The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  Ornn moved down the stairs, sliding on the rails from one level to the next. The rest followed using the steps, not quite desperate enough to launch themselves so forcibly at the next deck.

  “Are you all right?” Linden looked at Holli’s arm as they waited to get on the stairs.

  “I’m fine, it just grazed me.” She showed him what amounted to a paper cut. A thin cut that probably hurt like hell, but looked like it would stop bleeding any time. “I’m starting to believe your crazy theory about the monster, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Should have trusted me and joined my team.” Linden’s steps echoed in the confined area of the ship.

  “I’m probably going to be looking for a job soon,” Holli said. Linden watched her cover the cut with her hand and wince.

  At the landing, sailors were prepping several small submersibles. They turned at the sight of the XO and saluted smartly. Ornn returned the salute and kept moving.

  “You can take this first one. I’m setting a course to the north, there’s a civilian pier just south of Seattle where you can land.” He looked inside. “And there’s survival gear, rations. I’d send you to the nearest base, but if that’s where this Lusca is headed, then you’d pop up right in the thick of things where you started.”

  “Aren’t these just going to lose their energy like everything else?” Lou asked.

  The XO shook his head. “These run entirely on Magneto Hydrodynamic Propulsion. They use the water to pull themselves along. These are specially built to eliminate the need for power storage; they rely on the sea and the earth. The Montenegro uses similar methods, but unfortunately our energy is still stored in batteries. You’ll be fine, I assure you.”

  The platform rocked again. “Good enough for me. Thanks,” Linden said. “Good luck to you.” He shook the XO’s hand and climbed aboard, followed by the others. The sailors closed the door and the mini sub immediately began to sink, the propellers whirred to life and the vehicle jerked forward.

  As they dove beneath the waves, the Montenegro was still visible in the sub’s rear portal. There was room to move around, but barely. They all watched the underside of the giant platform as even their emergency running lights dimmed and flickered out.

  “Holli?” Linden asked.

  “Yes?” She kept her gaze fixed on the Montenegro and the black mass visible beyond it.

  “Any chance you saw how they set up the auto pilot, and if so, can you change the heading?” He said it as casually as possible, but if they were travelling toward Seattle, they wouldn’t arrive until after the creature hit landfall, and after that, it was pretty much all over if a plan wasn’t formulated.

  Holli looked around the cabin of the small craft. “I’m a sound analyst, not a hacker.”

  “That wasn’t a no,” Linden said.

  Tsui seemed to be stifling a scream from deep inside. His face was red and his chest puffed out. “For the love of fuck, I’ll do it. I was watching, in case I got a chance to beat all of you to death and steal this thing and take it home.” He stood and moved to the one-man control area and began flipping switches.

  “Wait,” Lou moved toward the prisoner.

  “I suggest you sit down and tell me where you want to go.” Tsui typed at the keys and adjusted several levers and the sub suddenly jerked downward. “Whoa. Touchy controls.”

  “Look…” Linden got up closer to Tsui’s seat.

  “I know. If I even attempt to escape or fuck you over, you’ll pound my face with a wrench and flush me out the latrine.” Tsui looked back quickly with a smile. “I’ll be good.”

  Holli quickly smacked the back of Tsui’s head. “You DID just say you were thinking of killing us and taking this vehicle home, right?”

  “Joking,” Tsui said. “Just a joke.”

  Holli pulled her hand back and smacked him again, this time on his cheek.

  “Oww.” Tsui put his hand on his cheek. “What the hell?”

  Linden pulled Holli to the back of the sub. “Holy crap, what was that?” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not a field agent. I got nervous. Just trying to look tough.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m locked in a sub with a war criminal and there’s a giant monster following us which will eventually explode in an atomic fireball.” She held up a shaking hand. “I’m a little on edge, you know?”

  “I know.” Linden nodded.

  “I have it under control now.”

  Linden nodded again and forced a smile. “Great.”

  “Hey. So where are we going?” Tsui asked.

  “You’ll find out when we tell you,” Holli said.

  “Holli? Enough.” Linden walked back to the front and stood next to Tsui at the controls. “Set a course for Cape Meares base off the coast of Oregon. We need to get ahead of this thing and help with preparation on the coast.”

  “Cape Meares, aye-aye sir.” It sounded like Tsui said it with the maximum amount of sarcasm he could muster.

  “Best speed.”

  “You could get out and push, that might speed us up a little,” Tsui said.

  “We could also go faster by throwing out extra weight,” Holli said. She’d turned back to watch the Montenegro fade in the distance.

  “After we’ve put some distance between us and that creature, I need you to surface. I have to make a few quick calls,” Linden said. He needed to get a report and a warning to the rest of the fleet and the mainland defenses to let them know some serious shit was coming their way. He hoped that someone from the Montenegro would have managed a distress call, but he couldn’t be sure. Surely the sudden lack of communications from the battle platform would be an indicator of trouble.

  And he had to call Cass. He needed to know what happened on the Cudgel, both today and ten years ago.

  36

  Ozzie was asleep in a chair by Martin’s bedside. He’d been monitoring Martin’s condition since the injection. Before that, he dove the Cudgel, before that he’d helped fight on the ship. Cass couldn’t fault him for drifting off. She looked at the monitors, and was happy with what she saw. Everything seemed stable, and would hopefully remain that way. The blood substitute was working.

  She turned and nearly ran into Jakob. “Sorry.”

  “How is he?” Jakob asked. “Is it working?”

  “Seems like it,” Cass said. “His blood pressure is steady, his pulse is good. I think he just needs some time.”

  “I hope so.”

  “We just need to decide what to do now. Do we move? Can he handle that?” Cass wasn’t a doctor and didn’t want to venture a guess. It might take some time for everything to stabilize. Travel on the high seas might be too rocky, but conversely, if they stayed here, a storm could pop up and make life difficult for everyone.

  “We’ll have to talk with the others, but I think staying here is the way to go right now,” Jakob said.

  Cass patted him on the shoulder and walked down the hall. She walked into her room, shut the door and locked it. She sat herself down on her bed and ran her hands through her hair. She looked on her dresser and noticed that Rina had returned the sat phone and plugged it in to charge again. The light was blinking green for a full charge, so she slipped it in her pocket-no need to hide it-and walked to the mirror. She was a bigger mess than she felt. Her eyes had dark circles under them and her clothes were the same she’d been wearing for days. She washed her face in the sink, pulled her red hair back into a ponytail and wrapped it with a band, before finding some relatively clean jeans and a t-shirt. Just as she was beginning to feel less like a street urchin, her phone rang in the other room. She hurried back to where she’d dropped her dirty clothes and fished it out.

  “Cass?” It was Linden. And he’d apparently dispensed with all the cloak-and-dagger business of code names. “Cass, we just left the platform Montenegro as it was being torn apart by your creature.”

  “What? That thing is the biggest and best we have,” Cass asked. �
��How can that be? The creature was big, but…”

  “I don’t know, it took out the Montenegro’s escort ships as well,” Linden said. “It neutralized their energy sources and then just started ripping shit apart. The ships barely got off any shots of their own. The Lusca was dropping what Tsui called slags. These little balls of rock or something that had legs. They were tearing through the crew like nothing.”

  “Those are what killed our science team, and put Martin in the condition he’s in now.”

  “How is Martin?” Linden asked.

  Cass was still sorry about how that conversation went down, and fully expected to hold him to accepting her resignation. “He’s better. I just came from checking on him. Seems to be accepting the medication and blood we pulled from the Cudgel. So far, at least.”

  “Good.” The line crackled for a few seconds before Linden continued. “What was it like? Inside the Cudgel?”

  “Amazing. It was still perfectly preserved down there. The inside was pretty pristine. The whole thing was just like it was in the pictures in the office,” Cass said. “I wish you could have seen it.”

  “Hopefully, I will.”

  It was quiet for a few seconds as Cass thought about the tone of Linden’s words. “They’re calling it the Lusca now?”

  “The R.L.T.’s science team code-named it that,” Linden said. “We didn’t want to strain ourselves coming up with something original.”

  “So what’s next? Where are you now?”

  “We’re getting ahead of the creature to rally the troops and advise them how to fight this thing—or how NOT to fight it, at least. I hope someone listens,” Linden said. “Odds are good, they’ll send drones by land, sea, and air.”

  “But those will just get their energy supply sucked out and strengthen this beast even more.”

  “And after that, maybe they’ll listen to me,” Linden said. “I’ll check in later.”

  The line went dead and Cass put her phone away. She walked to the kitchen for some water and found the rest of the crew sitting around the dining table, except for Martin. Cass grabbed a bottle of water, noted how low the supplies were getting, and then stepped toward the table with all eyes on her.

  They stood just as Cass started to sit down, and they walked for the door.

  “We need to have a discussion in the comms room,” Ben said. He wheeled himself out behind the others.

  Cass sat for a moment, unsure if that meant they needed to talk without her, or if she was actually invited. Ben turned his chair and looked at her, then nodded toward the other room.

  Once in with everyone else, Cass immediately could see not just the normal movie-viewing screen, but several other large monitors that had been brought in from other areas, mostly Rina’s room or the drone control area. All of them had images or schematics of the Cudgel on them. Some of the images had to be in real time, there were fish drifting in front of the camera. “Wow. This is impressive.” She looked at the dozen or so screens and tried to analyze what each of them represented. She also glanced at the crew when she could to try to gauge their intent.

  “Look,” Rina said. She was holding her phone, controlling the screens. “We get that you lied to us because you were doing your job. We get that. It sucks, but there it is.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, to help ourselves get over it, we deceived you too.”

  The room full of people did not look smug or happy with themselves, so it took Cass a minute to respond. “How?”

  “When the Cudgel was built, people still thought it was okay to use various disk and mini-disks to store their data, mostly in the construction phase. I cooked up a disk that could exploit their diagnostics programs.” A tiny disk appeared on the largest screen to bring home her point. “I had Ozzie put it into a port while the two of you were gathering supplies.”

  “You didn’t have time, we went on the spur of the moment.”

  “I’ve had it ever since we started looking for the Cudgel. We planned to turn it over to the government, but we wanted inside, and we wanted to get souvenirs. I created it with some info that Subtle Bagpipe gave us. She wanted a souvenir, too.” Rina looked over at Cass. “All we needed was someone to put in the codes to open it up.”

  It wasn’t something that Cass could figure out how to respond to. They didn’t want to steal the weapon, just look? That was still against the law. All of the governments involved in the treaty had made separate provisions for that in order to keep the Cudgel from falling into the wrong hands. “So, what did that little disk get you?”

  Ozzie stood and pointed at the side screen. “We have real stats on how the Cudgel is doing. With that creature gone, it seems like this giant is getting power levels back.” He pointed again, this time to a series of bars that indicated power consumption and collection. “Only at three percent right now, but it was nearly zero when we got control.”

  “We raise that thing, and its solar receptors could start collecting and help load up the cells. Hell, nearly everything is in working order so far. Diagnostics show a breach near one of the feet, but that was sealed off by the crew way back when.” Takis was excited about the ship in a way Cass wasn’t aware he could be. He was a joker, self-deprecating, occasionally sullen, but here he was-talking fast and breathy.

  “Wait. Those lift bags. That’s what this is all about? You just want to raise the Cudgel so you can go inside and loot it?”

  “No. We want to make it work again,” Jakob said. “So we can go kill that thing that we released.”

  Cass scanned the room to see if they were making fun of her. If maybe they were pulling a prank to get her back for lying and deceiving them.

  They were not.

  37

  Six miles out from the coast, the tiny escape pod began to receive radio challenges from the coastal defenses. Linden explained their situation and gave them whatever information he could to verify his story. Luckily, there were a number of other craft washing up on Oregon shores from the Montenegro that matched their pod’s profile, and they weren’t hassled too much. Still, the Navy sent two drones to escort them to a dock set aside from the main port.

  When they finally opened the hatch and Linden stepped out, there was a small, armed contingent waiting for them. “Agent Linden Kemp?” A woman in a dark flight suit, different from the other soldiers held up a piece of paper to read Linden’s name off.

  “Yes? That’s me.”

  “My name is Sergeant Dana Johnson. I have been ordered to escort you to my C.O. immediately for a quick word,” the soldier said.

  Linden nodded and turned to help Holli out of the pod. Tsui had wisely stayed back out of sight for the moment. Linden was also glad Tsui was no longer wearing his prison clothes, and that he had lost his cuffs earlier.

  “No sir, I’m to bring just you. The rest of your crew can use the facilities and then get some chow in our mess, if they’d like.” She nodded to the four soldiers with her. “These men will help them find their way to whatever they need.”

  Linden wondered if coming here was such a good idea after all. If they split up, who knew what would happen? Would they throw Tsui back in prison, ship Holli back to her cubicle? He decided not to think about it for now. First things first; he needed to explain everything he knew to whoever was in charge onsite.

  “Scuttlebutt has it that your team found the old Cudgel. That true?”

  Linden looked at his escort as they left the docks and began climbing a short set of stairs to a small building.

  “I have clearance,” Dana said.

  “I’m sure you do. I’m just not sure what I can say for sure.” He couldn’t really confirm anything technically until he saw the thing himself. Technically. But the little kid in him, heck, the Linden in him that started this job, wide-eyed and expecting to find the thing immediately, wanted to tell someone about the impossible find. “I’ve seen pictures and video, but that’s as far as I can say.”

  The woman smiled and nodde
d her head. “I just won fifty bucks.” She opened a door with her key card and waved Linden in. She then stepped forward and opened another door with a card and ushered him ahead. She led Linden down a hall, past sailors and soldiers who were gathering in a wardroom, before taking him up a flight of stairs. “The Fleet Admiral is getting ready to sit in on a briefing, so we need to be quick.”

  Though his head had begun to spin with the notion of distilling the events of the last few days into a short summary, Linden nodded. He knew how the military liked quick and simple bursts of information.

  They left the stairs at the third floor and walked down one of a number of hallways to a man at a desk.

  “The Fleet Admiral wanted to see Agent Kemp for a moment before the briefing?” Dana nodded toward Linden.

  “Go ahead; he’s going over his notes.” The man pushed a button under his desk and the door began to buzz.

  Dana pushed the door open and held it for Linden. Inside, there was a fairly sparse office with two metal framed chairs in front of a metal framed desk. There were some pictures on the wall, but not many. The desk held a thin computer, and a standard issue coffee mug.

  There was no Fleet Admiral.

  On the far side of the office was a door with a small frosted window, and a shadow appeared there. Dana walked over and pulled the door open. “Sir?” The sounds of the ocean and the smell of the salt air blew in causing Linden to miss what was said next, but she waved him over. Through the door was a small balcony that overlooked the harbor and all of the ships in it.

  A wiry man in a khaki navy uniform stood with a handful of sunflower seeds. “You’re Agent Kemp?” he asked. He chewed on a seed and spit the outside of it over the railing. Linden watched the pieces fly down toward a grassy area below.

  “Yes sir,” Linden said. He started to stick his hand out to shake, but realized that the man had seeds in one hand, and that the other was shoving those seeds into his mouth. “Pleased to meet you.”