Veteran explorer Max Hardwell goes missing while searching for a rare undersea mineral lode, on behalf of a global tech firm. When a team is sent to recover Hardwell's submersible, they encounter a shadowy defense agency, a sunken ocean kingdom, and...
The seafarers of the North Pacific routes have two popular tales, one much older than the other. But each holds the promise of fortune beyond one's wildest dreams.
Throughout Polynesia, faux-royals and would-be kahunas swear their heritage dates back to Kai Aupuni, the legendary ocean kingdom. It was a place of unfathomable riches and even stranger technologies, swallowed by the tides in aeons past. Wind-maddened navigators would claim to see traces of its ruins below the surface. The eerie bioluminescent glow of bizarre marine flora hint at the shapes of its once glorious palaces, still hiding their lost wonders.
Far more recent in vintage are the rumors of vast undersea mineral reserves near the bend in the Hawai'i-Emperor seamount chain. There was said to be a whole lode of durable ore called Vespucite, embedded in the rock near the base of a seamount. The dull grayish ore could be used to extract the elements tin and tantalum, at a fraction of the current processing cost.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
This was already a lucrative prospect in 1932 when navigator Per Lindstrom led an ill-fated expedition to find the Vespucite lode, bankrolled by American industrialist Charles Magnusson.
It was even more valuable by the mid-Sixties when rival Soviet and US-backed groups competed to locate the ore veins, to no avail.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Now the Vespucite lode was more prized than ever, with tin being used for solder in commercial electronics. Meanwhile, tantalum capacitors are essential to building smartphone chipboards and microprocessors. Any manufacturer that could reach the shelf would no longer need to source minerals from central African warlords and their dummy front businesses, in violation of global trade laws.
That's why Ficus Systems hired freelance explorer Max Hardwell for a covert solo mission to find the Vespucite.
