Allen Steele - Oceanspace.pdf - Allen Steele - margozap

Allen Steele - Oceanspace

Oceanspace

Allen Steele

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as

"unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this

"stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and

any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

OCEANSPACE An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace hardcover edition / February 2000 Ace mass-market edition / May 2001

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in

any form without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is www.penguinputnam.com

Check out the Ace Science Fiction & Fantasy newsletter and much more on the Internet at Club PPI!

ISBN: 0-441-00850-X

ACE®

Ace Books are published

by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ACE and the "A" design are trademarks

belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

For Sir Arthur C. Clarke

FIRST DAY

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2011

ONE

Kraken

6.4.11-1024 EST

Off the Atlantic coast of the United States, just past the edge of the continental shelf, rests a broad sub-

marine terrace known as the Blake Plateau. Located ap-proximately 2,500 feet below sea level, the

plateau stretches from Cape Hatteras to the Bahamas, and ex-tends nearly one hundred miles out into

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (1 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20

Allen Steele - Oceanspace

deep ocean be-fore it abruptly ends at the rugged escarpment which marks the farthest edge of the North

American continent; beyond that lie the vast undersea plains of the Atlantic Basin.

The Blake Plateau is a prehistoric relic of the last ice age. The same climatic shifts which caused walls

of gla-cial ice to advance across Canada into the Midwest also dropped the average sea level to the

present boundaries of the continental shelf; when the glaciers receded during the Oligocene epoch some

25 million years ago, the seas rose and the continental shelf gradually vanished beneath the waves. As it

did, rivers and estuaries carried post-

glacial sediments across the new coastline to the Florida-Hatteras Slope, where they settled upon the

leading edge of the tectonic plate forming the American continent. Thus the Blake Plateau was created.

Down here, there is no sunrise or sunset, only the eter-nal midnight of the abyss, pierced briefly by

quick-moving sources of bioluminescence: gape-jawed anglerfish, gulper eels, and tiny squid, stalking

one an-other in the frigid darkness. All else is dark, and still.

And then… something moves.

First, there's a faint sound: the gentle thrum of props, like the distant echo of a submarine earthquake, yet

con-stant, more regular. Then a dim, horizontal row of lights descends from unknown regions far above.

As the light pierces downward, it startles the fish and eels; for a few moments they break off their deadly

games to swim a little closer and investigate the source of the light and sound, until it becomes apparent

even to their primitive minds that the intruder is alien to their world, and therefore dan-gerous. They

speed away before the narrow swath of light can find them.

Downward the machine glides, the forward end of its long form backlit by thallium iodide lamps: a pair

of enormous, multijointed manipulators mounted above a ti-tanium sphere, itself connected by a slender

collar and thick steel trusses to a long cylinder, on top of which was mounted an open-top cargo bed.

Two barrel-shaped ma-neuvering thrusters are positioned along its port and star-board sides; at the aft

end, recessed within a cone-shaped cowling, is the lazily rotating propeller of its main en-gine. There's

no color down here—even within close proximity of the halogens, everything is rendered in muted

shades of greenish gray—so there's no way of telling that the submarine is painted bright fluorescent

yellow, interspersed with bands of reds and white.

At the front of the sphere, below and between the arms, is a single, cyclopean eye: a Plexiglas window,

two inches thick. Dim light glows within the porthole, sil-houetting a vague form. A creature not born in

this dark universe, yet, due to a long series of evolutionary pro-cesses stretching back millions of years,

a distant cousin nonetheless.

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (2 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20

Allen Steele - Oceanspace

A man. A human being. Joe Niedzwiecki.

One eye on the porthole, the other on the bathymetric chart displayed on the computer screen beneath

the window, Joe Niedzwiecki gently pulled back the yoke. The bottom itself was still invisible through

the dish-size porthole, but the steady, high-pitched pings of the active sonar told him it was down there

nonetheless, coming closer with each passing second.

Joe inched back the yoke a little more, then found the throttle bar with his right hand and yanked it back

to neutral. Gravity would take care of the rest; all he had to do was make sure the little submersible

didn't crash-land. The silt stirred up by the thrusters was becoming more dense, as if he was flying

through a thick green cloud. Two fathoms… one and half… one fathom… and suddenly the floodlights

captured a flat, muddy surface just below him, strewn with small, dark brown rocks.

There was an abrupt jar as the DSV's skids connected with the seafloor. He checked the screen again,

smiled to himself. Touchdown, right on the money. Joe bent over the keypad, typed in a brief message:

DSV-02 Doris.On bottom: W78.2°S29.9°810m. Over .

He tapped the transmit key, settled back in his chair. This far down, instant communications with the

surface were impossible; he had to wait while sub's Extra Low Frequency transmitter pulsed his message

to the radio

buoy he had left on the surface, which in turn would relay it to Tethys. With a transmission rate of only a

few words per minute, there was no room for him to send any lengthy sonnets, or even a decent haiku.

Once more, he pushed to the back of his mind the fact that this information was per-tinent only in the

event of an accident. If the titanium hull of Doris's crew sphere failed now—if, say, there was the merest

hairline fracture between the porthole's glass and its frame—then nearly twelve hundred pounds-per-

square inch of hydrostatic pressure would pulverize him so quickly that there would be no time for him

to send a dis-tress signal. So relaying his coordinates was only standard operating procedure, in the

event Tethys had to send down another boat to pick up the pieces.

While he waited for the base to respond, Joe reached under his seat for the CD box. During the hourlong

de-scent, he had listened to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew al-bum on the CD player rigged beneath the

sonar panel on his right side. Good music for a deep dive, but now he needed something a little less

spooky. He wavered be-tween Hancock and the Marsalis brothers, and finally set-tled on Coltrane's A

Love Supreme . Cool, mysterious jazz for a cool, mysterious world.

The ELF panel above the porthole came alive as he was pulling out the Coltrane CD.

6.4.11/1026 EST

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (3 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20

Allen Steele - Oceanspace

TETHYS TO DSV-02 DORIS

COPY LAST TRANS, PRES. COORD.

PROCD W/ SER. & RET.

OVER

Good. Now that the formalities were dispensed with, he could get down to serious diving. Joe slipped in

the Coltrane CD, carefully turning down the volume so he

could still hear the forward range sonar; every five sec-onds, it transmitted an acoustic pulse at 8.1

kilohertz. He found the water bottle in its nylon web next to the seat, took a slug, then spat on the deck

between his knees for good luck. One more seaman's custom; only he and Mike Cilantro, Tethys's other

deep-sub pilot, knew that there was an antique silver dollar taped beneath the control yoke where no one

could see it, and he had made sure to place his right foot first on Doris's ladder when he climbed aboard.

Having a naked woman aboard might have helped, too—ancient legend had it that Poseidon liked the

presence of nude women aboard ships, which was why vessels used to sport bare-breasted figureheads

on their prows—but he doubted that his wife would have approved. Even if she herself was willing to

make a dive with him, which she wasn't, there wasn't enough room within Doris's cramped confines for

him to take proper advantage of the situation.

On the other hand, even if he could have smuggled Karen aboard, he probably wouldn't have. Although

a passenger seat was folded away in the back of the crew sphere, Joe preferred making these sorties by

himself. It was a little less cramped that way, and besides, he en-joyed the solitude. Going down here

was like visiting another world, but even the astronauts on the new lunar base didn't have the Moon all

to themselves. Spit on the deck, a silver dollar, and a good onboard guidance sys-tem: that was all the

assistance he needed now.

Oh, yeah… and a proper fix on Porky.

The electronic chart showed that he had touched down on a gentle slope about thirty nautical miles

southeast of Stetson Mesa. Joe typed the robot's serial number into the keypad, then asked the computer

to display its co-ordinates. An instant later Porky's present whereabouts appeared on the screen. Joe

smiled as he studied it; the

mining robot was only about a mile and a half northeast of his present position, bearing 40 degrees true

North. All he had to do was lock onto its transponder signal, and the computer would navigate him

straight there.

He pushed forward the throttle bar and pulled back the yoke. Dora lifted her skids from the muck; he

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (4 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20

Allen Steele - Oceanspace

turned the yoke a quarter of an arc to the right until a tiny red spot on heads-up was aligned with a

yellow pointer, then he gave the main prop a little juice and off he went across the sea bottom

The Doris was essentially a deep-ocean truck. Al-though it could conceivably be used for exploration, it

was specifically designed as a workhorse to service the teleoperated mining robots which prowled the

Blake Pla-teau. As Doris skimmed across the sea bottom at an al-titude of little less than a fathom, its

floodlights caught thousands of the dark nuggets, ranging in size from golf balls to Idaho potatoes,

spread so evenly over the ocean floor that they looked like a vast field of charcoal.

No one knew the exact origins of these manganese nodules. Although it was theorized that they were pre-

cipitates of dissolved metals in seawater, why they lay on the sea bottom instead of buried beneath the

muck was a question which still puzzled oceanographers. Dis-covered during the H.M.S. Challenger

expedition of the 1870s, they remained little more than a scientific curi-osity until the 1960s, when

industrialists first proposed harvesting them, for each nodule was a miniature lode of valuable metals:

manganese, cobalt, copper, nickel, even trace amounts of gold. Quite valuable when gathered by the

truckload, yet it wasn't until the last decade or so that the technology was finally developed which would

make sea mining economically viable.

Joe followed the arrow on the screen as he homed in on the robot. The side-scan sonar pinged as it found

something just ahead of him; at first he thought it was the robot, until he checked the chart and saw that

Porky still lay three-quarters of a mile away. He throttled back on the main screw and raised altitude by

a fathom, and presently something loomed out of the darkness just ahead: an angular, man-made shape.

He cut the main engine and used the thrusters to cau-tiously approach it. The DSV's lights caught the

broken prow of what looked like a wooden fishing boat. No tell-ing how long it had been down here, or

where it had come from. Silt covered its battered hull, and tiny albino crabs prowled its decaying planks.

The stern was no-where to be seen. Probably a schooner which had broken apart and sunk during a

storm uncounted years ago; if her crew hadn't survived, the crabs had doubtless dis-posed of their bodies

long ago.

Another time, he would have liked to find and explore its debris field, see if there was something down

here worth salvaging. Even a brass deck fixture could fetch a hundred bucks from an antique dealer. But

he was on the clock, and Miles Bartlett frowned on wreck diving during company time. He reluctantly

left the boat behind and continued following the GPS beacon to its source.

The sonar beeped sharply as it registered a metal con-tact. Joe caught sight of a pair of red strobes

winking at him from far away in the darkness. No longer needing the computer to guide him, he turned

the rudder a few degrees starboard as he throttled down again, and within minutes his lights found

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20Oceanspace.html (5 of 231)13-8-2005 23:04:20

Allen Steele - Oceanspace.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: