There was emergency scuba gear on board D-Plus, but Kat was more than 2,800 feet down. That meant over one thousand pounds of pressure per square inch pressed on the sub. Kat had a wetsuit inside the submersible, but her hatch had all that pressure keeping it closed—and besides, she’d freeze to death even as every atom of air in her body was compressed to the point of complete organ failure. She wasn’t getting out, and even if she could, she would die within 30 seconds.
No one could dive down in scuba gear to rescue her, either, and for the same reasons. Another sub could perhaps couple with D-Plus, but they didn’t have another sub and they were too far out to request one before Kat ran out of oxygen or that cable snapped.
However, there was little risk of crushing: the submersible was rated for the entire 20,000 feet down. And there was a chance the whole works could be attached to a new cable and “carried” back to the surface by another submersible device.
Sea Legs carried an old but trustworthy Johnson Sea Link knockoff that could, in an emergency, possibly go that deep. The JSL was essentially human-shaped, with a clear-mask helmet for the human occupant’s head, and then controlled external arms and hooks that could perhaps slip a sturdier cable (one without any communication lines or fiber optics) onto D-Plus, and haul her up.
The problem—and of course there was a problem—was that the JSL had a crush depth of 3,000 feet. It used to be the vehicle for “deep-sea” exploration, but as exploration technology had improved dramatically since the mid-70s, when the university’s robotic-looking spare submersible JSL was built, the definition of “deep-sea” had also changed, or at least what it meant to science and technology.
Two researchers had touched the bottom of Challenger Deep in 1960, but that was funded by the deep, deep pockets of several sovereign governments and wasn’t intended to do any science; it was a Cold War demonstration by the United States and France, just like the race to land on the moon. The Muir expedition could buy only what they could afford with their academic funding—barely enough for the present mission, let alone getting down to the very bottom of the entire ocean. Besides, there were no hydrothermal vents believed to be that deep, so it wouldn’t have fallen under the mission parameters anyway.
The Muirs’ D-Plus could go to 20,000 feet (theoretically, anyway; that was what they were currently trying to test before committing to using the sub for exploration), and they were extremely lucky to have been able to afford that. Although not lucky enough, apparently, to have anticipated the need for a backup cable system.
“Guys?” Katherine called from the radio. “What’s the holdup? Traffic? Is there too much—?”
Sean swept up the mic. “Kat, we have a situation here.”
“Oh. I do not like situations.”
“We read you at about 2,800 feet, sound about right?”
“You guys are letting out the cable, you tell me,” she said with a laugh. “Yeah, looks like 2,840. The descent felt very smooth until we… well, you stopped. I have hours of air left, and I won’t try to go outside, I promise. Can we start up again? What’s the rumpus, like you always say?”
Sean couldn’t help but look at the spool with its almost bare-naked two-foot-long stretch of cable. “We’re having some trouble with the winch—or the cable—actually, it’s both. The winch can’t move it forward or back without, um, complications.”
“Forward or back? Those are pretty much the only options, right?” A note of concern had entered her voice, the playfulness sounding strained now. “Seriously, talk to me, honey. What’s happening?”
“The cable,” he said. “It’s stripped almost bare in one section.”
“I see. Boy am I really glad that’s impossible. But, just for fun, let me ask: one ‘problematic’ section is all you… we… I need to be completely screwed, isn’t it?” She was without levity in her voice now. “Sean, a thick-ass cable like that doesn’t get stripped by… I don’t even know how you could ‘strip’ that accidentally. You’d have to know a lot about how we do things and have a lot of time around the cable.”
Without conscious intention, Sean looked over at Vanessa, Toro, and Slipjack. They were all looking at him the same way, blankly but with uncertainty in their eyes.
Or maybe with certainty in them.
“So, Sean, babe, what’s the plan here? The cable’s magically stripped, fine. What are we going to do about it? Can the bare area be patched?”
Sean shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him, and said flatly, “No.”
“Well, shit.”
“I mean, it could, but that would take equipment, supplies, and room we don’t have. Not to mention time—that’d be a two-hour process before we even moved it onto the spool. If you weren’t attached to the other end of it, we could use the blow torch to just cut the cable off before the break and then reattach it. No worries. If we had all that, and we don’t.”
“So helpful, thanks.”
He loudly mumbled a string of angry-sounding almost-words; then, more clearly not much less loudly, shouted into the comm link with his wife, “These goddamn cables never just get stripped like this! They’re indestructible!”
Kat didn’t say anything.
He calmed himself. He took a big breath in and let it out. Then he could say with honesty, “Honey? We’ve got options. Don’t worry.”
When she spoke, it was clear from her voice that she had gone into shock. It was almost a whisper, as if she were talking to herself: “Someone’s trying to murder me.”
“What? No, that’s not…” He wanted to say it wasn’t possible, but she would give him the same retort as always when he said that: It doesn’t have to be possible anymore. It’s actual. “Listen, let’s just focus on getting this FUBAR situation fixed up, okay?”
Kat had head-mounted headphones with a microphone, so her scarcely audible mumbling of “… murder… someone’s trying to murder me… someone’s trying to murder me…” continued on the radio on deck where everyone could hear it, even though she clearly was no longer conversing with her husband.
He called to Toro: “How long do you need to get the JSL ready to launch?”
The big Hispanic mariner looked up at where the knockoff was secured. “If I bust my ass, it could be in the water in forty-five minutes. And you bet your ass I’m gonna bust my ass, jefe.”
“But what are we supposed to do when we get down there?” Vanessa asked, not as a challenge but as a consequence of her overflowing anxiety. “Okay, yeah, the JSL isn’t a tethered submersible, so we don’t need to use the cable on that. But the whole point would be to pull D-Plus and Kat up to the surface, and that would require the bad cable to be cut or separated, and a new one to be slipped into the place of the bad one.
“But even if we had another three thousand feet of cable—which we don’t, since all our cable for the whole mother-loving mission is on this one useless spool because this cable is practically indestructible unless you’re trying to damage it—how would we attach it? You can’t do detail work like that with those JSL claws, Sean. And God knows it’s too damn deep for an out-of-vessel excursion. Three thousand feet in just a wetsuit isn’t even close to possible, and that means we can’t attach another cable and we can’t just spring Kat out of there and into our sub—her lungs and heart would collapse instantly.”