‘Next month,’ Jack said. ‘But I’ve only known her for five years. Her mother and I split before she was born and she kept Rebecca secret from me – for Rebecca’s safety, and probably mine too. She was from a Mafia family and there was a vendetta. It’s a long story, but Rebecca has come out of it strong and I can’t imagine life without her now. When she’s not at school, she’s a full member of our team.’
‘I look forward to meeting her,’ said Sofia. ‘So what about Costas? The recompression chamber?’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I ran out of air and had to come up a little quickly. It was only a niggle in my elbow and a bit of dizziness, but I knew it was the bends and could get a lot worse. Luckily the fisherman had a decent radio, and there was a US Navy helicopter on search-and-rescue exercises only a few miles away.
‘Anyway, they got me into the chamber, and there was this slightly overweight sweaty guy surrounded by a jumble of electronics and tools he’d insisted on taking inside to play with. I spent the next eight hours holding bits of wire for him.’
‘Yeah,’ Costas said. ‘But we cooked up the idea of the International Maritime University, and here we are today.’
‘So what were you doing there? In the chamber?’
Jack coughed. ‘He’d spent too long monitoring the effect of pressure on some submersible component he was developing. Only instead of watching it from the outside, he’d gone into the chamber to cuddle it during its ordeal.’
‘I had to hold it together with my hands. It was too complex for clamps.’
‘What was it?’ Sofia said.
Costas looked at her shrewdly. ‘A coupling joint for an external manipulator arm. Later I developed it at IMU and it’s now standard on all our equipment.’
‘What’s the pressure rating?’
‘Two thousand metres ocean depth. It could be more except for the internal gyro, which is a little sensitive. But that’s what allows us to use the arm as a virtual excavator, with the finesse of a human hand.’
Sofia gestured at the porthole, where the submersible’s external arm array was visible. ‘I know how you could use it down to five thousand metres.’
Costas looked astonished. ‘No way. No way. What’s the gyro?’
‘A Universal Electrics SPC-100, with some modifications. You remember I said I had a flirtation with robotics engineering? It was my masters project.’
‘You’re kidding me. Can I see it?’
‘I can talk you through it now.’
Jack gave an exaggerated groan. ‘How long am I stuck here with you two?’
A red light flickered on the console. ‘I think you’re in luck, Jack. It’s Macalister.’
The familiar voice came crackling over the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack. We’ve done two half-kilometre sweeps across the head of the bay, and we’ve got a result. The magnetometer revealed a scatter of small linear anomalies over an area of flat sandy seabed the size of a tennis court, and the sonar showed a hump in the sediment that might be rectilinear. It’s at eight hundred and sixty-two metres depth, about a kilometre and a half from you at compass bearing 034 degrees. We’re holding position offshore above the anomaly so we can tether up to you and watch what you find on the video screen. Acknowledge.’
‘Roger that.’ Jack clicked the intercom to continuous so that the control room on Seaquest II could hear everything that went on, and turned to Costas, his throat dry with excitement. ‘I think we’re in business.’
Forty minutes later, they had reached a depth of seven hundred metres, having dropped down the slope at an angle of more than forty-five degrees. On the way they had passed huge outcrops of rock and dramatic slopes of sediment that had tumbled down the edges of the rocks like scree on a mountainside, until the dwindling light made it impossible to make out more than the twenty metres or so of seabed revealed in the cone of light from the submersible’s external strobe array ahead of them. Costas had been letting the computer steer the submersible towards a locator beacon at the bottom of the tethering line hanging below Seaquest II, and suddenly they saw it, a flashing red light in the inky blackness ahead. As they came to within a few metres, he activated the manipulator arm and extended the pincers at the end of it around the cable, and then let the automated program articulate the arm backwards and slot the cable into its aperture above the double-lock chamber. The blank monitor beside the navigational screen above the console suddenly came to life, an image crowded with the faces of the crew, who were staring down at them. The crew moved aside and the white-bearded Macalister appeared, the gold braid of a captain visible on the epaulettes of his naval sweater. Jack did a thumbs-up, and Macalister nodded curtly. ‘Let’s hope this is it,’ he said. ‘The weather’s worsening up here by the minute, and it’s going to be hard enough hauling the submersible into the ship’s docking bay as it is. We can’t afford more than a few minutes at the target, just enough for a positive identification.’
‘Roger that,’ Costas said.
‘Who’s operating the external video camera?’ Jack said.
A girl’s face appeared, her long dark hair tied back, wearing the new pair of glasses that made her look uncharacteristically studious, Jack thought. She waved, and blew him a kiss. ‘Hi, Dad. Maria sends her love. She met me at Madrid airport on the way here. As you know, we’re all supposed to be going climbing in the Pyrenees next week. She’d really like to hear from you.’
‘Good,’ Jack said, slightly discomfited. ‘Great. Later. What I need you to do now is concentrate completely on that console. The camera’s mounted on the end of the manipulator arm, and your job is to control it so that Costas and Sofia and I can focus on what we actually see outside. You got that?’
‘Roger that, Dad. Good to go.’
Sofia grinned. ‘Like a chip off the old block, as I said.’
Costas flipped a switch. ‘Rebecca, you have control of that arm.’
They watched out of the porthole as the end of the arm rose up from the equipment array below the strobes. It turned the camera towards them, the lens staring into the porthole like the outsized eye of some abyssal fish, and then it waved from side to side and turned forward.
Jack looked at the monitor and saw that Rebecca had gone from the image and been replaced by another figure, a man with long lank hair, wearing a lab coat. He lifted a small portable blackboard into view and tapped it, his face flushed with enthusiasm. ‘Hey, Costas. Glad to see we got the submersible going. You and I. When you’re back topside, I’ve made some time to give you the lowdown on submersible circuitry. I’ve tailored it specially for you. A kind of idiot’s guide.’
‘Thanks, Jacob,’ Costas said between gritted teeth. ‘Really appreciate it.’
‘Any time,’ Lanowski replied cheerily, and disappeared.
Costas shook his head. ‘What a guy.’
‘But you love him really,’ Sofia said.
‘We all love him,’ Costas said, gripping the controls. ‘Okay. All eyes on the prize. I’m going in.’
Jack slid back to his original position lying on his front with his face to the porthole. Costas gunned the submersible forward, and Jack watched the digital depth gauge beside the porthole drop below eight hundred metres. Ahead of him the seabed began to level out, but still there was nothing to see except empty sand and the occasional flash of a reflected eye as some creature strayed into the cone of visibility in front of the submersible, into light of an intensity that nothing down there would ever have experienced before. Costas slowed the submersible right down, and Jack watched the manipulator arm arch some five metres ahead with the camera roving from side to side like some giant insect searching the sea floor. ‘We should be there now,’ Costas said.