A winch system was called into action and the equipment was lowered along with engineering buoys and floats, ROVs, submersibles, even living quarters for the DSSD engineering team. Once all that was sorted out and operational, the Neptune Habitat itself was brought down in sections and assembled on a level plateau about three-quarters of a mile from the ancient city. AUV Orca had already selected the site, mapped it out, and dropped sonar markers in place.

The rest was up to the DSSD, Diving System Support Detachment, engineers.

The baseplate for the habitat weighed something like one hundred tons and was lowered to the bottom in twelve sections using tungsten cable guides and balloons that slowly deflated during descent. Once the sections were on the plateau, manned submersibles winched them into place. Divers then bolted them together and welded them into a whole. The baseplate provided anchoring for the habitat as well as a stable and level support base for it. Next, four legs containing 25 tons of lead ballast were fastened to the plate, then leveled using hydraulic-driven screw jacks. Then the habitat vessel itself was attached to the legs. Once it was fitted together, again, piecemeal, it was sealed and pressurized. The entire habitat was completely automated with back-up life support to the point of redundancy. Above, on the surface, the LSB was connected to the Neptune Habitat via steel cables and a three-inch diameter unitized umbilical. The cable contained hoses which supplied air from compressors, oxygen from storage flasks, power lines from generators, as well as coaxial and fiber-optic lines for data and communications.

Everything below could be monitored.

Orr himself had supervised the entire process and he didn’t actually believe they’d be able to do it until the moment that the habitat was on-line and operable. Then again, the DSSD had put Neptune Habitats in much deeper water and under worse conditions. They were designed to be easily-deployable. It had taken over two months.

The LSB itself was cavernous. It had something like 70 square meters of inside workspace which did not take into account the outer decks and winches that were used for launching the ROVs and submersibles. It had a communications tower, generators, compressors, VHF radios and a microwave broadcasting system. Half the technology on board was classified. Even when the LSB and Neptune Habitat were warehoused, ready for deployment, it would have been easier to roam the corridors of the Pentagon than it would have been to get within a hundred feet of them. That was the level of secrecy surrounding the DSU’s toys.

All that technology, all those resources…and it still did nothing to ease Orr’s mind. The margin for human error was always high on a project like this. And especially when you factored in the unknown quantity of who or what built that city down there.