The Savage Deeps, page 13
Ventilation fans ceased.
Oh, shit.
This was bad.
And still the mines fell. Explosions shook the seacar, pressure waves cascaded over us. Equipment and tools rattled in their drawers and toolboxes. It was impossible to stop. Sweat soaked my forehead. I wiped an arm across it.
Drops of it trickled down my back.
If our lives ended right then and there, faster would indeed be better.
—••—
The attack lasted for another ten minutes. The mines had fallen up and down the length of the canyon—at least within the five kilometers the VID could display—so I realized that the French captain didn’t know precisely where we were. They were just dropping the weapons everywhere, hoping to take us out.
But finally it ended, and the enemy vessel churned serenely over the lip of the canyon to the west.
They were moving away, perhaps to chase down one of the other targets.
Still, I thought while chewing my lip, they’d been moving slowly.
I blew my breath out and looked at the others. The canyon afforded us some privacy because it cut off any noise we produced, but at the same time it protected the French warsub. We could no longer hear where they’d gone.
Johnny was shaking his head but there was a smile on his face. Kat looked terrified and Meg had a determined set to her jaw. Lancombe and Ng were impassive, as normal, and Doctor Manesh Lazlow was wide-eyed.
There was an odor of burnt electrical insulation in the air.
“It’s okay,” I said to him. “They’ve left.”
He tried to speak but only a croak came out. Then he finally managed, “Thank God. I thought we were done for there.”
“I’ve been through it more than a few times. It never gets easy.”
But then I thought of Lancombe, who hadn’t seemed bothered in the least.
The sonar was now dark. We had a lot of repairs to start on before we could get moving again. Meg and Kat would most likely be able to fix the systems without much trouble. If there were any major problems that would keep us from continuing to The Ridge, they would be structural, caused by compression waves and falling boulders.
We’d have to inspect the hull, when we reached a shallower depth.
Luckily there was no water flooding into SC-1, but the ship had taken a pounding.
—••—
Some of the computer controls had shorted in the blasts. There was a haze of smoke in the air. Kat made swift work of them, however, locating the system outages and swapping out dead parts for new. Meg worked the engineering side, tracing circuits and checking breakers and wiring for any issues. Soon the consoles were lit again, the sonar was showing an empty canyon, and the VID system was up and running.
But when we switched ballast to positive, blowing water from the tanks, the vessel didn’t move a millimeter.
Rocking us back and forth with the thrusters didn’t work either. Both operated normally and the churning sand outside was reassuring, but still we couldn’t move.
And, of course, the SCAV drive was down, and would remain so for another two days.
There was no calling for help; the canyon would prevent all signals from reaching a junction on a comm line.
I turned and looked at Johnny; his face was as grim as mine.
In the incredible deeps of the Atlantic, at the bottom of a barren canyon, next to an unstable cliff that continued dropping boulders around us due to new cracks and stress fractures, we were going to have to go outside and clear the debris off SCAV-1.
—••—
I’d been out deeper, once before, and the punishment had nearly crippled me for life. But I’d anticipated it happening again, and this time had stored tanks of gases in the seacar so we could create our own mix. Because the pressure outside was so great, we’d have to make a breathing mix that had a very tiny percentage of oxygen. Too much oxygen under great pressures could actually be toxic. There would also be nitrogen in the mix—but once again, too much was a bad thing. The pressure would force more into our blood and tissues and cause nitrogen narcosis, or Rapture of the Deep. It caused euphoria and hallucinations. The rest of the mix would be an inert gas: helium. To make the pressure outside bearable, we would have to breathe a mix that was at an equal pressure, roughly 300 atmospheres.
Johnny swore when he heard my plan. He knew I’d done it before, but still the thought was terrifying. But being prepared and confident could get one through any manner of challenging problem, and Johnny and I had been partners in TCI for years. He trusted my advice, and I knew that physically he could handle it.
It didn’t prevent the fears from creeping in, however.
We were trembling as we climbed into the airlock.
Kat began to pressurize the chamber. Our ears started to hurt; we had to equalize constantly, squeezing our noses and pushing air into our ear drums to keep them the same pressure as the airlock—the Valsalva maneuver.
Kat monitored us through the closed circuit camera.
From this point onward, we’d have to depressurize when we returned from outside. It would take hours, perhaps the rest of the trip.
But it was a necessary discomfort. Survival was at stake.
Hell, the entire independence movement was on the brink. I realized with a hot pit in my gut that the people in that seacar were invaluable to it. We had to make it out of there. There were no other options.
The pressure continued to build.
—••—
The airlock hatch opened slowly. It was pitch black outside. Johnny and I had torches, which were high-wattage lamps, but even then they only illuminated a radius of a few meters. We stepped off the lip of the airlock and floated a meter to the bottom. It was hard rock at my feet; as we walked, we kicked up a few wisps of sandy clouds, but not a great deal. If we had been at a shallower depth, the visibility wouldn’t have been too bad. There didn’t seem to be much floating in the water with us. I’d been some places where there was so much life and churned up sediment that you couldn’t see anything at all, even with powerful torches and the sun high in the sky.
“Kat,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “Please turn on the exterior lights.” I didn’t worry about the vehicle being visible to anyone other than me and Johnny.
There was no one else around.
An instant later the seacar’s lamps flared to life, illuminating a circle around the vessel.
Johnny and I gasped.
Then we swore.
There were a cluster of boulders on the hull of the ship, in front of the vertical stabilizer. Smaller ones were sitting on the horizontal support structures containing the two thruster pods. No wonder we couldn’t move. There were hundreds of tons of extra weight on the sub. There’s no way we could have ever hit positive buoyancy, and despite being under water, inertia was still a substantial force with that much extra weight on the seacar.
“Johnny,” I said. “We have to get up there and start clearing the debris.” There was no choice, no time to mull it over. I figured we had maybe an hour at most out there, possibly only forty-five minutes, before we had to get back to the sub. Our tanks couldn’t hold much air at these incredible pressures, and going in and back out again was not something we wanted to tackle.
“Copy that,” he said in a short voice.
Back to the old days, I thought. Planning a mission with a partner. There was no banter, no joking around. Just get the job done, then move on.
We had to grab the horizontal stabilizer to haul ourselves up. Fingers scrabbled at the hull plates, and gravel rained down on our masks as we looked up. But that wasn’t the stuff I was concerned about. It was the large boulders we had to clear. I hoped we’d be able to move them. If not . . .
Finally I was standing on the seacar and I leaned forward in the direction I wanted to move. One foot after another, pushing stone chips and pebbles and rocks away, no doubt scraping the hull hundreds if not thousands of times. Kat will be pissed, I thought.
Still I pressed onward, Johnny at my side. His form was a shadow next to mine; the dim light barely showed him in his black wetsuit. But I could make out his face, and his eyes flicked to mine as we trudged along the top of the seacar toward the larger rocks.
Eventually we arrived—five meters had taken more effort than I’d imagined—and we began shoving rocks from the hull. We had brought two pry bars with us, and together we started to move some material.
The hull shifted under my feet, and I nearly lost my balance.
“Uh, Kat,” I said. “Make sure the buoyancy is set to negative, please.” I didn’t want the seacar to suddenly float away from us.
A laugh, barely discernible. It sounded as though she were a hundred meters away from me, despite the headphones being right in my ears. It was due to the air in the facemask—three hundred times the amount than would have been in there at the surface. Then came a muffled shriek. “Mac! Hunter! She’s right above us!”
I looked up but couldn’t see her. She was dark.
We had nearly cleared the material off the hull. We had to get back to the airlock, now.
I turned to Johnny—
And a figure appeared out of the darkness, hurtling toward me.
My brain only recognized a flash before the diver hit me. A light blinking on his mask, and the shadowy image—a silhouette—of a long cable stretching upward toward the rim of the canyon. A gun in a hand, and a glint of a knife’s hilt in a thigh holster, the deadly blade concealed within.
Shit! They were divers, tethered to the warsub, and they were trawling the canyon looking for their prey.
And they’d found us.
—••—
I cried out once to Johnny and then found myself sailing through the water, tumbling end over end, thrown away from the ghostly glow of the seacar and the hint of a cliff rising up into the darkness of the cold Atlantic waters.
“Mac!” I heard his reply. And then it cut off.
I focused on where I was going, which direction the seacar lay in, so I’d know how to get back. Landing on my tank, I bounced and skidded across the rocky bottom.
Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I saw a nightmarish scene: three figures streaked past the seacar, all linked with tethers, and all looking behind them as their sub continued through the narrow trench, hauling them along.
Their mouths were moving frantically, no doubt screaming orders at their crew, telling them they’d discovered us.
This French captain was driven. She wanted to kill me very badly, and she’d either inspired her troops to do something incredibly dangerous, or she’d ordered them against their better judgement.
Johnny had tumbled off the seacar in the collision; I could see him wobbling to his feet near SC-1.
I realized with a dull ache in my head we had not brought any weapons outside other than the pry bars, but I’d lost mine. We hadn’t expected visitors while clearing the debris.
“Kat!” I yelled. “Get out of here, right now! Blow the tanks, take off! Dim the lights!”
“But what about—”
“You can come back for us. Fire a torpedo! They know where we are!”
There was only a second’s hesitation and then SC-1 started to move. Bubbles spewed from the ballast valves, and the thrusters started to churn. She pushed it up to full power, and the vessel powered away. The wash hurled Johnny and I even farther backward, and a surge of smaller rocks and boulders fell from the hull. Each time a rock fell from the vessel, the ship lurched upward.
And then it was free of debris. The ship righted itself—the ballast trim tanks took care of that automatically—and it disappeared into the darkness of the black waters.
I turned to Johnny. He was looking at me, on his knees as he shook the rock and sand from his wetsuit and blinked repeatedly to regain focus. Either the fall had shaken him, or the pressure was finally getting to him.
We were alone, way too deep, with nearby soldiers intent on killing us.
The sound of a torpedo launch reached my ears.
Kat had fired on the French warsub.
—••—
“Mac, watch out!” Johnny yelled.
I spun slowly in the water and turned in the direction he was pointing. Three figures were swinging toward us again, tethers stretching up into the darkness. They’d appeared only a few meters from us. The darkness made it impossible to see much, but I realized it would be to our benefit; they held needle guns and were searching for a target.
Shots hissed out in the water, and the dim shapes of narrow, twenty-centimeter-long needles flashed between me and Johnny. I flinched back, swearing, and nearly lost my balance again. The last thing I saw as the figures disappeared into the canyon were hands grasping at latches and the tethers detaching as the three soldiers sailed free and arced into the depths.
Shit. They’d cut from the warsub as their ship tried to evade Kat’s torpedo. I could still hear it in the distance, the pitch changing as it altered course repeatedly, attempting to intercept Hunter.
“Johnny,” I said, breathless. “Do you have anything to use as a weapon?”
“No. I lost the pry bar.” His voice was dull, lifeless. But I knew him well. He wasn’t despondent; he was in a tactical mode of sorts. We’d been through situations like this before, infiltrating cities, fighting intelligence operatives, battling city security forces in other colonies of the undersea world. He was preparing to fight, and, like me, he was well-trained and deadly underwater.
“We have to kill these bastards now,” I whispered. Or be killed, I thought.
That was often our lives, underwater.
Chapter Thirteen
There were three hostiles hidden in the darkness in front of us.
They knew where we were, and they had needle guns.
Our vessel had just departed the area and was engaged in a torpedo battle with a French warsub.
Johnny and I were not armed.
We only had a few minutes of air remaining.
We were under incredible pressure.
Just another day at the office, I thought with a shake of my head.
If Kat didn’t score a hit against Hunter it wouldn’t matter what happened in the hand-to-hand fight to come. If we survived and SC-1 imploded, we’d still die from lack of air, or perhaps we’d succumb to the pressure and lie, catatonic and suffering, until the inevitable end.
Johnny was next to me. He was watching the darkness before us.
“No more voice contact,” I whispered.
He nodded and I cut the comm with a press on the wrist band. All indicator lights winked out at another touch, and Johnny followed suit.
I went left, he went right.
A squeeze on the control valve injected a squirt of air into my vest, and I started to rise. When I hit the correct depth, I neutralized my buoyancy with another touch. We were not wearing flippers; we’d been walking on the surface trying to clear the debris from the seacar. Swimming was laborious as a result, and I worked hard, kicking to make some distance. Johnny had disappeared into the black water.
I had to trust that he was doing the same as I.
A distant whine sounded as I pushed myself along. It was the torpedo, and it was still shifting course constantly, altering depth and speed and course as it tracked the French sub. Kat must have selected HOMING as the function.
Another burst of sound hit me and I snapped my head left and right to peer around me. I was growing disoriented in the near blackness. But I recognized the noise.
Another torpedo in the water.
This one was likely French, and if they scored a hit—even a close detonation—it was all over.
The dream of Oceania would end.
Until the next idiot builds up enough courage, I thought. Enough drive to force the people of the oceans into recognizing the inevitable—that Earth’s future belonged to them. That the people of the land superpowers had driven their countries into the dirt, literally.
That the oceans were the future.
I took a deep breath and stared below me, straining to see something on the seafloor ten meters away. Nothing.
After swimming twenty meters, I stopped and floated there.
Waiting.
The wail of the torpedo reached me again, and it continued to grow in volume. It was coming right for me. I made myself negatively buoyant and descended back to the floor. I crouched, and waited.
The shriek grew to unimaginable levels. The thing was right on top of me now, I thought. Fuck! What the hell was going on?
Another sound suddenly reached me. Another launch—only this one was screaming through the water.
I swallowed. It was a supercavitating torpedo. Had Kat launched it? A last resort to hit the warsub out there? Her only way out?
The volume was growing, and it was unnerving not being able to see anything.
The first torpedo abruptly pierced the veil of darkness and churned within five meters to my right. The screw cut the water and bubbles frothed from the low-pressure zone around the blades. There was a faint glow to the weapon as it streaked past. The wash of the four meter cylinder tossed me backward, head over heels. I spun crazily, arms outstretched to try to right myself, but it was hopeless. I collided with the cliff and floated motionless, trying to maintain regular breathing, but it was getting difficult.
Was I running out of air?
Probably.
I contemplated giving up. But there was no way I’d ever do that. It just wasn’t in me.
I would fight until the bitter end.
An arm wrapped around my neck and I burst to life.
No time to rest! I screamed at myself.
I elbowed the guy behind me, grabbed the arm and jerked downward. The move hurled him over my shoulder, but things were slower in the water than in air, and I held on and pivoted him to the seafloor.
