Chapter 5 - The Freezing Trench
The smell of burning acetylene cut through the bitter stench of frozen hydraulic fluid as Jasper sparked the emergency torch to life. A bright blue-white flame hissed violently in the sub-zero air, casting harsh, leaping shadows against the frost-covered walls. Jasper dragged himself up the tilted steel ramp toward the pod ejection hatch, throwing himself against the frozen mechanical trackway. Thick blocks of blue ice encrusted the heavy pneumatic pistons, welding the escape pod’s release mechanism to the station's buckling outer frame.
Behind him, Kora and Liam worked with frantic speed. They bound Miller and Davis onto lightweight carbon-fiber backboards, wrapping their shivering bodies in multiple layers of foil thermal blankets and industrial-grade insulated canvas. Every breath Kora took burned like crushed glass in her throat. The ambient temperature inside the triage bay had fallen to negative twenty-five degrees. Her fingers were rapidly losing all sensation; she could barely tie the securing straps around Davis’s chest.
“Vance, drop the laptop and get over here!” Kora ordered, her breath puffing in rapid clouds. “We need your muscle to drag these sleds up the incline!”
“I... I have to keep the uplink open!” Vance protested, his voice shivering violently as his thin body shook with hypothermia. “The Canadian Coast Guard Arctic Rescue Squadron just pinged our transponder! They’re eighty miles out! They saw the live stream! They scrambled two heavy-lift Cormorant helicopters because of the viral broadcast!”
“They won't get here in time if we are at the bottom of the sea!” Kora yelled, seizing the front harness of Miller’s backboard. “Pull!”
With a combined, agonizing heave, Kora, Liam, and Vance hauled the two immobilized men inch by inch up the twenty-degree incline toward the escape pod bay. Every movement was a brutal battle against gravity and slick, frost-covered diamond plating. Below them, the rear half of the triage bay was already giving way. With a terrifying shriek of twisting iron, a massive twelve-foot section of the floor tore free, plunging into the dark, churning ocean waters below. A geyser of freezing saltwater sprayed upward, instantly coating the remaining deck plates in a lethal sheet of black ice.
“The tracks are clear!” Jasper yelled from the upper platform, his face smeared with soot and his eyebrows singed from the blowtorch flame. He dropped the heavy cutting tool, which hissed and steamed as it hit the icy floor. “Get them into the airlock! The primary release latch is freed, but the hydraulic pressure is zero! We will have to trip the manual counterweight release from the exterior catwalk!”
Kora froze, staring at him through the condensation of her mask. “The exterior catwalk? That catwalk is exposed to sixty-knot winds and negative forty-degree windchill! Whoever goes out there to pull the manual lever won't be able to get back inside the pod before it fires!”
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Jasper looked down at the two wounded responders strapped securely into the survival sleds. Then he looked at Kora, whose hands were raw, bleeding, and frost-nipped from refusing to abandon her post. For the first time in his thirty-year military career, Jasper saw the unbridgeable gulf between management and leadership, between commanding from a safe screen and sacrificing for the flesh-and-blood human beings under his charge.
“I know,” Jasper said softly, his voice devoid of any hesitation. “Get them inside the pod. Now.”
