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I swallowed hard and tried to draw in a breath. I remembered that we were doing this to rescue my mom, who had saved my own life more than once. I remembered that she was being held captive in a sub probably not half as nice as this one.
"It's a sub, Max," urged Total, who was suffering from a bad case of missing-Akila blues, "not a vat of boiling oil. Get on already, and let's see if they have any croissants. I'm starving."
I took a big step forward, off the dock and onto the metal walkway that led to the top of the sub, not the sticking-up part of the sub, but the topside of its nose. I don't know the technical term.
There was an open hatch there, and I strode toward it, trying to keep abject terror from showing on my face. I began to climb down the ladder, managing a smile and a wave that I hoped was at least in the neighborhood of jaunty. Then Gazzy stepped on the walkway, followed by Total, and I knew the others weren't far behind.
There was no going back now.
Get this: if there was nothing inside the submarine, it might not be so bad. It really was a great big one. On the outside. On the inside, it was crammed chock-full of people, walls of instruments, panels of lights and switches, huge pipes and bundles of thick cables—basically, there was hardly any room to walk. And we're skinny.
There were not enough relaxation tapes in the world to get me through this.
Then Fang came up behind me and put his hand on my waist, just for a second. And I felt a little better.
The two officers zipped down the ladder, and one of them shouted the order to seal the hatch. Then he looked at us, these six weird, mostly tall, somewhat ungroomed children who had permission to be on a naval submarine. Plus their dog, who almost seemed like he could talk.
"Come with me," he said. "The birds are working again."
48
WALKING THROUGH the narrow corridors of the sub was like being inside someone's intestines, like we were making our way through the digestive tract. I kept expecting the Magic School Bus to show up and dump bile on us.
I absolutely refused to think about the fact that we were sealed inside this thing, sinking below the surface of the water. I kept repeating, We're saving my mom, over and over inside my head.
The officer stopped outside a door. All the doorways on a sub are shaped like Vienna Fingers cookies, kind of oblong. Each door has a sill about six inches high so that if the sub springs a leak and water gets in, each room can be sealed off. Oh, God, I was gonna die.
We stepped over the threshold and found ourselves in a small conference room. A tall man with short silver hair and dark brown eyes stood up and smiled. "I'm Captain Joshua Perry," he said, coming to shake hands with all of us. "I understand we have a mission to accomplish."
This wasn't what I was expecting.
Your mind creates your reality. If you expect nothing, you open up the universe to give you options. If you expect the worst, you usually get it.
The Voice. That really was the Voice, not my own thoughts and not something Angel was beaming into my brain. It was the Voice, loud and clear. And it had apparently been watching Oprah again.
Uh, Voice? Not that I'm not glad to hear you again, but this sub is already awfully crowded, and so is the inside of my head, so this might not be the best time…
"Max?" Captain Perry was looking at me.
"Sorry. What?"
"We haven't had any direct word about your mother. However, late last night, the following surveillance film was taken in the same general area as the first one that you saw. It looks strange because it was taken with a night-vision camera."
Someone dimmed the lights, and an image flickered on a white screen at one end of the room. It looked like daytime, except darker and kind of greenish. It was, like before, a huge expanse of featureless ocean. Covered with the shiny sides of dead, floating fish, as far as the eye could see. And attacking the seafood buffet were thousands of seabirds, who had clearly heard about the hundred-for-the-price-of-one special.
"We don't know what killed these fish," said the captain. "Several were recovered and tested. They were negative for traumatic injury, bacteria, parasites, starvation, fungal illnesses, cancers, enzyme imbalances, and gas bubble disease. They're simply dead, and we don't know why."
"Mass suicide?" Total muttered, clearly wishing he was back at the base with Akila.
"Then, look at this," said Captain Perry, pointing with a laser pen. The image pulled back; the camera was clearly attached to a rising helicopter. When the copter was quite high, it changed direction, as if heading back to land.
All of a sudden, in one tiny corner of the image, an enormous dark thing burst out of the water, sending dead fish flying everywhere and making the birds scatter. The camera quickly swung back to focus on it, and the helicopter started dropping altitude, but within moments the dark thing was gone without a trace.
"We've watched this film a hundred times now," said Captain Perry, "and we still can't tell what that was. It was almost like a mountain suddenly emerged from the ocean, then disappeared just as quickly. But sonar images show no large masses in that area whatsoever."
The lights flickered back on.
"What does this have to do with my mom?" I asked.
