Midnight Zone: a Cade Rearden Thriller

by JK Franks

  Samuel shook his head. “Don’t think so, Director. He would have been a kid back then. Maybe he’s Golette’s son, you said Thrall was the original thief’s kid.”

  It was a good theory, but Doris had turned up evidence that strongly suggested Golette was most likely gay and never had any children. “Don’t think so, but there is a connection. What can you tell me about the project itself?”

  “It was a bunch of mumbo jumbo, some really old artifacts. They handled them with white gloves, like ancient, religious relics or something. A few had weird writing on them. Goldman said they came from the Antarctic and that the Navy had acquired them after World War Two. Best I remember, one team was doing some exotic computer programming, they were developing this super-intuitive AI. Another team in a different building, that seemed primarily to be doing medical research. The weird thing was, these two very different groups talked a lot. One of the things I was supposed to be checking for was communication leaks, and the lines between those two departments were a freakin’ beehive of data and conversations.”

  “So, what happened?” Stansfield asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Samuel said. “From monitoring comms, I got the distinct opinion that someone had made a breakthrough. The AI group definitely had made several breakthroughs, one program called Alpha and then a later version they were calling Astra. Maybe something on the medical side, too. They all seemed pretty excited. All I know is, people suddenly started to disappear, you know, like just not show up for work. The comms chatter went way up, then nearly overnight, all but ceased. Goldman left suddenly a few days later. When I filed my incident report with the agency, they pulled the plug. Went in and took everything. I think that was a week, maybe ten days before that Thrall guy’s yacht washed up a thousand miles farther down the coast.”

  The meeting had been productive. Margaret was pleased but still needed to locate The Lion. “I know Carson had you track him down. Where is Goldman?” If she still had access to the data at Bumblehive, she could have gotten that info in seconds. Now, she had to rely on this man’s willingness and memory.

  “Texas oil country.” Samuel gave her an approximate location.

  “Good enough for now.” She leaned up and poured the man one more drink. “Thank you.” She retrieved her gun and left.

  “To the future, Margaret.” The man smiled and picked up the glass. “To the future,” he whispered.

  74

  Cuban Airspace

  Five minutes into the jump, the playlist switched from Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin” to ELO, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” The hard, driving beat helped drive Cade’s momentum as he reached terminal velocity. What is it with these kids and their music? he wondered, then remembered Doris was the real inspiration behind that. “Good one, Riley.”

  As the airspeed continued to increase above 175 kilometers per hour, he was fairly certain the wind rushing past would have ripped his arms off had he not been in the high-tech armored suit. At 18,000 feet, just before hitting terminal velocity, the tiny wings finally caught thicker air, and he began the long glide slope to the target location. Thankfully, the suit mechanics handled all the maneuvers and navigation. No way they could have done any of this and wound up together as a team in the right spot.

  “You are over Cuban waters, Nomad,” Dee called out minutes earlier when they’d crossed the invisible line in the sky. Relations with Cuba had improved considerably in the last decade, but he was sure foreign agents falling from the sky unannounced would strain things just a bit if discovered.

  “No radar tracks, flight line is nominal. Drop speed is now 55KPH. Airspeed is just over 125KPH.” Which, considering the mass of the suit, was phenomenal. The dawn light was just reaching the calm seas below, turning them into an iridescent, teal green, fading to a dark blue in the deeper areas. Cade still hadn’t wrapped his head around the fact they would be going down there. They would be descending below the ocean nearly as much as he’d been above it minutes ago. Focus on something else, soldier. Your team, the rescue, a date with the sexy rocket scientist.

  Gus was right. Time to get his head in the game. He checked all the WarHawk team readouts in his HUD—green lights across the board, although one was drifting a bit. “Greg, watch your track,” Cade said. Greg had been the designated addition from The Cove, the one Charlie had argued against. Alan probably had more battle experience and possibly could edge Greg on the sheer range of knowledge, but Greg was a natural athlete and scored nearly as high as the other soldiers in most combat drills.

  “Roger that, Nomad. Riley asked me to check out some of the flight characteristics. She thinks making a dual purpose XOD might be a good plan.”

  “Let’s do the testing on a training op next time.” Cade opened the channel to all team members. “WarHawks, final prep for dive, chutes will deploy at the last minute, do not trigger a manual release.” He and Charlie had drilled them constantly in the prior days. All, except Greg, had at least one traditional HALO jump before. But these chutes would be deployed by the computer with the intent of grouping them all close over the target and visible in the air for the least amount of time. “All of you should be ready to dive as soon as we touchdown. Make sure Dee turns off your O2 at that point. Your suit can extract what is needed from the water.” A chorus of replies came back. They all sounded like they were enjoying this. He had to admit it was pretty damn fun. If only they weren’t going forth to battle dragons.

  “Base, you’ll have something out here to pick us up, won’t you?”

  Riley’s soft voice came on, nearly drowned out by the wind whipping by the exo-divesuit. “Nomad, would I abandon you guys in the middle of the ocean?”

  The water was approaching at an alarming rate. His smartass reply momentarily was on pause while he checked readouts to make sure nothing was wrong. “Uh…I mean, okay, thanks.”

  “Are you okay, Nomad? Your pulse, respiration, and catecholamines are spiking.”

  He had no idea what the last one of those was, but assumed it was either adrenaline or he’d peed on himself. “Are you watching this, Base? I am scared shitless.”

  “You’re fine, Cap,” Riley said, “and you aren’t the only one. The rest of your team is spiking as well. We’ll bring you down for a nice soft landing.”

  Cade could make out the waves and occasional fish jumping now. His altitude was about three thousand feet. Several times, he thought he saw a lighter blue flash in the distance, deep under the water, but decided to pretend for now that it was his imagination.

  “Two minutes,” his suit computer said.

  Three thousand feet was about the height most HALO jumpers deployed chutes. Cade could feel his legs beginning to cramp from being locked in the awkward dive position for so long.

  Riley cut into his thoughts,“We are detecting an ascent from the Kalypso. Adjusting flight plans.”

  “Cutter, status of Raptor,” Deuce called.

  Alexandria’s voice was choppy, no doubt her descent was much rougher and faster than his team. “In FF now, be on the deck two minutes behind WarHawk. Situation nominal.”

  “One minute to impact, thirty seconds to chute.”

  “Impact, did she say impact?” Cade asked.

  “Very sorry, Nomad, a poor choice of words, I will have a word with the divesuit’s internal computer at once about her language,” his personal AI, Dee, responded just as he felt the wings fold smoothly back into the storage compartment on the back of the suit. Instantly, he was in free-fall again doing a fast arc into the water at well over a hundred miles an hour.

  “Seven hundred feet.” He felt a pop, and his forward momentum was nearly completely canceled by the gossamer thin, translucent parachute. His forward speed canceled out, he swung side to side momentarily, then began slowly descending the last hundred feet into the Caribbean.

  The XOD slipped into the water and immediately initiated a dive. The parachute cords released automatically, and like the super strong chute, they were designe
d to dissolve within the hour on contact with sea water. The depth readout quickly showed he was passing a hundred feet. The rest of WarHawk was grouped within about a hundred yards. All in all, the jump had been…fun, but a bit …well, anticlimactic.

  “Contact, three thousand yards and closing.” Cade’s suit initiated defensive mode. Maybe not so anticlimactic.

  75

  Kalypso

  Kissa continued to pry at the material around the door at first; he was convinced it was just some thick plastic, maybe acrylic, but several days of working on it had produced barely a scratch. He tossed away the piece of bed-frame he’d been using. Several times each day, they would move him from the cell to a viewing room where Thera was. He could see the anguish in her eyes, but she was healthy, and she looked unharmed. Despite the agony of not being able to wrap his arms around her and pull her close, knowing she was alive lifted his spirits to the wind.

  “There is no win, you imbecile.” And now he was talking to himself. Kissa was under no illusions. He knew that the captors had no intentions of letting any of them leave this place alive. They were using him for leverage to get his fiancée to do something she clearly didn’t want to do. Did it have something to do with the monster that had attacked? That creature still haunted his nightmares. Sometimes he still saw it, even when he wasn’t asleep. The thing was evil, unnatural…it wreaked of wrongness. The last time he’d seen her, Thera had signed for him to be patient. It was a subtle gesture, but he got it. Patience had never really been one of his strengths, though. More than once, he’d wound up hospitalized for short-cutting decompression stops on deep dives. His joints and back still ached at certain times as a vicious reminder of his impetuousness. “Calm yourself, man.”

  He moved back to sit against the wall. White floors, white walls, white lights overhead. He ached for some color, a window even, although he had a good idea what he would see outside, blackness. The inky, black depths of the Midnight Zone. From memory, he knew it was part of the pelagic zone that extends from a 1,000 to 4,000 meters below the ocean surface. It was also known as the Bathyal Zone. It was the place where sunlight went to die. The water column above pushed down on everything, creating intense pressure so great only a few animals had ever been able to adapt to it.

  In graduate school, Kissa had briefly wanted to study the deep ocean until he realized how little of the magnificent large marine life there was. Also, shallow seas were where Thera’s specialty was so…yeah, he’d chased the girl. Caught her, too. He smiled at the memory. Okay, what else did he know? He began to methodically catalog everything he had seen, all the facts relating to the place that might be important. Since he’d been out of the holding cells several times, he had a general understanding of the layout. They were in a section of mostly open storage space, although it seemed to be filling up quickly. The labs where Thera worked were up a short ramp on a different level. The roof overhead was flat, but the walls had a slight curve to them. That meant they were outer walls, probably part of the pressure hull. Thinking again to all that pressure outside made him shudder involuntarily. The walls were not cold, or even cool, so thermal transfer from the frigid water to inside was handled somehow. He’d seen no condensation, but there was a vent high overhead. That might dehumidify the space and circulate the air.

  What else, what else? Think of something useful. Kissa was a soldier and a scientist. His mind processed incoming information almost subconsciously. Somewhere in his head was a clue, something that could help him get out and get to Thera, but then what? They would still be trapped miles down near the ocean floor.

  Something wasn’t right about how they sounded. The thought had occurred to him early on, but he’d ignored it and just now came back to it. People who worked in deep water submersibles usually sounded strange when they talked. Kind of like cartoon chipmunks. That was due to the compressed gas mixture they used, normally a blend called helox, which made you sound as if you had inhaled the contents of a helium balloon.

  He’d met some saturation divers, or sat divers, over the years. Strange bunch, these guys often worked for oil companies in pressurized living quarters at the bottom of the sea. They were needed to perform maintenance and repair work, and they discovered it was easier and safer to just let them stay there for extended periods, like weeks or months. All of them he’d met had been a bit off, living and working in an environment that was constantly trying to kill them, no real way to safely get back to the surface on their own. It was a special breed of men.

  Why the helox, though? Kissa remembered from dive training it was to combat narcosis. They were constantly warned to watch their time below a hundred feet. Divers can develop what’s known as nitrogen narcosis. He’d also had firsthand knowledge of that. He had a history of not listening to good advice. Narcosis made you feel drunk and disoriented. The deeper you go, the drunker and more incapacitated you can feel. At a certain depth, the amount of compressed oxygen literally becomes toxic to the human body. Adding the helium combatted that effectively, and even other versions were out there, like trimox. So—how are they able to be this deep yet not sounding like they were breathing anything but normal air? If he had to guess, he would say the air pressure was about earth normal 1ATM as well. That indicated this place was more like a submarine than a habitat. Subs had thick enough hulls that did not require as much equalizing pressure nor compressed air mixes. How does any of this help?

  Subs, subs…when they took him and the others off the boat, they had used a smaller craft. Something similar in size to a normal charter boat but not as deep, and it was streamlined for underwater use. Kissa had been the only one not knocked unconscious by the monster, but he’d faked it easily enough. In truth, he’d been nearly in as bad of shape as Coffee and the others. The captors had been men, soldiers even, but seemed to have no particular nationality. He’d heard several languages and accents. They were definitely military, though, or ex-military. Possibly professional soldiers now, like many of his former comrades. What am I missing?

  He’d not seen any of the smaller craft since coming aboard. They’d black-bagged his head on exiting the craft. Still, what else could he recall? He didn't remember any docking hatch. In fact, it seemed like they had led him down some steps then up a short incline. So, they parked inside and just ran it up on a slope like beaching a jet ski. His footsteps echoed; the space was open. The space was big but not as large as the warehouse area outside. Did I hear anything? A pulsing noise, maybe, nothing identifiable. No hatch doors closing, no warning bells or alarms. Shit, his head was beginning to hurt. Did they turn left or right? Ummm…right, pretty quickly, and the sound had changed. A corridor, it had some sort of rubber matting that caused him to trip. He had fallen against the wall.

  Kissa stood and walked over to one wall. He closed his eyes and leaned the right side of his body against it. How does it feel? Nearly the same, the curve was a bit more pronounced on the bottom and a bit flatter higher up. So, he’d been on the outside wall. Possibly only one or two floors below. They’d walked for about two minutes. He did some mental math. That would be about two hundred meters. Thinking back to how large the vessel looked rising up out of the water, he would estimate that was less than a fourth of the distance around one half of the vessel.

  It wasn’t much, but he had some ideas at least. He had a direction now, he just needed a way out of this room and some way of reaching Thera. The massive door slid up and away. Two of the guards motioned for him to come with them. He stood and walked forward, wondering if this might be his last chance to force a more favorable outcome.

  76

  Caribbean

  The music flowing into Cade’s suit stopped as soon as the onboard computer’s threat assessment concluded that the glowing dot in the distance presented a significant risk.

  Cade keyed the all call, “WarHawks, stay sharp. We know some of what this thing is capable of. Suit lights off when we go below 2000.” Then, on a private channel to Greg and Deuce, “I’
m taking point on this. You guys watch my six. Guess we get to find out how good Riley’s enhancements are.”

  “Passing 800 meters, Captain,” Dee offered. “Oxygen production is at 92% of optimum.”

  The light was practically gone after a hundred meters down, now it was pitch black outside his small window into this alien world. The inky darkness was somehow more claustrophobic than anything else he’d ever encountered. He switched on one bank of the suit's lights, but they only showed more of the same. A bubble of blue white light surrounded by an ocean of black. They were descending fast, but to think of all the pressure the XOD suits would soon be under was terrifying. Also, the realization that if they had to go all the way to the bottom, it would be a dozen times as far, made his insides liquify. Fear is the real enemy.

  Gus, can you help here? Cade voiced internally. He needed calm and rational thinking.

  You gotta be fucking kidding me, dude. This shit is scaring the fuck out of me, and we haven’t even see the dragon yet, Gus replied.

  Not a dragon, it’s an angel, Ace chimed in. Saraph, or Saraphim, from the Hebrew words ‘to burn.’

  Gus sniped back, Angels and dragons, Who gives a fuck? Let the brute deal with it.

  “Y’all aren’t helping.“ Honestly, Cade was deathly afraid of his barbarian persona taking over. They were in an unforgiving environment in exoskeleton dive suits which were meant for precise movement, not brute strength battles.

  “Nomad,” Riley’s voice came over his headset. “We have more movement on the Kalypso. It is ascending, coming up on an angle. Adjusting WarHawk for intercept vectors.”

  He felt the suit’s tiny but powerful thrusters accelerate seawater through various directional nozzles quickly propelling him forward. The XOD used a similar drive system to the magneto hydrodynamic systems Micah had spotted pursuing the Kalypso. The Cove’s was a bit more advanced and incredibly compact. The benefit of having a nearly inexhaustible power supply in each suit’s onboard Pica unit provide them a very stealthy, fast, and efficient way to maneuver.