The Argo bristled with an amazing array of winches and cranes to handle the variety of electronic eyes and ears and hands, manned and unmanned submersibles the scientists on board dropped into the ocean. One crane, so powerful it could lift a house, also had weak links that would deliberately break under undue stress - that was to prevent them from sinking in case the ship hooked onto an undersea mountain.

Most of the heavy equipment was lowered through the moon pool, a center section of the Argo's hull that opened to the sea through huge sliding doors. With the UUV, however, it was only a matter of lowering it over the side. The propeller grabbed water and the vehicle took off like a fish released from a hook. It headed away from the ship and arced into a preprograrnmed thirty-foot circle when it hit open sea.

“She'll go around four times to calibrate the compass,” Murphy explained. “The vehicle is talking to the navigational net now, getting its bearings through triangulation.” As they watched, the vehicle made a small circle and disappeared below the surface. “She's heading off to do her first lane.”

“What do we do now?” Austin said.

Murphy gave them his big-toothed grin. “We go have some coffee and doughnuts.”

NUMA 3 - Fire Ice

-21-

THE UNDERSEA VEHICLE moved back and forth above the ocean floor in a lawn-mowing pattern, its path on the ocean floor displayed on the computer screen. When its task was finished, the UUV homed in on a third transducer like a puppy who'd heard the word bone. The vehicle nosed up to the side of the ship, where it was snagged in a special pickup rack and lifted back on deck. Murphy hooked up a modem and transferred all the data from the dripping vehicle to his laptop computer. Then he disconnected the computer.

Tucking the laptop under his arm, Murphy led the way to the conference room, where he set the laptop down on a table and connected it to a large-screen monitor. The computer's SeaSone software began to generate high-resolution sonar images in slow motion onto the screen, and the pictures of the seafloor as recorded by the UUV flowed down from the top of the monitor like twin waterfalls. Latitude, longitude and position were displayed to the right of the screen. Murphy adjusted the screen's color control to a yellow-brown that was easy on the eyes.

The seafloor was largely unmarked. Occasionally, a boulder showed up or dark and light patches indicated differences in sediment. Halfway through its fourth track, the sonar caught two straight lines joined at an angle. All eyes were focused on the monitor as the vehicle finished the track, turned and came back. Murphy froze the picture.