[Original Novel] Pressure: First Encounter, Part 2

^{Part 1}

The first relay was mounted on the same sort of tripod as the lights. The emitters were clustered together facing outward in a circle, eight in total. Two thin wheels of photosensitive glass above and below received incoming laser transmissions, and the emitters doubled as LIDAR so that one emitter could perform tracking duties for either of the two lasers it was adjacent to.

"They're stackable in case we ever get more suits and need to network more than two at a time, but with the funding situation now that's unlikely." As Eliot spoke Angie could just barely perceive slight fluctuation in his beam's brightness. She was witnessing the sound of his voice being sent as concentrated light through near-freezing ocean water at 10,000 psi. It was sobering.

"If our suit lasers can transmit to these relays, why don't we just use them to talk to each other?" Almost as soon as she'd said it, she knew it was another newbie question. "Limited range. They run on suit batteries, you don't want those to run out since you also need them to run your rebreather. You have 12 hours of oxygen and a passive backup CO2 absorbant, but if we ever wind up using those we probably have bigger problems than not being able to communicate."

So the short range suit lasers talked to the nearest relay, and the relay carried the message via other relays to where the other aquanaut was working. The optical equivalent of cell phone towers. "What do you do if you go someplace off of the path and you need to call home?" Eliot paused for a moment as he wiped some detritus from the relay's emitter. "...Don't leave the path."

"Don't leave the path. Don't use the thrusters. If I check my boots am I going to find training wheels?" She was joking, but got a stern reply. "It's your first EVA. I mostly just wanted to help you acclimate. Don't you notice a difference? You seem a lot more comfortable now."

He was right. She was moving confidently with the suit, her ear popping habit had vanished and if anything she felt invigorated. "I imagine your field is mostly men." Eliot didn't know how to take that. "I'm not making any accusations, but it seems possible you're in the habit of assuming that women need your help."

Eliot shrugged invisibly within his suit. "You'll get over it." He started back towards the station and with something between a laugh and a shout, Angie began pursuit. He proved unexpectedly quick though, and before she realized it he was out of sight. There was a fog-like effect in the distance and the dropoff was severe.

"Eliot? Eliot, I've lost you." Her beam shone forth into the darkness but she received no reply. Shortly afterward the tracking readout for the laser changed from "Searching" to "Target lost". Impossible. The range was at least a thousand feet. There was no way he had gotten so far ahead, so quickly.

Unless... "The thruster pack", Angie thought. "He's having some fun. He lifted off somewhere ahead of me and is going to be waiting at the station with a smug, shit eating grin. Or he's going to come swooping down at me from above. Something."

She kept walking a ways, but soon noticed that she hadn't seen a relay or light for some time. Her suit lights were the only visible source. That wasn't right either, she’d been able to see the lit up path for hundreds of feet from the station, why would-

A loud thump sounded against her helmet. Something was swimming at the dome and striking it repeatedly, it was a blur of white that was moving too quickly to make out. It darted around the suit, thumping over and over against the hull, as if searching for a way inside. Angie shrieked, and flailed her metal arms ineffectively at the creature.

The thrashing sent her off balance and the next thing she knew she was laying on her back in the muck surrounded by a cloud of silt. She caught her breath, searching the cloud for some sight of the creature. Right on cue it slowly approached the dome to investigate. Angie stopped breathing entirely when it came into view.

It was easily six feet long, as thick as her arm, and extremely pale. Bordering on translucent. Some kind of eel maybe, but with a face she could neither look away from nor bear to look at. It resembled nothing more than the face of an old man. Tiny, beady eyes inset in a skeletal face with a bony jaw that evoked memories of her grandfather's final days.

Regaining her wits, Angie screamed at the eel and jammed her thumb on the thruster control. It sent her suit spinning wildly across the ocean floor, then down a steep embankment. It was a rough ride, thrown to one side of the suit then the other as it tumbled down the hill, but Angie's thoughts were dominated by the image of that creature's face.

Finally the suit came to rest, face down in the muck. Having apparently waited for the worst possible time, her lights went out. With no small effort she pried herself up out of the sludge, and flipped over onto her back. Her heart was thumping wildly, the stench of sweat filling her lungs with every breath.

Inside the hand cavity she fiddled with the joystick that controlled the heads up display until she found the option for turning on the backup lights. They flickered to life revealing the creature's face looming above her, a thousand feet wide.

Angie fell out of bed screaming in a tangle of sheets. Within moments the rest of the crew gathered around her. "No, no no no...Not real, not real..." Tears soaked her cheeks and matted her hair against them as she violently struggled to be free of the sheets, blanket and other bedding.

"It was, it was some kind of animal. It was small, then it was huge, I was out in the suit with Eliot-...Where is Eliot??" It was all the three could do to restrain her until she recognized that Eliot was among them. "Angie, shhh." he said. "You went ahead, I lost sight of you, I think I went off the path and got lost and then-" Eliot stroked her hair and gestured for the others to leave. "Angie. I didn't go out with you."

She went silent. "We found you about half a mile down the path in one of the newt suits. You were passed out on your back. Brought you in about an hour ago, you were babbling in your sleep right up until you woke just now."

A deep sob escaped her body as she clung to him. It was still fresh in her mind. The terrible, bony little face. And its gargantuan twin, staring down at her from above. Of course it had been a nightmare, sleep walking, something like that. Nothing else made sense. Eliot stayed with her until her bed was restored to a usable condition, and then lingered at the door.

"It was so real. I've never had a dream like that. Everything was so detailed, I felt it all. You showed me the relays, and-" Eliot turned. "The relays?" There was a moment of startled recognition between them. "Angie, how do you know about the relays? They're a new addition. I was going to explain them to you tomorrow."

For both of them it felt as if all the heat had left the room. A moment of intolerable, oppressive silence followed. "Am I crazy?" Angie seemed too willing to ask, peering at Eliot through teary eyes, huddled beneath a pile of blankets taken from the other bunks. "No Angie", Eliot sighed. "You're not crazy. We've all been having dreams like that. It's why they sent you here."

Breakfast was a silent affair. The deceptively painted walls created a spacious, cheery impression that did nothing to prevent Angie from feeling the full force of the outside water slowly compressing her skull.

Nathan spoke first. "Eliot got hit first. Then it was Leonard, I was last. It took us a day or two to make the connection that it was affecting us in order of arrival." He looked back down at his tray, evidently expecting one of the others to pick up where he left off. Leonard looked up and glanced at Eliot, whose eyes gave quiet approval.

"There's records of the same thing happening to past crews, but none of them stayed down this long. It never got severe enough that they recognized it as something other than mission fatigue. One day we found Leonard sitting in the Rat Tail fumbling with the controls as if he'd never seen them before. He fought like a cornered dog when we pulled him away, only to snap out of it with no recollection of anything since he'd gone to sleep. Whatever it is, it happens while you're sleeping. At first."

Angie's eyebrow elevated and she mouthed 'at first?' to Eliot, who nodded. "Nathan was next, had an episode in the airlock. Got in a suit and tried to surface with it. I went out in the Rat Tail and held him down until he came back to us. Only he remembered the whole thing with the small difference that in his version, Leo was with him and he saw the Arygro implode. Dream Leo told Nate to make an emergency ascent in the suit, and that's when I woke him up."

Nate glanced at Leo, who was staring intently at the remains of breakfast. "It's like we're sleep walking. At first the dreams were short, abstract, we never remembered 'em and often stayed in our beds. But after Nate and Leo's episodes they just got more and more real, we remembered everything, each time it was someone else in the dream doing things it turned out they never did once we woke up."

Angie scanned their faces one by one. All seemed sullen, Leo possibly ashamed. Eliot pushed his tray aside and set one elbow on the table. "I know how it sounds. But we've all seen it happen, unless there's some severe folie a deux going on, I don't-" Angie cut him off. "I believe you." Nate muttered "It's your job to believe us." Eliot scowled, but Angie was unphased.

"I recognize some of what you're describing. There's ample precedent, although I will admit that it's unusual to see it manifest identically in more than one person in the same place. That alone suggests some common factor, most likely something physiological related to your time spent down here." Nathan piped up again.

"Show her Wormwood." Eliot whipped around and glared at him. "What’s wormwood?" Angie looked around, but nobody seemed forthcoming. Finally, Eliot spoke up, but his answer only created new questions. “He means the body”. She waited for further clarification but none was forthcoming. "What body? What are you talking about? Did someone die?"

It took some doing to talk her back into the sub. The uncoupling process sent a powerful lurching sensation through her body, and it took several seconds for the hull to stop vibrating. The ocean seemed violently frustrated that they had cheated it out of an opportunity to penetrate the Rat Tail and Arygro.

Angie's eyes strained to make out the docking collar receding into the darkness as the sub pulled away. It was alarming to think that a minute earlier, she'd been standing there. She'd passed safely through that hatch, in breathable air and comfortable pressure, where now there was only frigid black death.

"We can only stay for a few minutes. The effect becomes more powerful with proximity, and with the number of people." Leonard and Nate had stayed behind in the Argyro, she had last seen them watching one other intently over the kitchen table.

Twenty feet below, relays lined the lit-up path she vividly recalled having explored with Eliot, although if what they had told her could be believed, no such thing ever happened.

"The sonar system is mil spec, resolution is phenomenal but it requires multiple passes. You get a fuzzy image at first that gets clearer with each sweep. Feel your way around the UI, it'll be a few more minutes before we're at the trench."

It was straightforward enough, and by the time they arrived she’d taken several test soundings of rock formations just out of range of the lights. The screen was autostereoscopic and she could make out bumps and ridges with sufficient clarity that in some cases she could identify what sort of animal had coincidentally drifted into the picture.

"Have a look. We'll begin our descent after I call Nate and Leonard to let them know we made it." There was nothing to see. A row of lights followed the contour of the trench for a mile or so on either side, but the trench itself was such pure blackness that she could just as easily have mistaken it for an unlit stretch of seafloor.

When they began to sink into it, a feeling of panic came over her that she struggled to conceal. It was not so much like physically entering anyplace real, but instead plummeting slow-motion into oblivion.

The lit up path, final familiar point of reference, rose out of view as the Rat Tail sunk past the edge of the trench. Arc lamps illuminated the wall, which did nothing to restore an appropriate sense of moving through a solid, physical space but instead created the illusion that they were hanging solitary in an endless black expanse with a round patch of rock in front of them.

It seemed called into existence by the spotlight rather than revealed by it. The panic returned at once when the tiny sub rotated to face down the trench and the spotlight left the wall entirely. She was now without any outside point of reference whatsoever, and unable to inhale until forcibly averting her gaze from the viewing dome.

"Is something wrong?" She wished he'd turn to face her when he said that. It wasn't enough to stare at the wall, only partial relief from whatever was crushing her heart and lungs. Her whole ribcage felt compressed, a false sensation made devastatingly real by the anxiety of being alone in a seven foot metal sphere that was now almost a full five miles from sunshine and fresh air. Of course she wasn't alone, was she? And on a rational level she knew that she was safe in Eliot's hands, that the sub would-...

Eliot was gone. Angie blinked. Then looked back at the wall for a moment, then back at the pilot's seat. Still gone. "No no no no NO". She stood up, as much as the confines of the hull would allow and tried to pry the seat loose, turning over the three small supply bags as if he could somehow be hiding under them. "Eliot? ELIOT? ELIOT??".

Forgetting her fear of the black expanse she leaned all the way into the space afforded by the curvature of the dome and peered back at the body of the sub, or as much as she could see of it from that vantage point. But what for, she thought. He could no more have climbed outside than he could be hiding under those bags.

There was simply nowhere he could have gone to. The hatch was shut tight, with all of a foot and a half of space beneath the 'floor' and the bottom of the hull, which was packed with pressure sensitive electronics that couldn't be mounted outside. Eliot was simply gone.

Angie choked on her own frantic cries, pawing at every inch of the hull's interior. But of course, no secret door, no hiding place for him to pop out of. He’d vanished. In a moment of clarity she wondered if she was having a dream. It was an appealing prospect, but after a fit of slapping and pinching herself, she gave up on it.

Years of volunteering for various sleep studies had familiarized her with the signs that one is dreaming, and a dream this was not. She ran her hand again along the cold metal wall. Real, or beyond her ability to tell the difference. That's when she heard the first faint pop.

It was hard to place. Vaguely familiar, but not enough so that she was able to figure it out until the second and third, louder than the first, alerted her to the source. The sub continued slowly rotating on the way down, like a plane spiraling out of control.

As it came to face the trench wall again, it provided the contrast necessary to see a tiny Y-shaped crack in the dome. Small enough that she could cover it entirely with her finger, which she did for a moment until resigning herself to the reality that doing so would not make it vanish.

That, and the fact that the moment she touched it, another branch in the fissure appeared with a loud crackling sound. It was supposed to get stronger under pressure. Borosilicate glass, arranged on a molecular level to compress in the deep sea so that an impact that would shatter it on the surface would instead bounce off harmlessly at 33,000 feet.

Yet in spite of what she had been told as a matter of unassailable fact, the crack continued to grow before her eyes. She could not scream or cry, she still felt hoarse from before and could only fixate helplessly on the spiderweb of fissures as it grew from the diameter of a penny to that of a quarter.

Each time new fissures appeared at the periphery, it was accompanied by another pop, or crackle, the sound of borosilicate glass splintering under the terrible pressure of the deep sea. Almost as an afterthought she glanced at the depth reading. 24,000 feet.

It had only been a few minutes. The descent had accelerated. "Come to your senses. Do something." It was like she was shouting inwardly at someone else, like watching a hapless idiot in a movie whose decisions she had no control over. All of a sudden her body responded and in a flash she was in the pilot's seat, scanning the vast array of toggle switches for anything related to ballast.

"BANG!". She jumped in her seat. It was so loud, but muffled, definitely originating outside the sub. As it turned to face the wall again she noticed the illuminated area was dimmer and to the left of center. She felt herself beginning to lose control. A quick glance outside revealed that the right arc lamp had imploded.

The depth meter read "31,000 feet." It was too fast. She felt certain such a rapid descent would be noticeable. She glanced outside again in the hopes of getting a sense of speed from the rock wall, but the sub once again turned away to face the abyss. "POP".

Her focus shifted back to the radiating web of cracks, which had expanded considerably while she'd been distracted. Nausea overwhelmed her. Tears began to well up, but she would not yet scream. If she could find the ballast controls, maybe she could still-

"Yes! Oh thank you God, thank you!" She lunged for a pair of switches labelled "L" and "R" under "purge ballast". In the span of a few seconds she went from dread to elation, imagining her safe return to the Argyro and how she'd relate her tale of near-death to the others. But nothing happened.

She flipped the switches again. Then each one individually several times. Then both. Still no reaction. Angie brought her fist down on the control panel, screaming incoherently, finally letting herself cry. Then the lights went out.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}