Habitat Zero (Sam Reilly Book 15), page 16
Tom said, “Sure, but that doesn’t answer the question, how the Russians knew about it.”
“Knew about it?” Elise asked. “What are you talking about? The Yantar was probably simply here to track the Tahila, nothing more.”
“I don’t think so. It’s too unlikely.” Tom looked over at the Russian vessel on the horizon. “There are too many coincidences between this sphere and the nuclear waste dump beneath the Andaman Sea. It’s here for a reason.”
“Not anymore, it isn’t,” Matthew said, showing the radar screen. “The storm’s finally gotten to be too much for the Yantar. She’s pulling away. And we should too.”
“All right,” Tom said. “At least that’s something. I feel better knowing that the Russian vessel can’t do anything while this cyclone rages on.”
“That might not be true,” Elise said. “The Yantar just launched its deep-sea submersible.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Bottom of the Mariana Trench
Sam watched the seafloor mining machine approach.
Its massive dredge cutter head began to spin, feeding everything inside, in a guttural crushing sound. He suddenly understood what it felt like to be a small bug about to have its limbs gnawed off by a large praying mantis.
Nobody said a word.
There was nothing to say. Nothing to do. They were trapped and a machine designed to withstand the crushing pressure of 36,000 feet of water, and crush stones the size of cars, was slowly approaching them.
Sam held his breath.
The machine came to a stop directly in front of them. The driver of the vehicle could be seen working controls high up inside the safety of a domed compartment. He didn’t look at them, and if he did, he didn’t show any sign of recognition, while he continued to adjust the controls.
A single manipulator arm extended from the machine, attaching itself to a hook on the side of Ursula’s portside pontoon.
“The damned thing’s latched onto us like a grappling hook!” Sam turned to Major Marazzato. “You still think this thing’s from the future?”
Marazzato clenched his jaw, his arm holding the bracing bar tight. “I have no fucking idea!”
A moment later, the machine started to move.
Sam jerked backward into his seat with a jolt, as the submarine started moving. The seabed mining machine dragged them inside the sphere.
He watched as they slid in through the lockout chamber, before coming to a complete stop. The door closed, and they were trapped inside the sphere.
A blue haze from ambient lighting lit the room.
It turned red suddenly.
“What do you think the color changes mean?” Marazzato asked.
Sam thought about it for a second. “If this was a submarine, I’d say they’re about to blow the ballast, dispelling the water and filling the room with air.”
Marazzato shifted uncomfortably in his chair, as though eager to fight whoever was responsible for this. He turned to Dr. Smyth. “Does that make sense to you, doctor?”
Dr. Smyth sat with her hands folded across her lap, the only one among them who appeared fully calm, as though accepting whatever fate should fall her way. She shrugged. “I’m afraid submarines are more your area of expertise, Major.”
Another few seconds passed, and the argument became moot.
Air bubbles filled the room, venting in from beneath them somewhere, expelling the water and filling the entire place with gas.
The million-dollar question being, was that gas breathable?
As soon as the water was cleared another door opened up, and the mining machine started to move again, disappearing down another tunnel, leaving them to their solitude.
All three of them waited another couple of minutes as though expecting someone else to come and tell them what to do.
Finally, Dr. Smyth said, “Shall we get out?”
Marazzato said, “The gas may not be breathable?”
Sam shrugged. “Then again, we’re going to run out of air in another three days.”
Dr. Smyth stood up, stretching as much as the shallow bubble would allow, her hands reaching up to the internal lock on the hatch.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked.
“I’m not waiting around any longer.” She grinned. “I thought I might go stretch my legs outside.”
“She’s nuts!” Marazzato said.
“Does it matter?” Sam asked. “Let her go. We’re going to be out of air soon enough anyway. If we’re going to have to take a gamble, we may as well do it now. Here’s to hoping the future US Navy still needed to breathe air.”
He unlocked the latch and all three of them climbed out of the submarine.
Sam took a slow, deep, breath in through his nose. The air was cool. It had a distinct scent to it. Something out of place. Something he couldn’t quite place at first. A strong scent of a forest. He took another deep breath. It was the scent of a pine forest.
Major Marazzato grabbed his backpack and followed them out.
Sam asked, “What the hell have you got that’s so important in your bag.”
Marazzato opened the top of the bag to reveal a bomb. “It’s nuclear.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “You brought a bomb to the bottom of the ocean. Are you insane?”
“Hey, I wasn’t lying when I said we had no idea where this thing came from. One thing for certain it’s a million miles more advanced than we are. This might be our only chance to destroy it. We need to take that chance. If you want to do something useful, why don’t you have a look and see if you can work out how to open the lockout locker so we can escape.”
Dr. Smyth raised a Beretta M9 handgun, aiming it directly at Major Marazzato. “I’m afraid that’s not going to work out very good for anyone, Major.”
Marazzato lifted the palms of his hands. “Hey, let’s not do anything stupid here.”
She smiled, the mischief still in her eyes, as she grinned. “That’s exactly what I was going to say when you wanted to pull out a nuclear bomb.”
Sam asked, “What do you want, doc?”
She pointed the Beretta to the right side of the chamber. “I want you both over there where I can see you. And Major, I suggest you leave the bomb where it is. No quick moves. I’ve won the US Pistol Shooting Association’s national championships twice. I won’t hesitate and I won’t miss.”
They backed away into the corner, Marazzato leaving his backpack behind.
Sam expelled a breath. “Now what?”
Chapter Forty-Eight
On Board the Tahila
Elise’s computer flashed red.
Her program had found its first match.
She clicked the image, and her program brought up a man’s face. He almost seemed familiar. Not someone she’d met, but more like someone she’d seen on a public forum. The face was a very near genetic match, meaning that he must be immediately related to one of the Thirty graduates.
She ran her eyes down to the man’s name – Ryan Smith.
He was a sitting US Senator.
Elise brought up the Senator’s details.
He was born in Texas, but orphaned at birth. He excelled at sports and in his schooling, gaining an SAT in the highest percentile, before moving to Massachusetts to study under a Fulbright Scholarship at MIT. There he studied engineering and went on to develop a number of patents under his name.
Within a decade, his talents had brought him riches beyond his dreams. He opened up an engineering company that went on to develop research that eventually lead to the development of an MRI machine, cochlear implants, visual aids, and solid-state hard drives, that went on to be used in smartphones and most computers.
While he remained interested in engineering, he turned his focus toward politics, securing his position as a Senator in Connecticut.
Elise started to see through the web of lies.
But what had happened in the sixties?
Had the government really secured a team of the best engineers in the country? And if so, for what purpose? The world was in a state of crisis with the Cold War. Had the company locked up its brightest minds to develop a weapon?
If so, what happened to them?
Had Senator Ryan Smyth been the only survivor? Had he escaped, taking the team’s enormous supply of technological achievements with him?
She looked at a photo of the man’s family.
He had a child. A daughter named, Alyssa Smyth. She was grown up now, of course, and had a job as a Medical Director at the CDC.
Elise picked up her phone and dialed the Senator’s personal cell number. It was an easy hack to get, having tapped into the phone accounts.
The Senator answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Senator Smyth?”
“Speaking.”
“My name’s Elise. I’m working a case with your daughter. She gave me your number and said you might be able to help me with something.”
“Okay. What can I do for you ma’am?”
Elise held her breath. “Well sir, can you tell me about Habitat Zero.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Inside the Obsidian Sphere
Professor Ray Smyth leaned down and blew out the candles.
It was his hundredth birthday today. A veritable feat, he thought, given that this entire thing started with the Cold War. It was nearly seventy years ago when the USSR and the USA were on the brink of nuclear war, when he came into command of Habitat Zero.
He looked upon the seven hundred odd people in the room and smiled. The muscles of his face tightly hanging across the skeletal frame of his once proud face. These were his people. His family. His friends. And what remains of the human race.
Only, the human race still existed outside.
A tear rolled down his cheek. It had been nearly a lifetime since he’d made the worst mistake of his life. Since he and a group of thirty intellectuals lied for the greatest purpose of all – to save the human race.
Habitat Zero was to be a shelter.
A nuclear bunker for humanity. Filled with the brightest minds of the time, selected based on their age, genetics, intelligence, and physical abilities, they joined a list of workers, totaling a community of just five hundred persons.
Given the worst-case scenario of all out nuclear war, Habitat Zero would provide shelter for a small gene pool of the best of humanity.
The obsidian sphere itself was provided by an ancient race, who had done a deal with President J.F. Kennedy.
To this day, he never learned what the president had traded.
In the end, what the sphere had asked of him – his soul.
He closed his eyes, as his mind retraced his history. They say road to hell was paved with good intentions. But he wasn’t so sure. There were plenty of times he could have chosen another path and the reason he didn’t had nothing to do with good intentions.
If he wanted to keep lying to himself as he did to all those around him, he would say that he did it all to protect them, to save humanity. Sometimes good things require people to do terrible things. He swallowed down the guilt, looking at himself with the hard vision of a man who had reached 100 and knew that his time on Earth was short. The Nazis might have made the same argument when they murdered the Jews, disabled children, and the elderly.
He did it because he liked it.
And the only way to make it work was to sever ties with his own government.
He played the image out in his mind. The idea was that the sphere would be towed by a ship out to a secret location and then its seacocks – the oversized drains at the bottom of a boat – would be opened, and the hull flooded, so that the ship and the obsidian sphere would sink to the bottom. In doing so, no one from the surface would ever find them.
The idea was that the sphere would intermittently – twice a year during summer and winter solstice – float a HF radio to the surface via an umbilical line and make a coded communication with the Pentagon.
They even kept in communications for some time, until there were talks that the Cold War was cooling down. The Soviets had lost their will for the fight. People had turned their attention to the space race.
The Pentagon had requested that the program be cancelled.
And Professor Ray Smyth permanently severed the umbilical line.
He told his people that the world above had indeed been destroyed. Nobody knows who fired first. But it no longer mattered who was to blame. The fact was, the world they had once known no longer existed, and it was up to them to survive long enough to see humanity survive.
It was this purpose which drove the men and women of Habitat Zero to continue. They worked hard, making improvements on biosphere technologies, computers, health, and science. When computers became vital to their progress, they built submersible mining machines to extract the vital materials needed to develop the microprocessors from the hydrothermal vents, including platinum, gold, and copper.
He wanted to succeed.
Truly, he believed in the cause, but in the 1960s, no technology was good enough to make a perfect biosphere, and soon it became apparent that they would eventually dissolve their progress and retreat into the dark ages, before starvation, infertility, and eventually death overcame their community.
Refusing to accept this, he sent his only son out into the world.
By sending him technology that they had developed, his son was able to build a tech engineering firm, which rapidly acquired many patents, quickly bringing in millions and eventually billions of dollars. Those dollars were spent purchasing new materials, equipment, and live animal stock to prop up his failing biosphere.
The sphere itself was designed to have four main agricultural rooms, in which animals could be moved from one to the other in an ongoing process to maintain the nutrients of any area. Smyth would then re-introduce new animals where need be in a secluded area, while the majority in Habitat Zero were no wiser.
With outside resources flowing in, Habitat Zero thrived.
Technology progressed faster than anywhere else on Earth. The brightest minds were all locked within a confined space, driven by the goal to save humanity, and in doing so they had overcome unbelievable challenges.
But as he looked out on all those smiling, happy faces, he felt nothing but guilt – for the lives that he stole.
“Is everything all right?” Someone asked.
He forced a smile. “Yes of course. I’m just a little nostalgic. That’s all.”
One of the miners came running into the obsidian cavern. The man was yelling loudly. People started yelling next to him, but Professor Smyth couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He stood up and spoke with the booming voice of a commander. “I will have quiet in the chamber. Tell me,” he said, looking at the miner. “What have you found?”
The miner was breathing hard. He stopped, leaning forward to catch his breath and said, “I found survivors!”
“What?”
“There were survivors on the seabed inside a submarine. I’ve brought them here!”
Chapter Fifty
Sam looked at Dr. Smyth. “You want to tell us what’s going on?”
Her brows furrowed. “An ancient race built this sphere so that humanity could survive in the event of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War between the USSR and USA. My grandfather developed the biosphere technology to make it hospitable for upward of five hundred people.”
Sam took in the obsidian walls. Of course the Master Builders were behind this. But he’d never known them to build a moving craft before. “How does it move?”
“It doesn’t. It was towed here and then its ballast tanks opened so that it sank to the bottom. It’s the obsidian that makes it so strong. It’s built the same why a termite might build its nest, with hundreds of passages and tunnels, surrounded by a single core of energy. This unique heating system allows the sphere to regulate its temperature, with warm and cold areas flowing naturally throughout.”
Sam asked, “What sort of energy system have kept them alive all this time?”
“Nuclear fusion.”
“You mean, nuclear fission?” Sam clarified. “The same sort of system you have on a nuclear-powered submarine – it’s used to propel the vessel and also to run the electrolysis which extracts oxygen from water molecules…”
Dr. Smyth smiled. “No. I meant fusion. You don’t really think that I as a nuclear expert I would mix the two concepts up, do you?”
“Nuclear fusion!” Sam said, his eyes widening. “That’s the holy grail of energy source. True energy. But it’s a myth! Just a theory. Something for the future.”
Marazzato said, “What the hell’s nuclear fusion?”
Sam said, “Fusion power is – or was – a theoretical form of power generation in which energy will be generated by using nuclear fusion reactions to produce heat for electricity generation. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, and at the same time, they release energy. This is the same process that powers stars like our Sun. It uses hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium, which react more easily, and create a confined plasma of millions of degrees using inertial methods. The main benefit of the process is that it will provide much more energy than traditional forms of nuclear power, while releasing very little nuclear waste byproducts.”
“Sounds great,” Marazzato said. “So what’s the problem?”
“It doesn’t work.” Sam shrugged. “Okay, it didn’t work, until now. Basically, research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but with the exception of the one at the center of Habitat Zero, to date, no design has produced more fusion power output than the electrical power input. But no one could work it out. So how did your grandfather get a hold of it?”
“The ancient ones gave us nuclear fusion.”
Sam looked at her, she was still holding a gun at him. “Only you?”
“President John F. Kennedy to be exact.”
“Why?”
“They had a deal.”
Major Marazzato shook his head emphatically. “What sort damned deal?”
