The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  Cass lingered at the door. “Look, if you need anything, just call one of us. We’ll do whatever we can.”

  Jakob nodded, looking around his position nervously. “Yeah. Sure.” Cass watched him feel above himself for the second release, then below for the other.

  A mini-lift took Cass back up toward her level, she considered stopping to talk to Rina, but couldn’t decide what to say. When she got to the command level, she saw Takis and Ozzie testing their respective arms. Their controls were less confining and restrictive than what Jakob had to deal with. Each arm unit consisted of a glove wired to a wrist band, then to another band on the bicep. The bands allowed the Cudgel’s arms to mimic what was happening with Takis or Ozzie’s own appendages. The brothers even got to sit down on thin-backed seats that gave them better range of motion when swinging or reaching back, but still allowed them to strap in safely. She’d found them giggling and laughing in the right hand command pod. This was Ozzie’s and was housed in the right shoulder joint of the Cudgel.

  “Let’s go.” Cass leaned into the relatively small room. “Takis, get into your position.”

  She turned and sat at the huge command station. The Pilot’s chair was large and had a thick harness that Cass started securing right away.

  Her earphones came to life again. “Cass?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Holli. I’ve isolated your headset, so it’s just you and I in on this conversation.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you think so far?” Holli asked. “How is everyone doing?”

  “Considering it was all their idea, they’re surprisingly freaked out,” Cass said. “Not sure what I expected, or what they were envisioning, but this thing is pretty intimidating. Maybe once they can actually move it and try things out, they’ll get a little looser.” She tightened her harness a little more. “Or they’ll decide to back out.”

  “Well, by us handling the flight controls and general altitude, it should take a lot of pressure off, but we can’t control anything else from here right now. We’re locked out of the other functions.”

  “Understood.” Cass translated that as one less thing to worry about. “Where’s Linden?” Cass asked.

  “Off to plead with the military not to be dumbasses.”

  “So… he’s picking up lunch?”

  “Yep,” Holli said. “Once they get through their little tutorials, we need to get them to try everything for real. The fleet is on its way out of the harbor to intercept the Lusca now.”

  “Understood.”

  It was a few moments before Holli replied. “Good luck and whatnot.”

  Cass nodded her head in agreement. We certainly need it.

  47

  Once everyone was strapped in and ready, Rina and Cass started to run through a preflight checklist. They’d learned some from their own tutorials and Holli had some things taken care of on her end.

  “Deploying the hydro generators certainly helped get us up to an acceptable energy level,” Cass said. “Good thinking. That saved us some time.”

  Rina grunted in reply, still watching a screen on the far end of the console. Cass hoped Rina would get past the fact that she’d been deceived, and hoped time would help that.

  “Guys? I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t launch,” Holli said. “What do you think?”

  It was quiet for a moment. Nothing but the sounds of the ship itself filled the control room.

  “I’m ready.” Jakob answered first.

  “I’m go. Go time,” Takis said. “Let’s go.”

  His brother didn’t sound nervous in the least. “Right arm, checking in. I’m ready,” Ozzie said.

  Cass looked down the long control board to Rina.

  “This was mostly my idea, you know?” Rina said. “Of course I’m ready.”

  The three booster controls were flashing in front of Cass—one for each of the leg or foot boosters, and one switch for the waist and back rockets. Cass thought about what was next, what would happen once she clicked those controls.

  “If you want, I can push the buttons. I have the same set up for now,” Rina said.

  “No. I got it.” Cass flipped the switches and pushed the power up to full. The whole robot shook and swayed, and the roar of the engines blotted out everything else. Alarms and buzzers went off immediately.

  “Looks good. I’ve got the vectors and all that good stuff programmed in, should be a smooth lift-off,” Holli said. “Five seconds to go.”

  With that, the noise got worse and Cass was shoved back in her chair. The Cudgel spun slightly and righted itself. In the screen nearby, Cass could see the ocean get further away, and the Adamant got smaller and smaller.

  “Oh shit,” Takis’s voice came into everyone’s headphones. “I think this is a bad idea. I want to be on the ground.”

  “Little late, brother.” Ozzie sounded just as shaky.

  “Hold it together, guys,” Holli said. “Things will get better in a few.”

  Ten minutes in, the pressure lessened and Cass could move. She couldn’t stand up, yet, but that would come. The auto-orienting cabins made sure that everyone in the ship would stay upright no matter what way the Cudgel faced or how level its body unit was.

  To fill the time until she was able to move around or take control, Cass started looking into the ship’s onboard war records. The list was shorter than she expected, but it looked like the Cudgel hadn’t entered the fight until well after it had started.

  It was technically world war three, though no one called it that. The leaders were too embarrassed to admit a handful of minor and breakaway Russian, Korean, and Chinese factions had managed to create so much chaos with novel and deadly use of technology. Their hackers had made a mess of an already crumbling infrastructure and power grid, not to mention the damage that their internet interruptions had done to the U.S. and European countries alike. It seemed like it would be easy to roll in with the usual armaments and troops, but the Circle of Liberated Territories was far from the usual enemy. They weren’t a giant country with obvious targets like nuclear facilities or missile launchers; they didn’t have ports to cut off from supplies or airstrips from which to launch strikes. They hid deep in the cities of their former countries and led their fights online.

  It wasn’t until two years into the ‘hostilities’ that the allies even managed to discover the Circle had actual bases and research facilities hidden in innocent-looking factories in the United Koreas, Western China and Central Siberia. One base, near Palana on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia became a focal point. The main research and development sector was there, a large contingent of their army’s ground soldiers was housed there, as well as their contingent of weapons. Once that was found, the war began in earnest. The allies, mainly a recon team from Great Britain, discovered that a small solar farm and wave harvesting facility that was supposed to be providing energy to the whole island and part of the mainland Soviet Union was supplying far less than it should have been.

  Once the team landed, the Circle unexpectedly deployed a huge contingent of weapons, missile launchers, anti-aircraft, electronic disruptors and more. It was a surprising arsenal from a group that the allies were classifying as a cyber terrorist organization the longest time. As the group further revealed itself, intel surfaced that they’d built a huge base underwater, with connections to the island.

  More bases were discovered, not in the small territories that made up the Circle of Liberated Territories, rather in neighboring countries, deep in the mountains, off shore, even in the sewers of the large Ally powers. It made it tough to pin them down and eradicate the threats they posed. The Cudgel was seen as a way to help do that.

  Cass flipped over to the crew’s video logs, though the computer showed there were few for this mission. The first she decided to watch was from the day of the disappearance, an entry by the commanding officer, Captain Lenning.

  “Still stuck in here. Not sure how to handle it. We can’t let
this thing go, but we really haven’t a choice. We get a few surges of power, as the Cudgel collects some light for power, or it converts the current to a tiny bit of power for us,” Lenning said. “At first we were trying to power up any weapons we could, but nothing would come online. Then we tried to cycle on the engines to see what we could do, but the power always went out before we got far.” The grainy video showed the shadows of a couple of crew members moving back and forth in the background. “We decided to start leaving messages like this and archive them immediately, in the hopes they’d survive if we didn’t. We’re using the lowest resolution, and quality to make the files small, hoping that would help in some way. Who knows?” Another crew member tapped him on the shoulder and Lenning nodded. “Need to go. It looks like time to cycle down.” He put on a mask and began to breathe through it before clicking off the video.

  It was a video from after they’d become stuck in with the Lusca in the cave. There weren’t many, and they got less frequent as Cass checked the dates. She clicked on another a few days later.

  “We’re still good on oxygen. Using the backup tanks has helped, as has the recycler.” Lenning picked up the camera and moved it, causing the video to shake wildly. “I’ve kicked up the rez on this recording to show you something.” The video finally settled on another screen. “Sorry I can’t get an angle on this through a portal. We’ve only been here a few days, and…” He adjusted the camera again. “...can you see that?” The camera focused and Cass could see the shape of one of the slags that had attacked the crew of the Adamant. “We’ve only been here a few days and these weird black coral-like formations have begun to appear on the legs and other parts of the Cudgel. No idea what they are.” The screen came into focus a little more crisply. “We’re not sure what to do about them.”

  Cass clicked over to the monitors to see how the others were doing. She noticed Rina’s head bobbing with the motion of the ship and heard loud snoring sounds coming from her vicinity. The feed from Takis showed he and his brother playing a training game together and laughing their asses off. Jakob was watching a video about the construction of the Cudgel and, nodding off as best he could. Cass didn’t mind them sleeping, she hoped they would all nod off at some point. The last few days was nerve-wracking and she couldn’t imagine anyone had managed more than a couple of hours a night.

  A new face appeared on the next video. It was a younger man, red-faced and anxious.

  “This is Corporal William Clay. Uh… Lenning started these messages and felt they were important, so I think someone should take over for him now…” Clay looked off to the right for a moment, then leaned in and turned the video off.

  A voice in her ear startled Cass and she stopped the videos.

  “Cass, it’s Linden. How are you holding up?” A soft line of static settled in after he spoke.

  “Good. Not great,” Cass said. “I think everyone will do what they can.”

  “Sleep?”

  She knew he could monitor everything about her at the moment and could see she wasn’t or hadn’t slept. “Some of the crew, but I haven’t managed any myself.”

  “Try. You’ve got a few hours ahead of you. You will pass right over a naval base that got hit by the Lusca earlier, but it looks like you are good on energy thanks to the solar and wind collectors, so there won’t be any need to stop.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the updates.”

  The line went quiet again and sleep sounded like a good idea again, but she wanted to try a couple more videos.

  “Staff Sergeant Joann Leeds. I’ve reviewed the previous videos. I’ll fill in the gaps from the last week or so.” She was very matter of fact in her tone, her voice even and professional. “We investigated the lifeforms on the hull by launching a small tethered drone to observe them. No response from them to light or to a light collision by the drone. As unnatural as they seemed, we had to assume it was some form of reef life.” Here she actually paused and swallowed. “We have supplies, but the air is so dry.” Leeds started coughing. “Every morning, my throat is like I’ve been gargling a mouthful of sand.” She started to talk again but couldn’t. She held up a finger for the viewer to wait. But then shook her head and switched off the camera.

  Leeds came back for the next video, recorded nearly two days later.

  “We decided that some of us should suit up and swim for the surface, in the hopes that we could get a signal off, light a beacon without the creature’s interference, or something. We sent out a team of four. They were set upon by these… things that are clinging to the Cudgel’s hull. They attacked so suddenly that we weren’t able to seal all of the hatches fast enough. Lenning was on his way back, and at least one of these coral things managed to get into the airlock. Lenning didn’t make it.

  Cass cycled back and listened to the first recorded message from the day. It turned out to be something she’d already heard.

  “Strike Base, this is A-9. Listen, we’re seeing some kind of object on radar. No idea what it is. Running identifiers now.”

  “A-9, this is Strike Base. Can you get a visual?”

  “Negative Strike Base. Not exactly. All we can make out visually is some sort of shadow beneath the waves that seems to be approaching us from the opposite direction.”

  “A-9, you are authorized to take any evasive or defensive moves you deem necessary.

  “Affirmative Strike Base”

  48

  The combined military forces decided that the best way to handle the situation was to throw more high-tech weaponry at the monster. The Navy launched the aircraft carrier Genero from the Gulf of Fresno with two destroyers as an escort. The Genero was a low altitude hovercraft that floated nearly one hundred feet above the ocean. It used the latest technology in its forward guns, using liquid metal munitions in concert with magnetic propulsion, while firing laser-guided mini-missiles from its belly cannon. Though still stuck moving through the water, both of the destroyers were equipped with advanced designs to cut through the sea at higher speeds than past models. In addition, they had fast attack boats prepared to do whatever they could.

  The Air Force sent in a drone bomber squadron, coordinated to attack just as the fleet was set to arrive. All were unmanned craft originally meant for airstrikes during the war in the Circle’s home territory and the mountains and hills nearby. The ordinance was meant to drill down past bunker defenses and explode deep in the ground, destroying any assets hidden there.

  Linden asked if they had more. He asked if the group leaders would keep a mile or so away from the target. He asked if they had a plan based on what they learned from the Montenegro and from the Adamant’s crew.

  He was brushed aside by pretty much everyone, in the case of the Air Force; they wouldn’t take the time to hear him out, not even a little bit. He stopped trying. He got on his borrowed motorcycle, and dashed down the road to the hotel he’d rented as a base of operations in the town of Oceanside.

  He keyed into his room and found Holli there, alternately staring at the laptop she’d brought with her, and then at the television, tuned to the news channels. The door between their rooms was open, and extension cords snaked from one side to the other.

  “Anything?” Linden asked. He tossed a bag with sandwiches in it onto the table near the ice bucket.

  “The damn TV hasn’t said shit. Nothing about ships sinking, nothing about a giant monster, and certainly nothing about a giant robot.” Holli unwrapped a sandwich and bit into it.

  “What? It’s what you wanted, right?” He pulled a note out of his pocket and read it. “Tuna salad, lettuce, tomato, no onion, on lightly toasted Italian bread.”

  “You got it right.”

  It took a second but Linden was sure he understood. “You’re starting to think I’m not such an ass, aren’t you? You may even be thinking I’m kind of cool.”

  “Cool? You got a sandwich order right. Let’s not get carried away,” Holli said.

  Linden held his hands up in surrender. “
What about the Cudgel?”

  “They have been practicing for a half hour or so.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Kind of early to say,” Holli said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re doing simulations.” Holli reached over and unplugged her headphones, and the sound feed from the Cudgel came flooding out of the speakers.

  “Jesus, Jakob. Plant your damn feet, we nearly stumbled into that cliff,” Ozzie shouted.

  “Come down here and I’ll plant my foot up your ass.” Jakob sounded frustrated and serious.

  “Guys, we’re huge. Fuck the cliff. What’s it going to do to us?” Takis was anything if not tactful.

  The feed began to melt into one big voice—a huge cussing hiss of acidic aggression. “Turn it down,” Linden said. He walked over to the window and pulled the curtain. The good thing about the small hotel was that they had windows that overlooked the bay. He could see every ship that left the nearby base, and everything that came in.

  “Hey, maybe you should wake up Tsui?”

  “He’s asleep again?”

  “Yeah. He really didn’t bitch much after you left,” Holli said. “Just that he was hungry.” Holli focused on the bag that Linden had brought back. “You did bring him food, right?”

  He hadn’t. The turmoil with the military had made him forget the other reason he’d left the hotel. “Of course.” He scowled at Holli and held up the sandwich in his hand. “This one. This is his. I ate mine on the way back from the base.”

  “I think I was very helpful getting us here and you could use my help with the Lusca when the time comes,” Tsui yelled from the other room. “May I eat with the handcuffs off?”

  Linden looked at Holli and she nodded affirmative. She also showed him she had a pistol strapped to her ankle, then put it back.

  “Fine.” Linden cautiously unlocked the cuffs. After he was free, Tsui rushed into the other room and grabbed the sandwich. He smelled it. Unwrapped it slowly and smelled some more. “Do you know what kind of stuff we get in that prison?”