Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  In order to survive such a high-pressure environment without the protection of an atmospheric diving suit, there was a constant rotation of miners who spent weeks inside topside compression chambers until they were “saturated,” or sufficiently acclimated to high-pressure breathing gasses, allowing them to safely transfer down to the shacks where, when called upon to do so, they could operate inside standard, nonpressurized, radiation-shielded drysuits. While such relatively lightweight equipment meant that shack miners couldn’t go much deeper (and in fact wore redundant depth alarms on both wrists to ensure they didn’t inadvertently descend), it also meant that they had the agility and dexterity necessary to conduct much more complicated and intricate maintenance and repair procedures than could be attempted from inside an ADS. Having access to several wire traps full of all kinds of tools, and the use of all ten fingers with which to operate them, meant that most glitches, malfunctions, and failures could be fixed “on the fly” rather than having to reel equipment back up to dry dock on the rig. Staging was where final diagnostics and, if necessary, any last-minute tweaks, optimizations, and repairs were conducted on all heavy machinery before it was cast into the medium-rich void below, and before it was brought back up to the rig at the end of a job and stowed.

  Charlie wasn’t due to be back in the saturation rotation for another month, which was one of the reasons she initiated her plan when she did. Coordinating a ship-wide labor strike—shutting down all the mining operations, the refinery, and the foundry until the City Council agreed to scrap its new housing plans, and then subsequently organizing unions as a contingency against further abuses of power—would take a huge amount of coordination that she obviously couldn’t orchestrate from inside a hyperbaric chamber, or while trying not to electrocute herself as she welded broken cutting teeth back into place, or from inside an ADS a kilometer or more down on the seafloor. And with as closely as Luka was being watched, he couldn’t risk any more direct participation. But unfortunately, a friend of Charlie’s—a miner by the name of Benthic, whom she fondly remembered as one of her very first crushes—wasn’t responding well to compression mixtures this time around, so when he was pulled and sent to the Pacific Medical Center, Charlie was put into the saturation rotation to take his place, and all plans for once again bringing the San Francisco to a standstill were temporarily put on hold.

  If a miner was lucky, the hardest part of working the shack was enduring the boredom. Once all the heavy equipment was deployed, an ideal tour was three weeks of sitting around the miniature flickering moon pool between routine maintenance tasks, configuring and then consuming a few algorithmically generated romance or mystery novels, playing backgammon with your shack mate while a relaxing generative sound track reverberated in the background, and watching old cricket or football matches from the archives—all the while bathed in the beautiful green glow of nominal indicators. But never in her career had Charlie experienced such a deployment, and this one, as it turned out, was no exception.

  Having been the one to serve as the original inspiration for a new generation of female miners, and since shack mates were always paired by gender, Charlie was almost always the senior technician in her shack. But she was also frequently the senior technician across all three shacks since, as an early gender pioneer, she’d been forced to work extra hard to prove herself, which meant that she’d accumulated more hours in an ADS than anyone else her age, male or female. As the current active senior staging technician, Charlie could have used her authority to assign the task of getting a better look at a shaped cutter that had seized almost a kilometer below them to her shack mate, Kimberly, or to another more junior technician in some other shack. However, anxious to get her mind off the postponement of the strike, she decided to take the assignment on herself.

  Kim ran through all the regular obstruction clearing procedures while Charlie prepped the suit, and after thirty minutes of relaying commands down to the cutter through the network of ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) with no change in status whatsoever, Charlie finally called it.

  “Forget it,” she told Kim. “I could’ve been halfway down there by now. Back it up from the wall, shut everything down, and help me get into this thing.”

  Charlie really didn’t mind the ADS itself. It was pressurized to the level of the shack, which meant there were no additional risks of dysbarism, or various serious medical conditions arising from changes in ambient pressure, and it was assembled from some kind of molecular structure that was supposed to be so strong that as long as you didn’t step in front of a Nautilus-class cutter running at full tilt, nothing was going to get through it. It wasn’t even the physical exertion of working on-site that bothered her, or the inevitable dehydration (nobody wanted to drink so much that they had to urinate inside the suit), or all of the raw, pink, slippery blisters she would emerge with from pushing against actuators with worn padding. More than anything else, what Charlie disliked about stepping over the precipice and descending down into the blackness below was the fact that there was probably no colder, lonelier, and more desolate human-reachable location on the entire planet than the deep-sea abyssal plains.

  Charlie tied her traditional hachimaki around her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes, then climbed into the ADS from the ingress hatch in the rear. Once she was locked up tight inside her own personal anthropomorphic submarine with all of her diagnostics reporting green, she and Kim did a comms check, then Kim used the crane’s remote to maneuver the heavy suit out over the moon pool, lower it into water, and set it down on the staging platform below.

  The ADS had a widely diffuse ring light embedded around the perimeter of the faceplate as well as two adjustable socketed spotlights protruding from the rebreather on the back of the suit, but even at full intensity, they weren’t nearly enough for the voraciousness with which the ocean consumed all forms of radiance. That’s where Tinker Bell came in. Tink was a sleek, flat, hydrodynamic autonomous submersible with two primary modes: hover and tow. In hover mode, the bot oriented itself above the ADS it was linked to at either a default or specified distance, providing as much as a hundred thousand lumens of task lighting from the individually adjustable plasma panels on its underside. In tow mode, it descended and oriented itself directly in front of a linked ADS, waiting for the suit’s pinchers to mate with its two rear port hooks before gradually powering up its magnetohydrodynamic propulsors and smoothly delivering its payload to a set of predetermined coordinates. Most divers developed a strange form of affection for their ATCs, or Autonomous Task Companions, since the bots were usually the only company they had down in the trenches.

  Charlie took several powered but sluggish steps across the platform until she had cleared the shack above her and was beneath Tink’s column of illumination. While constantly relaying to Kim what she was doing (in full accordance with the San Francisco’s dive-mining regulations), she used the toggle switch under her thumb to navigate the menus of her heads-up display, selecting ATC > Link > Tow. She watched the light above her both narrow and intensify as the bot floated down into the range of her viewport and waited for its next command. Kim had already fed Tink the coordinates of the faulty cutter, so all Charlie had to do was hang on.

  Shaped cutters were the most intricate and complex of the Nautilus-class excavators. Their primary component was a twenty-six-meter articulated telescopic boom terminating in sixteen individual flat bits with sixty-four retractable teeth. Each bit could be independently pivoted and rotated, resulting in an almost infinite number of shapes, from a tapered bore for drilling directly into a surface, to a polygonal disk for planing, to a flared cone for consuming entire ridges or outcroppings all at once. In an exterior cutting configuration (one in which the teeth pointed outward), material was gathered by a flanged collection collar, and while in an interior cutting configuration (one in which the bits were pivoted so that the teeth pointed inward), anything that was chewed up was sucked down the machine’s whirring mechanical gullet.
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  It had only been a little over a week since Charlie had worked on the cutter in staging, but every time she saw a piece of Nautilus-class equipment up close, she was freshly impressed by its scale. Tink set her down beside the excavator’s starboard track, which was half again as tall was she was, even in the ADS, then kicked up twin clouds of sediment as it ascended into a hover position from which to both illuminate the scene, and serve as a relay in Charlie’s communications back to the shack. For the first time, as Charlie looked up at the cutter beneath Tink’s murky glow, she realized it was the only thing she’d ever seen down there that made the ocean feel just a little less vast. Of course, the inverse of her observation was also true: that it made her feel correspondingly insignificant, and just being in its presence increased the sensation of utter desolation and triviality.

  Charlie turned a full 360 degrees to see what else was around her and found that there was nothing but the usual suspended greenish-brown clumps of insoluble particles within the range of her lights. When she looked back up at the cutter looming over her, she confirmed what the telemetry data had already reported: the bits had seized in an interior cutting configuration that looked to Charlie like images she’d seen from the archives of a brand-new tulip blossom just about to burst forth. But inside, instead of delicate flower parts, were the carbon-hardened teeth of a beast born to chew through absolutely anything that divided man from medium.

  All Nautilus-class excavators had extremely sophisticated instrumentation infused through their structures and subsystems, so Charlie already knew that the source of the contention was deep inside one of the machine’s driveshafts. She even already knew which of the eight access panels to remove in order to expose the corresponding site-serviceable gearboxes. However, SRP (Standard Regulatory Procedure) dictated an initial visual inspection of the disabled region prior to initiating any repairs—a policy represented by the mnemonic acronym IDEA that, during training, every technician had thoroughly drilled into their heads (pun very much intended by every one of Charlie’s instructors, each of whom believed himself both witty and original):

  Inspect the site. Be aware of all equipment and other potential hazards around you. Plan primary and secondary escape routes and communicate them to your shack mate.

  Decide on an approach. Talk it over with your shack mate. Do not proceed with any form of maintenance or repair until a consensus has been reached.

  Evaluate your surroundings. Before attempting any form of maintenance or repair, make sure any loose debris or other hazards have been removed. Remember: 98 percent of accidents can be prevented through proper site evaluation!

  Address the problem. It is now safe to attempt an on-site repair. Remember that all procedures must fully comply with the latest approved maintenance manuals, field guidelines, and safety regulations.

  Charlie had never understood why such painfully obvious common sense required not only a mnemonic device, but one that was so redundant, generic, and verbose that it was far more confusing than it was instructive. She ultimately decided such policy was simply one more way in which the HR and curriculum departments attempted to justify their continued pathetic existences.

  Charlie knew that clearing debris from around a repair site was more for the sake of the machine than for the safety of the technician, but it was still sound procedure. The last thing you wanted was to remove whatever obstruction was causing the contention, move off to a safe distance (usually all the way back up to shack depth), start everything back up, and have something else go wrong. Although these machines were capable of masticating even the densest layers of the planet, because of all the additional torque required to function at such incredibly high pressures, they needed to achieve a certain number of RPMs before they were more destructive than they were vulnerable. According to the cutters’ engineers, Nautilus-class excavators functioned a little like air-breathing ramjet engines in that the faster matter moved through them, the more matter they could process. Once they reached a certain speed, there wasn’t much that could stop them, but while they were initially starting up, they were surprisingly easy to bind and stall. Charlie thought of them a little like a boulder at the top of a hill. If you could get to it early enough on the curve, you could probably stop it pretty easily. But once it reached a certain velocity, the best you could hope for was to get the hell out of its way.

  “OK,” Charlie transmitted to Kim. “I’m going up to take a closer look.”

  “Roger that,” Kim said.

  Charlie used the two joysticks beneath her thumbs to maneuver herself into position. The joystick on the left activated the horizontally oriented propulsors that controlled her depth, and the one on the right distributed power among the two vertically oriented propulsors that controlled either her orientation (by moving water in opposite directions), or her movement forward or backward (by moving water in the same direction). She powered them up gradually so as to reduce the amount of sediment she stirred up, and as she rose and rotated, Tink adjusted its position to ensure optimal illumination.

  The bad news was that since the bits were in an interior cutting configuration, Charlie’s options were limited. If she discovered large amounts of debris inside the parabolic jaws, there wouldn’t be much she could do from where she was. The opening was easily big enough for her to enter, but no matter how many safeties the machine had, or how many reassurances the shack gave her that it would not start up, there was absolutely no way she was crawling down its throat. With the right tools, the cutter’s hydraulics could be operated manually from an access panel, which meant that the bits could be opened up into a far safer configuration—one in which most of the debris would probably just fall away on its own. However, that was a level of repair that would have to be done up at staging.

  But the good news was that the bits looked clear. Charlie rolled her socketed lights over the entire interior of the dark carbon-barbed cavern, and although there was plenty of sediment inside, she couldn’t see anything nearly big enough to stop the machine from starting back up. Assuming she could reach the obstruction through an access panel, it probably wouldn’t be much more than an hour or two before she was back up in the shack with a lukewarm shower stinging her blisters and complaining about cold, overly bitter coffee.

  “Bits are clear,” Charlie reported. “We might just get out of this without having to reel it back up.”

  “Roger that,” Kim said. “The repair plan recommends starting with panel four and working your way up from there.”

  “Roger that.”

  It was unsettling to be positioned directly in front of something so enormous and so menacing. The diameter of the aperture was greater than the height of her suit, and from her perspective, the machine looked like a monstrous worm rooted to the seabed, lured out of its tube by the passing of oblivious prey, eerily frozen in midlunge. Each individual tooth was at least the size of Charlie’s helmet and they spiraled hypnotically down the machine’s gullet, terminating in a complex enmeshment of gears designed not for transferring power, but for pulverizing rock into slurry. Charlie stared directly into the beast’s maw, and then—as though believing it had her sufficiently lulled—the machine struck.

  At least that’s how it felt to Charlie. The movement wasn’t actually all that fast, but the effect of so much machinery—every visual point of reference she had—simultaneously stirring was so jarring and disorienting that it felt like her entire world had slipped.

  Charlie thought she screamed something, though she wasn’t sure what. She could hear Kimberly’s voice in her helmet, but there was no comprehension; no real communication; nothing but noise and the turning of the teeth in front of her. Instinctively she used her right joystick to move herself away, and as she did, she watched the rotation of the teeth increase so rapidly that they blurred, becoming a thick haze that coated the inside of the massive barrel. And then fear and shock turned to horror when she realized that her distance from it was no longer increasing. There was e
nough debris and sediment around her to give shape to what she already knew was there: a vortex forming between herself and the furiously rotating cavern of teeth and gears she was being pulled toward.

  An equilibrium had formed between the pull of the cutter and her suit’s propulsors. Her instincts screamed for her to try to break free of the funnel by moving to the side, but she deliberately disobeyed them out of fear of diverting any power at all away from the counterbalance. She could feel herself pushing against the back of the ADS with her feet and her palms, and she pulled back on the joystick so hard that she felt crushing pain in her thumb as though her suit’s inability to access more power was simply a function of the joystick’s limited range of motion. The gyroscopes in Charlie’s suit sensed the rotational momentum of the vortex, and opposing lateral propulsors were engaged in order to ensure that she did not succumb to the increasingly energetic storm before her. However, remaining vertically oriented came at a price, and power was automatically diverted from other propulsors. She could hear the pitch of the beast’s whine rise in greedy anticipation of their violent unification.

  “Shut it down!” she heard herself scream. And then repeat, over and over.

  As she watched the cutter grow larger and felt herself diminish, Charlie found herself pleading to some greater force that her terror would finally just yield to resignation, but it would not, and then some other part of her brain registered that the light around her was changing—that Tink was still somewhere above her, impassively tracking her progress toward being ripped apart and ground into silt. Conscious of the fact that this could very well be the last thing she ever did, Charlie desperately began navigating the menus of her HUD with her left hand while maintaining as much back pressure on the joystick as she could with her right. As soon as she reached the end of the hierarchy and selected the final option, the intensity of Tink’s light began increasing as it descended, gently easing itself down into the diminishing gap between Charlie and the cutter, though before it could stop and wait for Charlie to attach herself to its tow hooks, it was gone. In the harsh illumination of Charlie’s suit lights, she watched the bot spin with the force of the vortex and briefly bounce amid the blur of teeth before exploding and becoming a whirlpool of finer and finer particles.