Meg: Origins by Steve Alten Page A

as the broiling Pacific tossed his command within the valleys of its fifteen foot swells. Each rolling crest of blue levitated the British warship’s bow, each rise ended with the crash of copper keel meeting ocean. For the Scot, the spray of sea and the flap of canvas from the three mainsails defined the mantra of the past seven hundred-odd days; despite the danger, he much preferred the ocean’s fury to the mission’s incessant ports of call.
    He knew from day one that this command would be far different from his others. Once the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station, the Pearl-class corvette had been stripped of all but two of her guns and her spars reduced. The extra space had been converted to laboratories brimming with microscopes and chemical apparatus, water sampling bottles and specimen jars filled with alcohol—and not the kind her captain much preferred. In addition to the equipment and labs, the main deck had been altered to accommodate dredging platforms. These stations projected outward along either side of the ship like scaffolds, so that their occupants could work without fear of running afoul of the fore and main yards. The men who worked on these platforms were scientists, their crew skilled in troweling and dredging the bottom. To accomplish this feat required netting and containers rigged to great lengths of hemp, the coils of rope exceeding 140 miles, with an additional twelve and a half miles of piano wire reserved for sounding gear. Motorized winches released and gathered these lines—a chore that still took most of each work day to accomplish.
    Science was the mission of the H.M.S. Challenger , a voyage of discovery for the two-hundred and forty-three men aboard—a mission that would take four years while trekking nearly 69,000 nautical miles.
    Popular among his men, Nares led with an even temperament; what he lacked in physical stature he more than made up for with his cunning. Standing by the mainsail, he watched with a mixture of trepidation and amusement as a heavily bearded professor warily made his way aft along the swaying deck. “Professor Moseley. What is it to be then?”
    “Sink lines, followed by more dredging. The crew’s been rigging longer lines, the depths seem to have no end in this area of the archipelago.”
    The captain glanced to starboard. For weeks they had been following a course that took them past the Mariana Islands, each mountainous mass carpeted in green jungle. “I would have thought the depths around these islands far more shallow.”
    “As it turns out, these volcanic islands sit in the deepest waters we have yet come upon. The sea bed is ancient, yielding a treasure-trove of fossils and manganese nodules. This morning’s sink line exceeded thirty-five hundred fathoms and still there is no sign of bottom. We had to splice in another…”
    The captain grabbed the teetering scientist and held fast as the bow lifted again, then crashed back into the Pacific. “How soon until a new length of cable can be made ready?”
    “I’m told another twenty minutes.”
    “Very well. Helm, come hard to starboard. Mr. Lauterbach, lower the mainsails; prepare to engage steam engines.”
    “Aye, captain.” The first officer rang his copper bell, the signal mobilizing two dozen crewmen as the Challenger leaned onto its starboard flank to shed the wind within the valley of a swell.
    Captain Nares waited until the scientist disappeared safely down a hold, then returned his gaze to the Pacific, staring hard at the heaving waters.
    Thirty-five hundred fathoms… more than six kilometers of ocean. How deep could these waters run? What strange life forms could they be concealing?
    The depths surrounding this strange archipelago had certainly offered a bounty of clues, from cetacean vertebrae and whale ear bones to thousands of shark teeth, more than a hundred of these manganese-encrusted fragments as large as his hand. Moseley had identified these larger specimens as