Finished with the tour he turned to us.
“Any questions?”
“How do we get in,” Briscoe asked. “You just punched some numbers into the keypad out there.”
“Since you’ve already passed through the vault’s security lock Ivy knows you’re in the vault and cleared for entry into the Z-room. Just punch in your ID number so we know who’s in the room. You’ll have to use it again to access the DV computers. Oh, and when leave the room be sure to log out using your ID on the keypad after you exit; a loud beeping will remind you if you forget.”
With that, he led us from the room, slammed the door, and logged out.
“Now, Matt and Mica, please join Lt. Williams in her recovery of SeaPod 2. I’ll be waiting for your return.”
Chapter 12. SeaPod 2 Recovery
In Pod Bay 1, we found Williams scurrying around the SeaPod checking seals and lights preparing for the dive. The stairs were rolled up to the hatch and, in the pod’s manipulator arm, a suitcase-sized object with a pair of long coiled hoses caught my eye.
“Must be the cutting torch,” I told Briscoe as I pointed.
“Used one before?”
“Yes, but not at a thousand meters.”
“I did once freeing a black box from a sunken Navy plane. Got some quirks at this pressure though.”
“I’ll let you do the honor then. Just don’t damage the wheel. We have to roll tomorrow.”
“Now, Marker, you know me better than that. And I promise not to damage your suit either.”
“Good then button me up and let’s go.”
As I dropped my legs into the half-suit now labeled CROSS, Briscoe went to the cutting torch, took the torch head in his hand and flicked the trigger. A loud pop echoed through the bay then a bright jet-blue flame spewed forward.
“Works fine,” he said twisting the valve extinguishing the flame.
“Coming, Marker. Raise your arms.”
Pulling the upper half down over me, he explained that I could do it myself using the hand pincers in an emergency but it was much faster with two divers. As he fastened and tightened the final seal locks I felt like a superhero knowing that I looked like a storm trooper; such a refreshing change over my past dives using huge bulky mini-subs. Now I was a human submarine again able to travel anywhere under my own power for hours at a time… as long as I had water.
Soon we were all in our places ready for flooding.
“Hey, who’s going to operate the flooding and door controls?” Briscoe squawked from his suit’s intercom. “There’s no one up there to do it.”
“Got the controls on my console Briscoe,” her intercom boomed. We use them for self-diving but they aren’t recommended for use without a spotter. Bowman knows we’re out. He’s our spotter. Plus Ivy always knows too. She watches the bays with her sonar.”
I watched her hands move over the console, then she paused.
“Ready for flooding guys? Make sure to lock your boots in the floor stirrups. Otherwise you’ll wash around in here. Show me a sign when you’re ready.”
I had done it once before training with Briscoe but the boot stirrups were tricky. Below each suit were two boot-wide pairs of locking rails that required a diver to kick the aluminum boots into them. Then the rails locked onto the boot grooves much like snow skis locking onto a skier’s boots. Pulling them out was trickier. A Michael Jackson moonwalk maneuver was required to release the boots and I wasn’t a good moonwalker.
Kicking my boots in until they locked I was ready for the flooding to begin. Seeing Briscoe’s arm go up I raised mine.
All at once, we were standing under a powerful waterfall ribbon of water passing over our helmets into the bay’s center near the SeaPod. There was no torrential flow; just perfectly metered ribbons of seawater meeting together reflecting off each other raising the water level in the bay.
Only my second time through the flooding sequence, I found myself holding my breath again as the water rose up over my faceplate and slowly covered it. It brought back a fear from my youth of going underwater unable to breathe and finally relinquishing my fate to the pain in my screaming lungs. I guess it was an autonomic reaction instinctive to life for self-preservation but to me it was from my childhood’s claustrophobic horror of the water surrounding me closing in for the kill. It had never happened to me before in the mini-subs but this was different: instead of a small viewport out the front like a small movie screen the Exosuit’s almost one-hundred-eighty-degree panoramic view put my peripheral vision into play, increasing my visual immersion. Diving for me had become an IMAX experience.
Another thing I noticed was the chill that raced up my suit’s interior tracking the bay’s rising water. I had read from the POD that the outside water temperature (which stays almost constant a thousand meters down) was forty degrees Fahrenheit only eight degrees above freezing. If it were not for the internal suit heater, I would go into hypothermic shock in ten or fifteen minutes. But even with the suit’s thick aluminum exoskeleton around me I still felt as if I were being dipped into a bucket of freezing ice water.
Suddenly the water noises roaring around my suit ceased. The bay had topped out leaving only a few shrinking overhead bubbles. Those soon disappeared as Lt. Williams opened the pod bay door to the ocean replacing the door’s white surface with the infinite darkness of the midnight zone.
“Going out,” said her voice through my suit’s intercom. A spinning turbulence that vibrated my suit signaled her departure as she flashed the SeaPod’s floods and left the bay. Briscoe unlocked his boots and drifted upward and outward toward the darkness as he activated his forward floods.
“Coming, Marker?”
“Right behind you, Chief,” I answered trying to kick out of my stirrups. On the second try they released leaving me spinning in the bay’s currents still churning from their departures. Now I just had to remember how to navigate the suit as Briscoe has taught me. All by voice command, he had said. Just tell it what to do, he had said.
So I said, “Quit spinning.”
Nothing happened.
Then frustrated I repeated louder, “Cease spinning dammit.”
Still nothing happened but I knew I was getting dizzier with each revolution.
Next, I said, “Forward one knot,” and to my surprise, my suit’s propulsion motors activated and accelerated me across the room crashing into the far wall.
Fortunately, I was traveling so slowly the impact did no damage to anything but my ego. I was a clueless fool wanting a mini-sub’s comforting joystick for control. Yet now I was spinning out of control in the vortex on the other side of the room and still getting dizzier by the moment.
“Where the hell are you, Marker? I hear you giving weird voice commands but I still can’t see you. Don’t think it knows ‘cease spinning dammit’ but it made me laugh. In my mind’s eye I saw you twirling in the bay to the Blue Danube,” Briscoe said, his voice growing weaker with each word.
“Not funny, Chief. I can’t remember how to control this thing.”
“Heads-up display to your upper right. Read its voice command list. Stop always works in any emergency. Just be sure to—”
I figured his intercom must have gone out of range but I wanted to hear his last words. First, I had to stop my sickening rotation.