Read Dragon for Free Online

wary eye on the electrical and oxygen-level gauges. Salazar kept busy plotting their probe grid once they reached the bottom, while Stacy kept trying to catch the denizens of the deep off guard with her cameras.
    Plunkett preferred the strains of Johann Strauss for stereo background music, but Stacy insisted on using her “new age” music in the cassette player. She claimed it was soothing and less stressful. Salazar called it “waterfall” music but went along.
    Jimmy Knox’s voice from the Invincible sounded ghostly as it filtered down on the underwater acoustic telephone.
    “Bottom in ten minutes,” he announced. “You’re closing a bit fast.”
    “Righto,” replied Plunkett. “I have it on sonar.”
    Salazar and Stacy turned from their work and stared at the sonar screen. The digital enhancement showed the seabed in contoured three dimensions. Plunkett’s gaze darted from the screen into the water and back again. He trusted the sonar and computer, but not ahead of his own vision.
    “Be on your guard,” Knox alerted them. “You’re dropping alongside the walls of a canyon.”
    “I have it,” returned Plunkett. “The cliffs plunge into a wide valley.” He reached for a switch and dropped one of the ballast weights to slow the descent. Thirty meters from the bottom he dropped one more, giving the submersible almost perfect neutral buoyancy. Next he engaged the three thrusters mounted on the outer ends of the lower spheres.
    The bottom slowly materialized through the jade gloom into a broken uneven slope. Strange black rock that was folded and twisted into grotesque shapes spread as far as they could see.
    “We’ve come down beside a lava flow,” said Plunkett. “The edge is about a kilometer ahead. After that it’s another three hundred-meter drop to the valley floor.”
    “I copy,” replied Knox.
    “What are all those wormy rocks?” asked Stacy.
    “Pillow lava,” answered Salazar. “Made when fiery lava strikes the cold sea. The outer shell cools, forming a tube through which the molten lava keeps flowing.”
    Plunkett kicked in the altitude-positioning system that automatically kept the submersible four meters above the bottom slope. As they glided across the scarred features of the plateau, they spotted the trails of deep crawlers in scattered pools of silt, perhaps from brittle stars, shrimp, or deep-dwelling sea cucumbers that lurked in the darkness beyond the lights.
    “Get ready,” said Plunkett. “We’re about to head down.”
    A few seconds after his warning, the bottom dropped away into blackness again and the sub nosed over and fell deeper, maintaining its distance of four meters from the steep drop of the canyon walls.
    “I have you at five-three-six-zero meters,” echoed Knox’s voice over the underwater phone.
    “Righto, I read the same,” replied Plunkett.
    “When you reach the valley floor,” said Knox, “you’ll be on the plain of the fracture zone.”
    “Stands to reason,” Plunkett muttered, his attention focused on his control panel, computer screen, and a video monitor now showing the terrain below Old Gert ‘s landing skids. “There’s no bloody place left to go.”
    Twelve minutes passed, and then a flat bottom loomed up ahead and the sub leveled out again. Underwater particles swirled by the sphere, driven by a light current like flakes of snow. Ripples of sand stretched in front of the circular lit pattern from the lights. The sand was not empty. Thousands of black objects, roundly shaped like old cannonballs, littered the seabed in a thick layer.
    “Manganese nodules,” explained Salazar as though tutoring. “No one knows exactly how they formed, although it’s suspected sharks’ teeth or whale ear bones may form the nucleus.”
    “They worth anything?” asked Stacy, activating her camera systems.
    “Besides the manganese, they’re valued for smaller quantities of cobalt, copper, nickel, and zinc. I’d guess this concentration could run for