“Tell me more, Mac.”
“…came back… on us.”
Oh, damn!
Glenn needed information, and she needed it fast. She was going to have to control the data on this, to put the best face on it.
Gary Munro broke onto the circuit. “Sydney here, AG-4. We’re underway.”
“Give me an ETA, Gary.”
“We’ll churn water, Penny, but it’s still going to be over three hours.”
“Well, hurry up, damn it! There’s lives at stake.”
“Rate of ascent one hundred feet per minute, Kaylene,” Emry said. “That’s the max. We’re two-six-hundred off the bottom.”
It was dark. Thomas has shut down all of the lights and most of the electrical draw. Only a few of the crucial instruments were providing light inside the sphere. Her hands felt as if they were shaking, but they seemed steady enough on the joysticks.
“How’s Svetlana?”
“Not responding,” Emry said. “I think I’ve stopped the bleeding.”
Emry was on his knees in his seat, leaning over the back of the pilot’s seat to cradle Polodka’s head in the crook of his arm.
Brande’s voice, when it came over her headset, was confident and reassuring. “Rae, can you give me a status report now?”
Since her first report of the collision, he had been patient — and probably frantic — while she and Emry stabilized the submersible.
“Svetlana’s unconconscious. Larry’s stopped the blood flow.”
“How did that happen?” he asked.
“We were struck on the starboard side, and she was thrown to the right. We think she hit her head on the gyro control panel. There’s a long gash on her temple.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Larry, too. Svetlana seems to be breathing normally, and her pulse rate is down, but stabilized.”
“Okay,” Brande said. “Now, we’re showing you at maximum ascent.”
“Correct. I dropped the weights immediately.”
“We also show that you’ve lost a little over seventy per cent of your available electrical capacity.”
Thomas took a deep breath, trying to calculate.
Brande did it for her. “That still gives you plenty of time, if you conserve.”
“I’ve got practically everything shut down, Dane. I’m not getting readings on amperage draw or the voltage meters.”
“It looks all right from here. Don’t worry about it.”
“The bastard must have damaged the battery tray.”
“I suspect that’s the case,” Brande said.
She didn’t know how he could be so calm. All of her will power was devoted to keeping her voice level; she didn’t want to alarm Emry.
“How about environment?” Brande asked. “We’re not getting the telemetry.”
She was aware that he had worked slowly up to that question. She knew he would be worried. Thomas and Dokey were the only two at MVU who knew the full story of Janelle Brande’s death. She thought she knew the agony he had gone through when he had finally given her the last of the available air tanks and had watched her die.
“Larry says the scrubber is still working full-time. The flow from the external oxygen tank has decreased, but the emergency bottle is fine, and we’re augmenting from it.”
“Has Larry made a calculation?”
Emry broke in. “I’m on the line, too, Dane. It’s not like I stepped outside for a smoke. Yeah, on rough estimate, we’ve got a bit more than seven hours.”
“Good. That’s good. Any structural damage to the pressure hull?”
“None that we can detect from the inside,” Thomas said.
“I wonder if you could deploy Atlas and check the external damage?”
Thomas released the right joystick and flicked the switch to activate the robot. Immediately, an amber caution light flared.
She flipped the switch back.
“Not this trip, Dane. I’m getting a fault in one of the control circuits.”
Dokey was nearby, too. He said, “Kaylene, check the ROV circuit breakers.”
She had to turn on an interior light for a minute in order to see the circuit breakers, located low on her left.
“All of them have blown, Okey.”
He thought that over for all of ten seconds. “Let’s let it be, Dane. We don’t want to use up energy looking for the problems, anyway.”
“It’s your call, Rae,” Brande said.
“We’ll follow Okey’s recommendation,” she said.
“Next,” Brande said. “We lost signals from Sarscan. What are you showing?”
“Nothing,” Thomas said, involuntarily glancing at the monitor in front of Polodka, which had been carrying the sonar return from the search robot. It was now blank.
“She’s still in tow,” she clarified. “because I can feel the drag, but we don’t have control over her.”
“How much of a drag?” Brande asked. “We’d probably better jettison her.”
“It’s not all that bad, Dane. We’re getting full ascent rate, and I suspect her diving planes were in the up position when she lost power. Let’s hold on for now.”
“We can always recover her later,” Brande said.
“We’ll wait.”
“Okay. Svetlana?”
Thomas glanced to her right. Emry had slipped out of both of his sweaters and was using them to cushion Polodka’s head against the side of the hull. She released the joysticks and began to unbutton her own sweater.
“She’s the same, Dane.”
“Is there anything else we can check for you, Kaylene?” Dokey asked.
“I don’t think so. We’re stable, and now we just wait.”
“One other thing,” Brande said. “What about the other sub. Are you showing it on sonar?”
“I shut down the sonar, Dane.”
“Try it one time,” Dokey urged.
After handing her sweater to Emry, Thomas turned on the sonar, channeling the image to the screen in front of her. It took a few minutes to warm up.
When it came on-line, she noted the elongated blob in the lower right quadrant.
The audio volume was up, and her earphones sounded off with the “Ping, ping,” of contact.
“Damn!”
“What!” Brande’s voice now carried the higher register of his concern.
“They’re right alongside us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Like almost everyone else on board, Kim Otsuka had been in the lab for what seemed an eternity, waiting without patience for word from below. Without being asked, she had settled in at the computer console next to the command station, linked into the telemetry circuits for the submersible, and initiated diagnostic programs to see if the interrupted signals could be traced to ship-board equipment.
Behind her, scientists and ship’s crew milled about, listening to the conversations with DepthFinder which were issuing from the overhead speakers. Dokey was on the computer next to her, the submersible’s electronic schematic on the screen, searching for potential solutions to problems he could only guess at. Next to him, Mayberry was also on a machine, attempting to track the sub’s ascent on his map by the verbal reports coming from Thomas, and calculating the rate of electrical usage.
On her left, Dane Brande, when she glanced at him from time to time, seemed close to detonation. His back was rigid as he sat on the edge of his chair, and a vein was throbbing at his temple. She was amazed that he could hold his temper in check sufficiently to maintain a level tone in his voice.