The Life Lottery
Chapter 1
The deep-sea submersible Melvin had just reached its planned exploration depth – 1,559 metres below the surface of the Tasman Sea and 4.2 metres off the bottom of the eastern flank of the Lord Howe Rise – when the underwater telephone made the irritating belching sound signifying that the mother ship was trying to contact them. Like every other bit of technology, except that used for spying on people, it was decades past its use-by date.
Irith Hardey didn’t move from the viewport, partly because she suffered from claustrophobia and being able to look out made it bearable. She’d done her best to overcome that, for Irith was fascinated by the deep sea and there was no other way to discover, first hand, what was down here. She’d been waiting two years for this dive and no intrusion from the dismal world above, with its perpetual crises and steadily worsening political situation, was going to distract her. Her research was her life, her friend, her lover and comforter. It couldn’t turn her mind off after she collapsed into bed, though. It couldn’t keep the recurring nightmares at bay.
The submersible’s floodlights illuminated an expanse of grey mud between knobs of tubeworm-encrusted basalt. A white fish swam into the field of view. It was long and thin, like a length of squashed plastic pipe.
‘It’s for you, Dr Hardey,’ said the pilot.
Irith cursed under her breath. ‘What now? We only left the surface an hour ago.’
He motioned her to the receiver. ‘It’s Jacques Cuvier.’
The expedition leader, on the RV Thor Heyerdahl, above. ‘It’d better be important!’ She took it. ‘Hello, Irith here.’
Jacques Cuvier came on the line, his normally precise tones made adenoidal by the ancient instrument. ‘You are to come up, please.’
‘What?’ she cried, though the instruction had been perfectly clear. ‘Is it an emergency?’ Hardly likely, or the surface controller would be talking the pilot through it.
‘No emergency. You are to come up, without delay.’
But we’ve only just got here. We’ve got six hours’ work to do. Over at the other viewport Irith’s co-observer, Jason Slythe, spun around. What’s the matter? he mouthed.
She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Surely he can’t mean now? I’ve been waiting years for this.’ Not to mention written fifty-three research proposals, and begged and scrounged every cent of the $65,000 per day it cost for the sixty-year-old submersible, all her equipment and the rusting seventy-metre research vessel required to support it.
Jason held up his hands in a sign of helplessness. She put the phone to her ear again.
Jacques said something she didn’t catch through a prolonged gurgling sound, like a distant toilet flushing over and again. The underwater phone was always causing trouble; there had been no money for maintenance in decades. It gave her an idea.
‘Hello?’ she said loudly. ‘Jacques? Jacques?’
‘Lost him,’ she said to Fred, the pilot, then put her hand over the mouthpiece again. ‘Follow the dive plan, Fred. Go down to Station One.’
Fred adjusted the submersible’s trim by pumping mercury from the aft tank to the forward one. ‘But …’
‘Jacques hasn’t told you to come up.’
‘No.’
‘And it’s not an emergency.’
He grinned. Fred was the solid, dependable type, as pilots had to be, but there was enough rebel in him to enjoy someone else breaking the rules.
Irith put the receiver into an empty Milo tin used for storing odds and ends, and taped the lid on over the cord so no sound could get through. ‘And I couldn’t make out what he was saying, so we go on with the mission.’
‘You don’t have to worry. You’re not in charge.’
The Melvin proceeded downslope to 1,642 metres, keeping just far enough above the bottom that the wash from the thrusters did not stir up the sediment and reduce visibility. Irith was watching the trace of the echo sounder with one eye while she used the external video and still cameras with the other. ‘We must be nearly on station, Fred.’
‘The canyon should be coming into view any minute.’ The submersible kept dropping. ‘There it is.’
‘Just ease down into it so I can get images of the walls.’
The Melvin dropped over the lip into what appeared to be a gully eroded out of clayey sediment. The lights revealed wavy layering in the gully walls, dark and light, and occasional lenses of white. They continued down.
‘I knew we’d find it here,’ Irith said. ‘The hydrate signature on the echo sounder traces was as strong as I’ve ever seen.’
Further down, the grey-brown sediment was thickly layered with glistening bands of the white material, five to ten centimetres thick. It looked exactly like ice.
‘Follow it down as far as you can, Fred – I want to ground-truth the traces as best we can. Is everything recording?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
The white bands continued to the bottom of the canyon, twenty-seven metres below the sediment surface. The submersible tracked along the bottom for about two hundred metres, then hovered, neutrally buoyant, while Irith made measurements of water chemistry and physical properties with her external instruments. She checked that the data was recording and took water samples and sediment cores with the manipulator arms. After storing the sealed containers in the science sample basket outside, she said, ‘I’m finished here. Can we track back along the other side?’
Fred was rocking back and forth on his seat.
‘Something the matter?’ she said.
‘The canyon walls don’t look one-hundred-percent stable, Irith. I don’t want to spend more time down here than I have to. The operating regs specify –’
‘Of course,’ she said. At the bottom of the sea, safety always took precedence. ‘Take her up whenever you’re ready. I’ve done everything I have to do.’
Fred ascended the canyon, and at the place where they’d first seen the white material he worked the manipulator arms, since he was more experienced at that than Irith, to break off a chunk of layered sediment, which he placed in the pressure chamber in the sample basket.
‘Another piece, please,’ said Irith. ‘Since we’ve come all this way.’
That proved more difficult than Irith had anticipated. The white material decomposed in a little explosion of bubbles as soon as Fred closed the grips of the starboard manipulator arm.
‘I’ve read about that happening,’ said Irith. ‘What about just there.’ She pointed over Fred’s shoulder through his viewport at another lens of the icy material, ten centimetres across and just as thick.
He eased it into the pressure chamber and worked the remotes to close the lid and seal it. It would keep the samples at the same pressure and temperature until they reached the surface.
‘Excellent,’ Irith said. ‘Now, if we can just get a core or two.’
Fred used the sediment corer to extract a two-metre-long horizontal core through the white material, then a vertical core from the top, sealed them remotely in their core tubes and stowed them in the basket.
‘Where to now, Irith?’ said Fred, staring at her in a way that suggested it was time to obey orders and go up.
Irith heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I just love it down here. No one has ever dived on the Lord Howe Rise before – it could be a new planet for all we know about it.’
‘It’ll change,’ said Fred. ‘If they find a use for that stuff.’
‘Methane hydrate,’ she said absently. ‘Methane gas generated in the sediments over millions of years and frozen into ice crystals. There’s enough buried on the slopes of the Lord Howe Rise to supply the world’s energy needs for the next forty years.’
‘Assuming we could find a safe way to extract it,’ said Jason.
‘That’s the problem,’ Irith agreed. ‘There are gas hydrates everywhere in the deep ocean, but getting the methane out safely is another matter.’
‘See that?’ said Fred. Trails of tiny bubbles were streaming up from the exposed hydrate surfaces. ‘It’s two degrees outside, yet our lights are causing it to break down. Let’s go, Irith.’
‘All right,’ she said, and with another heavy sigh began removing the tape from the Milo lid. ‘Hello, Jacques,’ she said wearily, as though she’d been repeating it for hours. ‘Melvin here, come in please.’
‘Dr Hardey!’ Jacques Cuvier snapped. He wasn’t a fool. ‘Come up immediately.’
‘We’re on our way. But why, Jacques?’ The weather had been good when they’d left the surface, a clear winter day with only a gentle breeze, and the cyclone season didn’t start for months yet.
‘Someone wants to see you.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘The department hasn’t bothered to inform me.’
‘Is someone flying out?’ Irith could not imagine why, for she was just a marine scientist specialising in climate change. It was a big issue in a world beset by rising seas and violent weather changes from one year to the next. Not to mention perpetual resettlement conflicts between the billion refugees who’d been flooded out and those fortunate enough to live higher up. But even so, plenty of scientists were doing similar research and most had more experience than she did. Why her?
‘No, they’re sending a helicopter to take you back to Sydney, and it’ll be here in half an hour. You’d better not keep them waiting.’
‘Pick me up?’ Irith felt like a fool, repeating everything he said, but it made no sense at all. ‘Where am I going?’
‘I have no idea, Dr Hardey, but whatever you’ve done, I’m not happy about it. This mission has been years in the planning and it’s most inconvenient.’
‘It’s a damn sight more inconvenient for me!’ snapped Irith. ‘It’s my research time that’s being lost.’ With the greatest reluctance, she told Fred to ascend to the mother ship.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Jason, as if it were her fault. His precious underwater time was also being wasted. ‘This is a real pain, Irith.’
‘It certainly wasn’t my idea,’ she snapped.
Two hours later, at 11 am, she wriggled out of the hatch of the Melvin and climbed down onto the deck of the Thor Heyerdahl. A huge helicopter sat on the pad on the forward deck, its blades spinning. Like every other piece of equipment she came across, it was ancient – a two-bladed Sikorsky kept running long past its designed life. There were oil stains down the metal skin, which had been repaired using parts from a machine with a different paint job. It wasn’t a comforting sign.
Jacques Cuvier marched across, natty as ever in suit and bow tie, and looking completely out of place among the overall-clad scientists and technicians.
‘Come on, Irith, come on,’ he fussed. ‘The department’s been on the line three times in the last half hour, wanting to know why it’s taking so long. They have power over our funding, you know.’
Irith had asked Fred to come up as slowly as possible. It could be another three years before she got the chance to be in a submersible again, so she’d made the most of the time she had left. She thought about making an excuse, but Jacques must have known what she was up to – all he had to do was check the mother ship’s sonar logs. It could locate the Melvin to within a few metres in any depth of water. Besides, he’d been good to her in the past and he’d look after her as best he could.
Taking her elbow, he ushered her towards the helicopter.
‘How long will I be away?’
‘I don’t know, Irith. Days, certainly …’
‘What is it, Jacques?’
‘The helicopter costs $8,000 an hour and it’s well overdue for an overhaul. They may not bring you back at all.’
‘But my research …’
‘We’ve got the plan. It’ll get done.’
‘It’s not the same, Jacques!’ she said furiously.
He took two steps backwards. ‘I do understand, Irith. I’ve done my best but the department wouldn’t budge. The order comes from higher up, I understand.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know. The department wouldn’t say.’
‘Well, fuck the department,’ Irith said, just on the edge of audibility. She rarely swore but the situation seemed to require it.
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing. I’ll have to change and pack some clothes …’
‘There’s no time. You’ll have to go as you are.’
‘But –’ She looked up at him. Jacques wasn’t a tall man but he was a lot taller than her. ‘What’s the hurry?’
‘Just come on.’
He was uncharacteristically anxious. The Departmental Secretary must have really given him a roasting. Serves him right, Irith thought, but that was unjust. Jacques wasn’t much of a scientist, and the fussiness made him an absurd figure, but he knew talent when he saw it. He’d been most supportive of her over the past three years.
‘I’m absolutely bursting for a pee,’ Irith said. ‘And I’ve got to change my tampon before it leaks all down –’ That was a fib, but he wasn’t to know it. In these prudish times no one talked about such things, least of all Jacques Cuvier.
‘Five minutes!’ he interrupted hastily, avoiding her eye. ‘Not a second more.’
‘Thank you, Jacques.’ Irith sprinted off. She had only work clothes aboard, but even work clothes were better than her baggy old overalls and scuffed workman’s boots.
In her cabin she threw off the overalls and put on the best pants she had, a pair of blue jeans that were uncomfortably tight across the backside. Must get back into exercising, she thought, not for the first time. Brown boots, a soft grey blouse, a cotton jacket that was darker grey. She looked like a bushwalker. Irith gave her short brown hair a quick brush, which failed to tame it, and her teeth an even quicker going over, by which time Jacques was rapping on the door.
‘Coming!’ She threw a spare blouse into her backpack, a couple of changes of underwear, passport and ID cards and, lastly, her battered PocketBook computer. If she wasn’t coming back, at least she could get some work done.
In another five minutes Jacques was handing her into the chopper which, she noted, had been fitted with long-range tanks. The Thor Heyerdahl was over a thousand kilometres out from Sydney.
‘Good luck!’ he said as the co-pilot pointed to the rear left seat and slid the door closed.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered inaudibly. But for what?
Three hours later she was in Sydney but had learned nothing. The pilots were the most taciturn types she had ever encountered, saying not a word to her the whole trip. They set down at the airport heliport where a car was waiting. A uniformed woman got out and checked Irith’s ID with a portable terminal that she took directly from the manufacturer’s packaging. In a world dominated by refugee-sponsored terrorism, the security services had the best of everything. ‘Would you come this way, please, Dr Hardey?’
‘I’d really like to know what’s going on,’ said Irith.
‘I’m just an escort. You’ll be briefed on arrival in London.’
‘London!’
‘That’s right. Let me take your bag.’
Irith held onto it – the only stable thing in her shifting world. ‘It’s not heavy. What’s happening in London?’
‘I’m just an escort,’ the woman repeated.
It reminded her all too uncomfortably of her first trip to London, eight or nine years ago, and all the horrors that had come out of it. A desperate chase through flooded tunnels under the London Docklands, an insurgency school in mosquito-ridden Minnesota, and then … Irith felt panic rising along with the faces of all her dead, friends and foes. She took deep breaths and bit down on the memories.