Deep Sea

Chapter 10: Drop

Chapter 10: Drop

Joe scrubbed furiously at her body at four AM the next morning.

She had felt it might be safer to deploy the sub in the morning, not making too much of a fuss about it. If the lights were watching them, the cover of night would camouflage them a bit. So they would be pushing off at five, before the sun even rose.

Which was why Joe was showering at four being careful about her healing tattoos that only she and Ilia were currently aware existed.

The manned subs could only spend 8 hours submerged. Unlike the unmanned subs, they had a life support system that drained on the battery decreasing the time they could spend underwater.

However, that also meant that Joe would be spending 8 uninterrupted hours in Kai's presence. The last the thing she wanted to worry about was if she smelled bad. So Joe, who always showered at night, had opted to shower that morning as well.

There was a specially designed suit on her bed. It was light green, cover all style specially designed to keep her warm. Of all the life support systems on the sub, central heating wasn't one of them. The sub would keep things just warm enough, but it wouldn't exactly be warm. So the heat preserving suit was a necessity.

After washing her entire body, excluding her hair because she had washed that last night and didn't want to get into the sub with wet hair, Joe climbed out of the shower.

She pulled on her blue swim suit, a pair of soccer shorts and a tank top, then pulled the green body suit over herself. She was to wear a pair of black boots, provided, with it. There would be a dehydrated meal waiting for them in case they got hungry on the voyage.

All in all, it wasn't going to be a terribly uncomfortable experience.

Except that Joe would be spending 8 hours in complete darkness.

Alone with a guy that she prayed didn't think she smelled bad or noticed that she had scrubbed herself raw.

Thirty minutes later, Joe went up on deck where Kai and the maintenance crew who would be dropping the sub were already waiting. Josh was below deck in the sub room, ready to guide them from there.

Below the ship, Joe knew Adara, Flavian, and one other merman she hadn't met named Dorian were waiting to accompany them down. Kai assured her they were his best.

They wouldn't go directly up to the lights. If it was an organism they hadn't yet encountered making that pattern, which was very possible, they didn't want to frighten it. And if it was something more sinister, approaching it might cause it to do something harmful to them, like open fire.

So they would be hitting the sea floor a few miles away from it then approaching as silently as the sub could manage.

"Good morning, Kyma." Kai greeted her as she approached. "Are you prepared?"

His hair was wet and Joe knew he hadn't gone swimming last night. Did that mean he was just as nervous about spending all that time with her and had bathed religiously too? She hoped so. Him being nervous would greatly decrease the nerves she felt.

"Climb down through the hatch there." a maintenence man told her, pointing to a hole in the top of the sub.

The simulator was extremely accurate as far as the controls went. But the interior was a bit different.

The entrance was a circular hatch they climbed down into a pit beneath. The controls were in front of a window on the ground. They would reach them by laying down on their bellies and looking forward. Two other windows were placed on either side but they were circular and smaller than the main window. The manned sub also had arms but Joe didn't anticipate using them since they were just going to be looking.