Shadow Zone Read Free

different.
    Hannah turned, smiled, and waved at him.
    Be professional. Smother the annoyance. He lifted his hand and waved.
    Enjoy the trip.
    I’ll be waiting.
    Hannah glanced away from staring out into the murky water at the minisub’s forward port. “Once more around the spire, Josh.”
    Josh smiled as he pulled back on the control stick. “We’ve already photographed it from every conceivable angle.”
    “I don’t care. Let’s get it again.”
    “Aye, aye. And for the record, I don’t blame you, Hannah. I’m going to miss this place.”
    Hannah took in the magnificent vista before her. Even after all these weeks, the sight still took her breath away.
    Marinth.
    In the decade since its discovery, the fabled four-thousand-year-old city had sparked a cottage industry of books, television shows, a hit IMAX documentary, and even a new-age religious movement. It could be even older than scholars estimated because mention of Marinth was made on the wall of Hepsut’s tomb in Egypt. No matter how ancient the city, the glory was in the architecture and sweeping symmetry, streets laid out in perfect order. Huge white columns built to last forever, a people so advanced that universities were vying for every word of their lives and studies. There was even speculation that it might be the Lost Atlantis.
    But none of the media frenzy could match seeing it with her own eyes, Hannah thought. She had designed Conner One and its almost-identical twin, Conner Two, as state-of-the-art undersea-research vessels, and she couldn’t think of a better way to break them in. She had browbeaten the sub’s manufacturer, AquaCorp, into financing this trip not only to evaluate their new minisubs’ effectiveness, but also to demonstrate their abilities to potential customers.
    Hannah aimed the digital cameras at one of the tall golden spires as they moved around it. “The lighting is better today. This looks fantastic.”
    “Amazing what a couple million watts of candlepower can do, isn’t it?”
    Hannah nodded. Dozens of movable billboard-size light towers had enabled them to map and photograph every square foot of the site with incredible clarity and detail. Finally, the world would see Marinth for the magnificent city that it was, with long boulevards, breathtaking statues, and grand buildings that were as beautiful as they were functional. Tall golden spires marked north, south, east, and west on what was once a four-hundred-square-mile island, and miraculously, three of the four spires still stood, almost a quarter mile beneath the ocean.
    They circled downward around the South Spire until they found themselves cruising over what was once one of Marinth’s main thoroughfares.
    Josh smiled. “Get Matthew on the horn. Tell him to bring Conner Two down for a drag race.”
    “Not in my subs.”
    “Funny how AquaCorp thinks the subs belong to them.”
    “Not bloody likely.” Like all her other creations, the subs would always be hers, no matter what company or branch of the military financed their construction. A nautical magazine had recently run a series of articles on “Hannah’s Fleet,” which, to her surprise, now numbered over two hundred vessels—thirty-six individual designs—not including her early sketches dating back to a drawing on the place mat at her senior prom. She stood on the deck of her first launched sub on her twenty-fourth birthday, and in the thirteen years since, she prided herself on her versatility, from large nuclear attack subs to tiny one-man exploratory vessels.
    To the general public, however, she was best known as the woman who mapped and photographed the Titanic wreck like no one before, enabling armchair explorers to explore large sections of the doomed luxury liner through an interactive Web site and a 3-D software program. Although others played key roles in the expeditions, it was Hannah and her revolutionary subs that captured the lion’s share of attention from the world’s media