“We’re gonna hover at fifty feet, Gunner,” announced Bear. Hearing his name brought Gunner back into the present. “I plan on taking you to the stern, where supposedly there is a gaping hole that allows you easy access to the cargo hold. We’ll hang there, monitoring the currents and water temperatures, while you go grab one of these damned silver bullets.”
Cam released her harness and turned in her seat. “Gunner, this HOV has two exosuits. Do you want me along as your wingman?”
Gunner nodded and smiled. “Nah, I’ve got this. I’m gonna slap a thirty-minute timer on this thing. If I don’t walk out of there by then, come find me.”
“Makes sense,” said Cam. “That’s about the halfway point of your initial air supply. You’ve got more time, you know. It’s just that you can’t overexert.”
“Got it. Let’s get started.”
Chapter Forty
The Wreckage of German U-boat 1226
The Puerto Rico Trench
Depth: 27,840 feet
Fathoms: 4,640
North Atlantic Ocean
Gunner exited the DSC-6 into a world of peaceful darkness. He slowly dropped to the sandy bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, using the four one-point-six horsepower thrusters to control his descent. Once his feet were firmly planted in the sand, sort of, he experimented with the fingertip controls that gave him the ability to propel himself in all directions.
His operation of the exosuit was awkward at first. He couldn’t decide if he looked like the Michelin man, the Stay Puft Marshmallow giant from Ghostbusters, or the robot from the original Lost in Space, a program he’d enjoyed watching on TV Land as a kid. Regardless, it was a different experience but one that he caught onto quickly.
After taking a few breaths, he realized the air tasted different. It was pure oxygen unlike the compressed air in a scuba tank used in conventional saturation dives. In the exosuit, Gunner was surrounded by air in an eighty-to-twenty percent ratio of nitrogen to oxygen. The atmospheric pressure was maintained at 1 atm, one atmosphere, the equivalent of a shallow-water dive of less than thirty feet. The computer-controlled pressure allowed his body to acclimate to the intense forces pressed against it by the ocean.
The fresh air filled his lungs, and Gunner felt his body respond. It wasn’t an adrenaline surge. His pulse was already racing from the excitement of exploring one of the deepest places on the planet. It was almost a euphoric feeling. Not an artificial high, but one of clarity. His mind seemed to wipe out everything but his surroundings. He could hear his heart beating. Every breath seemed like a momentous occasion. It was odd and wonderful all at the same time.
As he moved toward the stern of the U-boat, he practiced flexing his limbs and was pleased at the results. In essence, the exosuit was a human-shaped submarine with all the bells and whistles found on the DSC-6, only streamlined. Like his eye-diving experience of a week prior, he had onboard telemetry in his face shield. The oxygen was self-contained and somewhat replenishing, to a point. His power plant of lithium-ion batteries should give him more than enough time to accomplish this seemingly simple task—gather up a couple of shiny canisters and bring them up to the surface.
In an emergency situation, the life-support systems of the exosuit could keep him alive up to eighty-five hours. The beacon contained within the suit constantly transmitted a ping to the nearby submersible in case he was pulled away by the current or got lost.
The rigidity of his suit did limit his mobility, but he had no plans of doing cartwheels or handstands. The exosuit was covered in a titanium alloy skin that prevented him from being crushed, and was also rupture resistant. Resistant being the operative word, as the team on the Sea Searcher II reminded him. In other words, Gunner, try not to bounce off the rusty walls of the U-boat.
He’d gotten the hang of using his thrusters and his own joints to move forward. By swinging his arms and legs as if he were walking on the lunar surface, used in conjunction with the propulsion jets, Gunner lent the appearance of a young girl skipping along the sidewalk in a park on a sunny day. He arrived at the gaping hole in the stern of the sub within ten minutes and paused to take it all in.
He was amazed at how well preserved the U-boat was after many decades of corrosive wear on the ocean floor. He walked across the remains of the wreckage, being careful with his footing. He approached the opening and used the artificial hands, called the prosthetic prehensors in this particular exosuit, to grip the ripped-open hull in order to steady himself against the current that flowed over the sub.
Like other exosuits, this model had plier-like jaws for the left hand, which Gunner operated by squeezing handles within the suit. The right hand was different. This model, which included three operable external digits, closely resembled the thumb position, and the other four fingers taped in sets of two. It provided a more stable grip as well as the ability to curl his fingers to wrap them around an object. The coordination and dexterity allowed him to perform tasks as intricate as starting a nut on a bolt and tightening it.
All the bells and whistles aside, Gunner wished it had the ability to scratch his nose. This issue actually caused him to laugh out loud, drawing the first communications with Bear and Cam aboard the DSC-6.
“Hey, you doin’ all right down there, buddy?” asked Bear.
Gunner chuckled. “Yeah. My nose itches. I feel like some kind of halfwit trying to press my nose against the inside of the helmet to scratch
