Titanic 2012

“Easy on a map but the real thing is difficult! No Google directions are gonna work down here.”

“Google? What’re you talking about?” Mendenhall sounded confused. David wondered if the pressures weren’t affecting his mind, and if not the pressures then the creature. David, one hand on his laser knife in its scabbard, could only wait and watch; he must study every nuance he saw in Jacob’s behavior to be sure, before he killed the man.

THIRTY

Captain Forbes remained unhappy with them and with Lou Swigart’s last minute decisions. He was ranting about Swigart’s being silent too long, along with Kelly; this worried David even more, creating a powerful anxiety that had begun to register with those above who were monitoring his vital signs. He called out to them, “Are you saying you have lost vital signs for Irvin and Swigart as well as coms?”

“That’s affirmative!” shouted Forbes. “And as for you two, we cannot see you. Our best technology and all we can see is silt—thick as snow on a TV screen.”

“For the moment, we’re enveloped in micro-organisms! Nothing we can do to improve your picture.”

“We’re all right, Captain,” Mendenhall assured those monitoring from above. “Everything you touch down here creates a cloud.”

“Go cautiously, you two. We’re monitoring your vital signs. So far, so good—but Ingles, you’re getting erratic. Calm down; go easy but go fast toward where Irvin and Swigart entered the ship. I fear Lou’s last decision was ill conceived—and I hope you are getting this, Lou!”

“Lou’s the boss!” shouted Mendenhall.

“That’s right, Captain,” added David, giving thought to his earlier suspicions of Swigart.

Forbes ordered, “Clear your cameras of debris when you get out of the spore fog, please.” Captain Forbes’ voice came over like a robot due to the electronic filters.

As quickly as that, they were inside Titanic’s gymnasium and what was once the adjacent pool area. Turning through a blown open doorway, moving as gracefully as a pair of swordfish, they found themselves in an elevator, its once ornate filigree rusted with age.

“This doesn’t look too promising,” muttered Mendenhall, his voice masked by the metallic signal.

“There’s got to be one, maybe two dead-zone areas at the bottom of Titanic, Ingles,” Mendenhall said as if to convince himself of it. A dead zone would insure that anything within its influence will not have deteriorated as no life existed in such and area.”

“All the literature says so,” David replied.

“Shall we take the elevator?” joked Mendenhall, something David had never encountered before now. A lot of firsts going on fast down here, he thought, even as the rush of excitement of at last being here filled his mind.

Instead of the ease of riding a working elevator car down, they instead had to take the elevator apart, bending back the ornate door far enough so they could get through without ripping their suits.

Mendenhall lowered himself through the blinding snowstorm of spores and pulled his lanky body through the surrounding darkness, the only light source here emanating from their Cryo-suited bodies as David followed.

“This route of yours is getting more dangerous as we go, Jacob.”

“It’s a damn labyrinth down here for sure.”

“Yeah, all we need is a ball of string and the Minotaur.”

Jacob made no response to this, and while David watched for the slightest flinch, there simply was none.

“We’ve got to get to the cargo hold,” Mendenhall said to David. “That’s our fastest way to connect back up with Lou and Kelly. Best way to follow Captain’s orders.”

It made sense as they’d come so far. Turning back and swimming up and out of the ship would take twice as long, so far as they found no obstacles ahead.

“Agreed, fastest way to find Lou and Kelly, let them know their comlink’s been cut, and their vitals are not registering upstairs.”

“Besides, our goal’s to inspect the cargo holds for anything salvageable.”

“Right. Got it.” But even as David nodded his agreement, he feared Mendenhall’s anxious voice and his impatience as an indication of his lack of duplicity at getting to the real prize he’d come for. Just what might that prize be? Artifacts and ornaments from Titanic like the elevator doors or might it be the creature’s spawn, its progeny? Had he—or it—held onto life for the past hundred years precisely for this moment? This chance for a full-blown spawning, a resurgence and regeneration of its kind?

According to Declan Irvin’s journal, the numbers of infected and killed aboard Titanic looked as if it had multiplied exponentially, and the fear that it would devastate the population on board and do the same to the entire population of New York—never mind that of the entire continent of America—had been the arguments put forth by Constable Ransom and the young interns as they had desperately worked to prove these facts to Captain Edward Smith.

If either Mendenhall or Lou Swigart was in fact the demon of Titanic, the cursed thing that brought Titanic down, then he—or it—was back. Back to unleash its deadly spawn onto an unsuspecting and skeptical world with plans to devastate the entire population.

Looking back, David realized that Mendenhall had watched as Swigart and Kelly had separated from them, effectively cutting the team in two. Mendenhall now said to David and thus Forbes above, “Watching Lou and your girlfriend go off as they did unsettled me, too.”

“What’re you talking about?” David countered.

“To… to witness the sudden, last minute changes Lou made. It smells of something, I don’t know… ominous. What do you think upstairs, Captain Forbes?”

“Lou’s in charge for good reason.” Forbes’ tone lacked conviction.

“Did he give you a reason for the changes?” asked David, curious now.

“Look, if he makes last minute decisions, well, damn it, that’s why he’s in charge—to go with the flow, so to speak.”

“We’re descending deeper into Titanic,” David informed Forbes as he continued to follow Mendenhall. “Just seems like odd behavior,” Jacob continued speaking to Forbes. “I mean, he wasn’t even going to leave the submersible in all the protocols I saw up till the moment we got down here.”

David added, “Yeah, what’s up with that, Captain?”

“I’m puzzled as well,” replied Forbes over the link. “Ingles, have you any idea?”

“Dunno—took it to mean passion, excitement.”

“It’s like changing orders on a battlefield in the midst of an attack if you ask me,” Forbes said, his voice trailing off.

“Nothing we can do about it now,” said David. “I think we just do our jobs and concentrate on the here and now.” Even as he said it, he realized his entire mind was on Kelly, and that made him vulnerable to error, and error here meant death. The ocean even at her surface was unforgiving of even the slightest mistake. This far down, any misstep could be fatal.

“Right… right,” muttered Mendenhall.

Forbes added, “I suppose.”

They found yet another stairwell, or else it was the one they’d begun down in the first place. However, it felt like they were below the debris and obstacles that had earlier stood in their way; in fact things down this far were surprisingly intact. The two divers pulled themselves along in the waterlogged, devastated environment, feeling a sense of wonder at the numbers who likely died down here, trapped in the ship when suddenly out of the darkness beyond their lights came a gruesome skeletal body in period dress—a woman who hadn’t made it off the ship, the remains lying in their path.

Their movement created just enough flutter to the dress to make the dead appear interested in them. Their lights soon displayed not one but many skeletal bodies here. With their passing, they could hear the rattling of bones. The skeletal souls startled David and Jacob, so far as David could tell. “We prepared for this—to encounter skeletal remains,” David reminded Jacob.