“Yeah,” said Jonah, a faraway sadness in his eyes. “Maybe we’re both sorry about that.”
“Come back this time,” she said as she placed the helmet over his head, ending any further exchange. She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the thick glass. “Don’t hoover the air — and don’t fuck around when you’re in that carrier. She’s already a widow maker.”
The temperature of the lockout chamber dipped sharply as freezing helium displaced the sea-level mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Jonah kept one eye on the gauges, watching carefully as the interior atmospheric pressure slowly increased to the sound of dry hissing air. Beginning at an ambient sea level pressure of fourteen pounds per square inch, the blowdown wouldn’t be complete until it reached over 200—the takeoff weight of a 747 pressing in on him from every direction. He slowly breathed in and out, swallowing to equalize the pressure in his ears. Pain built up deep inside his sinuses before releasing with a wet pop. The process would take only minutes. After all, pressurization was easy — it was depressurization that would kill you.
Jonah cleared his throat, hearing the high-pitched Daffy Duck sound of his own voice in his ears. It didn’t bother him, though. Helium made even the deepest-voiced divers sound like a founding munchkin of the Lollipop Guild. He sealed the suit and began the hot water flow, bracing himself against the sudden influx of weight as it filled. The sound of air rushing through the umbilical and into his helmet soothed him with its familiarity. Most of the previous generation of divers were “deaf on the left” from too many hours with the old-style air feeds, before manufacturers started protecting hearing with new designs.
Jonah turned to the tiny window and flipped a thumbs-up. With atmospheric pressure now equalized to 550 feet in depth, Marissa began to flood the lockout chamber. Hidden vents spilled forth brackish, frothy water into the closet-sized compartment, the cold liquid flooding into his rubber boots. The chamber was soon filled to the ceiling, gently releasing the weight of the tank, tool belt, helmet, and suit from Jonah’s waist and shoulders. He adjusted the hot water flow, the prickling warmth slowly spreading across his skin.
The wheel to the exterior hatch turned easily, the door swinging open to the permanent night of the abyss. No subsea light could reach these depths. Jonah stepped out of the lockout chamber and onto the Scorpion’s exterior hull. Vitaly had precisely landed the submarine on the submerged helicopter carrier, planting her long, slender length across the now-empty flight deck. The submarine’s running lights illuminated a small patch of the underlying surface and the very base of the control tower, impossible blackness surrounding them, stretching in every direction. Suspended particulates hung in the waters like snow, swirling and dancing in the glare of his helmet’s built-in light.
Jonah took a breath and leapt from the side of the Scorpion, slowly falling as the thick umbilical uncoiled behind him. His Wellington boots hit the deck, silently absorbing the impact of his near-weightless form.
“Can you see what I’m seeing?” asked Jonah, almost unable to recognize the squeak of his own helium-altered voice.
It took a moment for the communications descrambler to deepen and translate the transmission. Marissa answered. “We see what you see. Your onboard camera is working. All gas levels are good. I’m seeing green across the board.”
Jonah didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They’d be able to watch from the Scorpion’s command compartment as he approached the carrier’s flight control tower. He tried to remind himself how easy he had it, how much better things were than the old days. Less than a hundred years previous, divers went into the cold black encased in brass, rubber, and canvas, their burning lights barely able to penetrate the dark and only able to communicate with the surface by a crude systems of strings and bells. Half of them worked while narced or bent out of their minds, soaking wool their only protection against the cold. Others were so badly crippled that they begged for the deep, their fleeting moments underwater the only possible relief to the painful air bubbles permanently lodged in their joints and spine.
And yet their underwater labors built empires — men who lived like lions, drank like fish, and too often, died like drowned rats. If Jonah’s umbilical was cut he could tap his emergency tank and make a quick escape back to the Scorpion. But the old guard didn’t have such protection. A severed surface line meant instant death by ‘the squeeze’, their entire bodies crushed into unrecognizable human gristle within instants, leaving others the grim duty of scraping pulverized remains out of their helmets and air hoses.
The interior of the carrier’s flight control tower was a mess. The flooded main corridor was thick with floating paper, leaking oil, and debris. Air bubbles slowly trickled up from deep within the wreck, spilling across the ceiling like mirrored quicksilver. There were fewer bodies than he’d expected, most had made it to the boats or gone overboard. Those who remained were congregated in destroyed compartments, their sunken, pale corpses riddled with bullets, their joints frozen in rigor mortis, every ounce of buoyant air squeezed from their ruined lungs. The first of the scavengers had already found them, crabs and silver-fish inexorably attracted to the scent of waterborne death. Translucent crustaceans crawled across the bodies, hiding from Jonah’s light as their claws sought soft tissues.
Jonah shuddered. He’d recovered hundreds of bodies in the warm waters of Thailand after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Most in worse shape than these, and children among them. But it never got any easier. No, the bad memories just became more crowded, one piling onto the other until they threatened to overwhelm the part of his mind where he kept things he couldn’t un-see.
The now-familiar interior stairs of the bridge tower were a simple climb. He carefully unrolled the last long lengths of umbilical cord as he ascended straight up the railings, leaping upwards from flight to flight. The umbilical tugged at his suit just a few steps short of the command deck. He’d reached the end of the line. Jonah considered the tether for a moment before disconnecting it, cutting off his warm water, camera feed, and submarine-supplied air with a single twist.
There was no sense in telling Marissa first — she’d just waste precious time trying to talk him out of the reckless maneuver. The tank on his back would give him fifteen minutes; maybe less if he pushed himself too hard. The worst part of the disconnection was losing the warm water supply; heat had already begun to drain from his suit as though he’d eased himself into a frozen lake.
Jonah ascended the last steps to the bridge as he began to shiver. The influx of floodwaters had thrown the uniformed bodies of the dead carrier captain and his murdered bridge staff against one wall where they now lay in a twisted pile. He aimed a flashlight at the ceiling, the harsh illumination playing across mirror-like air pockets and oil until it fell upon a thick bundle of Ethernet cord. Tracing the bundle across the ceiling and into a bulkhead, Jonah located a service hatch, pulling it open to reveal a long bank of computer servers and hard drives. If he was lucky, it’d have everything he was looking for — navigational charts, radar imagery, maybe even uncorrupted security camera footage showing the carrier’s self-destruction. Jonah unclipped a folded mesh grab bag from his webbing and shook it open. He began to pull the large removable hard drives from the server bank and stack them in the bag, one after another.