Gideon paused at the hull opening and used his controls to shine the spotlight around, probing the recesses ahead. It was a mess. He saw what he believed must be a portion of the former cradle, a huge, sled-like object, mangled and splintered, jammed up against a broken bulkhead. The forward part of the hull offered a relatively clear pathway for his DSV, but deeper in he saw a tangle of cables and struts that would have to be dealt with.
“Control, this is John. Entering the hull.”
The briefest of pauses over the low-baud UQC. Then, full of static: “John, we read you. Report back as soon as you can.”
He eased the stick forward; the DSV hummed as it entered the wrecked space. Skirting a massive, torn edge of slab steel, he moved deeper into the hold. Without any effort on his part, the sub smoothly avoided some hanging cables and a strut. The hiss of UQC now ceased entirely and a message appeared on the screen, indicating he had lost communications. Bubbles rose in front of the main viewport. A layer of silt lay over everything, softening the contours. He would have to take great care not to stir it up.
He was moving at the pace of a walk. Orange blobs of rust grew from the iron struts and particles drifted in the water, dancing sluggishly through his light. Below, the side of the hull was littered with splintered beams and struts, torn to pieces by the violence of the explosion. The splintered wood, while waterlogged and sunken, looked fresh. Clearly, this had been a massive explosion, strong enough to bulge out the iron hull plates, pop the rivets.
There was another body here: wearing a mechanic’s uniform, head torn away, crushed torso held in place by two broken beams.
Averting his eyes, Gideon checked the schematic; the red dot that represented his sub was now a third of the way to the access point inside the hull space.
A tangle of I-beams loomed ahead. The autopilot slowed and he moved the joystick, looking for a way around. There was a space between two girders that looked big enough, and he aimed for it, the autopilot easing through with finesse. But it was beginning to feel as if he were in a shattered forest after a battle, the girders like warped, broken trees. He probed this way and that through the maze-like jungle, each time finding a hole just wide enough to get through.
As he penetrated deeper into the wreck, it grew increasingly difficult to shake off the feeling of claustrophobia. The radio silence didn’t help; Gideon began to feel very much alone.
…Or was he? Because, strange as it seemed, he was also aware of a sense of being watched. Followed. He dismissed this as best he could: it was the sort of anxiety that occurred when walking in a dark forest at night, he told himself, and it dated back to the early days when humans were, in fact, hunted. And hadn’t he compared this environment to a forest—albeit a wrecked one?
And now, quite suddenly, he reached a point through which there seemed no way to pass. He maneuvered forward, slowly, until he was blocked. He turned one way, then another, and then another. There seemed no passage forward. Hovering in place like this, his engines stirred up the silt; he could no longer tell from which direction he’d come.
Jesus, what was I thinking—agreeing to pilot my way through hundreds of yards of wreckage, miles below the surface? No way do I have the experience to do this. And now I’ve gotten myself trapped—and can’t call for help. He started to panic, then quickly forced himself to calm down; the autopilot would, of course, know the way out. But to go farther, he’d have to do some cutting.
Doing his best to breathe slowly and deeply, he centered his attention on the beam blocking his way and raised the robotic arm, activating the underwater acetylene torch. It had its own set of controls and, to his relief, was surprisingly easy to use; the arm seeming to know exactly what he wanted it to do. Another example of a quasi-AI automatic control.
The torch popped to life, sending up a stream of bubbles and a white pinpoint flare. He maneuvered it toward the beam and began cutting, careful to make the cut slanted so the beam would fall away from him. But the AI software of the arm already knew that. In a few minutes, with a muffled snap, the beam toppled away and he was able to proceed.
He continued maneuvering, this time to the left, and paused to cut through another beam. Now his spotlight shone on the bulkhead of the forecastle deck. Because the ship was lying on its side, the deck was a vertical wall of steel, which made it much easier to deal with. His screen schematic showed him exactly where he was supposed to cut in order to reach the electronics hub, where the two black boxes—actually orange in color—were stored. A second flat-panel contained a diagram of the hub’s interior, indicating the exact location of the boxes. They should be easy to get at, as they were supposedly designed for ready access in a wrecked ship at depth.
He maneuvered the DSV to align it with the pre-programmed cutting lines, and then, with a mere touch of the controls, the arm flared once again into life. The protocol called for cutting the access opening in five stages: removing five smaller plates of steel, each cut designed so that the plates would drop away and not present a further obstacle.
Practically by rote, the mech arm cut the plates with unerring precision, and one by one they fell away. In ten minutes, the hole was big enough for the DSV to pass through. But still impeding the opening was a forest of pipes between the decking, and he had to cut through each pipe in turn. They, too, fell away cleanly.
Gideon positioned the sub and probed the space ahead with the spotlight before entering. It was an utter mess. The cabinets that once held computers and electronics had burst open, spewing their guts everywhere; the space was a tangle of wires, bundles, cables, and fiber optic.
As if that weren’t enough, beyond the tangle of wires was a body, arms and legs splayed, slowly drifting about, neutrally buoyant. Long blond hair floated in the silty cloud—it was the body of a woman. It was clothed in a uniform. Four bars: a captain. What was the name of the Rolvaag’s captain? Britton. Sally Britton.
So this was her. Gideon felt a strange mixture of regret and horror.
The corpse had its back to him and floated in the middle of the room, turning ever so slowly in what seemed a slow-motion ballet.
Behind the corpse, on the far wall, were two bright orange cubes, each about eighteen inches square, affixed to the wall with easily removable bolts, and with nothing nearby to impede access.
Except the floating body.
Gideon eased forward, extending the robotic arm. He lit the torch and cut his way through the cables. In a few minutes he had cleared a path and eased into it, approaching the corpse. With the arm extended he gently touched its torso, attempting to nudge it to a far corner; the push was uneven and caused the body to rotate more, turning to face him as it drifted away, arms outstretched as if yearning to be rescued.
Gideon stared in fascinated horror. The face was perfectly preserved, the blue eyes flashing in the intensity of the headlights, the mouth partly open, just a bit of pink tongue visible, the blond hair swirling into a coil of gold: a woman of about forty, attractive even in death.
Perhaps harder than he intended, he pushed the joystick forward and the DSV surged past the body. Reaching the orange boxes, he used the arm to pull the emergency bolts and put each box into the science basket in turn, securing them with tie-downs designed for the purpose.
Now to get the hell out.
Twisting the joystick, the sub made a one-eighty—and once again the body came into view, drifting toward him as if to block his way.
“Son of a bitch,” Gideon muttered, maneuvering around it and heading for the hole he’d cut in the bulkhead. A few keystrokes on the control board and the sub’s autopilot was retracing its route, with no input from him—and doing it perfectly.