Deep Sea

Chapter 9: Fear

Chapter 9: Fear

"Collecting sample 5." Joe called out, as she had with the four other samples before, as she scooped some sand into the vial in the underwater sub's mechanical arms.

One week of sub dives was under their belt now and Joe was fairly proficient at it. Telling everyone, out loud, what she was doing no longer bothered her either. It was just a safety precaution.

One that trained her for their first manned sub dive tomorrow.

If there was something sinister about the lights, something watching them, surely it would have picked up their pattern of dive/no dive by now. She felt it was relatively safe to dive in the manned sub.

Because Kai would be able to see without lights, and could, in fact, see better without lights, they had been doing the manned sub simulator with lights off. The screen wasn't giving them any information so Josh would tell them what was 'coming' towards them at any given moment. Joe had memorized the entire sub control center by touch and memory.

She was incredibly nervous about it though.

Kai promised to be there to help her, Josh vowed to be an ever helpful voice over the comm. system, and she herself knew the job as well as could be expected.

But that didn't change the fact that she would be plummeting 10,000 or so feet under the water where death was all around her.

Water meant she couldn't breath.

And even if she had a scuba tank with her, the pressure would crush both her and the tank in less than a second.

And even if it didn't, the temperature, which hovered somewhere around a chilly 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, which was just this side of freezing, would make her hypothermic before she could hope to swim to the surface.

Which she wouldn't reach anyway because even a merman couldn't swim that length before the air in her lungs ran out.

Or the water crushed her.

So, the only thing between her and death was the tiny sub and a CBI injection which may or may not have taken affect or be rejected by her body and sent out with the rest of the waste.

All in all, it was terrifying.

But she wasn't too worried. She had Kai, an expert, and he assured her that his people would be standing by to try and haul the sub back up if anything went wrong.

Which was only slightly soothing because Joe knew that a leak in the hull, at that pressure, would send a jet of water through the sub powerful enough to slice her in half.

Because she knew she would worry herself stupid with all the 'what if's that could happen at that depth, she had opted to work instead of resting like Kai and Josh. Work kept her mind busy.

Work kept her from thinking of all the dangers of deep ocean travel.

Or it would if Kai had not shown up halfway through with a man to replace her.

"You're not staying in here all day, Kyma." he told her firmly. "You need rest to be alert in the sub."

"I'll be fine," Joe promised solemnly as she rotated the camera to check out the rest of the landscape that could be seen with the lights they had. "I'll take some sleeping pills tonight before bed."

"Not good enough." Kai retorted. "Come on, Hector will replace you."

"But-"

"No buts." Josh butted in, coming into the room. "Kai is right. You're not the best sub driver at your best. Get up and get out, that's an order."