The Hunt For Atlantis

“No!” Nina gasped, disappointed. “It’s a dead end!”

The ROV turned left, then right, its spotlights finding nothing but solid stone. “What do you want me to do?” asked Baillard.

Nina was about to tell him to bring the robot back out when Chase interrupted, leaning close to speak into her headset’s mike. “Jim, this is Eddie. Can that thing go straight up?”

“Yes, sure. But-”

“Do it.”

After a moment of hesitation, the ROV rose cautiously towards the ceiling…

And kept going.

“Whoa!” said Baillard, rotating Mighty Jack to examine the side walls as the robot ascended. “How did you know that was there?”

“Just a hunch,” said Chase, grinning at Nina. “Watch out, though. There might be traps on the way up.”

She gently swatted him away from her headset. “Eddie, somehow I doubt there’s been anybody maintaining this temple for the past eleven thousand years.”

“I dunno, those mermaids are tricky bitches…”

Nina smiled, then turned her attention back to the screen. Baillard angled the camera upwards as much as he could, the shaft taking on perspective.

“I see something,” he announced. A dark line on the wall of the shaft came up fast, a shimmering distortion…

The image suddenly rolled, tipping back to the horizontal. One of the stone walls filled the screen. “Jim!” Nina called. “What happened? Did you hit something?”

“Just a second…” The robot slowly turned, the image still shaking queasily. Nothing was visible except the walls. “Okay. I guess that’s as far as Mighty Jack can go.”

“What do you mean?” Kari demanded. “Is it stuck on something? Have we lost the ROV?”

Baillard almost laughed. “Not at all. It’s just that… well, Mighty Jack’s only designed for use in the water. So you’ll need some other way to explore from this point on.”

“Why?” asked Nina.

“Because we’ve run out of water. Mighty Jack’s floating on the surface. There’s air inside that temple.”

TWENTY

The submersibles returned to the surface. The Sharkdozer was recovered and winched back aboard the Evenor, but the Atragon remained in the water, a cable attached so it could recharge its batteries.

A second dive was being prepared. And this time, the exploration of the temple would not be left to robots.

“I wish I could go with you,” Nina said. Kari, Chase and Castille were in the final stages of suiting up for their descent.

“Bet you wish you’d brought your swimming certificate, don’t you?” Chase joked as a crewman assisted him with his helmet.

The three divers were wearing newly designed “deep suits”-a kind of hybrid of traditional scuba systems and the armorlike, almost robotic hard suits employed for deep, long-duration dives. The divers’ limbs were enclosed in the same neoprene rubber used in regular dry suits, but their heads and bodies were contained in a rigid unit connected to ring seals around the thighs and upper arms.

At a depth of eight hundred feet, close to the limits of scuba diving, the pressure on a diver’s body was over twenty-five atmospheres, requiring air to be supplied at an equal pressure to enable his lungs to expand against the crushing force surrounding them. But breathing such highly pressurized gas came with a price: the compressed gas that entered the bloodstream expanded as the diver ascended and the pressure around him reduced. Nitrogen bubbles swelled inside the blood vessels, causing excruciating pain, tissue damage and even death…

Decompression sickness. The bends.

The deep suits were a way to avoid this. By keeping the body within a shell able to withstand the external pressure, the divers breathed air at just one atmosphere, while keeping their arms and legs free to move with far greater maneuverability underwater than in any heavy, clumsy hard suit. It was a compromise-it was impossible to turn or bend at the waist, and the fact that their limbs were exposed to the pressure of the deep still placed limits on how long they could remain submerged-but it hugely reduced the risk of the bends.

“You’ll still be able to watch us on the video feed,” Kari promised.

“It’s not the same thing. This sort of discovery really should be hands-on.”

“Don’t worry,” Castille said. “We’ll bring you back a golden Nereid.”

“God, no! Leave everything exactly as you find it, please! And on that subject…” She turned to Chase. “Do you really have to take explosives with you?”

“If the passage is blocked higher up, we might need to clear it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow the whole place up! I know what I’m doing.”

“I hope so.” She rapped his helmet. “What’s it like in there?”

“Cramped. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic.”

“Lucky you,” sighed Castille. He looked down at the yellow shell covering his body. “I feel as though I’m trapped inside a giant bar of soap.”

“Or a corset,” added Kari, putting a hand on the waist of her own suit. While Chase and Castille’s units were of a generic design, size adjustments made by moving the seals on their limbs, hers was custom made to fit her precisely, still managing to show off her feminine shape beneath the steel and polycarbonate. “This must be how Victorian women felt!”

“Yeah, as they fell off the Titanic,” joked Chase.

“That was Edwardian, not Victorian,” Nina corrected him.

“Bloody historians ruin all my jokes…” He looked at his companions as the crewmen closed the last clips on their suits. “Okay… Are we ready?”

“Absolutely,” Kari said enthusiastically.

“Ready to go into danger again?” said Castille, rather less so. “Well, if I must…”

“Come on, Hugo, you love it,” grinned Chase. “And at least you don’t have to worry about helicopters down there.”

“Ah, but what is a submersible but an underwater helicopter?”

Chase banged a hand on Castille’s helmet. “Yeah, yeah. Now stop moaning and get your Belgian arse in the water!”

With the three divers holding on to its steel bumper cage, the Atragon disappeared into the ocean.

Nina watched it go before hurrying to the control room. Chase’s suit had a video camera mounted on the right shoulder, transmitting to the Atragon along a fiberoptic link, the submersible in turn sending the image to the ship via its umbilical. “Hey, Kari, I can see you,” she said, putting on a headset. The figure on the screen waved its free hand.

“Divers, can you check coms?” asked Trulli from the next monitor station. “Eddie?”

“Loud and clear,” said Chase. His voice was distorted, but no more so than if he’d been talking on a telephone.