The frame and Hardsuit were lifted from the deck and lowered into the water. Austin called for a halt at thirty feet down to retest the systems. While everything was in working order, he was sobered by the fact that the Navy’s record-breaking two-thousand-foot dive had taken years of planning and teams of specialists to pull off. It was a far cry from the mad dash to the bottom he was about to undertake.

The Hardsuit helmet’s digital time display told him that the bathysphere had less than an hour’s supply of air left.

He reached out with his hand-pod clamp and detached the hook from the frame. First making sure the hook was clamped tightly, he gave the order to send him to the bottom of the sea.

The cable winches for the suit and hook worked in tandem to lower Austin. The quick descent kicked up bubbles that obscured his view of his surroundings. As the minutes ticked away on the digital clock, he kept a close eye on the depth gauge.

After passing two thousand feet, Austin was aware that the suit now had entered uncharted territory, but his mind was too busy with other things to contemplate the possibility that it might have been pushed beyond its limits. At twenty-eight hundred feet, still with no discernible problem, he felt a change in the speed of his descent.

Gannon’s voice came on the intercom.

“We’re slowing you down so you don’t drill a hole through the bottom, Kurt.”

“Appreciate that. Hold at three thousand.”

The winch soon slowed to a stop.

The curtain of bubbles cleared around the dome that encased his head. Austin switched on lights that would have been useless during descent. Their pale yellow shafts accentuated blackness so devoid of color that any attempt to describe it in words would be doomed to fail.

All systems were working, and the joints were still watertight. Austin called for more slack on the cable. The winch slowly lowered him more until he was fifty feet off the bottom.

“You’re on your own from here on,” the captain said. “We’ll let out cable as you move.”

Scattered groupings and pinpoints of phosphorescence could be seen beyond the range of the searchlights, and odd-looking luminescent fish nosed up to the faceplate of Austin’s helmet.

He pressed down with his left foot and two vertical thrusters whirred, raising him up a yard or so. He next used his right foot to activate the horizontal thrusters, moving him forward several feet.

Austin tried moving his arms and legs and found that, even with the tremendous water pressure, the suit’s sixteen well-oiled joints allowed for an amazing range of movement.

He activated the suit’s camera zoom and focused on an anglerfish attracted by the light.

“Picture’s coming through,” the captain reported. “Good definition.”

“I’ll see if I can find something for the family album. Moving out.”