Chapter 23

The Isabella ’s small submersible was theoretically large enough for two people, but not when one of those individuals was six foot eight. As a result, Paul stayed behind, while Gamay and Chantel strapped themselves into the tiny seats inside.

With the pressure test completed and all systems go, they were lifted over the side by the ship’s crane and lowered into the water. Cutting the cord, they dove to thirty feet, mostly to smooth out the ride and prevent the sub from wallowing in the swells.

Chantel appeared a bit nervous as the waters closed in around them and rose up over the top of the viewport.

“First time in a submersible?” Gamay asked.

“Third, actually,” Chantel said. “But I honestly prefer diving. This is a bit claustrophobic.”

“I actually prefer diving myself,” Gamay insisted, “but until we’ve figured out what skeletonized those whales, I figure we should keep a suit of armor around ourselves.”

“Do you think we’re in any danger?”

“Only of bumping our heads,” she joked, reaching up and rapping her knuckles on the overhead panel. “But we have to assume there is some form of rapidly reproducing pathogen out there. Maybe a flesh-eating bacteria or some type of fast-spreading parasite. The kind of things I’d rather not expose my skin to.”

By now they were underway. With only a half mile between their position and the tangled web of dead animals, they would arrive over the dive site in a short minute.

“Lights on,” Chantel said. “Cameras recording. Vacuum system ready to retrieve samples.”

Gamay acknowledged her and stared out the viewport until a gray mass came into view. The animals were less recognizable than they’d been only a few hours before. The whale skeletons were breaking down as their musculature was consumed, and the sharks were being reduced to teeth and jaws hanging from what was left of their cartilage.

Gamay spoke into the microphone, reporting back to the ship. “Biomass further degraded. I’ve never seen anything consumed so quickly before. Not even lunch when Kurt and Joe show up hungry. We’re going to grab some samples before the buffet table is cleaned out.”

Maneuvering the submarine alongside one of the partially eaten whales, Gamay was careful not to bump it. “You should be able to use the claw from here.”

Chantel operated a remote arm that had been equipped with a circular tool designed to take sedimentary cores. She figured it would be strong enough to take a core out of the floating carcass. Extending it to the side of the animal, she activated the motor. The teeth on the end of the coring probe began to spin slowly. She pushed it out until it began cutting into the gray flesh, penetrating it with ease.

“Twelve-inch depth should be enough,” Gamay said.

The probe could core out a two-foot-deep cylindrical sample, but that was more than they needed at the moment.

At roughly twelve inches of depth, Chantel stopped and reversed the motion. The probe came back out, bringing with it a chunk of flesh and muscle.

“I’ll store this in bin number one.”

Bending the robot arm, she placed the sample in a cylinder on the side of the submersible, which then sealed up tight.

Several more samples were retrieved. Two from the whale and two from what was left of a great white shark. By the time they finished they were floating in a soup of residue from the decaying animals. Oils from the bodies oozed everywhere, along with globs of fat and strips of flesh drifting about.

Gamay noticed some of the spheres mixed in with the detritus.

“Let’s get some of these floating orbs,” Gamay said. “I’m not sure what they are, but I have a bad feeling they’re part of the problem.”

Locking down the robot arm, Chantel extended the vacuum probe. It was designed to suck in water and any sea life large enough to fit through its nozzle. Turning it on started a pump, and the water near the nozzle started to swirl, but sucking up individual floating orbs proved more difficult than it looked.

“Can you move in closer?” Chantel asked. “They’re harder to catch than a bar of soap in a dirty bath.”

Gamay noticed there weren’t as many of them as there had been earlier. She wondered if they were moving on, now that the food supply was dwindling. They didn’t appear to be able to swim, but maybe they could lift their bodies to the surface and inflate a sail like the Portuguese man-of-war.

“I’ll make it easy for you.”

Gamay nudged the thruster control gently, easing the sub forward and turning it toward the remnants of the nearest bloated whale carcass, expecting a result similar to hitting the shark with the ROV.

“We’re only moving at three knots, but hang on,” she said.

Angling the craft upward, she bumped the underside of the dead animal. The impact was soft enough, but still slightly jarring, like flopping onto a bed covered with thick comforters.

The sub’s momentum pushed the rounded bow into the side of the whale, pressing it inward and splitting the skin just as she’d hoped. She flicked the thruster control into reverse and the sub backed away as the tissue began to rupture and hundreds of the glowing orbs spilled out.

“Vacuum to your heart’s content,” Gamay said, pleased with herself.

Chantel wasted no time directing the nozzle into the swarm of luminescent little blobs. They were soon being sucked into the device and flowing down the collection tube, where they were deposited in a clear tank on the other side of the submersible like fireflies in a jar.

“If we lose the lights, we can hold some of these up and find our way,” Chantel joked.

Gamay laughed, but the laughter died as she realized they were actually losing the light. She looked up and saw the reason. The submersible’s impact with the whale had made it roll over. Though she couldn’t see it, the carcass had burped a large amount of gas and lost buoyancy. It was now sinking toward them like a giant wet blanket.

She hit the thrusters, but it was too late. The semi-formless shape came down over the top of the submersible, hitting it with a soft bump and then wrapping around it on all sides. The exterior light vanished as the viewports were covered up. More concerning than the loss of light was the loss of control. The thrusters, which could pivot and turn, were jammed into place by the overhanging remnants of the whale. The submersible tilted to the side and began to sink beneath several tons of decomposing blubber.

“What’s happening?” Chantel asked.

If she’d been claustrophobic before, looking around and seeing nothing but gray sludge and whale skin pressed up against every viewport was not going to help.

“The whale came down on top of us,” Gamay said. “I shouldn’t have been so careless.”

She was maneuvering the thrusters madly, but there was little effect. A quick glance at the depth gauge showed the descent accelerating.

“I can’t get us free,” Gamay said. “Blow the tanks. We need more buoyancy.”

Chantel moved to the dive controls. The submersible had two main tanks and four trim tanks. One by one she opened the valves and the sound of hissing air reverberated through the sub. The lights indicating tank status turned green in rapid order.

“All tanks empty,” she called out. She looked at the depth gauge. “But we’re still sinking.”

It was a simple math problem. The five-ton submersible could not provide enough buoyancy to hold up the remains of the forty-ton whale.

They passed two hundred feet and began to accelerate. Another math problem. This one related to the physics of water. As the depth increased, the pressure increased. That was not an immediate problem for the sub, but it squeezed the carcass and forced out whatever air and gas remained behind. In effect, the deeper they went, the heavier the whale became.

They passed three hundred feet and Gamay began to worry. NUMA submersibles were designed to withstand the pressure down to several thousand feet, but this was not a NUMA submersible. It was a craft designed and built on Reunion and used by the university students for the last decade. “What’s the test depth on this thing?”

“It’s been rated to a thousand feet,” Chantel said. “But I don’t think we’ve ever taken it below five hundred.”

Five hundred was coming up fast and there was nothing to suggest they’d stop there.

“Use the coring probe,” Gamay said.

“To do what?”

“Cut holes in the whale. It’s badly decomposed. If we can perforate it in enough places, we might be able to open a fissure and slip through. Or it might slide off us as our lift creates an instability in the system.”

Chantel switched back to the excavation controls. Spinning the core sampler up to full power, she had to guess at the direction to point it in, as there was no way to see outside. She angled it in what she hoped was a good direction and pushed it forward. She could hear the motor spinning and had a green light on the panel, but all she could see out the side port was the blubbery flank of the dead whale. It was even possible the arm was pinned against the side of the craft, spinning uselessly.

She twisted the controls back and forth. A yellow light came on, suggesting she was overloading one of the control motors. The sampler continued to spin, but a separate indicator told her the tube was empty.

“I’m not getting anything,” she told Gamay. “I think the arm is trapped in a down position. I can’t raise it.”

Gamay saw them go past five hundred feet and realized they were quickly running out of time. The only option she could think of was highly risky—it would either doom them or save them—but if she waited much longer, it would be too late to try.

Nervously, she thought of Paul. “Flood the tanks,” she said firmly.

“What?” Chantel replied, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“Release the air and flood the tanks.”

“That will just sink us faster.”

“Exactly,” Gamay said. “We can’t go up, so we have to go down. Once the tanks are flooded, we’ll be denser than that carcass. We should sink faster and be able to get out from under it. But if we don’t do it soon, we’ll run out of depth to try.”

Chantel looked like she was going to be sick. “There has to be another way.”

“There isn’t,” Gamay said. “Now flood the tanks. Before it’s too late.”

The young woman choked back her fear, steeled herself, and threw open all the valves. A series of banging sounds accompanied the gates opening and the water slamming into the empty space inside, forced in by the pressure of the depths.

“Fifty percent…” Chantel said. “Seventy percent…Tanks full.”

The whale hide slid upward on the windows, but friction was holding the submersible in place, and the depth continued to increase. They passed six hundred feet, dropping twice as fast now and still not free.

Gamay rocked the ship from side to side and then pointed the thrusters downward and pushed the power to full. The submersible moved with a jerk and then pulled free. The view through the viewport went from gray whale hide to pitch-black water.

Gamay kept them on a downward trajectory. She needed to get enough space between them and the whale to slide out from beneath it without getting caught up once again.

Chantel pointed the lights upward. They could see the animal’s body above them retreating slowly and shedding a stream of bubbles made from the air that the sub had expelled. As they pushed asymmetrically on the carcass, it rolled over and accelerated downward, its extremities folded up, looking something like an inverted jellyfish.

“Seven hundred feet,” Chantel called out. “That’s our design depth.”

Gamay shoved the throttles forward. Their own dive slowed, but the whale came on faster than ever. Gamay tensed, gritting her teeth in anticipation of the impact. There was a heavy thud on the tail of the sub, tilting its nose upward, but the small craft quickly righted itself.

Chantel aimed the exterior lights downward. The gray carcass had passed them by and was dropping into the deep dark of the ocean. She kept her eyes on the remnants of the animal, thinking how it would continue to fall for another ten minutes or so until it hit the bottom twelve thousand feet below. “That’s a sight I never thought I’d witness.”

“Let’s make sure we don’t follow it,” Gamay replied. “Blow the tanks. Mains first and then the trim tanks.”

Chantel closed the vents and opened the air valves once more. She noticed how much slower the tanks filled at this depth. Across from her, Gamay had rotated the thrusters and was using them to help arrest the sub’s descent.

They passed eight hundred feet and then touched nine hundred, slowing further and finally stopping their dive at nine hundred and sixty feet.

Gamay looked around. “Do you see any leaks?”

Chantel glanced up and about. “Nope.”

“This is your new test depth,” Gamay said.

Chantel laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell the boys who put this thing together.”

“Don’t tell them the part about the whale falling on us,” Gamay suggested. “You’ll never hear the end of it.”

Chantel laughed some more and took one last look below. The whale was still falling away, slowly escaping the range of the lights. It had almost vanished when something strange happened. It passed through what looked like a dim gray cloud, punching a hole in the middle of it and causing a ripple of light to radiate outward in all directions.

“Did you see that?” Chantel asked.

Gamay nodded. She’d seen it. Though she couldn’t explain what it was. She took a deep breath. “Let’s go a little lower.”

Chantel agreed.

With the caution of a person walking on thin ice, Gamay brought the sub down toward the cloudy layer below. It grew brighter as they neared it. And before they touched it, she knew what she was looking at. A web made up of millions of the glowing orbs. They stretched as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t that far underwater, but the effect made it seem like they went on forever.

Gamay cruised above them, piloting the submersible like an aircraft skimming the clouds. After a minute or two she’d seen all she needed to see. “I think we’ve spent enough time at this depth. Let’s surface before the men get all emotional about our vanishing act.”