Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘You may lose comms again. You’ve got to keep watching the depth gauge. If your ascent stops, you’ve got to get out and come up in the evac suit. We may get you all the way up to the surface without evac, but if we don’t, you’ve got to act fast. You’ll drop like a stone again otherwise. Have you got that, Dominik?’

‘Got it. Just get me out of here, Peter.’

‘We’re going to kill all power except the engines and comms. Hold tight until we bring back the control-panel lights.’

Darkness. A darkness beyond any night. To begin with he could see nothing; then something drifted past the quartz porthole. Something glowing in the distance. A single bright pinpoint. Bioluminescence: an angler fish or cookie-cutter shark creating its own distant speck of light in the abyss, like a distant lighthouse. A beacon. For a second, Korn fixed his full attention on that small, faint glimmer and it seemed to him to have a profound significance he could not quite grasp.

The control board before him lit up again. The few blinking buttons and the LED display of the depth gauge suddenly blindingly bright after the abyssal dark. Three thousand metres. There was an alert light on the suit. When he switched it on, its flashing exploded in the cabin. More creaking. The sea still wanting to crush him out of existence.

‘Dominik…’ Wiegand’s voice again.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We have to get you up to at least one-eighty metres. The evac suit’s tested to that depth. Just relax and let it bring you up. The suit’s designed to ascend no faster than three metres a second, so don’t worry about decompression sickness. But you must get out if there’s any sign that the module isn’t going to make it to the surface.’

One thousand, five hundred metres.

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Korn said to himself. ‘We shouldn’t be here.’

‘Repeat, Dominik…’

‘I said we shouldn’t be here. We have no right. We shouldn’t have the presumption, the arrogance-’

‘I need you to focus, Dominik,’ Wiegand’s voice cut across him. ‘Stay focused. Got it?’

Nine hundred metres. Eight.

‘I’m focused, Peter. I’m more focused than you think…’

The water outside became less dark. Not lighter; less dark.

‘Keep your eyes on the gauge, Dominik…’

The constant, reassuring whirr of the motors stopped.

‘Peter…’

‘Brace, Dominik!’ Wiegand’s voice over the comms was urgent. ‘I’m going to vent the tanks. Brace!’

Something thundered around Korn. Deafening. Uncompressible petroleum ballast being voided from the stabilising tanks. Steel ballast released from the Pharos One’ s electromagnetic grip. Now he felt movement. A surge upward pinning him to his seat. He clung tight to the armrests, trying to control his breathing, his pulse pounding in his ears.

‘Peter?’

The comms system was down again. He was alone once more, but surging up to the environment he belonged in. His true place in the world. Out of the depths. De profundis.

Five hundred metres. Four. Three. He snapped the red cover off the emergency explosive-bolt release and pushed back the trigger guard. He had to time it right. Exactly right. Two hundred and eighty metres. Just a little more.

He knew what he was seeing, but didn’t want to see it. His ascent was slowing. Two hundred forty… twenty… Even slower now. Two hundred. Too deep. Still too deep. The gauge held for an eternity at one seventy.

Now. Do it now. His reason screamed at him: he knew that the impetus given by the explosive voiding of the tanks was spent. There was only one way to go now: back down into the abyss. Yet something froze him: an irrational hope that the submersible would somehow overcome the universal laws of physics.

One hundred and eighty.

He had lost ten crucial metres and gained one atmosphere of extra pressure. He checked his restraint harness was fastened and pulled the switch. The explosive bolts fired, releasing the hatch.

It was like being hit by a car: the water did not surge into the cabin, it rammed into the back of the command chair like a solid mass. An intense steel-sharp pain shot through his arm and into his shoulder. He knew his forearm had been broken, but when he checked his arm it wasn’t to examine the extent of the break but to make sure the sleeve of the evac suit hadn’t ruptured. It hadn’t.

Slamming the fist of his uninjured arm into the release buckle, Korn undid the safety harness. Ignoring the sharp pain in his other arm, he scrabbled around behind his chair and pushed himself out of the Pharos One’ s only hatch, at the rear of the vessel. He was going to be coming out of a fast-sinking submersible; he needed to get out and clear fast. A snagged sleeve or belt, or becoming tangled in the robot arm, and he might end up trapped there, dragged back down to the bottom. As it was, he reckoned he’d have lost another ten, maybe twenty metres. Suddenly he was outside, in the open water. Pushing away. The survival suit insulated him against the cold, swelling up with captive air to resist the worst of the pressure, but its buoyancy pushed him upwards against the rear hull of the sinking submersible.

He braced his legs against the bright yellow hull and pushed away with his feet. He was free. Free and rising.

He watched the Pharos One sink beneath him. Silent. Fading fast in the gloom; becoming smaller, then gradually invisible in the dark of the water. He looked at the depth gauge on the wrist of his suit. One sixty and rising.

Survivable. Dangerous, but definitely survivable. He was going to make it.

He continued to rise at a decompression-safe rate for another ninety-seven metres. He could see, vague and distant above him, the attenuated bloom of day.

The surface.

It was at that moment that the material of his evac suit — which, unknown to Korn, had been caught on a hull rivet and stretched to tolerance when he had been evacuating the Pharos One — split open and exploded into a constellation of escaping air bubbles.

Two Weeks before the Storm

Meliha made her way along the street, hugging the wall as if the red brick had been magnetised. They were after her. They were after her and they would find her. They always found everyone. And when they found her, they would probably kill her. Maybe not there and then. Maybe not even in the way most people would think of a killing. They could kill someone’s mind, destroy their personality, and leave the body living, walking, breathing. But as a person, as a being, you would be just as dead.

It was cold. So cold. And wet. And dark. And her feet hurt. She had walked so far. Most of all, Meliha was afraid. She was afraid of the people who were after her because she could no longer see them as people. Somehow they had achieved what they had always wanted to achieve, what they claimed they could achieve, and had become something other than human. She found that she didn’t even think of them as individuals, but as a collective, single being. Corporate.

A singularity.

Meliha tried to push the fear out of her being. Fear was an emotion she had never really had much time for. She had been a clever, brave, inquisitive child. A bold little girl who faced the world pugnaciously. Fearlessly. ‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim ’: that was what her father had always called her: ‘My brave little tigress’. She thought back to the times, the hours, she would sit and talk with him, asking bold questions about the world. Whatever the question, he always had an answer. Not always the answer to her question, he would tell her, but an answer. He had once showed her a crystal paperweight that he kept on his desk. Something he had picked up during his many years and countless travels as a geologist. He told her that beautiful things like crystals and jewels lay scattered all around the world, waiting to be found; sometimes buried deep in rock, sometimes lying scattered near the surface. There were times, he had told her, when you simply found them by chance, other times when you had to work hard — looking carefully and digging deep — to find them.