Chapter 5:
Sunday, June 11th, 2243
The Lady Grey
On the North Atlantic
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For once, the sound of trickling water wasn't soothing. It wasn't like listening to rain running down a window, or a small waterfall in the woods, or even a brook running over stones. Oh, the basic sounds were the same, but this time, it meant something wholly different.
This time, it meant that the Lady Grey had been dealt a potentially mortal wound.
His sea boots sloshed in the water as Scotty made his way along the dark corridor, deep inside of the Grey's superstructure on her lower most deck, below her waterline, his hand light cutting a bright path through the gloom. Most of the lanterns were out, probably because no one had been down there to check them, and he found the presence of the torch he held reassuring.
Down there, where the wind and the chaos on deck were muffled to near nonexistence, the sounds of the ship were that much more powerful. More than once, a loud creak made him jump. There were a few times that she rolled and he found himself up against the wall, praying through the cacophony inside his skull that she would come back to rights again.
So far, she hadn't let him down.
The noise of her laboring through the water wasn't nearly so distinct as that wail in his head, though. It wasn't a sound that could be described in human terms, because it wasn't a human voice; it wasn't any voice, it was just there. Just like the constant white noise air makes, only noticeable in a silent room, except this wasn't even white noise. It was louder, sharper and completely indescribable; familiar, but only to him. Instincts manifest, and possibly in a kind of madness.
The bilge was under his feet, and filled with water now. Stepping carefully, Scotty shined the hand light down at the floor, looking for the hatch.
He had originally put it there so that they could get the hose in and pump any water out; now he wanted to see if there was some way to get into the bilge and survey the damage. It wasn't by any means a huge space, but he knew he'd be able to fit. Though, it might require oxygen of some sort, even in short supply.
Tucking the light under one arm, he reached down and flipped the clasp, then pulled the handle.
It came up easier than he expected; much easier. In fact, far, far too easily.
Water gushed up, given a swifter and easier exit than the consequences of hydrostatic pressure, temporarily shocking the hell right out of him. With something of a startled yelp, he barely fought the urge down to jump away, turn tail and run up to the main deck.
It was a brief battle, and he had to use every ounce of his weight and the roll of the deck forward to force that hatch down and lock it tight again.
Stumbling back and landing on his rear in two inches of frigid sea water, Scotty toyed with the notion of having automatic electrical pumps installed if they got out of this alive. "Sorry, lass," he murmured to the schooner, shakily. It was a stupid move on his part, and warranted an apology.
The hull creaked again, reminding him that this was still a very real issue and one that had to be dealt with as quickly as possible. But he couldn't see a way to repair the ship without diving under her; not without putting her at more severe risk, anyway. The numbers were there to back it up, too-- sixty-four pounds per cubic foot of water, plus density variation for temperature and depth below her waterline, versus volume of the bilge, free surface movement of liquid, maximum stresses of three inch oak deck planking--Â
Damn.
Crawling to his feet, he mentally ran through the list of emergency supplies onboard. There had to be something there, something he could use. He turned, casting one last glance at the bilge hatch.
Then he looked up.
Standing there, looking pale as death and trembling from head to toe, was Harrison. Scotty startled for a second time, backing up and nearly landing himself right back down on the floor. "Bloody hell!"
Harrison jumped back as well, eyes wide and panicked. For a moment he stood there like someone who wanted to run in several directions at once, then he apparently made up his mind and picked a way. Whirling, he headed for the steps.
Left behind, floating in the water, was a box of charges.
Scotty blinked, looking down at the box. It really didn't click with him right at that moment. It had never once occurred to him that one of the Lady Grey's own crew would try to hurt her, no matter the grudge; maybe Kelley's team, maybe someone outside of the group, but not one of her own. Not after all that had happened and all they had gone through just to get there.
Not even a weasel like Harrison, not like this.
When it did come together, like a red hot coil tightening in his chest, he took off after Harrison, sliding around the edge of the stairwell and bounding up the steps. He was a half-minute or so behind, but when he did end up catching up, just outside on the main deck, he leapt on the other cadet in what could well have been the most graceful move of his life to date.
They slammed into the pump handle, ironically. Harrison took a few blind swings, panic stricken. He managed to connect once, but every other strike hit open air.
Before he even had time to cry out, he was pinned down on the deck.
Needless to say, Scotty was living up to his nickname of Wolf. Teeth bared and voice low, somewhere between whisper and growl, he gave Harrison a good shake and demanded, "Why?"
Harrison didn't answer, just quivered with his eyes the size of saucers, throat working as he swallowed again and again.
It took a moment of gritting his teeth before Scotty was able to uncurl his fists; everything in him was screaming to punch Harrison's lights out. To punch his lights out and then maybe keep punching-- Â
But it wouldn't serve any real purpose aside from his own enjoyment. And he wasn’t gonna go down that road.
Instead, shaking his head in disgust and managing to unclench his teeth before he ended up needing a trip to a dentist, he got to his feet and dragged Harrison up, all but throwing him at Corry, who had been watching with his mouth hanging open. "There's the hull leak."
Corry nodded, blowing a breath out. Collecting himself, he latched onto the saboteur. "I'll make sure we lock him up. What's the situation down there?"
"Bad. Can't get into the bilge, so any repairs'll have to be done from outside." Scotty gave Harrison one last growl, then went back to dealing with the immediate crisis. "The Wildstorm?"
"Close. Real close. We should be on her any minute," Corry said, casting a nervous glance up at the bow.Â
"Cor, I'm goin' to have to--"
"Wildstorm off the port bow!" Sallee bellowed back, unwittingly cutting off the shipwright in mid-sentence.
The reaction was instantaneous. Corry had to have been waiting on the very edge for it, and when the shout came back, he yelled to his crew, "Bring the fore about! Helm, five to port! All hands on the lines!"
Scotty got back out of the way of the flurry of cadets in motion, fairly sure that there wouldn't be anything he could do. Most everyone else had more experience in actually working the lines, and he had a big enough problem to deal with as it was. Grabbing 'hold of a shroud, he strained his eyes to see the Wildstorm, but through all of the gloom and confusion on deck, he couldn't even catch a glimpse.
The Grey rolled under his feet, and he tightened his grip on the line. She wasn't answering to her helm as quickly as she had been before the sabotage, and she needed to be able to in order to avoid getting her rudder tangled in the Wildstorm's rigging; if she lost steerage, her lifespan was cut to minutes. She would turn beam to the seas, and end up just like the ship she was there to rescue.
"C'mon, lass, not much further," he whispered, without realizing it.
It was hard as hell to think with all of the noise. The shouts of the crew yelling 'heave!', the wind shrieking, the waves hitting, the distant background noise of the Wildstorm's crew shouting for help, the creaking; there was no peace to be found outside of his own skull, and really, none to be found inside either.
Slowly, the Lady Grey came about. Her sails were rigged to cancel out her forward motion and still keep her bow into the waves. There were almost thirty people aboard the schooner, and every single one of them was going to be devoted to saving the lives of the cadets in the water.
But there was only one person who could save the Lady Grey.
His eyebrows drew together in that moment of realization, as he cast a look at his crew, trying to save lives and do the right thing. For a few seconds, the noise seemed to fade away and everything took on another quality.
It was like looking through a window into another world, and not being a part of it. Alone, even among so many people.
For some reason Scotty couldn't even begin to fathom, it made him sad. Taking a deep breath, he watched as they started lowering the boats, then turned and headed below.
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The North Atlantic in this area was somewhere between 7 and 9C; cold enough to sap the life from anyone in the water for more than a very brief period of time. The wind was easing up, though, and so was the rain. Rescuing the Wildstorm's crew might not be as dangerous as it would have been ten minutes ago. The waves -- driven ahead of the front and lingering after at a significant height above what the last forecast had predicted -- were still a problem, but a more manageable one without the wind on top of them.
Corry stood by the falls of the lifeboat, waiting impatiently for the sailors who were going to man it. They were all gathering emergency first aid kits, survival suits, lights and life jackets, and he tried not to get too anxious waiting. His crew had performed incredibly well, even this far out of the element they were trained for. That, in some part, was one of the reasons they were still afloat.
The seven men finally leapt over the boat's side, settling themselves as quickly as they could, and Cor gave the order to the crew on the falls, "Lower away!"
He wasn't there to see Harrison sneak away. In all of the bustle, he hadn't been secured; still, he seemed like he could do little harm, standing at the starboard side bulwark, staring out to sea. There were more important things to worry about than locking him away. He likely wouldn't create any more of a hazard now that he had been found out, and now that his own life was hanging in the balance as well.
If Corry had noticed, he might have wondered exactly what Harrison was doing, dragging on a survival suit stolen from the rescue crew and then jumping over the side and swimming into what seemed like nothingness. And if he had looked, he might have seen the Queen Mary out there, with one of her boats launched only a couple hundred or so feet away, almost invisible in the rain, mist and waves, bobbing like a cork.
Not that it would have mattered anyway.
"Jerry! Go below and get every thermal blanket you can get your hands on." Looking around the deck, he trotted over to Lewis as Jansson followed orders. "Do you think we can spare anyone to man the pumps yet?"
Lewis paused in retying a line. "Maybe a few. You'll have to have them alternate, though; that kind of work exhausts people fast."
"Gotcha. Send 'em over. I have to get back to getting the other crew onboard."
"Aye aye, Captain," Lewis chuckled dryly, then went to round up people to start to pump out the water collected in the hull.
Corry watched him go, then went back to the bulwark, just as the Wildstorm's first boat arrived.Â
Everything was proceeding according to plan.
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Everything was going wrong.
There wasn't any other way to put it; every single thing that could throw a serious spanner into his plans happened. There wasn't enough epoxy to patch a dinghy's hull, let alone that of a schooner; no one had anticipated a major hull leak at sea that an emergency call on a communicator couldn't mitigate. There was no serious diving gear, just a half dozen emergency oxygen canisters that guaranteed, at their grand total of six, four minutes of air; Scotty figured that could be maybe about twenty minutes of diving time, but would likely be less. But all of the rest of the oxygen canisters were with the emergency first aid kits and the crews using them. There were survival suits, but every one of those was in use by the rescue team, either for them or the safe transfer of the Wildstorm's survivors.
Not enough time, not enough air, not enough materials.
Scotty ran around the below decks, gathering what he could. He complained under his breath about it about it the entire way, but that was more to distract himself from how terrifying the prospect of diving under the boat was, and the inevitability of having to anyway.
After all, there wasn't a hope in the world of changing the simple facts: The Grey was going down. She now had near a foot of water on her hold deck, and with every single drop, there was more and more stress on the boards and a steadily shortening righting arm. Something was going to give, or something would knock her over, but left alone, she had no hope. She would sink.
It was inevitable.
Leaping down the steps, he landed in that foot of water. There was now only one lamp still burning. Her nose went into the trough of a wave, and the water came rushing down the deck, nearly taking him right off of his feet.
"Dammit," Scotty said, to no one in particular, fighting the movement of the water as her bow rose again and he had to battle his way along a deck that couldn't decide if it was uphill or down. When he finally made it to the room he had been aiming for, it was a foot and an inch. Water was coming up through the floorboards, where the caulking had sprung.
It was rapidly reaching the point of no return; as Corry had called it, the zero moment point. It was that point where her center of gravity, now altered by the water, canceled out her natural buoyancy. And once that point was passed, there was nothing that would save her.
With that much water inside of the hull, that point was getting closer by the second.
Digging through the equipment that had come loose from all of the wave action, Scotty was closer to panic than he wanted to admit to even to himself. Of all of the people onboard, he knew the numbers better than anyone. Her fate was his, and determined the lives of every single person onboard and every single person they were trying to save. If he failed, it wasn't just the schooner herself at stake.
He almost whooped for joy when he found the lightweight life raft, a backup of backups. Snatching it and a long coil of rope, he made back for the gun deck where the rest of his ship-saving gear was stowed.
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Corry didn't know what his best friend was planning. If he had, it was a surefire thing that he would have put a stop to it. On a storm-surged ocean during the wee hours of morning, it was courting a deathwish.
It's said that there's a fine line between courage and stupidity, and Montgomery Scott was walking right on it. Not to say that he was usually foolish, at least not before this; if anything, he tried to err on the side of caution most of the time. Double-check everything. Always have a backup plan. In fact, have a backup plan for the backup plan. Go a few more backups deep after. Caution had kept him alive.
Scotty was probably the last person in the galaxy anyone would expect to throw all of his chips down on one hand, particularly one this incredibly bad.
That thought made him pause on the stern taffrail, looking into the streaked waves that were all the more menacing for the darkness, for the way they appeared out of the rain and the night and into the fragile radius of light around the roiling schooner.
They were oddly silent, at least compared to the nightmare howl of the wind. Mountains marching, dissolving, reforming, then smashing themselves against the Lady Grey, only then becoming thunder. He could feel it reverberate hard enough that it was like being punched in the chest.
It was like getting a glimpse at the very end of all things.
And it was a reminder, yet again, of just how small he really was. How small they all were. But forward, people were running around, hustling to tend to the half-frozen rescues, pulling more people out of the water, and generally doing all they could anyway.
And then, there he was, hesitating. Finding a reason to stall, maybe half-hoping in the back of his mind that someone would stop him. He ran through the list one more time: O2 canisters, check. Light, check. Epoxy, check. Life raft, check. Rope, check. A float to keep his head above the water when the cold shock hit, check.
He had everything that he could have that might make any kind of a difference.
It wasn’t exactly fear stopping him, though; more, the facts. Aye, he was afraid, who wouldn’t be, but that was grounded in basic, immutable facts. He had maybe -- optimistically -- twenty minutes of dive time, but he would lose the ability to swim effectively before that, in all likelihood; would lose his manual dexterity even earlier. The patch probably wasn’t going to require fine motor control, but he had no idea how big it would need to be.
He also wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, let alone an experienced diver. Â
Everything he’d ever learned -- growing up in a port town on the North Sea, occasionally going out on boats with his uncles, and in Basic during survival training -- was that if you ended up in cold water, try to get back out of it. If you couldn’t get out of it, try to curl up on yourself, stay put and conserve heat. Definitely don't intentionally submerge yourself and then stay that way, because that was pretty much a kind of suicide.
By diving, he was going to be doing everything wrong willfully.
Every single thing.
C’mon, he pleaded with himself, heart hammering in his chest, trembling with the thunder of the waves hitting the schooner. Jump.
The waves heaved and the Lady Grey rolled sluggishly; she was fighting the heavy seas and her ever-shortening righting arm, and she was the single only thing between the people relying on her and the ocean that would eat them all without mercy when she could no longer protect them.
Ultimately, it was that realization that gave him the nerve.
Scotty took a deep breath, clutched the float tight to his chest, closed his eyes and threw himself out into the end of all things.
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Forward and above, the exhausted, waterlogged and emotionally threadbare cadets -- crew and survivor alike -- kept working to pull themselves together.
"How many more have we got?" Corry asked Lewis, as the bos'un came aboard from lifeboat three.
"Everyone's out of the water now," Lewis answered, grabbing hold of the bulwark and leaning on it for a moment or two. It was a hell of a lot of work to pull soaked and torpid people from an ocean and still keep a lifeboat from being capsized by waves. The fact that Team C could do it was no small compliment. "A head count shows no casualties, but there are some pretty hypothermic people in there; they were in that water about twenty minutes before Scotty even heard them, near as anyone can tell."
Cor nodded, mentally running through the checklist of things that still needed to be completed. He had control of the sailors, they had a few men on the pumps, everyone else who wasn't in the midst of those tasks were tending to the unexpected guests.Â
Now-- now for the hull leak. "We're going to have to get some people on patching the hull. Right now, the pumps are only slowing it down a little." Frowning, Corry looked around the deck. "Where's Scotty?"
"Haven't seen him," Lewis said, standing straight again. "Want me to go looking?"
"Yeah, send him up here. I need someone good to supervise repairs."
Lewis nodded and trotted off, fairly spry for being as tired as he no doubt was. Corry took a deep breath, turning to the next task at hand. It seemed like there were a million things to do, and every single one of them was vying for space at the forefront of his mind. But the wind was calming fast, and though the waves were still high, at least visibility had increased.
Only peripherally, he was aware that the sky was starting to creep into light.
Turning and walking to the opposite side, he helped one of the shell-shocked crewmembers of the Wildstorm down to the sheltered quarterdeck, where there were people who could help. Then he went back forwards.
And then he nearly lost his footing, he stopped so fast.
Standing on the deck, looking like he was about to drop right in place, was Sean Kelley.
Corry froze for a second, then jolted forward, heart giving a tired, overwrought leap. "The Queen Mary?! " he asked, praying that the steel ship hadn't met a fate similar to the Wildstorm. If she had--
Sean shook his head, reeling and shivering so hard he could barely stand, apparently not able to find enough strength to answer in more than a word. "Safe."
Corry bit on his bottom lip, mind racing; he moved to support the other cadet and get Sean below where he could strip and dry off and maybe warm up and then Corry could find out what happened.
A sense of fear gnawing deep in his gut, he led Sean back to the quarterdeck.
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It was so much more brutal than he’d thought it would be.
The shock from the cold was expected. Scotty had known that was coming. And he had known that the waves were big enough and fierce enough to knock him around relentlessly before he’d be able to get his breathing back under control.
He had known that it would be physically painful.
He had known it would be dark.
Even knowing all of that, even knowing it would be brutal, didn’t come close to the reality of being surrounded by black and growling mountains of seawater; of being almost thrown into the air and then sliding down into the trough again. Or of how panicky he felt, thrown right into hyperventilating amidst those monsters, clinging to that float for all he was worth. Even after he managed to regain control of his lungs, sometimes he was driven under by a wave breaking right over his head, battering him down like a giant fist.
In all of that, it was desperation and willpower alone that let him keep his head, let go of that float and dive under the water, taking advantage of the weight of his waterlogged clothes and the gear he had tethered to himself to help.
Clutching the large, high-powered light he’d hooked to his jury-rigged harness and swimming as well as he could, battling against the turbulent water so he could find the bottom of the Lady Grey’s hull in all of that, he could already feel how much this was going to take out of him. But he dove deeper still, trying to get down to where the surface motion of the water wasn’t jerking him around so much; the last thing he needed was to end up right under her without realizing until it was too late and having her come down on him.
One proper whack from a schooner with a hundred and ninety-one tons of displacement and that would be it. He would be dead and everyone above him would not be too far behind.
Even with the light shining out -- the strongest one they had aboard that could be carried by hand -- the darkness was near complete.
Along the beam of it, bright became green, which then became nothing.
He couldn’t have been thrown too far from her, because he was tethered to her stern taffrail where he’d gone over; he’d given himself probably three times as much rope as his most generous estimate of what he’d need, but even then, there was a limit. But it was hard to even--
And down there, how impossible it really was knowing which way was which--
He could have been turned around, or--
It was the cavitation that gave her away; shoved him hard as her stern came down off a wave, and the displacement pushed him just barely far enough that her rudder didn’t take his face off.
It flashed in the beam of light, whisper close, visible in a wild mess of bubbles.
He couldn’t hear the terrorized little noise he made in his throat at that, the roar was fierce even under the water, but he could feel it.
Shaking -- from cold, from shock, from the soul-freezing fear of having just nearly met a gory end, it didn’t even matter which -- he kicked backwards in the water enough to hopefully avoid a repeat, and managed to get a breath of air off of one of the canisters, nearly choking from the unfamiliar blast of the mechanism working, but at least it took the worst of the sharp edges from the horror of nearly having his ship land on him.
Move, he told himself, and pushed himself deeper as he made to get under the Lady Grey properly, ears aching fiercely for the pressure as he did; wasn’t even that deep, but it ached all the way to his jaw. Just another piece of the torment, but when he turned back up, taking another breath, he could just make her hull out as it ghosted in and out of the fragile beam of light, still hove-to, riding out the storm.
Nineteen minutes left, maybe, of diving time just going by his air supply. Maybe. Less, before his limbs quit. Less still, before he lost manual dexterity.
He’d been in the water at least five already.
Approaching his own zero moment, Scotty pushed past it and started hunting for the leak.
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The gundeck was a mass of bodies; the Wildstorm wasn’t anywhere the size of the Lady Grey or the Queen Mary, but she still had a team of twenty and all twenty of them, plus some of the crew of the Lady Grey and the Queen Mary’s captain, made for cramped quarters as everyone tried to perform first aid and warm up too-cold fellow cadets and get information.
Corry ended up just taking Sean back to his own cabin, which was about the size of a large walk-in closet, but was quieter than the other areas; he paused long enough to borrow a set of Scotty’s clothes -- Scotty and Sean were close enough in size -- and then didn’t talk as he helped Sean strip to skin and get dressed in the dry clothes.
Sean’s teeth were chattering and his whole body was wracked with shivers, and Cor’s hands were shaky from the constant surge and retreat of adrenaline, but they made good speed on the whole operation despite that. It was as he was mostly dressed again that Sean managed to force out, –I jumped.â€
It stunned Corry; the idea that anyone would risk jumping into that ocean right now without dry survival suits, oxygen and a whole crew of people ready to pull them back out was terrifying.
–God, Sean, why? †he asked, grabbing his blanket from his bunk and wrapping it around the other cadet before crowding Sean back to sit in the chair at the chart table Corry had bolted to the floor
–They wouldn’t stop.â€Â Sean didn’t make any effort to take hold of the edges of the blanket. Didn’t make any effort to wipe away his tears, either.
–For us and the Wildstorm? †Corry pulled that blanket tight himself, then crouched, holding easily to the rolling deck as he searched Sean’s expression. He could feel the Lady Grey’s wounds, too, but if they were in danger of being attacked by the Queen Mary right now, while they were in the slow but steady process of sinking--
Sean shook his head. –Jamming communicators-- and-- and transponders,†he got out, though it took him a few tries. –Tried to-- to get them to help, but--â€
–But they wouldn’t.â€Â Corry swallowed, mouth twisting; there was an instant war in his chest between the spike of horror and the spike of rage--
But it would have to wait.
–They didn’t stop,†Sean repeated again, voice breaking. –I’m--â€
Whatever else he might have said was lost as he dissolved into sobs.
His own throat aching in empathy, Corry closed his eyes hard, then stood. –All right. All right. Get some rest, Captain Kelley; my bunk is yours for now. You’re safe. And-- we’ll figure out the rest later.â€
He didn’t wait for an acknowledgment, just slipped back out; one thing at a time, and right now, that was going to have to be fixing the Lady Grey.
He went hunting for Lewis and Scotty.
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The hull had taken a fair bit of damage; the hole wasn’t huge, but it was ugly.  That weasel Harrison had managed to effectively place the charges from the bilge to essentially peel some of her hull planks away from her skeleton, and when Scotty got a real look at it with the big light, his heart might have hit his boots, if not for the fact he was already freezing to death.
Just keeping up on the schooner was work, given the wave action and his own stiffening muscles. His hands were getting more and more useless, too. Every single motion was using up heat and oxygen he couldn’t have spared even before he dove properly, but--
But he wasn’t done yet.
But his ship wasn’t safe yet.
Getting the patch in place wasn’t easy, but between kicking and elbows and raw desperation, he’d gotten that liferaft unfurled and covered the hole, having disabled the auto-inflation before he'd even jumped ship. The boards still clinging to her skeleton, though, meant that suction wasn’t going to hold the patch in place without it being fixed there, so it was a bloody good thing he’d brought along that epoxy, but then he needed both increasingly clumsy hands to use it; he could knock the cap off on the bottom of her hull, but applying it took both hands because they weren’t working right.
The big light that had seen him this far had looked terribly eerie as it sank down and disappeared into the darkness.
The light of his penlight was even more fragile, where it was gripped hard between the epoxy bottle and his palm, affording him just enough visibility to see what he was doing.
Once he was working, though, he was making headway; it was while he was working, putting together the numbers at the speed of thought, that he realized that he wasn’t going to have enough time. He was going through air faster than he’d expected to, he was already cold and exhausted, he was losing mobility, the damage was just too much--
It would take an outright miracle to save the Lady Grey at this point.
Fixing the raft to the hull of the wounded schooner wasn’t anything that mentally difficult, even, but the physical effort of it was just more than he had in him. Not if he wanted to get out of it alive, anyway.
Despite the realization that diving was dangerously close to suicidal, he had built time into his estimate to get back out. To escape from under her and get himself back above water and hopefully get someone’s attention to haul him out before he couldn’t keep his head up anymore.
Scotty had always held onto two things in his life; his right to breathe -- to exist -- and his ability to fight for that. When everything else was taken from him, he’d had that, and he’d held onto it no matter how hopeless his defiance.
Whatever else, he was a survivor. A fighter. He’d had to be. No one else was going to do it for him.
He’d wondered more recently what he would ever be willing to give those things up for, and he’d even come to some conclusions about it. But even when he’d gone into the smoke to try to save the Lady Grey, there was no part of him that really thought his life was on the line. His heart, aye. But not his life.
And-- now it was. And his ship and crew were over his head right now, hanging in the balance.
It really only came down to one choice with two possible outcomes: Sink or swim. Fight or retreat. Breathe, or not, but no matter how hard he railed against the universe for its injustices, nothing was going to change it.
That only left him alone and the question of what he’d be willing to give up his right to breathe for.
Zero moment.
Even in the dark and cold, he bared his teeth back at the universe.
If a miracle wouldn't be given to him, he'd just have to make his own. The universe be damned.