One

end of its cable like a wrecking ball in search of something to hit. The abandon-platform siren was coming to him, shredded by the wind to an ineffective stutter.

Even as he tried to grab hold of something to stop him being clattered around the unforgiving innards of the bell, Jane was thinking of reasons. Electrical storms. Terrorist attacks. Dirty bombs. Chemical agents.

Stopper cracked his head hard against the CO2 scrubber and fell back against the top hatch, his foot folding under him as if it were without bone. Jane heard something crack dully, like the sound of splitting sapling branches. Stopper made no protest; blood pulsed steadily from a wound behind his left ear. Jane ducked down and propped him against the rack of heliox cylinders, strapped a belt around his chest and trapped it behind the heater. The diving bell jerked back on itself and Jane crashed into the control panel, tearing what felt like a foot-long strip of skin from his back.

But then there was a jolt that seemed unnatural, a punch that had not been dealt by the wind's fist. Water cleared a viewing space in one of the portholes; Jane swung over to it and peered out. He could see the other bell swinging around on its hoist wire and little else through a blizzard of spume. They were level with the decks but waves were crashing over the sides. He hadn't seen that in ten years of working around rigs. He'd much rather not be seeing that while being inside a pressurised diving bell. Again, that feeling of something controlling the bell came back; he heard the cable grind as it was shifted against the direction in which the wind wanted to take it. He felt a tightening, a drawing-in; he realised it must be the motion-compensation system, which meant that someone was supervising their return. He saw the other bell impact against a landing stage, almost crumpling it as if it were fashioned from aluminium foil.

Their own diving bell was stilled for a moment; it was under control. He heard the usual thumps and dings that meant the stage was being disconnected, and another thunk as the bell was mated to the entrance lock of the Ceto, the Diving Support Vessel. He tried to see through the porthole who was rescuing them – at least two men must have survived to be able to coax the bell into its docking position – but he could not make out anything beyond the ceaseless spray and the strange persistent fibrous rain.

He ran a palm over his forehead, pushing his sweaty hair back from his face, and looked through the hatch at the trunking space and the tunnel to safety that it offered. 'How are we for pressure in there?' he asked, but nobody was replying. The readings on the diving-bell gauge were normal but everything else was frazzled; it might simply have frozen. He had to hope that the pressure inside the DSV was equal to that in the bell. Jane thought of his son. He whispered, 'Stanley.'

He spun the hatch wheel and felt his body tense as the door hissed open. Seawater rained on him from the seal as he ducked under the frame and into the Ceto. Blood was smeared across the outside of one of its tiny windows. There was nothing to be seen through that. He ducked back into the bell, grasped Stopper under the arms and dragged him through to their living quarters. He tried hoisting him onto one of the bunks, but all his strength had left him; his muscles felt flabby, saturated by fear. The wound on the back of Stopper's head had stopped bleeding. His breathing and pulse were weak but regular. That was something. Jane wondered how long they would have to wait for help to arrive. Nothing was landing on the helipad while the sea was being whipped up like this. Decompression time for the team would be something in the region of thirty-six hours.

He made sure that Stopper was comfortable, then made his way to the end of the chamber where a window allowed him a view of the second chamber. He could not yet see Rae or Carver, but he could hear the clamour of their diving bell as the winchmen struggled to align it with the entrance lock. Shadows flashed across the porthole and then he could see the other bell as it was hauled into view alongside theirs. As the hatches drew level the tartan headband that Rae always wore became visible.

Rae was crying. Hismouth was open; light glittered in the bars of saliva between his lips. Maybe Carver had died. But that wasn't so; Rae's buddy was standing behind him. He was trying to calm Rae down.

What is it? Jane mouthed, but he wasn't sure Rae could see him. The cramped living quarters had never seemed so stifling to Jane.

A letter from Stanley lay on his bunk. Before they had descended that morning – the sky a beautiful unbroken span of coral pink; the sea flat cobalt, not a scuff of white upon it – he had read it half a dozen times. He wrote well for a five-year old. It was in a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, and the spelling relied on phonetics in the main, but it was neat, with little slope. Stream of consciousness, almost. A blurt of detail, as if he couldn't get it out of himself quick enough.

Me and mum went for a peetsa after the fer and I wasunt sic I was big enuf for the dojims this time remember wen you tuck me and I was to smorl.

It had been three months since he'd last seen his boy. He'd moved out of the flat in Maida Vale that he shared with Cherry and Stanley. She didn't like Jane being away for six weeks at a time. She felt she'd been dealt a short straw. I have to look after the boy 24/7 while you fanny around swimming with fishes? She wanted to know why he couldn't get a proper job. Something that started at nine a.m. and finished at five p.m. and meant he could put the boy to bed every other night and then eat dinner with his wife. She didn't seem to understand, or refused to. Four months of hard graft on the mid-Norwegian shelf meant they could take leisurely breakfasts for the rest of the year and he could have Stanley out of her hair as much as she liked. But no. She wanted the cliche. She wanted him in a suit and tie. At the bus stop with the other husbands, reading the newspaper, comparing packed lunches, complaining about the boss. She didn't understand the struggle it had been for him to reach the standard he was at. The years of training. The sacrifices. All of that had been before they'd met. She didn't appreciate that the diving was just a way for him to get from A to B. He was a skilled welder; one of the best. He had worked his nuts off to get to this point in his career. Companies requested him by name.

'What happens when all the oil dries up?' she asked him once. 'Where will the work take you then? Halfway around the world?'

'I'll be long finished before then, Cherry,' he said.

'We will be, you mean.'

And she was right about that. She'd missed out on one cliche but nailed another: the failed marriage to the man who was never around.

Bye Dad. I love you. With orl my hart. See you soon. Bring me sum Ben 10 stickers. And we can have a fight, just playing fight. And the chum-chiggle-iggle-umching-cha.

No. No. No.

'No.' The word flipped out of him, like a belch, involuntary. 'No,' he said again, louder. He yelled it so hard that spittle flew across the toughened glass of the window. Now he could see what it was that Rae was crying about. The hatch of the bell had been warped by one of the collisions with the platform. The flanges were rippled like the mantle of an oyster; they would not meet flush with their counterparts on the docking hatch. The bell was repositioned and the locking mechanism secured, but fingers of light poked in around the seal.

Jane shouted out again, shook his head, but either Rae couldn't see him or chose not to. He heard the hiss as bell pressure was increased to ensure a seal that could not be made. He saw the wheel on the hatch begin to turn. Jane spun away, flinching at the sound of their bodies as they unravelled into the hyperbaric chamber. When he was able to look back through the porthole he could see how the hatch in Rae's diving bell had been unable to open beyond three inches. Explosive decompression. Rae and Carver had been turned inside out. Tiny scraps of his friends slid through the red gruel on the window.

Jane staggered back to where he had left Stopper. He positioned a blanket over him, then sat on the bunk. He took up Stanley's letter, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. He realised he was wiping his hands, though it would have been impossible for any of Rae or Carver's blood to have splashed him.

There was tapping at the hatch. Someone was scooping away the muck from the glass. He staggered over to look through the porthole and saw Gordon McLeish, one of the derrickmen. His face was as red as the coat he was wearing; blood was the filling in a sandwich formed by his lips. Where the bones made angles in his flesh, Jane could not see anything but tight shining skin. He might have been inflated. What looked like spoiling cottage cheese was foaming from his ears and nostrils. There were two bodies behind him, face down. One of them had fallen on his hands, as if he had dropped in the act of fastening his coat buttons. Or if that was what Jane thought it was, piled up bloodily next to him, then maybe he was trying to keep as much as he could from slithering out of whatever rents had appeared in his abdomen.

What was it? Jane mouthed at McLeish, but the other man was too intent on other tasks to be able to answer. He punched buttons on a back-up console that had been plugged into the mains; the central computer must have failed. He was beginning the decompression process. Jane stopped rapping on the