His brain felt sluggish, limbs slow and unresponsive, his shivering now uncontrollable. He could ignore the numbness in his extremities, but his core temperature had dropped at least a couple degrees. No doubt early stage hypothermia. But nothing he couldn’t withstand for the duration of his emergency reserves. Jonah checked the tank — down by half. He should have turned around by now. He made a half-formed mental note not to flood the suit with scalding water once the umbilical was reattached. The risk of burning himself was unlikely due to updated manufacturing and safety specifications, but warming up too quickly could send a jet of freezing blood into his heart, shocking it into stopping.
There it was — the last clunky hard drive. Jonah stood and swiveled towards the door, retracing his steps down the stairs until his light fell over the floating end of the severed dive umbilical. He paused as he reconnected it, closing his eyes as warm water washed over him once more.
“—nah Blackwell!” came the intercom transmission through the helmet’s tinny speaker. “Jonah — answer me goddamn it!”
“I’m still here,” confirmed Jonah, barely hearing his own impossibly high-pitched voice over the hissing air valve.
There was a pause on the other end. “What the fuck was that?” she finally demanded. “You were completely off-line for almost ten minutes!”
“Umbilical must have gotten a kink,” said Jonah as he continued to descend the tower stairs, the hard drives in his mesh bag awkwardly knocking against the metal hand railings with each step.
“Bullshit. You think I’m a complete idiot?”
Jonah was just about to make up another excuse before Marissa cut in again.
“Don’t even bother making something up to get me off your back,” she said. “You may not give a shit about your own life, but there are other people down here that do. Tell me this: did you even stop to think about anybody else before you disconnected? The fact that I spend the last ten fucking minutes thinking you were dead, trying to imagine what I’d have to say to your crew?”
“Doesn’t matter — I got what I came for. Coming back now.” Jonah let silence fall between them. If she wanted more information, she could get it from his point-of-view camera feed.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Jonah stopped for a moment to coil his umbilical before continuing to retrace his steps down the corridor. He stopped dead at a double-wide hatchway, recognizing it as one of the ship’s galleys. The thick metal doors hung slightly ajar, just wide enough for Jonah to catch a fleeting glimpse of several emaciated bodies within. He clapped a gloved hand over his camera lens, stopping the video transmission.
“What happened?” demanded Marissa from the other end of the intercom. “I’m still getting camera telemetry, but the view is obstructed.”
“Is Sun-Hi with you?”
“She’s watching the monitors with the rest of us — but I have you on my headset, it’s just you and me talking.”
“Give her something to do in another compartment. Tell me when she’s gone.”
The transmission went silent, muted from the other end. A few moments passed before Marissa’s voice crackled back over the helmet speaker. “She’s gone. What’s going on?”
Jonah silently pushed the oversize hatch doors open, his helmet light illuminating the drowned bodies of nearly a hundred North Korean refugees within the cafeteria. Some still wore their thin cotton rags and sandals, the ghostly fabric of their ill-fitting clothes dancing in the eddy created by his movement. Others still in heavy Japanese work coveralls. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to envision their last, terrified moments, the fruitless sacrifices they’d made as they fled across the frigid North Korean icepack.
Marissa paused for the longest time before speaking. “What should I do about Sun-Hi?” she asked.
“I’ll tell her when I’m back,” was all Jonah could mumble. But despite saying it out loud, he didn’t know if he could.
Hassan watched Jonah’s return to the Scorpion over Marissa’s shoulder. There wasn’t enough room by the lockout chamber console; he was forced to hang onto the conning tower ladder like a lineman as they together watched the external camera feed on a too-small screen. Jonah clambered up onto the submarine’s submerged deck, waddling in his ungainly neoprene suit and heavy helmet, dragging two unfurled mesh grab bags behind him, umbilical coiled over one shoulder.
“I think I see the hard drives,” said Marissa. “What’s he got in the second bag?”
Hassan squinted at the feed. Jonah was closer now, half-walking, half-hopping his way down towards the open lockout chamber. He made it seem so simple, so effortless, almost more comfortable in the cold depths than his own skin. As he approached the camera, Hassan started to make out details of the several dozen compressed plastic packages in the other mesh bag.
“They look like… prepackaged meals,” said the doctor. “Perhaps military rations?”
“MRE’s,” confirmed Marissa with a smile. “Normally, I’d rather eat wet cement, but right now they’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Does that mean you’ll give Jonah a pass on disconnecting his umbilical?”
“Hell no. He’s still getting an ass-whuppin’ for that.”
Jonah situated himself inside the chamber, pulling the last of the long tether in after him. He secured the exterior lockout hatch and gave Marissa a thumbs-up through the tiny glass portal. She returned it and began the chamber drainage cycle, water rushing back into sucking vents beneath Jonah’s Wellington boots.
“I’m just replacing water with air; he’s still pressurized to depth,” explained Marissa. “He’ll be stuck in that chamber for a while, even if we surface, it will have to stay sealed. We’ll push it a little, but he’s still looking at about four days’ decompression.”
Hassan blanched a little, trying to imagine the claustrophobia he’d experience if trapped in the closet-sized space for so many endless hours.
Jonah popped the helmet off its ringed collar, shaking out wet hair and cracking his knuckles. His face and neck were covered with long red marks from where the seams of the dive suit had pressed and chafed. He held up the mesh bag of hard drives first, straining against their newfound weight out of water.
“Ready,” Marissa confirmed through the intercom. “Pass them through.”
Jonah nodded, opening a microwave oven-sized pass-through hatch designed to exchange food and tools between the differing pressure environments. He stacked the clunky hard drives in the small box and closed the door from his side, securing it tightly. Marissa depressurized the box to a single atmosphere, and opened the door to retrieve them.
“We got the drives!” Marissa shouted down the conning tower ladder. Dalmar appeared below, taking the hard drives as they were passed from Marissa and Hassan to the pirate like a bucket brigade. Satisfied that they were stacked on a chart table below, Marissa turned her attention back to Jonah’s intercom. “You need anything off the bat?”
“Nothing urgently,” said Jonah as he unzipped the last of the neoprene suit. There was always a strange pause after he spoke as the voice descrambler raced to catch up, the resulting disconnect between his lips and voice resembling a badly dubbed movie. Jonah stepped out of the suit and carefully secured the remaining valves. “A towel and a bedroll would be great once the chamber dries out a little.”
“I can help with that,” said Marissa, activating an interior fan.
Jonah dropped to his knees as he went through the prepackaged military rations. “Cheese tortellini!” he exclaimed. “Fuckin’ A. This stuff is legendary.” Setting it aside, he rifled through the rest, stacking them up on the floor in a haphazard pyramid three-dozen high. “I’ll pass the rest through the hatch. They’re calorie-dense, so rations are one per person per day. Oh, and watch out for the buffalo chicken. Either save it for last, or give it to somebody on your shit list.”