The Hunt For Atlantis

“Least you’ll be safe from choppers down there,” said Chase, looking overboard. The sea was calm, the gentle waves the perfect disguise for what lay beneath.

Kari led the group into the superstructure and up to the pilot house on level four, where they were met by the Evenor’s commander, Captain Leo Matthews, a tall Canadian in a spotless white uniform. Once the introductions were made, he updated them on the situation. “We’ll reach the target area in about three hours. Are you sure you want to send both subs down on the first descent, ma’am?” he asked Kari. “It might be better just to send the Atragon to inspect the seabed first.”

Kari shook her head. “I’m afraid time is a factor. Qobras already has a ship at sea-it’s looking in the wrong place, but he must know by now that we’ve set sail. Sooner or later he’s going to investigate, and I suspect it will be sooner.”

“Are you worried about an attack?”

“Wouldn’t be the first one,” Chase pointed out.

Matthews smiled. “Well, the Evenor might not be a warship, but… let’s just say we can look after ourselves.” He turned to Kari. “Your father sent some, ah, special equipment. We’ll be ready for any trouble, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Matthews ordered one of his crew to show the team to their staterooms. Despite offering it to Nina, on the grounds that she deserved the title, Kari had the chief scientist’s stateroom below the pilothouse, while Nina took a cabin next to Chase a deck beneath.

“Excellent,” he cackled, popping his head around Nina’s door. “Got a room to myself. No sharing with Hugo on this boat.”

“Does he snore?”

“He does much, much worse than that.” To Nina’s relief, he didn’t elaborate. “It’s not as posh as the Nereid, but it should be a lot harder to blow up.”

“Please, don’t even joke about that.”

“I wasn’t joking.” Chase came fully into the room. “Like Kari said, Qobras has got to know we’re out here. I know she thinks the crew’s loyal, but wave enough money around and anybody can be bought.”

“You think Qobras has a spy aboard?” Nina sat on the bed, worried.

“I’d put money on it. For that matter…” He trailed off.

“What?”

He sat next to her, lowering his voice. “Back in Brazil, Starkman found us way too fast. Those choppers couldn’t have just shadowed us as we went upriver, we were moving too slow. They would have run out of fuel. Which meant when they set off, they already knew where we were. Either there was a homing device on the boat, which is possible… or somebody aboard told them our position.”

Despite the warmth of the cabin, Nina shivered. “Who?”

“Couldn’t have been that idiot tree-hugger; nobody told him why we were really going there. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Captain Perez and Julio are on my list.”

“But they were killed when the Nereid was blown up. You saw the bodies.”

“Could be that Starkman killed them so there wouldn’t be any loose ends. So they’re still a possibility. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure Kari’s not trying to sell out her own dad…” He grinned at the understatement. “And you, well. Beyond reproach.”

Nina smiled. “I’m glad you think so.”

“Problem is, that doesn’t leave many suspects. There’s Agnaldo, the Prof… and, well, me and Hugo.”

“It can’t have been Jonathan,” Nina said immediately. “I’ve known him for years. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

“Okay then,” said Chase, raising an eyebrow, “I trust Agnaldo, and hell, I trust Hugo with my life. Which leaves… aw, buggeration and fuckery. It was me all along, wasn’t it? Bollocks.”

Nina giggled. “I think we can rule you out.”

“Hope so. I’d hate to have to beat the shit out of myself.” He smiled again, then shook his head wearily. “I dunno. Anybody on the Nereid could have had a sat-phone hidden in their personal kit-I only checked through the stuff we took aboard in Tefe. And as for this boat…” He sighed. “All we can do is just keep an eye out, look for anything funny.”

“What are you going to do if you find someone?” asked Nina.

Chase stood. “Make the bastard walk the plank.” She could tell he wasn’t joking.

Nina spent a while familiarizing herself with the layout of the Evenor, eventually making her way to the foredeck to check out the two submersibles. Kari was already there, talking to a pair of young men whose scruffy shorts and garish unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts went far beyond “beach casual” into actual “beach bum” territory.

“Nina,” said Kari, “these are our submersible pilots. And designers, in fact.”

“Jim Baillard,” said the taller of the two men, like Matthews a Canadian, only with a considerably more languid turn of speech. Nina shook his hand, his wristband of little seashells rattling. “So you think you found Atlantis, eh? Awesome.”

“You want it dug up? We’ll get it done,” said the shorter, more tubby of the pair, a deeply tanned Australian with bleached spiky hair. “Matt Trulli. If it’s underwater, we can dry it off for you.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Nina. She looked at the submersibles. “So these are your subs? They don’t look like I expected.” They resembled earthmovers or other industrial machinery more than submarines.

“You thought they’d have the big bubble on the front, right?” Trulli said enthusiastically. “Jesus, you don’t want that! One crack, and splatto! Well, maybe you want one if all you’re doing is taking snapshots of weird fish or poncing about on the Titanic, but these beauts, we built them to work. Tough as hell.”

“The last thing you want to do with a pressure hull is make a big hole in it,” added Baillard, continuing his partner’s train of thought as smoothly as if they were the same person. He pointed at the large white and orange metal sphere at the front of the smaller sub, the name Atragon painted on it in an elegant script. “Keep it in one piece and it’s a lot stronger-and you can go much deeper.”

“How do you see out?” Nina could see a porthole in the sphere’s side, but it was only a few inches across.

“We use a LIDAR virtual imaging system instead of a viewing bubble-like radar, but using blue-green lasers. The U.S. Navy designed them as a communications system, to contact their missile subs. They work on a wavelength that isn’t blocked by seawater.”

“Two lasers,” Trulli jumped in, “one for each eye. Proper stereoscopics! The lasers sweep in front of the sub twenty times a second, and any light that gets reflected back, we see on the big screen inside the pod in 3-D. No need to suck your batteries dry with a load of spotlights that do squat more than twenty feet away. We can see for a mile!”

“And because we have a much wider field of view than we would through a bubble, we can work a lot faster with the arms,” Baillard said, reaching up and patting one of the imposing steel manipulators. “It’s a revolutionary design.”

“You said it!” Trulli high-fived his partner. “Too revolutionary. Nobody else even wanted to risk giving us development money. Kari’s dad, though? Bam! Soon as he saw what we had in mind, we were in business.”

“And now, not only do you get to prove your design,” said Kari, “but you get to do so as part of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.”

“Like I said,” nodded Baillard, “awesome.”

“Too right,” agreed Trulli. Nina smiled as they high-fived each other again.

“So what do they do?” she asked. “I mean, I guess the Atragon’s like a regular sub, but that one?” She indicated the larger submersible, a bright yellow behemoth with what looked almost like the mouth of a giant vacuum cleaner beneath its crew sphere. A broad pipe led back from the nozzle into the main body