Ark Found

Chapter 7

Jayden slowed the sub as they neared the bottom of the elevator shaft. He would need to level the craft out at the bottom and maneuver it into a tight turn to exit the shaft out into the cargo hold area. But the sudden explosion of light from above told them their adversaries were in pursuit and that there would be less time than preferred for the tricky maneuvering.

“They’re coming down after us!” Carter said, craning his neck to look straight up. “And they’ve already got the one safe, I can see it in their grab arm!”

“Greedy bastards,” Jayden grunted, putting the one of the sub’s thrusters into reverse for a couple of seconds to turn it, then putting both thrusters into forward. Like parallel parking a car into a tight space, he moved forward and back, turning a little more with each pass, until the sub’s nose was facing the open side of the shaft.

“They’re almost down to us, let’s go!” Carter coaxed.

Jayden scooted the sub out of the elevator shaft into the cargo area. Carter swung the spotlight around to the front to aid with navigating the treacherous area with its jumbles of debris piled everywhere in random fashion. “Hopefully they take at least as long as we did to get out of—”

“Nope, here they come, they’re already out!” Carter informed Jayden.

“Great. They’re sub is smaller, otherwise—”

“This isn’t a sub pilot competition, Jayden. These guys are out to take the safe we still have, and no doubt don’t care if we live or die in the process. Step on it!”

“Which way?”

“Right, turn right!”

The radio crackled with Johnny’s voice requesting a dive status update. “I’ll handle it,” Carter said, snatching up the transmitter.

“What’s up Johnny, we’re almost out of the wreck, over.”

“Almost out of it? What’s your battery situation look like?”

“We’re gonna have dead batteries in a few minutes,” Jayden said nonchalantly.

Carter continued into the radio, “Almost dead, we’ve been using a lot of juice for the lights, grab arms and pulling the other sub that latched onto us like a barnacle,” Carter said into the microphone.

Johnny sounded flabbergasted. “Jesus, you’ve absolutely got to get outside the wreck before they run out. If you do that, the air system is mechanical and you can use it to inflate the buoyancy tubes to rise to the—”

“We know, Johnny. Listen, that other sub is still in pursuit. If they grab onto us again, we won’t make it out of here, and I have a feeling they know that.”

“We tried to board their ship, but were repelled by force. We radioed the Canadian Coast Guard, but no telling how long they’ll be to get here.”

“Okay, listen, I’ve got to focus here, we’ll see you up top in a couple hours, I hope. Over and out.”

“This is going to have major ramifications, you guys. Godspeed, over and out.”

They reached an obstruction requiring a turn of either left or right. “Which way, you think?” Jayden said before they got to it.

“Left, left — take the left!”

“You got it.” Jayden took the sub around the pile of debris and then straightened out on the other side. Both of them were used to looking for daylight when seeking the exit of a wreck or cave, but of course this deep down, it was black everywhere so there was no such advantage. Only the reach of the sub’s own lights offered any kind of advance look.

Jayden’s eyes lit on the red light that suddenly appeared on the dash. “Battery low warning is on.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“Less than ten percent remaining.”

“Great.”

Jayden zigged and zagged the sub to thread his way through mounds of debris and twisted wreckage, while behind them, the lights of the attacking sub bobbed and weaved in pursuit.

Carter looked up from his diagram and pointed slightly off center from straight ahead. “Takes us that way as the crow flies and we should be out of the wreck in about three minutes at this speed.”

“Crowds don’t fly underwater.”

“As the fish swims, then. Point is, you might not be able to take us in a straight shot because of all the wreckage in the way, but that’s the direction we need to go in.”

“Copy that.” Jayden made the course correction and proceeded to dart the sub around any obstacles before resuming that course. Once he had to swoop down lower to avoid a series of dangling steel cables, but he kept at it until the irregular yawning maw of the Titanic’s opening became recognizable in the floodlights. They opted not to use the spotlights anymore to conserve what little remaining battery power they had.

“Okay, we can start angling up now,” Carter said. “I don’t recall seeing hanging obstacles on the way in when we used the spotlights.”

Jayden reached for the rudder control and the sub slanted gently upward. “Keep a sharp eye out all the same. I don’t have a lot of reaction time at this speed using only the floodlights.”

“Will do.” It was hard for Carter not to keep turning around to check on their pursuer’s progress, but he kept his eyes glued to what lay ahead so that they could minimize their chances of hitting any stray wreckage that might be dangling from the shipwreck above or protruding from the bottom.

When they had completely cleared the hulking wreck, Jayden increased the angle of the sub’s ascent. No sooner had he finished doing that than the battery warning light began flashing red, instead of steady red, the lights in the cabin dimmed and stayed that way, and an alarm began to bray.

“Time’s up Carter. I’d say we have sixty seconds until it’s lights off in this bad boy.”

Carter reached for the radio. “I’ll update Topside.” He spoke rapidly into the transmitter, “Topside, this is Deep Voyager, we have lost—”

And then the lights in the cabin went dark.

“Crap,” Jayden said. After a few seconds a weak field of light appeared in the cabin. Jayden turned in surprise but then saw Carter holding a penlight.

“Never leave home without it.”

“Shine it over here so I can activate the switches to add air to the buoyancy tubes.” Carter did as asked and Jayden flipped a series of switches. They heard a hiss of escaping compressed air being directed into the buoyancy bladders. Then they slowly began to rise.

“Almost three hours up to the surface. Now it’s just a fun game of… Will Our Oxygen Last Long Enough, who wants to play?”

“I think they do.” Carter was twisted around in his seat, staring down toward the Titanic, which was not visible in the darkness, but the twin stabs of white light aimed up at them were unmistakable.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jayden said.

“Can they catch us?”

“I’m not sure. We have a decent head start and if they’re only using buoyancy, which is the norm for ascents, they shouldn’t be able to catch us. But if they use buoyancy and thrusters… I suppose they could,” he finished.

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

Carter flicked off his penlight, casting their sub cabin into total darkness. “They can’t catch us if they can’t see us.”

Jayden nodded in the blackness. “Every five minutes or so I should take a depth reading though. That gauge is a sensor hardwired to the outside, works by pressure, no power needed. Just to make sure we are in fact still rising.”

They sat alone in dark silence pondering the hell in which they would find themselves if for some reason the buoyancy system failed and they sank back to the ocean bottom. In a few minutes Carter passed Jayden the penlight. The other sub’s lights were still visible far below, now a little more off to one side rather than directly below them. Jayden cupped his hand around the flashlight to avoid giving away their position, and checked the depth gauge. Breathing a sigh of relief, he told Carter, “We’re still rising. Long way to go, but we’re rising.”

“They are too,” Carter said, turning around in the dark to watch the lights far below them and to his left. “I wish we could contact Topside and let them know we’re on our way. They’re going to be freaking out we lost contact.”

Jayden settled back in his pilot seat. “Nothing we can do about that. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip to the surface.”

Jayden turned on the mini-flashlight but nothing happened. “Batteries died on the light.”

“I don’t have any spares,” Carter said groggily. The two were tired and cold from sitting for hours in the same position. “Hey, I think it’s getting lighter, though.” He looked up toward the surface, which was not yet visible.

Jayden’s focus was in the opposite direction. “I don’t see any lights down there.”

“We either outpaced them, or they drifted off course because they couldn’t see us.”

“Maybe we drifted off course,” Jayden posited. “I sure hope we don’t come up ten miles from the ship or something.” Carter exhaled sharply in response. It wasn’t a comforting thought. Adrift in the North Atlantic, bobbing like a cork with no means to control their dead-in-the-water craft. It wouldn’t take much to flood and sink them. It wasn’t lost on Carter that in that scenario, they would experience much of what the Titanic survivors did on that fateful night, freezing to death in the very same patch of North Atlantic.

“Let’s just take it one step at a time,” Carter said. “In theory, we should be rising straight up, which, since we left from the Titanic itself, should have us within visual of our ship when we surface.”

“We’ll find out soon enough. It is getting lighter, I can see it now.” Looking up, the pitch black they had become accustomed to was now more akin to a dark gray.

“Still no sign of them,” Carter said, glancing into the depths below.

“Maybe they ran out of battery power after bee-lining down during their descent to catch up to us. We can only hope, right?”

When Carter didn’t answer right away, Jayden prompted him. It was still dark, after all, and so they couldn’t see each other faces to read expressions. “Right?”

“I’ve been thinking about who these people are.”

“Whoever they are, they basically tried to kill us, and so if they ran out of battery power and got permanently stuck down there, I wouldn’t feel bad about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

At that moment they saw a massive shape above them — moving — and after a few seconds realized it was moving down towards them from above.

“It’s way too big to be the sub,” Carter said.

And then the humongous form materialized not far above them, arcing down to within a few feet of their bubble dome before gliding upwards again toward the light.

“A whale!” Jayden yelled with genuine glee.

“A Right Whale if I had to guess,” Carter added. “They can dive pretty deep, maybe a thousand feet, but still, it means we’re definitely getting close to the surface.”

The cetacean soared out of view and the Deep Voyager continued rocketing towards the surface. Jayden gazed out the window, straining to see slow-moving particles or animals like jellyfish that he could use to gauge their rate of ascent in the absence of functioning gauges. But it was still too dark to discern that kind of detail.

“How fast you think we’re ascending?” he wondered aloud.

Carter shrugged in the near darkness. “Beats me. We don’t have to worry about the bends, at least.”

The pressure inside the submersible never changes, so decompression sickness was not a factor. Nevertheless, as a sub pilot, Jayden knew that it was not wise to ascend too fast. They could strike the bottom of their own ship, for one thing. They could come flying out of the water into the sky and land upside down, jarring loose the various oxygen and electronic systems. He had even heard of a fire starting in a sub that way, once, during his naval training. But since he didn’t actually know how fast they were rising, he was too scared to vent any air from the buoyancy tubes, which would slow their rate of ascent. What if they were barely rising as it was, and he let too much air out. He imagined coming to within fifty feet of the surface, the sunlit world above tantalizingly visible, only to begin sinking back down to the depths, slowly at first, then with increasing momentum the deeper they went, knowing that this time it was for keeps…

“Hay Jayden….you fall asleep on me?”

Carter’s voice jolted the sub pilot from his unnerving reverie.

“Huh? Nah, I’m with you.”

“Good because I’d say we’re not more than a couple of hundred feet from the surface. SCUBA depths!”

Compared to where they had just been, 200 feet was like being outside, but still in one’s backyard compared to halfway up Mount Everest. They were almost back to the ship.

Jayden stared at the depth gauge and found that he could now read it. The light around them was now dark blue instead of black or gray. A large school of silver fish cascaded past them. They were returning to the familiar world they knew and loved.

“We are going up fast,” Carter observed. In just a few seconds they were perhaps half the distance to the surface.

“I don’t see the bottom of any ships,” Jayden said. “At least we’re not going to hit anything.”

“Brace,” Jayden warned as he gripped onto a handhold above him to the left. They were sometimes used to aid in getting in and out of the sub. This was the first time he’d ever had to use one while underwater, and he wished he didn’t have to, but at least it was an option.

Sunlight burst all around them as fractured rays filtered through the ocean’s uppermost layers. Carter also held on and they looked upwards into the sun, so blindingly bright after so many hours in darkness. The blue sky appeared wavy and indistinct as they drew near the surface, and then water was washing over the bubble dome as they broke free of the ocean into the world of air once again.

“Hold on,” Jayden called out as their craft nearly came completely free of the water. As it levelled out mid-air, he saw two ships, one closer than the other by about a football field.

They landed back into the water with a great splash, both men jarring on impact.

“The good news is we made it back from the deep!” Carter said staring at the seascape in front of them.

“What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is that ship closest to us? That’s not our ship, it’s the one our submersible friends launched from.”

“Great. We’re dead in the water,” Jayden said.