Gance looked ready for a space walk. He lashed his helmet to one of Vairon’s booms and moved to help Tarp with the second suit.
Tarp found the suit deadening. He had had it on three times, and he was still not used to it. He loved the freedom of scuba; this suit was like a walking prison. There was a necessary tradeoff between freedom and safety; especially out of the water, the suit was ponderous, with both chestpack and backpack, and the clumsiness of a multilayer fabric that would be inflated between the layers with compressed air.
“Let’s go.”
Tarp climbed up the metal steps that led to the hatch, undogged it, and swung it open. The effort of getting above the hatch in the suit had him panting. He looked at Gance in disgust.
“Piece of cake!” Gance shouted.
“Right.”
Tarp went down the hatchway with an inch to spare on each side. When he crouched inside the Vairon he was surrounded by instruments on every side. He reached up the hatchway for his helmet, took it and then Gance’s, and moved one shuffling step forward and one to the right to squeeze himself into the crewman’s chair. Gance came down the ladder and fastened the hatch behind him, then turned slowly with his arms held at his sides and wedged himself into the deck space between Tarp and Jean-Marie.
“Ready?” Jean-Marie said.
“When you are.”
The pilot flipped four switches above his head and watched a row of lights that told him that they were watertight. “Allons,” he said.
It was very quiet. After the helicopter and the wind, the dive was like a dream. There was no sensation of descent, but merely the end of the rise and fall of the waves. The light beyond the ports changed from silver to gray to green, and they were under the water.
Tarp went over the final sonar readings on the table in front of him. Two of the depth probes had picked up echoes from the mass of metal that he hoped was the Homburg, eleven miles west under the ice. The ice was thirty-seven meters thick there and the metal mass lay at about seventy meters on an undersea ridge running roughly north-northeast. The bottom dropped away from it toward the polynya.
“Sonar on,” Jean-Marie said in a singsong voice. “Check.”
“Picture,” Tarp said.
On his screen was a computer simulation of the bottom and the ice ahead of them, made from composite signals of a coned forward sonar and two side-lookers.
“Switching to scan.”
A more conventional sonar circle appeared. The metal mass appeared as a bright pulse just inside the screen’s edge at thirty-five degrees.
“Distance?”
“Nineteen point three kilometers.”
“Check.”
The hum of the engines filled the space. As they went deeper there was a gurgling, as if they were being swallowed by an enormous belly.
“Pressure?”
“Two point seven.”
Tarp saw water in the floor of the submersible and he opened his mouth to shout, then realized the water was from his own suit. I’m spooked. I’d have liked a test dive in this thing.
Gance was watching over Jean-Marie’s shoulder intently, his tongue stuck out a little between his lips. His face was sweating.
“We are under the ice, my friends. Descending.”
“Depth?”
“Thirty meters.”
Tarp switched to the computer composite of the sonar scans. The ice roof above them was uneven, exactly like the roof of a cave, as the helicopter navigator had said, and, although its average level was well above them, it reached down toward them with long fingers.
“I’m taking it twenty meters lower.”
The electric motors hummed. It was black outside the ports. “Anything to see out there?” Gance said.
“No. Anyway, he’s saving power.” Jean-Marie touched a control. “The outside temperature is rising, Tarp.”
Figures began to move across a fluid costal display.
“What are those?” Gance said.
“Temperature and depth.”
“Dieu!”
“What is it?”
“Heavy current. Very heavy. It wants to take us north. Merde.”
“Can’t you overcome it?”
“Of course, but it takes fuel. Merde, merde. Eh-eh-eh…”
Tarp itched. He knew that he was going to be uncomfortably hot soon. His skin would be wrinkling, turning white. Bad planning. Done too quickly. He looked down at Gance, who held up a thumb and grinned. Good for him.
He made his mind smooth, smooth as the surface of the Vairon. A white plain, curving to infinity. Featureless. Timeless. Without concerns.
“One kilometer,” he heard Jean-Marie say.
Tarp tightened the sonar scan to three kilometers, and there was their target, big and bright and dead ahead.
Temperature 6°C… profondeur 63m…
“Why’s the temperature going up?” Gance whispered.
“Maybe thermal activity on the bottom. Whatever it is causes the polynya to form.”
“What’s this, then, Hot Springs, Antarctica?”
“Why not?”
Tarp shifted to French. “How are the currents?”
“Very rough.”
“Thermals, I think.”
“I think so, too. Maybe moving in a circle that forms the polynya. When you get out there, it’s going to be like moving in a heavy wind.”
He switched the sonar picture down to a six-hundred-meter scan. The metal mass was a bright line almost eighty degrees long. In composite simulation, it was possible to see its height, even the elevation on one side that could be a superstructure.
“If it’s the ship, we’re coming in on one quarter,” Jean-Marie said. “Looks as if she may lie on her side somewhat.”
“Can you veer off and approach dead on the beam?”
“Of course.”
The image shifted and lengthened and took up most of the screen’s midline. Above it the fainter signals from the ice were enhanced by the computer into a tracery of lines that curved above the heavier image of the target.
“It’s certainly big enough, Tarp.”
“I know.”
The sonar separated out three distinct features rising from the large horizontal mass.
“What’s the direction of the current?”
“Quartering from left to right from our bow.”
Tarp looked at Gance, who gave the thumbs-up sign again. Jean-Marie turned and looked at him. “Eh bien?”
“Take it in.”
When they were a hundred meters away, the lights went on. The ports changed from black to opalescent green. Jean-Marie switched the interior lights off, and they found themselves looking into a swirl of brilliance.
“We will see nothing until we are right on it,” Jean-Marie said. “This is going to be tricky in this current.”
The Vairon slowed. Tarp waited for what seemed many minutes.
“There!” It was Gance who saw it first. “See it?”
Tarp saw the window change color from green to a mottled green-brown. He looked at it, trying to get some sense of scale. “Stop!” he cried.
“I stopped some time ago, my friend.”
“What are we looking at?”
“The Prinz von Homburg, I hope.”
Tarp was leaning forward over the navigation table to get closer to the port. Now he saw something move beyond it. “What’s that?”
“I am putting one of the arms out. Calm yourself.”