When he was a kid, Mike Carr had seen an episode of The Twilight Zone where a jetliner had gone back in time, all the way to prehistory. He remembered vividly the pilot’s remark about how unsettling it was to be receiving nothing over the radio, not even static. Carr couldn’t quite grasp what that was like.
Until now.
It was eerie. That was the only word to describe it. No sound was coming from any of the audio monitors. There were no telemetric signals of any kind. There were nothing but baleful flatlines on several LED systems, and empty electronic columns that should have been busy with data but were showing only backslashes, and dead radios with buffers that filtered out static and thus provided them with no sound at all. Just like the television show.
Only real.
All means of communication between the Ant Hill, the Abby, and the Tempest D were left open. None of the scientists made any adjustments to their equipment. Emergency protocol was for settings to remain where they were for two hours. In the event of a technical mishap on board one of the vessels, the crew had that much time to effect repairs. Most of the damage the engineers had imagined could be fixed in that time. Circuits were modular and easily replaced. Systems that failed had backups that came on-line automatically. Backup failures had troubleshooting checklists that could be completed in under an hour.
The second hour was padding. It was primarily a transition period for the science team, a chance to shift from operation to recovery. That, too, would be an upsetting “twilight zone.”
After two hours the Ant Hill would presume a catastrophic systems failure of some kind, which could include external damage that had caused antenna misalignment. At that point they would begin running a Satellite Realignment Program, which would search the region for a signal. The problem with the SRP was that it would temporarily cut communication with the last known location of the vessel. That could cause them to miss each other. Rear Admiral Silver once described it as playing pin the tail on the donkey with the donkey moving. Still, the effort would have to be made. For now, all the Ant Hill could do was notify a list of research bases along the Weddell Sea and inland to listen for standard or emergency radio signals from the research vessel Abby or from a Chinese submarine that might have struck it. Most of those bases would not be equipped to lend assistance. But they might be able to relay messages, perhaps give the Ant Hill some hint as to where the vessels might be, maybe a seismic blip from the collision or a subsequent impact, something to help them narrow their search.
Beyond that, the Ant Hill was virtually helpless. Whatever the next step might be would have to come from Admiral Grantham at NORDSS.
If, in fact, there was a next step to take.