Salvage

by Chris Howard

  Ghost ships.

  The other thing that always struck him on seeing a ship underwater was how quiet they were. Even on deteriorated sunken wrecks, there was a sense of silence that should not be there. Ships were noisy operations, with steel, carbon fiber, or rigid plastic walls catching and distributing every vibration, from the hum of engines to whispered conversations to cargo slightly shifting in the hold to the cook chopping onions. Ships had a voice, a tone; sometimes they made music. The ocean itself added a whole new layer of sound to the mix, with waves beating a rhythm on the hull and the creak of steel framing torquing with the motion of the greatest force on the planet.

  Seeing the silent, sleeping Serina Beliz lit by their helmet lights—it was depressing. She wasn’t even his ship, but seeing her suspended in the dark, he felt his heart break.

  Damien signaled to Telly, adding, “I’ll take the bow?” They nodded to each other after getting the confirmation from Andres topside, and then kicked off the bell in opposite directions.

  Wilraven stepped into open space and kicked his way toward the third level of the superstructure, where an open door yawned eerily, left swinging in the mad rush for the lifeboat that never deployed.

  His air and comm lines spooling out behind him, Wilraven stretched through the water and grabbed the second-tier railing, glancing back to see the dive bell rocking gently as it was tugged in different directions by three divers. The smart spools compensated and reeled out more line.

  Wilraven turned his focus to the open door above him, trying to ignore the fascination, the pull of sorrow, like an open grave at a funeral.

  There was a lot of chatter about synching up the cables coming down from Irabarren’s roller winches, and more back-and-forth directives from Damien and Telly, all in the same metallic and thin-pitched speech of divers breathing carefully composed gas mixtures.

  Time check, and then Wilraven was climbing up the outside structure of the stairway, heading for the bridge. The captain’s quarters would be just down from there.

  It wasn’t easy maneuvering over the railings and into the dark space of the bridge, but Wilraven stopped a meter in from the door, staring around at the bank of video panels, the navigation and drive controls, and the intact windows, which collected silvery beads of air in rolling lines like mercury. The ceiling also had pockets of air, wobbling up and back with the motion of cables from above, the hull settling into the slings, and the currents flowing past.

  It all seemed so pristine: abandoned, but still usable. He should be able to punch down a button, raise the chief in the engine room, and get this ship running and ready to head out into a wide ocean. Wrecks were clearly wrecks, with instrumentation that was so corroded or overrun with sea life it made you stop and try to figure what some particular knob’s purpose was.

  Not here.

  This bridge was only slightly different from Marcene’s—and then only in arrangement. Nothing was damaged. Just flooded with seawater.

  Wilraven heard his name over the comm, Andres’ thin voice asking about his location. Andres knew exactly what he was up to. If he was asking, it meant the question was from someone else, which meant Levesgue. Or possibly the suddenly nosy-ass Royce?

  He lied. “Heading toward the deck crane. I want to see if everything’s lashed down. I don’t want this thing swinging free when we move her to the roller winches. Don’t want anything throwing off the balance of the ship in the slings.”

  He stepped slowly—astronaut-slow—into the captain’s cabin, pushing away papers and the frozen folds of a blanket rising off the bed like a ghost, waving away a few fish inspecting corners and dark spaces for homes. His helmet lights cast sharp shadows and sudden blasts of reflection across the deck of a workspace, carved wooden cabinets, and the hard metal walls.

  Not wasting another second, Wilraven elbowed open a cabinet door beside the bed and crouched down in front of the captain’s safe.

  He spun through the combination without success, but put that down to not being able to handle the rotary like he would in open air with plenty of light—and with fingers on the dial instead of work gloves. He tried again. Failed. He was going through it a third time, thinking that maybe Captain Nersesian had changed the combo after all, when it opened.

  The thick door swung wide, releasing a few big globules of air that shot to the ceiling. The safe wasn’t watertight, but some air had become trapped.

  “Cap? Wilraven?”

  Someone was calling his name over the comm, and it wasn’t Andres. It wasn’t Levesgue either, but he’d put money on Levesgue being able to overhear anything said. Sounded like Damien, who had headed for the Serina’s bow, and the Frenchman sounded agitated. That got his attention, because Damien was as solid and levelheaded as they came.

  Without looking through the safe’s contents, he reached in, dragged everything out, and stuffed it in the large front pouch in his dive rig: the wadded up stash of papers, a manila folder thick with documents, and what was clearly a rubber-banded stack of passports of different nations—the identities of Serina’s crew.

  Zipping the pouch closed, Wilraven kicked his way back toward the bridge and the open door on his left—the way he had come in. “Damien?” He didn’t want anything important said over the air. “You’re at the bow? I’ll be there in twenty seconds.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Pod

  It was more like a full minute.

  Wilraven made his way along the portside rail, ignoring the concerned voices from topside and Telly at the ship’s stern. Damien finally cut in with, “I am well. I just want the captain to see this.” It sounded like he was making it up, and his English, which was always very good, was starting to erode while he spent too much thought coming up with what sounded like total horseshit to Wilraven’s ears. “Yes, you see, a pocket of air . . . under the foredeck.” There was a pause, and Damien added, “The bow may be lighter than the stern if we cannot release this.”

  Wilraven made his way around the crew way to the bow while Andres returned a very non-committal, “Let us know if it will be a problem.” He clearly got the message. Damien was not in trouble, but there was something important for the captain to see, and it was for their eyes only for now.

  It looked like a giant white potato, a squat, roughly oval shape the size of a small car.

  Wilraven stopped, the thing sitting on the deck between them. With a limited view of his facial expression and some gestures, Damien gave him a you-want-to-tell-me-what-the-fuck-that-is? gesture, his gloved hands opening, shoulders shrugging, vigorous enough to read through the dive suit.

  The Frenchman leaned over the thing and pointed at the steady stream of bubbles coming from a tiny port on one side.

  Instinctively Wilraven followed the bubbles up, leaning back to see how far they went. All the way to the surface. Where else would they go? It’s not like physical laws were being pushed or twisted in any way.

  It just seemed like it. With a pale oblong pod lashed to the deck of a sunken vessel.

  It was tied down somehow, but there were no obvious cables or ropes.

  Glued?

  Wilraven reached out and touched the thing, flattening his hand against the surface. It was rigid, and didn’t flex when he pushed. The pod appeared to be molded, although he couldn’t see any seams. If it was full of air, then the whole compact-car-sized thing should be shooting to the surface.

  Wilraven held up one vertical finger to his mask—where his mouth would be if he wasn’t wearing the helmet—motioning for quiet.

  He bent to one knee, curling over to see if he could get a good view under it.

  The bottom of the pod wasn’t flat. The whole thing was lumpy in an organically generated way, but it was clearly technology of some kind. There was the little air release tube on top, which meant a regulator of some kind, valves, pressure measurement and balancing devices. And then there was the glowing ring at the base that was apparently holding it down to the Serina’s deck.<
br />
  “Interesting.” Wilraven didn’t want there to be more than ten seconds of silence from the bow.

  There was more chatter over the comm, some of it between Telly and Andres, but Wilraven ignored it. Damien motioned him to his side of the pod, pointing along a half-meter wide indentation in the surface that ran from the top, deepening as it wrapped around to the base.

  It definitely looked molded on purpose and functional.

  Damien was nodding, and Wilraven suddenly got it. That was the access point to the glowing device holding the pod down. There were two knobs sticking out on that side, one of them longer than the other.

  Now all he had to do was figure out how to release it. That felt like the right next step, even if it wasn’t the wisest thing to do. Did he really want this thing on the surface? On board or anywhere near his ship?

  Yes, if he really wanted answers to the Serina's end.

  Suddenly Corkran’s orders to drop the whole ship in much deeper water off Cuba made a little more sense. What did the pod contain? Toxic substances, mutant monsters? Was it filled with air? That seemed the likeliest. If it was, and it had kept its shape for weeks at twelve hundred meters, then it was some sturdy shit. He brushed that aside to let the obvious question surface in his mind. If it was filled with air, didn’t that mean that it was a life-support mechanism? For life that needed air to breathe?

  Wilraven straightened, running his gloved hands over the surface as he tried to find an answer. On one side he found a less opaque panel curving around with the shape of the pod. It was molded right into the surface, and he tilted his head down to direct his helmet lights in.

  Gasping panic, he fumbled back, Damien grabbing his arm to steady him. Then both of them leaned in over the panel for a better view inside the pod. There was a human hand half curled right up against the inside wall, but it was gray, speckled with rot. A wedding ring was on the third finger, a simple gold band that had slipped up to the first knuckle.

  Wilraven looked over at Damien, nodding back at his wide-eyed expression.

  At the same time, both of them looked up toward the surface several hundred feet above them, silently deciding that getting this thing to the Marcene was the right thing to do.

  Damien, looking beyond Wilraven, put one hand over a helmet lamp, cupping the face of it, and then in a series of opening and closing motions, signaled Telly, who was just coming up on the dive bell. At this distance, the Russian diver was just a dark shape with two points of light.

  Wilraven came around the far side to the surface depression that seemed to be made for accessing the device holding the pod to the deck. Not knowing how the thing worked, he figured he would just tinker with it until it did what he wanted it to do—let go of the Serina. He had tools, and if the tinkering didn’t work, he would get out the pry bar.

  He didn’t need it. He reached under the pod, grabbed the shorter of the knobs and tugged. It barely moved, no more than half an inch, but he felt something, like a soft jolt of electricity, and with it the big oblong shape lifted off the deck.

  Slowly at first, but it picked up speed, and Damien reached up to try to grab it. There was nothing to hold on to, and in seconds the pod rose out of their range and then out of sight.

  Wilraven waved Damien back to the dive bell, Telly’s helmet lights flashing at them in the dark. It was a mad scramble for the cage, taking up umbilical slack as they took wide man-on-the-moon steps, jumping over the railings along the Serina’s mid-deck. His breathing loud in his ears, Wilraven kept glancing up to see if he could find where the pod had gone.

  No sign of it in the deepwater night.

  A big yellowfin grouper—had to be three feet long—was hanging out with Telly when they got back to the bell. Telly was talking over the comms to Andres, arranging a quick lift, but he was gesturing as he spoke, and it looked like he and the grouper were conversing.

  Smiling at the scene, Wilraven glanced over at Damien and found the French diver was lagging behind.

  He went cold.

  “You okay?”

  His voice came out thin and metallic with the gas mix. Damien didn’t answer right away. He stopped twenty feet from the bell, bent over, his arms gripping his middle.

  “Andres, we have a problem.” Wilraven struggled through the water to get back to Damien. Telly was already following him, waving off the curious fish.

  Damien said something rapid in French, which Wilraven didn’t catch except for the words “pain” and “malaise”.

  “Fuck.” The word came over the comm, and Wilraven turned to find Telly right behind him, taking up Damien’s umbilical, readying to pull him toward the bell—to safety.

  Wilraven nodded back at him, made a circling gesture with one hand. “Reel him in.”

  The captain got behind Damien, reached under his arms to lift him into the water, and the two of them pushed and pulled the Frenchman back to the bell. There was a lot of noise and crosstalk over the comm. Telly was bent over Damien, his facemask right up against the other’s, speaking rapidly, asking for more information. Once their cables were tucked in, Wilraven called for Andres to bring them up to the first decomp.

  “Just some pain in my stomach and arms,” said Damien a few minutes later, his voice coming out smooth, and he straightened up in the cage. He looked more alert, but Telly was still holding on to him.

  Andres, cool as ever, was giving periodic updates on time, depth, and pressure, asking each time for any updates on Damien. “Dr. Kozcera is here. He’s readied the chamber for you.”

  A bent diver was a common enough risk for deep-sea work, and both the Irabarren and Marcene had decompression chambers. The one on Marcene could hold four at a time and was right outside the medical station.

  A couple of minutes later, they were moving again to the next decompression stop, climbing at a steady twenty meters a minute. Wilraven kept leaning out of the cage, looking for the pod, hoping it climbed as steadily as they were to the surface. It hadn’t shot off the deck like a rocket, so again, there was technology involved. Or extreme biology? He shook that off. He had taken a few steps down the alien pod path, but had jumped right back into reality when he saw the human hand through the observation panel.

  A dead man’s hand.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ekhidnadai

  An hour later, Andreden found Laeina with her elbows on the railing along Knowledgenix’s bayside walkway, looking out to sea. She tilted her head a little to acknowledge him, but didn’t take her focus off the rolling waves below.

  Andreden stopped at the railing a few meters down from her, also looking out at Monterey Bay, a few sails and sleek shapes of powerboats at the horizon. All the fires had been put out—mostly furniture and flammable equipment, art, and wall tiles, but the firefighters were still knocking on walls, testing the structural beams in the lobby, and inspecting the blast area where the front doors had been before the two SUVs had smashed through them. The wreckage of Andreden’s coupe had been hauled away.

  He was angry with her for pulling him into the mess, but couldn’t bring the anger out in the open. The five or six times over the last hour he had felt like raging at her were each crushed under a heavy wave of loss and depression. The feelings washed over him, weighing him down. He whispered, “Who are these people, Laeina? Where can I find them?”

  She broke her gaze with the water. “You know what I know. I told you I questioned the man with the rifle. Let us look for the ship called Katren. She was last seen off the Florida Keys.”

  He nodded sadly. That meant flying to the east coast, searching AIS traffic, digging through records. Theo could help out with a surface search. He didn’t want to call anyone else in on this, because so far that hadn’t gone well. He had brought Martin in, and now he was gone. They had also taken Rebekah, who would have no idea what was going on. And five people were dead, people with families, people he knew, some of them for years.

  “Maybe that’s a good idea. I shouldn’t
be here.” He turned, glancing up at the main building of Knowledgenix. “They were looking for me; they’ll be back.”

  One of the Monterey County sheriffs on the scene swung the back doors open and waved him over. He had spoken to Deputy Ramirez earlier about motives and which direction the vehicles had headed after the crime. The deputy was coordinating a statewide search with other agencies, the Highway Patrol, and the FBI. “Mr. Andreden. I just want to follow up on a call that just came in. Do you know Mark Rasanen?”

  Andreden’s gaze sharpened on the deputy. “He’s an investigator.”

  Ramirez nodded as if he already knew that. “Office on Asilomar in Pacific Grove. He was—”

  “I hired him to do some research,” cut in Andreden.

  “Yeah, what can you tell me about that?”

  Andreden stopped. “What were you going to say? He was what?”

  Ramirez sighed. “He was found dead, about an hour ago. A bullet to the head. Your name came up high on his client list. One witness described four people who looked like soldiers breaking into the offices.”

  Fuck.

  He really wanted to turn and give Laeina a good raging glare. He looked at the ground instead. “I can’t believe this.” Looking up at Ramirez and gesturing at Knowledgenix, he said, “And you think that has something to do with this?”

  “You tell me.” The deputy held up both hands, open. “No one’s made that jump yet, but the questions are piling up—and the descriptions match. Even if whatever you had Rasanen looking into doesn’t have anything to do with what happened here . . . Hey, it doesn’t mean the guys who drove their trucks into your lobby and blew the place up agree with you.”

  Andreden pulled in a deep breath. “Right. I’ll get my notes for you. Email you?”

  Ramirez nodded, held Andreden’s gaze for a moment, and then pulled out a business card with his contact info on it. “Send anything you have here—it’s secure. Number’s on there too. Call me if you think of anything else that might link these two . . . events.”