‘How you feeling?’ Derham asked.
They nodded. ‘All right,’ Lou said, a little breathless.
Derham pointed to the hull above the anchor. ‘We’ll need to pick our way up… but be careful.’
‘We’ve been out for nearly eight minutes,’ Lou commented.
‘That’s all right,’ Derham replied. ‘We’re still finding our feet. OK, I’ll lead, then you, Kate. But watch your step. If you slip and fall, it won’t be the same as falling through air, but you can still injure yourself or, worse, you might damage the suit. Follow my foot and handholds.’
They watched Derham get a grip on a ledge on the outside of the hull.
There was no shortage of grips and holds to get fingers and toes into because the hull was covered with gaping, rusty punctures, smashed-in portholes, and uncovered recesses. The real difficulty was coping with the fragility of the structure.
The two researchers followed the captain, keeping to the same holds and support points. Derham reached the boat deck first, then Kate clambered up. She straightened and Lou’s cry reverberated in their helmets. ‘Aghh!’
Kate looked down and saw him clinging to the hull with one hand. His second foothold gave and he yelled again.
‘Hang on!’ Derham ordered. He took two steps back, found some new footholds, and pulled up parallel to Lou. Grasping his arm, he helped him to find a new footing. Then Lou swung an arm round to get a grip.
‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks, man.’
‘No problem. Take hold of that ledge there.’ Derham pointed to a rim of metal about two feet above Lou’s head. ‘That’s it. Good. Now there’s a footing about eighteen inches above where you’re standing. See it?’
He peered down. ‘Yeah.’
‘Get onto that, then that window ledge — see?’
He followed the instructions and got his waist level with the top of the hull, pulled himself up and forward and hauled his body onto the boat deck. Derham clambered back up after him.
‘No time to waste,’ Derham said, pointing towards the stern. ‘According to the robot probes, there should be a blown-out hatch over there, about thirty yards towards the stern.’
The deck was covered with sand and a slimy substance making it difficult to maintain purchase on the rusted metal. There were wires and cables strewn randomly around the deck, along with metal rings, raised hatch doors, severed posts and bits of metal debris that had landed on the deck. All of these things offered good handholds as they made their way towards the stern.
They found two blown hatches next to each other about three feet apart. Derham crouched down at the first one and shone the beam from his helmet light into the darkness of the interior. It illuminated slimy walls of steel. Thirty feet on lay the floor of a corridor. But there was no way down into the opening. At least one of the floors beneath the deck had collapsed inwards, leaving behind it a jagged shaft three decks deep.
Derham pulled himself up and paced over to the second opening. He could see a ladder connected to the wall just inside. His helmet light lit up the nearest rungs and showed that the ladder stretched downwards on the side of a shaft extending to a point two levels beneath the boat deck.
‘Good!’ he said, straightening and checking his watch. ‘Looks like this shaft goes down to the second level beneath the boat deck, and it has a ladder.’
‘C16 is on the second deck down, yes?’ Kate asked.
‘It is, and about two hundred and fifty feet that way.’ Derham pointed towards the stern.
He keyed in a link to JV1. ‘Commander?’
‘Sir,’ came Jane Milford’s response.
‘We are —’ and he looked at his watch again‘— sixteen minutes into the mission. We’ve reached a hatch that leads down into the interior of the ship. We’re all fine. Suit integrity one hundred per cent.’ He stopped and glanced at the other two. They nodded their acknowledgement. ‘We’re now about to proceed into the Titanic. I think comms may be a little intermittent once we’re inside because of the steel and the radiation level, which —’ he glanced at his screen ‘— is now thirty-two times the level on the surface.’
‘Copy that, captain,’ Milford replied. ‘Good luck. Out.’
Their helmet lamps flicked on and illuminated a world of decrepitude and sadness, everything ruined, everything slowly dissolving away to nothing.
The ladder was secured to the inside of the ship’s hull by at least a dozen bolts, but many of these had corroded and three of them had crumbled to powder. To make it worse, the metal rungs were also severely corroded and covered with slime. The ladder creaked horribly as they descended with Jerry taking the lead again and Lou at the back.
They all felt relieved when they reached the second level below the boat deck. The corridor they found themselves in was one of the service passageways. Turning left, the beams of their helmet lights lit up a pair of steel doors a dozen feet away. One of them had fallen off its upper hinge and was poised at an angle to the floor. The captain had the sonar in his hand and was scanning the floor. It produced an image of the topography of the ground directly ahead, its screen displaying the configuration of the floor in different colours. Red patches indicated holes, orange areas were fragile because the floor was no more than a fraction of an inch thick, while green areas marked the safest regions.
He stopped just short of the doors and pulled on the right-hand one. It opened slowly, the sloped bottom edge scraping on the metal floor of the corridor. Then suddenly, a few inches from his body, it dropped off the remaining hinge. He jumped and hit Kate with a glancing blow that knocked her off-balance. The door just missed the outer edge of Derham’s suit and dropped through the water, bouncing and coming to rest.
‘You OK?’ the captain asked, spinning round quickly.
Kate had grabbed a rail to break her fall, but it had come away from the wall. She pulled herself up as Lou leaned down to help her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
They stepped through the opening into a wide passageway. Directly opposite, a fire-hose reel was hooked to the wall. A metal sign above it hung by one corner. It said: ‘Emergency Use Only’.
This was one of the corridors linking First Class cabins. Seeing it now, it was almost impossible to imagine how it would have once appeared when some of the wealthiest and most celebrated people of the early twentieth century had walked this way.
The metal shell of the corridor was still there, but it had been horribly disfigured. There were a dozen doors, six to a side. A single chandelier remained suspended from the ceiling; another had crashed to the floor, a tangle of brass, a carpet of crystals and glass scattered on the rusted steel. A sumptuous red carpet had once run the length of the corridor. Now almost every strand and fibre had been consumed by microbes.
They headed towards the stern. Their helmet beams lit up a wasteland of tangled metal, buckled hull sections and caved-in door frames. Twisted and rusted furniture lay in the corridor — the frame of a deckchair, half a round steel table. In the middle of the corridor they found a pile of plates and cups and beside this a row of twenty or so bowls. They were almost completely untouched and gleaming white. Each item carried the White Star Line emblem — a red flag with a white star in the centre and the company name written on a folded banner beneath the flag.
Kate, Lou and Derham stood transfixed, silent, each trying to take in the immensity of the ruin. Lou crouched down and picked up one of the bowls, turning it in his hands. ‘As perfect as the day it was manufactured,’ he said, placing it back carefully.