Panic Switch полностью

“What?” she said, staring at him. “Why is your alarm clock going off?” The sound of the alarm clock’s blaring alarm got louder, as if it were being held against her head.

There was terror in Daddy’s expression. Oxygen level… LOW!

Captain Second Rank Iron Irina Trusov, the systems officer and pilot-in-command of the deep-diving submarine Losharik, blinked and coughed, realizing she was having trouble getting her breath, then tried to focus her eyes on the console in front of her. The master alarm was blaring and the Second Captain AI system kept repeating, OXYGEN LEVEL… LOW. Trusov silenced the alarm and coughed again, trying to make sense of her surroundings. Something was deeply wrong. Instead of the usual brightly lit panel, it was dark. And the space, the cockpit, usually so well lit, was also dark. Dark and cold. Trusov shivered, exhaling, her breath visible in the space lit only by dual emergency lamps placed aft in the cockpit compartment.

But perhaps the strangest thing was that she hung from her seatbelt. She turned her head, trying to ignore the dizziness. There was something very wrong, in addition to the space being ice cold and dark. The room was completely on its side. Tilted an entire ninety degrees to starboard.

Carefully, Trusov unbuckled her five-point belt and lowered herself to the surface that used to be the bulkhead to her right, but was now a deck below her boots. She climbed away from her seat and console and found a battlelantern on a bracket of the deck — which used to be the bulkhead. She hit the on-switch and shone the light around the compartment. The other three — Captain Kovalov, First Officer Vlasenko and Navigator Dobryvnik — were all still strapped in, but hanging from their seatbelts. She reached up to try to rouse Kovalov, but although he was breathing, he wouldn’t respond. She tried the first officer and navigator, but their skin was cold and neither had a pulse. The shock must have hit them harder, or they weren’t as strong as she and Kovalov, she thought. She headed aft slowly, carefully, climbing over manuals that had fallen from their bookshelves, pad computers, teacups and other gear. She stared at the heavy hatch to the second compartment, but fortunately, the hinge was on the deck — if the boat had tilted to port, she would have been trapped in the cockpit compartment, unable to lift the two-hundred-kilogram hatch. She undogged the hatch, hit the opening lever, and it fell toward her with a loud slam just as she jumped away.

The second compartment was a complete wreck. Normally, the galley compartment, it was littered with cooking implements, pots, pans and stored food. It took a long time for her to reach the hatch to the third compartment, but when she got there, she opened it the same way she had with the last hatch. If the second compartment were messy, the third compartment looked like a huge bomb had detonated there. The hydronauts, the divers, should have been in this compartment, but there was no sign of them. The compartment housed the hotel quarters. Bunks, lockers, and bathrooms. With all the contents heaped up on the deck as high as a mountain, she had no idea how she’d get to the fourth compartment, but after ten minutes of climbing over debris, she made it to the fourth compartment hatch.

Beyond, the fourth compartment housed a large airlock for the hydronauts’ lock-out chamber, plus the atmospheric control equipment. The divers’ gear was strewn all over the deck, but it was less of an obstacle than the third compartment’s mess. She made it to the hatch to the fifth compartment, where nuclear control was situated. The sixth and seventh compartments were unoccupied, housing the nuclear reactor and steam machinery. Trusov opened the hatch, jumped away as it clanged open, and stepped through, a large puddle of blood below her boots. She looked down and saw the body of Starshina Statji Roman Leonty, the engineering senior chief petty officer. On the opposite end of the compartment, the chief engineer, Captain Third Rank Chernobrovin, lay on the deck covered in heavy books and manuals. She pulled the debris off his body and tried to sit him up.

His color was good, there was no blood, and he had a pulse. Trusov slapped him, but he didn’t respond. She considered for a moment that if she were the sole survivor, she would die when the air ran out. Or when the battery died, or the vessel started flooding. Or caught fire.

“Chernobrovin!” she screamed. “Chief! Wake the fuck up!”

She kept that up until, finally, the chief engineer’s left eye opened into a slit.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Yeah, fuck is right,” Trusov said. “Now wake the hell up and help me recover.”

“What happened?”

“The hell you think happened? We took a nuclear explosion. We’re on our side. We need to get the ship on an even keel and restart the reactor.”

The engineer put his head in both hands and moaned.