[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 19

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18}

---

“Fuck! FUCK!!” she cried, and set about frantically searching for a way out. There was some sort of service hatch in the ceiling but it was locked. She raise the pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger. It clicked impotently, out of bullets. Panic nearly set in before she remembered the second gun. Tossing the first to the floor, she pulled her spare gun out and fired it at the lock. That did the trick.

The new problem was how to get up and out through the hatch. It looked so easy in films. But without a ladder or stool and in her weakened state she just couldn’t pull herself up through it. A few minutes later the solution came in the form of a trickle of seawater re-entering the elevator through the closed doors. “Already?” she thought. But it was a blessing in disguise.

As soon as it reached her chest she was able to leverage the buoyancy of the dry case to boost herself up through the hatch. It was made more difficult by the weight seawater added to her soaked clothing. Leaning back down through the opening she grabbed hold of the dry case and pulled it up with her.

But now what? There was a ladder but she couldn’t climb it with the huge unwieldy case in tow. The hatch fell shut and she found herself in total darkness. Her eyes adjusted immediately, and the faint light coming through the crack between doors became visible.

She searched the roof of the elevator for tools and found nothing. Steeling herself, she wedged the tips of her fingers into the crack and, straining until she saw red, Olivia began pulling the doors apart.

She could feel the skin on her fingers tearing. A few of the small bones inside her digits cracked, her shoulder popped but did not dislocate, then finally the doors were far enough apart to get herself and the dry case through them. She held up her hands, now covered in blood but still too numb to feel anything.

Olivia staggered out of the elevator, struggling not to touch anything. Her hands burned. Reflexively she dipped them into the water now flowing around her shoes. The burning intensified. Of course, she scolded herself. Salt water.

This floor was packed with machinery. Most of which would soon catch fire as rising seawater shorted high voltage circuitry inside. Not wishing to be present for that, Olivia made a dash for the stairwell and began climbing. Two floors up, she heard someone call out to her.

“Are there any more or just you?” Olivia turned towards the voice. A young woman with red hair down to her neck stood in one of the tunnels connecting this tower to an adjacent one, frantically beckoning. Olivia shook her head. “Only me”.

“Then get the fuck out of there. This module is the only one we managed to seal when the flooding started. It’s dry all the way down to level 17. It should still be able to surface.” Olivia obliged her, running across the room to the hatch in the far wall. But the last part of her comment was baffling.

“Surface?” The woman, whose jumpsuit bore a nametag reading “Helen”, with “engineering” in small font below it. ‘Helen’ grunted as she swung the hatch shut and engaged the locks. “Oh yeah, I helped design the escape system on this tub. Four of these modules can detach from the central sphere and one another by explosive bolts. They’re a couple tons positively buoyant so they shoot right up to the surface after that. Only way to evacuate the whole crew in a hurry if there was ever a need to. And holy hell is there a need to.”

Olivia couldn’t argue with that. The fragile cooperation of countless machines and structural integrity of the station’s various connected hulls were all that held the full weight of the ocean at bay. One point of failure was all it took to set into motion a Rube Goldberg machine of sequentially larger, more severe failures until most of the station was flooded, collapsed or both.

“The terminals still work, somehow. Keeps spamming maintenance notices. I did a diagnostic, it says there’s big window down on the meat processing deck. It was gonna be an observatory at one point, before the increase in crew made sourcing food locally a necessity. That deck was reinforced as shit, had its own nested pressure vessel. Only reason why it didn’t implode the whole module. If it eventually does, the shockwave will weaken neighboring modules enough that they too will collapse minutes or hours after that. Then the ones next to those and so on, like falling dominos.”

“What can be done?” Olivia pleaded. The woman shrugged. “We’re doing it now. The air pressure out there is gonna be high enough soon for oxygen toxicity to kick in. If we can’t seal off this module before then, we’re all dead.” The ‘we’ she referred to turned out to be a dozen survivors, all conventionally human so far as Olivia could tell, who had against the odds made it to this safe haven as the rest of the Belusarius went pear shaped around them.

“So what’s in the box?” Olivia stiffened. “Oh….this?” The woman stared expectantly. “Yeah, you’ve got a death grip on it. Must be important.” Olivia searched for reasons and came up with very little that sounded convincing to her, finally settling on “Sentimental stuff. Family heirlooms. Couldn’t leave it behind. Don’t open it, I don’t want any of it to get wet, there’s some delicate stuff in there”

“Oh, Got it. Well there’s plenty of room in here. Sadly, not a whole lot of us made it in time. As the water level rose I heard pounding on the hatches, on one floor, then the floor above it, and so on. Until the pounding grew very rapid, then stopped altogether. Some kind of blockage must’ve prevented him from reaching the top. God rest his soul, whoever he was.”

Olivia’s mind was elsewhere. Helen’s mention of the box returned her thoughts to the precious cargo inside. What could be done? Even if she brought it with her to the surface, what then? Bring it to a surgeon? He wouldn’t know what to make of it. There was just one thing to do, wasn’t there? Find it a body.

“So...Helen. How do we detach the module? When the time comes, I mean.” She looked surprised, apparently not used to anyone taking an interest in her work. “Well the terminal on the floor below us is one of four capable of doing that. There’s a thumbprint and iris scanner keyed into my biometric info. After that a prompt will come up asking whether you want immediate or delayed release. That’s really all there is to it.”

Perfect. “Have you got clean clothes or food somewhere?” Helen gestured for Olivia to follow. When she turned Olivia spotted a heavy wrench hooked to her belt. Carefully as she could, she slipped it off the belt and raised it over her head. “Hey, did you just..?” Olivia brought it down on her head with a skull shattering crack. Helen collapsed in a heap.

Searching the room, she found a variety of tools, none of which were useful for surgery. Until she opened a drawer to discover a small circular saw. She recognized it as similar to the one the ‘good doctor’ used on her, except intended for something mundane like trimming insulation.

Alongside it was a battery operated reciprocating saw with a pistol grip. On a whim she took that too, along with two spare batteries. Returning to Helen, now bleeding profusely from her head wound, she set about cutting open her skull. Her hands shook as she dwelled on the disastrous results of prior attempts to mend, but this time it was sink or swim, with Violet’s life on the line.

Delicately she worked her fingers in around the quivering pink mass and lifted it out. Remembering Vivian’s admonition to leave behind the stem to take care of autonomic functions, she severed it there and dumped the rest of it to one side. It was a trick to open the case with slippery, blood coated fingers but she managed.

Violet’s brain was ice cold and showed no signs of life. But then, it wouldn’t. Olivia cut a small exit notch for the umbilical, then seated Violet’s brain carefully in Helen’s gaping hollow skull. Double checking the fit, Olivia then re-seated the top half of Helen’s skull, wiped away the blood and began mending it shut.

She’d lost a lot of blood, there was no getting around that. Olivia desperately hoped it wasn’t too much. The body lay motionless. She began to lose hope, but remembered the brain was cold and might need time to warm up. Then it occurred to her to listen to the heartbeat. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible.

What could be done? Olivia did an inventory of her options. Then she disposed of the brain matter in a nearby bin, and screamed. “Someone come quick! Helen’s fallen and hurt herself!” Within a minute she was surrounded by other refugees, most wearing jumpsuits identical to Helen’s. The remaining four were two sub pilots, an officer, and a doctor.

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 20!}