Deep Submergence: Submarine U-51

Dark, freezing cold, and the groaning of metal under eight thousand meters of water pressure.

Carl spat a mouthful of blood and oil onto the deck, setting his shoulders into a heavy wrench to force a ruptured high-pressure steam line shut. Under his boots, the primary viewport of the salvage rig Explorer was already webbed with hairline fractures.

"Main cable snapped! We're tumbling!" his young assistant screamed through the comms.

"Shut up and punch the emergency bags!" Carl roared back, slamming his palm into the manual override valve.

THUD.

The rig slammed into the shelf rock at the absolute bottom of the trench, the impact knocking Carl flat. When his head cleared, the Explorer’s floodlights were cutting through the black water, catching the long, barnacle-encrusted hull of a German U-boat half-buried in the silt—the U-51, missing since the second world war.

"We... we actually found it?" Sarah, the young marine biologist, crawled up to the forward console, her eyes wide. "U-51... the one with the high-command secrets..."

"Save the history lesson. The salvage bay is crushed and we're jammed in her aft hatch," Carl muttered, pulling a heavy hydraulic cutter and his dive knife from the rack. "We've got forty minutes of air. You want to breathe, you come with me inside to find spare high-pressure tanks."

They pulled on their heavy helmets, pried open the U-boat's rusted outer seal, and dropped down into the cold steel grave.

The smell hit them right through the scrubbers—a rank, sour mix of old diesel, saltwater, and something long rot that had gone bad in the dark. The bulkheads were gouged deep, the steel torn out from the inside.

"This wasn't an explosion," Carl whispered, his flashlight beam catching a sheared rib plate. "Something tore through this hull from the corridor out."

Before Sarah could answer, a wet, metallic rasp echoed up from the dark below.

Gurgle... gurgle...

In the beam of the light, a pale, four-meter-long thing backed out of a ventilation trunk. Its skin was translucent, covered in hard bone plates and blind, milky growths, its tail dragging a thick cluster of hooked tentacles that twitched in the dark.

"Move!" Carl yelled, shoving Sarah back as he brought the hydraulic nailer up and pulled the trigger.

A heavy steel pin buried itself into the creature’s chest, leaking a thick, green fluid. The thing let out a high-frequency screech, its heavy tail whipping across the narrow space and slamming Carl against the bulkhead. His ribs cracked, the breath leaving him in a red bubble, but he managed to pin a grenade pin with his teeth and toss the charge straight into the creature’s mouthparts.

BOOM.

The shockwave rolled through the narrow corridor. Half the thing’s torso blew open, and it slithered back into the dark piping with a ragged hiss.

"What was that?!" Sarah shrank against the wall, her face white.

"Not anything from a textbook," Carl spat, leaning against the console, his eyes dropping to the heavy aluminum case Sarah was clutching against her chest. "Or maybe it’s exactly what your bosses sent us down here to fetch. Right, Doctor?"

Sarah froze.

Carl grabbed the handle, snapped the latch with his knife, and shoved the lid back. No paper documents. Just racks of deep-sea genetic samples floating in clear preservative, tucked alongside an oilskin binder stamped with a high-command seal.

"She didn't get sunk by an enemy destroyer," Carl read, his voice flat in the helmet. "They were running gene-splicing experiments on deep-sea fauna. The test subjects broke containment, and the captain scuttled her down here to keep the mess buried. And your company sent you back down to harvest the strain."

Sarah’s expression turned cold. Without a word, she pulled a pneumatic dart gun from her jacket and took him in the thigh.

"You're sharp, Captain," she said, her voice dropping all its warmth. "But you talk too much. This strain is worth eight figures on the open market. Thanks for getting me through the door, but you can stay here with the crew."

She hit the manual door dump, trapping Carl in the reactor compartment as seawater began to spill through the overhead seals.

"Dammit!" Carl’s leg went numb as the nerve agent took hold. He could hear the wounded thing crawling back down the pipes toward the smell of fresh blood.

He bit down hard on his tongue until he tasted salt, using the pain to drive back the drug. Crawling over to an old manual torpedo tube, he wedged his knife into the tail end of an unlaunched air flask and hammered the butt with his heavy wrench.

CRACK.

The remaining high-pressure air blew out the back of the tube in a single violent burst, tearing the rusted hatch off its hinges and blowing Sarah off her feet just as she reached the escape trunk.

The U-boat's hull finally gave out, water pouring through the frame like a river. Carl dragged himself through the flooded hatch, grabbed Sarah by the throat, and shoved them both into the Explorer’s last intact single-man pod just as the U-boat's spine snapped under the pressure.

"No! My samples!" Sarah screamed against the glass as the outer door sealed shut.

The pod’s ascent rockets fired, shooting them toward the surface like a lead sinker in reverse. Behind them, the U-51 imploded into a mass of twisted iron and black mud, taking the creature and the bulk of the wreck down into the deep forever.

Twelve hours later, a North Pacific salvage cutter winched the pod onto its aft deck.

Company reps and armed guards crowded around the hatch as they unsealed it. They dragged a shivering Carl out onto the salt-stained wood, while two state troopers put wrist-irons on Sarah—Carl had dumped the pod’s audio log to the maritime court frequency forty minutes before they surfaced.

"You idiot!" Sarah screamed as they marched her toward the bridge ladder. "You left the samples down there! You ruined everything!"

Carl reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small glass vial, and tossed it onto the deck. It shattered against the timber, splashing a few drops of clear ocean water across the boots of the guards.

He pulled a damp cigarette from his pack, lit it with a shaky hand, and blew a thin line of grey smoke into the cold wind.

"Relax, Doc. The real samples went into the reactor core before I blew the tube. That bottle was just three bucks worth of mud from the trench."