AllFreeNovel
Share Us
1:52P.M.
How could this be?
Phoebe gazed in awe out her window.
Throughout the last hundred meters of theCormorant’s freefall, she had held her breath. Ninety minutes after entering the fissure, they neared its bottom. The sonar had warned them what to expect, but the sight still drew gasps from them all.
The walls of the crack fell away to either side, revealing a hollow,cavernous void. It opened under and around them. It was as if they had dropped into outer space. Dazzling lights blinked and flashed all around. They formed shining constellations that defied the eye.
“Can you slow us to a hover?” Phoebe asked Bryan.
“Gladly. Dropping ballast now.”
Phoebe had incrementally lowered their rate of descent once the end of the fissure had come into view on their sonar. She had good reason to be cautious. They all did.
Datuk reported behind her. “The sensors are picking up more than four hundred rem out there. Enough to trigger acute death if it climbs much higher.”
“What about inside here?” Adam asked.
“We’re just shy of a hundred. Not immediately fatal. But in a few hours, we’ll start experiencing mild radiation sickness. Fatigue, vomiting.” He shook his head. “Let’s not stay down here for that long.”
Bryan had his own concern. “We just crossed thirteen thousand meters. We don’t dare go much deeper.”
Phoebe understood. The crush depth of theCormorantwas only another thousand meters down. She leaned forward as they came to a hover. Amazement kept her fears at bay. The cavern, while vast, was not empty.
“How could all this coral still be growing down here?”
She gaped at the sheer expanse, trying to comprehend it, to take it all in. According to the sonar, the cavern stretched miles in all directions. The coral hidden here had to be ancient, far older than the forest above. The trees rose from the bottomless depths to the arch of roof overhead, as if holding everything up.
But that was no longer true.
The earlier quake had not only split the rock overhead, but it shattered this section of forest. The tumbling crash of the submarine had further damaged the area, ripping through as it all fell. The leaking radiation had done even greater harm, burning a far larger swath.
The nearest stretches of forest were shadowed and dark. Beyond the dead zone, seen in glimpses between the giant boles, distant regions still glowed and shimmered.
Phoebe longed to pass through this blight to what beckoned so brightly.
Datuk had his own opinion. “The growth down here looks less like a forest and more likeroots.”
She appreciated this sentiment. Unlike the straight trunks of the coral field above, the boles down here rose in twisted columns, forking out into curling branches, casting out questing rootlets.
She studied the forest in this new light.
Could Datuk be right? Was this vastness the wellspring of the forest above? Or was it simply another coral field, one trapped by the confines of the cavern to form such a twisted landscape?
Adam reminded them of a more immediate concern. “Where is the Chinese submarine?” He leaned forward. “Phoebe, have you been able to detect the bottom of this cavern?”
Focused elsewhere, Phoebe had momentarily ignored the sonar. “I’ll try pinging again.”
She reached to her controls and directed a sonic wave toward the bottom. As it returned, the screen showed glimpses of the surrounding walls, which were indeed miles away. But the view was patchy. Some areas were blocked by the heavy coral, others showed up as endless black spots. Directly under theCormorant, the sonar continued to show a black eye, a bottomless well of darkness.
“Wait.” She squinted at the screen. “I’m picking up some haloing far below us. Only a few small spots. As if the sonar is registeringsomething. Maybe peeks at the true bottom.”
“How deep?” Adam asked.
Phoebe sat back with a grimace. “Sixteen thousand meters.”
“That’s at a total depth of ten miles,” Bryan said. “We’ll never reach there.”
