He craned his neck around to peer out the top portal of the helmet, expecting to see a piece of fallen debris. A nicker of light from a second helmet lamp told him it was the other JIM diver.
Garner clumsily turned around to face his attacker, straining to identify him through the suit’s portholes. The other diver lunged again, knocking Garner backward. He stumbled over the edge of the GBS and fell heavily on his back.
As Garner struggled to right himself, the other diver attacked, pushing him sideways toward the lip of the canyon. Garner clung to an extrusion of bedrock and used this to slowly pull himself upright before the next collision came.
This time as he turned to face his assailant, he could clearly see Charon’s face inside the other helmet.
The problem with the suit’s regulator was growing worse. While Garner had the air inside the pressurized suit to rebreathe, the carbon dioxide would build up quickly without proper scrubbing and recirculation. He thumbed the comm link inside the helmet, not knowing if the umbilical would still carry his message to the surface, much less to the Hawkbill or the Rushmore.
“Is anybody there?” he called, struggling to keep his balance. “It’s Charon. Charon is down here and I think he’s trying to cover his tracks.”
“Repeat that, Brock?” Krail’s voice came back a moment later.
“I said Charon sabotaged the rig and now he’s trying to kill me,” Garner said, grunting as he dodged another one of Charon’s blows. “I could really use a lift here, fellas. I could be out of air before I can get back to the surface.”
“Matt? What the hell are you doing?” Krail demanded.
“He can’t hear you,” Garner replied, his breath coming in gasps. “His suit doesn’t have an umbilical or a safety tether.”
Krail couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Then how did he expect to get back up?”
Charon came down heavily on Garner’s back. The bulky suit, awkward and stiff from its internal pressurization, was difficult to control and Garner felt himself going over forward, toward the edge of the canyon.
“I don’t think he plans on coming back up,” Garner grunted. The temperature inside his suit had begun to climb. “Unless it’s on my back.” If Charon had somehow managed to don his own suit, there was no way he could have attached the umbilical or its comm link. He was running the suit on its air tanks only, improperly pressurized with nothing connecting him to the surface. With Garner’s own regulator malfunctioning, either one of them could collapse from oxygen starvation, if fatigue or Thebes Deep didn’t claim them first. Charon continued to step around Garner, lunging at him with his mechanical claws. Like a pair of sparring crabs, the two divers circled each other less than twenty feet from the edge of the dropoff.
Charon swung again, his clawed hand banging noisily on the porthole of Garner’s helmet. Garner sidestepped the next blow and wheeled around.
Then another blow hit him from above: debris. Garner recognized it as the swing boom that had fallen across the helideck. The massive, elongated structure was falling to the seafloor on top of them. Garner was jerked sideways as the debris wrenched at his umbilical, then released it as it sank past. Realization came too late for Charon. The metal scaffolding slammed into him, then continued to careen over the edge of the canyon. He was trapped inside the framework as its inertia carried him backward into the black depths beyond.
Garner stepped forward and saw the light from Charon’s helmet as he tumbled into the deep. A hundred feet down, two hundred, the illumination from Charon’s suit vanished from sight. A moment later, a silvery cloud of bubbles clawed past his light on their way to the surface.
Garner staggered back, breathing heavily and still stunned by the spectacle he had just witnessed.
The rock beneath him began to shudder. A moment later, the fractured lip of the canyon suddenly gave way. He instinctively moved back but the collapse was happening too quickly. Only the suit’s safety tether prevented him from falling after the edge of the fault as it fell into Thebes Deep. A moment later he hung suspended by only two thin lines over a newly formed canyon. An aftershock had dropped the seafloor, block-faulting a five-mile trough along the edge of Thebes Deep. Garner realized he had just felt the perfect stimulus for generating a tsunami, once incorrectly known as a “tidal wave” a sudden, massive displacement of the ocean’s surface. In his madness, Charon had created a disturbance as great as any earthquake or volcano.
Garner’s vision began to fog as he started to black out.
“Fellas? Anybody up there?” he called again into the comm link.
There was no reply from anyone at the surface. Garner waited, still breathing hard, collecting his thoughts. The blackness crushed in from all around him, broken only by the rumbling of the rig, far above.
“Hello?” he called again, hoping for any reply.
Only silence. A deathlike chill crept over Garner on the bottom of the sea.
Then Krail’s voice came back. The connection crackled and broke several times.
“We’ll get you up right now, Brock. Sorry, we’ve been a little busy.”
Garner could feel the slack being taken out of the umbilical. A moment later he began his painfully slow rise to the surface.
Krail sounded hesitant, uncertain how to continue.
“Brock, we’ve got some bad news. It looks like that last series of aftershocks generated a large surface disturbance.”
Garner winced as his fears were confirmed.
“Have you warned the Phoenix?”
“Negative. We’ve still got too much interference from the storm.”
“What do you mean, interference?” Garner snapped. “With all the equipment you’ve got?”
“We’re trying our damnedest, buddy. I’ll talk to you on the surface. Over and out.”
Garner switched off the comm link, realizing the futility of his anger.
If a rogue wave had been generated, it could travel between the detonation site and the Phoenix in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
If that was the case, then a possible source of the “interference” was that the ships themselves had been capsized or damaged.
Garner reached the surface and the JIM suit was removed. He quickly transferred to a launch that brought him back to the Rushmore. There he contacted the Hawkbill again and relayed to Krail the details of his encounter with Charon.
The two commanders sketched out a plan for stabilizing what remained of B-82.
“What’s the status of the leak?” Garner asked. “Did we plug it?”
“It’ll be an hour or two before we can even see it in all this stirred-up sediment,” Krail said. “But that’s our job. You’re the one with all the work to do now. I’ll find someone to get your ass out to the slick ASAP.”
“Any luck getting through to the Phoenix yet?”
“Still working on it,” Krail said.
Garner ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“Let me know the second you hear anything,” he said, then signed off.
Just then Tibbits stepped into the corridor from the helideck. His eyes met Garner’s and he immediately regretted it.
“Come on,” Garner said to the pilot before he could protest. “You’re taking me back up.”
“It’s called murking,” Tibbits yelled back to Garner over the pounding of the rotors. He was referring to the helicopter’s painfully slow progress to the east. “Fifty knots at fifty to a hundred feet until we get some kind of visibility.”