The Rising Sea

24

Gamay Trout picked her way through the narrow hall on the main deck of the Osaka-to-Shanghai ferry, squeezing past people, stacks of luggage and other items that lined the passageway. Because the journey was relatively short — and most of the passengers relatively poor — cabins were shared by multiple groups. Often six or eight people were in a room that would barely fit two on a standard Caribbean cruise ship.

This morning, the halls were particularly crowded as passengers who might have gone for fresh air on the upper deck remained inside, courtesy of gray skies and an icy rain.

Making it back to her cabin, she found Paul sitting at a desk that was entirely too small for him. “How’s it going?”

Paul was hunched over a chart, plotting their position. “I’ve figured out where we are, but I was starting to wonder where you’d gotten to.”

“I had to navigate by memory,” she said. “None of the signs are in English.”

She handed him a cup of hot liquid.

“Coffee?”

“Green tea,” she replied. “It’s all they had.”

Paul took the cup with a disappointed look on his face.

“It’s good for you,” Gamay said.

He nodded. “How do things look up top?”

“No one on deck,” she told him. “Too cold and miserable to be outside.”

“That’s one thing in our favor,” Paul said. “We’re only a few miles from the target zone, closer than I thought we’d be. We should probably wake up the Remora and make sure all systems are go.”

“I’ll get to it.”

Gamay settled in and turned on her laptop while Paul opened the cabin’s window. Brisk air poured in, freshening the room.

“Who needs coffee when you have salt air?” Gamay said.

“Me, for one,” Paul said. Standing beside the window, he removed a tightly wound bundle of cable from their luggage. With a twist of his hand, he attached a waterproof transmitter to the end and began feeding the cable through the open window. It slid down the side of the ship, drifting back with the wind until it eventually reached the sea.

“Transmitter is in the water,” Paul said. “Let’s hope no one looks out the window and wonders what this black wire is doing on the outside of the ship.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Gamay said. “As far as I can tell, every passenger on this ship has congregated in the hall. I’m ready to transmit.”

“All clear.”

She tapped away at the keyboard and sent a signal to the Remora, commanding it to power up. After a short delay, she was rewarded with a signal from the ROV and the appearance of a remote command screen on her computer. It looked like a video game display, with virtual controls and dials across the bottom and a forward-looking camera view across the top. A bank of indicators on the right side of the screen displayed readings from the magnetometer and other sensors.

“All systems green,” she said. “Disconnecting from the hull.”

At the touch of a button, the electromagnets in the Remora’s hull shut off and the ROV pitched down, diving to the right and away from the ferry’s spinning propellers. Turbulent water could be seen on the screen until the Remora cleared the ship’s wake.

“What’s the new course?” Gamay asked.

“The target area is almost directly south of us,” Paul said, glancing at his chart. “Set a heading of one-nine-zero.”

Gamay punched in the course, adjusted the dive angle and let the Remora do the rest. They were three miles from the target zone; it would take nearly twenty minutes to get there. “Better hope the batteries are charged.”

Paul grinned. “First thing I checked when we picked it up at the airport.”

With little to do as the submarine moved through the dark, Gamay began flicking through the instrument readings. Almost immediately, she noticed something odd.

“Check this out,” she said.

Paul leaned closer. “What am I looking at?”

“Based on the speed setting, the Remora is traveling through the water at eleven knots. But its position marker is barely making seven. We’re fighting a current.”

“Shouldn’t be,” Paul said, looking at his charts. “Considering our location and the time of year, the current should be in our favor, giving the Remora a push to the south.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “But we’ve got the nautical equivalent of a four-knot headwind.”

“That might explain why we’ve been traveling north of the shipping lane for the last four hours instead of on the south side. Anything on the bottom profile yet?”

Gamay pressed another key. A graphic display of the seafloor beneath the Remora appeared. “Flat as a pancake.”

“So much for my mountain range theory.”

“We’re still a few miles from the target zone.”

Paul shook his head. “If there was a new range growing up down there, I’d expect to see ridges and folding in the outer sedimentary layers. And we’d certainly detect a mild upslope.”

Gamay studied the readout for any sign of what Paul was describing, but she saw nothing to suggest a change in elevation. “Let’s let it play out before we go back to the drawing board.”

“Not much else we can do,” Paul said.

Gamay sat back, reaching for her cup of tea with one hand and tapping the keyboard with the other. Lazily, she cycled through a host of other readings: virtual topography, water temperatures and salinity levels. The computer organized the information into a series of displays and graphs, but the data made no sense.

“Something’s wrong with the instruments,” she said, putting the teacup down.

“Why do you say that?”

“According to the temperature profile, it’s getting warmer as the Remora goes deeper.”

Paul glanced over her shoulder. “Have you passed through a thermocline?”

“No,” she said. “No sudden change, just a slow, steady increase, approximately one degree for every seventy feet. That indicates a continuous mixing instead of boundary layer.”

“What about the salinity?” Paul asked.

Gamay tapped the key to bring up another sensor reading. “Even more screwed up than the temperature profile. According to this, the salinity is decreasing as we descend.”

“That can’t be right. Can you run a diagnostic on the sensor probes?”

Gamay didn’t know enough about the ROV to diagnose a problem with the sensors, let alone fix it remotely. “Maybe if Joe was here,” she said. “All I got was a rudimentary lesson on driving the thing.”

“Bring it back up,” Paul suggested. “Not all the way, just a hundred feet or so.”

“What good will that do?”

“If the sensors are failing, the temperature will continue to rise,” he said. “But if they’re working properly and we are actually dealing with an inverted temperature profile, the water should grow colder again.”

“Sneaky,” she said. “I like it.”

Gamay changed the dive angle and put the ROV into an ascent. “Temperature dropping, salinity rising. The sensors are working correctly. Now what?”

“Resume course,” Paul said.

Satisfied but confused, Gamay adjusted the dive profile once more and sent the Remora back toward the deep. She had it level off at a depth of five hundred feet so they could map a wide section of the bottom before investigating up close.

“Still flat,” Gamay noted.

“Amazing,” he said. “I’ve gotten shirts back from the dry cleaner that aren’t that smooth.”

“So, no mountain range,” Gamay said, “but temperature and salinity data that defy logic. Any thoughts?”

“Not at the moment,” Paul said. He glanced at the chart. “You’re nearing the epicenter of Kenzo’s earthquakes. Change course to the west.”

She made the adjustments and the readout changed. “We’re picking up something new.”

“Ridges and hills?” he said hopefully.

“Sorry, Charlie, it’s a depression. It looks like a subsurface canyon.”

The information on the chart suggested a flat plain. But as the Remora’s sonar bounced off the seafloor, a deep V-shaped gash was revealed. The point of the V was aimed like an arrow at Shanghai. “Let’s take a look at that chasm.”

Gamay was already changing course and directing the sub into the gap.

“Temperature continuing to rise,” she said. “Salinity continues to drop.”

It defied all logic. Colder, saltier water was more dense than warm freshwater. It sank to the bottom of the world’s oceans, sliding down into the subterranean canyons the way glaciers slid between the peaks of high mountain ranges.

At the bottom of every ocean were frigid pools and briny currents. Oceanographers considered them rivers because as they crept across the globe, they refused to mix with the rest of the sea.

As the Remora entered the canyon, Gamay turned on the lights. Sediment wafted by the camera like falling snow.

“One thousand feet,” she said.

“What depth is the Remora rated for?”

“Three thousand,” she said. “But Joe built it, so it’ll do twice that.”

From the sonar reading, they could see that the canyon was narrowing.

“Picking up the bottom,” Gamay said. “Shall we take the full tour?”

“We paid for it,” Paul said. “Might as well go on the ride.”

Gamay set the Remora onto a new course. “I’m really fighting the current now,” she said. “I have to keep five degrees down angle on the thrusters just to hold the depth.”

“So the current is flowing up the canyon?”

Gamay nodded. “It’s like we’ve entered opposite world.”

Paul pointed to something on the sonar scan. “What’s that?”

Gamay angled toward a strange rise in the bottom of the canyon. The Remora had to fight like crazy to get near it, pushing and weaving like a bird flying into the wind. As it got closer, the target resolved into a cone-shaped rise. Crossing over it, the Remora was pushed violently to the side and then away.

Before Gamay could circle back, another cone-shaped structure appeared on the scan. And then another.

“What are they?” Gamay asked.

“I think I know,” Paul said, “but keep going.”

Traveling down the canyon and zigzagging as it widened, they found dozens upon dozens of the protruding cones.

“I’m moving in closer to one of them,” Gamay said.

Using full power, the Remora crept up to the cone. The camera focused on its edge. Small amounts of sediment were blasting out of the cone, streaming toward the surface like ash from a volcano.

“It’s a subsurface geyser,” Paul said. “It’s venting water.”

“Geothermal?”

“Has to be.”

“Let’s get over the top,” Gamay said. “It’ll give us an idea of how much water is being ejected and allow us to get a direct sample.”

“Great idea,” Paul said.

She maneuvered the Remora up and over the very center of the cone. The submersible was immediately caught in the grips of the outflow. The view spun as the craft was thrust violently upward and outward, rising like a scrap of paper caught in the breeze on a hot summer day.

Gamay maneuvered the submarine away from the rising column of water and got it back under control. “The water in that plume is nearly two hundred degrees,” she said, checking the readings. “Salinity is zero.”

Paul sat back and scratched his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Black smokers on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” she suggested.

“Not the same,” he said. “They vent toxic sludge, high in sulfur and all manner of dangerous chemicals. Basically, volcanic soot. From the look of this chemical profile, you could bottle that water once it cooled down.”

“Keep it hot and we could make coffee with it,” she joked.

“Now you’re talking,” he said. “How many cones did you count before we stopped looking?”

“At least fifty,” she said.

“Let’s see if there are any more.”

She redirected the Remora once again and it traveled down the canyon for another twenty minutes. They counted more than a hundred cones. There seemed to be no end to them.

“Picking up a source of iron,” Gamay said, checking the magnetometer. “But we’re starting to lose the signal.”

“Head toward it,” Paul said. “We’re getting close to maximum transmission range. We’re going to lose the ROV any minute.”

She adjusted course once more, but the image on-screen began to glitch as pixels dropped out and the transmission became garbled. The view froze and then cleared.

“Hang in there,” Paul urged.

“Bottom coming up,” Gamay said.

The screen froze once more and then cleared just as the Remora crashed into the sediment pile.

“You’ve hit bottom,” Paul said.

Gamay was already adjusting the controls. “No backseat drivers, thank you.”

The impact caused a momentary blackout, but the link reset after several anxious moments. As the view resolved, the camera focused on a tangle of metallic wreckage.

“Something else was down there,” Paul said.

“It looks structural to me,” she said. Twisted steel plating and pipes were clearly visible. Whatever it had once been, it was now half buried.

Gamay adjusted the lights and then panned and zoomed the camera. The video flickered and a new sight appeared. “That’s an arm.”

It was white in appearance and stretching away from the camera. It looked like colorless, bleached flesh. But the shape was too perfect and consistent and the Remora’s lights reflected off its polished surface. At the end of the arm, they found a hand and mechanical fingers.

“Interesting.”

As the ROV hovered, its thrusters scoured away the loose sediment. A shoulder came into view next and then a face appeared from beneath the silt. Perfectly shaped and porcelain white, it filled the screen. It was like unearthing a statue of Athena.

“She’s beautiful,” Paul said.

“She’s a machine,” Gamay replied.

“Machines can be beautiful.”

Gamay nodded. That was true in many ways but oddly disturbing in this situation. The beautiful machine seemed a little too human. It appeared to be alive even though it was not moving. The face held a sad quality. The eyes were open and looking up toward the surface as if waiting for a rescue that hadn’t come.

It was the last image they recorded before the signal was lost for good.