Clockwork Universe

by John W Dennehy

  Moving to help them, Vanessa stopped next to Sean and asked quietly, “Listen, Cap—even if they can get it down and prepped in forty-five minutes, how long will it take to get it down three thousand feet? Another forty?”

  Sean looked pale but didn’t let his fear get the best of him. No effective mission leader could let anything, even something like this, get that deep under his skin. “Could be an hour.”

  Vanessa looked at the green-screen on-deck computer monitor. “She’s been down there an hour and a half, Sean. Those scrubbers work how long? I don’t know this shit, boss, you got to help me here.”

  “She’s got five hours in the sub. More than that and her brain dies from lack of oxygen.” He swallowed, shaken from listening to his wife go dissociative with talk of getting “murdered” while sitting in what could soon be her own coffin.

  “Shit. So an hour and a half, plus, let’s say, an hour to get the JSL down to D-Plus and get a good hold on her cable. How long’s it gonna take for our little JSL to pull our chunky sub to the point where Kat can get out and free swim to the surface?”

  “I have no idea, Van. I’ve never done this before. No one has. These armored cables do not—”

  “I know, Sean, I know. But there’s plenty of time for figuring that out once we have your wife back and safe. Give me a ballpark: How long?”

  “The JSL isn’t really made for towing, but since we’re pressing it into service, if I had to venture a guess—”

  “Which you do.”

  “—I’d say at least two hours with that heavy load and the limited thrust of the JSL. Maybe more.”

  “That maybe is straddling the line between saving your wife and losing her, Sean. You’ve done, what, a hundred dives in this thing? You have to be the one to go down and get her—you always find a way to keep us going. We haven’t lost a crew member yet, so let’s not start today, all right?”

  He allowed himself a very small smirk and said, “When did I promote you to first mate?”

  “When you lost your shit listening to Katherine. Besides, who do you want right now? Mickey is a boat chief, not a submersible expert. I’m not saying he can’t learn, but now seems an inopportune time for rookie training.

  “Slipjack doesn’t dive, but he could be your right-hand man on the surface once we get the JSL ready to go. And that should be soon, once they get the batteries installed and run through the checklist.”

  “Has Toro ever piloted a submersible?”

  “No. He’s purely a member of the boat crew, promoted to winch team. And I’ve dived a few times, just not in the pilot’s seat.”

  “Vanessa, I know all this. What are you getting at, already?”

  “I’m telling you that you need to get suited up, and you need to do this. Not because she’s your wife, but because she’s part of your research crew. Your skills and experience are the only things that can save her.”

  Sean took all of this in, sucked in a deep breath, then let it go. He shouted to Toro and Slipjack, “Let’s go, gentlemen! Time is short!”

  “Twenty minutes,” Toro said without looking up from his work.

  “Screw that. Fifteen at the most and I want this in the water.”

  Slipjack muttered under his breath, but it was plenty loud enough for Toro to hear, and laugh.

  “It’s a suicide mission, ese. You don’t want it. Like Van said, you don’t dive.”

  “No, I don’t. But I could. I want to be the hero for once, save the woman who …”

  “Who … who what?”

  “Who is really friggin’ important to this expedition! I want to be her hero instead of just a guy on the boat.”

  “What, you got a crush on Mrs. Muir? Ha ha, that is muy adorable!” Toro said with a sympathetic smile. “She is easy on the eyes, man, but come on. And you want to be a hero … or a martyr, maybe, you mean? ’Cause that’s what el jefe is gonna be in a few minutes, man. Ain’t no way this thing can drag up a full-size submersible.”

  “This ain’t right. The whole thing stinks like rotten fish covered with dog shit,” Slipjack said when they turned back to keep prepping the rickety-ass sub that was less likely to rescue the wonderful Kitty Muir than to send Sean and his wife to the bottom forever.

  He just hoped his check got signed before Sean Muir left on his mission to be the center of attention once again. And the Muirs would be at the center, all right. He could see the headlines: OCEAN RESEARCHERS DIE IN ‘ACCIDENT.’

  Except this bullshit is no accident, Slipjack thought, but kept it to himself. He had a job to do here, and doing it well and swiftly could mean rescuing Katherine instead of letting her die, even if the whole situation was Sean Muir’s doing, or if not his fault, then at least definitely his responsibility. But he shook that out of his mind and got the JSL ready as quickly as he and Toro could.

  “Sean … ?” It was Katherine’s voice, still sounding distant but much more cogent. “Come in, babe …”

  Sean spun around from watching them work with the JSL (just far away enough that he couldn’t hear what Slipjack was saying to Toro) and practically hurled himself the six feet to the mic and started talking almost before he had depressed the button: “Kat! Thank God! I thought you had gone off the deep end!” He winced at his own choice of words.

  “I’m okay. I’m alive. Had me a little freak-out there.” She sounded more with it, but hardly one hundred percent. “Honey, I’m just hanging in the dark. There’s nothing to see, not even dinosaurs … and directly below, there’s the vents. Maybe the dinos are nearby, maybe they can sense me …”

  “Don’t worry about that, honey—you’re not deep enough to give off a heat signature strong enough to attract them, anyway. So just forget about anything except my words, okay?”

  “Okay.” With that one-word response, she sounded again like the researcher who had first gone down in the submersible.

  “Okay, excellent. The cable is … not operational. We can’t haul you up with the winch, and we can’t even get you any deeper—not that we would—but never mind—I’m coming down to get you.”

  “Sean, it’s okay. I know the risks every time I go down.”

  “Jesus, honey, no—I said, I’m coming down right now.”

  “I’m at three thousand feet, Sean! What are you going to do, put on some swim fins and a snorkel? I can still get some data, even if we can’t find your prehistoric beasts—”

  “No! Just hang tight”—again he regretted his turn of phrase—“and I’ll be there in plenty of time. I’m using the JSL.”

  “That piece of [buzz]? Don’t you dare, Doctor Muir—we don’t both need to die! Somebody on the ship sabotaged the cable. Don’t give them a chance to mess with the JSL and murder you, too.”

  “Don’t say murder, Kat. Number one, you’re not going to die; and number two, I’m coming to get you and bring you up. Just keep your mind on that, okay? You’ve got to have two hours of oxygen left. I’ll make it in plenty of time.”

  “I love you, Sean. I’m so sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. We got this. And I love you, too, so much. And if I have to die to save you, that’s a fair deal to me.”

  “Well, it’s not to me!”

  “All right, then, we’ll both live. How’s that?”

  “Roger that. Okay, fine, go suit up and get down here already.”

  “On it.” He motioned for Mickey to come off the bridge. “Mick, you’ve got the comm, all right? Talk to her, keep her calm, and keep reminding her that I’m on my way.”

  “You got it, boss. And good luck—we know you can do it.”

  Sean nodded at that and got his ass over to the winch crew setting up the submersible, which looked like nothing more than a 1950s science-fiction robot. He squeezed into his wetsuit and stowed his air tank and regulator inside the JSL. There was no real reason he’d need them—or be able to use them—unless and until he got Kat near the surface and opened D-Plus to get her out. The extra equipment was fine, anyway;
he’d take a load of anvils on board if it would help him get down there. He froze. Why in God’s name didn’t I think of this earlier?

  “Holy shit! Mickey, tell her to jettison her ballast, every bit of it, right away!” He literally couldn’t believe he hadn’t remembered to tell her to do that in the first place. Everybody on board must have thought he was a complete shithead who didn’t care whether his wife lived or died. Not that he cared much about that right now.

  Mickey relayed the message, and the last thing Sean heard before Slipjack helped him into the JSL was her response of “Roger that.” It gave him the tiniest peace of mind, which was better than nothing.

  Slipjack got him ready and was about to screw the hatch shut but stopped and looked Sean in the eyes. “Go save your wife. Save our Kat.”

  Our Kat? But Sean nodded, holding back the desire to say, Why in the hell do you think I’m sitting in this thing? but he could hardly blame the crew for loving her. She was so good to everyone, always smiling and working as hard as anyone else. Sean saw her occasional tantrums and tears, but that was the difference between a husband and a coworker on a research vessel.

  Slipjack screwed on the hatch and stepped back. He and Toro and Vanessa exchanged thumbs-ups with Sean and then with one another when each of them took their assigned positions to deploy the A-frame and crane to lower the submersible into the sea.

  Excruciatingly slowly, they lowered the JSL. So slowly he would surely never get down in time to Kat, who was breathing the last of her air, waiting for him, so far away.

  Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them is available from Amazon here.