Chloe blinked rapidly, in a desperate battle to prevent the tears from flowing down her cheeks. The fact that the dead man wasn’t her brother gave her some relief, yet the guilt of seeing another like this filled her with shame and turmoil. “Oh my god, what happened out here?”
37
SITTING IN A HIGH-BACKED chair inside the Wanderer’s ROV control room, Blain Milburn continued to flip through several recorded videos of the wreck as he tried to make some sense of it all. Chloe and Ethan had just returned after using the submersible to scout the area, and he could see that both of them had been terribly shaken by what they had found.
Even though there were two empty chairs inside the small room since Blain had told his assistants to take a break, Chloe remained standing, leaning against the wall. She kept biting her fingernails as anxiety over her brother’s fate smoldered within her.
The door was slightly ajar, and soon opened a bit more as Ethan slipped inside the room. “Just came from the bridge. The Indian Navy is sending one of their ships over, but it doesn’t look like a priority for them since we’ve reported that we haven’t found anyone alive so far.”
Chloe kept her eyes on the floor. They had mutually agreed not to tell anyone else they had managed to find one survivor until they could first question her. “Izzy’s still not awake?”
Ethan shook his head before he grabbed one of the chairs and sat down on it with a tired groan. “Not yet. It’s only been eight hours since we fished her out of the water, Chloe.”
“I know that Morgenstern has got huge influence over the Indians,” Blain said softly. “But shouldn’t we inform the US Navy about finding her alive?”
“I’d rather we do that when we’re face to face with one of their officers,” Ethan said. “Telling them over the radio… well, it might get intercepted and all.”
“I get it,” Blain said.
Chloe continued breathing deeply to keep her stress levels in check. It had taken them several hours to carefully remove the corpse from the diving bell using the Sedna’s mechanical arms before they brought the remains to the Wanderer. She was physically exhausted, yet her mind just couldn’t relax.
Ethan swiveled his chair and looked up at her. “Why don’t you get some rest?”
Chloe hurriedly shook her head and gave him a dismissive wave. “I’m okay.”
After giving her a respectful nod, Ethan turned his attention towards Blain. “Well, since we’re down here, why don’t we try and figure this out? Do any of you have any theories as to how this big ship went down?”
One side of the room had several monitors along its walls. Blain switched over to a video recording showing the wreckage of a lifeboat floating on the calm swells. “One of our aerial drones got that footage. Whatever it is that sunk the Aurora took out at least one of her lifeboats as well.”
“What could this work boat have done to make somebody sink them? I just don’t get it,” Ethan said.
“It has to have something to do with what it is they were working on,” Blain said as he switched to one of the videos his ROV had recorded.
Ethan and Chloe looked at the screen in silent awe as the grainy footage displayed a huge undersea structure located on the seafloor. The camera continued to pan around, showing the interconnected hyperbaric capsules, all the way down to the large factory-like building at the bottom.
It was one shock too many for Chloe as she flopped onto the remaining empty chair. “An underwater habitat? What in God’s name did they build it out here for?”
“That’s the million dollar question,” Blain said.
“More like a billion dollar question,” Ethan said. “If they constructed it out in the middle of nowhere, then it was done in order to keep prying eyes away.”
Chloe’s eyes locked with her partner’s. “You remember the talk we had with Alan Percy back in Sydney?”
Ethan exhaled while nodding his head. “I get it now. Those pressure chambers he said his firm built for Morgenstern. They all ended up here.”
“Don’t forget the other thing he said. He also saw pieces of a larger building.”
Ethan pointed towards the bottom structure on the screen. “And there it is. Good old Alan was right all along.”
Blain rubbed his grizzled chin. They had both told him about their conversation in Australia beforehand. “Okay, so it’s all a Morgenstern job, but what could have caused the Aurora to sink like that?”
Ethan shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe something happened while they were doing construction work on it. Maybe they were carrying explosives and there was an accidental detonation or something?”
“Unless they kept those shaped explosives along the outside of the Aurora’s hull, there’s no way it would have brought her down like that,” Blain said.
“Someone didn’t want any witnesses,” Chloe said.
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “Come on, Chloe. We know Morgenstern is a horrible company, but they wouldn’t go as far as killing their own employees just to keep all this a secret.”
“They’ve been keeping secrets from my brother ever since he started working for them,” Chloe said. “They must have shut down his phone and internet too just before they did this so he couldn’t call for help.”
“With all due respect, I disagree,” Ethan said. “They wouldn’t sink their own ship when they could just pay them off. And what secret is it that they’re so intent on keeping that they’d want to kill their own employees? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Chloe stood up and pointed towards the footage of the undersea base. “Whatever it is, it’s in there. As soon as we’ve recharged the Sedna’s batteries, I want to take her down and check it out.”
Ethan held his arms up in a calming gesture. “Whoa, wait a minute. Are you just going to have a look around or do you plan on getting inside of that thing?”
“Blain’s kids already had a look around,” Chloe said. “What we’ve got to do is find a way to enter that structure.”
“That’s going to be complicated, Chloe,” Blain said. “Since the habitat is that deep, then you’ll need to do a sat dive just to enter it. You can’t do it using the Sedna, not unless you want to rip it open like an egg since there’s no way you could dock.”
“He’s right,” Ethan added. “We have a small hyperbaric chamber onboard this vessel in case of an emergency decompression, but we don’t have diving bells to make a pressurized transfer from one module to the next, and the heliox we carry isn’t enough for an extended stay down there.”
Blain nodded. “The umbilical hoses we’ve got don’t go down that far, and you’d have to use them in order to try to find a way inside.”
“Maybe it’s pressurized to one atmosphere,” Chloe said.
“Nope,” Blain said. “I spotted a lower hatch that could be opened from the outside like a moon pool, and the way the walls around the capsules are designed, they must have equal pressure with the outside.”
Chloe placed her hands over her eyes and moaned softly. She felt a sudden intuition that perhaps her brother might somehow be trapped inside the underwater base, and all she had to do was rescue him, but the feeling quickly went away, and the despair began to tug at her mind once more.
Ethan leaned sideways and placed a soothing hand on her trembling shoulders. “We’ll find Gordon. I promise you that. He’s an experienced diver, and I bet he’s alive.”