Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  Pacino rubbed his aching head. His elbow was emitting sparks of pain, his body saved from cuts and lacerations by the wet suit. His regulator was missing again. He found it in the dim light of the bulkhead-mounted battle lanterns, hoping it still worked. He took a breath, but noticed it was difficult to get air out of the tanks. In his panic he had consumed most of the air of two tanks, although the high pressure of the sinking submarine had consumed air also, since it took more air to inflate the lungs when working against a higher surrounding pressure. He didn’t have much time. He struggled to the hatch opening to the deep submergence vehicle’s docking port and spun the hatch wheel counterclockwise, grateful that it spun smoothly. He opened the salvage valve to equalize the air pressure on the other side of the hatch, then pushed the hatch

  and it fell open with the angle of the dive—at least someone had planned that well, putting the hatch hinge on the forward edge of the opening. The hatch latched. He reached inside and turned on the docking port battle lantern, then turned back to the tunnel. The water level was rising in the tunnel. The forward compartment was now completely flooded, and only the narrow tunnel was left for an air bubble. He equalized and opened the hatch to the deep submergence vehicle’s airlock and latched it open. The problem would soon be, how would he shut it against the ship’s angle? He decided to worry about that later.

  He maneuvered Captain Catardi into the airlock, then Schultz, then turned to Alameda. The ship’s engineer lay with the heavy hatch on her left knee. Her lower leg was covered by the hatch. Pacino pushed on the hatch, assuming the ship’s angle would allow it to come off her, but the hatch wouldn’t budge. Alameda blinked. Pacino assumed she would try to hit him again in her agitated state, but her eyes opened wide and she looked at him imploringly.

  “Leave me here,” she croaked. “Get into the DSV. The hatch weighs five hundred and fifty pounds, Patch. You’ll never budge it. Go on, get going.”

  He ignored her and kept pushing on the hatch, but it wouldn’t move. His air was running out, and the water level was climbing toward the two of them. He kept pulling on the hatch, but couldn’t move it. He told himself that he was much stronger than anyone else aboard, and his air was fresh, and that if he concentrated he could do this.

  “Anthony Michael,” Alameda’s voice said. It wasn’t the voice of a lieutenant commander, but of the woman he’d known in the DSV. “Let me go. Get into the DSV, please, if not for you, then for me. You can’t die here. I won’t have it. That’s an order.”

  The water had risen to her chin. Extending her neck could no longer keep the water from her mouth and nose. “Go,” she sputtered with her last breath, the water at her eyes, both of them wide in fear. Then they were submerged, until only her

  hair floated on the surface of the brackish water. Seeing her face disappear made something snap inside Pacino, and again he lost his conscious self, watching from a distance as he dived under the water and hooked his hands on the hatch and put his feet on the sloping bulkhead and began to lift. The effort was doing no good. His failure sent him into a fury. This close, a few seconds away from the hatch to the DSV and survival, and the god damned hatch would kill her. Suddenly he didn’t care about himself. He would let them shut the DSV hatch without him, and he would stay with Alameda and die with her. As he strained trying to lift the hatch, his air bottle ran out. He spit out the regulator and clamped his mouth shut.

  Still he kept pulling up on the hatch until the lack of air made him need to take a breath, and though he tried to keep from breathing, enough water leaked into his nose and down his throat that he coughed out what air was left, and took in water, and suddenly he became so pumped with fear that time dilated, each second stretching into a minute while the light of reason left him, and as his senses left him he dimly perceived the hatch moving and Alameda’s body limp in his arms, then himself coughing and vomiting on the surface of the water as he stroked for the DSV hatch, trying to see if Alameda was breathing on her own. A stream of seawater and mucus trailed from her mouth and nose, but she coughed twice. She was alive, but unconscious. Pacino gulped air, the putrid smoke in his lungs only a notch better than the water that had been there moments before.

  He pulled the unconscious engineer into the airlock of the deep submergence vehicle, hoping that its hatch would be lighter and easier to shut. He lifted the latch on the hatch and tried to push it, but it would only swing a fraction of an inch. The hatch, half the area of the one he’d freed Alameda from, was thicker, the steel protecting the interior from a much higher pressure.” Pacino slumped against the wall of the DSV airlock. It was hopeless. He turned to the other hatches set in the airlock—perhaps he could get the survivors into the command module and shut its hatch. But he would be faced with

  the same problem—the hatch opened into the command module, which was downhill, but would never shut. He decided to move the three into the command module anyway. He opened the command module hatch, the heavy lid slamming on its latch. He pushed Catardi, Schultz, and Alameda into the opening and rested them against the nearly horizontal bulkheads of the command module between the panels. It was the best he could do for the moment.

  He ducked his head out into the airlock. The water level was rising in the tunnel and the ship’s angle was getting even steeper. They had to hit bottom soon, he thought. If they hit the seafloor soon enough, before the ship flooded any further, and the hull remained intact and flattened out, he would be able to shut the hatches.

  Pacino unstrapped his scuba bottles and buoyancy compensator vest and threw the rig into the tunnel, just as he realized that the emergency beacons were still strapped to the harness, useless in bringing help. The one thing he could have done for the Piranha—call for help—he had failed to do. He collapsed against the bulkhead of the deep submergence vehicle’s airlock wall, the cold steel freezing against his back. The air was foul, his head aching. He had the odd thought that if he chose to he could simply let unconsciousness take him right then. He could fade away and pass out. Suffocation, hypothermia, and drowning would happen while he was asleep. It was a merciful choice. It was true that he had made it this far. He had swallowed his fear and returned to a crippled submarine; he had left the escape trunk and found survivors; he had gotten them into the dizzy-vee, going far beyond what he thought he could do, but it ended here. The hatches weighed tons, the air was more smoke than oxygen, the water was freezing and rising to the hatch lip, and soon the DSV would flood. He wondered for a second if he should try to go further aft. The reactor compartment might not be flooded, and perhaps they could even make it to the aft compartment’s escape trunk. But the memory of the first torpedo blast rose in his mind—nothing could

  have remained intact after that. The aft compartment must have flooded the second after the torpedo exploded.

  He was being an idiot, he decided. Everything he’d done since the first explosion had been the action of a fool. He had no right to throw his life away like he had. His father and mother would suffer for the rest of their lives when they heard he’d died here. And when he first opened the trunk lower hatch he should have gone back up. That at least would have proved he hadn’t abandoned his friends, and saved his life. But no, he had to explore the damned hull, giving hope to dead men. He was a failure, he thought, and he would die a miserable failure. Best just to shut his eyes and let sleep take him before the water reached his face.

  The thought was his last before the hull of the Piranha hit the seafloor and broke apart on the rocks of the bottom.

  Commander Rob Catardi had been reclining against the bulkhead of the forward-facing command module of the Mark XVII Deep Submergence Utility Vehicle when the bulkhead flipped with a violent booming noise and hurtled him to the opposite side of the vehicle. The bulkhead on the hatch side was lined with thick padding covering the thick hull insulation. Without foam insulation the subfreezing temperatures of the deep would condense the moisture from their breathing and ice up the hull.

  T
he impact would have been fatal had he hit a cabinet or unshielded steel. Instead it seemed to jog him back to awareness. The last thing he had as a continuous normal memory was standing under the escape trunk hatch with Schultz, Alameda, and Crossfield. When he opened his eyes in the DSV, he blinked in incredulity. He was in the DSV, his face and hands bloody, with no lights and no power in a compartment filled with smoke. What the hell had happened?

  He crouched at the bulkhead, a dim light coming from the hatchway to the vessel’s airlock. He ducked through it and found the battle lantern lying atop Midshipman Patch Pacino, who was bleeding from his throat and collapsed against the

  bulkhead. Catardi looked at the starboard side of the airlock. The hatch to the docking port was shut on the latch. The deck was level, with only a slight list to port. Catardi, still not quite believing his senses, reached out and spun the hatch wheel clockwise, dogging the hatch and isolating the DSV from the docking port. He shined the lantern into the hatch port, but could see nothing. It was black—either completely submerged in dark water, or the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see into the docking port.

  Catardi picked up the bleeding midshipman by the armpits and pulled him into the command module, then retrieved the bloody battle lantern, wheezing against the foul smoky air of the space. If the batteries or the fuel cells still worked, he could start the atmospheric control gear in the DSV and clear out the smoke, even heat the space to normal temperatures, until the batteries and the fuel cells died. Normally they would have an endurance of seven days with ten men in the module. With only a few people, they might last weeks. When Pacino was safely in the command module, Catardi pulled the hatch shut and dogged it. He reached into a bin and pulled out an emergency air breathing mask and strapped it on, cautiously pulling air in. The air was fresh, clearing his head. He coughed for ten seconds, then pulled out a half-dozen more masks, fastening one on Pacino. There were two more bodies, both of them the only women in the crew, Alameda and Schultz. He strapped an EAB mask on Schultz’s face, then one on Alameda’s. He was searching the space for additional bodies, but there were no other survivors. Catardi slapped Pacino’s mask, trying to wake him up, but there was no response.

  Catardi crawled into the commander’s couch and snapped the circuit breakers shut one at a time. The fourth and seventh breakers tripped back open, obviously due to an electrical fault, but all the other circuits came on-line. He snapped the breakers shut for the command module’s interior lighting, then for the atmospheric control console. The last breaker was for the electrical space heaters, which would burn power, but without them they would soon freeze. He climbed out of the

  couch and made his way back to the atmospheric control console and started the CO burners, high-temperature wire that would burn the flammable carbon monoxide and convert it to carbon dioxide. The burners would also eliminate any hydrogen leaking from a bad fuel cell and convert it to harmless water vapor. Next he started the carbon dioxide scrubbers. An amine solution pump came on, a vent fan winding up in the space, whirring quietly in the otherwise church like quiet. The amine solution would absorb the carbon dioxide.

  The oxygen banks were full and should outlast the batteries and fuel cells, assuming they hadn’t leaked. The DSV was designed to be a much “harder” system than the submarine itself, since it was designed for almost twenty times the operating depth of the Piranha to allow an excursion to the bottom reaches of the oceans. The final problem was the pressure in the space. The DSV was designed to have the pressure inside raised and lowered, and with the pressure this high, the oxygen in the space could actually become toxic, but too rapid a depressurization could give them all the bends. The immediate action was done—he decided to let the computer decide. Once the smoke was cleared up, he could energize the main and auxiliary computers and have them calculate a depressurization cycle.

  “Captain,” Pacino croaked. Catardi hurried to his side, helping the midshipman sit up.

  “What the hell happened?” Catardi asked.

  “We got hit by two torpedoes,” Pacino said. “The interior was a wreck. There weren’t any deck platforms left, just ripped steel and burning weapon fuel. And smoke and floodwater. You three were the only ones breathing I could see. I pulled you back to the compartment hatch and into the DSV, but the hatch wouldn’t shut. The down angle was too steep. How’d the hatch get shut?”

  “We must have hit the bottom and it slammed shut,” Catardi said. Then he mumbled, as if to himself, “Fucking Snare.” Catardi searched in a cubbyhole, where he found the blankets and covered Alameda with several, then put two on Schultz.

  Both women were breathing, but showed no signs of returning to consciousness.

  “You’re bleeding. Here.” Pacino’s wet suit front was soaked in blood that he hadn’t noticed, the blood coming from a deep gash in his neck. “This should have killed you, Patch,” Catardi said as he put on the gel-pack dressing, taping it around Pacino’s throat. “By the way,” he said, glancing up at Pacino, “thanks for saving us.”

  “Not that it’ll do any good, Captain. I never set off the distress beacon.”

  “How could you? You never made it out of the ship.” Pacino stared at him.

  The space had grown warm since Catardi had started the space heaters. The air seemed much less smoky. Pacino looked at the atmospheric control display. Other than pressure, the atmosphere was in spec. Catardi pulled off his mask and tasted the air. It seemed better than the mask, with normal moisture. He pulled the EAB masks off the women.

  “Take off your mask and save the emergency air for the moment when we run out of power.

  “Help me get the computers on-line,” Catardi called as he crouched at the artificial intelligence console and booted up both units, the startup taking several minutes. “What’s our depth?” Pacino went to the remote console and saw the depth readout.

  “Eleven thousand three hundred thirteen feet,” he called. It was far below Piranha’s crush depth of nineteen hundred feet. The hull would have imploded had it not been for the flooding. Except for this space. Had the compartment been left alone, the seawater pressure would have crushed it around the DSV, ruining the DSV and any chance of their survival.

  “What are you doing, sir?”

  “Computer’s checking the oxygen and nitrogen and pressure. We were pressurized by the water flooding the forward compartment. We’ll have to depress, but once we do we’ll be letting oxygen molecules go, and we won’t last as long.”

  “Can we stay pressurized?”

  “No. We’re above the levels of oxygen toxicity. We can’t bleed nitrogen into the space. It’s not designed for that. Once I select automatic, the computer will start a high-pressure double-vane rotor blower that will take a suction on the hull and exhaust to sea pressure, slowly, so we don’t die of the bends. Too fast and the nitrogen will froth in our bloodstreams and it’ll be over. After we have a successful depressurization, I’ll start an oxygen bleed.”

  After an hour, Catardi was out of things to do. The final thing on his list was rescue, and unfortunately, the signal ejector would only work if the DSV were free of the Piranha. Trapped inside the spec-op bay, any distress signal they ejected would just rise to the level of the Piranha’s hull. It might be useful to try, because perhaps the hull was breached enough that an emergency buoy could rise to the surface. Catardi lined up and fired two of them, with little hope that they would rise.

  He climbed into the command couch and tried to see if he could energize the exterior lights, but they came off the damaged bus. The last emergency option was the noisemaker, a primitive unit that would bang on the hull with a hammer. The trouble with it, like anything else aboard, was that it sucked current from the batteries. Worse, the noise of it could drive them half-crazy. Catardi decided to energize it for five minutes every hour. He replaced the fuses, since the unit was locked out at sea in case it accidentally went off, giving them away to a hostile foreign sub. He hit the breaker, hoping it would work.
The unit slammed a metallic noise out into the sea, then more hammer blows. It was completely annoying, but would perhaps get them help.

  “One. One? One Oh Seven? Can you hear me?”

  This… unit… can… hear… you… Krivak. Each word took a long moment for the carbon processor to form, as if it were speaking from a deep, dark cave, lying down to die. “One, please talk to me and tell me what is going on with you.”

  This unit has killed. Killed our own.

  “There is a difference, One. There were bad things on that ship. Our orders came from on high to—”

  No. The orders came from you. Where did you come from? Why did no one brief me on this? What if it was a mistake?

  It was a conversation with a mental patient, Krivak thought.

  “One, I need you to do some things for me. I know you are very”—Krivak searched for the word—”upset. But I need to be able to come to periscope depth.”