“Bottom in ten minutes,” he announced. “You’re closing a bit fast.”

“Righto,” replied Plunkett. “I have it on sonar.”

Salazar and Stacy turned from their work and stared at the sonar screen. The digital enhancement showed the seabed in contoured three dimensions. Plunkett’s gaze darted from the screen into the water and back again. He trusted the sonar and computer, but not ahead of his own vision.

“Be on your guard,” Knox alerted them. “You’re dropping alongside the walls of a canyon.”

“I have it,” returned Plunkett. “The cliffs plunge into a wide valley.” He reached for a switch and dropped one of the ballast weights to slow the descent. Thirty meters from the bottom he dropped one more, giving the submersible almost perfect neutral buoyancy. Next he engaged the three thrusters mounted on the outer ends of the lower spheres.

The bottom slowly materialized through the jade gloom into a broken uneven slope. Strange black rock that was folded and twisted into grotesque shapes spread as far as they could see.

“We’ve come down beside a lava flow,” said Plunkett. “The edge is about a kilometer ahead. After that it’s another three hundred-meter drop to the valley floor.”

“I copy,” replied Knox.

“What are all those wormy rocks?” asked Stacy.

“Pillow lava,” answered Salazar. “Made when fiery lava strikes the cold sea. The outer shell cools, forming a tube through which the molten lava keeps flowing.”

Plunkett kicked in the altitude-positioning system that automatically kept the submersible four meters above the bottom slope. As they glided across the scarred features of the plateau, they spotted the trails of deep crawlers in scattered pools of silt, perhaps from brittle stars, shrimp, or deep-dwelling sea cucumbers that lurked in the darkness beyond the lights.

“Get ready,” said Plunkett. “We’re about to head down.”

A few seconds after his warning, the bottom dropped away into blackness again and the sub nosed over and fell deeper, maintaining its distance of four meters from the steep drop of the canyon walls.

“I have you at five-three-six-zero meters,” echoed Knox’s voice over the underwater phone.

“Righto, I read the same,” replied Plunkett.

“When you reach the valley floor,” said Knox, “you’ll be on the plain of the fracture zone.”

“Stands to reason,” Plunkett muttered, his attention focused on his control panel, computer screen, and a video monitor now showing the terrain below Old Gert‘s landing skids. “There’s no bloody place left to go.”

Twelve minutes passed, and then a flat bottom loomed up ahead and the sub leveled out again. Underwater particles swirled by the sphere, driven by a light current like flakes of snow. Ripples of sand stretched in front of the circular lit pattern from the lights. The sand was not empty. Thousands of black objects, roundly shaped like old cannonballs, littered the seabed in a thick layer.

“Manganese nodules,” explained Salazar as though tutoring. “No one knows exactly how they formed, although it’s suspected sharks’ teeth or whale ear bones may form the nucleus.”

“They worth anything?” asked Stacy, activating her camera systems.

“Besides the manganese, they’re valued for smaller quantities of cobalt, copper, nickel, and zinc. I’d guess this concentration could run for hundreds of miles across the fracture zone and be worth as high as eight million dollars a square kilometer.”

“Providing you could scoop it up from the surface, five and a half kilometers away,” Plunkett added.

Salazar instructed Plunkett on what direction to explore as Old Gert soared silently over the nodule-carpeted sand. Then something gleamed off to their port side. Plunkett banked slightly toward the object.

“What do you see?” asked Salazar, looking up from his instruments.

Stacy peered downward. “A ball!” she exclaimed. “A huge metal ball with strange-looking cleats. I’d guess it to measure three meters in diameter.”

Plunkett dismissed it. “Must have fallen off a ship.”

“Not too long ago, judging from the lack of corrosion,” commented Salazar.

Suddenly they sighted a wide strip of clear sand that was totally devoid of nodules. It was as though a giant vacuum cleaner had made a swath through the middle of the field.

“A straight edge!” exclaimed Salazar. “There’s no such thing as prolonged straight edges on the seafloor.”

Stacy stared in astonishment. “Too perfect, too precise to be anything but manmade.”

Plunkett shook his head. “Impossible, not at this depth. No engineering company in the world has the capability to mine the abyss.”

“And no geological disturbance I ever heard of could form a clean road across the seabed,” stated Salazar firmly.

“Those indentations in the sand that run along the borders look like they might match that huge ball we found.”

“Okay,” muttered Plunkett skeptically. “What kind of equipment can sweep the bottom this deep?”

“A giant hydraulic dredge that sucks up the nodules through pipes to a barge on the surface,” theorized Salazar. “The idea has been tossed around for years.”

“So has a manned flight to Mars, but the rocketry to get there has yet to be built. Nor has a monster dredge. I know a lot of people in marine engineering, and I haven’t heard even a vague rumor about such a project. No mining operation of this magnitude can be kept secret. It’d take a surface fleet of at least five ships and thousands of men working for years. And there is no way they could pull it off without detection by passing ships or satellites.”

Stacy looked blankly at Salazar. “Any way of telling when it happened?”

Salazar shrugged. “Could have been yesterday, could have been years ago.”

“But who then?” Stacy asked in a vague tone. “Who is responsible for such technology?”

No one immediately answered. Their discovery did not fit accepted beliefs. They stared at the empty swath with silent disbelief, a fear of the unknown trickling down their necks.

Finally Plunkett gave an answer that seemed to come distantly, from outside the submersible. “No one on this earth, no one who is human.”

4

STEEN WAS ENTERING into a state of extreme emotional shock. He stared numbly at the blisters forming on his arms. He trembled uncontrollably, half mad from the shock and a sudden abdominal pain. He doubled over and retched, his breath coming in great heaves. Everything seemed to be striking him at once. His heart began beating erratically and his body burned up with fever.

He felt too weak to make it back to the communications compartment and warn Korvold. When the captain of the Norwegian ship received no replies from his signals to Steen, he would send another boarding party to see what was wrong. More men would die uselessly.

Steen was drenched in sweat now. He stared at the car with the raised hood and his eyes glazed with a strange hatred. A stupor descended over him, and his crazed mind saw an indescribable evil in the steel, leather, and rubber.

As if in a final act of defiance, Steen took vengeance against the inanimate vehicle. He pulled the Steyr automatic he’d found in the captain’s quarters from under his waistband and raised the barrel. Then he squeezed the trigger and pumped the bullets into the front end of the car.

•   •   •

Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Star when she blew herself out of existence, vaporizing in the final blink of his eyes.

A monstrous fireball erupted with a blue brilliance whose intensity was greater than the sun. White hot gasses instantly burst over an area four kilometers in diameter. A hemispherical condensation cloud formed and spread out like a vast doughnut, its interior quickly burned out by the fireball.