Jeff Long by The Descent

Author:The Descent [Descent, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-02-20T06:00:00+00:00

Those new regions which we found and explored... we may rightly call a New World... a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.

– AMERIGO VESPUCCI, on America

14

THE HOLE

The Colon Ridge Zone

'July 7,' Ali recorded. 'Camp 39: 5,012 fathoms, 79 degrees F. We reached Cache I today.'

She looked up to gather in the scene. How to put this?

Mozart was flooding the chamber over Dolby speakers. Lights blazed with the glut of cable-fed electricity. Wine bottles and chicken bones littered the floor. A conga line of filthy, trail-hardened scientists was snaking across the tilted floor. To The Magic Flute.

'Joy!' she printed neatly.

The celebration rocked around her.

Until this afternoon it had been one vast, unspoken doubt that the cache would be here. Geologists had muttered that the feat was impossible, suggesting that the tunnels shifted about down here, as dodgy as snakes. But just as Shoat had promised, the penetrator capsules were waiting for them. The surface crews had punched a drill hole through the ocean floor and landed the cargo dead on target, at their exact elevation and place in the tunnels. A few meters to the right or left, or higher or lower, and everything would have been socketed in solid bedrock and irretrievable. Their retreat to civilization would have been vexed, to say the least, for their food was running low.

But now they had all the provisions and gear and clothing necessary for the next eight weeks, plus tonight's wine and loudspeakers for the opera and a holographic 'Bully for You' speech from C.C. Cooper himself. You are the beginning of history, his small laser ghost toasted them.

For the first time in almost five weeks, Ali could write on her day map their precise coordinates: '107 degrees, 20 minutes W / 3 degrees, 50 minutes N.' On a traditional map of the surface, they were somewhere south of Mexico in blue, islandless water. An ocean-floor map placed them beneath a feature called the Colon Ridge, near the western edge of the Nazca Plate.

Ali took a sip of the Chardonnay that Helios had sent. She closed her eyes while the Queen of the Night sang her brokenhearted aria. Someone up top had a sense of humor. Mozart's magical underworld? At least they hadn't sent The Damnation of Faust.

The three forty-foot cylinders lay on their sides among the drill rubble, like tipped-over rocket ships. Their discarded hatch doors set among cables tangled in a steel rat's nest, salt water trickling down from a mile overhead. Various lines hung from the three-foot-wide hole in the ceiling, one for communications, two to feed them voltage from the surface, another dedicated to downloading compressed vid-mail from home. One of the porters sat beside the second electric cable, recharging a small mountain of batteries for their headlamps and flashlights and lab equipment and laptop computers.

Walker's quartermaster and various helpers were working overtime, sorting the shipment, stockpiling boxes, shouting out numbers. Helios had also delivered them mail, twenty-four ounces per person.

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