Source A: The minute after the last signal

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At 02:17, Oriole should have surfaced. The word ‘should’ seemed to glow more brightly than the time displayed above it.

Ten of us were gathered in the ship’s control room, although ‘gathered’ suggests a comfort that was not there. We stood separately, arranged around the instruments like pieces placed carefully on a board. Nobody wanted to block a screen. Nobody wanted to be the person whose sleeve caught a switch. The ventilation fans pushed cold air across us, and the room hummed with the stubborn calm of a machine that did not know anything was wrong.

Every twenty seconds, the operator sent a signal into the water. A green bar travelled across his monitor and disappeared at the edge. We waited for the answering bar.

Nothing returned.

‘Next cycle,’ the expedition leader said.

The same green line crossed the screen. Again, the dark space beyond it remained empty. Sending the signal was like dropping a coin into a well and listening for a sound that never reached the bottom.

Six hours earlier, Oriole had slipped beneath the waves with an almost comic confidence. Its orange shell had flashed once in the floodlights before the water folded over it. The vehicle was supposed to survey a narrow trench, collect temperature readings and rise automatically. When its final data message arrived, it had completed the survey and begun its ascent. We had congratulated one another too soon.

At 02:21, someone placed a paper cup beside me. I did not drink. A circle of coffee trembled against the rim each time the ship’s engines adjusted our position. Beyond the wall, the sea was moving us by centimetres. On the screens, the blankness did not move at all.

The engineer explained that Oriole could still be rising without transmitting. The aerial might have failed. A current might have pushed the vehicle beyond the receiver’s range. Its emergency system might have released a weight from its base, allowing it to float upwards slowly. Each possibility began as reassurance and ended by giving us something new to fear.

The battery estimate on the central display changed from fourteen minutes to nine. It was only an estimate based on the last message, the engineer reminded us. No one looked reassured.

‘Next cycle.’

A double knock came from the speaker. Chairs scraped backwards. The operator bent so close to the controls that his forehead almost touched them.

Then he shook his head. ‘Surface buoy. Not Oriole.’

People lowered themselves into their chairs again. The brief movement made the stillness afterwards feel deliberate, as if the room had decided to hold its breath.

At 02:25, the expedition leader stopped repeating her instruction. The operator sent another signal without being told. I watched the empty section of his screen, no longer aware of the other monitors or the people around me. The control room had contracted to that small rectangle of darkness.

A mark appeared near its lower edge: one thin green tooth.

The operator did not move. A second mark rose beside the first. Then the depth reading returned in broken figures: four metres, two metres, one.

We ran outside. For several seconds there was only black water shaking under the deck lights. Then an orange nose pushed through it, vanished beneath a wave and appeared again.

Only then did the room behind us remember that it had voices.