“I’m running low on oxygen, Skippy, so I’d appreciate you moving things along, Ok?”
“My point, Joe, is that I am not a thousand percent certain the command I transmit will not activate all the nanocord, not just the small circle stuck to the door.”
“That’s not good. How can you be a thousand percent certain?”
“Truth? The only way to know for sure it to try it. Hold my beer, Joe.”
Before I could protest, there was a bright circle of light at the bottom of the cockpit door, and fortunately only from that location; the rest of the nanocord in the big circle remained inert. When Skippy activated the nanocord, the tiny machines went to work, turning into a sort of plasma and burning a hole in the cockpit door. The hole it made was only about an inch across, and- Yes, I did that math in my head all by myself, smartass. A six inch length of nanocord, doubled over and wrapped in a circle gives a circumference of about three inches, so the diameter of the hole is one inch because pi is 3.14. The way I remember it is Two Pie Are, where ‘R’ is the radius of the circle. You make a joke of it, like ‘Two Pie Are delicious, but three are better’. When I told my father the formula for the area of a circle is ‘Pie Are Squared’ he told me that school wasn’t teaching me nothing useful, because everyone knows pie are round, cornbread are square.
Anyway, that’s how I remember what little math I have retained in my head. When the nanocord made a one inch hole in the door, high-pressure water came in like a jet, and the cockpit was instantly filled with blinding mist. What air remained was squeezed into a small volume at the ceiling of the cockpit and heated up rapidly as it was compressed. One amazing property of water is that it can’t be compressed much, so it stayed icy cold. My helmet got warm and the rest of me was getting cold fast. Most of my flightsuit went rigid to protect me from being crushed, a feature flightsuits normally used during ejections. Most of the time, flightsuits were trying to keep pressure in, not out. Despite the best effort of the suit, my ears ached from the pressure change, and I leaned my head back and yawned to relieve the pressure on my ears. It worked only part way; when Skippy talked to me, his voice sounded muffled. “Pressure in the cockpit is equalized, Joe. Are you ready?”
At least I thought that is what he said. All I really understood was ‘ready’ so I guessed the rest. “I’m ready!” I shouted and even my own voice was muffled, like when you have a bad cold and your head is congested. Skippy said something I couldn’t quite hear, followed immediately by a light bright enough for my helmet visor to darken automatically. The rest of the nanocord was burning a big hole in the door. As soon as the light flickered out, I didn’t wait for an invitation, I unbuckled the safety straps and floated out of the chair. With the flightsuit having gone rigid to protect me from being crushed, it was difficult to move, only the joint areas had any flexibility. Fortunately, all I needed was my shoulders and elbows to move, I let my legs stretch out behind me. That was not easy, because with the bone-chilling cold I wanted to curl into a ball.
The edges of the big hole in the door were already cool from the mass of freezing water by the time I got there. Maybe the plasma had heated the water slightly, or maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I was warming up from the exertion of moving. Thinking about exertion, I checked the meter on my oxygen supply. It was not good, I needed to be careful about breathing too heavily. It would suck to run out of oxygen and die while I was rising to the surface.
Squeezing through the hole in the cockpit door, I swung my head around, sweeping the cabin with my helmet lights. What I saw was a mess. Seats and all kinds of equipment had broken loose and were floating around. Wires and cables snaked through the space, creating a severe hazard for me getting tangled up and trapped again. What was worse was the side door. It was blocked most of the way by a rock and mud. Crap. Digging my way out of that heavy mud would use up too much time and oxygen.
“What’s the holdup, Joe? You need to get moving, dumdum.”
“Side door is blocked by whatever the Dragon is wedged up against.”
“What? You’ve got to be kidding me! This is total bullshit!” He roared in frustration.
“I agree, Skippy,” I forced myself to remain calm. Think, Joe, think, I told myself. And think fast; oxygen is running critically low. The back ramp? No way, the ramp was almost certain to be jammed. Or torn apart. Torn. The hull of the Dragon was twisted and ripped. Was there a hole in the cabin I could squeeze through? There was too much junk floating around blocking my view, I needed to get into the cabin. Randomly moving around in all that tangled debris was not appealing; the last thing I needed was to get snagged and trapped by some stupid cable. I had a knife in an ankle holster; the problem was that knife couldn’t slice through tough cables, and my gloves were too rigid for me to grasp anything with confidence. The only good move was for me to be careful and plan my moves two steps ahead. Wherever I went, I needed an escape route in case I couldn’t find a crack in the hull there. The cabin of the Dragon had too many corners with lockers and protruding equipment where I could become trapped too easily. “Skippy, do not tell Major Smythe I am out of here, until I am actually on my way up to the surface.”
“Uh, Ok, Joe. Major Smythe has been rather busy. At the moment, his team has pulled back to the LZ and have set up a defensive perimeter.”
“Perimeter? What the hell is going on up there?”
“The Thuranin attacked, with combots. How about you concentrate on something you can handle, and let the professionals on the surface do their jobs?”
Crap. I knew Skippy was right about that, and it renewed my determination to escape from the Dragon. Just then, something moving in the darkness caught the corner of my eye. It was a crack in the hull! A big one! The skin of the hull was shredded and peeled away between two structural frames. There were flaps of hull material flapping around in the current, some with jagged edges that might cut my flightsuit. A flightsuit is not a real spacesuit and it is not armored; it is for temporary survival and it can be damaged. “I think I found a way out, Skippy.”
“It’s about freakin’ time, Joe. You’re giving me a heart attack up here. Move faster.”
“Moving fast is a bad idea right now, Skippy,” I replied as I pulled aside flaps of the outer hull. The material was stiff and it took a lot of effort for me to bend it aside. Once it was bent, it stayed there. It took me almost five precious minutes to move aside enough outer hull to make a hole I could squeeze through without snagging or tearing my suit. Oddly, as I concentrated on carefully making the hole larger, I kept imagining movement at the corner of my eyes, but when I looked, nothing was out there.
And then something was. “Holy shit!” I forgot all about moving slowly and carefully, and jerked myself backwards deeper into the Dragon’s cabin. A loose cable nearly wrapped itself around my neck before I pulled it away from me. “Hey, uh, Skippy, is there, are there any dangerous animals in this lake?” What I had seen had a lot of shiny teeth, and based on the head, it was at least as big as me.
“Like I would know, Joe,” Skippy relied in his most sarcastic tone. “Let me consult Wikipedia to learn about the native life in that lake. No, darn it, no Wiki entry yet. Come on, Joe, how the hell would I know about some stupid fish in that lake? Why does it matter? Pop smoke and get out of there, stop fooling around.”
“There is something down here with big freakin’ teeth, Skippy.”
“Oh for- You are afraid of a fish, Joe?” He laughed. “Ooooh, save me from the big bad fishy! I am sooooo scared.”
“A big fish, with big teeth,” I insisted.
“Fine,” he huffed disgustedly. “Pull a couple flares out of a locker and use those to scare the nasty fishies away.”
“Oh,” I was ashamed not to have thought of that. There was a locker right behind me. Moving carefully, I opened the locker, the door was warped so I had to force it, I reached in and pulled out two packs of four flares each. Then I went back to the opening I had made in the hull, ignited a f
lare, and tossed it through. All I saw was a glint of something moving fast, maybe it was the flick of a tail; all I cared was that it was moving away from me.
And then, after a heart-stopping moment when my right boot caught on a jagged piece of hull, I was out. “I’m out, Skippy!” Reaching for the right side of my flightsuit’s waistband, I pulled a little orange tab we called the ‘carrot’ because of the color. It inflated the life vest that wrapped around my shoulders. Pulling the carrot out only one notch limited the inflation, as I didn’t want to fully inflate it and rocket to the surface. “And now I’m going up. Wish me luck.”
As I rose in the darkness, seeing glints of light at the limit of my vision that became more frequent. Whatever it was, there was more than one of them, and they were circling me. And getting closer.
“Major Smythe,” Chang called, “Colonel Bishop has freed himself from the Dragon and is rising toward the surface. His oxygen supply is in question and there may be a problem with some type of large fish, Skippy was not clear on the risk there. We may need air assets to retrieve Bishop once he is on the surface. Dust off and orbit to the north, wait for further instructions.”
“Acknowledged,” Smythe replied. Then to himself he breathed “Oh thank God.”
“Major?” Captain Chandra asked with concern.
“Bishop is on the move, toward the surface. We’re dusting off to assist retrieval.”
“That is good news!” Chandra clapped his hands. “Is there anything we can do right now?”
Smythe made a twirling gesture with an index finger for his team to leave their defensive positions and board the dropships. “Right now? I think all we can do is pray.”
Following Skippy’s instructions meant I was not rising through the black water as quickly as I liked. Once I got out of the sunken Dragon, I wanted to zoom to the surface as fast as possible, especially after I saw vague glimpses of large fish near me. Twice, something shiny with big teeth had decided to stop circling me and race in to bite or at least investigate. The first one I saw only out of the corner of one eye and I barely had enough time to ignite a flare and wave it frantically at the large predator before it veered away. That time I got a good look at it, the best Earth equivalent was a tuna, because it was skinny side to side instead of being kind of flat on the bottom like a shark. In case you think I am a coward for being afraid of a tuna, you weren’t in the water with me. This freshwater Gingerbread tunashark had big shiny sharp teeth that any shark on Earth would find scary, and the tuna was at least five or six meters long. The damned thing clearly intended to bite a chunk out of me until the flare blinded it or scared it away. Those flares were intensely bright; they were designed to be used as emergency signals in space and had to be visible from thousands of kilometers away. The visor of my flightsuit automatically darkened to protect my eyes but the tuna had no such advantage, and I hoped the light had it swimming around blindly crashing into things. Things that were not me. Assuming the tuna lived deep in the lake, their eyes were not used to bright light so they might take a while to recover their vision.
Either that first tunashark’s eyes adjusted quickly, or they used senses like smell to locate their prey or another tuna decided to try its luck, because the flare had just sputtered out when my visor’s enhanced vision warned me about another threat approaching. That time, I had a second flare ready and I popped the cap to ignite it. Through my automatically darkened visor, I saw the tuna veer off when it was maybe a dozen or ten meters away, uncomfortably close. As it spun around, it flicked its powerful tail and the rush of water slammed into me, flinging my arms and legs around and making me drop the flare. The bright flare fell away from me, spinning as it descended into the depths.
That was the last of the first pack of four flares. While I was still tumbling through the water, I used both hands to dig the second pack of four flares out of a thigh pocket, gripping the pack like my life depended on it. Because it did.
Apparently, an active flare was adequate protection against tunasharks even though it was dropping away below me. There was not another fish rushing at me until the sinking flare was far enough beneath me to dim more than halfway. By that time, I had another flare firmly gripped in both hands, with the remaining three tucked securely away in a breast pocket for quick access. With only four flares left and the hazy light of the surface still too far away, I didn’t ignite a flare when the tunashark appeared at the edge of my vision. This predator fish wasn’t swimming at me yet, it was circling me slowly. Only when it twisted its body to rocket toward me did I ignite the flare. My activating the flare was rewarded by the tuna turning abruptly away and disappearing into the underwater gloom. Visibility in the lake sucked; draining away a good portion of the water had stirred up silt and air bubbles so that without the enhancements of my helmet’s visor I might not have seen a tunashark until its powerful jaws crunched me to bits.
“Skippy, why are these fish so eager to attack me?”
“It is possible they are attracted to the electromagnetic field your flightsuit generates.”
“Oh! Oh, that is just freakin’ great! The flightsuit kept me breathing and from being crushed by water pressure, but now I’m going to be eaten by a Goddamn fish?”
“That is a danger, but your oxygen supply may be more a hazard to you. Joe, you are breathing too rapidly. You must calm down, or you will run out of oxygen before you reach the surface.”
“Calm down?” As I said that, I barely saw the silvery-gray shape of a tunashark swimming through the gloom left to right in front of me. “You try it first! Come down here and see how calm you are when giant fish are trying to make you their dinner.”
“Joe, while I appreciate your dilemma, your emotional response does not alter the facts. Your oxygen supply is almost depleted. Shouting at me is only making the situation worse.”
Crap. He was right and I knew it. Against every animal instinct, I forced myself to calm down, going almost limp except for the two hands gripping the burning flare. The red light flashing in the upper left corner of my visor was alerting me to the dire state of my oxygen supply. I didn’t need a status indicator, I could feel the air supply growing thin as the mask’s tube drew the last dregs of pressurized oxygen from the tiny emergency bottle.
“That is good, Joe. Do not reply, you need to save your breath. Literally. Heh, heh, that was funny. I have adjusted your suit’s heating controls to send pulses through the heating elements; those pulses are acting to cancel the suit’s natural magnetic field. Not cancel it completely, but my hope is the altered magnetic signature will deter predators, or at least make you less tasty to the fish. There is another piece of good news: I have analyzed images of these tunasharks from your visor. In my opinion, these are deepwater predators, and will stop their pursuit of you as you near the surface. While that is a guess, it is a Skippy guess, so you can be very confident in my analysis. If you do get eaten by a tunashark at the surface, you can take comfort that I will be horribly embarrassed.”
My forced relaxation slipped a bit as my jaw clenched. But I did not reply. By that time, in addition to Skippy’s voice in my ears, I was listening to increasingly strident warnings from the flightsuit’s alarm, notifying me that there was less than ten seconds of oxygen remaining. I tilted my head back to judge how close I was to the surface. The water above me was still depressingly dark. “Must ascend faster. Oxygen gone.”
“Huh? Oh, it is. Ah, what the hell, you’re close enough anyway.”
Without me doing anything, the torso of the flightsuit expanded and I felt the lifevest around my shoulders inflate. Unfortunately for me, the inflation gas was helium rather than oxygen, but I felt myself being jerked upward as I gasped to suck in the last molecules of O2 from the bottle.
And then, as my eyes were bulging and blood roared in my ears, I popped to the surface! It was a chaotic hell. Waves slammed me around, tossing me head over heels. Just as I managed to get my head above the water and reached up with one arm to
pop the seal on my helmet faceplate, a wave broke right on top of me, pounding me under the surface and flinging my legs up in the air. Knowing opportunities to breathe would be fleeting, I got the faceplate unlatched with one hand, and almost swallowed a mouthful of water. The churning waves dropped me into a trough and I sucked in as much air as I could before a wave smacked me in the face.
For a time I couldn’t track, I did nothing but focus on floating and breathing when I could. While my head was underwater, I blew out, and quickly inhaled when the capricious waves tossed me briefly upward. Skippy’s draining the lake had caused violent waves that had no pattern; they weren’t like the ocean where waves could be tremendously powerful but at least all went in the same direction. The part of the lake I was in had waves coming from all directions, crashing into each other, building on one another and then dropping the bottom out from under me. There was so much water spray in the air I choked every time I breathed in. I had heard of water spray saturating the air creating problems for Coast Guard rescue swimmers, who had to breathe under the furious downdraft of a helicopter. There was no helicopter or dropship above me, my problem was caused only by the top layer of lake water violently sloshing back and forth. Skippy was shouting something in my ear; I couldn’t understand him with my helmet part filled with water, and I didn’t have the time or strength to reply. I did notice my lifevest had fully deployed without me doing anything, and that did help keep my head above the water.
“Joe!” An ear-bursting sound blasted around my helmet. “Close! Faceplate!”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 34
