Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

She did as he asked, digging her boots into his shoulders, her shoulders pressed against his shins so that when she shifted, arcing in a parody of orgasm, the strain was taken up by his bones rather than muscles. He gasped as her weight came off of him, his back and stomach relaxing for the first time in twenty minutes. The position was now as painful for her as it had been for him. She bore it as long as possible, her body made supple and strong through years of fencing and exercise, but after only a few minutes, she had to lower herself against him again.

“I’m sorry,” she panted. “That’s the best I can do.”

“I’m all right now,” he lied. “Besides, we’re almost there.”

Deep below the rig, in the black waters of the Sound, buried under eighteen feet of silty mud, the five huge anchors restraining number three support jacket were losing their mooring integrity as the leg began sinking, pulling at the fifteen other anchors holding the rig in position. To maintain their strength, the mooring lines must be rigid at all times. Aggie had been forced to take the automated tensioning hydraulics off-line in order for her to flood only the one leg. As more water filled the support, the catenary lines began to sag beyond their fracture points, and one by one they parted. The seven-inch-thick steel wires sheared cleanly, the anchored ends dropping silently into the gloom, the remainder hanging from the underside of the rig like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish.

The other plow-shaped Delta Flipper anchors were so well placed that they hadn’t dragged, and their tension was so strong that the rig began to pendulum back. Rather than listing toward the filled support leg, the Omega swung one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Though the dynamics of the entire anchoring system was measured in the thousands of tons, the rig was now so unbalanced that every gallon of water cycling through the pumps and into the support column shifted the structure just a little more.

The twenty-knot incoming tide rushing past the platform was the only thing keeping the rig upright, pressing just enough against the legs to keep them stable. But the delicate balance of force, counterforce, weight, buoyancy, and drag wouldn’t last as the pumps continued to fill the Omega ’s buttress.

“Only a couple more feet,” Aggie announced in amazement.

“How far are we from the elevator opening?” Mercer asked grimly. The proximity of their goal couldn’t overcome his pain and the numbness that had spread through his lower body.

“We’re coming up right below it. Your feet are only a couple of inches from the cable.”

“As soon as we get close enough to the door, you have to jam the screwdriver between it and the casing. There should be a mechanical release to open it in case the automatic system doesn’t work and someone is trapped in the car.”

“Like in the movies?”

“Exactly.”

Aggie tried to extend her arm, simulating the motions she would need to pry open the door. As soon as she moved her hand, she fell off Mercer’s chest with a scream.

She hit the water pooled on the tarp and began to thrash, ripping through the plastic, and destroying the raft. Mercer let go of the struts, falling into the water with Aggie. The survival suit kept him buoyant, and he grabbed Aggie as she flailed. He pulled her close, trying to calm her before she drowned from her own panic.

“Oh, my God, it hurts. Oh, sweet Christ, I can’t, I can’t…” Her lips were blue as the freezing water seeped around the tape Mercer had used to cover her. “Mercer, please, oh, God, I’m going to die.”

“Aggie! Aggie!” Mercer shouted, looking into her eyes but seeing he’d already lost her to fear. She stared back vacantly and he feared she’d gone into shock. He barely noticed or cared that the Sterns suit had failed and that he too was soaked to the skin. He had to get them out of the water in the next few seconds.

Just then, four of the twenty-ton anchors securing the offshore platform were wrenched from the seabed in clouds of drifting silt, tearing huge furrows through the mud, relinquishing their combined thousand tons of counterforce. There was no stopping the Omega now. She was going to flip. There was too much weight on one corner of the rig, and without the anchors, the buoyancy of the other three legs would capsize her in minutes. Of the eleven anchors still holding fast, only three more had to fail before the platform upended and vanished beneath the waves.

The effects within column number three were instantaneous. One moment, Aggie and Mercer were struggling just below the elevator door, and the next second, the rig had dipped and rushing water forced them into the empty elevator vestibule. They were pressed to the very ceiling by Mercer’s survival suit, totally submerged and held helpless by water pressure.

The icy water beat against Mercer’s temples, sharp stabbing pulses that made him nauseous. His mind was nothing but a swirling gray cloud of pain. His reserves were gone. He’d failed. They were going to die.

Aggie’s movement was so slight that he almost didn’t feel it, yet unbelievably she pressed on his hand, opening his fingers and placing something against his palm. He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to open his eyes to the saltwater, but something forced him on. He glanced down and saw in the watery light that somehow, through her thrashing and her fear and her proximity to death, Aggie had maintained her grip on the screwdriver and had the presence of mind to place it in his hand.

He plunged the tool at the door, missing the seam by a good six inches with his drunken lunge, but the angle of his attack forced the flat point of the screwdriver to gouge along the door and lodge firmly in the crack. The tip found the release on the pressure bar. He hauled back on the handle and the door swung free, pushed outward by tons of water.

Aggie and Mercer burst through the narrow door in a rush, like the life-giving spill of birth, borne along the hallway by thousands of gallons of water, careening off the bulkheads and tumbling forty feet before smashing against a twist in the corridor, water surging around them in a diminishing torrent.

Both of them retched until their lungs ached, shivering in the steel hallway as water continued to gush past. They needed to stop, to take time to recover and strip out of their soaked clothing, but they couldn’t. The Petromax Omega was bobbing like a pleasure boat caught in a rough storm, the tensioned mooring lines stretching beyond their maximum tolerances yet amazingly still holding. But each swing against them was stronger and stronger, as the top structure of the platform arced fifteen degrees against the gracefully swooping catenaries.

“We have to move,” Mercer gasped, his jaw chattering like a jackhammer. “Can you walk?”

Aggie didn’t respond — she had slipped into unconsciousness.

Ignoring his own needs, Mercer took the time to strip Aggie out of her clothing, yanking off her sodden jacket, sweater, and T-shirt and peeling her wet jeans from her legs, gaining a few more minutes before she froze to death. He looked down the corridor, closing his eyes for a moment, thinking back to the winding journey he’d taken to this spot while under guard by Abu Alam. He closed his mind to everything — his pain, the cold, the imminent destruction of the rig — and reconstructed the route corner by corner.

After defeating the Minotaur in Greek mythology, Theseus used a string to guide him back out of the labyrinth. Mercer had only his own clouded mind. Carrying Aggie, he ran through the empty passages, his feet pounding the steel battle deck as he backtracked the tortured path. Yet unerringly he negotiated intersections and stairs and doorways, making the correct decisions every step of the way, instinct driving him on. Had he stopped to think, he would have been lost in moments. The stark corridors of the rig’s underworks were indistinguishable from one another. There were no remarkable objects to remind him of the proper route, yet still he ran, covering the distance back to the living module in half the time it had taken Alam to bring him to the support leg. Utilitarian steel walls gave way to faux wood paneling and thin carpet as he burst through an open hatchway and into the crew’s quarters.