Chapter 25 - The Sinking Monster
On the surface, the *Healy* unleashed its high-pressure compressors.
Down through the umbilical line snaking through twelve hundred feet of ocean came pure, compressed nitrogen at four thousand pounds per square inch. It slammed into the external bypass with the roar of an erupting volcano.
The submarine shivered violently beneath my feet.
From the ventral vents beneath the bow, massive plumes of displaced seawater erupted, boiling upward into the black ocean in giant, shimmering bubbles of air and foam. The sudden loss of thousands of pounds of water weight hit the bow instantly.
The nose of the *Viper* began to lift.
"It’s working!" Mendez shouted over the radio. "Bow is rising! Center of gravity is shifting forward!"
"Morgan, get out of that shutter bay!" Vance ordered. "Now!"
I hit the thruster controls, firing the hip props in reverse to back out of the confined torpedo locker. But as the submarine’s nose shifted, the massive steel shutter door above me, dislodged by the sudden mechanical jolt, swung downward under its own immense weight.
*CLANG!*
The heavy steel hatch slammed down directly across my suit’s umbilical tether, pinning the thick bundle of life-support and communications lines against the hull frame.
The sudden yank arrested my movement. The thrusters whined, spitting cavitation bubbles, but I was anchored fast.
"Tether fouled!" I yelled, my voice clipping as adrenaline flooded my veins. "I’m pinned at the bow entrance!"
"Morgan!" Vance’s voice cut through a storm of static. "...losing telemetry... pressure sensors reading spike... surface line under strain..."
The *Viper* was still rocking. The rush of nitrogen into the forward ballast tanks had stabilized her bow, but the shift had torn the brittle basalt shelf beneath her stern. A massive slab of rock sheared away, plunging thousands of feet into the Greenland Basin.
The entire submarine lurched backward.
The heavy steel door pinning my tether shifted, the sheared edge slicing through the outer protective casing of my umbilical. The communications line snapped with an audible *pop* inside my helmet.
May you like
Absolute silence filled my ears.
The radio was dead. I was twelve hundred feet below the ice, trapped inside an unpressurized compartment of a nuclear submarine that was sliding backward toward the abyss.
