Medusa

The winch soon slowed to a stop.

The curtain of bubbles cleared around the dome that encased his head. Austin switched on lights that would have been useless during descent. Their pale yellow shafts accentuated blackness so devoid of color that any attempt to describe it in words would be doomed to fail.

All systems were working, and the joints were still watertight. Austin called for more slack on the cable. The winch slowly lowered him more until he was fifty feet off the bottom.

“You’re on your own from here on,” the captain said. “We’ll let out cable as you move.”

Scattered groupings and pinpoints of phosphorescence could be seen beyond the range of the searchlights, and odd-looking luminescent fish nosed up to the faceplate of Austin’s helmet.

He pressed down with his left foot and two vertical thrusters whirred, raising him up a yard or so. He next used his right foot to activate the horizontal thrusters, moving him forward several feet.

Austin tried moving his arms and legs and found that, even with the tremendous water pressure, the suit’s sixteen well-oiled joints allowed for an amazing range of movement.

He activated the suit’s camera zoom and focused on an anglerfish attracted by the light.

“Picture’s coming through,” the captain reported. “Good definition.”

“I’ll see if I can find something for the family album. Moving out.”

Skillfully handling the thruster controls, Austin piloted the Hardsuit horizontally, tilting forward slightly, cable trailing behind.

The seven-hundred-pound ADS lost its clumsiness and moved through the water as if on wings. Austin focused on a small sonar screen glowing wheat-colored yellow. Employing a range of fifty feet to either side of the suit, it cut a swath a hundred feet wide. It tracked his position, heading, speed, and depth as it read the bottom.

A dark object appeared on the screen, approximately twenty-five feet to his right and down.

Austin maneuvered the Hardsuit into a sharp right turn and descended until the searchlights reflected off the gleaming plastic-and-metal surface of the ROV. It was lying on its back like a dead beetle.

Gannon also saw it. “Thanks for finding our ROV,” his voice came over the communicator.

“My pleasure!” replied Austin. “B3 should be within spitting distance.”

He extended the range of his search a hundred feet, then spun around slowly. The sonar picked up another object close by. Accelerating too quickly, he overshot the bathysphere and, turning sharply, had to come around again.

Austin hovered some twenty feet over the B3. The temperature inside the Hardsuit had dropped, yet sweat beaded his forehead. The difficulty of the task in this hostile environment having dawned on him, he knew that a mistake made in haste could be fatal. He took a deep breath, pressed the vertical-control pedal, and began his descent to the bathysphere entombed in mud below.

CHAPTER 10

THE B3 WAS QUICKLY BECOMING A GLOBE-SHAPED FREEZER as its battery-operated heating system fought a losing battle against the deep-ocean chill. Joe Zavala and Max Kane had wrapped blankets around themselves like Navajo Indians and sat back-to-back to conserve heat. Their numb lips proved useless for speech, and their lungs labored to extract an ever-diminishing amount of oxygen from the rapidly thinning air.

Zavala dreaded the moment when the power would fail completely. He didn’t want to die in the dark. The bathysphere had an auxiliary air tank, but he wondered if it would be worth prolonging the misery. At the same time, he stubbornly fought the urge to give up, and he filled his mind with visions of the mountains around Santa Fe. Closing his eyes, he imagined he was resting after a hike in the winter, not trapped in a hollow steel ball at the bottom of the cold sea.

Clunk!

Something had thumped against the bathysphere. Zavala pressed his head against the wall, ignoring the coldness that seeped through the metal skin. He could hear a gritty, scraping sound, then another clunk, followed by several more.

Morse code for k, he realized.

Then, after an agonizing pause, he heard a.

Kurt Austin.

Kane had been sitting with his head down and hunched over his knees. Raising his chin off his chest, he glanced toward Zavala with rheumy, unfocused eyes.

“Wha’sat?” he said, his words drunkenly slurred from the cold and lack of oxygen.

Zavala’s cracked lips widened in a ghost of a smile.

“The cavalry has arrived.”

AUSTIN CROUCHED ON TOP of the bathysphere like a spider, using his manipulator claw to tap out letters. A deepwater suit’s size and shape makes it susceptible to currents, and a bottom eddy threatened to push him off his perch. He hooked the cable to the top of the sphere, clamped a manipulator onto the cable to keep himself from floating off, and maneuvered the suit’s thrusters so that they were facing down into the mud surrounding the sphere.

He depressed a foot pedal and was immediately enveloped in a blinding cloud of stirred-up silt that settled after a moment. He turned the Hardsuit’s searchlights off. The faint glow coming through the B3’s previously buried windows indicated that systems were still operating. Austin blinked the suit’s lights on and off to get Zavala’s attention.

Zavala saw the flashing lights, and his mind lost some of its cold-induced sluggishness.

Kane had seen the lights as well.

“What should we do?” he asked.

Zavala hungered for the opportunity to do something, anything, to get out of this mess, but he knew they would have to be patient.

“We wait,” he said.

AUSTIN UNCLAMPED HIS MANIPULATOR from the cable and began to tap out a new message on the bathysphere’s skin. He got out only a few letters before the current suddenly caught his suit and pushed him several feet away from the sphere. Regaining control, he returned to tap out more letters.

The Hardsuit’s camera had been transmitting his struggles to the surface ship.

“What’s going on down there?” Gannon’s voice called. “Picture went dark, and now it’s back all jumbled.”

“Stand by,” Austin said, then finished tapping out his message.

“Standing by,” the captain replied.

Austin’s efforts had sapped his strength. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, and he was gulping for air like a beached flounder.

“Haul away!” he shouted breathlessly into the suit’s microphone.

ZAVALA HAD LISTENED CAREFULLY to the measured tapping coming through the skin of the B3. He’d caught the first few letters. After a pause, he’d caught the rest.

Float.

Hell, Kurt, if I could float, I would float.

The bathysphere still stuck in the mud, and Zavala vacillated between anger and despair. Maybe this was all a dream brought on by lack of oxygen. Maybe he was imagining all this, playing out a rescue that existed only in his mind.

A buzzer yanked him back to reality.

A red light blinked madly on the control panel. He realized that the light had been going on and off for some time, but his slow-moving mind had not realized it was warning that the air supply was about to end.

He reached out for the spare tank, barely got it off the wall, and turned on the valve.

Air hissed into the cabin and blew the fog from his brain. He flipped back the panel covering the manual switch