The umbilical drops down in slack loops out of the blackness above, draping itself over the habitat in large coils. One Night pilots her submersible feverishly among the falling loops. She banks and twists. A length of heavy umbilical slams onto her neck, tipping the sub. She manages to get out from under it a keep going. In the control module, Hippy puts Beany into a zip-lock bag and seals it. Through the front viewport they can see the coils of cable piling up in front of the rig.
The hull booms with impacts as the massive stuff hits. Everyone hold their breath as the sonar return-pings get closer... and closer. And closer... An enormous shape plunged into the floodlight in front of the rig. K-WHAM!! The 40-ton crane hits like a flatiron thirty feet in front of them. A clean miss. Much whooping and cheering. Then... The crane topples slowly over the back. It rolls down the slope of the drop-off, gathering speed. Then tumbles over the cliff into the abyssal canyon.
The coiled umbilical starts to pay out after it like rope after a harpoon. And they're still attached. An agonizing few seconds. Then... the cable pulls taut. K-BOOM!! The rig is slammed by the shock. Everyone is knocked off his feet, into walls and equipment. The rig begins to slide. It tilts over the embankment and grinds down the slope of the drop-off in a cloud of silt. The cable pulling it inexorably toward the cliff.
The framework twists and slams into rocks. screeching and groaning of tortured steel. All hell has broken loose. sirens, screaming, a klaxon hooting moronically. Bud sprints from Control, bouncing off the corridor walls as the rig lurches and tilts. The lights go out. Emergency light come on. He trips and falls, scrambles up, running on. In the ladderwell of trimodule C, Lindsey runs toward the machine rooms. K-BOOM!
A searing bright explosion in the electrical room. Flames roar through the doorway. She dashed to a seawater hose hanging nearby and starts to unroll it. She sees Coffey and Schoenick in maintenance, lashing down the mystery package. In Trimodule C Compessor Room, Monk is working in a spray of seawater, turning valves to stop the flow of ruptured pipes. Behind him, a wall of flame blossoms through the door from the electrical room, driving them back with the heat.
A reservoir-tanks breaks loose from one of the compressor assemblies. In rolls at him, crushing his legs against machinery. The fire roars into the room. In the Sub-Bay, Hippy runs in. The place is going nuts. Water floods from the moonpool as the rig tilts. Wilhite is dancing across the deck, leaping over compressed- gas cylinders which are rolling around loose. Cab One jumps clear off its cradle and slides screeching across the deck.
Wilhite, running before the 12-tom juggernaut, had no place to go. The SEAL dives into the churning moonpool. Cab One slams into the end wall, then spins and rolls toward Hippy. He starts to run. Drop something. Looks back. Beany, in his zip-loc bag, is lying in the path of the slide submersible. Hippy runs back. Scoops up the baggie. Cab One fills frame behind him. He makes it through the door an instant before the thing hits behind him, buckling the steel doorframe.
Wilhite is clawing up the sheep skirting of the moonpool. He gets his fingers over the top. Pulls himself up... A steel helium tank slams against his fingers, crushing them, and he falls back. More tanks bounce over the lip of the pool, hammering Wilhite down into the foaming water. He doesn't surface. The rig is sliding to the edge of the cliff. Beyond it... the bottomless pit of the Cayman Trough.
It slams, crushing and twisting, into a rock outcropping and stops, hanging over the precipice. In Trimodule A Quarters, Perry is trapped as the trimodule floods with stunning swiftness. He makes it through an emergency hatch between floors but can't get it closed. The inrushing tide blasts it open. He scramble upward to the next hatch. Spins the wheel. No time. He is slammed against the ceiling by the force of the water.
In the Drill Room, Lew Finler, Tommy Ray Dietz, and Lupton McWhirter fight their way toward the door as the drill room floods rapidly. Ahead, the big automated watertight door is closing like a motorized bank-vault. They reach it just as it is closing, but can't prevail against the strength of the motors. From the far side, we can see them screaming soundlessly at the tiny pressure window in the door. We can hear the dull dunk of their pounding.
In Trimodule C Compessor Room, Coffey and Schoenick in emergency breathing masks, are fighting the fire with a seawater hose and fire extinguishers. Smoke and steam choke the dark chambers. Nearby, Lindsey grabs Hippy's arm as he is running past and drags him into the blazing compressor room. Hands him her seawater hose. Wide-eyes, he starts blasting everything in sight with water.
She rushes into the teeth of the fire as Hippy blasts her with a spray of water, following her into the intense heat. She grabs Monk, who is semiconscious, and drags him out of the blazing room... Hippy dancing back with the hose, tripping, blasting her in the face. But it works. They get Monk clear. In the Drill Room corridor, Bud comes pounding down the flooding corridor in time to see the water in the drill room swirl above the pressure window, obscuring the faces of the trapped men.
He claws futility at the door. The motors and the fail-safe latching mechanism are on the opposite side. Through the pressure window he watches helplessly as they drown. We don't see what he sees, but we know what he sees. Suddenly the bulkhead next to him gives way and a freezing torrent thunders in. Bud is blown off his feet a hurled along the corridor. He scramble up somehow, splashing waist deep toward the opposite end of the corridor where another of the hydraulic doors is closing inexorably.
He's not going to make it. He reaches it a moment too late to squeeze through. Grabs the edge of the door and desperately tries to stop it from closing with the strength of this arms. It doesn't work. The steel door closes on the fingers of his left hand, pinning them in the doorframe. But something amazing happens. His wedding ring lodges between the door and frame, preventing his fingers from being crushed and the door from sealing and locking.
It resists tons of pressure, denting but not collapsing. The freezing sea pours in until only his head is clear. On the other side of the door, Catfish and Sonny come pounding up. They see his face at the tiny window and his hand jammed in the door. Sonny wedges a crowbar in the narrow opening and starts to pry. Catfish whips open his jackknife and slashes the hydraulic hoses on the door actuator.
He is sprayed with red hydraulic fluid, machine blood. Together they force open the door. Bud is blown through in a torture of water. Sonny is thrown back into some pipes. Breaks his arm. Together they somehow heave the door shut manually, cutting off the flow. Catfish hammers the fail-safe latch home with the crowbar. Bud lies gasping and shivering... staring at the tiny band of metal that saved him.
One hour later, looking down the wall of the canyon as Big Geek moves beneath us, tilting up to show Deepcore perched at the very edge of the abyss. The rig is twisted and dented, covered with loops of umbilical, trimodule-A a mass of wreckage. The ROV passes across the front of the control module. Through the front port, two figures can be seen in the light of a single emergency lamp.
In Trimodule C, Bud walks down the corridor from control, slowly... as if carrying a great weight. The air is still thick with smoke. The power off... everything lit by emergency lights. Makeshift quarters have been set up in the mess hall, with blankets laid out on the tables, and with folding cots in the storage room across the hall. Jammer is still unconscious. The impact killed six of the station's crew and injuring several of the surviving crew and SEALs.
Tensions mount as the platform has lost contact with the surface and anger of the crew towards the SEALs intensifies over the deaths of their friends and co-workers. Coffey and Schoenick bring Monk in on a stretcher, and set him up on a table. He is conscious but dazed with painkillers, his leg splinted. Coffey and Bud lock eyes. Bud bites back on his recriminations, but his gaze blames Coffey. He turns away.
Coffey's manner is subdued, contrite. A marked contrast to his previous brusque arrogance. He's wrestling with his own loss, a sever blow to the tight brotherhood of a SEAL unit. Bud's anger is not dispelled. But he can't address it now. He moves on. past the infirmary, where Sonny Dawson is rigging a sling over his own broken arm. He cries out in pain, cursing at himself. Looking down the central well as Bud crosses.
Down through the grill decking we can see the bottom level of the module is flooded. Catfish is down there welding, sending shivering reflections through the chamber. In the Machine Room, Lindsey is working, up to her knees in water. She is covered with grease, tools scattered around. Bud puts his hand on her shoulder. She looks up, blows some hair out of her eyes.
She's attempting to power the module and sub-bay by reworking busses if she can get past the mains, which are a total melt-down. Rather than trigger anger and invective, the disaster seems to have affected her in a different way. She's accepted the situation, now that's it's done, and is immersing herself in technical tasks, which are for her therapeutic.
Lindsey delivers the heaters will go down in a couple hours and Deepcore will be as cold as a meat locker. The news gets worse, they've got about 12 hours worth of oxygen if they close off the sections they're not using. The storm's going to last longer than 12 hours, but she can extend it with some storage tanks outboard on the wrecked module. She will have to go outside to tie onto them.
She goes back to her task, working efficiently with a socket wrench. The sub bay is still a mess. Dark. A few battery-operated lamps. Flatbed is back, floating in the moonpool. One Night and Hippy are in deep concentration, piloting the two ROVs in a damage survey of the rig. Bud comes up behind them, checks her screen first. Big Geek's monitor shows a view of the aft section of the rig.
The drilling derrick had collapsed across Cab Three, totaling it. A girder is jammed through its acrylic front dome. Hippy is remotely exploring the Trimodule A Quarters. Little Geek rises up through the open central hatch, pivoting in a circle to scan the flooded interior. The interior of the structure is in shambles. The lights of the little robot fall upon a figure... Perry. Lying on the deck, almost looking like he's asleep
The crew begins to experience more strange encounters from what appear to be underwater beings (referred to as non-terrestrial intelligences, or NTIs), which the paranoid Coffey determines to be a threat. One such incident involves an encounter with a tentacle that appears to be made entirely of water, but can move like a snake.
It also morphs into the faces of both Lindsey and Budd in an apparent attempt to communicate. When Coffey finds the tentacle's origin in the rig's diving pool, he panics and closes one of the hatches, cutting it off, and the remainder sinks into the depths. When the end of the tentacle "looks" at him, Coffey becomes even more scared and paranoid.
Strapping the warhead to Big Geek, one of the platform's remote operated vehicles, he decides to send both of them down to the bottom of the trench where the NTIs appear to be coming from. Bud and Lindsey intervene; Bud ties the ROV to a railing on the rig and is picked up by Lindsey piloting one of the rig's subs.
After a furious chase along the sea bottom, Lindsey disables both subs and stops Coffey, who falls off a ledge and is crushed within his submersible by the pressure. However, they cannot stop the ROV from taking the warhead down into the trench. Trapped in their rapidly-flooding sub, Lindsey orders Bud to use the ship's sole diving suit to swim back to the platform, towing her body.
While she will drown, she banks on the very cold water preserving her via the mammalian diving reflex until she can be resuscitated in the platform. A very tense situation develops while her comrades try to resuscitate her. When using emergency equipment fails, but frantically begins to shake and even slap Lindsey, who regains consciousness, much to the relief of the entire crew.
Bud then dons an experimental diving suit given to him by the remaining SEALs, in which the diver breathes an oxygenated fluid instead of air. This has the advantage of allowing the diver to descend to incredible depths without injury, as the body will not be crushed by the pressure by having liquid in the lungs rather than gas. Bud's mission is to dive to the bottom of the trench, two miles down and deeper than anyone has ever gone before, and disarm the warhead before it detonates.
He succeeds in his mission, but Lindsey is distressed to learn that he does not have enough breathing fluid remaining to allow his return to the platform. He tells her, via a wrist keypad, that he always knew it was a one-way trip, but that he had to go to save both the platform crew and the NTIs. He transmits a final message saying that he loves her and still considers her to be his wife, and she tells him how much she loves him before assuming he's dead.
The NTIs find Bud as his oxygen runs out and bring him onto their ship. They provide him with air to breathe at his normal pressure and engage in silent communication with him. They then show him several television clips they have stored of humanity's destructive behavior, silently explaining that they have left humans alone but now believe humans are too self-destructive to continue this behavior.
As a result, the NTIs are using their ability to control water to form 1000' high tsunamis off the coasts of every continent on Earth, threatening to destroy humanity. The NTI's view Bud's transmission "LOVE YOU WIFE" and decide to stop the storm and tsunamis, realizing humans do possess compassion for each other. With everyone baffled, Bud types another message into his communicator and tells them what he has discovered.
In Deepcore the crew becomes aware of a strange subsonic rumbling. The sonar is going crazy. One Night puts the headphones of her passive sonar rig up to her ear, then jerks it away. The rumbling increases and a glow diffuses the water. The glow intensifies until a blinding shaft of light blasts through the viewport, bathing the whole interior in a cold white radiance.
A last message appears on the screen: KEEP YOU PANTYHOSE ON/YOURE GONNA LOVE THIS The radiance intensifies. Everyone covers their eyes. It flares to brilliant colors. On the bridge of the Benthic Explorer, Bendix and the bridge crew are going nuts. All their instruments are pegged. Their sensors are detecting something enormous beneath them. A depression appears in the surface of the sea a hundred yards off, not swirling down like a whirlpool, just dimpling down.
It gets wider. Deeper. Rapidly becomes a yawning pit. The ocean is opening. Now the surface is churned by turbulence. Slow massive roils of tremendous power boil up from the depths. McBride leads a mass exodus onto the deck to see better. The open becomes a roaring maw a hundred yards across. The ships are like toys on the shimmering rim of the maelstrom. Something rises in the center of the opening.
A massive spire. Smoothly curving and iridescent. Off the starboard beam, a quarter mile away, another spire rises. Tons of seawater fall from its sides with a thunderous roar, the energy of Niagara. Off the port bow... another spire. And another, beyond the destroyer Albany, dwarfing it. Six towers... plus one larger, in the center. Rising. One the Explorer's deck, a shadow engulfs them as the nearest spire blocks out the sun.
The air, the sea, the deck... all vibrate with the thunder of creation. And now for the payoff shot: we're high, looking down. The spires form a perfect ring a mile across. A vast dark form, like a great shadow, rises from the depths beneath the ships. The spires are connected. It is all one. The NTI Ark. It surfaces with slow majesty, gently beaching all the ships on its broad back.
We recognize it as the structure into which Bud was led by the angelic being, which we assumed was a city. The Explorer rocks gently on its flat hull, clunking massively to one side as it settles. The bridge crew watch millions of tons of seawater streaming off the back of the vast, slightly curved hull. The missile cruiser rocks back and forth nearby, high and dry... its prop whining futility.
On the Explorer's deck, McBride, Bendix, DeMarco, the rest of the Navy contingent... they're all standing there open-mouthed, in a dream-like daze. Touched by the hand of God. Fifty yards away, between them and the Albany, sits Deepcore Two. It looks like a particularly ugly and unwanted toy, sitting on the glistening plain of the NTI Ark's hull. Closer, on Trimodule C, as the hatch at the bottom opens.
Catfish's feet appear, bicycling. He swings down to the pearlescent 'deck'. Stands there blinking in the sunlight, mole-like. Jammer plonks down behind him. He turns, lifts Lindsey down. Hippy, Sonny, and the rest, emerge into the light of the sun. A deliverance from the blackest night they will ever know. They are puzzled why they are not dead, they decompress. The NTI's apparently did something to them.
Lindsey has tears streaming down her cheeks... for the sun, for life, for their deliverance and the larger one she knows has happened, an epiphany for the whole human race. She blinks. Seeing something not far away. She gives a little laugh, or something between laughing and crying. Reverse, as Bud walks up the curving incline of one of the mouth-like enterances to the NTI structure.
His suit is casually unzipped and the FBS helmet dangles from one hand jauntily. She starts toward him. Breaks into a run. Then stops a few feet from him. Watching him come to her. His smile, his eyes illuminating her. He stops and she touches him, lightly. Is this real? The look at each other, wonderingly a moment. Then laugh. She sniffs loudly. Lindsey and Bud rush to each other. Greeting each other as a newlywed couple would, they engage in a passionate kiss.
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