by Chogan Swan
Would she trade her identity for them?
No.
Did she long for them?
She took a calming breath. Oh yes!
In the floodlights, Valishnu looked almost enshrouded in the web of cables that secured and balanced the yellow field of heavy-lifting bags. The bags, straining their cables for the surface, created the illusion of a meadow of giant dandelions—somehow transported to the depths.
Most of the bags were inflated now; overinflated really—but at this depth, the air pumped into them was compressed so dramatically it still left the lift bags looking thin. When the bags reached shallower water, the volume would expand and pressure-relief valves, designed to keep the bags from exploding, would bleed off the excess.
El Salvador 's huge drum of lift cable—4,000 meters of synthetic rope with a lift rating of 100 tons—was gradually applying force. But despite the cable and the bags, the corvette still clung to the bottom where it had rested since just before the turn of the 18th century—when its mass had wedged it into the muck. If they could achieve breakout soon today, they would have as much as sixteen hours of daylight to bring her up.
Over the last weeks, the drones had finished excavating Valishnu’s top, sides and as far as they could reach into the breaches in the hull. The drones had removed tons of the sediment that held her down. But just getting cables underneath had been a major undertaking. Finding the balance point that would let the drones work beneath her without Valishnu settling and crushing them had proved to be an intractable problem. Too many unknown and unstable factors littered the calculation to risk losing the crucial robots beneath Valishnu’s unstable mass.
The current strategy was to apply as much lift as possible and let the robot operators continue working under the edges with jets of water until she broke free.
Ayleana stood, suspended above the waves, on Dive Platform One.
She wore a harness crammed with dive tools, including sensor gauges, dive lights and flippers. Her VR camera eyepatch let her keep one eye on what was happening below. With her other eye, she checked her equipment. A tank of pure oxygen was attached to her breathing mask, covering mouth and nose so she could hyperventilate (then dive fast and deep without using SCUBA).
Heavy lift bags (with propeller-driven maneuverability) hung on the outside of the platform. A custom designed diver propulsion device lay at her feet. The release lever at her right hand would plunge her and all the heavy gear into the sea with one yank. The whole ensemble would sink like a stone, delivering her to the end of a 600-meter cable unless she hit the brake sooner.
Ayleana—along with the other members of her species on the crew—rotated through the daylight, active-lifting periods on staggered, 4-hour shifts.
She’d realized last week that one of the things that triggered her anger toward ShwydH was naming him, in her mind, by sounding the aspirant at the end of his name. So she had renamed him—will he or nill he—to ‘Shwyd’. It helped so much that she’d done the same to her branch-sister's name.
The first time she’d done it aloud—calling her Humana—her branch-sister had looked at her in puzzlement, raising an eyebrow in a human style inquiry.
“It's a human custom to shorten difficult names,” Ayleana said before continuing with the explanation of ship's procedures.
Three days later—when she’d found it necessary to speak to Shwyd—she had done the same, continuing with what she was saying without pause. Shwyd said nothing. If he’d objected, Ayleana had planned to switch the aspirant to a ‘Y' sound. She'd been a little disappointed, wanting to see how he reacted to being called ‘Shwydy'.
The change had been adopted (with relief) by all humans on the crew within a few hours.
Ayleana was pleased, and more than a little amused, with her social engineering.
Since this was the first shift of the day, Ayleana would work 4 hours. Shwyd would work one.
When she'd come aboard last week, Humana had reviewed the lift plans and insisted that she and Shwyd would need to be ready to assist the project with emergency dives. In spite of the backup systems the salvage team had put in place, Humana argued that using the lift bags to assist with raising the corvette introduced a risk too high to ignore. She'd then gone on to outline three scenarios that could all end in disaster.
Sometimes there was no substitute for life experience. Ayleana understood the math, as had the salvage engineers. Ayleana hadn't foreseen the problems, but she could point out the obvious … that she could dive as deep as anyone there and even nii required rest.
The bone-conducting audio wafer glued high on her cheekbone vibrated with Edward’s voice, “We have movement. Looks like a 3-centimeter slide south. Stay alert for breakout.”
All their work and so many hopes were on the line. Ayleana focused on the eyepatch, though it was certain the sensors at the ship would register progress before she would see it.
“Vertical movement! Three centimeters…. Five!”
Ayleana reminded herself to relax. There was nothing she could do while the ship was still at that depth. She stretched, watched the video for the first visible signs of movement, and focused on her breathing. A plume of sediment began to flow from the intersection of ship and sea floor.
She was coming loose!
In an instant, video visibility fell to zero as sediment flooded the sea floor.
“Sensors report the starboard side has risen ten centimeters. We're slowing the hoist and balancing the load.”
No one on deck was doing any celebrating yet; too much could go wrong, and they had a long way to go. But Ayleana could smell the excitement wafting to her from the El Salvador . The winching continued. The robot operators raised one of the drones above the plume, the data from the drone indicated that it had to ascend about 50 meters before the water cleared. But that was all they could gather from the visuals.
This time Edward's voice came through the ship's speakers. “Okay, everyone, we're maintaining steady tension until we can get a visual on how she sits. Our calculations indicate she's still got a lot of sediment stuck to the bottom and it's held there by her hull emplacements. It could be a while before anything changes.” Even through the speakers, Ayleana could hear the tension markers in his voice.
The agony of waiting stretched on. The cloud of sediment wasn't clearing out. More sediment continued to stream from the crack between ship and the sea floor.
Shwyd went off shift.
Humana took his place.
“Good morning, branch-sister,” Ayleana said. “Are you looking forward to seeing Valishnu again?”
The channel was silent for a moment. “I don’t remember the actual crash. I have only a few memories of the ship.” Humana's voice was … calm and quiet. “I don't know if that's a mercy or a curse. I understand from Tiana that it was a short command.”
“I'm sorry,” Ayleana said. “I should have asked you about this before I said anything.”
“No, It isn't your problem, sister of my heart. When would you have had the chance?”
AyleanaH knew Humana had always cared for her like a daughter, even amid the emotional pain of her memory loss. But since arriving on board El Salvador, Humana had been willing to interact with people more than Ayleana had ever seen.
She wondered at the change.
Humana spent hours each day teaching Kaitlin and Calypso martial arts. Amber and Kest had joined the workout sessions too. Humana hadn't even shied away from interacting with Edward, but she still bunked with Kaitlin instead of reconnecting with her old partner.
Ayleana knew from Humana's smell that she was having sex with Shwyd every day. So was Calypso. Ayleana shied away from wondering too much about the details. But she decided to be glad her branch-sister and Calypso had something to enjoy rather than fretting over who else was involved. Life was too precious to spend it that way.
Ayleana's bone-conduction wafer vibrated again. “Mission control reminds us that daylight is burning, people. We'r
e going to lift some more and see if we can achieve breakout.”
The motors on the winch started again. The deep whirring of the Active Heave Control changed its alternating pitch as it moved out of station-keeping and into active-lifting mode again. The ACH was what kept the waves from disastrously bouncing over 100 tons of Valishnu on the end of the cable. The main winch and crane were rated at 250 tons, but the cable could safely handle only 100 tons. Without the heavy lifting bags, the initial breakout of the Valishnu would have required much more than that.
Updates continued as Valishnu crept from her bed.
“She's off the bottom completely, everyone, but canted to her port side. We'll bring her up a slow 30 meters more to see if we can get a visual. Current estimates of her weight, including all the muck stuck to her and what's gotten inside the hull, are about 200 tons. If it weren't for the lift bags, we never would have gotten her out of bed. Humana, would you come to the bridge? We're having a discussion on how to handle this, and we need your input.”
With her uncovered eye, Ayleana watched Humana leap from her platform to the ship's rail and disappear onto the deck.
The recovery had now fallen into one of the more complex scenarios. If Valishnu were empty and on dry land—she would have weighed around 100 tons without her nacelles. Lifting her like this, loaded inside and out with unstable muck, was much trickier.
Shwyd returned to the other dive platform and put on the breathing mask. “It looks as though the two of us are on duty here for the duration of the lift,” he said over the team channel.
“Understood,” she replied, holding calmness around herself like a blanket.
A few minutes later, Edward's voice came over all channels. “Recommencing lift.”
The winch motors changed pitch again as the spool began to take up cable. Progress continued with increasingly frequent pauses to balance the air in the lift bags.
The sediment remained stuck fast to Valishnu’s undercarriage. The first kilometer took five hours.
At 10:00 AM, Ayleana took sips of blood to boost her strength in case she needed it. She'd made good progress handling the physical and emotional effects of taking blood since threshold and she'd stopped growing taller at 195 centimeters … shortly after she'd learned to stop worrying about it.
At 10:45 AM, Kaitlin stopped by to ask if she needed anything. Aylean asked her to stay and tell her more about her trip through Mexico. The two of them had been spending time together. Ayleana felt drawn to the young woman's unyielding courage. She’d been saddened to hear about the shooting death of Beatrice Handy. Ayleana had healed Beatrice of ALS on the same day that she'd met Kaitlin. Also, hearing the story of Cleo making a comeback from rape trauma was encouraging. It helped Ayleana bring herself back into balance.
Kest and Amber came by to check on her at noon. They brought sunscreen, and Amber climbed down to the platform to apply it for her after toweling Ayleana dry of the salty spray whipped up by the wind.
At 2:12 PM, El Salvador ’s crew began deploying a secondary winch from a surface-level lifting platform. The secondary winch had its own Active Heave Control, but it could be synced to the main winch. Soon, Valishnu would be shallow enough for the secondary synthetic rope from the other winch to reach. Then, it would be up to Ayleana and Shwyd to attach the lift hook to the harness holding Valishnu. The heavy hook splashed into the water, and began dropping through the depths at the winch's highest speed.
It was almost time to dive.
Ayleana snugged the oxygen mask tighter to remove any leakage and focused on chasing the remaining nitrogen from her system. She might have to descend as low as 500 meters. Nitrogen turning to liquid at pressure would be a dangerous nuisance to clear out of her body. She had memories of diving deeper on other worlds—from Tiana's time in the infantry—but none of those dives had been in this body. And it had deviated far from normal since her maturation threshold.
The audio transmitter vibrated on her cheekbone and Humana's voice sounded inside her head. “About 30 tons of sediment just separated from Valishnu. Some of the pressure relief valves on the lift bags are malfunctioning, and the sensor didn't relay the message. Now Valishnu is rising without the winch. We’re trying to take up slack as fast as we can, but we may need to use some of the mechanical puncture backups.”
Ayleana could hear shouting in Humana's background.
“The two of you need to dive as soon as possible to get the secondary line on before we puncture if at all possible. Go together. Teamwork may be crucial.”
Ayleana looked at Shwyd, pushed aside her habitual anger and signaled him to start the hyper-ventilation sequence. She unlocked the release and started the 10-second breathing routine herself. With a last deep breath, she signaled.
Ready?
At his nod, she signaled GO and pulled the release lever.
The platforms plunged as one into the waves.
The chill water of the South Atlantic surrounded her, seeping into her body. Ayleana nudged her body to burn more fuel to keep her temperature in a safe zone as the water around her faded quickly from dark pastel to deepest blue.
She focused on forcing all gas from her lungs and body, collapsing her lungs completely. She ripped off her VR eye patch and let it float to the surface. It was only waterproof to 200 meters, and it was useless to her now.
She monitored her body as the pressure increased. The deep-water LED lights from Shwyd's platform mingled with her own as they sank. Humana's voice, ticking off the depth at 50-meter increments sounded in her head.
At 400 meters, the lights of Valishnu’s rising began to penetrate the dark below. She was coming up fast … too fast.
“We are puncturing lift bags four and ten,” Humana said, her voice fuzzy at this depth as the pressure dampened the vibrations of the wafer on her cheekbone.
Huge clouds of expanding air erupted below, sparkling in the lights of Valishnu’s nest of cables as enormous bubbles wriggled past the dive platforms.
Ayleana flashed a signal to Shwyd on her LED wrist light.
Brake.
They couldn't let the platforms collide with the corvette.
Valishnu was still rising too fast.
“Puncturing two and twelve.”
Another cloud of air exploded below them and rushed past. Valishnu slowed then began to drift downward.
Ayleana brought her DPV up to operating position and flipped the toggle. The propeller began to spin, making a noise that resonated dimly in her bones. She pointed her body down toward the brilliant, blinking LED that marked the auxiliary cable hook.
She could see Shwyd, DPV in his hands and slightly ahead of her. His fins kicked efficiently, to assist the DPV while trying to conserve the oxygen stored in his muscles and fat.
Humana's voice echoed in her head. “She's going down. Some of the remaining pressure relief valves are stuck open. We’re still trying to catch up to her with the main winch, but it will take two minutes before we can start applying the brakes. We can try to soft-catch her and slow her down, but downward velocity is building. If you don't get the second line attached before three minutes pass, she'll be right back on the bottom.”
Ayleana kicked faster. At the moment, Valishnu was only drifting lower, but as she went down the remaining air in the bags would compress or escape. Either could mean disaster. If the line broke, the corvette might not land on the shelf. She could easily end up at the bottom of the Malvinas Chasm.
As she raced to the target, Ayleana handed Shwyd one end of a haul line. He attached it to his belt.
Ayleana, holding the other end, veered off toward the central attachment point on the cable harness supporting Valishnu’s weight. The huge, main-lifting hook weighed 690 kilograms and could support 300 metric tons. Its synthetic rope would be under incredible tension as it strained against the load. It might even kill her if it snapped.
She reached the lifting ring and attached the line and pulley, finishing as Shwyd completed lashing th
e line to the shank. As Shwyd turned and rushed toward her to help, she braced her feet on the main hook and began hauling the 275-kilogram secondary hook in, hand-over-hand. She was glad it was only about 40 meters away. When Shwyd reached her, he wrapped his tail and legs around the harness holding the Valishnu and pulled with her—splitting the effort and oxygen use between them.
Together, they wrestled the heavy hook into place. The spring-loaded catch snapped closed, but it still needed locking to insure nothing knocked it loose when the winch took out the slack. Ayleana waved Shwyd away. He obeyed, swimming to his DPV and starting toward the surface. It only took a few moments to lock the catch.
The lock snapped closed. Ayleana was turning her head to spot her own DPV, when an urgent banging of some metal tool on Shwyd's platform sounded an alert. Ayleana swiveled her head, shining her light about, searching for the problem.
