The Calm Before The Swarm

Two

Kilinailau Trench

South Pacific Ocean

176 km East of New Ireland Island, Papua New Guinea

November 26^th

11:58 a.m. PGT

Present Day

The deep sea submersible cruised over a mat of gray lava pillows the size of boulders, twenty-two hundred meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Far off in the murky black distance rose the rugged rim of the Kilinailau Trench, formed by the subduction of the Pacific tectonic plate beneath the Bismarck microplate. Their movement resulted in a steady flow of magma and geothermal heat from the Earth's molten core. Forty-five hundred watts of HMI lights mounted on an array of booms, enough to nearly illuminate an entire football stadium, turned the water a midnight blue. Jagged crests of mineral and ore deposits appeared at the extent of the light's reach, where they abruptly climbed hundreds of meters back toward the sun.

After close to four hours of freefall in absolute blackness and another two skimming the bottom of the world, they had finally reached their destination.

The Basilisk Vent Field was a hotbed of geological activity. Seawater that leeched through the silt was superheated, suffused with toxic chemicals and minerals, and funneled back into the ocean at more than seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit through tall chimneys called hydrothermal vents. Seven main chimneys, nicknamed black smokers for the noxious plumes of water that poured out of them like the smoke from a tire fire, were staggered across Basilisk. It was one such formation, a more recent eruption named Medusa, that had summoned them more than a mile down to where the pressure could crumple a man in tin can fashion. Over the last twenty days, intermittent seismic activity had already toppled two of the older chimneys and increased the ambient water temperature by two degrees, which may not have seemed significant to the average man on the street, but reflected a massive expulsion of hydrothermal energy at nearly twice its previous rate. An opportunity like this might not come along again.

The submersible Corellian, named after the fictional manufacturer of the escape pod used by R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars due to its striking physical resemblance, slowed to zero-point-eight knots as it closed in on the ridge. Its thirty-foot, twenty-eight ton body was primarily fabricated from fiberglass and foam attached to a titanium frame that served as housing for the rear thruster assembly, a series of lights and cameras on forward-facing booms, and the two-inch-thick titanium personnel sphere that accommodated a dedicated pilot and two scientific observers. Patterned after the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence vehicle Alvin, which had set the standard for nearly half a century, the Corellian had cost GeNext Biosystems more than thirty millions dollars to build for its own personal use. Factor in the cost of its mobile berth, the one-hundred-and-seventy-foot Research Vessel Ernst Mayr and the salaries of the eighteen scientific researchers and twenty-eight officers and crew, and this was a two hundred million dollar private venture that amounted to little more than deep sea prospecting.

"Medusa rears her ugly head," John Bishop said. The pilot could have passed for a beach bum with his unkempt blonde hair, deep tan, and lazy surfer drawl, but the former Navy Seaman was all business when he assumed the helm. He eased back on the throttle and watched through the foot-wide porthole as they approached the hellish eight-story behemoth. The Corellian had been equipped with a thirty-six inch LCD screen that relayed the footage from the digital video assembly mounted above the window so that the pilot no longer had to press his face against the reinforced glass to see where he was going, but Bishop was old-school. His motto was I didn't come all the way down here to watch it on TV.

Dr. Tyler Martin shifted his lanky six-foot frame. His unruly chestnut hair fell in front of his brown eyes. He tucked his bangs behind his ears and leaned back from the port view window, where he had been watching the lava fields transform into sharp crests that came to life with scuttling crabs and shrimp, and turned to face the monitor. The digital clarity surpassed even what he could see with his own eyes.

The live feed focused on the chimney, a great branching trunk composed of anhydrite, and copper, iron, and zinc sulfide precipitates. Black smoke poured out of various openings reminiscent of the pipes on some bizarre Dr. Seuss machination and roiled toward the sky. Six-foot tube worms that looked like crimson tulips bloomed from chitinous tunnels, filtering the hydrogen sulfide from the scalding water, which fueled the chemosynthetic bacteria in their guts, the source of all life in this strange ecosystem. White Yeti crabs snapped at the worms while clouds of ghostly shrimp swirled from one toxic flume to the next. Golden mussels and pale anemones staked claim to every spare inch of space. An octopus squirmed away from their lights.

"You guys ready to get to work?" Bishop asked.

"Might as well, you know, since we're already down here and all," Dr. Courtney Martin said. With her long auburn hair and emerald eyes, it was nearly impossible to tell that she and Tyler were related. His little sister snuggled up to the starboard viewport, where she could use the control panel to her right to manipulate the retractable armature. The monitor above her head displayed footage from the camera affixed to its hydraulic claw.

"How close can you get us?" Tyler asked.

He dimmed the screens that displayed their GPS data and bathymetric maps to better see the monitor for his own armature.

"Close enough to count the hairs on a crab's ass."

Bishop smirked. He had logged more than four thousand hours in this very submersible over the last three years and took his job so seriously that he even catheterized himself prior to launch so that nothing would distract him from his duties. He maneuvered the Corellian with such fluidity that it seemed like an extension of his body, an exoskeleton of sorts.

"Take us up about thirty feet," Courtney said. "You see where the chimney forks like a cactus? Right there by those two vents where all the smoke's coming from. That work for you, Ty?"

"Perfectly," he said.

He fiddled with the armature controls, flexing the elbow, testing the clamps. Satisfied, he used it to pinch the handle of his collecting device, a tubular bioreactor that looked like an industrial coffee dispenser, and drew it out of its housing beneath the sphere.

"Sonar's registering seismic activity," Courtney said. "Looks like a swarm of mini-quakes."

"It's been like that for the last three weeks," Bishop said. "It comes and goes."

As Bishop watched, several of the fluted pipes broke away from the chimney and tumbled toward the sea floor, dragging crabs and anemones with them. There was a flicker of light as magma oozed out of the ground and immediately cooled to a gray crust.

Courtney bumped him from behind, knocking him forward against the glass. Three of them in that diminutive metal ball was like keeping a trio of goldfish in a wine glass. With the rounded walls racked with equipment and monitors of all kinds, it barely left room for them to squat on top of each other in what amounted to an uncomfortable, padded pit. There was barely space for them to kneel. The air was damp and sweaty. Fortunately, that was one luxury they had in abundance. There was enough oxygen for forty hours, while their dive was timed for only ten. Of course, that wouldn't matter if the sphere breached. The pressure would compress the titanium shell and the equipment, with them right there in the middle, into a metallic tomb the size of a basketball.