She slept heavily that night.
When she woke, Em’s camera feed was off, but her comm line was open. It was comforting, to know she’d been watched over while she slept. Em had remained visible on her helmet’s screen until Gyre had drifted off the night before, working in silence, and the odd companionship had made things . . . easier.
It shouldn’t have, but Gyre had been too tired to feel guilt, either for enjoying the other woman’s presence or for the recording indicator that had remained, unchanged, throughout the night.
As she plugged in her morning canister, she considered the indicator.
“Good morning,” Em said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Hey,” Gyre said. She made herself smile, lean back on her heels. “Have you slept yet?”
“Briefly, yes.”
Now or never. “I’ve been thinking.”
“The new amendment,” Em said, and it popped up on her screen before Gyre could protest. “It’s here. I wouldn’t have withheld it from you the other . . . last night, but I wanted you to feel rested and alert when you signed it.”
Turn back, turn back. Be selfish. You’ve always been selfish; don’t stop now.
“I don’t want to sign it,” she said. It didn’t feel right.
Em let out an involuntary sound, like a hitched breath, but it wasn’t clear if it was a whimper or a gasp. “I . . . I . . . What?”
“I don’t want to sign it,” she repeated, her shoulders drawing up toward her ears. Her gut filled with nutritional paste. She felt sick. “Look, I’ve come this far. Right? There’s just this last push?”
“Yes,” Em said. She sounded desperately confused, desperately hopeful. Like she was edging up on a skittish beast.
“Then I might as well continue, right?”
“It’s dangerous.” Em swallowed audibly. “You read the dossiers. Saw the video. You’re saying you’re willing to risk that, even though you don’t have to?”
But she did have to. It was the only way to stop Em from doing this again, the only way that would work for good. Finish the mission and get it all on record as insurance. Everything wrapped up in a neat little bow.
Gyre swallowed, looking skyward, to the vault of stone above her. “What does my personality inventory say about me?”
Em tapped a few keys. The document sprung up in front of her, replacing the contract. “That you’re strongheaded,” she said. “That your willingness to lie about your professional history wasn’t to cover a lack of skill, but to let you jump over entry-level risk. That you have few connections outside yourself, and that your only goals relate to your own success.” She paused. Then: “Not to your own enrichment.”
Yeah. That sounded about right.
“That’s why, then,” Gyre said. “I’m a stubborn bitch who knows best. That work for you?”
Em hesitated, and Gyre waited for her to try to argue, to try to dissuade her. She had so much ammunition she could use. She could list every danger, or even invoke the contract to close the expedition out.
But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I understand. We’ll continue.”
Gyre unhooked the used canister. “Is there any equipment at Camp Three that isn’t also at Five or here?”
“No. There’s just more of it,” Em said.
“Hauling that gear sounds like a stupid idea, then,” she said, standing. “If the goal is just to get to the chamber on the other side of the sump—” She paused when Em snorted, no doubt at just. “If it is,” she continued after a moment, reaching the battery box and crouching to unlatch it, “then there’s no point in trekking between Three and Five that many times. It’ll just increase ration consumption and battery usage, and increase the chance for injury. If we’d been able to go between Three and Four as planned, it would make more sense, but with the Long Drop and the first sump, and the climb between them . . .”
“I can see the logic in it. But for the next caver—”
“You haven’t been listening—there won’t be another caver,” she said. She closed the case and stood. “I’ve come this far, and I don’t intend to die for you.”
Em let out another shaky breath.
“So are we good to go today? Take a first stab at it?”
“I should be rested enough, yes. And your biometrics look good.” She hesitated. “If you’d like to have more time to think it over—”
Gyre cut her off. “How much sleep did you get?”
“I managed five hours.”
“In the last how many?”
“That’s . . . difficult to answer. When I’m manning the systems up here, I usually sleep for only ninety minutes at a time. Just enough time for REM sleep, and I do it every several hours as necessary. This was one of my longer rests.”
“Sounds miserable.”
“Less miserable than living in a suit for several weeks,” she pointed out.
Gyre snorted.
“Are you ready, then?”
She looked over at the sump entrance. Last chance. She’ll still let you leave.
Probably.
“Yeah,” she said. She felt good. Surprisingly good. Like she’d slept for days instead of hours. She stood and stretched, finding only the stiffness that came from sleeping in a suit. “I mean, assuming those tests you ran on the spores came back fine?”
“I would have woken you up if there was a problem. You’re clear; there was no trace of anything in your system. Looks like we were worried for nothing.”
“Glad to hear it,” Gyre said. She crouched again and swapped her battery; the level on her current one had looked lower than she liked, no doubt because of the tests the suit had been running on her blood and body while she slept. Besides, it was best to go in fresh.
Best to go in clear-headed.
“No drugs,” she said as she stood up and stretched. “No adrenaline, no nothing.”
“If you get into a situation where—”
“Have you actually experienced what it feels like to have that stuff dumped into your system without your say-so? It’s going to fuck with me, not help me. I’ll go slow today. We shouldn’t even get into a situation where it might be necessary.”
Em didn’t respond, clearly not pleased with the idea. Gyre ignored her in turn and began opening the supply boxes, separating everything into organized piles.
“There’s an anchor by the pool edge,” Em said. “Check the integrity of it, but you should be able to go from there.”
“Can I take extra spools of diving line?” Gyre said, tapping one of them.
“Yes, but you only have space in your suit for two. I have an array of lengths and sizes. Not all of them slot easily into your suit—they’re from earlier expeditions—but they should be fairly easy to carry. My suggestion is to stock your suit, then take one or two handhelds, and use those up first.”
Gyre reloaded the slots on her suit with the appropriate spools before looking through the other options. There was a small handheld spool, easy to manage; she set that aside as well.
“There are also silt screws, for if you can’t find a good place to attach a line. General practice is to do what you did in the first sump, looping the line around formations to keep it steady, but that might not always be possible. These handle the muck better than climbing bolts, and are faster and easier to place, since they don’t need to take your whole weight. Swap out your climbing bolts to the ones in the cache. Your main bolt drill will work with both.”
“Can I take both kinds?” Gyre asked, hesitating. “In case there’s dry climbing, or there’s too much muck and no outcroppings?”
Em thought it over. “Usually I’d tell you to not to split them given your limited carrying capacity, but there should be a small pod in your equipment hump filled with cold-light sticks.”
“The techs topside mentioned them. Said they were experimental?”
“Not in design, but in effect. I don’t have data on how things . . . react to them.”
She didn’t need to say what “things.”
Tunnelers.
Gyre nodded and then reached back, running her hand over the various compartments until her screen showed she was above the right one.
“They’re for an emergency situation where your headlamp and reconstruction no longer work. A suit breach.” Em’s voice was uneasy at the thought, and Gyre tried not to picture that scenario. “But that’s unlikely,” Em said quickly, “and trading them for more equipment to prevent a suit breach is a solid alternative. Move the extra climbing bolts to the small pod, and load the bigger space with the silt screws. I don’t want you running out, and you’ll still have to manually swap back, but it should give you the best of both worlds.”
“Small price to pay,” Gyre said, opening the compartment catch and thumbing out all the plastic sticks inside. She tucked them into the gear box she’d taken the silt screws out of, then began moving the old bolts over, going slowly and taking inventory as she went.
She was left with twenty extra once she’d packed the small space. Grudgingly, she put them away.
Closing the pod on her back and starting the fiddlier work of emptying her bolt drill’s storage chamber and swapping over to the silt screws, she glanced at the pool again. “I shouldn’t trust the old anchors in there, right?”
“They may not lead in the right direction anymore,” Em confirmed grimly. “There may also be existing line in there, so go slow, and make sure to add those directional markers consistently. I’ll do my best to record where you are on them from what I can see on my camera, but there’s always a chance I’ll miss something, and have an—incorrect calculation of how far you are from safety.”
Gyre shivered. That had almost killed one of the other cavers on a dive, she remembered.
Turn back, turn back.
She ignored it, forcing down the fear and her selfishness, ignoring that they were the reasonable things to feel now.
She continued inventorying and kitting out. Her adrenaline was up, but not in a helpful way; she was shaking slightly, and nervous of having her back to the pool. Em needed an experienced diver, not—her. Her earlier bravado was once again beginning to fail, leaving her uneasy and vulnerable.
Maybe she should haul gear. Take another day.
No—waiting would make it worse. If she was nervous now, how would she feel after a day of just thinking about it? Her options were to do this now or bail, and she was already in it. She was diving today.
“One last thing,” Em said. She sounded hesitant, almost apologetic.
Gyre stiffened. “Yeah?”
“In case you’re trapped, and cut off from me, there are . . . kill switches built into the suit. In case there’s no way out.”
Trapped in her suit, starving or suffocating, crushed half to death. The images came to mind far too readily, and she forced herself to focus on packing up the unused gear. “Won’t need them.”
“Hopefully not. But if you do—”
“This isn’t the time, Em.”
“It’s the only time.”
Her HUD shifted, flowing through a sequence of menus slowly enough that she could have tracked how to do it. She did her best to ignore it. The image settled on dosage information of various drugs.
“Stop,” Gyre said.
“No. Look. You have options. I recommend an overdose of morphine, but both sedatives will also work if they’re above these volumes.” The numbers flared yellow, throbbed. “Any less and it won’t definitely kill you, or it might make you suffer needlessly. There’s also a way to suffocate yourself. You could just turn off the exchanger fans, but I recommend coming here”—the screen shifted again and Gyre tried to turn away, but of course it followed her, hovering just in front of her eyes—“and using this command to make the suit shunt the helium it uses for your buoyancy sacs into your suit proper. It will displace the air and make for a much easier death.”
“Stop telling me how to die,” Gyre hissed, her hackles raising at how easily Em could discuss this. Like it was just hitting a switch.
“I need to know that you know. Things can go wrong in there. Things do go wrong.”
Gyre growled, then shut down the option menus, clearing her field of view. “Fine. I saw it. I understand. Let’s just get this started.”
Em didn’t respond. Gyre took that as agreement.
They ran down a checklist of gear one more time, and then she approached the pool. She found the original anchor at the lip of the pool, and tested it while Em ran confirming diagnostics. It was still strong, so she attached the start of her first short handheld reel to it.
“No water in the suit this time,” she said.
“No water,” Em agreed.
“Diving,” she said.
“Dive,” Em called back, unable to hide the tightness in her voice.
Gyre glanced skyward one more time, then slipped into the pool. She sank quickly, the water covering her head, and she kept desperate hold of the line as she turned and oriented herself toward the first passage. Her suit adjusted automatically, extending her small diving fins, switching from air exchange to her rebreather without so much as a shiver.
The sonar reconstruction she looked out on was clear close to her, but quickly became hazy the farther away she looked. Even though the reconstruction had changed to bright, artificial daylight colors for ease of use, she felt closed in and, almost immediately, lost. It was one thing to embrace tight spaces, but another for there to be no clear way out. Her heart pounded as she looked around. The stone surrounding her protruded and fell away in odd formations, tunnels leading in three or four directions off the shaft she was in, and in the distance she could see overlays of what she assumed were currents, different-colored explosions of lines mapping water flow that wavered and disappeared every so often as her sensors couldn’t locate them. Flashes of white danced across her screen, old line flapping through the maelstrom.
“Sorry for the chaos. It’s the silt,” Em said. “I’ve improved the sonar capabilities of the suit over the last few years, but it’s harder to change the laws of physics. The silt bounces sound back and confuses the sensors.”
“I get it,” Gyre said, her suit’s buoyancy returning to neutral as she came in line with a passage that branched off directly ahead of her. That odd weightless feeling was almost worse than sinking. She turned herself slightly, but it took a forceful motion, one that immediately made part of her view shudder as her turning upset the silt flowing around her.
She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them wide as she realized she could be moving without even feeling it. She was right where she’d left herself, but she clung to the wall all the same. Apparently, her panic at Camp Five had made things seem a lot easier than they really were.
Or maybe they were that easy. Maybe she was just letting herself get spooked. She rolled her shoulders, trying to relax.
“Drive a second anchor bolt here,” Em said. “A hard one, not looping it on anything. That way, if the line were to break up at the surface for any reason, you’d still know this is the exit.”
For any reason. “God damn it, Em,” she muttered, but prepared to drive the bolt.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, then flinched as the sound wave from the drill made everything ripple and shift. She ran her line through the anchor as she waited for it to still, tying it off securely like she had up at the surface. Just in case. Just in case the cache stealer comes back and takes my gear and I need to pump myself full of drugs instead of dying a slow—
Why would Em say something like that? It didn’t do either of them any good. Muscles tense, she used the bolt as a leverage point to turn herself back to the cave.
“Which tunnel am I going down?”
“The one straight ahead of you. The side branches on your left narrow too much to pass through. The one on your right—that’s the one the caver who went in before you—”
“Eli,” Gyre supplied, the dossier vivid in her memory.
“Eli,” Em repeated, then cleared her throat. “That’s the one Eli was swept down. I don’t know where it goes, but it’s not worth the risk.”
Gyre swallowed and oriented herself toward the tunnel ahead. She couldn’t argue with Em’s logic. “Swimming forward.”
“Swim on,” Em said.
Gyre wished she could have pushed off the wall, but she couldn’t risk more silt skewing the reconstruction. Just the motion of her arms and legs as she crept forward disturbed her sight, and her head began to ache at the constantly changing landscape. Her line unspooled behind her, smoothly.
Then the fin on her left foot hit it on a downward kick, and she lost her grip on the reel. She swore and twisted, but the effect on the silt erased the reel from sight. She dove toward where it should have been, hand outstretched, hoping, hoping—
Her fingers caught line, and she followed it, hand over hand, trying not to unspool any more line than she’d already lost. She went down, and down, and—
“Gyre,” Em snapped. “Gyre.”
“If I don’t catch it, it will keep—”
“Follow the line back to your anchor,” Em said. “Tie on a new line. Reel in the old one.”
Gyre was gasping from the sudden fear and exertion, and it took a moment to process what Em had said. And her tone of voice—had she been shouting her name, and Gyre hadn’t even heard her? Her heart was pounding in her ears loud enough that it was possible. She swallowed down her panic and then carefully turned, following the line back in the other direction.
She reached the anchor in a few minutes and took a moment there to close her eyes and calm down. Then she clipped in and began pulling in the unspooled line, gathering it up in her hands as she floated. It felt like it took an eternity, but at last she had the reel in hand.
At least it had been a short line.
Instead of hooking in a new line, Gyre unclipped and followed the old one up. Surfacing, she gasped as if she’d been holding her breath. Her sight stabilized, and she tossed the reel and tangled coil of line toward the camp cache, then held herself on the rim of the sump, just breathing.
“Shit,” Gyre said.
“We can be done for the day.”
“Hold on,” she said. “I’m just—just freaked out.”
“That’s an especially valid reason for resting. More than.”
“I want to lay more line than that.”
“This is the easy part,” Em said softly.
“I know,” Gyre snapped. Then she stopped, shook her head, and took a long, deep breath, holding it in her belly for a moment. She let it out slowly, and turned to look back down at the sump. “Let me try it without the sonar reconstruction.”
“No.”
“My head is already pounding and I was only down there for—what, fifteen minutes? Twenty? The way that it represents the uncertainty with the silt—I can’t think.”
“Then maybe you should just pull back!”
Gyre’s breath hissed out of her angrily. “Let me try it with a headlamp,” she said slowly. “Just until the next anchor.”
“I’ve already tried it that way; it doesn’t work. If you go down there, you go down there with everything I can give you.”
“Em, what you’re giving me isn’t useful. I’m going back under, and I’m going to—”
“Hold on,” Em muttered.
Gyre hauled herself from the sump and sloshed out of the standing water over to where the extra spools of line were, her lips curled into something bordering on a snarl. She had a fresh spool and was halfway back to the sump when Em spoke again.
“There,” Em said. “Go under. Try that.”
Gyre reached the pool and stepped into the darkness, letting herself sink down. Her suit’s lamp switched on, and the reconstruction was no longer bright like daylight. Instead, it was overlaid on what she could see naturally, the shifting of the computer readouts hidden somewhat by the silt and darkness. The overlay gave her more information, and made the currents visible, but she could match it up with real landmarks now, hazy though they were.
Because the cavern was filled with roiling silt.
She’d known it, but seeing it as the dark, murky hellscape it was . . .
Gyre took a deep breath. “That should work,” she said. “Much better. Less overwhelming.”
“Let me know if at any time you want the reconstruction to be clearer.”
“Got it. Following the line down to anchor two now.”
“Swim on.”
Gyre followed the line down to the anchor. She attached the spool to her wrist, in case she dropped it again, then clipped the line onto the bolt. Carefully, she swam forward, keeping an eye on how she held the reel and how her body moved in relation to it. What had been easy on her first dive, and so far down her priority list on her second, was now all-important. Once she was comfortable, and not much farther out than she’d been when she lost the first reel, she turned her attention back to the space in front of her.
This section of the sump was narrowing quickly and dipping down. For a moment, it looked like there was only a solid wall in front of her. But a few kicks forward made the image resolve itself. Down, and then up again; that should do it.
“Still forward, right?” Gyre said. “Not straight down into that pit back there, where I lost the spool?”
“Forward.”
She angled herself down only as far as the forward path led, and toward the nearest side wall of it. There, before the path turned upward once more, she paused to drill in another anchor. The bolt drill made the silt shift and seethe, blurring and darkening her readout for a moment, and pushed her back even as she kicked against it, until the bit caught and dragged her closer to the wall as it cut in.
The drill stilled and the silt settled. She pulled her wrist away, then hooked her line through the new anchor and set a plastic marker on it.
“All right, I’m going down and around this outcropping,” she said.
“Go slowly. Look here,” Em said, and the colored lines marking a current flow brightened. There were two different colors. “On your side is a pushing current. The suction-return current to stabilize the chamber you’re in is on the other side. Both are weak here, but they’ll grow stronger in this passage. The last time it was mapped, it was very narrow.”
“Which side should I take, then?”
“I recommend the pushing one; you’re less likely to lose control on it, but take it at an angle and tack back and forth. Stay away from the suction. There’s no telling where it could take you. Or turn back for the day.”
Gyre swallowed, hoping to loosen her dry throat. She refused to consider Em’s second option. If she got out of the sump again, she’d turn tail and run.
Em waited a moment, then continued, “On the way back, you’ll take the other side. We’ll lay line for that when the time comes, on a different reel. Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”
“Take your time,” Em said.
Gyre nodded inside her helmet. After watching the swirling colored lines for a moment, she turned back to her rope and checked the distance markers. They were painted on, outside of the reconstruction, but they’d been visible even without light input, which Gyre supposed meant they were made of acoustically distinct materials. Smart.
She was distracting herself to avoid what came next. She chewed at her lip and checked her reel, made sure she had a good grip on it.
“If it would help, I can brighten the colors on the pulling current,” Em said. “Make it a Do Not Cross situation.”
“Yeah, that would help.”
The suction grew more vibrant on her screen, until her brain saw it as a solid wall. Better. She’d still have to be careful and controlled, but it was a lot easier to avoid smashing into something that looked impassable.
And if things got bad . . .
I’ll just stop swimming. The current should push her back to here. She’d have to protect her head and as much of the suit as possible in case she scraped along or banged into the rock walls, but the current would lead back here, and then she could plan her next move.
“All right, starting,” Gyre said, and began swimming at an angle into the narrow gap, toward the brightly colored wall. The effect of the current was light at first, a nudge against her leading shoulder. But by the time she drew close to the wall marking the shift in the current, she was having to kick harder, could feel the pressure of the water like a weight on her head and shoulders.
“Turn,” Em said as Gyre was already beginning to reorient herself. She was mostly through the slot now, and turned sharply up, her body curving around the edge of the outcropping. As she turned back toward the other wall of the passage, her left hand connected with the bottom of the slot, and her readout went dark as a plume of silt rushed past her, dislodged by the light touch.
She hesitated, and the current started to push her back down the passage. Panicking, she kicked again; more silt, but she launched from the bottom and up against the stream. She made her way to the ghostly outline of the far wall that her readout had shown before the silt obstructed everything, swimming hard, her hand outstretched.
The current grew stronger, and her muscles burned with the effort. Her hand found rock, and she grasped at it, but her fingers slipped off the surface worn smooth by the powerful, continuous flow of water, the thin layer of silt or whatever else covered the rock in the face of the current slick and unforgiving. Gyre gritted her teeth, kicking hard just to stay in contact with the wall.
“Gyre—”
“I’m thinking,” she snapped.
“Listen—go toward the back of the passage. Turn ninety degrees to your right, instead of the entire way around. The slot’s opened up enough that there should be some distance there.”
Right. She tried to turn, but the break in her momentum let the current take control of her. With a shout, she surged forward, her shoulder brushing the rock as she turned, her foot catching and slipping on the wall but giving her just enough force to shoot back toward that end of the passage. Her body screamed at her as she powered her way forward, but her readout began to clear, her blindness dissipating into the same roiling, dark, murky hellscape as before.
She reached the back of the passage. The suction current grew brilliant on her screen again.
It was less than ten centimeters from her.