Katie woke up to silence. Shouldn't the launch's systems be beeping? She tried to stand up and immediately ended up back on the floor. Her head was pounding. She reached up to feel her forehead and her hand came away with blood. I must have hit my head. Katie tried to remember what happened. The systems started to crash, Lucas sent out the emergency beacon and… Lucas!

Katie looked frantically around until she saw him. He was slumped forward in his seat. Slowly she crawled over to him. He was so still. She reached up to feel a pulse, praying he was ok. He still had a pulse and he was breathing. He was just unconscious. She stood slowly. This time she managed to stay upright. She moved towards the first aid kit, and was just tying off the bandage on her head when she heard Lucas groan.

"Katie?" he said groggily. His eyes shot open wide. "Katie!" he yelled.

"I'm here," she replied, making her way over to him. Her head was still pounding but the aspirin she had found in the first aid kit was helping.

"Are you ok?" she asked.

Lucas straightened up and started hitting buttons on the control panel.

"I'm fine," he said, "how are you?" He shot a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. He saw the bandage around her head and was worried, but he knew that that wasn't the biggest problem.

"Fine. I think I have a concussion." She dropped into the seat next to him.

"What happened?" she asked.

"We crashed." Lucas was still hitting switches, trying to get a response from the launch's system. Damn Damn Damn he thought.

"Obviously…" she muttered. "I meant with the launch."

"Um." He looked at her trying to figure out how much to tell her. Katie saw the look of apprehension on her face.

"How bad is it," she asked.

"Bad," he admitted. "The system is totally shut down. Navigation, communications, nothing is working."

"But you sent out the emergency beacon. That's still running, right. " She saw the worried look on his face deepen. "Right?"

"No."

"What do you mean no?" she practically shouted at Lucas. It wasn't his fault, but still, how could it not be working.

"How can it not be working?" she cried.

"The error in the system was in the programming and it occurred in both the main system and the back up systems. I managed to reroute the life support onto a third system before I lost control but I didn't have time for the emergency beacon. I figured that one sort of out weighed the other."

"Oh yeah, it's great that we get to live a little longer at the bottom of the ocean before we die!"

"Look, we got at least a minute of the beacon out, I'm sure someone heard it," Lucas tried to console her.

Katie just tuned him out and stared out the window. Lucas sighed and went back to trying to get the systems to work.

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"Damn it," Lucas shouted slamming his fists onto the dash.

Katie looked over at him. She'd sat in silence for over an hour while he'd tried so desperately to find them a way out. She hadn't tried to help. She'd just resigned herself to the fact that they were going to die. What am I doing? She asked herself. Acting like a fool was the answer her self gave.

"Can I help?" she asked tentatively.

"There's nothing we can do," Lucas said. "The flaw in the programming won't let me turn the systems back on and the flaw can't be fixed with the systems off."

"Are you sure it's the programming? Maybe its hardware." Hardware she could handle. It was the stuff inside that she was a little iffy on. She could hold her own, but when it came to the inside of a computer, Lucas was the expert.

"No, it's definitely a flaw in the programming. It's a flaw in all the MR shuttle programming. They were supposed to be updated months ago." Lucas spat out the word supposed with such venom that she knew whoever was responsible was going to get it when they got back to SeaQuest. If they got back. Katie scolded herself for thinking negatively.

"Want to know the real irony?" Lucas snorted.

"Ok," replied Katie tentatively.

"I'm the one who was supposed to make sure that the software was updated. I assigned two crewmen to update them all, but I never bothered to follow up properly." Lucas shook his head. "I checked exactly two shuttles. I couldn't be bothered to check the rest to make sure it was done properly." Lucas banged his head back on the seat. "Stupid."

"Hungry?"

"What?"

"Are you hungry," she repeated. "I'm going to grab some food."

Katie returned with a few food rations and two bottles of water. She handed half of everything to Lucas and they both sat there in silence as they ate. Katie tried to think of a way to pull Lucas out of the hole he was busy burying himself in.

"My parents died in a launch crash," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"My parents. The real ones. Died in a launch crash when I was five. I lived in the orphanage for three years before Katie and Ben adopted me. I…" Katie faltered for a moment before continuing on. "I knew how they died. I heard some of the workers at the orphanage talking about it when I first got there. They talked about how horrible it must have been, the fear they must have felt, slowly suffocating to death. I had horrible nightmares for years, I always dreamed that I was in a launch, and that it crashed, and I suffocated. It wasn't until after I was adopted that they started to go away." Katie worked up the nerve to look at Lucas. "That's what the nightmare on the way to the research colony was about. I don't have it every night now, but sometimes it sneaks up on me."

"How did you get them to go away?" Lucas asked carefully.

"Katie." She shrugged, and then smiled. "She found out about the nightmares shortly after I moved in with her. I was terrified she'd send me back but all she did was hug me and tell me everything would be ok. They started getting better but it wasn't until I started to work on the Gazelle model that they truly disappeared.

"The Gazelle model?"

"Yea. Katie was designing a submersible when she adopted me. She used to take me to the lab- she thought maybe being around one would make me less afraid. I found it all fascinating. After a few days she realized that I was asking much more advanced questions than an eight year old should. Katie and Ben took me to some specialists to get my IQ tested. Once they started talking to me and realized how much I had read and learned they let me take the high school equivalency test and the rest is history." Snorting she continued, "Ironic that I'm going to die the same way isn't it," she said bitterly.

Lucas was stunned. In spite of losing everything, she'd still managed to rise above. He'd never really thought about what had happened to her real parents. He tried to think of what to say but he couldn't find the words. Instead he set his rations aside and walked over to where Katie sat. Sitting on the floor, he leaned against the wall, pulling Katie into his lap. He ran his fingers through her hair and kissed her forehead.

"You're not going to die here. I promise."

With Lucas holding her, in a launch at the bottom of the ocean, Katie finally let go of the grief she'd been carrying around for so many years. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but they were tears of happiness. She was happy that she had found Lucas. If she had to die anyway, she wanted it to be in the arms of the man she loved. The man she hoped loved her.

"Lucas I," she started, but was interrupted but a loud banging.

"What is that?"

"It sounds like a grapnel," Lucas replied. "Someone found us!"

The two of them held each other silently for ten minutes as they felt the launch being pulled up through the water. They heard the sound of the airlock being opened and moved towards it.

"Well look at what I caught. What do you say Verne? Should we keep them or through them back?"

Author's Note: OOOoooo Who is it? lol… I'm tempted to not write the next chapter for a few weeks just to see if anyone can figure out who is at the door