Many scanners, very deep

摘要

ON JANUARY 2nd, at 8pm local time, a strange vessel cast off and sailed out of the Port of Durban, in South Africa, heading east. Her hull was orange. Her superstructure bristled with antennae-some long and pointy, some sleek, white and domed. Her stern sported a crane and also a strange gantry, known to her crew as the "stinger". Her bow looked so huge and ungainly as to be on the point of tipping her, nose first, into the depths. And below deck, invisible to those on shore, she carried eight autonomous submarines called hugins, each six metres long, weighing 1,800kg, and containing a titanium sphere to protect the sensitive electronics therein from the pressure of the ocean's depths.