A Sunken Ship

Many miles away, a torrent of bubbles exploded from her diving suit as Captain Eve Charette, formerly of the 9th squadron “Diables volants” of the Armée Aeronautique Française, surfaced from the rushing river. P. Phineas and Hera von Hedwig helped her onto the aluminum grate extending below the her airship, the Lucy Stone, on which they had spent the last anxious hour.

With a hiss, the Captain released the seals on her glass bubble helmet, and handed it to Herr von Hedwig.

“Whew! That current puts up a fight!”

“Are you all right?” Hera asked. “No injuries?”

“Just out of breath.” She took a deep breath as water flowed from her suit back into the underground river. Her airship hovered only a foot above the water, and its envelope nearly grazed the cave ceiling. “It’s their ship, all right.”

Hera gasped, leaning against the airship door.

“No, they’re not in it,” Eve hurried on. “It’s been stripped, abandoned. I’m not sure how they got out of here, but they did.”

“So, we have a trace of them at last, and we cannot follow,” Herr von Hedwig said. “How must they have proceeded?”

“The balloons?” his wife replied. “They might have separated some of the balloons.”

“May be,” Eve answered. “There are frayed ropes, but no balloons that I could see.”

“Either that or they made a boat out of something. How can we give chase?” Herr von Hedwig contemplated the tunnel downstream. “If we go another inch we’ll damage your fine ship. I’m surprised we haven’t already.”

The Captain grinned. “She’s tougher than she looks.”

“You could tie a line around me,” Hera said. “I’ll swim downstream and see what’s there.”

Herr von Hedwig and the Captain exchanged a look.

“I’m tougher than I look, too,” Hera said.

“My dear-” her husband began.

“Just a reconnoiter.”

“And we pull you back when you run out of rope?”

“Of course.”

“And you won’t untie the rope and go after them by yourself?”

Madame was caught off guard, and blushed. He stepped closer and put his arms around her.

“I cannot lose you, you know.”

“Would you two mind getting back in the ship and leaving me some room out here?” Captain Charette said. “It’s hard to take this suit off in a crowd.”

“I’ll go,” Herr von Hedwig insisted.

“My darling, you don’t float,” his wife said.

“You could decide what to do next, and make a nice hot toddy for me,” the Captain suggested. “In the ship.”

“Eve,” Hera said, “how much line do we have?”

“Why don’t you go inside and look?” The Captain waved a sodden glove at the ship’s door, spraying the von Hedwig’s with cold water.

In the end, after promises were made, suits removed, and toddies consumed. P. Phineas von Hedwig lowered his wife into the raging river,wearing only her under things, a flotation ring, and one end of one hundred yards of rope. Within the hour she had been hauled back and given her report. The cave opened up to an enormous cavern with a forest of giant mushrooms.

“One of the mushrooms was cut off its stem – I could see the stump, though not get close enough to see how it was done.” She directed a reproachful look to her husband, who had made her swear not to untie the line. “But I could see drag marks at the river’s edge.”

“Well I’ll be!” Captain Charette said. “They made a boat. What resourceful children.”

“They are von Hedwigs!” P. Phineas smiled. “So, we either swim for it, make our own boat-”

“Or,” the Captain interrupted, “keeping these bearings in mind, we explore the tunnels branching off this one. If we go on foot, we lose the ability to search from the air and cover ground efficiently. If we can find another way out, even if it’s miles from here, we’ll still find them faster than if we abandon ship now.”

“They might be camped in the tunnel a mile from here!”

“In which case we make our own boat and follow,” Phineas said.

“But if they’ve left the tunnels we’ll need my ship. If they’ve done anything except camp at the cave mouth, we’ll find them fastest from the air.”

Hera bit her lip. Her husband kissed the frown line on her forehead.

“Given the choice between prudence and adventure…” he said.

“I doubt they’ll be camping at the cave mouth,” his wife finished.

It was a difficult proposition to agree to. They had lost so much time lost in the tunnels that they were loath to turn back now that they finally regained the trail. But the Captain was right; they might never find the children on foot. And so they turned back from their only lead to explore the unknown, in a desperate hope to find another way.

*

Early diving suit photo by AlejandroLinaresGarcia (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons