on the speed, Okey.”
“Six knots good by you?”
“Seems prudent.”
Together, they reduced speed from the ten knots they had been holding for both vehicles.
Through the porthole, Brande’s view was of rock sentinels and heavily-silted sea bottom. Another set of tracks, this one older judging by the way the ocean current had drifted silt into it.
Then two more tracks, converging on each other, and following the direction they were heading.
“Another set of tracks,” Dokey said. “This is turning into a regular Chisholm Trail.”
Abruptly, the seabed leveled again.
“I’ve got them on the sonar,” Thomas said.
Brande looked at the waterfall display. As soon as they had topped the ridge, the sonar had found what they were looking for. The station was apparent on the screen, balanced on its thin legs.
“Two subs,” Thomas said, “and three floor crawlers.”
“I don’t suppose,” Dokey said, “you’d want to circle around and sneak in from the backside.”
“Is there a backside, Okey?”
“As soon as we came out of the sonar shadow, they picked us up,” Thomas said.
“You sure?” Dokey said.
“I’m sure. They’re coming after us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Stretched out on her bunk fully clothed, Penny Glenn had been napping when the buzzer of her wall-mounted intercom sounded off. She rolled over and hit the Talk key.
“Yes?”
“Penny, it’s Bert. Can you come down here?”
“On my way.”
The tinge of panic in Conroy’s voice urged her to speed, and she went through her doorway and down the spiral staircase at a trot.
In the control room, her eyes immediately checked the status board: Canberra was on the way to Test Hole J to collect samples. Perth was at Test Hole K. Melbourne was on the surface for her extensive repairs. Sydney and Brisbane were nearby, their crews sleeping aboard. There were three floor crawlers parked in the vicinity. FC-6 had been towed back from where it had been disabled and was in the process of being raised to the surface for replacement of her motor control cable aboard the Outer Islands Lady. Team Three was on the site of Test Hole L, drilling the hole for the explosive charge.
In the subsection of the status board for activities at Test Hole D, she noted that the sea station had been lowered to the seafloor, but was not yet anchored or manned. The nuclear reactor power supply was to be lowered today.
“What do you have, Bert?” she asked, taking a chair next to him at the main console.
He laid a forefinger against the upper right corner of the sonar display on his screen. “Right there, Penny.”
The elongated shape was moving slowly in the direction of AG-4, which was displayed as a gray circle in the center of the screen.
“Sub?”
“But it’s not one of ours. It appeared just a few minutes ago.”
“It’s got to be our friend Brande, then. Go wake up Mr. Deride.”
As he got up, Conroy said, “I’ve already alerted the sub and crawler crews. They’re taking up positions around the station.”
A defensive posture. AquaGeo Limited had never, and Penny Glenn had never, been anything but aggressive in their corporate and personal lives. She didn’t know why she should start changing now.
“Have you heard anything on their frequency, Bert?”
“Not much,” he said, headed for the doorway. “About an hour ago, there was a one-word message, ‘Glorify.’“
“Glorify?”
“Right. Some kind of code, I figured.”
She checked the station monitors and got a sense of Conroy’s paranoia. He had turned on all of the banks of exterior floodlights. The overhead camera was turning lazily in a circle, but not capturing much beyond the sixty feet of space illuminated by the lights. As she watched, the camera got a glimpse of the top of one of the floor crawlers, just starting to move. A few seconds later, it caught Sydney rising a few feet from her resting spot on the bottom. The monitoring video camera mounted outside the air lock showed Brisbane disengaging from the station.
Switching the acoustic transponder to the frequency utilized by Marine Visions, she pulled the desk microphone close and pressed the transmit button.
“DepthFinder, this is AG-4.”
The response was immediate, and even with the distortion of the acoustic system, she knew the voice was Brande’s.
“Dr. Glenn, I presume?”
“Are you snooping again, Dane?”
“I’m watching you,” he said.
She liked the thought of that — it set up a tingle of anticipation for the future, but she said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Penny, I don’t know what topics the legal artists are toying with, but I like my ocean the way it is. Irradiating it or blowing up sensitive geologic structures is not my idea of progress.”
“We’ll have to talk about progress sometime, Dane. For the present, though, I don’t think you’ll find much change in your ocean.”
“Have you measured the radiation?”
“Nothing there that won’t dissipate in a short time,” she said.
After a momentary pause, he said, “This could all be resolved easily if you’d shut down your operation for a few days.”
“That can’t happen, Dane. We don’t have all that taxpayer-supported scientific money to rely on; we have to stay on schedule.”
“Whose schedule?”
“My boss’s, of course. Everybody has a boss.”
That was good. She wanted to get that statement on the record, and she was certain that DepthFinder and Orion were recording this conversation.
“I’ll have to stop you, Penny.”
That wouldn’t happen, either.
“I suspect, Dane, that if you try, Uncle Paul will sue you out of your beautiful ship and submersible. Look, this will be over in a few days, then I’ll come to San Diego, and we can laugh about our differences.”
“I’m not laughing, Penny.”
“You will,” she said. “Bye for now.”
Glenn immediately switched over to the scrambled frequency for Team Three.
“Dorsey, you there?”
She had to try twice before he answered.
“You always catch me when I’m trying to get a few winks, Penny. What’s up?”
“You’re on site?”
“You bet. After we rest, we’ll start drilling.”
“I want you to skip Test Holes K and L. Go right on to M.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am. And Jim, go now. I want that hole done today.”
“Hey, Penny, we’re getting into some rugged terrain. It’s going to take twelve hours or more to get there, and some of our reserves are getting low.”
“Then you’d better get underway,” she said. “I’ll send out a sub with fresh batteries and an oxygen recharge.”
“Please do,” he said. “I hate running this low.”
She signed off just as Deride arrived in the control room.
“It’s the middle of the night, Penny,” he said. “Something wrong?”
“Brande’s out there.”
“Bloody hell! You talked to him?”
“I tried,” she said, and left it ambiguous.