Chapter 47
Pauper's Drop - Bathysphere Station
"Dr Wells...Lydia? Are you receiving?" Jack fiddled with the frequency knob on his shortwave radio. Dr Wells had left to return to Minerva's Den, with Jack's instructions for The Thinker to be tasked with sending every functional Bathysphere to Paupers Drop, and hold them in a queue ready to be laden with ex-splicers as soon as those that had accepted the cure were back on their feet enough to make the journey back up to the surface.
As he continued to nervously listen to static, he watched as two small, withered men clambered over the Bathysphere currently bobbing freely in the small entrance pool, frantically trying to engage the emergency release on the door so they could power it up and re-stabilize it. "Fucking thing! These have never worked how they was s'posed to!" One crowed, hitting the hull out of anger with a wrench.
Behind him, Jack could hear the groans and whining of the twenty-six men and women that had been the first to willingly accept the ADAM cure. It seemed to hit the adults much harder than it had the Big Sisters, as Jack had suspected it might. The Big Sisters, were still technically children, no more than fourteen or fifteen, and having been raised as some of Tenenbaums little sisters, had been the most recipient to having ADAM in their blood without it resulting in too much trauma to the mind and body. The adults however, most had been heavily abusing their bodies with ADAM for almost twenty years, had all suffered extreme mutations and mental collapse, and so the immediate eradication of ADAM from their bodies now was deeply traumatic. They reeled on the station benches and blanketed floor, sweating, vomiting and cursing themselves for being 'fooled' into taking the cure.
Jack had made sure that those receiving the cure were immediately transferred away from the rest of the population, for fear the sight of the suffering caused by the cure might put many of the others off. He wasn't sure how any of these people would react when they began to see clearly again - for the mutations many had would of course be permanent, and even with the attention of the best surgeons up on the surface, many would still resemble a Picasso. Maybe Tenenbaum could help them, given time.
"Lydia - can you hear me? Are you in the Den yet?" He returned to tinkering with the radio. There was a crackled reply, too distorted initially to tell who it was.
"Yes... I am here." Finally her distinctly British accent came through. "I can hear you..." She spoke again.
"Great! Well done! Have you made it to the Thinker? How any Bathysphere's can it get down here to the Drop?" The radio fell silent for a short while, long enough for Jack to wonder what she was doing at the other end. From what he had seen of Minerva's Den, he pictured her climbing through small access vents surrounded by electrical cables.
Finally, she responded again. "Yes... I am here. The main door was malfunctioning, I had to access The Thinker via the pit - sorry it took me some time." Her voice was steady and nervous, lacking the faint glimmer of hope she had left with.
"Is everything ok Lydia?" He checked, noticing her subdued demeanor, hoping it was simply a result of having to climb through whatever 'the pit' was. He was answered only with static.
Minerva's Den
Office of Dr Lydia Wells
Her tired, boney hands were trembling as they lay out on the desk in front of her, both from fear, and from a burning rage that was telling her to repel, to fight back and see through what she had promised to do. But her life until now had been focused on the outcomes of equations, and she hadn't made a single one the last few minutes that had seen her successfully fight her way out of this deadlock against Bear - one of Edward Carson's enforcers, and his six armed men, one of whom held an upgraded Pistol loaded with anti-personnel rounds, to the back of her skull. She had managed to evade their outer perimeter at first, despite her clumsy use of a diving suit with which she was far from familiar, but they had caught her with the simplest of traps - a trap bolt set across the doorway into Central Operations, the damn thing had nearly taken her leg off.
Bear was stood in the corner, on the radio to Edward. "Yeah Boss, you don't need to worry about the doctor getting caught in the action down in the drop - we got 'er right here. Right where ya want 'er." He cheered, winking at her across the room.
"Excellent! You get her to work straight away on granting me access to Rapture Central Computing again, with unlimited access to The Thinker. We'll sweep up the mess down here." Edward signed off from his transmission.
"I don't know what he thinks he can do - without access to anything, he can't harm Jack Ryan, or anyone down in the drop." Lydia sneered, trying to make the most out of the one card she held. "Pumps, power, they still belong to me for the time being. No matter how hard you press that pistol to my head, re-programming takes time. Time Edward doesn't have - but time enough for the evacuation to begin as planned. You could go with them you know..." She suggested, cautiously.
There was a slight hesitation from Bear, as he and his men exchanged the most fleeting of glances. "As lovely as that sounds lady - it 'ain't gunna happen. And Ryan junior hasn't got another five minutes left - think he can clear out all them fuck-heads in five minutes?" He laughed.
"Five minutes? Until what?" She couldn't help but let her panic show. "What can you do that doesn't need the computers? You wouldn't have the manpower to cause enough of a flood... or..." she began to frantically try and figure out what Edward could have planned for Paupers Drop.