deepest known point on earth. Until now.'
The image flickered again. A simple drawing showed a cross-section of the earth's crust. 'Beneath the continents, the abyssal cavities are not exceptionally deep. They mostly exploit surficial limestone, which is readily eroded by water into such traditional features as sinkholes and caves. These have been the focus of public attention lately because they're close to home, underneath cities and suburbs. At last count, the combined military estimate of continental tunnels ran to 463,000 linear miles, with an average depth of only three hundred fathoms.
'Where you're going is considerably deeper. Beneath the ocean crust, we're dealing with a whole different rock from limestone, much newer in geological terms than the continental rock. Until a few years ago, it was presumed that the interior of ocean rock was nonporous and much too hot and pressurized to sustain life. Now we know better.
'The abyss beneath the Pacific is basalt, which gets attacked every few hundred thousand years by huge plumes of hydrogen-sulfide brine, or sulfuric acid, which snake up from deeper layers. This acid brine eats through the basalt like worms through an apple. We now believe there may be as many as six million miles of naturally occurring cavities in the rock beneath the Pacific, at an average depth of
6,100 fathoms. That's 36,600 feet below sea level, or six-point-nine miles.'
'Six million miles?' someone said.
'Correct,' said the cartographer. 'Very little of that is passable for human beings, naturally. But what is passable is more than enough. Indeed, what is passable seems to have been in use for thousands of years.'
Hadals, thought Ali, and heard the stillness all around her.
The screen filled with gray, shot through with squiggles and holes. The overall effect was of worms burrowing through a block of mud, surfacing and diving into the nether zone.
'The Pacific floor covers roughly 64,186,000 square miles. As you can see, it's riddled with these cavities, hundreds and thousands of miles of them. From Level 15, roughly four miles down, the density of rock and our limited technology drop our scale to 1:120,000. But we've still managed to count some eighteen thousand significant subterranean branches.
'They seem to dead-end or circle on themselves and go nowhere. All except one. We think this particular tunnel was carved by an acid plume relatively recently, less than a hundred thousand years ago, just moments in geological time. It appears to have welled up from beneath the Mariana Trench system, then corkscrewed east into younger and younger basalt. This tunnel goes from Point A – where we sit this morning – all the way across to Point B.' He walked from east to west across the front of the screen, pulling his pencil point across the entire Pacific territory. 'Point B lies at point-seven degrees north by 145.23 degrees east, just this side of the Mariana Trench system. There it dips deeper, beneath the Trench.
'Where it goes, we're not quite sure. It probably links with the Carolinian system west of the Philippines. A profusion of tunnels shoots throughout the Asian plate
systems, giving access to the basements of Australia, the Indonesian archipelago, China, and so on. You name it, there are doorways to the surface everywhere. We believe these connect with the sub-Pacific network here at Point B, but our scan is still in progress. It's a cartographic missing link for the moment, as the source of the Nile once was. But not for long. In less than a year, you are going to tell me where it leads.' It took Ali and the others a minute to catch up.
'You're sending us out there?' someone gasped.
Ali was staggered. She couldn't begin to grasp the enormity of the endeavor. Nothing January or Thomas had told her was preparation for this. She heard people breathing hard all around her. What could this mean, she wondered, a journey so audacious? Why send them all the way across to Asia? It was a stratagem of some sort, a geopolitical chess move. It reminded her less of Lewis and Clark's traverse than of the great expeditions of discovery once launched by Spain and England and Portugal.
It struck her. Their journey was meant to be a declaration, a pronunciamento. Wherever the expedition went, Helios would be asserting its domain. And the cartographer had just told them where they were going, beneath the Equator, from South America all the way to China.
In a flash, Ali saw the grand design.
Helios – Cooper, the failed President – intended to lay claim to the entire subbasement of the oceanic bowl. He was going to create a nation for himself. But a nation the size of the Pacific Ocean? She had to relay this information to January.
Ali sat in the darkness, gaping at the screen. It would be larger than all the nations on earth put together! Helios would own almost half the globe. What could you possibly do with such immense space? How could you manifest such power?
She was awed by the grandeur of it. Such imperial vision: it was virtually psychotic. And she and these scientists were to be the agents in gaining it.
Her neighbors were lodged in their own thoughts. Most were probably weighing the risks, adjusting their search goals, adapting to the vastness of the challenge, reckoning the odds.
'Shoat!' a man bellowed.
Shoat's face obligingly appeared at the podium light.
'No one said anything about this,' the man said.
'You did sign on for a year,' Shoat pointed out.
'You expect us to traverse the Pacific Ocean? A mile to three miles beneath the ocean floor? Through unexplored territory? Hadal territory?'
'I'll be with you every step of the way,' Shoat said.
'But no one's ever gone west of the Nazca Plate.'
'That's true. We'll be the first.'
'You're talking about being on the move for an entire year.'
'Precisely our reason for sending you a workout schedule over the last six months. All those climbing walls and StairMasters and heavy squats weren't for your cosmetic enhancement.'
Ali could sense the group calculating.
'You have no idea what's out there,' someone said.
'That's not exactly true,' Shoat said. 'We have some idea. Two years ago, a military reconnaisance probed some of the path. Basically they found the remains of a prehistoric passageway, a network of tunnels and chambers that are well marked and have been improved and maintained over a period of several thousand years. We think it may have been a kind of Silk Road for the Pacific abyss.'
'How far did the soldiers get?'
'Twenty-three miles,' Shoat answered. 'Then they turned around and came back.'
'Armed soldiers.'
Shoat was unflappable. 'They weren't prepared. We are.'
'What about hadals?'
'There hasn't been a sighting in over two years,' Shoat said. 'But just to be safe, Helios has hired a security force. They will accompany us every step of the way.'
A gentleman stood. He had Isaac Asimov muttonchops and black horn-rims, and had X'ed out the word 'Hi' on his name tag. Ali knew his face from the dust jackets of his numerous books: Donald Spurrier, a renowned primatologist. 'What about human limitations? Your projected route must be five thousand miles long.'
The cartographer turned to the glowing map. His finger traced a set of lines that ambled back and forth across the equatorial rhumb. 'In fact, with all the bends and turns and vertical loss and gain, a better estimate is eight thousand miles, plus or minus a thousand.'
'Eight thousand miles?' said Spurrier. 'In a single year? On foot?'
'For what it's worth, our train ride just gave us an easy thirteen hundred miles without a step.'
'Leaving a mere 6,700 miles. Are we supposed to run nonstop for a year?'
'Mother Nature is lending a hand,' the cartographer said.
'We've detected significant motion along the route,' Shoat said. 'We believe it's a river.'
