The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  “Nope.” Martin was no scientist, but the motion of the Adamant was definitely not the cause of the motion. “What’s going on?” he asked Lewis.

  The thing sounded like eggs being cracked for an omelet. Eventually it started to rise, moving slowly upward as long skinny legs forced their way out of the bottom of the creature and into the water of the aquarium, the coral-like portion rose nearly a foot when the flexible fin at the top began to split into four parts and droop down over the rocky black body. The rubbery appendages felt around to touch its surroundings, slowly at first, sluggish.

  “Jesus.” Lewis was transfixed. “It’s amazing.”

  Martin felt Rina’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back toward the door as she spoke. “Lewis, let’s leave and lock this door until we figure out what these things are.”

  “Figure it out? That’s what we should do. We’d be famous, discovering some new species. Imagine if you found the America’s missing war toy AND discovered a new species of sea life? We could name it after you,” Lewis said. “This is a great moment…” As he spoke, long shadows reached out from beneath the table and took ahold of his shirt.

  The other creature had somehow stuck itself to the underside of the table and had shot its upper tentacles out to pull itself onto Lewis. As Lewis punched at the thing, the other from the aquarium leapt onto Lewis’s chest and knocked him to the deck. Martin stepped forward to help just as the first creature skittered on thick crustacean legs, further up Lewis’s body and stopped at his neck. Lewis screamed and flailed at it, but his hands bounced off the hard shell. The creature reared up, showing a mouth like a Venus Flytrap, with long rows of thin, needle-like teeth. It clamped down on Lewis’s throat, teeth sinking in deep as blood began to seep out. It kept closing, until both sides nearly met in the middle. Martin tried to kick the beast to stop it, only to be blocked by the other one, which began moving in Martin’s direction.

  Martin turned to run just in time to see Rina come into the room with a fire axe from the corridor. She shoved Martin out and swung the axe like a golf club at the creature. The pointed end connected, but glanced off the hard hide of the advancing monster. It was enough to send it backward though, and possibly stall it a moment. Martin left the room, looking back just in time to see the creature sever Lewis’s head from his body.

  Rina retreated and slammed the portal. She turned the outer latches, sealing the room shut. She leaned her back against the wall across from the lab and held onto the axe.

  Martin fell to his knees and vomited.

  21

  The team dropped through the calm sea, using an anchor line with decompression stops marked with bright red ribbons at the appropriate intervals. It was weird not to be able to talk to each other. Usually the Suvari brothers would have made six fart jokes by the first marker. But now they had to give thumbs up, or nod or point when they wanted to convey something. But it was not so much of an inconvenience once they approached the cave with the Cudgel in it. Cass could feel her heart race as they approached it. Even in the low light of the individual flashlights and glow sticks, it was majestic, even though it was hard to see. Having watched the video feed didn’t help her fully make out the lines of the vehicle, it was so covered with coral and other plant life.

  The group stayed close together, exploring as a unit, so as not to lose one another. They got close to the robot’s chest and started moving up toward the exposed viewport in the head.

  Cass looked up close at the plants and coral that the others had mentioned, as well as the hard rock specimens that had been brought back to the Adamant. The closer she got, the more a strange network exposed itself. There were thin, almost threadlike lines that ran among the plants, connecting some of the larger bits. Cass looked up and saw the web of lines continued up toward the top and then back down toward the legs. She motioned for Ozzie to come look, but he was too interested in moving further up the thing to come back and see what she was waving about.

  She followed, not wanting to be left alone, mostly out of fear of losing sight of the others. As she brought up the rear of the ascending group, she heard a high squeal in her headset. “Hello?” she said.

  There was a chorus of greetings that she recognized as the rest of the divers coming on line in her headset. “Everyone have comm signal now?” Takis asked. Each of the divers checked in, indicating the affirmative. “Adamant, are you online?”

  Ozzie tried too. “Come in Adamant, Martin? Ben? Rina?” He looked around at the divers with a look of semi-concern. “Anyone?”

  “Probably beer O’clock,” Jakob said. “Everything likely came on at the same time back on the boat and they have to deal with figuring out what to do first. They might not even realize the radio has come on line.”

  Ozzie’s voice came next. “Let’s check the cockpit again, see if we can get in.”

  “We tried that, and we’re not supposed to go in anyway.” Cass felt like a school ma’am, repeatedly telling the kids to stay out of trouble. She was afraid it was going to blow her cover before it was time, and made a note to tone it down. If communications were working in their helmets, maybe she could get a call out to Kemp and get the whole thing over with when she got back topside.

  They stared into the forward portal of the Cudgel as if they could see inside. The portal was tinted a light red that allowed the Cudgel’s crew to not be seen from the outside anyway, but Caroline and Jakob swore they saw shapes inside. Cass had been briefed, like all the other baby-sitters that the NIA had planted with salvage crews, in just about every aspect of the Cudgel’s capabilities. She had memorized all the weapons, flight stats, limitations, entry points, emergency capabilities, dangers, failings and crew biographies. For a time, they thought one or more of the crew had defected to the Liberated Territories and taken the Cudgel with them. The government surveilled the crews’ families and friends, waiting for some sign of communications to back that theory up, but none materialized. They never gave up that possibility, but the idea that it was lost at sea always stayed at the forefront of the investigation.

  “I’m going to check the Cudgel’s storm moorings,” Cass said. “I have a hunch that’s what has it stuck here. Someone want to come with me?” Jakob responded, and together they moved down the machine’s right arm. They followed it to the wrist and stopped, where Cass pulled her dive knife and carefully began to clear the undersea life from around it. The arm was as wide as the length of a tractor-trailer truck and she needed to clear a path to where the truck met the rock wall. She pried a few of the strange coral pieces away and set them on the arm, but as she kept going, it was obvious that the things were thicker where she believed the Cudgel’s hurricane moors were imbedded in the rock.

  “We have about five more minutes until we need to head back, just to be safe.” Ozzie’s voice came through the headphones. “We need to start decompressing.”

  Cass looked at her gauge to mark the time.

  “What can I do?” Jakob asked.

  “Come over and pry some of these away from the other side of the wrist, right in here.” Cass pointed around where the rod and anchor should be, and Jakob dug in, though not quite as gently as Cass hoped.

  “Is this what we’re trying to find?” Jakob called Cass over. He had uncovered the thick bar that anchored the machine to the rock. Cass knew that the Cudgel had been given the capacity to aid in the event of disasters, in addition to their war-time duties. In case a storm got too intense, they had the ability to use these bars to anchor in their bases, or, if they were caught out in the storm, they could extend the bars into the ground, or solid rock to keep them from becoming victims of the storms themselves. Anchored correctly, they could withstand winds of three hundred miles per hour. Each of the appendages had storm anchors; there were two in the torso, and one in the back of the head.

  But here, the rod was deteriorated. The middle of it was almost completely worn through.

  “What the hell happened to that?” Jakob asked. “
Did it just rust down here? I mean it’s been underwater for over a decade.”

  She wanted to tell him it was highly unlikely—the Cudgel was made to never rust, with alloys that could withstand anything nature could throw at it. Something had disintegrated the rod, a two foot thick anchor rod that never rusts and Cass had no idea what it was.

  “One minute to rendezvous at the mouth of the cave,” Ozzie said.

  Cass looked over at the things she’d removed from the wrist. They seemed slightly different from the ones that had been brought aboard the Adamant, these had a dark blue streak up the flexible fin on top. In fact, all of the creatures around the anchor point had the same coloring. She approached the pile they’d made of the creatures. Was it possible these things were secreting some sort of acid or solvent that was corroding the bars?

  “Time to go,” Jakob said. “They’re gathering.”

  “I can’t figure this out. The whole situation is just fucked up.”

  “No shit,” Jakob said. “But we need to leave before we run out of air.”

  She knew it was true, but a few more moments to check out the rest of the storm anchors would reassure her somehow.

  A crackle in her headphone hurt Cass’s ears and a voice came through just as loud. “Can you hear me?” It was Rina. “Lewis is dead. Those creatures attacked us and killed him. We have them trapped in the lab.”

  “What?” Caroline shouted.

  The others headed for the anchor line to head back up, but Cass turned as a new sound caught her attention. It was a loud thumping sound, that got louder as it went on for two, three, four times. Each time it happened, a handful of the creatures fell off the arm of the Cudgel. She looked up at the cave entrance and saw the tiny creatures that had been waving with the tide had begun to quickly recede into the rock around them.

  “Let’s go, Cass,” Ozzie said.

  She stared at the Cudgel, unable to look back at the group. She could see the machine’s body bow out slightly with each thud. The fifth thud turned into a rumble as the arm she’d just been examining came loose from the wall and swung out. There was another surge, and the leg and waist on that side also suddenly broke loose sending the machine outward, held fast only by the rods on the other side of its body.

  The group turned then, toward Cass and the calamity that was unfolding behind them.

  22

  The Cudgel exploded outward, as though it was on hinges; the left portion of the machine was still attached to the rocks, the right swung free. Rocks, debris and the bubbles of trapped air floated freely through the water in the space where the Cudgel had been.

  Static filled Cass’s earbuds as she caught bits of voices from Jakob and Ozzie, but the set went dead again. She looked over to make sure the group was still safe, they looked shocked and frightened, but they hadn’t been harmed by any debris that flew out with the Cudgel.

  When she looked back, she could finally see what was behind the long-lost giant machine—a long but thin crevice, maybe twenty-five foot wide, by one hundred foot tall, which the Cudgel had managed to completely cover with its thick metallic frame. As Cass stared, some of the darkness of the crevice began to leak out. At first, it looked like only a shadow, but soon more shadows began to slither out like fat octopus tentacles, more and more came, squeezing themselves out until the mouth of the opening was filled with twitching, writhing darkness.

  The rest of the divers began swimming toward the anchor line, with only Jakob hanging back to try to pull Cass along. She grabbed his arm and braced herself as the appendages fell along the edge, and wrapped themselves around outcroppings and jagged protrusions. Once they’d found something to hold onto, a blob emerged from the center, slowly getting larger as more of it came out. Soon, the creature pulled itself free and out into the cave entrance, bumping and jostling the Cudgel like it was nothing. Once it had spilled out, it got larger, inflating itself to a size that rivaled the Cudgel itself. This patch of writhing darkness moved forward toward the minimal light that filtered down from above. The light was enough to bring the thing’s features into better focus for Cass. It seemed smooth and dark along the tentacles, but its body was covered in long thin strands of white fibers, the anemones that had been poking out on top of the rocks, in places, it was covered with thick patches of the coral-like lumps like the ones they’d taken back to the Adamant. Cass felt light-headed as her mind tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

  The creature stopped and rested on the ocean floor, stretching and expanding, absorbing more coral and rock from the cave. The tentacles extended and the thing rose until it appeared that it was nearly as tall as the Cudgel. A head became evident as it moved its legs to keep stationary in the sea. The body was similar in shape to a walrus, but instead of flippers, the entire lower half seemed to consist of thick tendrils that reached out in all directions. The smooth, bulbous head had enormous black eyes like an octopus, that allowed it an incredible field of vision on the front and sides. A mouth opened and closed, partially obscured by smaller tentacles and tusk-like protrusions on either side.

  It slowly made its way forward to leave the cave, and the strange dizzying sensation left Cass’s mind and she dragged Jakob in the opposite direction of their crewmates, afraid cutting directly in front of the thing would only draw attention to themselves. Instead she and Jakob swam to the edge of the cave and did their best to stay out of sight. It moved on, ignoring the others as well. It swam like a squid, propelling itself ahead with the help of the tentacles and the relatively thin shape it had made itself into. It took a few slow strokes, seemingly getting itself acclimated to the open space again, before it suddenly took a few heavy strokes and jetted into the distance and quickly out of sight in the darkness.

  Cass motioned for Jakob to accompany her back over to their crew and he sluggishly followed. Takis and Ozzie’s faces were both frozen in shock and surprise-eyes wide within their facemasks-moving their bodies only to keep themselves buoyant. Jakob lifted his gauge and pointed at the needle in the red zone that indicated he, and everyone else, was dangerously low on air. The group moved together to make it to the anchor rope, and they held hands to make sure no one made a frantic swim to the surface that would surely give them the bends or worse. They surrounded the rope in a circle and ascended to each level. At the halfway point, Takis motioned to his brother and dropped his own regulator to his side. For the rest of the way up, the brothers shared Ozzie’s mouthpiece, drawing air only from what was left in Ozzie’s tank.

  They finally reached the surface and dropped their mouthpieces to breathe fresh air, and to scream in horror.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Caroline said.

  “God damn, that thing was bigger than a fucking whale. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Takis said.

  “Bigger than a Goddam whale,” Ozzie whispered. “What the fuck was it?”

  Cass started swimming toward the nearby ladders to get back onto the Adamant. As freaked out as she was about what they’d seen, Martin was in danger as well. “We need to make sure everyone else is okay.” She slid off her fins, and dropped her tank and vest on the deck and stepped into her deck shoes as she got to the ladder to the upper decks. She could see Jakob stepping onto the bottom rung as she reached the top. “Rina?” Cass made her way to the control room first, and found no one there. She nearly slammed into Martin as she left the room. “You’re okay?”

  “Me? What the hell happened to you guys down there?” Martin asked.

  “You first. Where is Rina? Is she safe?”

  “Yes. She’s in the kitchen, sitting down. Shaken up, but who isn’t?” Martin started walking toward the ladder from the diver’s platform to check on everyone else.

  “We’re… I’m…” Cass had trouble explaining how she felt, and just what happened. Luckily Jakob was more eloquent.

  “Fuck,” Jakob said. He grabbed Martin by the shoulders and held him fast. “I mean, seriously… Fuck.” He let go and moved toward the ki
tchen.

  The rest of the divers came filing up and headed straight for the kitchen, passing Martin without a word. By the time Cass met up with all of them, everyone had a drink, or a bottle in their hands.

  “What happened?” Martin asked once some time had passed and everyone had stopped breathing heavily.

  “The Cudgel was blocking something. Had it trapped. And whatever that thing was just escaped,” Ozzie said. “It was massive. I can’t even explain it…”

  “But it was nearly as tall as the Cudgel and much more massive. And it wasn’t something I fully understood,” Takis added.

  “Seriously? How did it get into and out of that small hole?” Jakob didn’t wait for an answer, just chugged his beer and pulled another out of the carton.

  “I don’t understand,” Martin said.

  Cass tried to find a way to explain that he probably wouldn’t understand, couldn’t understand until he saw it. Up to that point, it would only be a strange fish story that someone told him. “I was frozen in fear that this thing might look my way.”

  “Did it have eyes?” Takis asked. “I didn’t see eyes.”

  Cass was panicked to the point that she couldn’t remember eyes either, but she could remember feeling the thing gazing around the area and getting its bearings. Maybe it did have eyes, she just couldn’t see them. “I can’t imagine what that was.”

  “I don’t want to imagine.”

  Caroline had been silent, and refused anything to drink. “Lewis? You said that those smaller things killed him?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Martin said.

  “Where is he? I want to see him,” Caroline said.

  “You can’t do that. We locked the lab doors to keep the things trapped. His body is in with them.”

  “I have to see him. I can learn about these things from him. I can help with everything. You just have to let me see him and help him.” She reached for a glass of water, but her shaking hands wouldn’t let her pick it up. “I can help.”