She stared at him through her faceplate. “What?”
“They weren’t too good at considering the consequences. Just the immediate profit.”
Raven turned away, staring down at the destroyed reefs.
H124 touched down on the roof of the building, finding an old rooftop door leading down. It stood open, rusted solid on its hinges.
She took the lead, lowering herself into the building. She followed the schematics down a long hall to a stairwell. Everything inside the underwater structure was covered with white corals and dead sea creatures she recognized from books as barnacles. She reached an open elevator shaft and peered down into the darkness. If the elevator car still existed, it was at the bottom of the shaft.
She pulled herself facedown into the dark passage and kicked her legs, descending into the black. Her helmet beam shined over more bleached coral and barnacles. The water was murky with floating debris, and she was starting to really feel the cold through her suit. Light flashed on the walls around her, and she looked up to see Raven and Dirk following her into the elevator opening.
She reached what would have been the first subbasement of the building and paused at a closed elevator door.
Dirk floated down next to her and picked up a piece of rebar lying on a small ledge. Together they levered the door open, revealing a vast room filled with ancient office equipment. Chairs and desks lay around the room, all in states of extreme decay. Sand had sifted in through a broken window, creating a drift by one of the far walls.
Together they swam across the room. She looked at her PRD. The warehouse space where the A14 had been stored was just past this room. They arrived at a heavy set of double doors. Dirk still had the rebar, so they tried to lever it open, but it wouldn’t budge.
Raven swam up behind them, pulling a pocket pyro out of his dive bag. He went to work cutting a hole big enough for them to slip through.
He’d only cut through one foot of the metal when a deafening whump sounded behind them. H124 spun in time to see an AUV in the elevator opening, firing an explosive at them as bubbles filled the room.
Chapter 2
Kicking away from the door, H124 barely dodged the small projectile. It smashed against the door with incredible force, setting off a blinding explosion that rocked the entire room. The concussive wave threw her backward into a jumbled pile of old rusted metal. She felt a searing pain in her thigh, and sucked in a sharp breath as the freezing cold sea made direct contact with her skin. Crimson blood billowed outward. The bubbles around her dissipated.
Wincing against the pain, she stared out as the water started to clear. One section of the room remained a turbulent mess of water. She realized it was Dirk, physically engaging with the AUV, his suit giving off a torrent of bubbles. He had both hands wrapped around the craft, but it was too big to get a good hold on it. Raven joined him, and together they pushed the thing back into the elevator shaft.
H124 swam to the elevator quickly, her thigh screaming in protest. As they wrestled the AUV into the elevator shaft, Dirk started to swim upward with it.
“Get the door shut!” he cried.
H124 and Raven went to work sliding the doors closed, leaving just enough room for Dirk to slip back through.
Then he shoved the AUV toward the top of the shaft and turned around, kicking against the wall to propel himself downward. H124 grabbed his hand as he neared and pulled him through. Then all three desperately shoved at the door, finally managing to slide it shut.
“It won’t take long for that thing to turn around and start blasting at this elevator door,” Dirk said. He noticed the blood pouring out of her leg. She clamped her gloved hand over it. “Is it bad?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered, though she really wasn’t sure. They turned back toward the door that led to the warehouse. The blast from the explosive had crumpled it inward, closing off the little cut that Raven had managed to make. But small spaces had torn open at the top and bottom of the door now, and H124 could see through to the other side. It was too gloomy to make out any details, and they still couldn’t fit through.
Raven went to work again with the pocket pyro, cutting two feet before they heard another explosion on the other side of the elevator door.
“Hurry!” Dirk urged him, not that he needed to. Raven cut quickly, opting for a small hole just big enough for them to get their shoulders through, though not enough to accommodate the AUV.
The metal glowed red, and soon the cut was almost complete. H124 heard another explosion on the far side of the elevator door; it groaned and shot outward, the metal bent and forced. One more blast and the thing would be through.
Raven completed the circle and leaned back, kicking the metal with his foot. Dirk did the same, and it fell away. H124 looked down at her leg, pressing on the wound until it clotted. At least that was looking up. Quickly they filed through the small hole, Raven first, followed by H124 and Dirk.
Raven lifted up the cut away section of door and placed it back inside the hole, hoping the thing wouldn’t be able to see them on the other side of it. Dirk borrowed the pocket pyro and welded it in a couple places to keep it in place.
They turned, their helmet lights flooding the warehouse. H124’s spirits fell.
The space was empty.
At the far end of the room stood another door. They swam toward it, finding it rusted open, and moved into the next room, touring it slowly. H124 gently kicked her flippered feet behind her. Her thigh stung, but the bleeding had definitely stopped.
This room had been more protected from the sea than the others. It was still flooded, but not as covered with sediment. A few objects lay about the room, so largely disintegrated she couldn’t tell what they had been. Now they were just corroded lumps on the floor. She could guess that some of them might have been old computers. A tall, rusted rectangle might have been an ancient filing cabinet or maybe even an old server. But it was damaged now beyond repair. Her heart started to sink further.
Dirk checked the schematics. “This was an old records room.” Bubbles rose from his suit, fanning out above his head.
Raven turned slowly, taking in the space. “It’s so empty. Maybe most things were moved before the building was inundated.”
“Moved to where?” H124 asked.
Raven met her eyes, his brow creased in worry. “I don’t know.” He swam in a slow circle around the room. “Maybe we could find some other records among the things we gathered at the aeronautic facilities.” He was trying to sound hopeful, but she could hear the note of despair in his voice. They’d been through those records countless times, scouring for any additional information they could find that would tell them how to stop the asteroid. If there was something in there on the location of the A14, they’d have found it by now.
“Didn’t you go through all of that?” Dirk asked, uttering the words that she didn’t have the heart to say aloud.
Raven turned to him. “Maybe it’s on some of the corroded parts of the data. We’re still repairing some of the disks.”
She looked behind them, to where several large rectangles had been mounted onto the wall. Sediment coated them. She thought of the similarly large objects she’d found in the university under New Atlantic. They’d been accounts of the past. Framed articles from newspapers. Posters that held information. When she’d been staying at the Rover camp just after the airship crash, she’d gone through the Rover books and discovered things like the “Periodic Chart of the Elements,” and knew that at least one of the rectangles in the university had been just that. Maybe the ones here held information.
She swam to the first one and dusted it off, the sediment momentarily clouding the water as it billowed out from under her glove. When