Page 37 of Hurricane Irene

They launched their DPUs in a staggered line. Mo first, angled into the current. Garrett followed five yards behind. Nash came last. Their helmet lamps twisted through clouds of aerated water, appearing and vanishing as the sea rolled them. The propulsion units screamed through their frames, but forward became sideways, then down, then suddenly up.

Mo spread his left hand, palm out: hold spacing. He chopped upward twice: ascend. Nash acknowledged with a fist. Garrett answered with a flash of open fingers, his body already being lifted by a current that seemed to recognize him.

A shadow spun through their lights. Mo saw the torn section of aluminum catwalk half a second before it hit. He kicked his DPU sideways and rammed Garrett with his shoulder. The metal swept between them, clipping Mo’s cylinder and snapping his tether line. The impact sent him cartwheeling into darkness.

Garrett released his controls and reached. The water around Mo tightened—not a hand, not anything visible, but a sudden coherent stream that caught his spinning body and drew him back. Garrett closed both hands toward his chest. Return. Mo slid through the chaos until Nash seized the valve guard on his cylinder.

Mo slapped Garrett’s forearm once. Thanks would waste air. He reattached to the group with a spare line and pointed upward.

The surface struck like a falling building. They breached into rain moving nearly horizontal, each drop hard enough to sting through their suits. Waves rose as black slopes, their crests torn away by wind before they could break. The sky had no depth. Cloud and ocean were one convulsing chamber lit from within by violet lightning.

Mo fired an inflatable anchor drogue from his pack. It opened fifty feet below, caught in the deeper current, and yanked all three of them into a rough triangle. He cinched the central line through his harness, pointed at Garrett, then down. Pointed at Nash, then up. He raised two fingers, brought them together, and drove his fist southwest.

Garrett rolled facedown and plunged both arms into the sea.

The change began close to his skin. Rainwater stopped skittering away and gathered along his sleeves. The trough around him deepened. Beneath the waves he felt heat banked in the upper Gulf, a vast reservoir feeding vapor into the storm. He felt the counterclockwise pull, the convergence, the inflow racing toward the center. It was not one current. It was ten thousand braided together.

He opened his hands beneath the surface and pulled southwest. The water resisted with the weight of the horizon. Blood vessels darkened along his wrists. His shoulders shook. A circular patch around the team flattened, then elongated toward open Gulf.

Garrett unclipped from his DPU, stood upright against the harness line, and lifted both arms.

The gale hit Nash from the east and tried to fold him backward. He turned his palms into it. Air sheared around his fingers in pale streamers of spray. For one heartbeat the wind slackened in front of him. Then the storm answered. A blast slammed him flat and dragged him underwater.

Mo hauled on Garrett’s line until his helmet broke the surface. Garrett coughed into the regulator, eyes open, one glove raised. Again.

Sixty feet below, Montana watched their biometric traces jump against the tactical display. The submersible drifted north despite full counterthrust. She pulsed the ballast, dropped ten feet, and found a denser layer moving west. She angled the keel vanes into it, using the current like a rail. The tether telemetry stabilized. Barely.

Then the damaged port thruster failed completely.

The vessel yawed toward the divers’ anchor line. Montana killed the starboard thruster before the imbalance could spin her. Momentum carried the bow around. She released a burst from the forward trim tanks, brought the stern up, and let the swell roll the hull beneath the tether instead of across it. A restraint bolt tore loose beside her shoulder. The cabin filled with the smell of scorched insulation.

On the surface, Mo drew a wide circle in the air and slashed through its northeast quadrant. Break the feed there. Garrett turned his head enough to see. He plunged deeper, driving his arms into cold layers below the heated skin, then twisted his wrists. The sea around them buckled. Warm water streamed southwest while cooler water welled up in its place, roughening the surface in long dark seams.

Garrett felt the difference. The humid inflow shuddered where it crossed the cooling water. He raised one hand toward the clouds and swept the other southwest, not pushing the gale head-on now but opening a channel through it. The wind curled around his body. Spray spiraled upward in a narrow column.

Far above, unseen inside the rain, the storm’s lower clouds began to lean. The shift was tiny—a fraction of a degree across miles of rotating air—but Montana’s instruments caught it. The projected track flickered. Louisiana remained inside the impact cone. The centerline trembled west.

Lightning struck the sea a hundred yards away.

White fire filled every visor. The concussion hit underwater, sharp and physical. Nash seized. His grip on the current broke. Garrett’s wind channel collapsed and snapped back with a roar. Mo’s display went blank. For several seconds there was only rain, blackness, and the brutal rise and fall of the anchor line.

Below, Montana’s tactical glass dissolved into static. The three biometric traces vanished. She ripped the dead communications lead from its socket, opened the backup hydrophone circuit, and listened. Turbine noise. Hull strain. The distant grinding thunder of the storm. No locator pings.

She engaged the emergency winch for half a second, stopped, then engaged it twice more. One pull. Two pulls. The pattern traveled up the tether: alive, position held.

Mo felt the rhythm through his harness. He found Nash floating face down at the limit of his line and rolled him over. Nash’s eyes opened. Mo raised a fist between them, then slowly opened it. Breathe. Nash’s chest hitched. The regulator bubbled.

Garrett surfaced ten feet away, one arm wrapped around the drogue line. Mo extended two fingers toward him, pointed to Nash then crossed both forearms. Wait. Garrett shook his head violently. He pointed northeast, where lightning now strobed without pause. Then he held up five fingers and closed them one by one.

Five minutes. Maybe less.

Nash pushed Mo’s hand away and turned back to the water. This time he did not reach for the surface alone. He followed the cold upwelling Montana had found beneath them, traced it down through pressure and darkness, and hooked his awareness into that moving layer. His body arched. The sea lifted around all three men in a broad, rising dome.

When the dome collapsed, it collapsed southwest. A river formed inside the ocean, invisible except for the way wave crests turned and ran along it. Warm surface water peeled away from the storm’s eastern feed and stretched toward the central Gulf. Nash screamed into his mouthpiece, but the wind tore the sound away.

Garrett watched the changed waves, read their angle, and mirrored them with both hands. He pulled the inflow down and southwest, then split his arms wide above his head. The air responded in layers. Low wind bent first, racing along the new path over the water. Higher wind resisted, twisted, and finally began to shear across the storm’s northeast side.

The hurricane recoiled. A descending burst punched a crater into the sea beside them. The anchor drogue tore free. Their triangle collapsed. Mo saw the steel remains of a buoy mast tumbling through the spray and kicked his DPU to maximum. He struck Garrett in the ribs and drove him clear. The mast caught Mo’s shoulder and spun him away, trailing a ribbon of bubbles from a torn suit valve.