Ted was at the helm while the skipper and Tony were both catching some much-needed sleep. He glanced around the room to make sure no one was around, then plugged a thumb drive into the computer console. His screen lit up with new coordinates for the landing site. The main computer busily ran new sequencing lines for its automated navigation system. While the sea lab wasn’t designed to be self-propelled like a submarine, it was designed to adjust its ascent and descent. Small screws on four sides of the sphere came on and off at variable speeds to move the big white ball slightly as it slowly dropped to the seafloor. As soon as the new location was locked, Ted pulled the thumb drive and slipped it back into his pocket. He deleted the history of the past few moments from the MC databank and changed screens in case anyone walked in.
Sitting in the muffled quiet of the bridge, Ted sat sour-faced, wondering what it would have felt like to be in a similar control room, but in deep space as he headed toward Mars. The “new direction” that the president had set for NASA may have gutted his Mars project, but the research he would be able to conduct at the new location at the bottom of the sea would reawaken interest in deep-space exploration. Although the ship hadn’t been designed for placement so close to a “black smoker,” Ted was confident the hull could withstand anything, including the superheated cocktail of acidic sulfides that blew out of the Earth’s broken crust at these hydrothermal vents. Collecting life-forms in this environment would be akin to examining life on Mars or Venus. Surely creatures that could thrive at seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, in total darkness, feeding only on bacteria in an acid soup, could occur in other parts of the solar system, or beyond.
Ted sat back and looked out at the blackness outside his window. Not even a star to look at. “You’ve got your agenda, and I’ve got mine,” he thought to himself.
The haunting sounds of a lone humpback whale echoed through the bridge, snapping Ted out of his thoughts. He turned on the infrared cameras and activated their homing system. Sonar systems on the cameras began searching the vast ocean. As soon as they locked on to the huge mammal gliding through the open water, the cameras rotated and zoomed in on the target. Ted turned to the monitor and watched an immense humpback whale come into view.
Tony walked into the bridge and saw the image appear on the screen. “You heard it, too? Woke me out of a dead sleep. Damn, man. How big is that fuckin’ thing?” Tony had sleep lines on his face from his pillow and looked half out of it.
Ted’s fingers flew over the keyboard and the sonar began running its computations. “Forty-seven feet.”
“Adult male. Probably sixty thousand pounds.”
“Should I wake Ian and see if he wants to try and catch it?”
“Might be a little big for the observation tanks,” said Tony sarcastically, rubbing his tired face. He sat down at his station and turned on his own sonar array. They sat listening to the whale’s song as Tony scanned further and wider in the limitless deep. “Hey—I think I got his girlfriend.” He punched keys as fast as Ted, and a small dot appeared on his sonar screen. “Too far out for a camera image, but she’s headed for her boyfriend.”
“Well if she gets close enough, you can film it. It’ll be the world’s first whale porno.”
“I leave you alone for a few minutes and you guys start watching porno?” asked Jessica as she walked into the lab.
Ted looked at her and back at Tony. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be sleeping?”
“Who the hell can sleep with that giant fish out there screamin’ all night.” She walked closer to the monitor and watched the giant male glide through the water effortlessly. “Amazing how something that big can be so graceful,” she said to no one in particular.
“You talking about me again?” asked Tony, zooming in closer on the whale.
She walked past him and patted his shoulder. “Nice try.” Standing closer to the monitor, she folded her arms and watched the enormous beast in silence.
“Positive sonar contact, fifteen hundred yards and closing,” said Tony, slipping back into submarine mode without even realizing it.
“What is it?” asked Jessica .
“Female, most likely,” answered Tony as he tapped away on his keyboard. “Cameras are attempting to lock on. Give me a sec.”
They sat in silence for a moment, until the male’s long call reverberated throughout the ship. The female, somewhat smaller, came into view.
“There she is,” said Tony, zooming a second monitor on to the female.
“Hey, you weren’t kidding,” said Jessica. “They gonna do it live on camera?”
“Negative,” said a new voice in the room. It was Mike. “They mate near the surface. And the singing and calling isn’t how they attract females. That requires a bigger show—breaching, tail slapping, and so forth. These two probably know each other already. Probably just finding each other.”
Jessica nodded, impressed.
“So we don’t get to watch whale porn?” asked Ted.
“Not unless Tony is gonna get nasty,” said Mike.
“Hey Jersey—fuck you,” said Tony.
Jessica leaned over and patted Tony’s belly. “It’s just a couple of pounds. Nothing that a year on the ocean floor won’t take off.” She smiled and headed out of the bridge. “I’m going back to sleep. Mike, tell your friends out there to shut the hell up.”
Ted glanced at the ship’s GPS screen and smiled at the coordinates, then changed screens to the atmospheric readout as they continued their slow descent into the darkness.