CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There's a lot you can tell about a city from the outside looking in, and most of its wrong. The defiant skyline that cuts across the sky, the pulsing neon lights proclaiming the names of great men and tales of the great deeds found within. There's no sign of the bitterness of the city's true nature. From the outside, there's no conflict, no adversity, the pain of living not even the smallest strike against the steel and concrete might of the city. And what a city it was.
I was strapped to the outer hull of a bathysphere, hurtling deeper into the ocean, looking up at Rapture from below. Turns out even at the bottom of the sea, there's still lower to go. My clunky dive suit didn't gave me enough mobility to turn my head, but I could careen my neck back and forth inside the steel helmet, so my only options were to look up at Rapture, and down into the trench. I was attached just behind the drive shaft of the vehicle, so I would be invisible to any watchers from below or directly ahead, hidden by the bubbles and backwash of the propeller screws. If another bathysphere came behind us, I'd be easy prey, but Cat and I had worked out the schedule and decided it wasn't likely.
Though it had been built over the heat vents, the trenches under Rapture should have been dark, the magma thousands of feet below the surface, only its warmth rising above where it was harnessed by the massive machinery of Hephaestus to power the city. The trench, instead, was so bright, the only way to keep from blinding was to constantly pull my eyes upward. The light blazed up from the deepest depths of the cut in the Earth, and streamed out in all directions, mocking the darkness piled above in thousands of fathoms of seawater.
Even stranger, the light really did seem to be moving. Pulsing. Writhing.
I heard three knocks from inside the bathysphere. We were getting close. I couldn't hear, but Cat would be hailing our destination on their encrypted frequency. We were about a hundred feet beneath Rapture's penal colony, Persephone, a secret to most citizens of the city. I had been there more than my share of times to drop off malcontents – murderers, rapists, thieves. It was amusing to think that just below there, hiding in the light, was a far worse sort of prison.
As Cat slowed the bathysphere, I caught my first glimpses of the deep-sea outpost. The Russians had built it small, even by Russian standards. Blinking as my eyes adjusted to the blinding light, I realized it was actually an attack submarine. About 300 feet long, with the insignia K-3 on the hull, it was ugly and ferocious at the same time. It looked like someone had taken a warship, stripped it of almost all the masts and rigging, and replaced them with guns, mines, and nearly the entire hull with torpedo tubes. Fishing holes, I remembered some old sailor called them. The thing looked like it had enough firepower to wipe out all of Rapture, and was positioned facing the foundations of city. Not hard to guess what they planned if their project failed. Leave it to the Russkies to come to a party with drinks for everyone and enough firepower to wipe out the East Coast. Perfect.
My plan was simple enough. Cat would turn herself into her handlers. Say she was willing to come back if they resumed the Avrova treatments and made her whole again. Reverse the rapid aging process, she would demand. They might listen, they might not, but they weren't going to just shoot her on the spot. She was going to tell them she had information about Ryan's security forces catching wind of Avrova and the KGB infiltration. I even recorded a few audiologs to that effect to give her story some credibility. It wasn't much, but it was better than a clipboard. For myself, I didn't have much of a better idea.
As the bathysphere docked with the submarine, I heard the shrieking hiss of compressed air matching up, the mating end of the airlock reaching out to find its partner. I couldn't see much through the viewplate, but inside the portholes, I could see Cat's female figure and a blob of red that must be her hair. She met with some green and white blobs that were taller than her, and walked away, deeper into the mass of Soviet iron.
I decoupled the straps from the dive suit and pushed off from the vehicle towards the sub's hull. My counterweights were just enough to give me a little buoyancy at that depth, which was great since I'd only had deep sea dive training twice since joining the security force. Have to thank Sullivan for that. I made my way down along the hull, grasping any protrusion or cut in its surface to pull myself along. Cat had told me she'd seen divers exiting through the base of the hull through something called a moon pool – an hole cut directly into the keel of the sub with a chamber maintaining pressure, allowing easy access out for divers, and hopefully, easy access in for me.
Groping down and forward, I finally saw the spot where the water seemed to come up and into the sub. I pulled myself over, and began dropping counterweights. The pressure pushed my helmet right up above the surface of the pool, and I was looking around the dive chamber. Labels all in dark Cyrillic lettering and the room littered with spearguns that had been modified to fire what looked like some sort of needle. I dropped more counterweight, and brought my chest out the water. Working my arms up, I was able to get off my helmet and begin undoing the suit.
With a quick pop, I pulled myself up and out of the dive suit, letting it fall to the depths below. Though I had barely exposed myself to any of the impossibly cold water, the room itself was colder than the Delaware Valley ice storms I'd grown up with in Philadelphia. I saw a puffy overcoat with fur lining hanging up and put it on over my shirt and trousers. I checked to make sure my revolver was still working. I walked up to the watertight door and pulled the level to unlock the dogs slowly, quietly, and stepped through into the passageway.
The world went black as I was knocked out cold.