Ester considers this question long enough to make me really worried.
‘You’ve changed the Nautilus,’ she decides. ‘You’ve heard of imprinting?’
‘Like when a baby duck imprints on its mother,’ I say. ‘They form an attachment.’
‘Or when another species of animal attaches to humans,’ she says. ‘Dogs, for instance.’
Top thumps his tail. He knows the word dog.
‘You’re saying the Nautilus is my baby duck?’ I ask.
‘Or maybe you’re the Nautilus’s baby duck,’ Ester muses. ‘Either way, you’re connecting to each other. I think that’s good. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
Ester looks puzzled. ‘Nelinha didn’t tell you? She wants you to go outside the ship and try something with the hull.’
‘Leidenfrost,’ Gem says as we’re suiting up.
He actually says it twice. The first time I don’t respond, because I’m obsessing about my most recent nightmare. I was glued to Captain Nemo’s chair while the bridge filled with green slime …
‘Sorry, what?’ I ask.
‘It’s a kind of shielding,’ Gem says. ‘Different than Leyden guns. Leidenfrost would create a near-freezing sheath of water around the hull.’
He sits on the bench across from me, connecting hoses to his antique dive suit. On the other side of the interior airlock door, Nelinha raps her knuckles on the window. ‘Red hose in the red valve, Twain,’ she says over the intercom. ‘We marked them for you. And Leidenfrost shielding wasn’t meant for combat.’
‘I know, I know.’ Gem rolls his eyes at me. ‘Ever since she became a billionaire engineer, she’s impossible.’
‘I can hear you, billionaire gunslinger,’ Nelinha says.
Gem grins. Among the many things I never thought I would see in this life: Gem and Nelinha joking good-naturedly with each other.
‘Anyway,’ he says, picking up his helmet, ‘Leidenfrost was designed so the Nautilus could dive in extreme temperatures. Like, she could theoretically plunge through an active volcanic vent, straight through lava, and suffer no damage.’
‘Wow.’ I stare at the exterior door that will lead us into the abyss. ‘Nautilus, what kind of adventures did you get up to back in the day?’
The sub does not answer, but I imagine her feeling smug. Yeah, kid, if you only knew.
‘If we can get our Leidenfrost shield working,’ Gem says, ‘it might disperse energy weapons. Obviously, Nemo didn’t use it that way. No other ships in his time had Leyden cannons. But I have a theory the Aronnax is using Leidenfrost and that’s why it was impervious to Lincoln Base’s electrical turrets.’
I remember the fuzzy aura around the enemy sub on our LOCUS displays. ‘Okay. So how do we get it working?’
‘I’ll guide you,’ Nelinha says over the comm. ‘There’s a damaged conduit just past the starboard aft bulkhead. I have a feeling it’ll need that special Nemo touch, which is why we’ve gotta send you, but otherwise it should be a simple fix.’
‘If we weren’t doing it a hundred metres underwater,’ I say.
The Nautilus has stubbornly refused to budge from this depth, for reasons none of us understand. I can’t shake the sense that she wants us to be in this particular spot, though there is nothing around us on the LOCUS but the yawning canyon of the Palau Trench.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Nelinha says. If I didn’t know her so well, I might miss the nervousness in her voice. ‘We’ve pressure-tested the suits. They’re better than anything modern navies could design.’
Still, we’ll be the first people to use them since the 1800s, at a depth where only the best modern technical divers with nitrox tanks should work.
The suit’s mesh material doesn’t cling like a wetsuit. It also isn’t bulky like a typical drysuit. It’s so light and flexible I can’t imagine how it will provide any thermal protection. Nelinha tells me it’s a nemonium weave. The texture feels more like a cashmere sweater than metal.
The air tanks are impossibly small and compact, no larger than a school backpack. Instead of fins, we have boots with squid-inspired jet propulsion （naturally）。
The helmets are the most disconcerting part of the gear. The transparent spheres are made of the same pseudo-glass as the windows on the bridge. When I put mine on, I can breathe just fine. I have a great range of vision. But I feel like my head’s in a fishbowl that smells like … well, a fishbowl.