The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton's Lair Read online

  M.K. came back with her tray of thin gray potatoes and fried livers. “I think this is the grossest dinner they’ve ever served us. I’m giving it the prize. Don’t you . . .” She saw our faces. “What’s wrong?”

  “We were just telling Kit that we think the proposal should have Zander’s name on it,” Sukey said in a quiet voice.

  “Oh, is that all?” M.K. sat down and dug into her meal. “They’re probably right, Kit. No one really likes you. You ask too many questions. They’ll be much more likely to pick it if it has Zander’s name on it. They all like Zander. They seem to think he’s on their side, even if he isn’t.”

  “Thanks, M.K.”

  “What?” she said through a mouthful of liver. “I like you. It’s just that no one else does.”

  The terrible thing was that I knew they were right. But I couldn’t let it go.

  “It isn’t fair. We wouldn’t even know about it if it weren’t for me.”

  “Kit, we’ll know it was you,” Sukey said. “And we’ll all be there. It will be all of our expedition, even if Zander’s name is on it.” Her face was soft, a gentle look in her eyes. She felt sorry for me. It was worse than if she’d been mean about it. “Only if we all get on the expedition,” I spat back. “And I think we all know how unlikely that is.”

  “Kit . . .” Sukey began, but I pushed my chair back.

  “Okay,” I said. Zander’s eyes darted around, avoiding mine. “Fine. I‘ll put your name on it. Good luck.”

  I got up and walked out into the snow.

  Three days later, on November 15, I handed Zander the stack of pages I’d worked so hard on, and he gave me his—an incomplete, badly written proposal for an expedition to study wildebeests in Munopia. Then I walked through the drifted snow to Maggie’s office and turned in Zander’s proposal with my name printed across the title page.

  Fourteen

  I finally found a chance to talk to Mr. Wooley. I had been in a dark mood, going through the motions in class, angry at Zander and Sukey, nervous about the proposals. I knew that Maggie and the rest of the faculty were spending hours every day poring over them, trying to decide which ones had a chance of success. Every once in a while, I’d start daydreaming about my proposal being chosen, hearing my name announced, before I remembered that it wouldn’t be my name they called but Zander’s.

  One chilly night a few days before the Thanksgiving banquet where the winning proposals were to be announced, I was walking along the path leading back toward campus from the training grounds when I caught sight of Mr. Wooley walking up ahead of me, his platinum-blond head bent, his shoulders rounded. Even from far away, he seemed depressed. I knew I should leave him alone, but there wasn’t anyone else on the path, and I knew this might be my only chance to speak to him with no one listening. I started running after him.

  He heard me coming and turned around, a frightened look on his face. When he saw it was me, he looked relieved but also a little guilty.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wooley,” I said breathlessly. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I wanted to talk to you, and I figured this was a good place.”

  It was terribly cold, my breath hovering in front of my face as I spoke.

  He looked around at the trees and shrugged. “About the only place one can talk, I expect. What’s on your mind?” We started walking again, slowly matching pace on the path.

  “I was looking at some old expedition proposals,” I told him. “And I saw that you and my dad were assigned to the same expedition one of your years here. To the Caribbean?”

  He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise. “That’s right. The King Triton’s Lair expedition. Well, that’s what the locals called it.”

  “What happened? Did you find anything? You were trying to find out what caused all the shipwrecks, right?”

  He watched me as we walked. His blue eyes were tired and bloodshot. “Did we find anything? Didn’t your father ever tell you what happened?”

  “No, at least I don’t think he did. I’m assuming you didn’t find them because I would have heard about it if you had. I’m just curious about what happened on the expedition.”

  Now he stopped walking and turned to me. He studied my face as though he was trying to figure out if I was telling the truth.

  “You mean to tell me he never said anything about that expedition?”

  “No.”

  He swore under his breath. “The expedition was a disaster—that’s what happened,” he said. “He almost died. He should have died. It was a miracle that he didn’t.”

  “Really?” Now I was gobsmacked. “How?”

  “We were looking for what had caused the shipwrecks, and our ship sank. Kind of ironic, if you think about it. There was a bad storm—it came in the night, out of nowhere—and we went down not far from where your father thought the shipwrecks were. The rest of us managed to get into the lifeboats, but Alex disappeared. He was knocked out and washed overboard before we could find him. We all assumed he’d drowned. We were devastated. A passing boat rescued us, and we were on our way back to school when we heard that a fisherman had found a boy floating on a raft made of driftwood and debris, confused and delirious with thirst. He said he’d been on a ship that had gone down in the ocean and had been floating for days. Alex was a day or so away from death when they found him. There were sharks . . .” Mr. Wooley stared off into the distance. “It was awful. He looked like a ghost when we finally met up with him. And he was in the hospital for weeks. He really never told you any of this?”

  I shook my head.

  “That expedition was a complete disaster from start to finish. Before we went, we laughed at the old tales we’d heard about King Triton’s Lair. Rogue waves. Strange currents that could pull a ship under. Sea monsters. Hidden coral reefs. Weird weather. Afterward, we weren’t laughing.”

  “Mr. Wooley, what happened to Paul Mirkopoulous?”

  “Paul died on an expedition a few years back. I forget where.”

  “And what about the other members of the expedition?”

  “I don’t know. Coleman Miller was a great friend of your father’s. He dropped out of the Academy afterwards, from the trauma. As for me—well, here I am.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was about to tell him goodbye when I realized that this might be my only chance to ask him about something else I’d been wondering about. “Mr. Wooley?”

  “Yes?”

  “The King Triton’s Lair expedition wasn’t the only thing he kept from us. We didn’t know until after he disappeared that he’d been kicked out of the Expedition Society. We heard something about Munopia, but we don’t know anything more than that.” I lowered my voice. “BNDL says he was a criminal. Do you know why he was kicked out? I wouldn’t ask, except that, well, Raleigh doesn’t know, and there isn’t anyone else we can ask.”

  Wooley’s eyes got very wide. “My God, you poor children.” He took off his tweed hat and ran a hand through his hair. When he looked up, his eyes were full of sadness and exhaustion. “I could get in a lot of trouble for talking about this, but you have a right to know. About a year ago, just before your father left for Fazia, I heard that he was being investigated for taking bribes in Munopia. He’d been there on an expedition to find a new river, right?”

  Munopia was a Newly Discovered Land on the southwestern tip of Africa. “Yeah, a water source for the cattle farms.”

  “Right. Well, BNDL had lost control in Munopia. The local farmers who operated the cattle farms there weren’t sending the beef to us. Instead, it was all going to Munopian markets and, it was rumored, to the Indorustans. The story I heard was that instead of turning his maps of the new water source over to BNDL, your father sold them to these farmers. But someone saw him. He was about to be arrested when he left for Fazia. After he disappeared, they said he’d lied to BNDL and they stripped him of his membership, removed all trace of him from the society. He’s not the only one it’s happened to.”

  I just stood there, t
aking it in. It was what Francis Foley had told us. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it was hard to think of another explanation. “Thanks,” I finally said. “And thanks for all of the information about the Caribbean.”

  He studied me for a moment. “Hold on. You’re not thinking of going there for your expedition?”

  “No, no, I’m not,” I hurried to say. “I proposed an expedition to study wildebeests in Africa. But Zander wants to go to the Caribbean.” I grinned at him. “Maybe you could be his expedition instructor and come along.”

  He shivered, and the look on his face made me sorry for making the joke. “You couldn’t pay me to go back there,” he said. “There isn’t enough gold in the world.”

  Fifteen

  I walked slowly back to campus, thinking it through. It was clearer now than ever that Dad had meant for us to look for King Triton’s Lair, to succeed where he had failed.

  And he must have known that somehow, we’d figure out how to get there and devise a way to explore the ocean floor.

  I looked up to find the long, low workshop, tucked up against the side of the mountain, steam from who knows what sorts of machines pouring from various chimneys and pipes sticking up all over the roof.

  Quincy had been the Engineering instructor ever since she graduated from the Academy. She was a gifted engineer and could take credit for many of the most impressive inventions of the new modern age: SteamOutboard motors, ultra-efficient Steam bicycles used in cities, SteamWashers, SteamPonies. . . . the list went on and on. Whenever you walked by the workshop, day or night, you could hear clanging and whooshing and all kinds of strange noises. Quincy taught all of the engineering, field repair, and gadget-design classes inside the workshop, but most of us were only allowed to work on one side of the building. The other side was for the top-secret projects that Quincy worked on with her best students, like M.K. The Bureau mostly left her alone, but that was only because they needed her inventions.

  Quincy looked up and smiled when she saw me. “Mr. West!” she called out. She had been at the Academy with Dad and claimed that he’d taught her everything she knew about gadgetry and engineering. She said it with a twinkle in her eye that made me think it was the other way around, but it was clear she’d loved Dad, and by extension, she loved us. When we’d first arrived at the Academy, she’d asked if she could take a look at our vests. She’d even tuned up a few things for us. Our parachutes needed a thorough cleaning before being replaced in their hidden compartments, she’d replaced Zander’s flamethrower, and she said she’d be happy to add some new gadgets once we knew where we were going for our exam expedition.

  “You looking for your sister?” she asked me. I nodded, and she led me to the rear of the workshop, where I could see M.K. at a long workbench, tightening something with her wrench.

  “Hey, there,” she called out, grinning. “Come check this out.”

  I watched as she tightened the bolt on a small metal utility box. When she was done, she stepped back and held it up, then pressed a button on the side. A metal spear shot out of the box, trailed by a length of long wire.

  “M.K.!” It had come within inches of piercing my upper arm.

  “Sorry. In case you need to go spearfishing,” she said, handing it over. “Put it in your vest. I’m making some more for the rest of us.”

  “Thanks,” I said, tucking it into a pocket and looking around the workbench. “Whoa. Are those what I think they are?”

  At the other end of the bench were four brass-and-Gryluminum diving helmets shaped like fishbowls, with glass panels in front. Tubes and wires connected them to four diving suits, each made of a blue synthetic material that shimmered in the light. The suits had small Gryluminum tanks attached to their backs—oxygen tanks, I assumed. I leaned over to inspect the gadgets decorating the front of the suits and saw a light like the one on my vest, a removable speargun, an underwater compass protected by a thick bubble of glass, and a couple of zippered pockets.

  “Quincy and I based the design on the suits that Dad took on his expedition, but I completely redesigned them so they’d be lightweight and allow the diver to stay down longer,” M.K. said, showing me the breathing apparatus inside the helmet.

  “So this is your big surprise, huh? Pretty cool.” I picked up the helmet and put it on. The room fell into complete silence as I looked out through the glass and watched M.K.’s lips move. “What did you say?” I asked her, taking off the helmet. “I said that’s not the surprise. Those are just for backup.”

  “What do you mean, ‘backup’?”

  M.K. looked up at Quincy. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s okay. You’re almost done, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m getting close now,” M.K. said. “Okay. Come on.” She put down the wrench, pushing her too-long bangs out of her eyes and led me through a set of doors to a big room at the back of the workshop. In the room’s center was a large swimming pool.

  Floating in the middle of the pool was M.K.’s surprise.

  “Here she is,” M.K. said with pride. “Her name is Amphitrite.” She grinned. “The Greek goddess of the sea, mother of King Triton. But I call her Amy.”

  Bobbing on the surface of the water was a huge brass-and-chrome octopus, its egg-shaped head made of shiny steel with a rounded plate of glass riveted to the top, forming a sort of windshield. Eight metal arms attached to the chrome body, which appeared to hold the cockpit and the machine’s engine.

  “She’s a submersible,” M.K. told me. “Specially designed for exploring”—she lowered her voice—“the floor of the ocean.” Looking through the glass window, I could see four seats inside the pod, as well as a wall of controls and dials and gauges.

  M.K. watched my face. I sometimes forgot she got nervous just like everyone else. “What do you think?” she said, blinking quickly. “There’s an airlock, so we can dive right out of her. And I included a pressure-adjusting seal to make it safer . . .”

  “I’m pretty much speechless,” I said. And I was.

  Quincy put an arm around M.K.’s shoulders. “She designed it herself. It holds four people, and the sealed SteamEngine keeps you under for up to six hours. She’s come up with an incredibly innovative technology that addresses the problem of the steam combustion engine taking up all the oxygen in the submersible. I’m amazed at how quickly she’s pulled it together. There’s a lot of fine-tuning still to do, but she’s the finest engineer I’ve ever come across.”

  “That’s what Dad always said.”

  “He was right. I haven’t told anybody just how really, truly good she is. They’d start making plans for her in about two seconds, have her making bombs or something. I told her not to talk too much about this, but word gets around. Maggie came to look at it yesterday. Mountmorris will know about it soon enough. Word on the street is that they’re building some kind of submersible themselves. The next frontier, and all that. Tell him about the arms, M.K.”

  M.K. gestured to the submersible’s various arms. “Okay, well, they each have different tools: two different drills, pincers that can collect objects from the ocean floor, a hose, a light, a speargun, a jackhammer, and another supersecret one.” She gave me a wicked grin. “I’ll let that one be a surprise. It’s all controlled from the cockpit. Here, come in and take a look.”

  She hauled the submersible over to the side of the pool with a rope and pressed a button on the head. The hatch door flipped up so we could step inside, then closed again, sealing us off from the water. The interior was small but cozy, with four comfortable seats in a semicircle around the perimeter. With a smile I recognized the pattern on the seats’ cushions: M.K. had upholstered them with the red flowery sheets that Raleigh had bought her just before we’d left for school. She didn’t like anything with flowers on it.

  “Don’t tell Raleigh,” she said with a wink.

  “What do all those levers and buttons and things do?” I pointed to the dashboard, and she launched into a monologue about adjusting
pressure and conserving energy and buoyancy, then pressed one of the buttons. An engine started, and the submersible sank below the surface of the water. Using the levers, M.K. and I explored the floor of the pool. She showed me how the pincers and the other attachments worked.

  “I went and looked up all those other expeditions you were talking about. The thing is, they didn’t have the right equipment,” she said. “A few of them had small submarines, and others had diving helmets that allowed them to go down for an hour or two. But no one had anything like Amy.”

  I sat back in my seat, running a hand over the smooth wood of the dashboard. “It’s great, M.K.”

  She searched my eyes, looking older than her eleven years. “Are you still mad at Zander?”

  “I don’t know. Not really. I’m just . . . worried. We have to get them to send us there. It’s going to take an incredible amount of luck for it to all work out.”

  “Well, remember what Dad always said about luck.”

  I did remember. Dad had always hated it when people wished him good luck on his expeditions. He would tell us, “You make your own luck. You don’t wait for it to come to you. You create luck by making connections. By putting things together. It only looks like luck on the other side.”

  “We’ll get there,” M.K. said as we gazed across the floor of the pool. Midday sunlight streamed through the water, which rippled on the turquoise tiles on the pool’s edge. “One way or another, we will.”

  Sixteen

  Pretty soon it was the day before the Announcement Banquet. After lunch, I decided I needed to get up into the mountains to get my mind off the expedition proposals.

  I didn’t see any agents, so I left campus and started up the west slope trail that switchbacked up the far side of the mountain. It was the fastest but most challenging trail, especially with a little bit of snow on the ground, and I had to stop a few times to catch my breath.