Chapter 80 - The Edge of the Abyss
"MASON!" Daniel’s roar defied the thunder, the storm, and the entire weight of the Atlantic Ocean.
The submarine was sinking. The black steel deck was already vanishing beneath two feet of rushing seawater. The cargo hatch, where Arthur’s pod and the net holding Mason had been pulled, was beginning its hydraulic sealing sequence.
Daniel didn't think. He didn't calculate angles or survival odds. A father who has already crossed through hell doesn't negotiate with the devil.
Daniel sprinted toward the cliff’s edge. He threw his empty rifle aside, shed his blood-soaked tactical vest, and launched his body out into the open air, forty feet above the crashing waves.
The freezing wind caught him for a terrifying second of free-fall—before his boots slammed violently onto the non-skid surface of the sinking submarine’s conning deck.
The impact jarred his broken ribs through his chest, blacking out his vision for a terrifying beat. But Daniel rolled forward, grasping a steel railing just as a massive wave broke over the hull, threatening to wash him into the churning propellers.
Inside the cargo bay beneath him, the heavy hydraulic doors were three seconds from sealing shut.
Daniel wedged his body into the descending hatchway, jamming the jagged barrel of a discarded commando carbine directly into the hydraulic teeth.
*SCREECH.*
The reinforced steel gears ground to a halt, locked by the jammed weapon, leaving an eighteen-inch gap into the pressurized bay.
Daniel slithered through the opening, dropping into the emergency staging area of the submarine just as the outer ocean engulfed the hull, plunging the world into a deep, claustrophobic green silence.
Inside the staging bay, emergency red battle-lanterns bathed the steel bulkheads in a bloody glow.
In the center of the chamber, Arthur’s pod was locked into a biological cradle. High-voltage cables were already snaking from the ship's main core into the pod’s interfaces. Mason, still tangled in the net, was lying on an adjacent surgical gurney, his eyes wide with terror as robotic surgical calipers descended from the ceiling toward his neck.
Emily stood by the control console, a pneumatic pistol loaded with neuro-paralytics locked in her steady hand.
"You should have stayed on the rocks, Daniel," she whispered, her voice bouncing off the cold, riveted hull. "We are already passing one hundred meters depth. If you breach this compartment, the pressure will crush all of us in less than two seconds."
"Let him go, Emily," Daniel gasped, pulling his combat knife from his boot, his vision tunneling as blood pooled inside his lungs.
"He is the future!" she screamed. "Arthur's mind is uploading to the neural bridge right now! In three minutes, your son’s consciousness will be wiped clean, and my father-in-law will wake up in his body!"
On the console, a digital timer counted down: *02:45... 02:44...*
Mason looked at Daniel through the steel net, his small voice breaking through the hiss of the pressurized oxygen: "Daddy... kill the lights."
Daniel’s eyes met his son’s. He remembered the boy’s training in the basement in Blackwood Hollow. The dark was where they survived.
Daniel hurled the combat blade not at Emily, but at the main electrical junction box feeding the compartment's life-support and lighting grid.
*CRACK-SPARK!*
A blinding explosion of electrical sparks detonated across the bulkhead.
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Total darkness swallowed the submarine.
In the pitch black, deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, a single gunshot echoed through the pressurized steel—followed by the horrific sound of reinforced hull glass cracking under three hundred tons of deep-sea pressure...
