She paused for a moment and opened the link to the control room on the surface.
‘Armstrong?’
No response.
‘Armstrong? This is Commander Milford. We have established the nano-carbon bridge and we are about to cross the crevasse.’
Nothing.
‘Armstrong? Captain Derham? Come in.’ She glanced at the two scientists.
Then a sound, an electronic hiss.
‘That’s odd. The line is still open.’
She gave up and stepped onto the end of the ladder, found her centre of gravity and started to move forward. ‘We have to go one at a time. Kate… wait until I reach the far side and come after me. Lou… you go last.’
He checked his watch. They had been out for twenty-nine minutes fourteen seconds.
Looking up, he watched the commander scramble along the extended ladder. The structure was absolutely rigid. Milford moved fast. In a minute she had traversed the span and was standing up on the other side. They could just make out the shape of her LMC suit. When her voice came over the comms she sounded slightly out of breath.
‘Made it. Kate, you go… keep staring ahead.’
She stepped onto the ladder, crouched and gripped the first rung with both hands. Half a dozen steps on, she started to move out over the blackness of the ravine. Staring straight ahead, she scrambled forward with surprising speed, one hand over the other, a bit like a kid in a playground, her boots finding purchase and propelling her forward through the water.
‘Almost there,’ she declared, and with a last rush forward she was on the far side of the chasm straightening up.
‘OK, Lou,’ Milford said. ‘Go!’
But he could not move. He was staring across the bridge to where the two women stood and saw the shadows transform, a black shape, the outline of a shark bearing down on Kate and Milford.
‘Lou, come on.’
He could not speak; could not move a muscle.
‘Lou?’ Kate said much louder. ‘What’s wrong? LOU!’
Kate’s voice snapped him out of the horrible delirium; the mirage dissolved.
Lou was on the ladder in a couple of seconds. It was difficult to manoeuvre in the cumbersome LMC suit, but after a few moments he established a rhythm, using the repetition to direct his thinking, to shake off the panic, the phantoms.
He saw a flash of light at the extreme edge of his vision. It lasted only a moment. He kept going, growing more confident. But then… the view through his helmet seemed to judder. It was the oddest sensation. He had felt something like it once before, in Los Angeles, five years ago when he had experienced a 6.3 earthquake that had shaken his apartment block. He knew instantly what it was — the ocean floor was moving.
He froze and heard a strange grinding sound over the comms. Gripping the rungs with all his strength, he glimpsed Kate and Jane Milford stumble and lose their footing. The bridge shook. He felt the vibration shoot along his spine, along his arms. He slipped forward, one hand sliding from the rung in front of him as he tumbled. His helmet hit the nano-carbon structure and his suit yielded, just as it was meant to do, reshaping itself around the ladder.
Then came another violent jolt. Lou saw Milford pull herself to her feet, lose her balance again and trip forward, breaking her fall with her hands.
The bridge rocked again. Lou rolled to one side. A third, more violent tremor crashed around them. He tried to bring his arm round, grabbed at a rung, missed and slipped. Swinging slowly through the water, he tried to grasp the edge of the bridge, failed and fell under the nano-carbon struts with just his left foot hooked over a rung.
He heard Kate scream in his headset. All he could see was the featureless gash of the crevasse; his whole world turned black. His helmet light had shut down. His arms flapped, sending small bobbing rings of illumination all around.
And in that moment Lou suddenly felt relaxed. He was staring into the black void. It was featureless, immense, stretching on and on into oblivion. But he no longer feared it. Part of him wanted to embrace it. Part of him wanted to simply twist his ankle and he would fall, slowly, slowly through the ink-black water. He would fall miles and he would never again see light.
He felt his ankle move. It was involuntary. He was shifting in the current. But then he realized a hand was holding his calf and pulling him upward. He twisted, swung an arm, and touched the side of the bridge.
‘Keep swinging, Lou.’ It was Jane Milford. ‘Swing like a pendulum, get some momentum going, then get hold of the bridge.’
Her voice seemed to be coming from far off, but the words made perfect sense. Of course that was what he had to do. He did as he was told and saw the void move, the blackness sweep around… a flash of the far wall of the crevasse, a torch beam, the shimmer of the nano-carbon in the sorry light. He touched the ladder with a finger, fell back, swung forward, clasped the rung, wrapping his arm around it. Then he brought his other arm about, grabbed the strange lambent material and swung his leg over so that he was once more in a stable position on the bridge.
‘Hurry!’ Milford bellowed in his ear, ‘it won’t hold both of us for long.’ And she was pummelling the rungs, bouncing ahead of him back along the remaining forty feet of bridge. Lou sprang into action and followed her as fast as he could.
Thirty feet… twenty. He caught sight of Milford as she reached the far side and rolled over onto the ocean floor. Staring down, he saw a gash appear in the left strut of the bridge. The nano-carbon crackled along its entire length. He pushed onward, adrenalin swamping him, propelling him forward with phenomenal speed.
His foot slipped through a broken rung. His helmet hit the ladder hard, jarring his head, but he was almost there. He stretched out his right arm and Kate caught him. He moved his other arm forward. His foot fell through another rung. Jane had pulled herself up and between them the two women hauled him to the edge and he scrambled across the ocean floor, kicking up whirlpools of water and sand as he went.
37
‘Oh, fuck… oh, God…’
Lou had slivered across the floor at the edge of the crevasse and now lay on his back.
‘Take deep breaths. Try to calm—’
‘God!’
‘Lou…’
‘We’ve lost the bridge, Kate. What the fuck are we going to—’
Milford was trying the control room again. There was nothing but static. ‘Lou… Please calm down. Panicking won’t help,’ she snapped.
‘Easy for you to say,’ Lou shot back. ‘It makes me feel better, actually.’ Then he stopped and breathed deeply as he knew he should do. ‘OK… OK…’
He looked around. Kate was leaning over him, offering a hand up. He could see Jane Milford tapping at the comms control on her arm.
‘What the hell caused that?’ he said.
Preoccupied, Milford said nothing.
‘Any luck?’ Kate asked.
The commander shook her head and tried again.
‘Armstrong, Armstrong, come in, please.’
Nothing but a soulless hiss.
‘Captain Derham. Come in, captain. This is a Code Red. I repeat… Code Red. Please acknowledge.’
No response.
Milford cursed again.
Lou glanced at the small computer screen on the sleeve of his suit. The numbers ‘4… 1… 5… 6’ shone on the monitor.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he hissed. ‘We’ve been out almost forty-two minutes.’
‘I’m aware of that, Lou.’
‘So what now?’
‘Only one option: we have to get into the hold and hope we can breathe in there without the suits. The radiation level inside the metal hold should be much lower than it is out here, but we won’t be able to last long, even if the air is breathable. It’ll at least give us a chance to recharge the suits. Maybe the guys up top will get to us in JV2. Come on.’