Nighthawk (NUMA Files 14)
The water grew darker, and the pitch steepened until the nose was pointing downward at an eighty-degree angle.
Though she was strapped in, Emma instinctively put her hand on the console to compensate for the sensation of falling forward. “It’s like we’re on a roller coaster and we just went over the crest of a hill.”
“I didn’t want to bore you,” Kurt said.
“Is this why they call it the Angler?” she asked. “Because it dives so steeply?”
“No,” Kurt said. “But we are nose heavy. It’s designed that way. By descending almost straight down like a raindrop, we travel faster and save on power and oxygen.”
“And sacrifice a little bit of comfort,” she said, hanging forward in the straps of her seat. “How fast are we going?”
Kurt pointed to the depth gauge and a digital readout that noted the rate of descent. “About three hundred feet per minute. We could go faster, but this is a nice, safe speed. We’ll level off before we hit the bottom, I promise.”
The submersible continued to dive. Aside from the odd creak and groan, all sounds vanished and the world outside the canopy grew rapidly darker, changing from sea green to indigo blue to a deep violet color. Finally, it became an impenetrable black curtain.
Kurt dimmed the interior lights to help their eyes adjust and soon they needed only the glow of the various switches, indicators and gauges to see comfortably inside the sub.
“There’s a certain ambiance to this,” Emma said. “Almost like candlelight.”
“And I forgot to bring the wine.”
“A huge oversight, in my opinion,” she replied.
With an eye on the depth gauge, Kurt began to trim the submarine. By using the ballast controls to pump air into the forward tanks, he raised the nose and decreased the rate of descent at the same time. “Coming up on the seafloor. Or should I say down?”
“How about turning on the porch lights?” she said.
“Afraid of the dark?”
“No. Afraid of running into things in the dark.”
Kurt reached above his head and flipped a series of switches. A battery of lights around the base of the Angler came to life. Initially, they lit up nothing but the sedimentary particles flying upward past the windows.
The particles were actually stationary or moving slowly downward, but as the Angler was dropping at a much faster rate, the particles were more like snowflakes moving in the wrong direction.
A yellow light began to flash. “Terrain detected, one hundred feet,” a computerized voice said.
Kurt pumped more air into the tanks and slowed the descent further. The gray sediment layer of the seafloor began to appear in the cone of light beneath them.
“Terrain, fifty feet,” the computer voice said.
“So much for ambiance,” he said, looking around for a way to switch the voice off. He’d never liked talking cars and he didn’t want a talking submarine either.
“Terrain, thirty feet,” the computer said. “Descent stopped.”
They were now suspended in the water at a depth of nine hundred and seventeen feet.
Kurt pressed the radio switch. “We’re on the ground floor,” he said. “Give me a bearing.”
Joe’s voice came back, slightly distorted. “Target should be no more than three hundred yards from you, on a heading of one-five-zero degrees.”
Kurt dialed up the heading and the Angler’s inertial navigation system took over. The batteries kicked in and small thrusters on either side of the sub began to spin. Instead of propellers at the stern, which could only drive them forward, the Angler had two compact propulsion pods jutting out on stubby wings near its tail. They could be rotated to point forward, back, up or down, making it easy to move the sub in any direction.
For now, they drove the sub across a carpet of gray silt that stretched unbroken into the dark like a field of dirty snow.
“It’s so bleak,” Emma said.
There were no colorful reefs or schools of fish, only the occasional tube worm and small outcroppings of volcanic rock that hadn’t yet been buried by the marine snow.