Tunnel Rat

Chapter 344: Fifty-Five Fathoms Beneath the Sea

Milo knew the direction to find his headstone, which was straight out from the beach and pointing downward at a sharp angle. He knew he had very little time for his scavenging expedition and didn't want to come into conflict with the Sharks or another crew of scavengers. But he wanted the Sharks gone, and to do that, he needed to take away their wealth. Money was one of the tools they were using to take over part of the town. That clan, more than all the others, had worked to buy or steal the land around the docks and the docks themselves. They were hurting a lot of people in Shadowport and driving up the cost of fish tacos. Milo had spent his entire life in a place where people had little money, and little access to buy the goods they wanted. The Sharks were destroying the economy of the city, destroying the jobs and homes of the fishing clans, and interfering with trade. Shadowport was an important crossroads in the world, but its trade had been hurt by the mass exodus of the rich traders when the World Boss marched on the city and hurt worse by the lack of space to moor a ship and the huge 'Trading Fees' extorted by the pirates and scavengers.

Laws in Shadowport were fast and loose, but they'd never been bent the way the Sharks were playing. Tradition and a shared community went a long way to keep things sort of fair. The Sharks took advantage of that, buying up small debts, forcing families from their homes, purchasing the docks, and making it impossible for many people to stay in the city. Milo wanted to fix that, and he was happy to play by the same rules the Sharks were using. He wasn't part of any Scavenger Clan and owed them nothing. A wreck on the seafloor was up for grabs, and sunken treasure belonged to the person who got to it first. He'd seen a lot of gold scattered on the floor of that vault and stacks of ingots. He just had to get to them first.

The pawn shops and junk dealers had happily sold the crazy human their broken diving gear. He'd spent the first two hours after leaving the casino buying it piece by piece and then fixing what he could and throwing the rest away. He was left with a semi-functional diving helmet with a cracked faceplate, an assortment of hoses that didn't leak once he'd applied a new protective coating, and three tanks of air. He'd had to pay a fee to have the tanks recharged. That was when the fourth tank exploded. Better then than when he was underwater.

While any dwarf would have quailed at the idea of diving deep with such crappy equipment, Milo had some advantages. The Runes of Swift Swimming would let him navigate the depths quickly, far faster than someone walking along the bottom in a clumsy diving suit. He had good vision when using his goggles and his dark vision enhancements. His toughness and hard bones would let him shrug off the pressure of the depths, and he could hold his breath for long periods if his air supply failed. The last advantage was his Ring of the Swiss Army. Besides the useful effects of summoning a loyal guard lizard and fondue pots, it could set up his tent, and darn socks, and grant him water breathing for 1 hour a day. His plan was to use the tanks and gear on the way down, and the ring for the trip back up. His chest could hold a large amount of coins and bar stock with its 54 cubic feet of space. If he could get to the wreck, open the door, and summon his chest then the Sharks would be denied a new source of income and he could cripple their operation. He just had to hurry and get there first.

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His problems included other scavengers, eels, and someone linking Engineer Milo to what the Sharks and other clans would think of as theft. He didn't want to bring trouble to his guild. Some of them had links to the Scavengers now, like Boomboom and Pillbug. He didn't know how much trouble the combined politics of the situation would create if his theft became known. The easiest way to solve that problem was not to get caught. Luckily, no one would notice a raggedy human scavenging for parts over by the docks reserved for the fishermen and he wasn't planning on using a boat. Several chunks of wood served him as a makeshift raft. With the tanks on top of a piece of decking, he moved into the water and slowly kicked behind the raft as he moved out into the bay. When the direction of his gravestone was directly below him, he grabbed the leather strap holding the tanks together, put on the diving helmet, double-checked his airflow, and started swimming down.

He was constantly looking for eels but was surprised that he saw none. The System Message must be true and he'd wiped out most of the population. He had a happy feeling when he thought about that. Fifty feet down he saw the edge of the dropoff and the marks in the seafloor where the wreckage had left a trail in the mud and the muck. He looked at the curve of the bay, both around and downward, and the picture in his mind astounded him. The tower in the bay where the eels were thickest perched on a thin spire of rock in the center of a complete sphere where everything else had been destroyed. He'd listened to the dwarves' stories, but it was still hard to imagine any type of weapon that could destroy a one-mile-diameter sphere of matter so completely. Or that the tower, the supposed target, had survived. After thinking about that for a minute, he realized he was wasting precious air. It was a mystery to look into later.

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He began his descent, swimming down the slowly curving seafloor as he went deeper and deeper. Three hundred feet down he saw wreckage of the back third of the Silver Shark. The eels had dented her hull everywhere and sprung the seems between the armored plates. Further up, cannon balls had crashed through both sides and severed this piece from the midsection. It had come to rest on a slanted shelf with the stern higher in the air. Before he went into the wreck, Milo detached one empty tank and began drawing air from his second. He was slightly ahead of schedule, but the next step in the project had an unknown time to complete. He squeezed into the wreck and moved upward to the vault, careful not to snag an air hose. Crabs and small fish were already picking the bones of the Scavengers killed by cannons or eels. The only body he touched was the mate who'd nearly killed him. He shifted her half-eaten corpse to the hallway, and out of the way of his small working space.

The vault door was still shut and unlocked, held in place by its weight, friction, and the pressure of the water. If the vault had leaked, it would be easy to open, with gravity on his side. If it was airtight, he'd have to fight against the pressure of the water, a nearly impossible task unless you had the necessary tools. Milo being an Engineer had anticipated the problem and brought the tools.

Summoning his chest, he opened it up slowly, releasing air that floated to the top of the compartment and was trapped in a corner. That was an emergency air supply that he hoped he wouldn't have to use. Inside the chest were strong cables, pulleys, and a strong device called a 'come-along' used for tightening ropes and wires. He ran the cable through the handle of the door, then to a spot he could anchor it to in the hallway. The come-along was a type of ratchet with a lever. Every time he moved the lever down, he tightened the cable. As the air in his second tank slowly ran out he spent long minutes adding tension to the cable. The door budged a quarter-inch, finally and bubbles appeared on the edge of the door. That confirmed the vault was airtight. Now that water was seeping in, the pressure would equalize, and opening the door would be easier.

Milo didn't think he had that long. He connected his third and last air tank and began setting up a second cable. The first come-along would strip its gears if he put any more pressure on it, but a careful Engineer brought backups. Milo's chest was full of cables, ratchets, and other gear for opening stubborn doors, including a block of cataclysmite, happily loaned to him by BoomBoom, no questions asked.

The use of the explosive was a last resort. While it was better for his plan to have the treasure scattered into the deep parts of the bay than to let Manco get it back, the best result was to take it with him. Just like in the real world, money was a good tool for some things.

With the second cable tightened, the door moved even more, and water began to pour into the vault, and a trickle of coins poured out. The door was stuck with only a half-inch gap clear. Milo could see bars of gold and coins piled against the door that he couldn't get to. He examined the hinges and saw that one of them was bent from being improperly mounted and the pressure of the sagging door had bent it further. With the hydraulic system, the door would have still opened, but not now. Milo considered his options, putting explosives on the bottom. He could hook up more cables, but the damage to the hinges was bad enough that he had little hope the strategy would work, and he was running out of air. A force spell might work, but the angle was terrible. Squeezing himself next to the door might let him cast the spell, but he would have to use a huge amount of force to bend the damaged hinge and it put him in a bad position if the door slammed open and rebounded. He ran through every option he could think of, and the part of him that came up with bad ideas provided the answer in the form of a tool he hadn't thought of using.

Pulling the not-so-ordinary-looking screwdriver from his chest, he examined it carefully using his goggles. The last time he'd attempted to understand the tool, he'd nearly killed himself and changed the Mace of Armageddon into a pre-system multi-function tool. Now though, even though he didn't understand all the controls he did see a way to reset the tool to its last function. He pushed mana into the device, mentally selected the setting, and waited for the resulting explosion.

Nothing happened other than the tool turning back into the heavy 'mace' that General Gangreen had nearly killed him with. It was now labeled as a 'Force Application Device', which certainly was appropriate for a mace. He tapped lightly on the hull and was rewarded with a loud echoing boom and a dent in the hull. Satisfied with the result, he began hitting the door, forcing it in the correct direction. As the door began to move an inch at a time, Milo hit the door harder, which had several unexpected results. The hinge broke, the door slammed open, and all the gold coins and ingots that had been piled against the door flowed out, taking Milo by surprise and burying him both underwater and under hundreds of pounds of metal.