The exertion left her arms feeling rubbery. She knew that she had probably been breathing a little harder too, using up her precious supply of air. According to her watch, she still had at least twenty minutes of bottom time, and if she ran out unexpectedly, she could always ditch her gear and make an emergency free ascent, but it probably wouldn’t come to that. They were nearly finished.
With one hand on the cable, she turned to get more instructions from the tech diver but he was no longer in the crater with her. She looked up and spotted him, a dark speck moving beneath the enormous oval of the Explorer’s hull.
Where’s he going?
“Where is she?” Professor said. He sounded irritated, but Dorion thought perhaps he was trying to hide his concern. “She’s five minutes overdue.”
Dorion leaned out over the rail and peered down into the depths, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on down in the excavation. There was little to see, but Dorion had learned how to spot the rising bubble of the divers’ exhalations. “They do not appear to be out of air.”
Professor shook his head. “She’s got a reserve, but the whole point of a reserve is that you don’t use it. You keep it, well, in reserve. For emergencies.”
“If there are relativistic effects from the Moon stone, as I believe there must be, then time is passing more slowly for Jade. To her, it may seem like only a few minutes have elapsed.”
Professor made a growling noise, as if acknowledging the possibility but drawing no comfort from it. Dorion knew that no further explanation was required. He was used to people looking at him blankly when he tried to explain even the simplest aspects of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, but he knew that Professor was already well versed in the subject. He still didn’t know exactly what subject Chapman was a professor of, but he was one of the few people Dorion had ever met, outside of CERN, whom he considered to be an intellectual peer.
“Someone’s coming up,” shouted a crewman, and both Dorion and Professor hastened to the edge to watch the diver rise into view. Dorion felt a twinge of disappointment when he saw that it was the salvage technician that had gone down to supervise Jade. Barry joined them on the dive platform and helped the man climb aboard and shed his gear.
“Where’s Jade?” Professor asked.
“Just finishing up,” the diver said. He turned to Barry. “Now is as good a time as any.”
Something about the man’s tone, or perhaps it was the look in his eyes, resonated with something in Dorion’s memory. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew that he had glimpsed this moment before. No doubt it was part of the same vision that had led them to this spot. He had not told the others everything he had seen while holding the Shew Stone. So much of it had seemed irrelevant or just completely unimaginable, and just as with his earlier premonitions at CERN, sometimes it took a trigger to bring one of those memories to the forefront of his consciousness. That was what he was experiencing now, but only as a vague feeling of foreboding.
Something bad was about to happen.
He was still thinking that when he saw Barry nod to the diver. In a smooth, almost nonchalant motion, the Chief Mate hefted one of the diver’s oxygen bottles and swung it like a baseball bat. There was a loud clank as the aluminum cylinder slammed into the back of Professor’s head.
Professor crumpled, dazed but still clinging to consciousness. Dorion felt similarly stunned by the brutal attack. He drew back, a purely reflexive movement, and looked about for some avenue of escape. No one moved to block him. Instead, Barry deftly picked up a heavy weight belt and wrapped it around Professor’s waist. The latter seemed to grasp what was happening, but his efforts to resist were slow and ineffective. Barry got the belt buckled and then gave Professor a hard shove that toppled him over the edge of the platform where he vanished with a small splash.
Dorion ran. He sprinted up the gangplank to the main deck where Ophelia, Nichols and several other crewmen were looking on.
“Ophelia,” he shouted. “They just—”
His cry fell silent as he caught sight of the familiar, but almost forgotten, face of Brian Hodges, standing with the others.
Ophelia stepped close and placed a hand on Dorion’s arm. “It’s all right, Paul. You’re in no danger.”
Dorion gaped. His mouth worked but he couldn’t find any words.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ophelia continued. “This is the way it has to be. You’ll see.”
She turned her head toward Hodges and gave a nod.
Hodges returned the nod and then directed his attention to Nichols. “Do it.”
Dorion felt paralyzed. Do it? Do what? This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Or was it?
The memories of an uncertain future broke free from the place where he had, in utter disbelief, locked them away, and flooded through him.
It was.
The Quest Explorer’s engines roared to life, and the ocean beneath the ship began to boil.
Jade heard a splash, not an unusual sound on a dive site, and looked up at the outline of the hull. Something was coming down. No, not something. Someone. The outline of the rapidly falling figure was distinctly man-shaped, but something looked wrong about it. The man wasn’t kicking with his fins or trying to reach the guide line. He was simply sinking, and fast. Someone had fallen overboard.
Without a second thought, Jade let go of the cable and started swimming for the distant shape, even as she saw the current grab hold and start to pull him away. The Gulf Stream hit him like a stiff wind, dragging him away but without enough force to slow his downward plunge. She could see that the man was moving, struggling, but none of his efforts seemed to reverse his awful trajectory.
Kicking furiously now, her fins propelling her through the water like a rocket, she could make out more detail. The man wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, definitely not a diver….
Oh my God. It’s Professor.
At that instant, an ominous rumble filled her ears. She glanced up just in time to see a plume of white froth erupt at the stern of the Quest Explorer.
Disbelief and rage vied for primacy in Jade’s mind. What were they doing up there? With a diver in the water and a man overboard, they had fired up the mailbox blowers. Were they insane?
Then, as the blast hit her like the spray from a fire hose, engulfing her in a storm of white violence, she knew that the answer was much worse.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“What are you doing?” shrieked Dorion. “They’ll be killed.”
For just a moment, his shock at seeing Hodges, the man who had tried to murder them more times than he could remember, was overcome by the immediacy of the peril Jade and Professor were now in.
Ophelia hushed him again. “It was a tragic accident,” she said, as if reading from a newspaper obituary. “Jade made an unscheduled dive, not realizing that we were about to start another excavation. Dr. Chapman dove in to save her and was caught in the blast.”
For a moment, his mind refused to accept Ophelia’s complicity in what was unfolding. “You’re working with…him?”
She gave him a sad look. “It has to be this way, Paul. It’s the only way they’ll let us continue our research.”
Dorion still could not fully process this.
Hodges stepped close, his face a mask of cold menace. “Dr. Dorion, whether or not you continue to live is entirely inconsequential to me. If this is going to be a problem, you can join your friends down there.”