by S. S. Segran
The friends hurried to the nondescript door at the back of the vault. Aari and Kody passed through first, hauling Jag. Mariah, helping Tegan carry the chest, was the last in line. She turned to Mokun. He stood fifty feet away at the vault’s closed entrance like a guard dog, his back to them.
“How will we know when you disengage her from the lathe’ad?” she called.
He didn’t turn to acknowledge her. “I recognize your consciousnesses now. I will reach out to you in the novasphere and let you know. We’ll figure out the next steps afterward.”
“Alright . . . good luck.” She hesitated. “And thank you for helping us.”
A series of beeps came from the door in front of Mokun. “They’re here. Go, Ms. Ashton.” As Mariah stepped through the exit, he added, “And you were right, you know. I do have a responsibility to share knowledge with my people—if they’ll have me.”
The door to the cavern swung shut behind her before she could answer, and the lapping of water filled her ears as darkness took her sight. “Oh, wow, I can’t see a thing in here.”
“There’s a control room or something beside us,” Kody said. “Here, put Jag down so I can check it out.” A hard bonk sounded not two seconds later. “Ow! Stupid door! You know what, for the longest time I kinda thought my abilities were lame compared to you guys, but I’ve been proven wrong twice in the span of, like, three minutes. I already miss my enhanced senses.”
There was some scuffling of feet followed by a click near Mariah. Lights flared to life, revealing a cavern with two docks on either side. Seawater filled the space between, its briny scent sitting heavy in the air.
Kody emerged from a small structure near the door they had entered. “Holy smokes, check out our ride.”
A glossy, elongated vessel was held in position by two large clamps on the dock directly ahead, its bulbous transparent cockpit facing them. It was unlike any submarine Mariah had ever seen, though not overtly ostentatious. A horizontal fin with two mostly submerged propellers behind it was attached to the aft of the watercraft, and round portholes were set a few feet apart the entire length of the vessel.
“Chop Anand.” Kody grabbed Jag under the arms again. “You guys hear the fight going on back there, yeah? We need to move.”
“I hope Mokun holds out,” Mariah said.
Aari’s expression strained as he helped carry Jag over the dock. “He seems like a fighter. Dunno how long he’ll be able to fend off those SONEs, though.”
Kody pulled open the submarine’s hatch and they rushed in just as the door from the vault flew open. Five muscular forms lunged through, fangs flashing in the overhead lights.
“Marauders!” Mariah threw out a hand but, to her dismay, nothing happened.
“The pills we took!” Kody shouted. “We’ve been nerfed! Get in!”
Mariah slipped inside and spun the sturdy hand-wheel, sealing the vessel just as the beasts drew even. They prowled the dock, sulfur-yellow eyes homing in on the friends visible through the cockpit’s acrylic glass.
Aari dropped into the pilot’s seat and pressed the button Mokun had told them about. The rock wall slid up, revealing an expanse of water. The night sky was barely visible; darkness had begun to fade away and welcomed in its place the first streaks of dawn.
“Okay, cavern door’s open. Now how do we reverse this giant—aha!” He tapped the screen twice. The vessel shuddered as the propellers whirred, but otherwise did not budge.
“We’re still attached to the clamps!” Tegan yelled.
“Agh, right!”
The girls had just pushed the chest against one of the bulkheads when the hydraulic limbs swiveled, lowering the submarine deeper into the water and releasing it. As it began to move, two of the Marauders leapt onto the globular anterior. Their limbs flexed as they tried to find purchase but the acrylic refused to yield to their claws. They struggled to make a dent atop the cockpit and slid off in the end, splashing straight into the water, their razor claws leaving long scratches on the smooth surface.
Aari slumped in his seat, one hand resting on his heart as the submarine reversed out of the cave. The fingers of his free hand hovered over an accommodating touchscreen display. “There are instructions here that say we need to be three hundred feet out into open water before we can dive.”
Tegan grumbled as she settled onto the chest, cross-legged, and proceeded to knead her cheeks with her hands. “We are inside one very expensive floating contraption.”
Mariah sat beside her, linking arms as they rode the motion of the waves. “Are you going to be okay?”
“As long as this thing has enough air to last us all the way to Portugal, I’ll be fine. Which reminds me—Brainiac, where exactly in Portugal are we going?”
“The destination entered into the system says Lisbon,” he replied. He leaned over the controls eagerly. “Man, this is so much easier to work with than a car. Everything is automated. Climate control, digital depth gauge as well as a physical one, rudder angle indicator, ballast panel, all the good stuff. It’s interesting that everything is still functioning even after the EMPs hit. I guess that means the sub is shielded somehow. But if that’s the case, how does the autopilot connect to a GPS satellite when there’s no GPS?”
Kody hunkered down beside Jag on the floor as they cleared the open mouth of the cavern, adjusting the other boy’s position so he would be more comfortable. “As long as it takes us to safety, I don’t care. It’s probably another tech Phoenix created before they set the world on fire.” He pulled the broken pieces of his staff from the waistband of his sweatpants and held them up mournfully. “Not cool, big guy. Not cool.”
Mariah began scouring around the cockpit. “Aari, is there a physical copy of a handbook somewhere? Like an Owner’s Manual type of thing?”
In response, an object came whipping toward her, knocking her in the chest. She caught it; a white binder with a picture of the sub on the cover. “Perfect!” She rejoined Tegan. “Here. This might help distract you from everything. I know you’d feel better being prepared.”
Tegan took the binder and tapped it against Mariah’s arm gratefully before diving into its contents.
Something pinged against the hull. Tegan shot up, using a knee on the box to steady herself, and peered out one of the portholes. Mariah found another and stared up at the island’s seventy-foot cliff. In the fading twilight, the sun’s newborn rays spangled off mounted weapons at the edge of the precipice. Small figures stood behind, angling the barrels down so they pointed at the submarine.
Mariah’s fingertips arched against the window, so hard her joints might have snapped. “They’re shooting at us? I thought they wanted us alive!”
Projectiles clanged off the vessel’s body. Occasionally one struck the cockpit, leaving a smear of white against the acrylic, but did not seem to do any damage otherwise. “Looks like they’re trying to puncture the hull!” Aari yelled. “They wanna prevent the sub from diving!”
“That might change pretty quick,” Kody warned. “If we get too far out of range, maybe they’ve got orders to just blow us up.”
“How much longer, Aari?” Mariah cried.
“We’re almost there!”
She scrambled toward the cockpit, latching onto the pilot’s chair, and remained by Aari’s side as the bullets continued to pelt their vessel. She flinched at every strike but kept her gaze fixed on the display in the control panel. The moments dragged. Seventy feet . . . sixty feet . . . fifty . . .
The projectiles rang gong-like throughout the submarine. Behind Mariah, Kody had his hands pressed against his ears, muttering something about wishing he had his powers back so he could shut out the sounds.
“This is probably bad timing,” Tegan said, “but should we really be diving? With all the bullets it’s taken, the sub might be compromised.”
Aari’s fingers darted across the screen. “Says here the hull integrity is at a hundred percent.”
Mariah cast a wary eye upward, sc
anning for signs of breaches but finding none. She looked back at the monitor. Thirty . . . twenty . . .
“Alright, here we go!” Aari hollered. A heavy hissing instantly surrounded them. “Don’t panic, that’s just the ballast tanks filling up with water and forcing air out though their vents!”
The impacts petered out as water closed over the transparent cockpit. A collective breath was released from every conscious body within the submarine. “We’re at fifty feet, diving beautifully and moving forward,” Aari announced.
Tegan settled back onto the chest, reopening the manual. Her face was splotched, and she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “How far down are we gonna go?”
“Four hundred feet, by the looks of it.”
She swallowed, nodding, then stuck her nose back into the laminated pages, never once lifting her eyes to take in the scenery around them. Mariah, on the other hand, flounced around the cockpit, drinking everything in. “This is insane! We’re a hundred feet below the surface! Everything is so blue down here! Like, I knew it would be, but until you experience it, it’s so abstract.”
Aari beamed at her. “This would be even better if there was full daylight up there. We’re at the perfect depth to see some really neat marine life when the sun’s shining. When we pass three hundred feet, we’ll already be in the dysphotic zone—darker to see, but not impossible.”
Mariah put her nose up against the acrylic. “I do see some fish. Ugh, I didn’t realize how empty my stomach is until I saw them. Oh, jeez, I sound like Kody.”
“Please don’t talk about food,” Kody moaned. “I’m so hungry, I could eat my pants.”
“There’s probably some grub in the back,” Aari said. “Old man wouldn’t send us off without the basic necessities. Uh, I hope, anyway.”
Kody leapt up and padded toward the other end of the submarine. “Good point! I’ll go look. See if I can find the little men’s room while I’m at it . . .”
Mariah stole another glance at the gauges on the control panel. “Two hundred-and-fifty feet. It’s super weird not feeling any changes in pressure like you sometimes do in planes.”
“It would be really bad news if we felt that down here.” Aari passed the back of his wrist across his hairline. “Why am I sweating?”
Something cool and wet landed on Mariah’s head, trailing down between her eyebrows and sliding off the side of her nose. She wiped it away, only to have another drop follow the same path. She lifted her gaze from her hand, meeting Aari’s eyes. They looked up.
“Oh boy,” he whispered.
“‘Oh boy’ what?” Tegan asked sharply.
Mariah pointed up at the hairline cracks at the top of the cockpit that were spreading ever so slowly. “We might be in some trouble.”
As though waiting for her declaration, alarms suddenly screamed. Kody rushed back. “That’s not a sound you wanna hear when you’re a few hundred feet underwater!”
“We gotta get back to the surface!” Aari barked. “The system’s already started pumping out the ballasts so we should be rising soon!”
Mariah watched the digital depth gauge. Despite being on the ascent, they were hardly moving. “Aari, why aren’t we going up as fast as we came down?”
“I don’t know! There should be enough buoyancy! Maybe one or more of the tanks got hit? But it would show on the readout—”
“Just like how it showed integrity was at a hundred percent?”
“I . . . yeah, okay, maybe the sensors took a hit when we were being shot at.”
Mariah stumbled over to Tegan, who was still sitting on the chest, her attention locked on the growing fissure above. All the color had receded from her skin. Mariah grabbed her face, holding the sides of her friend’s head firmly. “Teegs. Teegs, look at me.”
Tegan’s pupils quivered, shifting from the submarine’s wound to Jag’s unconscious form on the floor. “If I had my powers, I could find some marine life to lift the sub to safety,” she whispered. “But I have nothing. We have nothing.”
“Does this boat have that liquid rubber in a spray can?” Kody yelled. “That would be incredibly helpful right now!”
Aari left the pilot’s seat. “At this rate it’s going to take us forever to get to the surface. We need a Plan B and, in our state, it probably shouldn’t involve swimming out there in the dark and cold.”
Tegan shook her head free of Mariah’s grasp and tapped something in the binder on her lap. “The . . . ah . . . um . . .”
Aari knelt beside her, squeezing her forearm. “Take a moment.”
Her face creased; Mariah recognized the look of self-irritation. Seconds passed, and Tegan’s gaze cleared a little. “There are rebreather helmets. Only two. Jag needs to take one.”
“And you’re taking the other,” Kody said as he began rummaging around the numerous cubbies. “No, don’t try to argue. We’re all scared but it’s okay to admit that you need the helmet most.” He found the glossy black rebreathers, tossed one to Tegan, and rested the other by Jag’s head. “Also, when I went looking for snacks, I found an evacuation compartment at the back.”
Tegan set the helmet beside her and flipped to the end of the manual. “He’s right. It takes up the aft quarter of the sub. It leads to a tube, which leads to a hatch, which leads to a—a life raft!”
Aari angled his head to take a look. “It’ll just shoot out to the surface when it’s automatically released at two-hundred-and-twenty feet. We’d still have to swim to it.”
“Literally between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Kody piped. Mariah was surprised at his sanguine attitude until she noticed he was constantly moving, keeping himself busy with this and that.
Aari picked up Tegan’s rebreather and gave it a once-over under the light. “This is nuts,” he said. “Count on Phoenix to have all the best toys. The other closed-circuit rebreathers on the market don’t come close to this. And the mixed gas cartridges slot so nicely on the side.”
“The manual says it’s got a heads-up display to keep track of depth and monitor the chemicals used in the respiratory mix,” Tegan said. “Um, so it’s not all oxygen?”
“Nope. Pure O2 under pressure would actually kill you.”
Kody cleared his throat. “Not to alarm anyone, but my feet are getting a little wet.”
An inch of seawater covered the deck, but as the breaches in the cockpit grew, so too would the volume of the leaks. Tegan rested her elbows on the manual, fingers tented against her lips. “Hypothetically speaking, if we did have to swim, what would be the safest depth to do it from?”
“Fifty feet, max,” Aari said. “Our bodies were out of commission for almost a week, and this is far from a controlled pool environment. Not to mention, we’d have to help Jag along.”
“Where are we at now?”
Another alarm went off, and a red sign flashed on a screen against the wall across them, right above Jag: Life Raft Released.
“Looks like we just hit two-twenty,” Aari said. “Took us a little over six minutes. At this rate it’s gonna be another seventeen or so until we get to the surface.”
“Do you think we can make it without leaving the sub?” Tegan asked.
“I hope so. And we’re supposed to have enough air for several days, so unless we get flooded, we should be able to make it without much issue.”
Mariah, noticing Jag was currently lying in cold water, scampered over to pick up his helmet and drag him closer to the back of the vessel. “It would be super great of you to wake up soon,” she said, smoothing back his dampened hair. “And I could really use one of your hugs right now.”
The friends rode out the next five minutes wordlessly. Tegan, keeping her feet clear of the rising water, studied the manual with renewed urgency. Kody took up post by the pilot seat to monitor their ascent. “One-hundred-and-fifty-feet, and we’re taking on more water.”
Mariah pulled Jag upright, using her body to hold him against the pressure hull so he wouldn’t topple into what
was now several inches of sloshing brine. He flopped over her like a marionette, arms dangling past her shoulders. She grunted. “Listen, how about next time, one of us passes out and you do the heavy-lifting?”
Jag answered with a soft snore.
“Try to keep his head in a position where he isn’t doing that,” Aari advised. “His airway shouldn’t be blocked when he’s this unconscious.”
Mariah pushed Jag’s forehead back. The snoring stopped, and for the following era-spanning minutes, no one spoke until Tegan mumbled, “Is it just me, or does it feel like it’s taking longer to reach the hundred-foot mark?”
“We’re definitely taking longer,” confirmed Kody. “We might have lost more than one tank, but there’s no way to know for sure with the sensors all jacked up.”
Mariah looked up at Jag. It was disconcerting to be this close and see no life in him except for the uneven rhythm of his breaths. Aari’s words replayed in her ears, and a horrible thought occurred to her. “Guys, he’s not just unconscious, is he?”
The discomfort in their expressions unsettled Mariah’s stomach. Aari scratched the side of his neck. “The way Mokun said it, he did make it seem as if Jag’s probably comatose. But people in comas generally have some kind of brain damage. This is completely different. He’s had his mind messed with, then we tried to fix him, and now this.”
“One hundred feet,” Kody informed them quietly. “But he’ll wake up eventually, right?”
“Rest is probably the most important thing he needs to recover. He’s mentally spent. We just have to keep him hydrated. Once we get to the raft, we’ll wait out the drugs in our system, then reach out for help.” Aari smacked his brow. “I just realized—with the life raft up top, Reyor’s people are gonna know what’s happened, and they’ll be heading there to intercept us.”
I am going to lose my mind, Mariah thought, groaning.
Aari fiddled with the communicator. “According to the site map, the only place they house boats on site is at the other end of the island, so that’ll buy us a few extra minutes. But by the time we get up top . . .” He looked toward the expanding fissures. “. . . if we get up top, they might already be there.”