The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [3]
And now that Clementine is nearly on target, there’s a storm coming.
“Fucking weather,” complains Milgram.
“Language.” Duke is a tight-ass. “How bad can it get?”
Milgram brandishes his paper, the latest chart to come out of the weather office on C deck where Stan and Gilmer hunch over their green-glowing radar displays and the telex from San Diego. “Force nine predicted within forty-eight hours, probability sixty percent and rising. We can’t take that, Duke. We go over force six, the impellers can’t keep us on station. We’ll lose the string.”
The kid, Steve, crowds close. “Anyone told Spook City yet?” The guys from Langley hang out in a trailer on E deck with a locked vault-type door. Everyone calls it Spook City.
“Nah.” Duke doesn’t sound too concerned. “Firstly, it hasn’t happened yet. Secondly, we’re only forty fathoms up from zero.” He snaps his fingers at the curious heads that have turned in his direction from their camera stations: “Look to it, guys! We’ve got a job to do!”
Clementine—the vast, submersible grab at the end of the drill string—weighs around 3,000 tons and is nearly 200 feet long. It’s a huge steel derrick, thickly coated in gray paint to resist the corrosive effects of miles of seawater. At a distance it resembles a skeletal lobster, because of the five steel legs protruding from either flank. Or maybe it’s more like a giant mantrap, lowered into the icy stillness of Davy Jones’s locker to grab whatever it can from the seafloor.
Duke runs the engineering office from his throne in the center of the room. One wall is covered in instruments; the other is a long stretch of windows overlooking the moon pool at the heart of the ship. A door at one side of the window wall provides access to a steel-mesh catwalk fifty feet above the pool.
Here in the office the noise of the hydraulic stabilizers isn’t quite deafening; there’s a loud mechanical whine and a vibration they feel through the soles of their boots, but the skull-rattling throbbing is damped to a survivable level. The drilling tower above their heads lowers the endless string of pipes into the center of the pool at a steady six feet per minute, day in and day out. Steve tries not to look out the window at the pipes because the effect is hypnotic: they’ve been sliding smoothly into the depths for many hours now, lowering the grab towards the bottom of the ocean.
The ship is much bigger than the grab that dangles beneath it on the end of three miles of steel pipe, but it’s at the grab’s mercy. Three miles of pipe makes for a prodigious pendulum, and as the grab sinks slowly through the deep-ocean currents, the ship has to maneuver frantically to stay on top of it in the six-foot swells. Exotic domes on top of the vessel’s bridge suck down transmissions from the Navy’s Transit positioning satellites, feeding them to the automatic Station Keeping System that controls the ship’s bow and stern thrusters, and the cylindrical surge compensators that the derrick rests on. Like a swan, it looks peaceful on the surface but under the waterline there’s a hive of frantic activity. Everything—the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations—depends on what happens in the next few hours. When they reach the bottom.
Steve turns back to his TV screen. It’s another miracle of technology. The barge has cameras and floodlights, vacuum tubes designed to function in the abyssal depths. But his camera is flaking out, static hash marching up the screen in periodic waves: the pressure, tons per square inch, is damaging the waterproof cables that carry power and signal. “This is shit,” he complains. “We’re never going to spot it—if . . .”
He trails off. Good-time Norm at the next desk is standing up, pointing at something on his screen. There’s a whoop from the other side of the room. He squints at his screen and between the lines of static he sees a rectilinear outline. “Holy—”
The public address system crackles overhead: “Clementine