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Overview
A three-time Hugo Award winner and modern master of hard science fiction now departs from outer space for a vast, unexplored realm that is equally perilous and mysterious. Allen Steele’s Oceanspace is a heart-racing near-future adventure of danger and discovery unfolding in the dark, cold, and merciless depths of the ocean.
The undersea research facility Tethys is a technological wonder, self-sufficient and seemingly impervious to natural danger. Located off the coast of Florida deep beneath the surface of the water, the station supports a robotic mining operation on the ocean floor and facilitates the ongoing scientific exploration of Earth’s last frontier. But while on a routine assignment with his colleague Peter Lipscomb, submersible pilot Joe Niedzwiecki comes face to face with something incredible and alive, and only luck—and Peter’s quick actions—can save them.
Peter’s wife, a marine biologist named Judith, is determined to uncover the secrets of the mysterious leviathan that destroyed Joe’s sub and nearly killed him. But the strange creature prowling the dark waters is only one of the dangers confronting Tethys.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480476325 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 372 |
| Sales rank: | 61,222 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Since then, Steele has published eighteen novels and nearly one hundred short stories. His work has received numerous accolades, including three Hugo Awards, and has been translated worldwide, mainly into languages he can’t read. He serves on the board of advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also belongs to Sigma, a group of science fiction writers who frequently serve as unpaid consultants on matters regarding technology and security.
Allen Steele is a lifelong space buff, and this interest has not only influenced his writing, it has taken him to some interesting places. He has witnessed numerous space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center and has flown NASA’s shuttle cockpit simulator at the Johnson Space Center. In 2001, he testified before the US House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of space exploration. He would like very much to go into orbit, and hopes that one day he’ll be able to afford to do so.
Steele lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Linda, and a continual procession of adopted dogs. He collects vintage science fiction books and magazines, spacecraft model kits, and dreams.
Before becoming a science fiction writer, Allen Steele was a journalist for newspapers and magazines in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, and his home state of Tennessee. But science fiction was his first love, so he eventually ditched journalism and began producing that which had made him decide to become a writer in the first place.
Since then, Steele has published eighteen novels and nearly one hundred short stories. His work has received numerous accolades, including three Hugo Awards, and has been translated worldwide, mainly into languages he can’t read. He serves on the board of advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also belongs to Sigma, a group of science fiction writers who frequently serve as unpaid consultants on matters regarding technology and security.
Allen Steele is a lifelong space buff, and this interest has not only influenced his writing, it has taken him to some interesting places. He has witnessed numerous space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center and has flown NASA’s shuttle cockpit simulator at the Johnson Space Center. In 2001, he testified before the US House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of space exploration. He would like very much to go into orbit, and hopes that one day he’ll be able to afford to do so.
Steele lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Linda, and a continual procession of adopted dogs. He collects vintage science fiction books and magazines, spacecraft model kits, and dreams.
Read an Excerpt
Oceanspace
By Allen Steele
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2000 Allen M. SteeleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7632-5
CHAPTER 1
Kraken
6.4.11–1024 EST
Off the Atlantic coast of the United States, just past the edge of the continental shelf, rests a broad submarine terrace known as the Blake Plateau. Located approximately 2,500 feet below sea level, the plateau stretches from Cape Hatteras to the Bahamas, and extends nearly one hundred miles out into deep ocean before it abruptly ends at the rugged escarpment which marks the farthest edge of the North American continent; beyond that lie the vast undersea plains of the Atlantic Basin.
The Blake Plateau is a prehistoric relic of the last ice age. The same climatic shifts which caused walls of glacial ice to advance across Canada into the Midwest also dropped the average sea level to the present boundaries of the continental shelf; when the glaciers receded during the Oligocene epoch some 25 million years ago, the seas rose and the continental shelf gradually vanished beneath the waves. As it did, rivers and estuaries carried postglacial sediments across the new coastline to the Florida-Hatteras Slope, where they settled upon the leading edge of the tectonic plate forming the American continent. Thus the Blake Plateau was created.
Down here, there is no sunrise or sunset, only the eternal midnight of the abyss, pierced briefly by quick-moving sources of bioluminescence: gape-jawed anglerfish, gulper eels, and tiny squid, stalking one another in the frigid darkness. All else is dark, and still.
And then ... something moves.
First, there's a faint sound: the gentle thrum of props, like the distant echo of a submarine earthquake, yet constant, more regular. Then a dim, horizontal row of lights descends from unknown regions far above. As the light pierces downward, it startles the fish and eels; for a few moments they break off their deadly games to swim a little closer and investigate the source of the light and sound, until it becomes apparent even to their primitive minds that the intruder is alien to their world, and therefore dangerous. They speed away before the narrow swath of light can find them.
Downward the machine glides, the forward end of its long form backlit by thallium iodide lamps: a pair of enormous, multijointed manipulators mounted above a titanium sphere, itself connected by a slender collar and thick steel trusses to a long cylinder, on top of which was mounted an open-top cargo bed. Two barrel-shaped maneuvering thrusters are positioned along its port and starboard sides; at the aft end, recessed within a cone-shaped cowling, is the lazily rotating propeller of its main engine. There's no color down here&dmash;even within close proximity of the halogens, everything is rendered in muted shades of greenish gray&dmash;so there's no way of telling that the submarine is painted bright fluorescent yellow, interspersed with bands of reds and white.
At the front of the sphere, below and between the arms, is a single, cyclopean eye: a Plexiglas window, two inches thick. Dim light glows within the porthole, silhouetting a vague form. A creature not born in this dark universe, yet, due to a long series of evolutionary processes stretching back millions of years, a distant cousin nonetheless.
A man. A human being. Joe Niedzwiecki.
One eye on the porthole, the other on the bathymetric chart displayed on the computer screen beneath the window, Joe Niedzwiecki gently pulled back the yoke. The bottom itself was still invisible through the dish-size porthole, but the steady, high-pitched pings of the active sonar told him it was down there nonetheless, coming closer with each passing second.
Joe inched back the yoke a little more, then found the throttle bar with his right hand and yanked it back to neutral. Gravity would take care of the rest; all he had to do was make sure the little submersible didn't crash-land. The silt stirred up by the thrusters was becoming more dense, as if he was flying through a thick green cloud. Two fathoms ... one and half ... one fathom ... and suddenly the floodlights captured a flat, muddy surface just below him, strewn with small, dark brown rocks.
There was an abrupt jar as the DSV's skids connected with the seafloor. He checked the screen again, smiled to himself. Touchdown, right on the money. Joe bent over the keypad, typed in a brief message: DSV-02 Doris. On bottom: W78.2°S29.9° 810m. Over.
He tapped the transmit key, settled back in his chair. This far down, instant communications with the surface were impossible; he had to wait while sub's Extra Low Frequency transmitter pulsed his message to the radio buoy he had left on the surface, which in turn would relay it to Tethys. With a transmission rate of only a few words per minute, there was no room for him to send any lengthy sonnets, or even a decent haiku. Once more, he pushed to the back of his mind the fact that this information was pertinent only in the event of an accident. If the titanium hull of Doris's crew sphere failed now&dmash;if, say, there was the merest hairline fracture between the porthole's glass and its frame&dmash;then nearly twelve hundred pounds-per-square inch of hydrostatic pressure would pulverize him so quickly that there would be no time for him to send a distress signal. So relaying his coordinates was only standard operating procedure, in the event Tethys had to send down another boat to pick up the pieces.
While he waited for the base to respond, Joe reached under his seat for the CD box. During the hourlong descent, he had listened to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew album on the CD player rigged beneath the sonar panel on his right side. Good music for a deep dive, but now he needed something a little less spooky. He wavered between Hancock and the Marsalis brothers, and finally settled on Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Cool, mysterious jazz for a cool, mysterious world.
The ELF panel above the porthole came alive as he was pulling out the Coltrane CD.
6.4.11/1026 EST
TETHYS TO DSV–02 DORIS
COPY LAST TRANS, PRES. COORD.
PROCD W/SER. & RET.
OVER
Good. Now that the formalities were dispensed with, he could get down to serious diving. Joe slipped in the Coltrane CD, carefully turning down the volume so he could still hear the forward range sonar; every five seconds, it transmitted an acoustic pulse at 8.1 kilohertz. He found the water bottle in its nylon web next to the seat, took a slug, then spat on the deck between his knees for good luck. One more seaman's custom; only he and Mike Cilantro, Tethys's other deep-sub pilot, knew that there was an antique silver dollar taped beneath the control yoke where no one could see it, and he had made sure to place his right foot first on Doris's ladder when he climbed aboard. Having a naked woman aboard might have helped, too&dmash;ancient legend had it that Poseidon liked the presence of nude women aboard ships, which was why vessels used to sport bare-breasted figureheads on their prows&dmash;but he doubted that his wife would have approved. Even if she herself was willing to make a dive with him, which she wasn't, there wasn't enough room within Doris's cramped confines for him to take proper advantage of the situation.
On the other hand, even if he could have smuggled Karen aboard, he probably wouldn't have. Although a passenger seat was folded away in the back of the crew sphere, Joe preferred making these sorties by himself. It was a little less cramped that way, and besides, he enjoyed the solitude. Going down here was like visiting another world, but even the astronauts on the new lunar base didn't have the Moon all to themselves. Spit on the deck, a silver dollar, and a good onboard guidance system: that was all the assistance he needed now.
Oh, yeah ... and a proper fix on Porky.
The electronic chart showed that he had touched down on a gentle slope about thirty nautical miles southeast of Stetson Mesa. Joe typed the robot's serial number into the keypad, then asked the computer to display its coordinates. An instant later Porky's present whereabouts appeared on the screen. Joe smiled as he studied it; the mining robot was only about a mile and a half northeast of his present position, bearing 40 degrees true North. All he had to do was lock onto its transponder signal, and the computer would navigate him straight there.
He pushed forward the throttle bar and pulled back the yoke. Doris lifted her skids from the muck; he turned the yoke a quarter of an arc to the right until a tiny red spot on heads-up was aligned with a yellow pointer, then he gave the main prop a little juice and off he went across the sea bottom
The Doris was essentially a deep-ocean truck. Although it could conceivably be used for exploration, it was specifically designed as a workhorse to service the teleoperated mining robots which prowled the Blake Plateau. As Doris skimmed across the sea bottom at an altitude of little less than a fathom, its floodlights caught thousands of the dark nuggets, ranging in size from golf balls to Idaho potatoes, spread so evenly over the ocean floor that they looked like a vast field of charcoal.
No one knew the exact origins of these manganese nodules. Although it was theorized that they were precipitates of dissolved metals in seawater, why they lay on the sea bottom instead of buried beneath the muck was a question which still puzzled oceanographers. Discovered during the H.M.S. Challenger expedition of the 1870s, they remained little more than a scientific curiosity until the 1960s, when industrialists first proposed harvesting them, for each nodule was a miniature lode of valuable metals: manganese, cobalt, copper, nickel, even trace amounts of gold. Quite valuable when gathered by the truckload, yet it wasn't until the last decade or so that the technology was finally developed which would make sea mining economically viable.
Joe followed the arrow on the screen as he homed in on the robot. The side-scan sonar pinged as it found something just ahead of him; at first he thought it was the robot, until he checked the chart and saw that Porky still lay three-quarters of a mile away. He throttled back on the main screw and raised altitude by a fathom, and presently something loomed out of the darkness just ahead: an angular, man-made shape.
He cut the main engine and used the thrusters to cautiously approach it. The DSV's lights caught the broken prow of what looked like a wooden fishing boat. No telling how long it had been down here, or where it had come from. Silt covered its battered hull, and tiny albino crabs prowled its decaying planks. The stern was nowhere to be seen. Probably a schooner which had broken apart and sunk during a storm uncounted years ago; if her crew hadn't survived, the crabs had doubtless disposed of their bodies long ago.
Another time, he would have liked to find and explore its debris field, see if there was something down here worth salvaging. Even a brass deck fixture could fetch a hundred bucks from an antique dealer. But he was on the clock, and Miles Bartlett frowned on wreck diving during company time. He reluctantly left the boat behind and continued following the GPS beacon to its source.
The sonar beeped sharply as it registered a metal contact. Joe caught sight of a pair of red strobes winking at him from far away in the darkness. No longer needing the computer to guide him, he turned the rudder a few degrees starboard as he throttled down again, and within minutes his lights found another alien object in the black depths, one much larger than the fishing boat.
"Hello, Porky," he murmured. "Long time no see."
No one Joe had met could explain why exactly the mining robot was called Porky. Certainly it didn't look like any hog he had ever seen, and Joe had been born and raised in Indiana farm country. A little larger than a John Deere harvester, it also bore a vague resemblance to one: an enormous, rectangular machine riding on tandem caterpillar treads. The four dustpan-shaped dredge heads beneath its undercarriage scooped up nodules and fed them through semicircular tubes into its diffusers, which sifted out the silt and spat it out through vents behind the machine, leaving behind a small bin of nodules.
When the onboard computer sensed that the bin was full, it shut down the robot and awaited further instructions from the surface.
Teleoperators on Tethys guided Porky during every step of the procedure, piloting the robot through a complex sequence of ELF signals transmitted from the base and downlinked through geosynchronous satellites. Porky had a companion robot&dmash;predictably named Elmer&dmash;but it was currently dry-docked at Yemaya's base of operations in Jacksonville. The big harvesters cost $20 million apiece, and although they could be operated at the same time, the company was unwilling to risk deploying both of these costly&dmash;and notoriously finicky&dmash;machines simultaneously. So Porky spent six months at sea while Elmer took a vacation, and then vice versa.
The only catch was that once the robots were down on the plateau, they were down for keeps; it was prohibitively expensive to bring them to the surface every time their bins were full. In shallow-water operations, inflatable lift bags might have been used to bring up their cargo, but that was clearly out of the question this far down; ditto for the idea of dropping ballast, since lead shot would be outweighed by the nodules. So there was only one practical solution: every two weeks or so, a DSV had to go down, pick up the load, and haul it back to Tethys.
This time, it was Joe Niedzwiecki's turn to bring home the groceries.
Porky's operator on Tethys had put the big machine on standby mode, so Porky had come to a halt, its vents clear of the cloudy silt it normally left its wake. Behind the harvester, he saw the long, shallow furrow it left along the seafloor. Once again, he was oddly reminded of the swath a combine makes through a cornfield in late September.
Now for the tricky part. Joe cut all engines, set Doris down on her skids. When the sub was motionless, he reached up to the low ceiling above him and pulled down the RMS hand controllers. When they were in position at shoulder height, he toggled the activator switches on the dashboard, then fitted his palms within the grips and gave the triggers a brief, experimental squeeze.
Through the porthole, he watched the manipulator claws clamp shut. He relaxed his fingers, and the claws spread open again. The remote manipulators looked fragile, but on the second day of his training course, his instructor had placed a quarter-inch lead pipe between them, then shimmied into the cockpit and proceeded to tie it into a loose knot. Graduation exercise consisted of performing the same feat, two thousand feet under water. Joe's knotted pipe presently rested on the living room floor of his Jacksonville condo; his kids were still trying to undo what their dad had done in less than a minute.
So the RMS arms checked out. Good. He left the claws open, took a moment to wipe his hands on his jeans. As an afterthought, he turned around to stab the pause button on the CD deck&dmash;too much of a distraction&dmash;and reached beneath his seat for the water bottle.
The side-scan sonar gave a loud beep as it suddenly detected something as startling in the silence of the cab as a footfall in an empty house.
He glanced up, and something moved past the porthole.
It whisked through the lights so quickly, he caught only the most fleeting glimpse of it.
Joe peered through the porthole, then turned his head again to check the sonar screen. He didn't see anything else, though, and the sonar remained blank.
He gazed out the porthole for few seconds, and finally relaxed. This far down, there was no telling what a sub driver was likely to see, and thick Plexiglas has a tendency to magnify even the smallest of sea life. Probably a cuttlefish checking him out.
Back to work. He carefully aligned the manipulators until the arms were straight ahead, the claws open. All he had to do now was maneuver Doris a little closer to Porky and set her down directly behind the harvester; once he was close enough for the RMS arms to reach the bin, he would detach it from the robot and empty its cargo into Doris's cargo bed. Another glance at the computer screen&dmash;nope, no problems there&dmash;and he was ready to go. Once again, he reached down to pick up the water bottle.
Something slammed against the sub's port side.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Oceanspace by Allen Steele. Copyright © 2000 Allen M. Steele. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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