Rolling Thunder (22 page)

There was also a certain look in Senator Wu’s eye that I would describe as a deadly calm. So Cosmo swallowed hard.

“I apologize,” he muttered, and stomped off to the back of the bus to sulk. Tina later told me that it wasn’t the first time Cosmo had had to back off from a duel, and given his temperament, it certainly wouldn’t be his last. Another certainty was that he would make life hell for his employees for the next few weeks.

The driver popped his head out of the hatch and looked at us, oblivious to the lovely scene he had just missed.

“Well, you want the good news or the bad news?” he asked, cheerfully.

I think we all groaned.

“Just give it to us straight, Doc, we can take it,” Aldric said.

“Okay. I can move this baby, but only at about one mile per hour. The tranny’s pretty much fried, except for low gear.” He shook his head. “I inspected that sucker myself, just before we left. Didn’t see the hairline crack.” Or the fickle finger of mishap, I thought, which seemed to point directly at Taliesen most of the time.

“We’d have to wait for a part,
except
“—and here he grinned—“it’s only about a mile and a half to NEMO. I’m pretty sure I can swap out a part from one of their buggies.”

“So how long?” Tina asked, glancing back at Cosmo.

“Hour and a half over there. Say three hours to fix it.” He grinned even wider. “Also, I got a girlfriend at NEMO, so add another … say an hour.”

“Say two hours,” I suggested, to general agreement.

NEMO STANDS FOR
Navy Europa Mobile Oceanautics. We tend to forget, standing on a sheet of ice that’s as deep as thirty miles in some places, that beneath it is a mineral-saturated ocean three hundred miles deep. The areas around the freckles also appear to be hot spots on the silicate rock that forms the bulk of Europa’s core. Those hot spots are caused by the deep molten iron core being stirred with the gigantic run-cible spoon of the tides of Jupiter, Io, and Ganymede.

For whatever reason, the ice around Taliesen is thinner than at any place on Europa, only about two miles. A mere crust, a rime, an eggshell. I’m surprised we don’t all fall through like incautious skaters. That makes it the ideal site for the daredevils of NEMO, who regularly dive into an environment that may be the harshest humans have ever attempted to invade.

It was even smaller than Forward Base, dominated by the large dome that housed the submarines. When we went down the ramp in the bus bay we were met at the bottom by the base commander, Captain Glenn Scott, who seemed happy enough to see us.

Captain Scott gave us a tour of the base. NEMO was only a year old. They were doing something here that had never been done, and were still pretty new at it, according to Captain Scott. They were still learning. We ended up in the submarine bay.

“There are maybe a dozen small harbor patrol craft, based on Earth,” the captain told us. “Other than that, these are the only boats in the Martian Navy.”

I learned that submarines were traditionally called boats, even the underwater aircraft carriers of East and Western America, China, and the European Union. These little fish were nothing like that. They were made on Earth, which had the expertise to do it, and were about forty feet long, fat and stubby, but sleek as dolphins. They were all a Day-Glo yellow with orange stripes.

They were hanging from racks, in a row, and could be trundled out to the center of the dome, where the entrance hole was now covered with a metal cap. There were five subs, each with NEMO and a Roman numeral painted on the side, but there was no NEMO-III. The space where it would have been was empty.

“Nautilis, Turtle, Plongeur, Kairyu,
and
Crocodil,”
he said, with proprietary pride. “The toughest little ships in the solar system.
Turtle
is mine. Named after the first American submarine, designed by David Bushnell, 1775.”

There was a name written above the empty berth:
OCTOBER
.

“So
October
is on a dive?” I asked.

“October
is overdue,” Captain Scott said.

“How long?” Monet asked.

“About six months now.”

Well, that was a bit of a conversation stopper, considering he’d already told us that the maximum submersion time for these NEMOs was forty-eight hours. It seemed rather callous to me, too, until I realized he was dead serious.

“No ship under my command will ever be listed as ‘lost’ unless I see the wreckage with my own eyes,” he said. “We know she’s down there, we just aren’t able to dive that deep. Yet. We’re working on it.”

And as for the crew, they had KYAGs, so there was at least a chance that they were still alive down there, encased in stopper bubbles, in suspended time. I patted the little unit attached to my own belt.

Captain Scott came up to me with a look in his eyes that I thought I recognized. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have been averse. He was a good-looking guy, though two inches shorter than me and balding almost to the top of his head. I liked that he didn’t try for a comb-over, or even bother with transplants. That indicated confidence in his manhood, in my eyes. And he had strong arms and friendly blue eyes. Ships that pass in the night … I’m not opposed to that, if it’s an attractive ship. I could feel my heart thumping a little faster.

“Say, Lieutenant …” he began.

“Podkayne, if it’s not too informal.”

“We’re very informal around here. Podkayne, then. I was wondering …”

I batted my eyelashes in a way I’d practiced in the mirror since I was twelve.

“Well, since you’re going to be here awhile, would you mind dropping by our canteen and favoring us with a few songs?”

I hoped my smile looked genuine. Ah, the perils of fame. No doubt the man was too overwhelmed by my star power, my charisma, to even consider me as a bed partner. Well, I shouldn’t be daunted. Soon, no doubt, the situation would be reversed, and I’d have to hire a platoon of hefty guys to surround me and keep the legions of handsome young men from smothering me with their worship. Sigh.

But enough regrets. My public awaits!

“I MUST BE
out of my mind to do this,” Captain Scott said, gloomily.

No, we weren’t in his bed, sorry to say, but the next best thing. I was sitting in the jump seat behind the pilot, Captain Scott, of the MNV
Turtle.
We were about to take a dive. A really
deep
dive.

I’m not sure exactly where I got the nerve to ask for the trip. Maybe my star power really
was
going to my head, because suddenly I knew I could convince this man to do something he knew he really shouldn’t. And I did it. I told him I’d be happy to entertain his troops, if he’d give me a ride in his little motor scooter. His multimillion-dollar motor scooter.

He dithered awhile, he called up his copilot, and ten minutes later the deal was done. I did a one-hour set in the canteen, enthusiastically received, and ten minutes later we were in the big fish.

By “we” I mean myself, Slomo, Ambassador Baruti, Dekko, Captain Scott, and Dr. Nadine Land, a tiny Earthie in her midthirties, oceanographer and submersible expert on loan from the East America Navy, the woman who had taught Scott and all his other pilots everything they knew about driving these things.

The pressure was enormous down there, higher than at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench on Earth. I decided I didn’t even want to know how much. These little crafts had made it halfway to the bedrock, and could go farther, but you did this sort of thing in increments. These boats were never going to reach the rock below, but the next generation might.

Captain Scott maneuvered the arm holding
Turtle
suspended in the air out over the lock leading to the water. Dr. Land was watching Scott’s every move while trying not to be too obvious about it. It was clear to me that she still regarded him, and probably all the other pilots, as drivers in training.

Slomo was aboard because we all knew he’d kill the rest of us if he was denied a seat if that’s what it took. No way he was going to miss filming this. Baruti and Dekko were there because of a coin toss. NEMOs seated six, absolute maximum, and were crowded at that.

I wasn’t scared. Really, I wasn’t. Well, maybe a bit nervous. We wouldn’t be going to any great depth, just a quick pop down under the ice, and a quick look around. And forever after I could have bragging rights about having been to the most remote and hostile location humans had ever penetrated.

“Any chance of seeing a boojum?” I asked.

Captain Scott jerked his head around and stared at me.

“Where’d you hear that?”

I shrugged. “It’s common knowledge at Clarke. Not even all that hard to come by in Thunder City.”

He looked a little pissed off. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. He concentrated on his controls, and we started lowering toward the sealock.

“It’s not exactly top secret, Glenn,” Dr. Land pointed out. The high-pressure door was rolling away beneath us. I could see this through the lower porthole near my feet. “Why do you think we call them boo-jums?” she asked.

I quickly googled the word, and as I had remembered, it was from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” Mom used to read me to sleep with Carroll.

“I’m presuming it’s not because if you find one, you softly and suddenly vanish away,” I said.

“We don’t know that,” she said, with a smile. “Nobody’s ‘found’ one. We know they’re out there, but only within three miles or so. We haven’t tried to chase one; we don’t have that kind of range yet.”

“So you call them that because they’re elusive?”

“We don’t even know that. Hard to find, let’s say.”

“And you think they’re alive?”

“It makes sense to me, but I’m not an exobiologist. Nobody can prove anything one way or another, yet again. One day we plan to try to chase one down.”

“Nobody knows anything on this damn planet,” Dekko groused. “Even the most basic things. Is it alive, isn’t it alive? You’d think in all this time, somebody would know.”

“Sometimes the most basic questions are the hardest ones to answer.”

So, the mountains themselves, the fairy lights inside them, the boo-jums … all of them might be alive, but no one had demonstrated anything that was conclusively life as we understood it. All of them might be intelligent. Which meant, to most people, that it was simply life as we
didn’t
understand it, but to most people, like Dekko—like me—that wasn’t a very satisfying proposition.

We were lowered into the sealock, the cables holding us detached themselves, and the lock sealed above us. With a roar that made me jump, water under pressure began to jet into the big chamber. This was Europan water, clear as vodka, so sterile you could use it to clean wounds. I’d drunk many gallons of it, desalinated, back at Clarke. But it somehow looked alien. It was saltier than the Dead Sea, and had more minerals dissolved in it than the pools of Yellowstone. And not a trace of any of the complex chemicals we associate with life.

The doors opened below us. I strained to see between my feet. We really were crammed into a tiny pickle barrel in there, with barely room to turn around.

We started to drop. Somebody turned on the exterior lights. Outside, I could see metal walls moving upward all around us. The pipe was about a hundred feet wide, made of some bright, shiny metal, but encrusted here and there with brownish growths.

“Mineral deposits,” Scott said, shining a light on a large patch of them. “We have to clean it out once a week.”

The walls started moving faster, and I felt myself lifted out of my seat for a moment. Then the vertical metal tunnel ended and things got even brighter. I realized I was seeing ice. The hole we were dropping through was now about twice the width it had been. The ice had an undulant surface. In places it was white, like compacted snow, and in others it was translucent, and bright blue. Around us, at the four points of the compass, heavy cables hung, attached here and there to the surface of the ice. Every hundred yards or so we passed a quartet of what looked like oil drums with rotating yellow lights on top.

“Heaters,” Dr. Land explained. “We melted our way down here at first with a big hot plate sort of thing. If we don’t keep the water above a certain temperature it can freeze back again. We’re like seals in the Antarctic, keeping our breathing hole open by keeping it constantly in use.”

“Yeah, and it’ll take us all day to go down like this,” Captain Scott said. “So hold on to your valuables, I’m going to kick it into high gear.”

He moved the stick forward and the ship nosed down, then he opened up the throttle. I was pressed back into my seat for a moment, then I leaned forward and to the side to get a better view.

If they ever make a movie of my life, they’ll probably spend a lot of time on this part, because it’s a good visual. We were speeding down a narrow tube, the details of which emerged into our lights only as we neared them. I guess we could see about a hundred yards of the ice itself, but the yellow markers of the beacons stretched out quite a bit farther than that before they vanished in the gloom. I knew we had plenty of room, moving down the center as we were, and I knew we wouldn’t hit anything unless the tunnel made a turn, which it would not do. Still, the impression of headlong, reckless speed was pretty strong. I found myself gripping the armrests.

Then the whole ship rang like a gong. I felt it right down to my toes, and braced myself. Captain Scott, that rascal, leaned back toward his passengers.

“Sorry, should have warned you about that,” he said, but from the smug expression on his face I was pretty sure he wasn’t sorry at all. “Compression joint, compensating. We may get a few more before we reach bottom.”

Then, without much warning, we shot out of the bottom of the tube and Scott pulled up on the stick. We leveled out and slowed down quite a bit. Scott angled the biggest lights on the boat to point upward. I looked up there, and gasped.

It was so beautiful!

It was the Emerald City, the Big Apple, Shangri-La, and the Mother Ship from
Close Encounters.