Daughter of the Deep(55)

‘Ah, you see?’ Luca raises his eyebrows at Ophelia. ‘This is why she enjoys my company so much.’

‘She tolerates you, anyway,’ Ophelia says. ‘She knows you are useful.’

‘Now, dear. Don’t be jealous.’

Nelinha continues her inspection of the control panels. She reads aloud the fancy calligraphy on each engraved bronze label: ‘Vector thrusters. Dynamic positioning. Recursive ballast control? Oh, this is incredible! Nautilus, I love you!’

The ship does not respond, but I imagine she’s thinking, Yes, I know. I am rather marvellous.

I have trouble sharing Nelinha’s enthusiasm. This is still the ship that killed my parents. I try to control my feelings. I’m doing my best to understand my ancestor’s strange, ancient, apparently living creation. But part of me wants to grab Luca’s pipe wrench and start smashing things.

I try to refocus. ‘Luca, you said there was a secret door?’

‘Yes, just here!’ Luca leads me to a hatch that’s tucked in a corner behind the giant pistons. It’s not so much a door as a service panel, maybe big enough for a child to squeeze through. There is no visible lock or handle.

‘Do you know what’s inside?’ I ask.

Luca hesitates, so Ophelia answers. ‘We’ve found several panels like this throughout the ship,’ she says. ‘We suspect they allow access to the Nautilus’s core processor … her brain, if you will. After a century and a half under the sea, her other systems required quite a lot of cleaning and repair. We suspect her core does, too, but …’

‘She is reluctant to let someone fool around in her brain,’ Luca says. ‘Understandable, of course. And I will not try to force the panels.’

‘No,’ Ester agrees. ‘That would be bad.’

‘But if we could clean out these hatches –’ Luca gives me a meaningful glance – ‘I suspect it might help all of us, especially the Nautilus.’

I get his point. For all we know, the submarine’s higher reasoning could be severely impaired. That might be why the Nautilus lashed out at my parents when they woke her up. Fixing the sub’s brain could make her friendlier and easier to deal with.

On the other hand, it could make her angrier and more dangerous …

Top sniffs the hatch. He, at least, looks eager to smell a submarine brain.

‘Ester, any advice?’ I ask.

‘Be careful,’ she suggests.

‘That’s very helpful. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

One of Ester’s many superpowers: she is impervious to sarcasm.

I place my hand on the hatch. ‘Nautilus, we would like to clean inside here,’ I say in Bundeli. ‘We will be extremely careful not to damage you. Would that be all right?’

The panel clicks.

‘Wonderful!’ Luca beams. ‘May I?’

I move aside. Luca pulls open the hatch, which unleashes a hideous stench like Davy Jones’s gym locker. Top wags his tail deliriously.

Luca reaches inside. He pulls out a large wad of gunk – algae, seaweed, crustacean poop? I don’t know.

‘You see?’ Luca holds up his prize like it’s a golden goose’s egg. Black slime coats his arm up to his elbow. ‘It’s a miracle the Nautilus still functions at all! Oh, Ana, imagine what she’ll be able to do once we get her cleaned up properly. You are the key to –’

FOOOOOOM!

The sound shakes the floor and rattles my eye sockets: a deep, resonant low E-flat, held for a whole note. Luca drops his goo. Top hides behind Ester’s legs. Nelinha widens her stance like she’s expecting a tidal wave. Ophelia braces herself against the wall.

The noise dies. I wait, but it does not repeat. ‘That sounded like –’

‘The pipe organ,’ Luca says in alarm.

‘It’s never done that before,’ Ophelia murmurs.

‘The what?’ I ask.

Luca and Ophelia look at each other. They seem to have a silent, anxious debate about what to do next.

‘I think,’ Ophelia says at last, ‘it is time to show Ana the bridge.’





The first thing you want to install in your high-tech super sub?

A pipe organ, of course.

The wonders of the Nautilus have already waged war on my sense of reality. When we reach the bridge, my mind simply runs up the white flag and surrenders. A pipe organ – now silent – does, in fact, take up the entire starboard side of the room, but that’s only one of the bridge’s oddities.

The prow’s ‘eyes’ dominate the front of the bridge. The bulging metal-laced domes provide a wide view of the cavern outside, making me feel like I’m in an aquatic conservatory … or maybe a fish tank.

‘The windows aren’t really glass,’ Luca assures me. ‘As near as we can figure out, the material is a transparent iron polymer created at extreme temperature and pressure.’

‘Like at the bottom of the sea,’ Nelinha guesses. ‘Near a volcanic vent.’

Luca taps his nose. ‘Just so, my dear. Perhaps Nemo forged his hull plating using a similar process. We’re not sure how he would have managed that. It’s yet another mystery to unravel. Of course, when Jules Verne wrote his novels, he didn’t know what to call that material, so he called it iron.’ He plinks a knuckle against the nearest nemonium girder. ‘Clearly not iron.’