Frozen Solid A Novel

23




SHE VALVED GAS OUT OF HER DRY SUIT TO ACHIEVE NEGATIVE buoyancy, dropped to fifteen feet, hovered, and performed predive checks, testing both regulators, all her lights, both computers, her suit inflator and deflator valves.

She released more gas and sank down through the shaft. The hot water drill had left smooth walls that gleamed in her light. Dropping from the bottom of the shaft into the cryopeg, she stopped, got neutrally buoyant, and played her light over the ceiling. It was not, as she had expected, like the jagged, spiked roof of a cave. Instead, slightly concave and riddled with dish-shaped depressions, it reminded her of the surface of a vast golf ball.

She had thought that such high salinity would probably cloud the water, and indeed visibility was only about twenty feet. There was so much backscatter that her light beams looked like car headlights on a very foggy night. Her computers registered the water temperature at twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. So much salt kept the water from freezing, but fluid that cold and saline had a molten, syrupy feel. At this temperature, the thick crushed neoprene of her dry suit became stiffer and more resistant, too, so every kick and hand movement required extra effort, which meant increased respiration. Gas management would be especially critical on this dive.

Emily had placed an ice screw in the ceiling next to the shaft bottom and run a guideline from that point diagonally down to the extremophile colony. Hallie tied her own guideline to that ice screw as well. It would spool out from her main reel as she descended. If she did not do that, and anything happened to the primary, fixed line, she would have no way to return to the shaft.

Circling the main line with her thumb and forefinger, Hallie started following it down. Even with all her layers, she was feeling the cold, and more than the whisper she had experienced on entry. Now it was more like standing in damp clothes in a brisk fall breeze. She looked at her computers for a depth check: eighty-three feet. Nothing compared to some of the extreme technical dives she’d done, but it was impossible to forget the thousands of feet of black water beneath her.

She descended slowly, keeping contact with the line, equalizing the pressure in her ears with each breath. It took her almost twenty minutes to reach the vertical wall of the cryopeg, where strange ice formations sprouted and flared in her light beam. They were not the sharp, spearlike shapes of cave stalagmites or stalactites but more like ornate coral growths. Some resembled giant mushrooms twenty feet long and other bulbous domes, but most were as random as snow-flakes. Unlike cave formations, which were colored brightly by mineral deposits, everything in the cryopeg was blue. But not just blue. As she played her light over the wall and the various shapes, she saw the blues of sky, turquoise, berries, violets—everything from blue so light it looked almost white to the blue-black of a moonless night. Water this murky normally filtered out much of any color’s intensity, even in strong light, but here, strangely, the colors were sharp and intense.

There was no perceptible current, nor any sediment to stir up, and the only sounds were the hissing and burbling of her regulator’s second stage when she inhaled and exhaled. Then, suddenly, the extremophile colony blazed up in the bright spot of her headlamp. It covered the cryopeg’s wall in a foot-thick layer of matter that resembled bright orange cauliflower with irregularly shaped yellow patches. The largest extremophile colony she had encountered in terrestrial caves had been no bigger than a refrigerator. This one stretched out on the wall and down into the depths, far beyond the reach of her light. There was simply no telling how large it might be.

Establishing neutral buoyancy, she detached the Envirotainer from its D-ring on her chest harness and opened its hinged top. Using a scalpel-sharp excavating tool, she removed some biomatter and placed it inside the container, which had filled with cryopeg water. The extremophile might resemble cauliflower, but it was much tougher. Slicing through it was more like cutting canvas. She rehung her tool, secured the Envirotainer’s top, and reattached it to the D-ring. As she did so, she inadvertently hit the switch on her headlamp’s waist-mounted battery canister.

She knew what had happened and wasn’t alarmed. In fact, it was not unpleasant to hover there in complete darkness—except for the glowing displays of her computers. Any variation of pressure in her ears would tell her if she was rising or sinking. She rotated slowly a full circle, enjoying being one with this strange environment, and moved her hand toward her waist to turn her lights back on.

A faint, reddish glow began to come from the thing Fida called Vishnu. It wasn’t limited to one spot but seemed to emanate from the entire mass. She felt her respiration and pulse increase. She didn’t feel afraid so much as surprised. Bioluminescence was fairly common in the oceans, but she had not expected to find it down here. As she watched, the glow became brighter, then dimmed and went out completely.

Something touched her right knee.

She jerked her leg away, grabbed for her light switch, missed. The damned clumsy, three-fingered mitts.

She recoiled again, swiping one hand through the water in front of her knee while she fumbled for the switch with her other. Felt it, clicked it on, saw the beam shoot from her helmet. She swept it down toward her legs and spun 360 degrees, lancing the water with her light.

Nothing.

A computer alarm sounded.

She gasped involuntarily, sucked in a spoonful of freezing, salty water, spat it back through her regulator.

Calm down.

Breathe.

Think.

Act.

The computer alarm had been her turnaround signal.

One-third of her gas gone.

Time to leave.

Her right knee suddenly felt as if someone had stuck an ice pick into it.

She looked down. A tiny stream of bubbles was flowing from a pinhole in her dry suit. That ice pick was a needle-sharp stream of frigid water, driven by the pressure here at depth, squirting through her inner layers to her skin. How? Tough reinforcing patches covered both knees, so they were the last places a suit failure should have occurred. That was beside the point now. She could feel icy water beginning to accumulate in the dry suit boot on that side. The cold was so intense that it felt like her foot was on fire.

Thank God it was only a pinhole. Not common in professionalgrade, $3,000 dry suits like hers, but not unheard of, either. This suit didn’t have that many dives on it—fifty, maybe. It had seen hard use on deep wrecks, though. She might have damaged that knee on a previous dive, not punctured it completely but stressed it enough that failure would occur later. It would be uncomfortable, but not a true emergency. She had plenty of air and was already starting her return.

She headed back the way she had come, frog-kicking, reeling in her safety line. Halfway to the shaft’s bottom, she felt the leak in her suit grow worse. Her boot was full of water, and her foot was completely numb. The feeling of being on fire was crawling up her leg. Soon it would go numb, as well.

She knew that this was how disasters began: with a single failure that led to two others, each of which led to more, a cascade of events feeding on itself. She forced herself to breathe evenly and slowly and swam faster. Eventually she spotted the ice screw, untied her line, and secured her reel.

The pain in her leg was excruciating, but she could not rise up through the shaft too fast. In warmer water, an ascent rate of thirty feet per minute would have been possible. Here, in water so cold, that might not give her tissues enough time to off-gas their nitrogen load, and nitrogen caused the bends, a buildup of gas in the joints that could cripple or even kill a diver. With no recompression chamber, she could not risk getting bent. To be on the safe side, she had decided earlier that ten feet per minute would be best. At that rate, it would take her three minutes to ascend to the top of the shaft.

Almost immediately her computers began to beep, signaling that she was violating her preset ascent rate. It had happened without her realizing it, prompted by anxiety. She slowed down, but recognized a new danger. As it filled with water, the dry suit lost buoyancy. Even completely flooded, it would not sink, because the water in her suit would have the same buoyancy as the surrounding water. But without the buoyancy of an intact dry suit to compensate, the weight of all her equipment would make her sink.

In addition to the dry suit, she was wearing a buoyancy-control device, which, when inflated, might get her to the surface. But buoyancy was not the worst of her problems. That was hypothermia. She knew that water conducted heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air. If her suit flooded with twenty-two-degree water, she might well die from hypothermia before buoyancy became an issue. She was facing a Hobson’s choice: ascend too fast and risk the bends or rise too slowly and have her dry suit flood. She checked her depth. Twenty-five feet. Two and a half minutes. It was going to be close, and painful, but she would make it. Probably.

Then two things happened in rapid succession.

A pinhole leak opened over her other knee.

Her helmet light went out.