Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Page 32

  David punched at the computer console to give Max the order to flood herself from the Perflourocarbon tanks, and the liquid air rained down over everyone, fast filling the sub as she submerged. In essence, they were all about to drown within the confines of the small ship unless they fell back on their training and swallowed hard.

  Swigart switched off the standard atmosphere recycling/re-circulating system and reminded, “You gotta breathe the liquid air now people, cause there’s no air-air left behind once Max is filled with the liquid stuff.”

  A few groans and grunts responded.

  “Respect your training, divers. Vital signs on… shoulder-mounted cameras on.” He had to shout over the sound of the liquid air filling the elongated aerodynamically-shaped sub.

  “See you on the other side,” David added from his console.

  Between David and Swigart, they had over five hundred hours diving, but only one hundred using this technology. Among all the divers present, they had just over eight hundred dives using the liquid air technology; however, no one had ever taken it to the depths they were headed toward now.

  The outer hull formed of titanium could withstand the pressure, especially as the unusually squareish sub would be exerting pressure against pressure—having been filled with the oxygenated perfluorocarbon. Cameras, batteries, ballast tanks, tanks marked OPFC-413, electronic housings, viewing ports, her cross-shaped nose viewing port with its huge panorama of whatever spread before them for piloting and viewing—all of it would implode in less than seconds if a single protocol was improperly followed, or if they had a system failure. Aborting the mission could prove just as dangerous; it would cause the iron ballasts to be dropped, resulting in their rising at too accelerated a pace which could cause cracks in the hull if not outright leaks, and possible death before reaching the surface. Still it was a preferential way to go, and at least there would be remains—something left to bury.

  Mad Max also had a built in failsafe system to save itself by jettisoning over half of its weight by separating much as a space ship separates in flight. That is to say Maxi-million, which was actually worth billions to Kane and all investors, could save itself. Unfortunately, no one knew what a separation and instant rise to the top would do to the humans inside her despite all the experiments with monkeys and mice. In fact, such animal testing had pretty much convinced everyone that most likely such a rapid ascent would kill them all unless their suits held. On the other hand, the expensive sub itself could be salvaged.

  “All in-board electronics and sensors looking good,” David assured everyone moments before they would all be momentarily ‘drowned’ as the oxygenated perfluorocarbons would be filling their lungs. They had already dropped several hundred feet so any light from Scorpio or above had completely faded; the only light source was that generated by the sub’s downward-looking camera lights, forward-looking camera lights, and overhead, side, and back flood lights. From any distance, no doubt a shark or any other sea life seeing them would take a curious glance toward the sphere of light in the otherwise pitch darkness found at these depths.

  Everything around and inside Max was being recorded on discs, including every word spoken—and all of it was being transmitted back to Scorpio IV, where all data was of great importance to tally a running record of the research, exploration, and salvage operations. Since Forbes and his team topside meant to use this as a test platform for exploiting the technology, they wanted every detail down to a sneeze recorded.

  Inside Max, the light source was limited to panel lights on the consoles, and while it grew colder and colder within, it also grew darker and darker within the cabin. After less than three minutes, the altimeter told David they were at 1200 feet—in total darkness surrounding the sub. The abysmal darkness took on a life if its own just the other side of the hull and bubble viewing window.

  Max moved through the sea like a Great White shark in its sleekness but more accurately in the manner of a squid. As she dove, her passengers continued to be hit by the liquid oxygen spray from above. The sub was now two-thirds full of liquid air, filling up in what appeared certain death for them all as it poured over them and filled the space, rising to their necks within minutes. The last of the air pocket at their heads fast disappeared to hem in every seated diver, braced now for filling their lungs with the liquid form of oxygen. No time for contemplation, but a quiet, calming meditation on nothingness they all knew would help in the transition.

  “Microphones and cameras!” came Lou’s last order.

  The microphones were of the contact variety, fitted to a neck brace to which the masks attached, the contact point being the throat, precisely at the larynx. The mics could work without the headgear as a result here within the sub where they needed no mask, even with the divers submerged in liquid. With the hardware built into the dive suit, David and the others had but to plug the mic into a port on the inside of the neck collar. It was a computer that interpreted their throat microphones.

  Once they were on the other side of what was termed ‘the small death’, they’d quickly come to, then place the mouthpiece for the liquid air bak-pak, as it was commonly called to the on position, along with the helmets needed on the outside, and its camera, and vital-sign monitoring equipment carried by each diver.

  Divers no longer required bulky helmets and suits at these depths thanks to the liquid air, which equalized to the pressure which marine life enjoyed. The only difference was that the divers breathed clear oxygenated fluid and not sea water, but the Navy was working on that, moving toward true ‘Aquanaut’ fashion. For now they must use their packs which lasted up to four hours in hundreds of feet of water but no one knew for certain how long they might last or fail to last under the tremendous pressures here, pressures that would require divers to take deeper, longer breaths as they worked. While it was true that under normal conditions, a single lungful of liquid air had been proven to last an hour, this was two and a half miles down. It was all experimental from here.

  They had dropped at high speed to 5000 feet below the surface and were still dropping.

  With everyone suited up entirely now, head gear on, cameras, lights mounted on each diver, microphones operational, for the brief moment each in turn went under, breathing in the liquid air. For the half second time that they took undergoing the ‘small death’, Max had violently lurched as if hit by some powerful force from outside.

  The impact had sent Kelly and Steve Jens almost off their seats. In fact, it snatched all eight people inside the sub to one side or the other. When David came to at the same time as Lou, they knew instantly they’d been knocked off course by something large that had taken a strike at the sub—either a swordfish, a Great White, or something larger still. The pilot and copilot now spoke through their com-links as they simultaneously assessed damages and worked to bring their vessel back on course.

  “Why didn’t we see whatever it was that hit us on sector-sonar?” asked David, a metallic quality to his voice attributable to the computer which decoded the garbled sounds of speech over vocal chords in a liquid atmosphere rather than a gas atmosphere.

  “It would appear sonar is gone—it went offline along with the feed from Scorpio!”

  “What? When?” came a chorus of questions.

  “A few minutes before we all took the plunge.”

  “Whatcha mean, gone?” David was incredulous.

  “It’s shut down is what I mean—not working.” Lou worked at the controls for the sector-sonar but it was no use.

  “Damn thing went off before we were struck, Bowman, now shut up; gotta think. Without sonar, we could crash right smack into Titanic—these lights only extend so far in this murk.”

  Indeed, save for their running lights, they found themselves in a world of dark.

  “Who in the hell wants us all dead?” asked Bowman.

  David suspected Kelly might well have continued her efforts at sabotage, acting as a modern-day Declan Irvin. That this tampering might well b
e a last ditch effort to kill either the mission or thwart the thing that one of them had become. Could it be her plan to end the life of this monster once and for all at the cost of far fewer lives than in 1912?

  But David had no desire to go down with it and certainly not to careen into Titanic’s hull at a hundred miles an hour.

  He turned and glared at Kelly and saw the truth in her eyes. You are your ancestor, he thought but did not say.

  “Who would do such a thing?” repeated Bowman as Lou slowed the craft to a safer speed.

  “Whoever or whatever killed Alandale and Ford, I suspect,” replied Kelly while nursing a bruise.

  “Anyone’s suit compromised?” asked Lou. “Check for rents, tears. There’s InstaPatch in your overhead if needed. This is no time to fool with the cold and pressure, people.”

  Once everyone was acclimatized to literally being aquanauts, swimming in an oxygenated Perflurorocarbon-413 soup, like spacemen in zero gravity, they each manned their stations. The titanium alloy compartment seemed softened by its being under water with them now. The sealed instruments put off a soft blue glow to the interior. While filled with the commotion and activity of everyone seeing to his job, some readying equipment to travel with them on the outside, everyone did so in a surprisingly calm and orderly manner here in their cramped quarters—much as astronauts in a space capsule. Recordings and monitors beeped, console lights pulsated, while above Forbes and his team mapped their progress and simultaneously sent them information on the terrain around them. The sonar malfunction was playing havoc with the sub but their progress was informed by the signals and messages being sent down to them—details of the ocean floor and how far they were from their destination.

  At the same time, Vital signs on all the divers continued to be monitored from above. Data both here and above was being logged simultaneously as well. The number of bells and whistles annoyed David up to a degree; the noise meant all was well at the moment.

  “We’re at two miles down,” Lou announced just as everyone became aware that the safe cocoon they were in had become a good deal less safe. At two miles the immense pressure exerted by the ocean against the hull literally shrank it. Scorpio at this depth would be made as thin as toilet paper. It was like being squeezed between thumb and forefinger and one’s cocoon was a gel capsule. Everyone began to feel the exertion this put on their bodies as well. The only thing holding the window bubble in place was a precisely cut angle in the metal that balanced the force trying to squeeze the reinforced glass out balanced against pressure trying to push the bubble in. Having filled the sub with liquid air significantly changed the equation, assuring them of safety even if they had literally shrunk due to the enormous pressures on Max.

  Lou had slowed the speed to a crawl by comparison now, and he was slowing even more, so quickly in fact that the sub shuddered in response, and a good thing he had done so as out of the gloom and darkness ahead came an unexpected dark mountainside they were about to slam into as Forbes from above shouted, “Hard-a-port, Lou!” shouted David for collision avoidance. “N-Now, Lou!”

  They averted slamming headlong into the giant hull of Titanic and would have if not for Lou’s earlier slowing of the sub’s descent, which he now informed everyone was not his doing; that Forbes had taken control of the sub remotely from above to avert the danger, using the holotank and the holomap of Titanic’s remains and the position of the sub. Without sonar, they were indeed running blind except for Captain Forbes godlike eye on them even at these depths. Had he waited a moment longer, no warning system aboard Max would have kept them from slamming into Titanic’s hull at a dangerous rate of speed had come late.

  “Everyone OK down there?” Forbes calmly asked, the calmness in his voice only adding to the terror everyone had just swallowed.

  “I’d say we’re all palpitating, Captain,” Lou spoke for them all, “but then you guys can see that from our vitals. Thanks, Juris. Had we relied on my skills alone—without sonar—we know damn well that Max would’ve slammed into that mountainside which now in the light ahead of us reveals itself as Titanic’s hull.”

  “From here, it appears you are staring right at her name,” replied Forbes.

  “Her name, eh? Her name is covered over by huge rust worms, Captain.”

  “Rust worms?”

  “Looking like massive cave formations--stalagmites,” added Kelly Irvin. “The kind that are formed by microbial iron-eating life.”

  “You should know, Dr. Irvin,” muttered Swigart. “You’re field.”

  They all fell silent, everyone staring at rivers of rust that covered this side of the ship, some of it running the length of the exposed vertical hull plating and pouring out over the bottom sediment where it formed great thirty-foot wide pools that looked for all the world like the blood of Titanic.

  The dive team felt Max rise now in controlled, slow motion up the ghostly wall of the port stern, running lights reflecting off the gold-red rust and the still unbroken glass of portholes—windows on outside berths. David half expected to see a ghostly face in one of these windows looking back at them, and his mind flooded with the possibility that indeed there must be bodies floating around inside the ship. They’d been warned there could be bodies perfectly preserved in areas cut off to sea life, in which case Ballard was right about Titanic being a place that perhaps the living should not desecrate. Theory had it that anyone dragged down with the ship on a mad, watery slide to the bottom would have had the unpleasant death of implosion so that nothing of significance would remain, and that items such as shoes with toes in the air, pants, blouses, dresses that might be found would have been items tumbling from staterooms and steamer trunks. But David wondered if there might have been those aboard who wound up in secure, sealed quarters aboard, in which case, he imagined the bodies would be intact.

  Kelly gasped behind David, making him look over his shoulder. She said, “Check your downward-looking camera, everyone!”

  A child’s doll, perfectly preserved had been unearthed from the seabed below where Max had disturbed the surface, and as they ascended alongside Titanic, the sub kicked up silt.

  “Look, too, there!” said Mendenhall. “Slightly to eleven o’clock from the doll’s head.”

  An eerie row of shoes—their toes sticking up from the silt. An even number by David’s count.

  “Sand, silt, and sea life can’t do much with shoe leather,” said David, trying not to allow these sights to disturb him too deeply.

  They had risen to come parallel to Titanic’s once gleaming upper railing – still largely intact. Reddish-brown and sienna stalactites of rust hung down as much as several feet—so many ugly long needle-like icicles that Bob Ballard had dubbed them as rusticles—a name that had stuck.

  These formations were proven to be extremely fragile on earlier manned dives to Titanic; if touched by a robotic hand or a human hand, they would crinkle and crumple and became a cloud of smoke. If the Styrofoam-like outer crust was knocked away, the steel and brass railings and fittings beneath were in places near perfectly preserved, somewhat pitted in other areas, and so shimmering like new in other locations that the manufacturer’s stamp proved easily readable.

  As they next lifted up and overtop of Titanic, four feet below they saw the expected destroyed wood decking that Ballard had discovered so long before. The whole of it was replaced by billions if not trillions of wood-boring mollusks. “Bloody worms’ve done more damage than either the corrosive seawater or the iceberg,” David said to no one in particular.

  From topside, Captain Juris Forbes informed them. “We’re getting this!”

  “Astonishing, isn’t it?” Lou shouted like a kid in a playpen.

  Lou now brought the sub around to the other side where a huge debris field littered the ocean floor alongside the stern section of Titanic. The cameras continued sending video feed topside as well as to the sub.

  The heaviest concentration of debris had settled around the stern section and just t
o the east of it according to maps created by Ballard on his previous visits to the site. This area included all the smaller single-ended boilers believed to have fallen out of the mid-section of the ship when it tore itself apart at essentially what was her mid-section seams. It’d been surmised that these heavy round objects had careened like giant bowling balls straight down to the bottom and right behind them were three telegraph sets completely intact—museum pieces awaiting the platform on its way down from Scorpio.

  The plan was that the dive team here would direct cables and winch hooks and from above these artifacts of Titanic would be hoisted topside. But interior ‘archeological’ activity would go on first. A bird in hand did not apply to treasure hunters. Still among the lighter debris seen here included a space heater in near perfect condition, a cornucopia of dishware, wine bottles both with popped corks and some with corks intact alongside Champagne bottles, crates filled with them, second and third class cups with the White Star insignia on them, torn off yet still framed stained glass windows intact and unbroken, gym equipment lying upside down, spokes and bolts poking upward, countless floor tiles, and a long, huge, wide swath of coal overall looking like spilled India ink.

  At this ‘destination’ depth, the total pressure on the crew compartment became—as everyone expected—seventy thousand tons per square inch. No lunar landing could be as dangerous as this. In times past, no human could have withstood these pressures as no airlock or dive suit could withstand it, but liquid air technology had changed the rules of the game if not natural law itself, and had in fact beat nature and the North Atlantic Ridge by in a sense sending evolved man back to the sea from which he came.

  “What a vacation spot, hey?” David said into his com-link to ease the tension he felt even here under water inside their protective cockpit. Now both the submersible and the men and women inside it were coming in sight of the major portion of Titanic’s remains, and David added, “For the first time in history mankind will have “touched” down on Titanic in the manner of free-swimming divers, and Max will document it all remotely from a nearby hovering position while we stood atop Titanic for a photo op.”