“You mean, why’s my submarine glowing?” A childish grin came across his face.
Tom nodded his head. “Yeah.”
“It puts the plankton at ease.” Luke wrapped up the loose rope.
“No. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam complained. “Plankton doesn’t glow to make itself feel good. It glows as a deterrent to would be predators.”
“Yes, I agree. I don’t know why this works. But I do know that before we lost control over them, they would literally destroy any yellow submarine that entered the cavern. I don’t know why, but they did. We stopped losing submarines when we made them glow with phosphorescence. Weird huh?”
“Yeah, little about these creatures seem to make sense,” Sam agreed.
Veyron began climbing back down into the Sea Witch’s cockpit. “I’m going to call for the Maria Helena. We still have to find where the hive went.”
“I can tell you that.” Luke said.
They all looked at him.
“If the cavern’s empty, it means they’ve gone out to hunt.”
Chapter Eighty Eight
A bright light heralded the arrival of the Maria Helena. Sam brought Luke aboard to talk in depth. “We can bring your submarine on board if you like.”
“No thank you, I have to return to the cavern to gather some more evidence. It will be necessary if we’re ever to win this.”
“Suit yourself. You can tie up alongside the Maria Helena and at least have a meal while we work out what’s going on.”
Luke squatted down on the side deck of the Maria Helena and tied his submarine to its side. “Where do you want to talk?”
“We can go to the back deck. It’s private and you can talk freely. Do you want a beer?”
“No, thank you. I’ll have a strong coffee. Black. If you’ve got some.”
Sam stepped into the bridge. “Hey Matthew, when you see Genevieve, can you please ask her to bring us two strong, black, coffees.”
“Will do boss.”
“We’ll be out on the aft deck.”
Luke checked his lines again and then followed Sam. Down the side deck. Onto the aft deck. He stopped to look at the Sea King. “She’s a beautiful ship with a striking helicopter to match. You look like you’ve been having fun. Good for you.”
“I haven’t lately. We’ve had a problem. One you intentionally brought me in to fix. So, you may as well fill me in. Elise, one of my crew — she’s kind of a computer genius, is currently tracking the area with military satellite surveillance. Looking for their glowing lights. We might have to go at any time if she finds them.”
“Good. Tell her to look for intermittent electrical depolarizations.”
“You mean like the discharge in a storm cloud?”
“Precisely. Each plankton is producing electrical charge through kinetic energy. If she can’t see their bioluminescent glow, she should spot a five-mile area containing multiple electrical discharges.”
“Okay, thank you. I’ll let her know.”
Sam went inside to give Elise the tip. He returned a couple minutes later. Luke had stopped at the most aft section of the ship and was staring out into the calm seas. He looked up at Sam, smiled and then said, “How long have you known that I was alive?”
Chapter Eighty Nine
Sam took a deep breath. Smiled. “I had a feeling when I watched the video of your purported death. You appeared to be moving downwards. It wasn’t that, so much as your smile. It wasn’t even the fact that you appeared calm. It was the fact that you looked proud.” Sam shook his head. “It was nothing but a hunch until Tom told me about the green ghost he’d met. And then when I saw it with my own eyes, I knew that you were involved somehow.”
“It’s not what you think,” Luke reassured him.
“I never thought it was. So tell me about it.”
“Timothy Locke, Benjamin White and I have spoken for nearly twenty years about the need to harness the power of the ocean. I’ve known it since I was a child. If we’re ever truly going to become self-sustainable as a species, we needed to capture some of the energy from the ocean. About five years ago, the time had come for us to act. We’d reached the perfect time in the history of civilization. Timothy Locke had the knowledge and the power to make small machines, Benjamin White was an expert on the movements of the oceans, and I had spent my entire life studying alternative and mainstream energy sources. I’ve studied everything from solar panels, windfarms and wave generators, through to nuclear and thorium conductors.”
Luke stopped as Genevieve arrived with their coffees. She dropped them off, left a pot of black coffee, and quietly left without saying a word. Luke watched her go. “She’s quite stunning, isn’t she?”
“Forget it you dirty old man. She’s not interested.”
“In men?”
Sam shrugged his shoulders. “In anyone.”
Luke hadn’t changed with age. He was always known as a lady’s man — attractive, intelligent, funny and loquacious around women in a way that they never seemed to find annoying. And as far as Sam could tell, they just liked him. Of course, it had probably been the cause of all three of his divorces.
Luke smiled when he finally accepted that Sam wasn’t going to give him any more information. “Okay, where was I?”
“You’re an expert in the development of clean energy.”
Luke took a small gulp of coffee. It was 4 a.m. after all. “None of those sources were limitless and without damage. Even windfarms require large amounts of mining to gain the materials to build. Wave generators destroy the local marine life and require the use of oil, which naturally seeps into the ocean, to maintain. In many ways nuclear and thorium reactors appear the only feasible long term solution, with the one major drawback being our inability to remove the waste.”
“So you created a swarm of nanobots intent on destroying humanity?” Sam interrupted.
Luke smiled good-naturedly. “So we looked at it from an entirely different perspective — we looked at breeding a species that worked symbiotically with nature to produce energy. Kinetic energy, small amounts, absorbed through the natural movements of the sea, covering trillions upon trillions of plankton cells.”
“Okay, so how far did you get before someone offered to kill your research?”
“It took more than a year to build fifty nanobots. The sheer practicality of such an undertaking made it impossible for us to continue without the ability to increase production substantially. Even if we wanted to, we would die from old age before we could build a relevant colony.”
Sam had heard this argument against nanotechnology before. “So you looked to the plankton to grow them for you?”
“Yes. As you would know, certain plankton procreate through cellular division. At its most basic level, the cells make an exact replica of themselves. It’s inside their DNA — the building codes for all cells. So we thought, why not reprogram the DNA with nanotechnology?”
“Because up until the time I watched it under an electron microscope I believed that it was impossible,” Sam said.
“I did too, but Timothy Locke assured me it could be done. In fact, he wasn’t even concerned about how to do that. For him, it related to computer codes. And coding was something you could do at any level. His concern was our ability to produce substantial numbers.”
“Why? If he could reprogram the DNA to include the nanotechnology and plankton cells divide every 24–48 hours, the population must grow rapidly?”
“They do, but not fast enough. You have to realize that the type of plankton we were using had a complete life cycle of eight days. That meant that although we were doubling the colony every 24–48 hours we were losing an entire generation every ten days.”