A moment of silence passed by, punctuated by loud clicks and bangs as the pressure changed slightly and the hull expanded a little as it rose up from the seabed.
Suddenly, the electric motor hummed and the lights flickered back on as Ethan heard the oxygen pumps rattle back into life. The internal lights flickered on again and he let out a loud sigh of relief as the dials and gauges appeared as a soft green glow around him.
‘Jesus,’ Amy uttered as her laptop began to reboot in front of her. ‘I could’ve done without that.’
Ethan checked the gauges and then looked at the communications screen on Amy’s laptop as it started up again.
‘Doctor Chandler, can you hear me?’
A fuzz of static was all that was returned as they waited for a response. Ethan looked up uselessly out of the dome and figured that they had been cut off for good, for now, by the thermal channel they had passed through during their descent.
‘That warm water flowing through here will rise up continuously and disrupt our line of communication,’ he said. ‘We might not be able to get it back until we get closer to the base again.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Amy said. ‘The sub’s working and we’re alive. Good work, captain.’
Amy whipped him a brisk salute over her shoulder, her smile bright in the gloomy hull, and Ethan saw her laptop screen and the signal upon it.
‘We need to figure out a way of getting that thing up to the dock without finishing off our batteries,’ he said.
Amy thought for a moment. ‘Riggs said that this submarine was originally designed to be rigged with a detachable explosive charge in the bow, right?’
‘Yeah,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘But that charge isn’t in place, only the shell and…’ He smiled as he realized what she was getting at. ‘If the charge shell was magnetic, we could tether it and lower it down.’
‘If the Black Knight is magnetic too, then the nose shell might be strong enough to pull it up to the surface on a tether. That’s why we saw all those krill blooms — there might be iron in Black Knight, and iron is magnetic.’
Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s our only chance now, so let’s give it a try. If it doesn’t work we’ll mark the location and hope that the support teams arrive before Veer storms the base.’
Amy wasted no time as she clambered out of her seat and made her way forward to the nose of the submarine. Although designed to be fitted with torpedoes, the Seehund’s original plans had mimicked a similar and successful British design which carried an explosive charge in its bow.
Amy could make out the charge casing before her, sitting beyond an open pressure door the size of a dinner plate. She peered inside and saw the casing, which was attached to the submarine via a series of mechanical pins, themselves connected to a lever inside the hull.
‘Seal the hull, pull the lever and she’s away,’ Amy said. ‘I can tether it to the pin mechanism in the front here.’
‘You’ll need cable,’ Ethan said as he reached down to his waist beneath his jacket and began pulling off a length of rappel line. ‘How far are we from the signal?’
‘Maybe twenty yards,’ Amy replied.
The confines of the submarine made it tough to move, but he reeled off what he hoped was something more than twenty yards and handed the coil down to Amy. She shuffled her way back to the bow and looped the rappel line twice through a hoop in the Seehund’s hull. She then coiled the line through the charge shell and back through the locking mechanism and finally clipped it in place.
Ethan peered down into the submarine and watched as she backed out of the nose and then heaved the pressure door shut.
‘Make damned sure that’s tight,’ Ethan said.
Amy did not dignify his concern with a reply as she sealed the door shut and began heaving the pressure wheel over and over until it would go no further.
‘Sealed,’ she said. ‘Now, get us overhead the signal.’
Ethan complied as he advanced the power lever and the submarine inched forward. He adjusted the hydroplanes and the submarine began to ascend gently through the darkness as a fresh bloom of bioluminescent creatures shimmered past the Seehund in the darkness, and Ethan finally caught a glimpse of something ahead on the seafloor before it was obscured by the bow of the submarine.
At first, in the brief moment that he could see it, Ethan’s brain could not quite understand what he was looking at. A trembling haze of heat seemed to surround it, the heat causing the water around it to billow and shiver in much the same way that heat bent the passage of light through the air and distorted it.
A black shape, angular, unnatural, resting on the ocean floor and surrounded by a vibrant cloud of pulsing bioluminescence. Dense clouds of krill and other marine creatures swirled around the object, which was half as large as the Seehund itself and enshrouded in a casing as black as oil and completely unreflective, as though the submarine’s lights did not exist despite their illumination of the object’s surroundings.
Ethan lost sight of the object as he climbed the submarine upward and over it, going by gut instinct as he tried to maintain a reasonable distance from the device and prevent the submarine from losing power again. He knew that he had very little compressed air remaining and with Black Knight shackled beneath them he’d need every last bit of buoyancy he could get.
‘Almost there,’ Amy whispered.
Ethan gradually levelled the Seehund out as he quickly peered down into the hull and saw Amy’s screen denoting the signal’s origin, almost right below them.
‘A little further,’ she gasped.
Ethan eased the controls forward, one hand hovering over the power lever to bring the submarine to a dead stop as soon as Amy gave the word.
‘Now!’
Ethan pulled back on the lever and the Seehund came to a stop before drifting away again from the signal.
‘It’s the current,’ Ethan said as Amy cursed. ‘We’re going to have to use power to stay in position.’
‘Hurry it up then,’ Amy shot back. ‘We need to grab this thing and get the hell out of here.’
Ethan turned the Seehund to the left, angling her into the current to minimize the drift as he advanced the power once more and crept overhead the signal.
‘There!’
Ethan pulled off a small amount of power to hold their position as he looked down into the hull.
‘Now, cut it loose!’
Amy hurried to the bow and hauled on the lever to detach the bow charge casing. A dull clunk shuddered through the hull as the locking mechanism thumped through a quarter-turn and the nose section was released.
The Seehund tilted slightly bow-down and Ethan eased the hydroplanes back to keep them on station as he waited. There was a long silence and then a distant clanging sound, that of metal striking metal.
‘You think that’s it?’ Amy asked.
‘I damned well hope so,’ Ethan replied.
He checked his compass and then began turning the Seehund gently through a hundred or so degrees until he was pointing her back the way they had come. Silently, he prayed that the submarine’s motor could produce enough power to draw the Black Knight away from the seabed and up toward the docks a few hundred yards behind them.
‘Here goes nothing.’
Ethan pushed the power lever fully forward as he pulled back on the hydroplanes to prevent the bow from being pulled down toward the tethered weight now attached to them. The Seehund’s electric motor hummed loudly and then she began to move slowly forward.
‘It’s working!’ Amy clapped in delight.
Ethan reached down and twisted the oxygen valve open, bleeding more compressed air into the saddle tanks. The Seehund rose up gradually, and then the speed began to increase as Black Knight broke free from the seabed. The submarine’s bow dipped precipitously and Ethan pulled fully back on the hydroplanes as he fought to keep the Seehund level.