Medusa

CHAPTER 10

THE B3 WAS QUICKLY BECOMING A GLOBE-SHAPED FREEZER as its battery-operated heating system fought a losing battle against the deep-ocean chill. Joe Zavala and Max Kane had wrapped blankets around themselves like Navajo Indians and sat back-to-back to conserve heat. Their numb lips proved useless for speech, and their lungs labored to extract an ever-diminishing amount of oxygen from the rapidly thinning air.

Zavala dreaded the moment when the power would fail completely. He didn’t want to die in the dark. The bathysphere had an auxiliary air tank, but he wondered if it would be worth prolonging the misery. At the same time, he stubbornly fought the urge to give up, and he filled his mind with visions of the mountains around Santa Fe. Closing his eyes, he imagined he was resting after a hike in the winter, not trapped in a hollow steel ball at the bottom of the cold sea.

Clunk!

Something had thumped against the bathysphere. Zavala pressed his head against the wall, ignoring the coldness that seeped through the metal skin. He could hear a gritty, scraping sound, then another clunk, followed by several more.

Morse code for k, he realized.

Then, after an agonizing pause, he heard a.

Kurt Austin.

Kane had been sitting with his head down and hunched over his knees. Raising his chin off his chest, he glanced toward Zavala with rheumy, unfocused eyes.

“Wha’sat?” he said, his words drunkenly slurred from the cold and lack of oxygen.

Zavala’s cracked lips widened in a ghost of a smile.

“The cavalry has arrived.”

AUSTIN CROUCHED ON TOP of the bathysphere like a spider, using his manipulator claw to tap out letters. A deepwater suit’s size and shape makes it susceptible to currents, and a bottom eddy threatened to push him off his perch. He hooked the cable to the top of the sphere, clamped a manipulator onto the cable to keep himself from floating off, and maneuvered the suit’s thrusters so that they were facing down into the mud surrounding the sphere.

He depressed a foot pedal and was immediately enveloped in a blinding cloud of stirred-up silt that settled after a moment. He turned the Hardsuit’s searchlights off. The faint glow coming through the B3’s previously buried windows indicated that systems were still operating. Austin blinked the suit’s lights on and off to get Zavala’s attention.

Zavala saw the flashing lights, and his mind lost some of its cold-induced sluggishness.

Kane had seen the lights as well.

“What should we do?” he asked.

Zavala hungered for the opportunity to do something, anything, to get out of this mess, but he knew they would have to be patient.

“We wait,” he said.

AUSTIN UNCLAMPED HIS MANIPULATOR from the cable and began to tap out a new message on the bathysphere’s skin. He got out only a few letters before the current suddenly caught his suit and pushed him several feet away from the sphere. Regaining control, he returned to tap out more letters.

The Hardsuit’s camera had been transmitting his struggles to the surface ship.

“What’s going on down there?” Gannon’s voice called. “Picture went dark, and now it’s back all jumbled.”

“Stand by,” Austin said, then finished tapping out his message.

“Standing by,” the captain replied.

Austin’s efforts had sapped his strength. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, and he was gulping for air like a beached flounder.

“Haul away!” he shouted breathlessly into the suit’s microphone.

ZAVALA HAD LISTENED CAREFULLY to the measured tapping coming through the skin of the B3. He’d caught the first few letters. After a pause, he’d caught the rest.

Float.

Hell, Kurt, if I could float, I would float.

The bathysphere still stuck in the mud, and Zavala vacillated between anger and despair. Maybe this was all a dream brought on by lack of oxygen. Maybe he was imagining all this, playing out a rescue that existed only in his mind.

A buzzer yanked him back to reality.

A red light blinked madly on the control panel. He realized that the light had been going on and off for some time, but his slow-moving mind had not realized it was warning that the air supply was about to end.

He reached out for the spare tank, barely got it off the wall, and turned on the valve.

Air hissed into the cabin and blew the fog from his brain. He flipped back the panel covering the manual switch for the flotation system and waited for something to happen.

AUSTIN HOVERED ABOVE the bottom of the ocean with the Hardsuit’s lights trained on the top of the B3. The cable went taut as, a half mile above his head, the winch began to turn, but the bathysphere didn’t budge. Dire scenarios marched through Austin’s head: the jury-rigged hook would break immediately and the sphere would remain trapped in the suction created by the mud; Zavala would forget to deploy the flotation system or the system wouldn’t work when he did; worse of all, both men were unconscious.

“Cable’s tight to the winch,” Gannon called down. “Anything happening at your end?”

Austin saw that the cable splice was unraveling.

“Just keep hauling,” he said.

He gritted his teeth as if he could lift the B3 through sheer willpower. The bathysphere remained where it was. The cable unraveled some more.

“Move, damnit!” he yelled.

Plumes of mud billowed around the bathysphere. Then the sphere pulled free, popping from the mud like a cork from a bottle, and righted itself. A thick cloud of silt hid the sphere for an instant before it rose into the glare of the Hardsuit’s searchlights.

Austin’s triumphant yell blasted through the ship’s public-address system.

The B3 was ten feet from the bottom, mud streaming off its sides, then twenty feet, and still there was no sign of air-bag deployment. What was Joe waiting for? Maybe the flotation doors were clogged with mud.

Austin kept pace, rising slowly with the bathysphere, his eyes glued to the hook and cable.

As the last strand of cable splice gave way, doors along the sides of the sphere suddenly blew open and six air bags blossomed and rapidly filled. The bathysphere rocked back and forth, stabilized, then began to ascend.

Austin watched the B3 until it was out of sight.

“They’re on their way,” he notified Gannon.

“You’re next,” the captain said. “How are you?”

“I’ll be a lot better topside.”

Austin steadied the thrusters so that he was in a more or less vertical position, and was ready when the Hardsuit jerked at the end of the cable. As the suit began its long trip, Austin turned off his lights and saw that he was not alone.

The blackness was speckled with dozens of constellations. He was surrounded by luminescent sea creatures that hung in place like stars. Occasionally, he saw something moving like the lights of an airplane across the night sky. Then his eye caught movement off to the left. The constellation hanging there at the edge of his peripheral vision seemed to be growing larger. Turning his head, he saw what looked like a trio of glowing amber eyes moving closer.

An alarm went off in Austin’s brain. He’d been focusing on the rescue and forgotten about the sinister shadow loitering nearby when the cables were cut on the B3 and the ROV.

The Hardsuit’s searchlights reflected off the smooth, dark surface of something shaped like a flattened teardrop. It was a submersible of some kind, most likely an automated underwater vehicle, or AUV, because he couldn’t see a tether. The glowing eyes on the leading edge were apparently sensors, but Austin was more interested in the sharp-edged metal mandibles protruding from the front of the vehicle.

The vehicle moved fast, gliding at a depth where the mandibles would intersect the cable pulling him to the surface. Austin stomped on his vertical-thrust pedal. There was a second’s delay before the thrusters overcame the Hardsuit’s inertia, then he shot up several feet, his attacker passing below him, the mandibles snapping at empty water.

The vehicle made a wide banking turn, rose to keep pace, and circled back for another attack.

Gannon was watching the encounter on the ship’s monitor.

“What the hell was that?” the captain yelled.

“Something that wants me for dinner!” Austin yelled back. “Haul faster!”

The nimble AUV was quick to adjust its strategy and speed. Coming in for its second attack, it slowed to a walk, stalking its target with the wariness of a predator whose prey showed unexpected behavior.

Austin waited until the thing was just yards away and then tapped his foot pedal. The Hardsuit rose a few feet, but not fast enough to escape the attacker. He raised his arms defensively, holding them out straight and close together. He crashed into the AUV’s extended manipulators glancingly, but not before his claw stabbed the AUV in its middle eye.

Austin’s head slammed against the inside of the Plexiglas helmet. The impact knocked him sideways, and he swung at the end of his cable like soap on a rope. Pain shot up his left arm from the wrist.

The AUV went for another pass, but it was moving slowly, and it jerked erratically from side to side like a hound sniffing out prey. Rather than coming straight for Austin, it feinted a frontal attack, then angled upward toward the cable. Because Austin was still dazed from the last attack, he was slow to give the vertical thrusters juice. The AUV’s pincers caught his raised right arm at the elbow and closed around it.

With his left manipulator, he grabbed onto a thruster mandible and powered himself down, then up, operating like a yo-yo. The thrusters were designed for horizontal rather than vertical movement, and the weight of the vehicle worked against it, bending the mandible so that it was useless. Then the blade snapped at the base. The AUV thrashed wildly, peeled off, and disappeared into the darkness.

“Kurt, are you okay?” the captain’s voice rang in Austin’s earphones. “For God’s sake, answer me!”

“Finestkind, Cap,” Austin managed to croak. “Haul me up.”

“Hauling away,” the captain said with relief in his voice. “What kind of music do you want for the ride to the top?”

“I’ll leave that up to you,” Austin said. He was too tired to think.

A moment later, the strains of a Strauss waltz came through his earphones, and he began his long trip to the surface to “Tales from the Vienna Wood.”

As Austin was hauled toward the ship, he was vaguely aware that he still clutched the AUV’s blade in his metal claw as if it were a hunting trophy.