“What, you want a thank-you or something?” Ryan gasped.
The Dweller nodded.
“Manners are manners,” Ryan replied with a weak laugh. “Thanks.”
Mike waved once, and like a dropped stone disappeared from sight.
Ryan gratefully swallowed down the fresh sea air while unfastening the weight belt, then the air tank. For a moment, he almost started to save the gear, until realizing he’d never have use for it again. He dropped both into the water next to him, where they promptly began the long journey back down to the ocean’s floor.
“Good fucking riddance,” Ryan muttered.
“SOMETHING OFF the starboard bow, John,” Mildred said. “I saw movement. Looks like something’s floating out there.”
“‘Starboard’?” J.B. repeated. “Since when did you become so conversant with the lingo?”
“When in Rome, I guess,” Mildred replied. “I watched a lot of TV as a kid.”
Krysty turned on a large spotlight that was mounted at the front of the cruiser’s cabin and illuminated a round circle of the water in the direction Mildred had pointed, but she knew what she would find even before the raft was revealed.
“It’s Ryan,” the redhead breathed, then added with more authority, “Ryan’s out there.”
“Dad!” Dean cried joyfully, pointing at the bobbing life raft in the distance.
Ryan saw the approaching boat and waved the flashlight back.
“Could be anybody. Could be Admiral Poseidon. Could be another one of those scaly Dwellers. Who could tell from here?” J.B. muttered quietly but without conviction. If Krysty said it was Ryan, then the Armorer would take her word for it. He felt a stir of excitement as he steered the sleek craft toward the spot Dean had pointed out.
Krysty and Jak reached down and grabbed the neck of Ryan’s tattered shirt to help steady him at the side of the boat as they pulled up and over.
“Welcome back, lover,” Krysty said, her flushed cheeks and anxious green eyes belying her light tone. “Decide to go for a swim without me?”
“Uh-huh. Come on in,” Ryan rasped back. “The water’s fine.”
She smiled down at him, tears starting to run down her cheeks. Ryan took her hand, smiling back in return. Then, exhausted beyond all limits of human endurance, he closed his eye in confidence, knowing she would watch over him and would still be there when he woke up.
Epilogue
Down in the watery depths, down farther than human eyes could see and human lungs could breathe, down farther still, deep on the hidden floor of the black ocean rests the wreckage of man.
Sunlight can penetrate a full half mile into the sea, feeble light that didn’t even come close to where the crushed hull of the USS Raleigh rested. Paper-thin creatures drifted past, blind in the dark. No bubbles of air escaped the many fissures where the welds of the plating of the once mighty submarine had given way.
The Raleigh and her crew were dead.
A man trapped down there would implode, fold inward on himself from the pressure. No human could survive such a crushing defeat. Poseidon had been wrong. He was no lord of the sea. He was a man, and man, despite his inventions and scientific magic that allowed him to travel beneath the sea, belonged on the land, not down there in the deep.
But what about a man who took the name of a god and caressed the three-pronged trident of power and dared to emulate the most fearsome of Olympians and shake storms of radioactive dust from his own great beard, claiming the title of Admiral and the command of his followers that went with the title. What about him?
Listen close—there were no sounds here, yet still, there was a tapping.
Down there, where there was no air, one man drank deep of the ocean and still lived.
Down there, in the silence, one man raged on…
Not dead.
Not yet.