Dead Sea Read Free Page A

them to their various duties.
    â€˜Yes,’ agreed Fatfist. ‘It looks like one of those pictures of starving African kids. All skin and bone and swollen belly.’
    Ironwrist just grunted and slit the fish open. Its stomach burst all over the deck, disgorging handfuls of brightly coloured plastic splinters. ‘Shit,’ said the ship’s master angler in disgust. ‘Would you look at that? This poor creature must have gorged itself to bursting on that crap. And the more it filled its belly, the more it starved to death!’ The others nodded silently in disgusted agreement. The sea heaved wearily. The ship rocked. The rubbish on the surface whispered against her sides. Eight bells tolled.
    â€˜No wonder it was after your fingers, then!’ laughed Fatfist. ‘They’d have been its first square meal in ages.’
    â€˜That’s enough. Get it over the side with the rest of the rubbish,’ ordered Straightline. ‘And get to your watch stations. Now!’
    â€˜That’s the afternoon watch,’ said Richard as the bells rang through
Poseidon.
‘It’s our signal to come up.’ Less than ten seconds had elapsed since Nic’s alarm warned of that massive, mysterious movement below and it was still sounding.
Neptune
was still holding the big square of netting cut from the Lion’s Mane jellyfish, but at least the sonar seemed to be settling down.
    â€˜Good timing,’ observed Nic. ‘And weren’t we supposed to be testing the emergency surfacing routines?’
    Both men hit the switches designed to release compressed air into the variable buoyancy tanks forcing out the water which had allowed them to explore at this depth.
Neptune
and
Salacia
began to head for the surface, still side by side, like a couple of steel and crystal bubbles. As soon as they did so,
Salacia
’s alarm fell silent.
Neptune
’s sonar returned to normal. The tension eased. It had taken them three hours to get down – it would take them the better part of twenty minutes to return to the surface. Richard decided that clearing the deep of one more piece of dangerous rubbish was more important than winning Nic’s race, so he kept hold of the net and didn’t push for full buoyancy yet, though the submersible’s burden was slowing
Neptune
as effectively as it had slowed the jellyfish.
    Richard kept his eyes glued to the screens that showed what both of the vessels were experiencing as
Salacia
began to pull ahead.
Neptune
’s equipment was designed to look all around. Light, sonar – everything reached out in a sphere around the vessel, presenting as many facts as could be gleaned, warning of as many dangers.
Salacia
’s more advanced systems were designed to do the same, but were sensitive to a much higher degree.
    Nic’s systems might well be oversensitive, thought Richard hopefully, as fifteen minutes passed and everything on his monitors continued to read clear and safe while the two vessels raced on up towards the two-thousand-metre mark, the better part of ten metres apart now. Perhaps
Salacia
had misinterpreted a shoal of fish as one great entity. Or a deep-water current which had been given added weight by temperature, compression or salinity.
    To be fair, compression was unlikely, Richard allowed. Even at these depths and under this pressure, water compressed only fractionally. But an unexpected wall of dense, salty water might explain the disturbance to
Neptune
’s sonar too. Especially if the thoughts about escaping Arctic abyssal streams he had shared with Nic earlier were anywhere near the truth. Could the Oyashio Current, flowing south through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, be gaining enough force to push further south than ever, its water less salty than the Pacific Ocean’s, perhaps – but so much colder. Settling unsuspected into the lower depths, full of displaced Arctic life forms. Something must have