You see these hands? They’re stiff now, but they used to be the best. I spent twenty years welding metal at the bottom of the world. It’s a quiet place, mostly. Just the sound of your own breath and the creak of the steel trying to hold back the weight of the ocean. I liked it down there. The water doesn’t ask questions. It doesn’t look at you with pity because you’re the man who let his daughter’s hand slip on a rainy dock.
Goldie was six when I lost her to the waves. I’ve been trying to find her in the dark ever since.
That’s why I took the job at the Deep-Six. It was a research station sitting right on the edge of the Mariana Trench. It was a dirty, leaking bucket of a place. The big bosses in the city were using it to store something called a “Kill-Switch.” It was a computer drive that could turn off every power grid and water pump on the planet. They wanted to use it as a threat. But then the earth started to move. The trench began to swallow the station, and the “Wolves” came to get the drive.
The Wolves were a strike team. Professional killers in high-tech diving suits. My boss told me to blow the place before they could get the drive. He knew I didn’t care if I came back up.
I was in the main airlock when the first tremor hit. The metal floor buckled. A pipe snapped and sprayed steam that hissed like a snake. I had my bag of plastic explosives over my shoulder. Taped to the inside of my glass faceplate was a tiny, wet photo of Goldie.
“I’m almost there, honey,” I whispered. My voice sounded thin and scratchy in the helmet.
I moved through the hallway. The water was already ankle-deep. It was freezing. The station groaned. It sounded like a giant animal dying in the dark. I reached the first support pillar. I set the charge and wired the timer. This place had to fall. If the Wolves got that drive to the surface, the whole world would burn in a war that never ended.
I heard a thud behind me.
I turned my head. My neck popped. There were three of them. They wore black suits that looked like shark skin. They had underwater rifles aimed right at my chest. The leader stepped forward. His name was Sutton. I knew him from the briefing. He was a man who sold his soul for a paycheck a long time ago.
“Give us the drive, Artie,” Sutton’s voice came over the short-range radio. It was cold. It had no feeling in it at all.
“I don’t have it,” I said. I leaned against the pillar. “And you’re not getting it.”
Sutton raised his gun. “We know it’s in the vault. Move aside. We don’t want to waste a bullet on a drunk who couldn’t even save his own kid.”
The coldness in my chest didn’t come from the water. It was an old, sharp pain. I looked at Goldie’s face in the photo. She was wearing her yellow raincoat.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I told him.
I didn’t use a gun. I used my welding torch. I flicked the igniter. A blue flame roared to life, screaming in the pressurized air. I slammed my hand into the manual override for the hallway’s fire door.
The heavy steel door slammed down between me and two of the Wolves. But Sutton was fast. He dived through just in time. He tackled me into the rising water. We rolled. He was stronger, but I was heavier. I had the weight of the ocean and twenty years of regret on my side.
He smashed his helmet against mine. The glass cracked. A tiny bead of water leaked in. It ran down my cheek like a tear.
The station shook again. This time, it tilted hard. We slid across the floor, hitting the vault door. The drive was inside. Sutton scrambled for it. He punched the code into the keypad. The door hissed open.
I grabbed his ankle. I pulled him back and shoved the blue flame of my torch into his oxygen tank.
He didn’t have time to scream. The tank didn’t explode: it just melted and hissed. He panicked, clawing at his throat as his air turned to poison. I didn’t watch him die. I couldn’t. I just reached into the vault and grabbed the drive. It was a small, silver box. It looked too small to cause so much misery.
I looked at the timer on my charges. Three minutes.
The floor beneath me snapped. The station was sliding into the trench. If I left now, I might make it to the escape pod. But the remote trigger was busted. Sutton had crushed it during our fight.
I looked at the silver box. Then I looked at the dark water rushing into the hallway.
If I stayed, I could hold the wires together. I could make sure the station collapsed into the mud where nobody would ever find this drive. I could make sure no other fathers lost their daughters because the lights went out and the world went mad.
I sat down in the water. It was up to my waist now.
“Artie, what are you doing?” My boss’s voice crackled over the radio from the surface. “Get out of there! The whole shelf is going!”
“I can’t, Brooks,” I said. I pulled the wires close to my chest. “The trigger’s gone. I have to do it by hand.”
There was a long silence. All I could hear was the rushing water and Brooks’s heavy breathing.
“You’re a good man, Artie,” he said.
“No,” I whispered. “I’m just a man who wants to go home.”
I touched the photo of Goldie with a shaky finger. The water was at my neck now. It was pressing against the cracked glass of my helmet. The pressure was building. My ears started to bleed. The station gave one last, terrible scream as the earth opened up beneath it.
I saw the light of the first charge go off down the hall. The walls began to fold like paper.
I didn’t feel afraid. For the first time in ten years, the weight on my shoulders felt light. The water was coming inside the helmet now. It tasted like salt. It tasted like the dock.
“I’m coming, Goldie,” I said.
I pressed the wires together.
The ocean didn’t make a sound when the station blew. It just swallowed the fire and the metal and the silver box. It swallowed me too. And down there, in the deep and the dark, I finally found the quiet I was looking for.