Stephen Baxter - Flood

And then, as the mooring arm was released and the ship bobbed free, they gave a last wave to the watching crew and scientists on the deck of the Endurance. Gordo gave them a crisp salute. Gary stood beside him, watching silently. It struck Lily how odd it was to see that familiar face here, in circumstances that could hardly be more different from their long confinement in Barcelona.

Lily and Thandie climbed down through the access tunnel to the gondola. The tunnel ran vertically through the body of the bathyscaphe, cutting between two of the gasoline tanks. Lily had gone through this during her training with Gordo, and knew the drill. At the bottom of the tunnel she had to lower herself feet-first through a hatch into the gondola itself. The hatch more than any other component showed the bathyscaphe’s age, its handles rubbed smooth by decades of wear.

Once they were both in, Thandie pulled the hatch closed. “Christ,” she said. “This tub always stinks of gasoline. Let’s get it done.”

They shucked off their Mae Wests, settled at their stations and ran through a quick checklist of their essential systems. They would be kept alive by oxygen cylinders and a modern carbon dioxide scrubbing system, cylinders, fans, pumps, filters, derived from similar technology used on the Space Station. When the scrubbing system started up there was a wheezing noise, like the hum of the fan on an old-fashioned desktop computer. Lily confirmed that the propulsion system, the steerable propellers set on the upper hull, was functional. And Thandie checked that the external sensors were working, the TV cameras, a sample-collection pump system, a pod of down-pointing sonar and radar to explore the deep subsurface. There was a kind of robot arm which could be used to manipulate objects outside the hull.

As they worked, the gondola, fixed to the keel of the rolling hull, swung sharply back and forth. The bucket seats had harnesses, and Lily strapped herself in. But the rolling made it hard to work the controls, even to read the display screens, and her stomach churned. But she was most definitely not going to throw up in here. Thandie whistled as she checked over her equipment, deliberately nonchalant.

The gondola was a sphere only about two meters across, equipped with a couple of bucket seats, a small chemical toilet and a provisions bag. Opposite the hatch, looking downwards, was the single window, a solid block of Plexiglas set into the ten-centimeter-thick steel walls. There was actually a lot more useful room in here than there had been back in the 1950s. The interior had been stripped out and remodeled with modern instruments and controls; the scuffed walls were plastered with foldable screens.

But still the gondola felt very cramped to Lily. She could see why Gordo had taken to the work so easily; spacecraft like the Soyuz were just as confining. Lily was a flier, used to small cabins maybe but usually surrounded by infinite space. She wondered how well she was going to cope with the containment inside this steel coffin with kilometers of ocean piling up above her, and absolutely no way out.

Finally Lily tested the comms system. Gordo was acting as what he called “capcom” today; it was reassuring to hear his voice. They had a long-wavelength radio link, and also a backup hydrophone link, although at the depths they would reach it would take several seconds for a sound wave to pass through the water to the support ship on the surface above.

All was confirmed ready, by Lily, Thandie, Gordo and the Endurance crew. Lily tapped a screen.

The ballast tanks fore and aft flooded, and the Trieste dropped. Just for a moment there was a surge, like a fast elevator descending. But that soon smoothed out, and so did the rolling; already they had left the surface waves behind them. Lily glanced through the window. Looking down she saw nothing but a bluish glow, and random particles of murk.

Thandie looked over Lily’s shoulder at the pilot’s display. It was centered on a schematic of the ship, the hull sliced up into the floats and ballast tanks, the blister of the gondola suspended beneath, the image covered with status numbers. “Looks nominal to me.”

“Yes…”

The principle of the bathyscaphe was pretty simple. She was like a hot air balloon, laden with ballast. Gasoline was used as the float material, the “air” in the balloon, because it was lighter than water but incompressible even at extreme pressures, and so retained its buoyant properties. The ballast was heavy iron shot. Right now the Trieste was heavier than the sea water she displaced, just, and so she sank steadily. The descent would be a powered dive, with Lily directing their fall to points of interest with the steerable propellers.

When it was time to lift, the external pressure would be too high to allow them to blow ballast tanks with air in the usual way. So Lily would shut down an electromagnet to release the iron ballast from its hoppers, and the Trieste would instantly become lighter than the water, and up she would go like an air bubble. It was a fail-safe arrangement; if onboard power failed the shot would be released immediately.

The whole design was an advance on older bathyspheres, which were simple balls of steel lowered from ships on cables, like bait on a fishing line. The Trieste was a free-falling, self-directing super-bathysphere.

Thandie tapped a depth meter.“We’re dropping at around sixty centimeters per second. Well, that’s about right, two kilometers an hour. The Ridge summits are around two and a half kilometers below sea level, and the flank of the mid-Atlantic rise is five kilometers deeper than that. I’m hoping to make it down to around four klicks today-about two hours down.” She sat back and looked at Lily. “So. Welcome to my world.”

“Thanks.”

“We may as well relax.” Thandie rummaged in the provisions bag and produced a thermos. “You want some coffee? We have chocolate. You’re supposed to save it until we’re down in the depths, when it gets pretty cold in here, seven or eight degrees, and you need the sugar rush. What I always say is, fuck it.” She hauled out a slab of chocolate, tore off the wrapper, cracked it and handed Lily a piece.

The two of them sat there, eating their chocolate sociably and drinking coffee, while the smooth descent continued.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” Thandie said, munching. “We haven’t had a lot of time together, you and me, since all this started. But I feel I know you already. I should tell you the stories Gary has about you, from Barcelona.”

“Go on,” Lily said cautiously.

“Like the time you took on the guard who walked in wearing the ring he stole from you.”

“Yeah. They took stuff off each of us in the first minute, as soon as we were captured. But to tell the truth I was just as pissed at the way he wore my sunglasses all the time.”

Thandie laughed. “And the time you cut off your own hair, rather than let them do it to you.”

“I always wore my hair short anyhow. But I couldn’t bear to have them do that, you know? It was all I had left, of me. So I fought back when they tried to shave me.” Which had earned her beatings, and from Said a threat of violation with a broken Coke bottle. “They gave up in the end and let me do it myself.”

“And,” Thandie said, “the time Gary said you dug him out of the worst pit he fell into. When he had diarrhea, and wasn’t allowed out to the john. It wasn’t the illness, he said, it was the shame in front of the others.”

And so Lily had lifted her faded T-shirt, dropped her shorts and shat in the corner, just as Gary had. “My finest hour,” she said.

“Well, it worked, you were a true friend,” Thandie murmured. “You know, I don’t know if I could have stood it. Not the captivity, but the fact of not being able to do anything.”