Jayden’s eyes lit on the red light that suddenly appeared on the dash. “Battery low warning is on.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“Less than ten percent remaining.”
“Great.”
Jayden zigged and zagged the sub to thread his way through mounds of debris and twisted wreckage, while behind them, the lights of the attacking sub bobbed and weaved in pursuit.
Carter looked up from his diagram and pointed slightly off center from straight ahead. “Takes us that way as the crow flies and we should be out of the wreck in about three minutes at this speed.”
“Crowds don’t fly underwater.”
“As the fish swims, then. Point is, you might not be able to take us in a straight shot because of all the wreckage in the way, but that’s the direction we need to go in.”
“Copy that.” Jayden made the course correction and proceeded to dart the sub around any obstacles before resuming that course. Once he had to swoop down lower to avoid a series of dangling steel cables, but he kept at it until the irregular yawning maw of the Titanic’s opening became recognizable in the floodlights. They opted not to use the spotlights anymore to conserve what little remaining battery power they had.
“Okay, we can start angling up now,” Carter said. “I don’t recall seeing hanging obstacles on the way in when we used the spotlights.”
Jayden reached for the rudder control and the sub slanted gently upward. “Keep a sharp eye out all the same. I don’t have a lot of reaction time at this speed using only the floodlights.”
“Will do.” It was hard for Carter not to keep turning around to check on their pursuer’s progress, but he kept his eyes glued to what lay ahead so that they could minimize their chances of hitting any stray wreckage that might be dangling from the shipwreck above or protruding from the bottom.
When they had completely cleared the hulking wreck, Jayden increased the angle of the sub’s ascent. No sooner had he finished doing that than the battery warning light began flashing red, instead of steady red, the lights in the cabin dimmed and stayed that way, and an alarm began to bray.
“Time’s up Carter. I’d say we have sixty seconds until it’s lights off in this bad boy.”
Carter reached for the radio. “I’ll update Topside.” He spoke rapidly into the transmitter, “Topside, this is Deep Voyager, we have lost—”
And then the lights in the cabin went dark.
“Crap,” Jayden said. After a few seconds a weak field of light appeared in the cabin. Jayden turned in surprise but then saw Carter holding a penlight.
“Never leave home without it.”
“Shine it over here so I can activate the switches to add air to the buoyancy tubes.” Carter did as asked and Jayden flipped a series of switches. They heard a hiss of escaping compressed air being directed into the buoyancy bladders. Then they slowly began to rise.
“Almost three hours up to the surface. Now it’s just a fun game of… Will Our Oxygen Last Long Enough, who wants to play?”
“I think they do.” Carter was twisted around in his seat, staring down toward the Titanic, which was not visible in the darkness, but the twin stabs of white light aimed up at them were unmistakable.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jayden said.
“Can they catch us?”
“I’m not sure. We have a decent head start and if they’re only using buoyancy, which is the norm for ascents, they shouldn’t be able to catch us. But if they use buoyancy and thrusters… I suppose they could,” he finished.
“I’ve got an idea.”
“What?”
Carter flicked off his penlight, casting their sub cabin into total darkness. “They can’t catch us if they can’t see us.”
Jayden nodded in the blackness. “Every five minutes or so I should take a depth reading though. That gauge is a sensor hardwired to the outside, works by pressure, no power needed. Just to make sure we are in fact still rising.”
They sat alone in dark silence pondering the hell in which they would find themselves if for some reason the buoyancy system failed and they sank back to the ocean bottom. In a few minutes Carter passed Jayden the penlight. The other sub’s lights were still visible far below, now a little more off to one side rather than directly below them. Jayden cupped his hand around the flashlight to avoid giving away their position, and checked the depth gauge. Breathing a sigh of relief, he told Carter, “We’re still rising. Long way to go, but we’re rising.”
“They are too,” Carter said, turning around in the dark to watch the lights far below them and to his left. “I wish we could contact Topside and let them know we’re on our way. They’re going to be freaking out we lost contact.”
Jayden settled back in his pilot seat. “Nothing we can do about that. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip to the surface.”
Jayden turned on the mini-flashlight but nothing happened. “Batteries died on the light.”
“I don’t have any spares,” Carter said groggily. The two were tired and cold from sitting for hours in the same position. “Hey, I think it’s getting lighter, though.” He looked up toward the surface, which was not yet visible.
Jayden’s focus was in the opposite direction. “I don’t see any lights down there.”
“We either outpaced them, or they drifted off course because they couldn’t see us.”
“Maybe we drifted off course,” Jayden posited. “I sure hope we don’t come up ten miles from the ship or something.” Carter exhaled sharply in response. It wasn’t a comforting thought. Adrift in the North Atlantic, bobbing like a cork with no means to control their dead-in-the-water craft. It wouldn’t take much to flood and sink them. It wasn’t lost on Carter that in that scenario, they would experience much of what the Titanic survivors did on that fateful night, freezing to death in the very same patch of North Atlantic.
“Let’s just take it one step at a time,” Carter said. “In theory, we should be rising straight up, which, since we left from the Titanic itself, should have us within visual of our ship when we surface.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. It is getting lighter, I can see it now.” Looking up, the pitch black they had become accustomed to was now more akin to a dark gray.
“Still no sign of them,” Carter said, glancing into the depths below.
“Maybe they ran out of battery power after bee-lining down during their descent to catch up to us. We can only hope, right?”
When Carter didn’t answer right away, Jayden prompted him. It was still dark, after all, and so they couldn’t see each other faces to read expressions. “Right?”
“I’ve been thinking about who these people are.”
“Whoever they are, they basically tried to kill us, and so if they ran out of battery power and got permanently stuck down there, I wouldn’t feel bad about it. That’s all I’m saying.”
At that moment they saw a massive shape above them — moving — and after a few seconds realized it was moving down towards them from above.
“It’s way too big to be the sub,” Carter said.
And then the humongous form materialized not far above them, arcing down to within a few feet of their bubble dome before gliding upwards again toward the light.
“A whale!” Jayden yelled with genuine glee.
“A Right Whale if I had to guess,” Carter added. “They can dive pretty deep, maybe a thousand feet, but still, it means we’re definitely getting close to the surface.”
The cetacean soared out of view and the Deep Voyager continued rocketing towards the surface. Jayden gazed out the window, straining to see slow-moving particles or animals like jellyfish that he could use to gauge their rate of ascent in the absence of functioning gauges. But it was still too dark to discern that kind of detail.