[Episode 62343] [Episode 62343]But now, it wasn't shrieking, it was humming seductively, sawing at his frayed nerves. The last thing he needed was something to go horrifically wrong.
He sluggishly swam/crawled forward through the tunnel, looking upwards. His headlamp cast a dim glow, thickly filtered with the floating debris so common near the ocean floor. Everything had an eerie tinge to it, as though a million small things were hiding behind each and every piece of flotsam. Yuri clamped down on the urge to bat some of the junk away. He was in charge here, he needed to stay in control.
He set his foot down on the floor, and braced himself, taking slow, deep breaths. His hand found a guide-rail, and he steadied himself. No sooner had he touched the rail then he felt a faint, quiet tremor through the metal surfaces, reverberating faintly, but building in strength.
"What the fu--" His explative was swallowed back when he looked up, upwards along the elevator shaft he had swum down. He could see billowing silvery clouds shooting upwards across the ceiling, dancing about in a merry fashion, like drunken porpises playing with the wave off a surface-going vessel's bow.
"BRACE!" he shouted out over his communication system, deafening his colleages with his voice. His left hand found another rail to sieze onto, and he clung with all his might. At that second, water began to surge down the channel, and the volume of air above him increased. A monstrous groan, as though some great wall of metal had slowly been pierced, rang through the ship, and the vibrations threatened to numb his hands.
The pressure began to push him back, down towards the door he had left behind, the airlock he had abandoned to search for Wallace. It seemed that the combination of the vibrating rail, the pressure of the water, and the inevitable pull of gravity would win... but it didn't.
Gradually, the flow of air over his head waned, until only a few streams of bubbles passed overhead, and the current declined to a sluggish draw he could overcome.
"Boss?" Frost asked over the comm system. "What the hell was that?"
"I want everyone's status," Yuri rasped, still clinging to the rails. "Where is everyone?"
"Uh, I'm with the other guys," Frost said somewhat anxiously.
"I'm here, though visibility's going to shit -- something blew up a whole ton of stuff off the ocean floor," Jackson replied, panic barely restrained from his voice. "You okay? I saw a ton of air bubbles blasting out over the top of this wreck a second ago."
"We just lost sight of that yellow wreck," Roper warned. "It's getting really cloudy down here."
"Wallace?" Yuri asked, finally loosening his left hand from the rail he was clinging to.
See other episodes by Sgt. Chibi De`Ohki
(Posted Sat, 06 Sep 2003 01:22)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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