Crush Depth by Joe Buff

Author:Joe Buff [Buff, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the eastern Indian Ocean

GUNTHER VAN GELDER felt relaxation and inner joy, as much as this was possible for a sailor at sea in a war. He had the conn in Voortrekker’s control room, and Jan ter Horst was asleep.

Voortrekker was doing what she did best, moving quietly near the ocean floor in water three kilometers deep—snaking through the massifs and fissures of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. These endless undersea volcanic mountains and valleys formed the ideal landscape in which Voortrekker could hide. To Van Gelder, watching the stark, razor-sharp faults and escarpments go by on the ship’s gravimeter display, it was the ideal place for him to sightsee.

The ship made only seven knots, for safety as well as for stealth. A remote-controlled off-board probe was deployed well ahead of Voortrekker, scouting for enemy mines and hydrophone grids. The probe used special cameras to study the bottom in Voortrekker’s path, and Van Gelder watched the images raptly.

Starfish in large groupings waved their arms on the ground. Huge jellyfish rippled by in the slow and steady bottom current. Other deep-sea creatures, with hideous black faces or bodies too weird to describe, came to examine or challenge Voortrekker’s probe. Diffuse glows, bright swirling starbursts, stabbing flashes of sheet lightning, all lit up the scene, in shades of otherworldly blue and electric white and vivid yellow. This was bioluminescence, Van Gelder knew. The ocean all around him, even this deep, was alive.

Voortrekker passed another black-smoker hydrothermal vent field. Van Gelder heard it rumbling and gurgling on sonar, and sent the probe closer to look. Again, here was life. Primordial microbes fed a teeming community of albino crabs and giant clams and thick red-blooded tube worms.

Until recently, only a handful of scientists had visited places like this. Few men and women had ever seen firsthand what Van Gelder was seeing. To be here now, to witness such things with his own eyes, made Gunther Van Gelder feel himself a very privileged man.

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