A woman in a golden shirt surveyed the scene outside her command window.
“Let’s go,” she said after a long pause.
“Aye,” nodded a man in a blue shirt.
He flipped a control switch between a pulsating panel of multicolored buttons. Flood lights splashed across a dense curtain of suffocating blackness while 40,000 horsepower engines whirred to life.
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
They hovered now over the Lomonsov Ridge, some 2,000 meters beneath the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The Ridge divided the sea into two basins of grim, coal-black darkness: the 4,000 meter Amerasian Basin and the even deeper still Eurasian Basin.
“We’re not moving, ma’am,” said the man with trembling hands.
Oceanographers speak of pressure in terms of atmospheres, not stress. Or dependence. Or expectation. One atmosphere equals the weight of the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, or 14.6 pounds per square inch. Pressure increases one atmosphere for every 10 meters of water depth. At 2,000 meters the pressure is 200 atmospheres, or 200 times greater than the pressure at sea level.
The man knew the math, he couldn’t let it go, couldn’t set it free to scamper off into the depths along with trajectory calculations and buoyancy analysis.
If just one screw loosened, they’d be pulverized by 3,000 pounds of unrelenting pressure. But he liked to laugh and tell people this weighed the same as the chains of the Tiffany Chandelier in the Washington State Capitol, in the United States of America.
Crushing beauty, he’d joke, and take another drink and try not to think about how much his life depended on the soundness of a single screw.
It was enough to burst an eyeball.
The yawning stretch of void he spent his days patrolling caused many to crack. Those who managed to stifle it had developed methods of bottling the raging paranoia and fear. For most, it was a bottle.
He felt the weight long before he descended the ladder. Too many bills, too much debt, marriage on the teetering precipice of failure. A life spun out of control, sinking deeper and deeper.
Each time he kissed his children goodbye, breath tinged with Cimarron or Beluga Gold, he felt it would be his last. There was a disquieting beauty in knowing this with such certainty. He told everyone he met a fact he’d once committed to memory while flipping through the tattered pages of an ancient Guinness Book of World Records: the Arctic was the only ocean smaller than Russia.
The woman in the golden shirt shifted in her seat. This was her 52nd voyage, now 2 past the number she had kept to herself for so many years. A number that should have marked the end. And yet here she was—back in the drink again, playing a young man’s game. She was needed, she told herself. Her home was haunted without ghosts, and it could wait another month.
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
So much sweat. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips to try and ease the pain of the split skin. He tasted iron and salt. His vision was blurry.
“Goddammit, what are we looking at here?” shouted the captain.
“I don’t know, ma’am! I’ve reset the aft scanner and it’s still pinging!”
“Do it again,” she commanded as she slid back in her chair. “It doesn’t make sense at this depth.”
“Aye ma’am. Resetting now. Standby.”
Normally bathed in soft crimson, the cabin was now dark and lit only by the helmsman’s flashing control panel.
The sub began to rock left, then right, then left again, groaning with each rotation. The steel walls knocked and rattled in protest at the unnatural movement—its engineering pushed beyond limit.
“Surface, now!” shouted the captain. “Get us the hell up.”
“I can’t, she won’t go! Ballast tanks are full, but we’re not moving!”
The man thought of screws and fancy chandeliers.
The clamor started, then stopped, then started again in a nervous cacophony. The man chased each sound through the darkness with bleary, bloodshot eyes.
“Fire the e-blow tanks!”
His hands shook as he pried open a panel beneath the console. He gripped the cold steel of the emergency tank lever and pumped.
“Nothing either, ma’am!”
The captain closed her eyes. She needed time, time to slow her breathing, gain composure. She knew the swirling mix of cortisol and adrenaline sloshing about her brain dampened her ability to problem solve. She had to clear it out, remove it from her body.
Think.
But now all she could think about were the waves. Deep, dark waves picking her up and burying her, over and over again in an endless cycle. She called out, but she couldn’t catch her breath. The freezing water flowed in and out of her mouth and nostrils. The salty brine burned the soft tissue of her sinuses. It held her down and resisted every kick, every thrash.
She could feel each churn pull her deeper and deeper down into the cold black.
She was surrounded.
She was so tired.
As the outer edges of her vision began to fade into a shimmering field of radiant white embers, she thought she had given enough. Fought hard enough. More than she ever knew she was capable of and there was nothing left to give. No choices left to make.
Surrender.
But then a warm hand gripped her wrist. It pulled hard and then harder still, fighting against the obdurate, choking stranglehold of the ocean’s fervor.
“I’ve got you, baby! Hold on!”
I won’t let go.
I can’t.
She saw her father’s brown eyes sweep away the sea.
I’ll hold on forever.
“Captain!”
And now, as their submersible heaved and the instruments barked, she opened her eyes in time to see a red tentacle slither across the nearest porthole. It left a thick trail of inky sludge on the acrylic plastic window.
“Kill the power.”
“What? That’s—”
“Do it, helmsman. It senses our heat.”
He flipped each system control switch downward. The steady whirring of engines gradually gave way to deafening silence.
“The pressure hull,” she whispered.
“Captain! Goddammit, what the hell is out there?” the man shouted in panic. “What do we do?”
She moved beside him, looked in his eyes and gripped his face in her hands.
“We breath,” she said. “And we hold on.”
She thought of flying her father’s Cessna 150 over Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. Occasionally he’d pull back on the small, single-engine plane’s yolk until it sputtered into a stomach-twisting stall.
“Recover,” he’d calmly tell her.
The first time was scary, but the 17th wasn’t. The solution felt counterintuitive, as if challenging death to a duel. Pilots never pull in a stall, instead they point the plane downward to build air speed and catch the glide slope.
Now she released his face and moved towards the control panel.
“We float when the mass of water we displace is the same as ours.”
“So what?”
“So we recover!”
She pumped the emergency blow tank lever and smashed the pneumatic stick down.
As the sub plummeted through the darkness, 3,000 pounds of pressure forced air through the ballast tank.
Every surface of the sub vibrated as it pushed deeper into the abyss.
Bang!
He stared at the depth gauge’s mechanical needle. It slowed from a wild clockwise spin to a slow counter-clockwise trickle. They felt weightless as the sub reversed its decent.
A black diamond formed from the depths of hell.
A woman in a golden shirt surveyed the scene outside her command window.
“Let’s go,” she said after a long pause.
“Aye,” nodded a man in a blue shirt.