[Original Novel] Pressure: First Encounter, Part 1

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No amount of reassurance that the interior of the sub would not change pressure on the way down could stop Angie from popping her ears. It was compulsive. She’d been diving only once in her life, a brief touristy hand holding affair in Cozumel back in ‘26. It had gone well enough, but while everyone else adjusted to the underwater environment within minutes she had spent the entire dive pinching her nose, yawning, struggling to equalize.

Of the four crew members, she was easily the least qualified in a technical sense and felt minor guilt for taking up a seat on the mission she knew very well had been fought over ferociously by marine biologists, geologists and various other academics in applicable fields. Why the NOAA saw fit to send a dream researcher to the bottom of the Pacific was a mystery to everyone, and many had told her so by email.

That she had accepted the invitation came as a surprise to her family, but friends closer to her seemed intuitively aware of her reasons. “This is going to be big for you”, they said. Yeah, that was the idea. She’d been stuck in what was essentially indentured servitude for six years under Mike Hargrove and two other senior scientists with the only potential way out being a job offer from a pharmaceuticals company that made sleep drugs.

Put you to sleep, keep you from sleeping, stabilizing your sleeping patterns, keep you from wetting the bed, make you wet the bed, who knows what all. The commercials were incessant, three quarters of which consisted of the narrator hurrying through the long list of side effects.

She had no moral compunctions about taking the position, but the wording of the offer made it clear that she’d be transplanted from one dead end to another, and at 33 she was beginning to feel as though she should’ve accomplished more by now.

So, to the abyssal plain. The email included a photograph of the station, which looked to be a large central pressure sphere with four pill shaped cylinders extending from it. The spherical hub was supported from below by thick steel pillars, although it was more accurate to call them restraints. A sphere with that volume would be tremendously buoyant and it was only four hundred tons of pig iron in the ballast tray that held it down.

“Argyro”. Named for Argyroneta Aquatica, the diving bell spider. Co-funded by NASA as an experiment in assembling modular Mars colonies, but on the ocean floor. Angie recalled the “History of Man in the Sea” DVD she’d gotten in the mail as part of the prep packet, all prior undersea labs had been in pitifully shallow water on the continental shelf and sunk as a single preassembled unit.

Argyro was a historical first in that it was assembled module by module in a process intended to mirror how a base might be constructed on other bodies in the solar system. That was NASA’s angle, NOAA’s interest was in putting scientists on-site near a cluster of black smokers and very near the edge of the Mariana trench so that subs could be deployed into it frequently and regardless of weather conditions. It was the most valuable research site you could hope to find for such an outpost, and in spite of the ongoing industrialization of the sea floor for mining, drilling and fish farming it had been an uphill battle to secure funding.

The pilot coughed. Lost in her own thoughts until that point Angie began to feel self conscious. It had been just the two of them in the tiny metal sphere for nearly an hour. Perhaps seven feet in diameter, the sphere was the only portion of the much larger submersible that actually held out water pressure, and space was at a premium.

The docking hatch lever was at just the right height that she'd banged the top of her head on it several times when the sub swayed unexpectedly, but there simply wasn’t room to move. Backpacks and dry cases surrounded her, and the duffel bag containing her clothing took up the remaining space on her lap.

"Claustrophobic?" The pilot, whom she'd learned on the boat was also the crew's microbiologist, didn't bother to turn as he addressed her. It was rhetorical, but he’d guessed wrong, so she answered anyway. "Actually not at all. I love confined spaces. When I was young I used to build make believe space capsules out of cardboard boxes. You know, stick some pillows and a blanket in there, cut a porthole, and I'd hang my tablet on the other side showing a slideshow of photos from the James Webb space telescope. It was my place to get away."

The pilot nodded. More than he'd asked for, but it was standard practice to feel out new crew members as decades of data on human interaction in isolated, confined conditions made very clear the importance of understanding each others' quirks. "I was the same way. My cardboard boxes were all submarines, though." Both smiled. "I'm Eliot by the way. I study the bugs. Thermal vent organisms, extremophiles, I'm sure Lizzie told you topside."

In fact she hadn't. She'd spent all of ten minutes on the boat before they'd hurried her into the sub and sent her on this long descent. "I know a little bit about that, from the DVD. I saw a documentary on it once but I don't remember much." It didn't escape her notice that he was an exceptionally handsome man, save for a pair of barely noticeable bags beneath his eyes. An occupational hazard in any field of research. Just then, the station came into view.

It looked astonishingly similar to the Tiangong space station. Banks of floodlights blasted forth in all directions, spotlights swept through the murky void and came to bear on their vessel. "They should be calling us momentarily."

Angie raised an eyebrow. "I thought you needed a tether for that? Water's pretty much opaque to radio waves." Another tidbit from the DVD. "That's true except for ELF, but the Argyro uses neither. Just watch." So she did. Seconds later a shimmering turquoise beam appeared and slowly tracked their movement until it shone directly on a large patch of what she now figured for photosensitive material just under the left pumpjet.

"Blue green laser. Goes further than you'd think in sea water, and it's silent. Doesn't disturb the critters." Sure enough a video feed replaced the sonar readout on the small screen just above Eliot's seat. "Took your sweet time. Getting to know the new girl probably." Eliot fumbled for a moment before his hand came to rest on the comms controls.

"Haha, easy. You watch out for him though, he hasn't seen a woman in three weeks." Of course, none of them had. She expected this sort of thing, having been cooped up with a tent full of undergrads during an expedition in the Summer of '29. She was there to study their sleep cycles. They seemed to think they were there to study her.

The spotlights and laser remained pinned on their little boat as it slowly positioned itself for docking, as though the lights were tractor beams, or lassos physically pulling the sub into place. The impact was startling, a loud clang reverberated through the hull signaling that the docking collar had received them.

Whirring followed, the collar clamps pulling the rim tight for a good seal. It was one of many small reminders that they were surrounded by cold ocean water exerting a terrible force on the hull, constantly trying to get in. Joining two pressure vessels in a safe manner such that comparatively fragile animals could pass between them in a dry, one-atmosphere environment three miles underwater is a feat in many ways more impressive than landing on the moon.

That anxiety gave way to relief when the hatch swung open and a rusty ladder slid down and locked into place in the center of the cabin. A brief shower of residual water hit Angie across the forehead. "We...we have a dry seal right?" Eliot laughed. "Yeah, that's normal. Didn't mean for you to get rained on, I guess I should've warned you but it's not like you can avoid it."

Arms belonging to some unseen person reached down through the hatch, like the hands of God descending from the clouds in a pillar of sunlight. "Toss me something. Let's get you out of there." Once all of her gear was unloaded, she shimmied around the side of the ladder and looked up into the interior of the Argyro.

The light was almost blinding, her irises having adjusted to total darkness on the ride down. That same set of hands grabbed her by the wrist and helped her up the ladder. She discovered at the top that they belonged to Leonard Snyder, the crew's habtech. "Hope the ride wasn't too rough. Eliot flies a sub the same way he drives." She searched the men's faces for hostility but their identical lopsided grins suggested the sort of recreational antagonism typical of brothers.

After brief introductions with Nathan, the Argyro's marine geologist, Angie turned down the grand tour and opted instead for a hot meal. The sub was dry but frigid, as it ran on battery power which had to be conserved for the lights, motors and electronics. She'd been told that she might want to get into her thermal suit up on the boat but she shrugged it off, only discovering after 1,000 feet that the Rat Tail was nothing like the tourist sub she'd been on in Cozumel.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 2!}