The Descent

Chapter 52 - Trapped

Unconsciously, Denton grabbed hold of the table and looked around the room. Carter followed his example while Leah looked confused.

"Why will this be unpleasant? What do you mean?" she said.

"We're at the end of a pendulum," Jonythan continued, "Except under water. Jarell wants me dead. We're not going to suffocate in here as long as we're attached to the tether. If the module is disconnected from it, eventually the life support will fail and we will, eventually, suffocate."

"What happens when it's released?"

"It'll be a bumpy ride, which is why you want to hang on to something."

Leah's faced drained of all color as she sat down and held on to the table. "Do we need to take shelter in the sleeping quarters? Would that be safer?"

Carter shook his head and shot Jonythan a glare. "No, we'll be fine in here. He's exaggerating. When the module is disconnected, the built-in stabilizers kick in during the descent. They're not perfect though so we can expect a lot of rocking back and forth until we hit bottom."

The bottom. There it was, the word that Denton knew had to come out at some point. He shivered at the thought of hitting the bottom of this icy ocean.

"So we just wait?" Denton said.

Carter nodded. "Yep, it shouldn't be long now. The mechanism to release this module isn't complicated. Jarell only needs to press a couple of buttons, and we're history."

As they sat in silence, their bodies tense as they held on to whatever surfaces they could, Denton could help but be annoyed by their predicament. Why didn't a module like this have some sort of safety feature? An emergency exit or stop, something that prevented a situation like this from occurring. At the very least, there should be a way out in case there ever was a malfunction or, as in this case, a person intent on killing everyone in the pod. Denton shook his head in disgust.

The minutes ticked by as they waited for the inevitable to happen. When five minutes had passed, and nothing had happened, Denton decided it was time to do something.

"I'm going to take a look around," he said and left the room before either of the Forsythe's could protest. To his immediate left, the hallway returned to the observation deck. To his right, he saw several other doors, most of them unmarked. He checked each one in turn. Cleaning supplies, a pantry, and a server room. Unfortunately, nothing useful.

He walked across the observation deck to the hallway on the other opposite side. A couple of meeting rooms and a fully equipped lab took up most of the space, likely used at some point by the scientists that had used the module. Just as he was about to leave the lab, his eye caught a bunch of papers stapled to the wall, partially covering a plaque with large, red letters on it. He ripped the yellowing papers off of the wall, and his heart skipped a beat when a schematic showed the proper evacuation procedures for the module.

The plastic plaque on the wall looked like many other ones just like it that he had seen throughout the years. Floor schematics, red arrows and the red dot that indicated his location. It was so archaic, the leftovers of a process used many generations ago, but government bureaucracies were slow to make policy changes. Implementations were even slower to trickle down to the places where they were needed. Today, Denton was thankful for whatever rule that required one of these to be posted. Although he had never seen this particular schematic before, what he saw made his heart beat quicker.

He left the lab behind and ran back to the kitchen. Gabi had joined them since he left to search the module. They all looked up at him with surprise when he rushed through the door.