“This one’s on the floor bed,” Thomas reminded them. “That will mean the floor crawlers will have a chance at us, depending on where they are.”
As the submersible and Gargantua rose from their parking places and Dokey switched the sonar on, he said, “These guys strike me as dummies. They won’t know what we’re after.”
However, once they were within a thousand yards of their target, Dokey changed his mind.
“Damn. Two crawlers, friends. The bastards knew we were coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They paused to reload Gargantua, and the first grenade/mine that Brande selected from the robot’s basket was number nine.
“Throw it away,” Dokey said.
“Do you really think Kim mixed the numbers?” Brande asked.
“We’ll never know, and that’s going to drive her batty, but let’s humor her, Chief.”
Brande dropped it, and then picked up twelve and ten. After the visual verification, he turned the robot and moved it out two hundred feet ahead of them.
With Gargantua leading the way, they made their attack run toward the habitat from the west, moving at ten knots.
Thomas was analyzing the imagery on the sonar screen. “It looks to me, Dane, as if the Beta sub is mated with the habitat.”
“Good. That’s what we wanted.”
“But it means they’ll have use of the sub’s communications,” she said.
“That’s why the crawlers are in place,” Dokey said.
“And we’ll have to live with it for a few minutes,” Brande said. “This won’t take much longer.”
“No more than a couple, three hours,” Dokey clarified.
“Pessimist,” Brande told him.
“Five hundred yards,” she said.
He removed his hands from the joysticks for a few seconds to flex his fingers, and then replaced them. He listened as Thomas read off the descending numbers, and as Dokey ordered a change in heading, but he kept his eyes on the multi-function screen displaying the ROV’s view of the sea bottom. The monotonous terrain unrolled before the camera, a backdrop to the out-stretched manipulator arms. He had to trim in additional down thrust on the aft end of the robot in order to balance the weight of the extended arms.
The seabed was ten feet below the robot, according to the readout on his panel. The darkness ahead steadily gave way to the floodlights.
“One hundred,” Thomas said.
“Go to fifty feet,” Dokey told him.
“Climbing.”
He eased back on the right stick, and the seabed fell away, nearly disappearing from the field of view.
“Two knots,” Dokey said.
“Two,” he repeated, backing off on the forward speed. “Where’s the sub, Rae?”
“Still at the station.”
The first floor crawler appeared on the screen. They had seen Gargantua’s lights, and their video camera was trained on the robot. The crawler’s manipulator arm waved back-and-forth, a cobra ready to strike.
But the robot was out of reach, and the snake was impotent.
Brande sailed Gargantua slowly over the crawler, aimed the ROV downward so he could maintain his camera view, aligned the left manipulator arm, and released the mine.
It drifted downward with apparent nonchalance, found the right-hand track, and clicked into place, its magnet enchanted with the steel tread. As it fell, the crawler’s video camera tracked it, and as soon as it locked in place, the operator panicked and slammed power to the treads.
They began to move, kicking up a fog of silt.
“Three… two… one,” Dokey said as Brande threw up thrust into the ROV, moving it out of range.
He didn’t get to see the explosion since Gargantua’s lights had gone out of range, and inside the submersible, they were barely aware of it.
“The other crawler is scrambling,” Thomas said.
“Where to, Rae?”
“Anywhere but here, I think. They’re headed south.”
“Let’s go back down and check our work,” Dokey said.
Brande lowered the ROV, and they soon had a view of the floor crawler. The left track had parted and been spun off its sleepers by the sprockets. It lay, half-twisted, under the canted crawler like a steel-encrusted eel. A thick cloud of silt was just beginning to settle.
Brande turned the ROV slowly in place. The camera picked up the nuclear plant’s dome, some forty feet to the north.
“I hope that thing will shut itself down,” Brande said.
“Has to,” Dokey reassured him. “Basic safety design.”
Turning the robot back to the east, Brande dove it toward the seafloor and coasted until he picked up a view of the thick umbilical cable resting on the seabed.
“That’s the honey, Chief.”
It was armored cable, and the magnet of the mine snapped into place easily. Brande backed Gargantua out of range, and Dokey detonated it.
When the robot approached the cable again, Brande saw that it was neatly severed.
“I should think the station would be on emergency power now,” Thomas said.
“And its inhabitants should be re-evaluating their alternatives,” Brande added.
“Do you like legs, Chief?” Dokey asked.
“I like legs.”
“Let’s go find some.”
When the power went, there was a momentary blackout before the emergency battery system cut in. It was eerie for those few seconds — blower motors that were always chanting in the background shut down, the hum of electronics evaporated.
When the power came up again, though substantially reduced, Glenn was aware of the reduction. The overhead lights were dimmer. The computer screens displayed garbage. The sonar was automatically recycling, as it had been doing since Brande destroyed the antenna. She shut it down.
She felt deaf and dumb, entirely alone.
She spun around and left the control room, passed through the lounge, and descended the spiral stairway to the reception chamber.
Paul Deride was there, waiting to board the Brisbane. In contrast to the brief blackout, his face was pasty white. He was seated in a chair, and he didn’t look good at all. She wondered if he was on the verge of a heart attack.
“Are you all right, Uncle Paul?”
“I think so, yes,” he panted. “What happened?”
“What I feared might happen. They cut off our power supply.”
“Bloody hell! Are we… are we….”
“We’re fine. There’s a three-day supply of energy. However, I think we’d better evacuate the station until we can make the repairs.”
“Goddamn it! We’re letting Brande drive us out.”
“Only for the moment, Uncle Paul. There’s always tomorrow. Or the day after. It’s going to take some time for the Outer Islands Lady to raise the crawlers.”
“How long, Penny?” Some of the color was returning to his face.
“A week, perhaps. Ten days.”
His lips sagged, and she knew he was counting the cost.
He looked so pathetic, sitting there. Scared to death. Helpless. His decisions didn’t matter much.
She didn’t want him to die, not like he had forced her parents into their mutual suicides by stealing from them everything they owned and believed in.
She wanted him to live to suffer the ridicule and ostracism of an entire world when that world realized he was responsible for the devastation of the American West Coast. She wanted him to know that, for the first time, he had been conned. Soon, she would tell him that manganese samples were doctored to show higher contents. He would learn that the written and recorded records would show that every decision had been his own.