Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

“You thought they’d have the big bubble on the front, right?” Trulli said enthusiastically. “Jesus, you don’t want that! One crack, and splatto! Well, maybe you want one if all you’re doing is taking snapshots of weird fish or poncing about on the Titanic , but these beauts, we built them to work. Tough as hell.”

“The last thing you want to do with a pressure hull is make a big hole in it,” added Baillard, continuing his partner’s train of thought as smoothly as if they were the same person. He pointed at the large white and orange metal sphere at the front of the smaller sub, the name Atragon painted on it in an elegant script. “Keep it in one piece and it’s a lot stronger-and you can go much deeper.”

“How do you see out?” Nina could see a porthole in the sphere’s side, but it was only a few inches across.

“We use a LIDAR virtual imaging system instead of a viewing bubble-like radar, but using blue-green lasers. The U.S. Navy designed them as a communications system, to contact their missile subs. They work on a wavelength that isn’t blocked by seawater.”

“Two lasers,” Trulli jumped in, “one for each eye. Proper stereoscopics! The lasers sweep in front of the sub twenty times a second, and any light that gets reflected back, we see on the big screen inside the pod in 3-D. No need to suck your batteries dry with a load of spotlights that do squat more than twenty feet away. We can see for a mile!”

“And because we have a much wider field of view than we would through a bubble, we can work a lot faster with the arms,” Baillard said, reaching up and patting one of the imposing steel manipulators. “It’s a revolutionary design.”

“You said it!” Trulli high-fived his partner. “Too revolutionary. Nobody else even wanted to risk giving us development money. Kari’s dad, though? Bam! Soon as he saw what we had in mind, we were in business.”

“And now, not only do you get to prove your design,” said Kari, “but you get to do so as part of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.”

“Like I said,” nodded Baillard, “awesome.”

“Too right,” agreed Trulli. Nina smiled as they high-fived each other again.

“So what do they do?” she asked. “I mean, I guess the Atragon’s like a regular sub, but that one?” She indicated the larger submersible, a bright yellow behemoth with what looked almost like the mouth of a giant vacuum cleaner beneath its crew sphere. A broad pipe led back from the nozzle into the main body of the vessel; at its rear a second pipe, a flexible concertina arrangement that looked as though it could extend for some length, ran into a second compartment that Nina realized could be detached from the submersible’s spine. Yet another length of extending pipe hung down from the module’s stern almost like a tail. The words “Big Jobs!” were spray-painted, graffiti-style, on the side of the sphere.

“That?” said Trulli proudly. “That is the Sharkdozer. You know, like a bulldozer, only ’cause there’s no bulls underwater, we named it after a shark instead?”

Nina grinned. “I think I get the idea.”

“It’s a self-contained underwater excavator,” Baillard told her, pointing at its two heavy-duty arms. Rather than the claws on the smaller sub, these ended in buckets like those of an earthmover. “The arms move larger rock deposits, and the vacuum pump,” he indicated the maw of the pipe beneath the sphere, “removes silt and sediment-”

“And because the main pump module’s detachable,” Trulli cut in, pointing at the “trailer” section of the vessel, “we can park it away from the site so all the crap we clear doesn’t hang around and wipe out visibility.”

Nina was impressed. “How quickly will it be able to clear the silt over the site?”

“Five meters?” said Baillard. “No time at all; at least enough to see that there’s something underneath it.”

“Actually dredging out enough to see what it is , though…” Trulli shrugged. “Depends how big a hole you want to dig. It’s, what, two hundred feet wide? If it’s nothing but silt covering it, we could suck one end clear in a couple of hours.”

“Then if there’s anything there, we can either use the Atragon’s manipulator arms to pick it up, or send in Mighty Jack.”

“Who?” Nina asked.

Baillard pointed out a small cage attached to the Atragon , inside which was a bright blue boxy object that turned out to be a tiny vessel in its own right. “Mighty Jack’s our ROV, Remotely Operated Vehicle. He’s a robot, basically, a Cameron Systems BB-101. He’s connected to the Atragon by a fiber-optic cable, and we’ve fitted him with a stereoscopic camera so I can operate him right from the pod. Even got his own little arm as well.”

Nina smiled at Baillard’s anthropomorphization of the robot. “And this’ll be the first time you’ve used them?”

“We’ve tested them, but yeah, this is the first full-on real operation,” said Trulli. “Can’t wait to see what we find!”

“Nor can I.” Kari looked at the horizon ahead. “We should be in position in about two hours. How soon will you be ready to launch?”

“We can do all the prelaunch prep in transit. Everything else… about an hour,” Baillard said.

“We’ve got repeater monitors already set up in the main lab,” Trulli told Nina. “You’ll be able to see everything we see, as we see it-in 3-D, as well! Pretty smart, eh?”

“Sounds great.” Nina felt a thrill of anticipation, a sense of impending discovery-but also of stress and tension. If there turned out to be nothing down there…

Kari picked up on her unease. “Are you okay?”

“I just haven’t got my sea legs yet,” Nina fibbed. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while. You’ll let me know when we arrive?”

Kari adopted a deadpan expression. “No, I thought I’d let you miss the moment when we discover Atlantis.”

“Don’t you start,” Nina chided as Kari cracked a smile. “I can’t cope with having two sarcastic friends!”

Nina returned to her cabin and lay on her bed for a while, trying not to think about the enormous amount of money and labor the Frosts were putting behind her deductions. When she eventually realized this was a fruitless hope, the thought of “sarcastic friends” prompted her to get up and knock on Chase’s door. On being invited in, she was mildly surprised to see him on his bed reading a book-and more surprised when she saw the cover.

“Plato’s dialogues?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Chase, sitting up. “Don’t look so shocked! I read. Thrillers mostly, but… Anyway, I thought that seeing as you’ve been going on about them so much, I ought to actually read the things. You know, the bloke doesn’t spend all that much time actually talking about Atlantis.”

Nina sat next to him. “No, not really.”

“I mean, in Timaeus there’s, what, three paragraphs on Atlantis? All the rest of it’s like some stoned student talking bollocks about the meaning of the universe.”

Nina laughed. “That’s not the usual academic description… but yes, you’re right.”

“And the other one, Critias , he doesn’t even start talking about Atlantis for about five pages. And when he does… it’s interesting.” There was a thoughtful tone to his words that caught Nina’s attention.

“In what way?”

“I don’t just mean about the description of the place, and how spot-on he was about the temple. I mean about the people , the rulers. It doesn’t really add up.”