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Chapter 4 - Descent
Paysha
It’s time to play a final round of truth or lie. Within half an hour I’ll be either clutching a valuable artefact or cursing a duplicitous mariner and his tall tales. Becoming fish food isn’t an option I want to consider, despite the risks.
I quickly don my diving gear as the hover’s impellers maintain an inertial lock over where I’ve estimated the Aleutia’s hulk lies. Gloves, weights, tanks and lines – checked and rechecked, mouthing the mnemonics Tom taught me. I strap the dive computer to my wrist, my scavenge bag to my thigh and hook a large spool of lightstring onto my belt. Finally, I carefully extract my melon-assisted diving helmet from its foam-padded case and disconnect its charging cable. This is a Stinker’s most coveted piece of equipment. Without ultrasound, salvage dives would be impossible in these garbage-laden waters. And no salvage meant Lewey dumping me on a beach with the rest of the City’s human driftwood. I pull it over my head until my face emerges within the mask, then tighten the buckles until they pinch.
Py watches in silence as I perch on the hull and push my feet into a monofin. With ears down and tail tucked under, his eyebrows twitch at my every move. He knows I’m vanishing underwater. Perhaps he also remembers clinging in fear to a pallet in the dark, spinning in cold eddies of debris and bodies. Now he’s a useful deterrent for Townies with theft on their mind, despite a bite far weaker than his bark.
A quick scan of the surrounding lagoon reveals only the usual diving activity. With regulator in and helmet switched on – its twin spots bright even in daylight – I check the cylinder pressures and set my dive computer. Then, with a final ruffle of Py’s ears and a tug on my straps, I pitch backwards into the Stink’s foul-smelling soup.
My atmospheric senses evaporate as I wait for the bubbles to dissipate. Unaided viz in the waters over the sunken docks is less than two metres – as good as it gets in the lagoon’s windier western catchment. Still only a metre below the surface, I orient myself vertically down and activate my helmet’s melon mode. It boots up within seconds, its coveted wizardry combining sound and vision into a single, real-time visual sensorium. The melon is good, very good, but still no match for my childhood fantasy of being a naturally sonar-equipped ocean mammal. Instead, I’m more blind bat than dolphin, a tiny screen projecting into each eye a computed synergy of ultrasound echoes and amplified residual light.
I sink deeper, keeping my body prone, the melon transducing active echoes of whatever lies in the water column within four metres. It’s mostly plastic bags and pulped cardboard, their false-coloured shapes flashing into my eyes a rainbow of cyclical colours as I draw closer. From indigo through oceanic blues into cut-grass green; then mustard into amber; finally turning blood red as the debris floats within arm’s reach.
It’s easy to be hypnotised by the melon’s son et lumière display. Analysing the larger pieces of garbage at speed requires a practised eye, and it’s now an almost subconscious task. But I can’t resolve the myriad of glittering particles from countless City ghosts drifting down into the primordial ooze. Something wriggles away as I disturb a larger piece of detritus with a sweep of my monofin. I ignore it, pushing aside fraught memories of drowned children and bottom-feeding scavengers as I focus on finding the Aleutia.
After tipping into the Stink’s trash-filled briny, I’ve been playing the part of Gretel. The lightstring has been unspooling from my waist as I descend. Its breadcrumb trail of glowing white diodes, vanishing upward into the turbid gloom, marks my route back to Py and the hover. It’s the easiest way to return topside through these drek-laden waters. There’s no need for a Hansel to fuss over me – the unaccountable fairy godmother occupying my head, sensing my every emotion, is enough.
A brighter echo flares onto my retinas, a twisting rhombus rendered in stereo. It shifts from sky blue to tangerine orange as I sink towards it. Then my helmet’s converging spots light up its true colours. A pre-Flood spectre emerges from the static-speckled, inky dark: a vivacious young woman, her graduand’s cap perched on perfectly coiffured hair; eyes bright with infinite promise. I don’t recoil from this two-dimensional ghost, the sound of my breathing unchanged. It’s a curling university recruitment poster, an eager young mind advertising her desire for untapped knowledge. I’d love to embrace her unfettered curiosity with a mutually satisfying project. But now she’s just another random, unwanted object. Sorry, gorgeous. Maybe when I’m less busy. I reluctantly swipe her away and she buckles and twists into the abyss to rejoin our dead.
My heart beats faster as the image widens into a blanket of orange, then red. There’s something big below me.
My descent continues, my wrist computer flagging more than fifteen metres of water above me. I’d planned a longer dive than I’m used to, a slower ascent better for my abused diver’s body. Claiming my prize, only to flap beside it like a dying fish, would be a futile exercise.
I’m now twenty metres under. Inside my helmet’s perspex bubble, the melon’s chittering processor warms my face as it ensonifies my surrounds. It’s not yet detected the Aleutia and I conjure up a pale imitation of the cetacean guise I crave to boost my confidence. My black skins and breastless body warp me into a contemporary half-woman, half-seal Inuit spirit – the Stink’s very own Sedna.
A buzz from my wrist signals I’m close to halfway through my dive time. Only a few minutes remain before I need to consider a safe ascent. That’s too soon for my ever-present impatience. The melon presents a smear of pale yellow, blotched with motile red and blue. My heart beats faster as the image widens into a blanket of orange, then red. Yes, something big lies below me. My breath catches as a barnacled surface looms into the view cast by my head spots. I bend my knees in reflex and push back with splayed fingers to hover over it.
It can only be a ship, its curving bulk stretching out either side into the murk. She’s rolled almost belly-up on sinking. But I need to know it’s the Aleutia and not another disastrous dockside sinking. It won’t be difficult: her moonpool makes her a special lady. I follow the widening swell of her hull and my tension turns to relief, then excitement, as the melon renders a large, elliptical disk of scintillating grey. “Here you are and here we go,” I whisper, as I plunge without pause into the Aleutia’s still invisible interior. The lightstring tugs on the cave-like entrance’s rim as its glowing dots fade into the speckled darkness. Three years of nascent sludge swirls around me as I try to match my memory of her captain’s two-dimensional sketches with the melon’s 3D rendering. A pale white crab scuttles under a faded prawn cocktail crisp packet wedged between tendril covered pipework. An ironic smile passes over my lips at this inverted trophic pyramid: the crustaceans are now feasting on us.
Even ignoring such distractions, I struggle to locate a port-side passageway, cursing as my mental map fights the pressure of both water and time. Then a eureka moment hits me: only an upright ship requires an upright me and the Aleutia is a turtle-backed vessel. So I spin on my long axis to face upwards and rapidly re-orient on the correct heading, twin vortices of muck spiralling in my wake.
The melon displays a smaller, darker ellipse and my stomach tightens in optimism. I glide through the open bulkhead into a tighter space, trying to dampen my diver’s wariness of protruding obstructions and lethal snags. Glancing back again, I check the lightstring hasn’t snapped and my exit route remains obvious. Another nagging wrist vibration reminds me time waits for no diver. Especially this diseased one.
I finally reach the third door on the passage’s outboard side. It should open into the ship’s chandlery store. Dogged from the outside, I struggle to unlatch it, hindered by my neutral buoyancy and monofin. A familiar tension builds as the urgency of my inner clock exceeds my computer’s. Don’t panic, Paysha. Stay calm, breathe slowly. You’ve got this. Another obsessive glance at my wrist: only seven minutes remaining. Too few. There will be pain after all. But first I need to gain something.
Bracing my shoulder against the door’s recess for leverage, I push as hard as I can with my legs braced against the opposite wall. An explosion of pent-up bubbles jars my ears as the door budges outward. Another few heaves and expulsive breaths and I squeeze through the resulting gap. My tank’s dial is hovering on the red. This damn thing better be in here.
The compartment’s walls are almost ultra-violet as the melon paints a triplet of parallel yellow lines across my vision. The shelving emerges into my spots as I swim closer. Too many shelves, with their contents clearly not all stowed securely when the Aleutia went down. Boxes and equipment are scattered across the deck – now the overhead. I don’t have time to inspect them all. My scavenging brain kicks down a gear. Come on, Paysha, you know what you’re after. My spots pick out a jumble of slime-topped files, boxes and bags, the melon overlaying their reality with a myriad of low-res outlines and painted fills of any objects within them.
My dive computer’s countdown continues unabated as I try to tease out the images. Its insistent, irritating buzz with each passing minute is too much like my own life’s clock. Then I spot it, a box the right size, and – yes, yes – a vague ovoid shape sits within it. It’s just as Markus described. This is it, I’ve found it!
But then the melon’s augmented image sputters, the orange-daubed ellipse fading back up the spectrum. It morphs again as I approach the box, from green to blue, then its colour is suddenly extinguished. I’m staring at an uncluttered inversion, a negative of darkness, with neither the water’s random echoes nor my eyes providing any context. There’s only a vacuum, a bubble of nothing, the artefact only discernible within its box by an egg-shaped absence of…everything.
My jaw slackens in horror as I toggle the melon’s power switch. Don’t flake out now, you stupid device. It cycles through a tortuous reboot whilst I attempt to pick out the box with my spots. Extracting one from the chaotic heap, I hurriedly turn it until I see a faded scientist’s scrawl: ‘Metal…ic…Ar…’. Yes, yes. My restarted melon replaces scrolling system text with a fresh, vibrant image. My brow furrows at its intricate, fluctuating detail. What the…
You were right, Markus. ‘Kam-eel-on’ indeed. This thing is weird.
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This is demanding reading for Substack, Johnathan, but so enjoyable.
Trippy...