Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
Olivia found the terminal and scanned her thumb and irises. As she’d hoped it found nothing out of order and authorized her to decouple the “lifeboat module”. She chose a delayed separation, set it for five minutes, then joined the others in the decompression chamber. It was crowded inside. The doctor had gone in first and was near the back, perhaps not wishing to spend the ride to the surface pressed up against her given what he now knew.
With the decompression routine initiated, Olivia swung the hatch shut and turned the wheel valve from inside until a familiar sensation in her inner ear told her it was sealed tight. Next to her, “Helen” stirred but did not awaken. Just then a tremor rocked the module and the lights in the deco chamber flickered. “What is it? Not now, please. We’re so close.” The engineer fumbled for his tablet in the tight quarters.
“A window buckled on level 17. Batteries are shorting out and we’re taking on water fast. If enough gets in before the bolts blow, we won’t be buoyant enough to make it to the surface.” Anxious murmuring followed. “More movement. Six….No, twenty….Shit, there’s at least a hundred now. I thought Olivia wasted ‘em all.”
She could think of no way to explain the shadows, or where they led to. Not in the few minutes remaining. She felt helpless but to stand packed into that chamber with the others while re-animated corpses ascended floor by floor. “How much time left?” the doctor pleaded. “Three minutes. I don’t know how much water’s inside. I don’t fuckin’ know if it’s too much. I don’t know. If….If we get trapped down here, the oxygen will last a couple days. Impossible to shut it off from inside.”
Some of them began to lose it. A sub pilot produced rosary beads from his pocket and fondled them while chanting something indecipherable. One of the engineers simply held his head in his hands, eyes wide and expressionless, contemplating the end. Outside, the first of the fabricants reached their floor. It spotted them through the chamber’s porthole and threw itself at the door.
“Can’t get at the oxygen from in here, but it does lock from the inside.” Small comfort. More fabricants appeared outside, howling and beating at the chamber with chairs, tables, whatever they could find. “Will the porthole break?” The more put together of the two engineers answered. “That’s two inch thick acrylic. No chance.”
The chamber was now surrounded by an agitated throng of reanimated corpses, beating and clawing at it from all sides. A familiar face appeared in the porthole. Olivia bent to peer at it. “V...Vivian?” Her face contorted into the purest rage Olivia had yet witnessed and screamed something incomprehensible, too muffled by the thick window.
Then the bolts blew. A series of distant bangs followed by the gut wrenching sensation of being in an elevator in free fall….upwards. Outside the porthole, fabricants stumbled around, the tables and chairs thrown about as the whole module rumbled like a rocket taking off from its pad. Vivian’s face remained in the porthole, her eyes locked on Olivia.
The engineer with the tablet began reading out loud. “16,280 feet. 16,150 feet. 16,021 feet. Jesus we’re really moving.” A relieved cheer erupted, barely audible over the rumbling. Or the clawing and screeching just outside. “15,952 feet.”
Outside, the lights had finally gone out. Only the interior of the deco chamber was still lit. The walls and ceiling swarmed with patches of boiling shadow. Bony, pale arms drifted into and out of these swirling black masses. Yet more fabricants poured through rifts in the walls. Olivia spotted Vivan with a familiar sledgehammer. “Oh fuck”.
Vivian took a swing at the porthole and missed. The impact rang the deco chamber like a bell. She lifted it, and took another swing. This one connected. Small fractures appeared in the middle of the acrylic pane. “You can’t have her you bitch!” Olivia cried. Another impact. “13,874 feet” the engineer reported. They were picking up speed. Again and again Vivian swung the hammer against the porthole. Each time, more fissures accumulated. “STOP! JUST LET US GO!” Olivia screamed. The light inside the deco chamber flickered again. Like a candle in the darkness, last redoubt against creatures of the night.
“11,320 feet.” Vivian vanished down the stairs. Olivia waited, drenched in sweat, crippled with anxiety. Soon Vivian returned with what Olivia recognized as a pneumatic jackhammer. “Oh shit. Oh shit, shit.” The others wriggled to get a look. “What is it? What’s going on out there?” Vivian searched the room for a compressed air port.
“9,501 feet.” Something began to happen. It was initially visible as swelling in the face and hands. Vivian didn’t seem to notice as she searched for something to plug the jackhammer into. Nor did it stop the rest of the fabricants from their incessant clawing and bellowing. “7,769 feet.”
Blisters began to appear on Vivian’s face. Some of the fabricants retreated from the chamber, looking at one another in confusion. “What are you stopping for?” Vivian shouted. “5,221 feet. Less than a mile to go.” The blisters on Vivian’s face burst. sticky black blood trickled from them. She bled also from the ears and nose but didn’t seem to feel it.
Finally she found the spigot tucked away between a cabinet and console. She looked back at Olivia, devious excitement in her eyes. It couldn’t be tightened properly by hand. She set about looking for a wrench. “3,407 feet” the engineer reported, gripping his tablet with white knuckles. Vivian found the wrench and set about tightening the connection.
The other fabricants had started to notice something was wrong. One of them collapsed, open sores gushing black fluid. Some looked on in alarm while the rest remained oblivious, pounding and scratching at the outside of the chamber and wailing in frustration. “1,860 feet. Home stretch, should be seeing sunlight soon.”
The boils on Vivian’s face multiplied. Skin bubbles emerged, burst in a spray of black goo, then were followed by more. Vivian began to stumble as if disoriented. “What’s happening Olivia? For god’s sake!” She remained quiet, transfixed by what she now witnessed. “494 feet. We’re in the photic zone.”
Vivian, with great effort, lifted the tip of the jackhammer to the porthole. She met Olivia’s gaze with a wide, deranged grin on her face. The window behind her now shone radiant blue instead of the familiar black. Vivian faltered. a look of fear and anger in her eyes. One of her eyes burst, a waterfall of black liquid seeping out of her empty socket. She pawed at her bloody face with hands now mangled by burst veins. She dropped the jackhammer and screamed.
“That’d be us right now if not for the chamber. We’re still pressurized to depth.” One of the engineers was now beside her, also peering through the small window. She remembered the burst window a few levels down. The rapid ascent was killing them. “Right now every cell in their body is coming apart. Four atmos will pack a lot of dissolved nitrogen in the blood and soft tissues. All of which just came out in the span of a couple minutes.” It was sobering, and Olivia very briefly felt sorry for Vivian.
Not the Vivian out there, disintegrating into bloody pulp as expanding bubbles of gas shredded her cells. The Vivian she’d known for those first few weeks aboard the Belusarius. How easily humanity can be lost. And how difficult to restore. The rest of the fabricants lay motionless around her, blood fizzing furiously from their wounds like a shaken soda.
The module lurched as it breached the surface, bobbing up and down like a buoy. The window on the far wall now admitted an intensely welcome ray of sunlight, illuminating a circular patch of the floor. It was an agonizing twenty more hours in the chamber until it was safe to emerge. The engineers pulled down a ladder and opened an emergency hatch in the top half of the domed ceiling. Cold, salty air rushed in.
“Smell that! Oh sweet fuck I’ve never smelled anything so wonderful!” She understood his delirium the moment she felt sunlight on her skin. The rest busily scrambled up the ladder and through the hatch, to stand on the top of the module in the open air. Olivia turned to see ‘Helen’ sitting up, eyes open.
It was a tense few seconds before she spoke. “Olivia? Where are we. I can’t remember...They took me from the hospital. Then there was a dark room. It was loud and smelled terrible. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. How did you…” Olivia was at her side in a heartbeat, arms around her neck.
Violet laughed. “You’re crushing me. This is real, isn’t it? The outside. You really did it, didn’t you.” Tears welled up in Olivia’s eyes, and her lower lip quivered. “You wanna explain to me why I have red hair?” Olivia now finally bawled, overcome with relief and resumed hugging Violet over her protestations. It was the happiest she’d ever been.
“And the happiest she’ll ever be” spoke a booming voice which echoed down the concrete shaft. In one of the cages lining the rim, Olivia stood tearfully embracing a phantom shaped like Violet. The real Violet stood just outside, opening the next cage over. The booming voice once again issued forth. “That makes three, little one. I return your father to you.”
The End.