Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

Aggie was trembling, and it wasn’t only the cold air causing it. Both of them could be dead within the hour. For Mercer, it was a feeling he’d experienced before but had not grown used to. But it was something that went far beyond Aggie’s realm of experience. Her beautiful face was pale, and her pouting lower lip quivered. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

“We’re going to make it, Aggie,” Mercer said. “We have to.”

She nodded up at him and could not resist kissing him, pressing herself against his body, wrapping her arms around him. It could be the last embrace either one would ever experience, and they made it special, something beyond fear and beyond a physical touch. A current passed between them in the frigid pump room, something tangible that neither could, or wanted to, deny. If they survived the next hour, it was something they both wanted to explore together.

“Are you ready?”

“Let’s do it,” Aggie replied, steeling herself.

Mercer settled himself on the raft, his head and feet in perfect position, his grease-slicked hands slipping through the loops of tape he’d made as handholds. The toolboxes under the framework would allow water to creep up underneath the raft and float them free. Otherwise, the raft would have simply filled with water as the cavernous chamber flooded.

Aggie went to the controls, pressing several rubberized buttons in succession, each motion bringing another pump online. The noise of the huge turbine pumps built quickly, echoing off the steel walls in a shrieking cry as four thousand gallons per minute were forced through each one.

“The noise will die after the pumps are submerged,” Aggie screamed, closing the watertight pressure doors that housed the electronic controls. “We’ve got about ten minutes before the water reaches this level.”

“Get into position now,” Mercer said from the floor. “We can’t afford to be surprised.”

Aggie lay down on top of him, her back pressed to his chest, her bottom cupped around his waist almost sexually. He shook under her to dislodge her.

“Not like that. Stay on your back but turn around so your head is on my thighs, your legs around my head. That’ll distribute the weight better.”

She did as he ordered, shifting nimbly. Their position afforded Mercer a view of the mysterious place between her spread thighs. He quickly purged his mind of those thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

The wait was interminable. They lay quietly, not speaking to each other even when the pumps were finally submerged and their piercing whine was dulled to a low whoosh. The water was rising so fast they could feel the air being pushed ahead of it in an icy gale, a tease of the true cold to come. Minutes dragged by. Mercer kept glancing to the side, expecting to see the water rushing through the floor grates in a frothing roil. Yet it would not come.

Every second felt slower than the previous, expectation and fear bringing them both to the point where neither could lie still. They nervously scratched at imaginary itches or twisted to get more comfortable. Mercer was breathing so deeply that the motion of his lungs forced Aggie to bend even farther in an already uncomfortable position.

The sound of the rushing water was getting louder, the wind blowing more fierce. It would happen at any moment. Mercer turned once again to look to their left. Just then the water came like a geyser.

“Here we go!” he shouted over the din. They were lifted up off the toolbox cradle even before he had finished speaking.

Like a kite caught in a brutal updraft, the makeshift raft was plucked from the deck in a gut-wrenching swoop. Water splashed over the side at an alarming rate, drops hitting their exposed faces like needle jabs. Within seconds, six inches of icy saltwater were pooled around Mercer’s bent waist, inches from soaking into Aggie’s buttocks. If any more came aboard and drenched her, she would be dead before they reached to the top of the caisson.

But Mercer couldn’t dwell on that now; he had something more immediate to worry about. His weight, plus hers pressing down on him, was almost too much for him to bear. The straps he’d fashioned for his hands dug into his flesh, wrenching his arms painfully. It would take them thirty minutes to reach the top and he was already afraid he couldn’t hold on for another thirty seconds.

The eddying water twisted the craft around, spiraling it on a tight axis. The raft was surprisingly stable considering the turgid water, but as they spun, more water slopped over the side. Mercer could feel it against the survival suit in the few areas where the insulation had been lost. The cold was biting. It numbed him so that his thigh felt as though it had been burned. And that was through the waterproofing of the Sterns suit and his jeans. If water got against his skin, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than a few minutes.

“How you doing?” he managed to ask, his teeth clenched from the stress of holding his body rigid.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Aggie cried.

“That’s what the Wright brothers said to each other.” Mercer tried to put a little cheer in his voice.

“They failed the first time.”

“We don’t have that option.”

While at first the ascent up the support leg seemed quick, the little raft rising alarmingly, their perception changed as the true nature of the challenge unfolded. Aggie was within a couple inches of being submerged by the water flooding onto the tarp, and there was nothing they could do about it. Mercer needed to keep a vise grip on the scaffold to maintain the raft’s stability so he couldn’t try to bail, and Aggie was having a hard time just holding her precarious balance. The first ten minutes were an absolute agony, and there was no reprieve as they continued.

Mercer’s arms began to tremble as his strength waned, his body unconsciously sinking farther against the tarp, Aggie coming that much closer to hitting the water. She noticed the dip and cried out. He tightened up once again, his stomach and back knotting in great bunched cords. The strain was only slightly less than the gymnastics maneuver called the iron cross. It was forty-two degrees in the column, and he was sweating, salty sheets running down his face.

Aggie could sense his struggle. “Is there anything I can do to make this easier?”

It took him a few seconds to gather the strength to reply — he was tapping out and they still had another sixty feet to the top of the shaft. “Go on the fastest crash diet in history.”

Slowly, too slowly, the water level rose, and the surface calmed considerably from those first frightening moments when they were caught in the initial upwell. The weld seams on the walls marked their passage, each weld another ten feet of progress, another ten feet less until the torture was over. The top of the caisson still looked impossibly out of reach, a shadow high over their heads, a dim goal that got darker as another of the lights strung along the circular walls submerged.

At first, Mercer thought the pain that suddenly shot through his upper thigh was a sharper stab of muscle cramp. A second later, he realized that his suit was leaking. The near-freezing water had found a way in through a tear he had missed, or more likely the tape was beginning to fail. The water felt like acid.

He cried out, his pain echoing over the sound of the pumps and the bubbling water.

“What is it?”

“Hole in my suit, the water’s getting in.”

“Is it bad?”

“It ain’t good,” he moaned as more of his skin was doused in icy water. So strong was the urge to try and rub some warmth back to the spot, he had to shut his eyes and concentrate to maintain his grip on the scaffold. They had thirty feet to go. “Aggie, you’ve got to arch your back, take your weight off of me. I can’t take this much longer.”