Beyond the Ice Limit

69

GIDEON SWAM BACK from unconsciousness, racked with pain. It took a few minutes for him to think through what had happened and realize he wasn’t dead.

The DSV was still floating on the surface of the ocean, but it was now upside down. His chair was on the ceiling, its straps loose and dangling. Something was wrong with his arm, and when he examined it he saw the ugly, shocking sight of a bone sticking out of his forearm, oozing blood. The interior of the sphere was wrecked, glass and wire everywhere, the acrid smell of smoke hovering in the dead air. The only light came in through the viewports.

But…the shell was intact and he was alive.

The sub had been battered severely by the shock wave, but the titanium hadn’t been breached. He could see, outside the starboard viewport, the R/V Batavia, about two miles away. It was listing in the water, no longer moving. Even as he watched, the list grew more pronounced and he could see that the ship was launching orange lifeboats.

Dead air. He took a deep breath, felt a wave of dizziness. As he surveyed the interior wreckage of the sub, he saw that all life-support systems were dead. His only air was what was already inside the shell, and he’d been breathing it now for several minutes, perhaps even longer. It felt like the oxygen levels were dropping, as he was panting—or maybe that was due to the horrible pain of his broken arm.

He needed to get out. And that meant climbing down and exiting from below; since the DSV was floating upside down, its only hatch was on the bottom. He hoped to God the force of the explosion hadn’t warped the hatch, trapping him inside…

Pushing aside all thoughts of anything but escape, he tried to move. His head was splitting, he was bruised and cut all over; glass was in his hair, blood was trickling into his eyes, and his arm was a fright. Every movement was excruciating.

He had to immobilize that arm if he hoped to be able to do anything. And he had to do it quickly, before he fainted from shock. Using his good arm, he managed to unbutton, then pull off his shirt. Gasping through the pain, he lashed the broken arm against his abdomen, keeping it in place. Clearing away debris with his good arm, he unsealed the hatch and—thank God—managed to open it. Water did not rush in—the air in the personnel sphere had nowhere to escape, and it formed a sort of bubble. The water was going to be cold, around fifty degrees.

So be it.

He eased himself down into the water until it was chest-deep. The shock of the cold took away some of the pain in his arm. The upper, flimsier personnel hatch was gone—lost in the shock wave. All he had to do was hold his breath, dive down and out, and then surface.

Which he did.

He came up next to the mangled, half-submerged DSV. He grasped a projecting piece of metal and managed to crawl up out of the frigid water, where he stretched out atop the wrecked mini sub. There were plenty of handholds, which was good, because the seas were heavy and the sky scudding with dark clouds, the storm wind rising. God, he was cold.

But as he lay atop the bobbing Pete, shivering, he marveled that he was alive at all. It would be a shame if he died now. And just as he had that thought, he heard a sound, and a plane flew overhead, waggling its wings at the sinking Batavia and dropping flares and signal buoys.

He didn’t know if the blast had destroyed the Baobab. Chances were, the force of the detonation—impeded as it was from inside the Rolvaag’s hull—hadn’t been sufficient for the liquid-liquid explosion. But he did know one thing: they were all going to be rescued. And he had survived—at least, for the time being.

And then Gideon passed out.