by Isaac Stone
He closed his eyes and thought of the men he’d seen die. It was all unnecessary. Someone could have found a way to negotiate early on before the war began. The elites wanted this war.
Chapter 34
Harlo fastened his diver helmet in place and checked the seal. It wasn’t as hard to do as combat suit armor, but a failure would bring you death just as quick. The pressures where he was headed would squash you like a bug under at those depths.
He checked his radio and made sure the collection bags were in place on the elevator. The dive master was about to send him down when Harlo signaled a wait. He walked across the platform and checked his toolbox. Good, it was still there, what he’d placed inside it. No one had found it yet.
He didn’t have as much trouble readjusting to civilian life. Only gone a few months, he was officially out of the Force Volunteers and returned to life in his home syndicate. He was returned to his old aquaculture job and allowed to do light duty unil he felt like returning to the depths.
The good news was that there were no further kraken reports in his absence. No one had even seen one of the abominable beasts while they were at work. The boards assumed the sighting were all fake to begin with while the divers were certain it was still down there.
Harlo gave the down sign and the elevator began its descent into the water. Soon he was down below the waves.
“Can you hear me?” he asked the dive master over his helmet radio.
“Loud and clear,” he was told. “How far to you want me to go down?”
“Take me down to one thousand feet,” Harlo told him.
“Isn’t that a bit deep for your first descent in a long time?” the dive master asked him. “You can do plenty of collecting at higher depths.” The voice was a little muffled over the headphones.
“I want to make sure I’m still good at the lower depths. If I have any trouble, you can bring me up quick. What’s the worry? This suit is pressurized.” He held onto a rail as the elevator continued on its way down.
“I know how you felt about Nea. I don’t want you to have any panic attacks down there.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
He felt the water on the suit increase in pressure, but not by much. The suit was designed similar to the one he’d worn in battle and gave him a similar feeling to the one he’d had while in combat.
In fact, he was back in combat. But this time it was him against the kraken. Just the two of them. He knew the beast was still down there. It waited for the right moment to make lunch out of another unsuspecting diver. Good, he was ready for it too. Harlo had it all figured out. He would descend as far as he could go with this suit and wait for it. He had enough chum concealed in the toolbox to attract it. The squishy monster liked meat? He had ten pounds of raw beef in that toolbox. There was no way that kraken could resist.
The elevator continued to take him further down. He watched the glowing numbers pass as it descended into the deep ocean. Small fish swam by, but the types changed every time he went down further. The seaweed and algae began to grow in fantastic patterns as the lights provided the only illumination at the deep levels.
When he passed five hundred feet, the sea life changed. Now the creatures provided their own illumination. He watched anglerfish swim past and stranger aquatic creatures with their own bioluminescent. Down at these depths, only those creatures who could survive in the dark would do very well. Evolution eliminated their eyes when there was no light.
It won’t be far now, he told himself. I know you’re out there motherfucker. I’m waiting for you and I have something special just for you.
Even the great squids of the deep were seldom photographed. What he searched for had never been recorded. It was seen only a few times. He thought about how the life cycles of so many sea creatures were still not understood. Eels, for instance. No one knew where they spawned and how they migrated around the planet. Every so often, someone would find a whole new sea creature never witnessed before. The ocean depths had many secrets and guarded them from the world of the surface.
It was fine, all he wanted was one.
He heard a click as the elevator stopped at the depth he wanted. Harlo looked through the cage door and saw the thousand foot level proudly marked. It glowed at the ocean depths. His suit exterior lights provided most of the light down here. There were lights that popped on when he stopped, but they only extended to the outer rim of the algae growth.
“A thousand feet down,” he heard the diver master tell him in the audio. “I can see you fine. Don’t wonder off too far and I’ll expect you back in another hour.”
“One hour tops,” Harlo told him as he unlocked the cage door and opened it. He was supposed to attach his safety cable to it, but it would only slow him down.
It might take a lot less than one hour, he told himself.
Harlo reached over and grabbed the toolbox. He left the collection bags alone and clicked off the audio from the surface. He didn’t need anything to break his concentration. This was something he needed to do himself as a way of honoring Nea and every dead Volunteer back on Mars. He stepped off the platform and began to descent further down on his own. He kept one hand on the pylon so he could know where he was.
At fifteen hundred feet, Harlo opened up the toolbox and let the raw meat chum the waters. He’d made sure it was nice and bloody. It was hard getting it down here, but not as hard as the next item on his agenda. He floated and waited.
The final item down there was very hard to smuggle to this level. It was very hard to get it off Mars. He was sure there would be hell to pay when he used it, but it was the one thing he knew would take out the kraken. Harlo pulled it out of the box and held it in his hand. With his other hand, he attached the safety line to the pylon. His side of the line was attached to a spool. When he was finished, he wanted to be able to retract himself to the pylon. There was no telling how far the kraken might yank him away.
It wasn’t a long wait. The chum in the water did the trick.
First one tentacle whipped out and wrapped around him. Then another. Finally, three separate tentacles were wrapped around him and Harlo felt them pull him away from the pylon. He didn’t struggle much, so the tentacles didn’t have to tighten. He’d made sure he took the best deep diver suit down there he could. The tentacles were wrapped all the way around and pulled him in the direction of the kraken.
He could see the black eyes as it brought him close. The main body flashed a variety of colors in the dark. The bioluminescence was astounding and he couldn’t believe the display in front of him. The creature must be excited to grab such a large prey. He didn’t struggle, no reason to give it an excuse to tighten up and crush him.
Come on, you bastard, Harlo thought, don’t keep me waiting.
He was five feet below the snapping beak of the kraken’s mouth, big enough to crush a skull, when Harlo turned on his heat sword.
He came up with the idea of using the sword before he left Mars. He reasoned if it could burn through armor, a kraken would be nothing to it. It took some questions, but he found out the heat swords were built to work in any environment. This included the depths of space, or the bottom of the ocean. He made some promises and transferred funds to certain accounts before he left Mars, but it was worth it. By the time Harlo was on the star liner for his trip home, there was a one stashed in his luggage. Every credit he used to pay for it was worth the trouble.
The heat sword turned white hot. He was directly under the monster and the water around him turned into a steam caldron. The kraken tried to release him and get away, but Harlo was too close.
He rammed the blade up into the mouth of the beast, burning through it, and didn’t stop until he’d found the brain. Next, he slid the burning rod across it and neatly sectioned the kraken in two.
The tentacles fell away from him. Harlo turned off the sword and began to retract himself to the pylon. The cable had stayed attached to it and he was back to safety in
two minutes. Surrounded by the green algae, he began to climb back up the pylon to the elevator. There were no malfunctions in the dive suit. He made sure to drop the heat sword down to the bottom. No sense in letting the syndicates bring him up on charges.
He reached the bottom of the elevator and entered it. Once inside, Harlo shut the door, locked it and leaned back on the rail. Time to face the music, he thought and switched on the audio.
“Harlo here”, he said into the microphone, “take me up.”
“…..Jesus Christ, where have you been?” the dive master screamed at him. “We were ready to send a submersible down there to look for you! The temperature readings went crazy and the ocean just exploded in a geyser. What the hell happened down there?” Harlo expected every bit of it.
“Don’t know,” he told the dive master. “Some kind of super-heated bubble floated up. It went right past me and I narrowly missed it. Scared the shit out of me. Get me up before another one comes. Maybe an undersea volcano erupted.”
“Impossible! There’s no volcanic activity around here!” There was a pause as the elevator began to move up.
“Holy shit!” he heard over his earphones, “The biggest squid tentacle I’ve ever seen just came to the surface! Some other pieces too. You sure you didn’t see anything down there?”
“Nope. Guess it got cooked. I’ll see you top side.”
Harlo was immediately put in an isolation ward pending an investigation. He didn’t care. It allowed him to watch the crew on the platform run all over the deck as they tried to find the source of the heat blast. For a few hours, he thought they were going to evacuate the platform, but it never took place. They decided it had to be a bizarre exception and calmed down. No official report was filed about the body of the kraken, which did not surprise Harlo at all.
They put him through a round of interviews and tried to find out what really happened down there. Dives were suspended for days until the investigators were satisfied. He repeated the heat bubble story over and over until they quit asking about it. The investigators ruled it a freak occurrence that happened at the bottom of the ocean. They installed some temperature monitors, which were very sensitive to oceanic heat fluctuations.
Then everyone went back to work. Including Harlo who did it with a very good attitude. He slept peacefully.