Chapter 26 - Severed Lines
Panic is a luxury for people who have time to die. I didn't have time.
With the comms dead, the red warning light on my internal dashboard turned from steady amber to flashing crimson:
**UMBILICAL SEVERED. INTERNAL LIFE SUPPORT ENGAGED. O2 REMAINING: 42 MINUTES.**
Forty-two minutes of air before the carbon dioxide scrubbers saturated and I choked on my own breath in the dark.
I looked at the heavy steel door pinning the cable. The cable itself was useless now—the wires were shredded, the primary hoist line frayed to ribbons. If I stayed attached to it, I was an anchor.
Using the right manipulator claw, I engaged the suit’s emergency pneumatic shear—a high-pressure cutting blade designed to cut steel cables in case of underwater entanglements.
I positioned the jaws over my own umbilical line, right above the snag.
"Forgive me, Mendez," I whispered, and squeezed the trigger.
*BANG.*
The hydraulic cutter snapped shut. The umbilical severed completely. The severed line whipped away into the darkness above, pulled back toward the surface by the buoyant swell of the ocean.
I was free, but I was completely untethered. An eight-hundred-pound titanium suit on the hull of a sliding submarine.
Beneath me, the *Viper* groaned again, sliding another three feet backward. The friction of the steel hull against the basalt sounded like grinding teeth, vibrating straight through the titanium soles of my boots.
If she went over the edge, she would take me with her in the slipstream of her descent.
I fired the hip thrusters, clearing the torpedo shutter bay just as the submarine's nose lifted completely off the rock shelf. The ballast blow had worked—the forward tanks were buoyant—but her stern was dragging her down like an anchor.
She was drifting backward, tilting at a thirty-degree angle, about to plunge over the lip of the underwater cliff.
Then, through the quartz viewport, I saw it.
On the submarine’s forward casing, right beside the escape tower, was the primary mooring bitt—a solid, forged-steel double bollard rated to hold the ship during Category 5 hurricanes. And twenty feet away, snagged against an outcropping of volcanic rock, was the massive, four-inch-thick steel braided towing hawser that had been dropped by the *Healy* during the initial rescue attempt.
The cable was anchored to a three-ton hydraulic dead-weight wedge dropped on the safe side of the continental shelf.
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If that cable could be secured to the *Viper*’s bitt, the dead-weight would act as an emergency brake, holding the submarine on the plateau long enough for her crew to blow the remaining auxiliary tanks from within.
I had thirty-four minutes of air.
