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Captain Ava is going to die either way, so she climbs into the second submarine.
She found a weird lump on her leg yesterday. She knows it's the radiation growing tumours through her body - the same thing is happening to David, patches of his beard falling out in clumps. Even if she gets off this Godforsaken blood-soaked planet, she will be dead in a year, if not months. They don't have another convict yet. The COI have sent someone but it takes a while to get anything anywhere with so few people left alive. She wonders briefly if they intended for her to die down here, along with her crew. When they got down here, there was sixteen of them. Now there's just her, and Jack, and David.
And the Convict. Simon. She could call him by his name now that she knows it. Simon is still alive down there, and Ava is going to get him and that black box data. She's going to save the world, the galaxy, the universe.
This submarine is not quite water-tight, and Jack can barely stand as he welds it back together. He looks half-dead, shivering and shaking, coughing up blood. David has to hold him upright, arm under his shoulders as his shaky hands clumsily weld shut Ava's metal tomb. No, not a tomb. An iron lung. It'll keep her alive long enough to get the black box.
And save Simon. She promised she would, and Ava may be a liar, but she doesn't break her promises.
"This is a fucking terrible idea, Ava!" David yells over the sound of the welding. "You'll die down there - the Convict is probably already dead."
"I'll die anyway! The fuckin' radiation will kill all of us." Ava yells back. Jack coughs and a dribble of blood rolls out of his mouth, as if to prove her point. "I'd rather die trying to do something than sit here waiting to get sick, because what will happen to us up here will be worse than dying down there."
"If you don't come back-"
"If I don't come back, you take Jack home. You get off this fucking planet and get both of you to a hospital." Ava says. There's nothing else they can do, if she doesn't come back with that black box. "And when I do come back, with Simon, we need to put him straight in a decomtamination shower. He's absorbed a lot of radiation."
David stares at her through the porthole. Then he nods. "You got it, Captain."
Ava is sealed into the submarine, the porthole closes over Jack and David, and she never sees either of them again.