by JE Gurley
“Anchors away,” Kelly replied. The hull vibrated as anchors fore and aft plunged into the water and began their rush to the distant bottom.
“You’d best get on with it,” Mac ordered without looking at Casey or Nari.
“Roger that.” Casey followed Nari down the stairs as the ship rose and fell in the gentle swell.
In the room below the bridge, the divers and science team had gathered and Casey brought them up to speed.
“We are on site,” he announced. “The habitat was finished last month and one of our team will go down first to ensure that everything is still working. I know you have trained for this and you are all experienced divers, but, I will say this again, where we are going is nothing like your usual SCUBA trip to look at the pretty fish. At four hundred meters, it is dark and cold and the pressure is a fuck of a lot higher than you can imagine.
“This is a saturation dive. Which means you can look forward to a couple of days in a decompression chamber when you get back. We’ll be taking you down in the dive bell and you need to obey every single instruction given to you by the dive team and alert us immediately if you find yourself in difficulty.”
He looked around the group; three divers and seven civilians in all, two women and five men, including an underwater video specialist, his two video production assistants, a geologist, and a deep-sea mining engineer. The last two would be earning their keep, taking core samples and determining if it was worth committing company resources to a full drilling expedition. The cost of a prospecting mission with equipment like that would be high even without all the lobbying and bureaucratic rigmarole to jump through to get the necessary permits and licenses.
The video crew were mining company men, with experience working on offshore drilling platforms, tropical jungles, and deserts. How they got into a soft job like camera operating and editing was a mystery to Casey. The three of them looked like hard bastards. Not that it mattered a damn where they were going. Casey knew from experience that even the toughest could break when they went deep.
“There will be two trips. First, Steve and Billy will take Doctor Prasad, Doctor Halligan, Doctor Steele, and Mister Hudson. Then I’ll bring the video crew and their gear.”
Steele, the geologist, had the tanned and wiry frame of a field scientist. Only his salt-and-pepper beard suggested he was close to retirement age and still he grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. Behind his TV screen-sized glasses, his eyes sparkled with delight.
Hudson, the deep-sea engineer, was half Steele’s age and his face had the solemnity of a judge. Casey had worked with him before on other projects and knew that Hudson’s reputation for being the best man for the job was justified.
Casey closed his briefing. “Any questions? Okay then, use the bathroom; trust me, it’ll be a few days before you get to go comfortably again. Steve will help you with your dive gear and complete the safety checks. I’ll see you all on the bottom.”
The room cleared in silence, until only Casey and Aroha remained.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to do this. If you’re not ready, I mean. We can bring you down later.”
Aroha looked at him for the first time. “I said, I’m fine.”
Casey wanted to say he was sorry about her brother. The news had reached them in port two days before they shipped out. Aroha’s brother, Dave, was killed in a shark attack while surfing off the Kaikoura coast.
Aroha had been understandably shocked and devastated; it was in support of her that Casey took her drinking the night before they boarded the Waitangirua and left the port of Lyttelton. Ending up in bed together hadn’t been what either of them intended, and since then, Aroha found it hard to make eye-contact.
Casey nodded and walked out to the deck, inhaling the fresh air. The motion of the boat always made him nauseous and on the surface, he felt close to drowning. Underwater, those fears vanished, and he was completely calm and focused; he missed that tranquility when he was onshore.
“First group should be ready in a few minutes,” he announced.
“Yeah, boss,” Billy replied without looking up from doing the technical checks on Tyler’s gear.
The young diver stood next to a large suit of armor that weighed over 500 pounds and looked like a tire company mascot. The steel and fiberglass suit protected a diver to a depth of a thousand feet.
Casey frowned for a moment. “I’ll go start the monitoring and comms system check.”
Tyler watched Casey walking away from the corner of his eye. “I could totally drive the bell.”
“Uh-huh,” Billy grunted.
“Seriously, man. Casey should let me take it.”
“Didn’t you crash his truck?” Billy paused and looked at Tyler.
“I barely scratched it.”
“You backed his truck into a concrete wall and you expect him to let you drive the bell with passengers?”
“I—”
“No.” Billy opened the gleaming armored suit. “You ready to get canned?”
“Like a sardine.” Tyler pushed his arms into the stiff molded arm sections and settled his feet into the heavy boots.
“Air okay?” Billy asked.
Tyler felt the flow of cold gas coming into the suit caress his face. “Yeah.”
Billy closed the suit from behind and sealed the sections.
“You on the air yet?” Casey’s voice echoed in the fish-bowl helmet.
“Comm’s check,” Tyler said into the helmet microphone.
“Comm’s check confirmed,” Casey replied. “What are you going to do?”
Tyler rolled his eyes. “I’m going to descend on the umbilical line to a depth of two-hundred and seventy meters.”
“And then?”
“Hold until the cargo passes and Steve brings the bell back up.”
“Nothing else,” Casey warned.
“The suit can go to three hundred meters easy,” Tyler said.
“Yes, it can. But you aren’t going that deep.”
“I could drive the bell, which would give me more certified dive hours.”
“I haven’t forgotten what you did to my truck.”
“Yes, Dad,” Tyler muttered.
“Hey, you are only here because your father asked me to help out with getting you more commercial dive experience. So watch the attitude.”
“Roger that. All suit systems green. Ready to launch.”
Tyler had been diving since he was a kid. Finally old enough to get his commercial diving certificates and then breaking into the insular world of commercial diving had been a dream come true. It had only been possible due to his father’s connections as a maintenance engineer on ships and underwater pipelines. Casey was taking him on this job as a favor to Tyler’s old man, and there was no way the boy was going to screw it up.
“You hear me, bro?” Billy’s voice came on the line.
“Loud and clear.”
“Taking you up now,” Billy replied. A moment later, the heavy suit creaked, as the steel cable attached to a hydraulic crane arm took the weight and lifted Tyler off the deck.
With careful precision on the crane’s controls, Billy maneuvered the suit off the deck and over the open water. Tyler’s teeth tingled at the vibration from the winch motor as the metal frame descended. He slipped into the water and focused on breathing steadily. The waves rose and fell and then he was underwater and at the mercy of the currents.
“You secured yet?” Casey’s voice growled in his ear.
“Hang on, Jesus…” Tyler felt more confident now he was in the water and out of the direct gaze of the dive leader. He hung suspended by the crane cable in water with a visible range of about twenty feet, not bad for this part of the world. Even the halogen lights built into his suit couldn’t penetrate much further.
Activating the inbuilt propellers, Tyler turned the suit through ninety degrees. The bundle of air, power, and communication’s cables tha
t went to the habitat on the bottom hung like a thick jungle vine in front of him. On the surface, the cable remained secured to an anchored platform with a flashing light and a beeping radio transmitter to warn any passing boats of the hazard. The lines passed from the platform to the ship where the generators and compressor pumps hummed and whirred.
Tyler attached a thin wire cable attached to an auto-braking descender from the armored suit to a thicker steel rope marked with an orange flag that indicated it was for equipment connections. He locked the descender on the cable; it would be strong enough to hold the suit in position until Tyler released the grip.
“I am secured and ready to descend.” Tyler felt a rush of adrenaline. He could see his feet, the white-painted metal boots almost glowing against the dark backdrop. It was a long way down and shit was about to get real.
“Hold your horses.” Casey could have been standing next to him given the clarity of the transmission. This time, Tyler kept his mouth shut; the communications link was always open, and it wasn’t too late for Casey to drag his ass out of the adventure.
At the other end of the taut cable, four hundred meters down in on the cold silt, the habitat set up for the team of divers and explorers waited in the dark. The habitat was a modular construction that made for a cramped shelter with air recycling, a mechanical toilet, and little in the way of comfort or luxuries. It would keep the team safe and dry for the two days they would spend completing their survey of the seafloor.
“Can I disconnect from the ship-line?” Tyler asked. The swirling currents this close to the surface were pushing him around like seaweed in the tide.
“No.” Casey didn’t elaborate and Tyler resigned himself to hanging like a kid on a swing until Casey gave the order for him to disconnect.
With his air supply coming from the surface, Tyler would spend his entire trip at normal pressure, protected by the strength of the suit from the high pressure of an ocean of water pressing in on him and dissolving gas into his blood.
The divers in the bell were going to be out and exploring in the depths. That meant they were already breathing a cocktail of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen, called Trimix; it was the safest breathing gas mixture for deep diving.
*
The dive bell slipped into the water twenty minutes later. Tyler stirred and blinked away the boredom that had set in long ago.
“We’re in the water,” Billy said into the headset. Steve, the other member of Casey’s dive crew, checked readouts and confirmed everything was in the green. Behind the two pilots, four civilians sat pressed into the curved bench seats of the diving bell. Trimix air tanks and dive gear took up the rest of the interior of the steel sphere that would deliver them to the bottom in relative comfort and safety.
“Dive bell is ready to descend,” Steve said.
“Dive bell, you are cleared for descent.”
“Initiating dive bell descent,” Steve replied. Tyler watched as the gleaming yellow sphere slipped down into the darkness. A thousand facts about the dangers of diving were always lurking in the back of Tyler’s mind. His dad had been a careful diver, enforcing rules that Tyler never took for granted. Diving to this depth had its own special risks, which is why Tyler waited unmoving, staring into the darkness below.
“Tyler, disconnect the ship line and follow them down. And watch your depth gauge.” Casey could have been ordering a pizza for all the emotion in his voice.
Tyler unclipped the line that had lowered him from the ship’s deck, took a final breath, and let himself follow the dive bell into the dark.
Hell’s Teeth is available from Amazon here