EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum

by Shane Stadler

  Where did he fit into the food chain? he wondered. And what about Denise and Jonathan?

  “You and Jonathan better watch your backs,” he warned. “You’re prominent in the investigation. You’re dealing with ruthless people.”

  She assured him that they’d be okay, and they ended the call a minute later, leaving him in a numbing silence.

  To take his mind off of it, he reached for the television remote, but then reconsidered. It was time to practice.

  He leaned back on the bed and put his arms at his sides. He closed his eyes and brought memories of agony to the front of his mind, concentrating on the pain of the dental treatments in the Red Box … Kelly Hatley driving a sharp instrument under his left upper molar and into his jawbone … the dentist cracking a wisdom tooth with a curved pliers … the white hot pain surging through his entire jaw and leaching into his head and neck … and then he was out …

  He looked down on his body from above. His face seemed relaxed. Only slivers of white were visible in his mostly-closed eyes. He moved about the room and touched things. He grabbed the remote, turned on the TV, and then turned it off again. He went into the bathroom, picked up a glass, and filled it at the faucet. As he brought it back into the room, he stopped at a mirror and looked in wonder. In the mirror were the reflections of both his body, flat on the bed, and the glass of water suspended in space. He stared at the image for a few seconds, trying to decide whether it was real, and then moved along to the bed and put the glass on the nightstand.

  After a few more minutes of moving around the room, and out and over the balcony, he returned to his body and opened his eyes. He sat up, grabbed the glass with his hand, and took a drink. He put it back on the nightstand and watched as the disturbance on the water’s surface dampened to smoothness. He lived in two worlds: one constrained to the physics of matter and time, and the other bounded by neither. The latter caused him great angst. There was a purpose for it, for him. He had no idea what it was but, as the Israeli said, it was something that transcended the geopolitical. It was deeper.

  His eyes were tired, and he’d need sleep if he were going to get an early start on the six-hour drive to Baton Rouge. He was returning to his past, but his purpose resided somewhere in the unknown future.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  Sunday, 10 May (4:01 a.m. EST – Antarctic Circle)

  Captain McHenry walked around the sonar consul to another control station. He was on minimum sleep and maximum caffeine. His eyes burned as he squinted into a video monitor that lit up the face of the man testing the equipment. “Ready, Stuart?” McHenry asked.

  “Going through some preliminary checks, sir,” Stuart replied, focused on the controls. He pushed a button and the computer screen flashed white. The display then faded to a view of a load-lock bay containing a small submarine.

  “The Little Dakota easy to operate?” McHenry asked.

  “The right joystick steers, and the left directs the camera,” Stuart replied. “The depth, speed, and lighting are controlled by the keyboard. Not too complicated.”

  “We’ll be in position soon,” McHenry said and then walked to the navigation station where a team of four monitored computer stations. A large screen displayed a map with a blue line that represented the North Dakota’s past and projected course. Seeing their current location on a map had often amazed him. He’d been in so many strange places over the years: beneath the North Pole, the bottom of foreign harbors, and, now, inside the Antarctic Circle. But it had never felt like actually being there. It was like reading a book: his physical environment was unchanging, but his imagination filled in the gaps and gave him a sense of what was outside.

  They were about 150 nautical miles southwest of Dronning Maud Land, in the Weddell Sea, near the Brunt Ice Shelf. Why anyone would expend so much effort to build a structure in such a place he couldn’t fathom.

  “We’re in position,” a navigator said.

  McHenry made his way to sonar. “Finley, you getting the signal?”

  “Had it locked in an hour ago,” Finley replied.

  “Stuart, ready the launch,” McHenry said.

  “Little Dakota’s ready,” Stuart replied.

  “Go,” McHenry ordered.

  Stuart actuated the load-lock fill valve.

  Other sailors jostled for position behind McHenry to get a line of sight to the video feed.

  The load-lock bay flooded with seawater and quickly rose above the submersible. A few seconds later, the bay doors opened, and the clamps holding the Little Dakota in place disengaged. The mini-sub was free to roam.

  “How much line do we have?” McHenry asked Stuart, referring to the umbilical cord providing remote control communications to the sub.

  “About 2,500 meters of fiber-optic cable. But we have to be careful to avoid slack,” Stuart explained. “The crosscurrents will snap the line.”

  The Little Dakota had two built-in emergency protocols. One made it blow its ballast tanks and go to the surface if its tether was severed. The other filled the ballasts and made it sink to its destruction. The latter option was selected for this operation.

  It was a quiet vehicle, even more so than its parent, which made him feel better than he had during the noisy operation of the previous day. Returning to the same area after just 24 hours, however, made his stomach burn.

  After a few minutes, Stuart reported, “LD is at 1400 feet, but still no visible on the sphere.”

  “We’re coming at it from above,” McHenry said. “Make sure we don’t land on top of it.”

  He tried to suppress a thought that loomed in the back of his mind: was it possible that the thing was rigged – booby-trapped for an inquisitive cat like an American fast-attack sub? He’d brought up the idea hours earlier with Diggs, but they’d both dismissed the notion. First, it would be an exceedingly elaborate trap just to kill one sub. Second, it would mean war for whomever had set it. Still, the thought lingered.

  “Stopping at depth, 1,480 meters,” Stuart said. “It should be close by. Going to circle around and look.”

  Stuart tipped the camera downward with left joystick and circled the sub slowly with the right. About halfway around the circle, gasps and expletives spewed from the crew. “Recording,” Stuart said.

  The smooth, white sphere had no markings of any kind – no seams, rivets, paint, scratches – nothing.

  “Get closer,” McHenry said. “Don’t hit it.” He was more concerned with the noise it would make than with damaging it.

  Stuart guided the Little Dakota closer until the screen filled with the white color of the object. “Fifteen meters away, sir,” Stuart said. “Probably shouldn’t risk getting closer. The current compensators might not be able to keeps us stable.”

  McHenry nodded, not averting his eyes from the screen. The surface was featureless. “Go all the way around.”

  Stuart piloted the sub along the equator of the sphere. The surface was bright white, at least in the lights of the mini-sub, but not shiny. It seemed like it had a texture similar to that of unglazed ceramic – like that on the backside of a bathroom tile.

  “Let’s look underneath, at the stem,” McHenry said.

  The sub backed off a few meters and then descended until the joint between the stem and bottom of the sphere came into view. The camera panned back and forth. The cylindrical stem connected to the sphere via a smooth joint – as if the whole thing, sphere and stem, were cut from one enormous piece of material.

  “Move down the stem,” McHenry instructed. It was smooth like the sphere, but he hoped there was a marking of some kind – a serial number or a company name – giving away its maker.

  Stuart lowered the sub along the stem, panning the camera back and forth along the way. It revealed nothing but a smooth, white surface, but its radius increased gradually with depth. The Little Dakota stopped.

  “We’re at maximum depth,” Stuart informed.

  “Damn,” McHenry cursed. “Where ar
e we?”

  “Twenty-three hundred meters on the tether,” Stuart replied. “We started at 240 meters, so the absolute depth of Little Dakota is currently 2,540 meters.”

  “Christ, that thing goes on for another 1,500 meters,” McHenry said. They needed a longer tether. “Bring it up, and let’s get the hell outta Dodge.” It was time to communicate the information back to Naval Command.

  McHenry was acutely aware of the risks they’d been taking, and how easy it was to get used to such behavior. His father, a machinist, had often claimed the he’d been able to keep all of his fingers by sustaining a healthy fear of the powerful machines that he used every day. It was prudent to have a similar outlook as a sub captain.

  But that self-preserving awareness was slipping away. The mystery at the bottom of the sea was taking over.

  2

  Sunday, 10 May (5:58 a.m. EST – Washington)

  The sun warmed the right side of Daniel’s face as he sipped coffee from his glass mug. His unusually early 6:00 a.m. arrival warranted something stronger than his usual cup of green tea. He’d been awake since 4 a.m.

  Horace hadn’t given him much to go on. However, the old man’s words had kept him riled through the past two nights. Existential implications.

  Something was sounding in the icy deep of the Weddell Sea, a little over 150 miles off the coast of western Antarctica. It had been two centuries since Captain Cook heard the same signal in approximately the same location. The noise must have been dormant for all that time; otherwise it would have been discovered by military ships, or by the multitude of scientists who studied that part of the world. So why had it come back to life?

  Daniel concluded the previous evening that Operation Tabarin had been instigated by the voyage of the German ship, Schwabenland. And it seemed that that vessel had spurred events that extended many years into the future, maybe even to present day.

  As if cued by his thoughts, there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and Sandy stood in the doorway with a large envelope. He signed the receipt, thanked her, and closed the door.

  The size of the package disappointed him.

  He sat on the couch and tore it open, removed the contents – about two hundred pages of individually bound documents – and set them on the coffee table in front of the couch. He sorted them by country of origin, and located the one that he sought: a report by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, now known as MI-6. It was the logical place to start, Tabarin being a British mission.

  He finished reading the document in just under two hours and looked over his notes. The Schwabenland was an exploratory vessel. It had set out on its Antarctic expedition at the end of 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II. Herman Goering himself had authorized the mission, the official objective of which had to do with Germany’s concerns about the whaling industry. It made sense since whaling was important for the supply of lubricants and food products. However, the Germans were more likely concerned at the time with another whale byproduct – glycerin for nitroglycerine to be used in explosives.

  It was also suggested that, anticipating the invasion of Russia, Goering needed to test aircraft performance in extremely cold weather. The Schwabenland had been rigged with a catapult to launch small seaplanes from its deck, which could then be retrieved with an onboard crane.

  The SIS report claimed that the primary objective of the Schwabenland was to scout for viable areas for U-boat landings, both in the Antarctic region of Dronning Maud Land and in the isolated Brazilian Islands of Ilha Trinidade, 1,000 kilometers east of Vitoria, Brazil. A British reconnaissance vessel had documented an awkward, open-sea meeting between a German U-boat and the Schwabenland in the Weddell Sea, about 200 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica. The U-Boat was not identified.

  Daniel got a chill and rubbed the back of his neck. A German U-boat in the Weddell Sea brought up many questions. Had the noise been there in 1938? Had the U-boat detected it? The meeting place could have just been a coincidence, but he doubted it.

  He stood and looked through the window over the tops of the trees to the eastern horizon. That a device of any sort could have been positioned in one of the least accessible locations on the planet during the late 1700’s was intriguing. But a machine of any kind operating for over two hundred years – and in saltwater – was downright fascinating. A hoax of this magnitude – even in current times – seemed impossible. Daniel was a skeptic by nature, but he knew this couldn’t be a trick.

  His desk phone rang. It was Director Thackett. They had more information, and were to meet at 4:00 p.m. in Room 713. He looked at the clock on his computer: 12:48 p.m. He’d forgotten to eat lunch.

  3

  Sunday, 10 May (1:52 p.m. CST – Baton Rouge)

  Will took a right on the Jefferson Highway off-ramp and found himself in dense, stop-and-go traffic. He recalled that this part of town had been a horse ranch just a decade earlier. Now it was packed with stores, restaurants, and fancy houses.

  He turned onto Corporate Boulevard and weaved his way through a labyrinth of high-end apartment complexes until his GPS guided him to the address he’d programmed that morning. He parked in a sparsely populated lot, and climbed several flights of outdoor stairs to a third floor apartment. He unlocked and opened the door, and the odors of new construction and carpet tingled in his nostrils.

  He walked in and flipped a light switch. Bright lights, recessed in the high ceiling, illuminated a fully furnished living room, dining room, and kitchen. It was an open floor plan; the only thing separating the kitchen from the living room was an island with a large, double sink. Four barstools were lined beneath its black granite countertop.

  He padded across the wood laminate floor and around the island. He pressed a switch that energized the lights hanging over the counter, and then opened the large stainless steel refrigerator: empty, clean, and new.

  Exploring the rest of the flat, he found two bedrooms: one with a carpeted floor and a queen-sized bed. The other had wood floors and was set up as a study, furnished with a large desk, couch, upholstered chairs, and a coffee table.

  He shook his head and sighed. The apartment was excellent.

  He looked out a window into the bright afternoon and decided it was a good time to explore Baton Rouge and to pick up a few things to stock the fridge. He’d make a nice dinner and then find the swimming pool. He needed to decompress after the long drive.

  4

  Sunday, 10 May (3:58 p.m. EST – Washington)

  Daniel was on time, but still the last to arrive in Room 713. He sat on the leather couch next to Sylvia, with everyone in the same seating arrangement as the first time they’d met. He wondered if all Omnis lives were ruled by routine.

  Thackett glanced to Horace on his right, and then opened a laptop, clicked on the keyboard, and turned it toward Daniel and Sylvia. It was an underwater video, already playing.

  “This is from the USS North Dakota,” Thackett explained. “Footage of the object.”

  Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off the computer. It was mesmerizing. The video seemed to be in black and white, but it was hard to tell in the dark water background and the white object. It resembled a spherical water tower.

  “It doesn’t move – just seems to make noise,” Daniel said. “Is it a beacon of some sort?”

  Horace shrugged.

  Thackett snapped the computer closed and put it in a briefcase on the floor next to his chair. “Other than knowing what it looks like,” he explained, “this video doesn’t add important information. We’ve requested a sample of the material, the analysis of which should provide us with some useful information – the manufacturing company, country of origin, something – that should aid in your research.”

  Thackett nodded to Horace.

  “Sylvia, Daniel,” Horace said and then seemed to carefully formulate his next words in his head.

  Daniel’s intuition told him bad news was coming.

  “My gut tells me you
r respective projects are closely related to the object, and to each other,” Horace continued. “We know it’s against every safeguard we have, but we’ve decided that you two should work together.”

  “I thought we already were,” Sylvia said, vocalizing Daniel’s thoughts.

  Horace nodded and said, “Now we need you to interact.” He opened his arms and looked about the room. “This will be your new office. There’s enough space for you both to have your offices moved here, but maintain some privacy.”

  Daniel didn’t like it. He was happy working alone. He could tell by Sylvia’s expression that she felt the same.

  “You both have reservations,” Horace said, grinning. His eyes conveyed understanding. “But this project is too important for us to miss anything.”

  It seemed that Horace was implying danger, but Daniel wasn’t convinced there was an immediate threat – the object had been there for centuries. He remembered the old man uttering the words existential implications, but it seemed farfetched. Maybe it was time for Horace to retire.

  “You two can figure out the office arrangement,” Thackett said. “There’s enough room so you can each take a corner and have your offices arranged exactly as they are now.”

  Sylvia looked to Daniel and shrugged.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Good,” Horace said. “You should get each other up to speed on your respective projects and update each other regularly. Brainstorm.”

  “Your offices will be moved after you leave tonight,” Thackett said. “You’ll report here first thing tomorrow.”

  Daniel cringed at the idea of sharing space, but nearly panicked at the thought of changing his routine. How would this affect his research? His concentration was fickle. When focused, he could make connections that most people would never find. If distracted, he might miss something. Thackett was new, but Daniel knew the CIA director understood this about him and the other Omnis. Horace had to know it as well.