His control room staff had the unenviable job of monitoring the gas flows, making sure that the heliox mixes were perfect in order to keep the divers alive. One of his assistants had been watching the gauges, his hand on the levers in case emergency air was ever needed. A second subordinate stared at the camera feeds to the hyperbaric chamber and the crew of tenders by the moon pool below deck.
As the diving supervisor, it was his responsibility to keep everyone on their toes and get the job done. Only this time, something finally happened that made him feel entirely helpless, despite his three decades of experience in the industry.
When Gordon started screaming in the intercom circuit, all Mullins could do was stare in mute awe as the diver’s helmet camera caught a glimpse of a silvery, titanic behemoth swimming just beneath the waves.
Mullins’s mouth hung open. He could barely believe what he had just seen. “What in the world—”
The next thing he knew, the entire vessel seemed to rock back and forth, as if the Aurora had struck something on her bottom, but since they were in the open sea, the logical part of his mind kept telling him that it just wasn’t possible.
Turning to his left, Mullins could only stare at Sandor, who had quickly leapt out of his chair and ran out of the room, the torn headset wire dangling behind him as the corporate representative opened the door and blew past two petrified tenders standing in the outside corridor.
A torrent of screams, curses, and shouts had distracted him, before Mullins turned his attention back to the live video feeds along the walls of the control room. He could see O’Keefe being tossed back and forth as the interior of the diving bell began to flood. Another camera feed in the lower deck showed a group of tenders running around in panic and gesticulating wildly, with some pointing down towards the opening at the base of the ship’s hull, and what lay beneath it.
Something jutted out from the moon pool’s surface. At first Mullins thought they were a pair of man-sized radar domes, as if the top of another vessel had suddenly popped up above the blackened depths. But as he watched, the two spheres seemed to rotate independently, and he realized they were actually a set of compound eyes, like those of a giant insect. Less than a second later, these sensory organs suddenly disappeared beneath the waterline.
Mullins stood up and pointed at his equally surprised staff. “Get the diving bell back up here! Do it now! Do it—”
His orders were interrupted when the entire vessel suddenly swayed to port, and the decks began tilting. A series of loud clangs reverberated along the entire superstructure of the Aurora, followed quickly by the unmistakable sounds of screeching metal.
Mullins managed to grab hold of the side of his desk as the entire control room began to lean towards the port side. By now they were all screaming as a general alarm had started. After he tried to push himself towards the door, Mullins’s foot slipped, and he rolled along the floor, hurting his back.
Groaning, he looked up and saw one of the tenders hanging on to the side of the door. “Tell them… tell them to bring the bell up.”
The youthful tender had lost his hard hat, but he nodded energetically. “Let me help you, sir.”
“Just go already!” Mullins ordered.
As the young man moved away, Mullins struggled to get back up. The Aurora had already begun to list, just as everyone heard more hammering noises coming from the bottom of her hull.
“What the hell is going on?” one of his assistants bellowed.
Reaching out towards the microphone, Mullins grabbed the device and keyed it to the hyperbaric chamber where half his diving team remained. “Abandon ship. Get to the lifeboats. Please, get to the lifeboats.”
SANDOR’S GLASSES HAD been lost as he struggled to get to the emergency stairs of the rapidly sinking Aurora, and now everything in front of him was a cloudy blur. He had warned Mullins about deactivating the electrical field that was protecting both Typhon and the ship, but that fool of a supervisor had insisted they turn it off when one of his idiotic divers had grabbed hold of one of the rods. When Mr. Morgenstern asks me about what happened, I’m going to pin the blame on Mullins, that stupid retard, he thought.
He had to crawl his way up the stairs as the entire ship continued to rock back and forth. A series of ear-splitting reverberations would erupt every few minutes, as if an army of people with humungous drills were busy tearing out the underside of the Aurora’s hull.
It took him several precious minutes to make it to the outside. Sandor always kept at least one hand on the steel railings to steady himself, and he would defensively crouch down whenever he felt the vibrations of tearing metal.
Turning to his right, he could see one of the orange hulled lifeboats being prepped by one of the crew. Unlike the open topped rowboats during the olden days of sea travel, these new models were fully enclosed and equipped with a motor, just like an ordinary ship. Pushing past several terrified female crewmembers, Sandor quickly got to the front of the line.
The crewman standing in front of him was manning the davit controls, a crane-like mechanism designed to lower the lifeboat into the water. He turned towards Sandor and gave him a disgusted look. “Hey, ladies first.”
Sandor drew himself up to his full height, but kept both hands on the side railing. “No, this one’s mine. I have to do something with it.”
The crewman raised one eyebrow in confusion. “What do you mean this lifeboat’s yours? She’s for everybody. As I’ve told you, the women go in first.”
Sandor snarled as he unbuttoned his suit jacket, reached into it, and pulled out a compact Glock 26 pistol before racking the gun’s slide, placing a round into its chamber. “I said this one is mine! Now let me inside and lower her down, or I’ll make sure you’re blacklisted from ever working in the industry ever again!”
The crewmembers who had lined up behind him shrieked in terror the moment they saw the gun, and several of them began running in the opposite direction, to where the other lifeboat was located. The others merely stepped back, cowering in fear.
The crewman by the davit held his hands up. “Hey, j-just take it easy, mister.”
Sandor climbed into the lifeboat’s back entryway and sat down in front of the helm controls, all the while continuing to keep his eye on the other man before closing the aft hatch behind him. “Lower this thing into the water… now!”
After seeing the gun and hearing the threat to his career, the crewman capitulated, pulling out the safety pins and activating the launching system. The davits quickly extended, and their attached cables began to lower the lifeboat onto the churning surface of the dark waters around the ship.
Sandor activated the hydrostatic hook release a few seconds after the bottom of the lifeboat hit the water. Looking out into the darkness beyond, he quickly started up the motor while turning on the radio and switching it to the right frequency, calling out towards the one man who he could talk to.
He waited until someone answered as the lifeboat slowly made her way through the night sea. “Hey, it’s me. We’ve got a big problem.”
26
THE HELIOX GAS MIX made Gordon’s muffled screams sound like mouse squeaks as he hung on with both hands to his umbilical. With the nightmares he had once thought left behind now coming back with a vengeance, Gordon began to hyperventilate, increasing the pressure load on his breathing system as he continued to be pulled about along the black depths of the sea.