Shadow Tyrants

THIRTY-FIVE

Lyla Dhawan’s coordinates were so precise that it didn’t take long to find the sunken wreck lying seventy feet below the surface. The 500-foot-long hulk lay across the side of the growing undersea volcano formed by a crack in the earth pushing apart the continents of Africa and Asia. It was resting at an angle, so they could see the top deck from their current vantage point.

“No wonder the plotters behind Project C weren’t concerned about anyone finding this ship,” Eric Stone said from the cockpit of the Oregon’s Nomad submarine. “In a few weeks, it will be completely buried.”

Juan, sitting beside him in the copilot’s seat, nodded as the hull of a cargo vessel loomed in front of them. A large hole on the starboard side below the waterline amidships was obviously the reason for its sinking. He couldn’t read its name because both the bow and stern were covered by hardened lava. A thin ridge had formed upslope from the ship along a good portion of the length, diverting the ongoing lava flow, but the underwater mountain was growing so fast that it was just a matter of time before the red-hot molten rock breached the ridge and covered the wreckage.

Nomad was the larger of the Oregon’s two subs — sixty-five feet long, big enough to carry ten passengers including the pilots, and equipped with a diver’s air lock. With a transparent polycarbonate nose and a cigar shape, Nomad resembled a miniaturized nuclear attack sub, but with robotic claws jutting from her chin. Though she was rated for depths down to one thousand feet, they wouldn’t be going nearly that far down today.

Normally, when sending divers down a mere seventy feet, the Oregon would maintain a position over the site and release them from the central moon pool. But Juan didn’t want her any closer to an active volcano than she needed to be. Besides, by the time the divers swam that distance to the wreck, they’d have only a couple of minutes to explore before being boiled by the extreme heat.

Juan turned and asked Linda Ross, who was behind them in the main cabin of the sub, “Temperature reading?”

“Just one hundred and five degrees here,” she said. “But it’s rising fast as we approach the ship.”

“Are you sure you want to go out in that?” said Julia Huxley, who was sitting next to Linda and frowning at the gauge.

Juan smiled. “Why not? It’ll be like a nice soak in a hot tub.”

She rolled her eyes. “Hot tubs max out at one hundred and four. It’s good I came along to monitor your vitals if you’re crazy enough to go out in that.”

Linda said, “They worked great last time we used them.”

Max had modified two of their drysuits to mimic the cooling suits used by race car drivers. Cold liquid flowed through tubes lining the inside of the suit. The cooling unit and pump were mounted on the back next to the air tank. Juan and Linda had worn them on a previous mission to infiltrate a Russian nuclear power plant through the drainpipes of its secondary cooling system. The water hadn’t been radioactive, but it was too hot for a diver to survive without protection.

“I remember,” Julia said. “But that water was only one hundred and ten degrees. The water here looks like it’ll get even hotter.”

Linda gestured to the two diving suits hanging by the air lock. “Max says they’re rated for up to fifteen minutes at a hundred and thirty degrees.”

“And then you’ll begin to cook.” She gave Juan a scolding look. “If your body temperatures reach a hundred, I’m pulling you both back in immediately.”

“Works for me,” Juan said. “I don’t feel like stewing in my own juices. But before we do that, let’s take a look with Little Geek and see if an excursion is even necessary.”

Little Geek was their remotely operated vehicle, named after a similar ROV in the movie The Abyss. It was currently resting in Nomad’s claws, waiting for Linda to begin guiding it via the fiber-optic and power umbilical links to the sub.

“Where should we start?” she asked.

“Eric, take Nomad closer to the bridge,” Juan said. “We might be able to find something in there.”

“Aye, Chairman.”

Nomad climbed up the sunken hull and back toward the superstructure located aft. They could now see that the deck was not laid out like a typical cargo ship. Instead of hoisting cranes and hard points for fastening containers, the deck had four thirty-foot spiral masts and a large satellite dish at the center of the ship. One of the masts had snapped off at its base and lay half buried in lava.

“What are those?” Julia asked, pointing at the eggbeater-shaped objects.

“They look like wind generators,” Juan said. “Some cargo ships have them installed to save on fuel.”

When the sub was within a hundred feet of the superstructure, Linda launched Little Geek, and it whizzed away twice as fast as Nomad could ever move.

They watched its video feed on the monitor. Little Geek’s bright LED lights panned over the white superstructure, and they could see the empty davits where the lifeboat would normally be hanging.

“Looks like the crew got away,” Linda said.

“Even if some of them didn’t, we won’t find any bodies,” Julia said. “Not if it sank eight months ago. They’d be fully decomposed at this depth and temperature. Only bones will be left.”

Linda piloted Little Geek up to the bridge. The windows were caked with algae. All of them were intact, and none of the doors were open.

“Can’t see a thing,” Linda said.

“And we’re not going to get Little Geek through impact-resistant glass,” Juan said. “We’ll have to go in ourselves.” The ROV’s small manipulator arm wasn’t strong enough to open doors.

Julia gestured at the temperature gauge. “Little Geek’s sensor shows one hundred and nineteen degrees.”

“Still within the suits’ capability to keep us cool.”

“There’s one other way in,” Eric said from the cockpit.

“The hole in the hull,” Juan said. “Let’s go down there.”

They descended with Little Geek taking the lead. Eric hovered the sub a respectable distance from the tear in the ship’s midsection. With all of Nomad’s light focused on the hole, which was the size of a minivan but still too small for Nomad, Juan could now see a feature he hadn’t noticed before.

“The edges of the metal are bent out from the inside of the ship,” he said. “The explosion came from the hold.”

“So we know it wasn’t sunk by a torpedo,” Linda said. “Sabotage?”

“Or the cargo they were carrying blew up,” Eric said.

“Only one way to find out,” Juan said, and nodded at Linda.

She guided Little Geek through the hole and into a vast hold whose bulkheads were beyond the reach of the ROV’s lights. The first thing they saw on the monitor was a vast array of pipes, power cables, and electrical conduits snaking through the hull. Some of them had been ruptured by the internal explosion and lay in a tangled mess on the deck.

“This could get tricky,” Linda said. “Don’t want to get the umbilical tangled.”

Juan pointed to a space on the right that was relatively clear of the pipes. “That seems to be the best route.”

Linda navigated in that direction, and a huge round metal vat came into view. Half of it had been torn apart by the explosion, but from its exterior, so the blast hadn’t resulted from whatever had been inside the tank. Dozens of the pipes and conduits were connected to it.

“Looks like they were brewing beer in there,” Julia said.

“Those would be expensive six-packs,” Juan said.

Linda piloted Little Geek into the vat, and they could make out a complicated array of cells, like the honeycomb in a beehive.

“What do you make of that?” Juan asked.

“This tank is made to create a biochemical reaction of some kind,” Julia said. “But it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“Why is it connected to electrical cables?”

Julia shrugged. “Maybe for monitoring.”

Linda backed Little Geek out of the vat and kept it moving along, revealing that the hold was packed with identical vats. At the end of the hold was a giant rack full of computer servers.

“That’s an awful lot of computing power just to monitor a chemical reaction,” Eric said, who was watching the video while keeping Nomad steady.

“Lyla Dhawan said Project C was supposed to be a breakthrough in artificial intelligence,” Juan said. “This has to be related to what was going on at Jhootha Island somehow.”

“The name of the ship would help us answer that, I bet,” Julia said.

“That’s why Linda and I are going in. Maybe we can also find some information about this ship’s purpose. Once we take a look at the other side of the hold, we’ll suit up.” They were recording Little Geek’s feed, so even if they didn’t notice anything of use now, they could scour the video for clues later.

She turned the ROV toward the port side of the ship, careful to avoid the cables and pipes that had been jarred loose by the explosion and sinking. Seeing the effort put into designing and building this unusual vessel, along with the time and money spent to construct the prison on Jhootha Island, it was even more obvious that the people responsible for Project C had virtually unlimited resources at their disposal.

Little Geek reached the opposite end of the hold, and now they had enough video to simulate the hold in 3-D. This would help them to better figure out what was going on. Linda turned the ROV around to follow its umbilical back the way it had come.

As Little Geek maneuvered past the damaged vat, its wake was strong enough to cause a pipe hanging by a thread to detach from the tank and plummet to the bottom.

The video feed went black. An instant later, it was followed by the sound of an enormous explosion that rocked Nomad. Eric was secure in his pilot’s seat, but the rest of them were thrown to the deck.

Juan, whose ears were ringing from the blast, got up and said, “Everyone all right?”

They all said they were okay.

Eric backed away from the hole in the ship. “No damage to Nomad. We’re lucky that the detonation occurred on the other side of the ship.” Then Juan heard him say into his radio headset, “Yeah, Max. We’re fine down here. It came from the wreckage. No, we don’t know yet. We’ll keep you posted.”

“Run the video back,” Juan said to Linda.

She rewound the recording until it showed the pipe falling.

“I’ll zoom in on the bottom to see if we can tell what it hit.”

She ran the video in slow motion until they could see the steel pipe bounce on the deck and careen into the exterior bulkhead. It hit a red box no bigger than a carry-on suitcase, and that’s when the video went blank.

“That red box wasn’t just lying there,” Juan said. “It looked like it was welded to the hull.”

“Some kind of self-destruct bomb?” Linda wondered.

“That’s how they got rid of the evidence at Jhootha Island,” Juan said. “They might have done the same thing with this ship.”

“So either they sank the ship on purpose, but the portside explosive didn’t detonate until now,” Eric said, “or the starboard one went off by accident.”

“Or it was sabotage like Linda thought,” Juan said. “We won’t have any idea if we can’t at least figure out where this ship came from.”

As Nomad rose, they could now see past the top deck. The explosion had done more than tear apart the interior of the ship. Part of the hardened lava ridge was now gone, collapsed in an avalanche caused by the blast.

Molten lava was now pouring through the gap toward the ship.

“That’s not good,” Julia said.

“How long do you think we have before the ship is covered?” Juan asked Eric.

He could see the naval genius doing calculations in his head as he watched the flow of hot liquid rock cascading over the breach.

He finally said, “At this rate, I’d say an hour before the hull is too hot to go near. Maybe less.”

Juan looked at Linda. He didn’t have to ask if she would volunteer for the hazardous dive. She simply nodded and started donning her dive suit. He did the same.

“You’re not seriously diving with that coming our way?” Julia asked in disbelief as she pointed at the ropy lava coursing like a river in their direction.

“We need answers, Doctor,” Juan said, shrugging the suit over his torso and pulling the air tank and cooling pump onto his shoulders. “Once the lava reaches the ship, the hardened rock will make it impossible to enter the crew areas even after it has cooled. If we don’t go into that ship now, we never will.”