They watched its video feed on the monitor. Little Geek’s bright LED lights panned over the white superstructure, and they could see the empty davits where the lifeboat would normally be hanging.
“Looks like the crew got away,” Linda said.
“Even if some of them didn’t, we won’t find any bodies,” Julia said. “Not if it sank eight months ago. They’d be fully decomposed at this depth and temperature. Only bones will be left.”
Linda piloted Little Geek up to the bridge. The windows were caked with algae. All of them were intact, and none of the doors were open.
“Can’t see a thing,” Linda said.
“And we’re not going to get Little Geek through impact-resistant glass,” Juan said. “We’ll have to go in ourselves.” The ROV’s small manipulator arm wasn’t strong enough to open doors.
Julia gestured at the temperature gauge. “Little Geek’s sensor shows one hundred and nineteen degrees.”
“Still within the suits’ capability to keep us cool.”
“There’s one other way in,” Eric said from the cockpit.
“The hole in the hull,” Juan said. “Let’s go down there.”
They descended with Little Geek taking the lead. Eric hovered the sub a respectable distance from the tear in the ship’s midsection. With all of Nomad’s light focused on the hole, which was the size of a minivan but still too small for Nomad, Juan could now see a feature he hadn’t noticed before.
“The edges of the metal are bent out from the inside of the ship,” he said. “The explosion came from the hold.”
“So we know it wasn’t sunk by a torpedo,” Linda said. “Sabotage?”
“Or the cargo they were carrying blew up,” Eric said.
“Only one way to find out,” Juan said, and nodded at Linda.
She guided Little Geek through the hole and into a vast hold whose bulkheads were beyond the reach of the ROV’s lights. The first thing they saw on the monitor was a vast array of pipes, power cables, and electrical conduits snaking through the hull. Some of them had been ruptured by the internal explosion and lay in a tangled mess on the deck.
“This could get tricky,” Linda said. “Don’t want to get the umbilical tangled.”
Juan pointed to a space on the right that was relatively clear of the pipes. “That seems to be the best route.”
Linda navigated in that direction, and a huge round metal vat came into view. Half of it had been torn apart by the explosion, but from its exterior, so the blast hadn’t resulted from whatever had been inside the tank. Dozens of the pipes and conduits were connected to it.
“Looks like they were brewing beer in there,” Julia said.
“Those would be expensive six-packs,” Juan said.
Linda piloted Little Geek into the vat, and they could make out a complicated array of cells, like the honeycomb in a beehive.
“What do you make of that?” Juan asked.
“This tank is made to create a biochemical reaction of some kind,” Julia said. “But it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Why is it connected to electrical cables?”
Julia shrugged. “Maybe for monitoring.”
Linda backed Little Geek out of the vat and kept it moving along, revealing that the hold was packed with identical vats. At the end of the hold was a giant rack full of computer servers.
“That’s an awful lot of computing power just to monitor a chemical reaction,” Eric said, who was watching the video while keeping Nomad steady.
“Lyla Dhawan said Project C was supposed to be a breakthrough in artificial intelligence,” Juan said. “This has to be related to what was going on at Jhootha Island somehow.”
“The name of the ship would help us answer that, I bet,” Julia said.