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The interior of the sub lay in near darkness.
The only light came from the faint glow of instrument panels and emergency lighting. Maddock had been inside spaces like this both above and below the waterline. It was suffocating, but livable if you ignored the thought of just how little realistically separated you from the water. He knew his way around, basically, because the layout was going to be similar from submarine to submarine. He broke a glo-stick and dropped it down to the bottom of the ladder. It clattered down the rungs to the steel floor.
Nothing could have prepared him for what the light revealed.
At first he thought that the Russians were waiting for them, gathered together at the bottom, ready to take them as soon as they descended, but none of them moved or reacted to the light. They had died waiting to be rescued. Trapped inside by the metal bar jammed into the lock. Someone had passed judgment on them.
Did that mean they’d been beaten here?
“Looks like they froze to death,” Bones said, first down the ladder.
It was hard not to step on a body as he reached the bottom. The crew had huddled up around the ladder, dressed for the outside in full winter gear, with mittens and ski masks beneath their hoods. It was as cold in here as it was out on the ice. Colder if anything.
“What about the illness? Radiation sickness?”
“Who knows? But this can’t be all of the crew.”
“How’s the counter looking?” The moment Bones turned on the device, he was greeted by clicks coming thick and fast. It was worse than outside. Not unexpected, but not good either. The reactor was obviously the source of the radioactivity, and given the readings weren’t off the scale that meant it had to be shielded to some extent. But for how much longer? The submarine was not designed to take the stresses and strains of being trapped like this. Surely the integrity of the hull was at risk?
Maddock managed to find enough floor space to place a foot down, then carefully looked for another, using handholds overhead to pull himself through the mass of corpses. The deck inclined fairly steeply. He took the climb slowly, not wanting to stumble and fall into the pack of bodies.
The glow from an instrument panel lit up the frozen faces of crew still sitting in their seats.
There was no one here to save.
He tried not to think about the horror of it; dying trapped in a place like this, locked in a sardine can that slowly froze them.
“That sucks,” Bones grunted, ever succinct. He wasn’t wrong.
“Let’s get this over with, man,” Maddock said. “The sooner we can get out of here the better.” Bones didn’t argue with him. It was all about finding Pandora’s Egg.
Maddock moved slowly to the front of the submarine, climbing higher with each step. Metal groaned against metal with every movement, echoing with the relentless press of the ice on the hull. The Echo II had been built to sustain immense pressure at great depths, but this was different. How much more could it take before the stresses and strains were too much for it to bear and the great boat started to come apart at the seams? Would it be torn apart with them still inside it? What would happen to the shields around the reactor? How much damage would they be looking at if the core was breached? Would they even be safe if they made it back to the ship? Or was the entire island and every one on it already damned?