The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  Shouts came down the hall, each of the current crew’s voices yelling from one to the other, but Martin couldn’t understand a word. The Adamant made a series of quick maneuvers as it slowed and finally stopped, turning slowly back the way it came.

  “Hello?” Martin shouted. “Hey. Ben?” The voices continued down the corridor, just far enough away to be indiscernible. Out the nearby portholes, Martin could see nothing but sky. He heard footsteps coming his way and saw one of the crew headed his way. “Hakim. What’s going on?”

  The tall man stopped in the doorway. “We hit some debris and circled around to check it out. Looks like some kind of craft went down.”

  “Craft?”

  “Probably a large private boat, doesn’t look huge. We’re doing a visual search for survivors, but it doesn’t look good,” Hakim said. He came over to Martin’s bed side and checked the monitors. “How are you? Feeling okay?”

  “You tell me, you know what all that gibberish means on the screen.”

  “Well, I can see your heartrate is slightly low, but not terrible. BP is up. But I want to know how you feel.”

  There was a lump in Martin’s throat that hadn’t been there when he started speaking, he felt terrible, physically and emotionally. “This downed boat? Did the creature do it?”

  “Man, I don’t know. If that thing was really doing a straight line for Oregon… It probably came through here.” Hakim lifted Martin’s hand and checked the needle that fed fluids into Martin’s arm. Satisfied, he put it back on the soft sheet and patted Martin’s forearm. “I’ll let you know if we figure anything out.” With that he left Martin alone again.

  52

  Linden was sure he’d heard wrong. “Excuse me? We weren’t supposed to find it?”

  “We were pretty gung-ho about finding it early on, because we worried about the Cudgel falling into enemy hands, secrets getting out, shit like that. But after the war, we were less concerned. And as the years dragged on, we just didn’t care. Who was going to find it? We assumed it was buried in an avalanche or something. Or crashed and broke apart over miles of ocean. Anything. That’s why we took so many people away from you. We couldn’t close it completely, not just yet. Maybe at the twelve-year mark?” Braun said. “Anything much sooner and we’d look like we didn’t care about the missing crew.”

  Holli pushed back her crappy chair and stood up by Linden. “Don’t you?”

  “Of course we do. Look, we genuinely, you genuinely looked for that ship for years, Linden. You know we went out of our way to try to find it. But we had to stop. Hell, once we officially called off the search, we’d announce a good reward, or we’d hire private search firms to keep looking.”

  “Maybe it would’ve even been these assholes that are in the Cudgel now. They could’ve been handed a nice fat check if they’d kept their noses out of the goddam ship. Now there is all kinds of shit going to rain down on them for illegally entering a vessel against a federal order,” Johnson said. “Shit, it’s too bad your agent couldn’t do her job and keep them out.”

  As the argument continued, Linden noticed Tsui slide from his own seat to the one behind the laptop controlling Mister Punchy. The prisoner slyly looked down at every opportunity at the screen in front of him.

  “That agent made a judgement call. She thought the weapon could do some good now, seeing as all the news she was receiving was about your troops back here getting their asses handed to them by this monster.” Holli crossed the room and pointed at the map they’d tacked to the hotel wall. “First here, then here and now it’s right on top of us here. There isn’t much to stop it after this, is there?”

  It was a mystery to Linden then, whether Holli was in on it. Whether she’d noticed Tsui moving to the computer or if she’d somehow sent a message to him on that laptop’s screen. But she had everyone in the room looking in the opposite direction.

  “If it gets past us here, there’s only mile stretch to the plant and the possibility of a nuclear-level explosion.”

  The men turned then, and looked back at Tsui, who had leaned back in his chair to act casual. “Right, the nuclear explosion that this man told you about. Tsui, is it?” Braun said. “Weren’t you in prison yesterday? I only ask because a lot of our investigators went to your cell to ask you questions about this monster, and were shocked to find you weren’t there. Once we determined Agent Linden here had visited before us, it took almost no deduction to figure out you were here.”

  Tsui looked at them in all seriousness. “Was there a question I was actually supposed to answer in there? There were a bunch, but they seemed rhetorical.”

  It didn’t matter, the general turned back to Holli and Linden. “This is all insane. You’ve illegally moved a war criminal, stolen government property…”

  “More insane than an eight or nine-hundred-foot monster destroying the fleet?” Holli asked.

  Time wasn’t something that the team had too much of, and it was being wasted arguing and sniping at each other. “You were about to tell us something about why you didn’t want the Cudgel found? What does clearance matter now? We are running out of time.”

  Johnson and Braun looked at each other and the man nodded.

  “It doesn’t work,” Johnson said. “It never really did.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The Cudgel was an experiment we never got right.” Braun opened his jacket and pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it flat in his palm. A six-inch 3-D image of the Cudgel appeared slightly above the device. “Look at the thing. It’s huge, it’s complicated, it’s bulky, it’s impractical.”

  “The machine was so large; we had trouble powering it efficiently. That’s why it’s equipped with those solar collectors around the shoulders and cowl. That way it could draw energy as it was moving, if it had to. Same with the intakes around the waist and legs. If it was flying, it could draw in energy from the wind, underwater, the current charged the machine. Problem was, if it were in the dark and stationary for a long time… it was screwed.”

  “That’s it? So it could still put up a fight now. It’s flying. It’s charging,” Holli said. “It’s powering up.”

  There was a rumble in the distance, first a single whistle that disappeared soundlessly in the distance. Then another and another. The ships at sea were firing. In the hallway, some of the soldiers left, their boots thumping on the stairs. Linden looked out the window and saw them getting in their vehicles. They all tore off toward the nearby base.

  “The Cudgel had simulation programs to train us in how to use the weapons. We got pretty good at those trials. Trouble was, they never got around to installing the actual weapons.”

  “What?” Holli asked.

  The look on Johnson’s face seemed pretty serious to Linden. “But, we saw the Cudgel in battle in all those news feeds from early on in the war. It was at the Battle of Timons Square, the uprising in Anders Forest. Those are all iconic images.”

  “They never happened. Not the way they were reported. The Cudgel was there to help in the clean-up and assist with the medical team.”

  “Clean-up?” Holli asked.

  “It has a ton of things that were active for search and rescue; medical supplies, the arms were strong for lifting debris, it could hold a lot of water for fighting forest fires, the shovel was good for a variety of things.” Johnson pointed at the hologram as she mentioned the features.

  “But no weapons?” Linden asked.

  With a shrug, Johnson pointed to the right hand. “The fingers were low-payload missiles. The left hand had a rail gun that shot ammunition the size of my car.”

  “That was it?” The sounds of gunfire got more prominent outside.

  “By the time we got that far, the power problems were evident and impossible to ignore,” Braun said. “We had to go back to the drawing board to figure the scalability troubles out, but the military was breathing down our necks to deliver something to turn the tide. The whole conflict was going south qui
ckly.”

  “So they delivered an inferior product, to buy time to work out the problems with future units?” Linden asked.

  “Why not just work with your allies? They all had working mechs and war machines. Surely they would’ve given you the solution to your problem.” It was Tsui. He was standing now at the computer he’d been using.

  “We were the leader in this tech,” Johnson said.

  Braun fiddled with his phone and an image of an imposing machine appeared where the image of the Cudgel had been. The new thing was wider, squatter and stood on four legs. Gun barrels jutted out at various angles.

  “The Italian Parenti mech model,” Linden said. He’d studied the machines of other countries, thinking that they might have stolen the Cudgel to make improvements to their own weapons, but allies wouldn’t have done it, and no Triad power ever made a mech. “That one was active in Italy, Poland and Germany.”

  An image of the Parenti Mech replaced the first, showing the robot standing, smoking from battle, with prisoners of war marching in front of it, guided by allied soldiers. “This is what you mean?”

  “Yes. I heard firsthand that the Parenti routed our forces in Genoa,” Tsui said.

  “Well, your source was a liar.” Braun enlarged part of the image. “Do you see where this picture was taken?”

  “Looks like a rail yard. So?” Holli asked.

  “The Parenti was brought in by mag-train because the mech couldn’t fly. It was broken up into three pieces, put on the train, brought in AFTER the battle, and reassembled next to the rail yard. See that smoke?” The image shifted again and focused closer on the smoke pouring out of the back of the mech. “That’s not from combat. It was on fire because they tried to make the thing walk and one of the six engines burned out. They had to march the prisoners past the mech to get this shot, because they couldn’t get it to move to them. It was all an effort to boost morale.”

  “Same story with everyone else you’d see with a machine like that; they couldn’t get it to move, couldn’t get it to shoot right, wouldn’t fly, caught on fire, crashed, sucked power to an incredible degree, or was just plain worthless.” Johnson stared at the hologram of the mech on Braun’s phone. “We were the best out there, and ours barely functioned. Isn’t that sad?”

  “But the Cudgel wasn’t worthless. It attacked the Lusca and stopped it,” Lou spoke up. “That’s not a failure.”

  “It was a fluke.” Braun shut his phone and the image disappeared. “It shouldn’t have happened, and there isn’t a way of repeating whatever the hell they did. So let’s get back to the matter at hand. We need to land the Cudgel, so a team can recover it.”

  A siren started howling in the distance and the soldiers in the doorway grew nervous and looked at each other. The sound of boots resounded on the stairs again, though this time they were coming up. A gruff voice spoke to the men and they disappeared down the hall and down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Braun stood up and moved for the door to see what exactly his men were doing. As he got close, another man entered: Lieutenant Ornn of the Montenegro. “Who are you?”

  Ornn ignored the question and looked at Linden. “I got your message.”

  Everyone looked at Tsui and he waved back. “I noticed he was listed as alive and on the base. I just said hello.”

  “We’re thrilled to see you alive. We didn’t know if you went down with the Montenegro or not. It was looking rough,” Linden said.

  “And I am surprised to see you all here as well. I sent you three up north to keep you out of this thing’s path.”

  Braun got up close to Ornn and shouted. “I outrank you, sailor. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, sending my men away like that, but I’ll have you arrested for…”

  Ornn didn’t touch the superior officer, he just held up his index finger to quiet the man. “I just saw a lot of people die because of that creature, and it’s headed this way. I need you to be part of the solution right now.”

  Linden agreed, but it wasn’t so simple as saying it had to be done. They had to figure it out and work together. He looked over at Braun and then at Johnson. “We need to stop this monster, and we need the Cudgel to do it.”

  Johnson looked willing to help, but her brow furrowed as she turned to her superior.

  Braun laughed and walked for the door. “Do what you want, I’m leaving. I sure as hell don’t want to be here for the big boom. Even if you manage to stop it, you’ll all be in the brig soon. This is a mistake.”

  An alarm beeped frantically on one of the computers. Tsui looked at his screen. “There are multiple contacts on the beach.”

  Linden turned and looked out the window. He could see a bunch of dots surfacing on the shore and knew immediately what they were. “Shit. Those slags are here. They’re all up and down the god damn beach.”

  “They’re even headed this way, toward the town, not just the military targets,” Ornn said. “Those things could finish off anyone left along the coast that didn’t evacuate.”

  Tsui sat down at a computer and typed furiously. “They don’t exactly have a plan. They just fall off of the Lusca and destroy whatever they find.” Linden watched as the prisoner started typing away. He walked closer and looked over Tsui’s shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Linden could see camera feeds from a drone similar to Mister Punchy lifting off down by the docks. “That thing isn’t ours.”

  Lou crowded behind Tsui’s computer to watch, while Holli and Johnson sat down at the other work station. They commandeered another similar drone. The video feed from Tsui’s showed the drone’s point of view as it swooped over the trees near the shoreline and closed on slags as they made their way out of the water on their spiny legs. There seemed to be more this time, a horde that skittered ashore.

  His jaw set firmly, Tsui took the drone in and started using it to smash slags with the machine’s fists, punch them with the metal hands, and tear them apart whenever possible. Linden watched the bloody spectacle on the monitor. It was helping, but there were so many of the slags coming in with the tide, it was hard to say how much it helped.

  With nimble fingers, Linden punched in the numbers to reach Cass off the headsets that everyone else used. “Cass? Bad news.”

  “New bad news, or the same old bad news?”

  He jumped right in, not having time to mess around. “That weapon is fairly useless. It was never finished. Those training programs are just training programs. It doesn’t have most of those weapons, just survival and disaster assistance equipment.”

  Cass laughed.

  “I’m serious,” Linden said. “You have to abort.”

  “We can’t. The destination is locked in.”

  “We can unlock it,” Linden said. “Holli?”

  The conversation ended abruptly when the line went dead. Linden looked around for another way to contact her, only to find the computers had frozen up and lost contact. “I’m sorry, we’re out. Something’s blocking us.” Holli started another screen. “I’m afraid we’re being blocked deliberately.”

  “Your friend Braun seems intent on fucking us over,” Tsui said.

  Linden turned to the window at the sound of the alarms. Further out to sea, the dark form of the Lusca breached the surface.

  53

  Martin opened his eyes to find Angela and Hakim staring at him. “What the hell? Why are you always staring at me when I wake up?”

  “Makin’ sure you aren’t dead.” Hakim shrugged.

  “Sorry,” Angela said. “We heard you mumbling and thought you’d be coming around. Wanted to wait a little to see if we could talk.”

  Over on a tablet, Hakim tapped away. “How are you feeling?”

  He was still too sleepy to know how his injuries were actually doing, but could tell they still hurt. “Really? Look at me.”

  “We’re using some of the tech we took off the Cudgel to accelerate the tissue growth around your wounds. It’s going to hurt like a b
itch for a while, but it looks like your body is already responding well,” Hakim said. “That’s good news. We need to get you to a hospital, but it doesn’t look quite as desperate as we’d feared.”

  “Dandy.” It was hard to believe that he was in good shape, when every breath hurt his chest, but he’d take their word for it.

  “You’re welcome,” Angela said. She turned down the sheets to look at the dressing across the wound.

  “Look, we got a message from Cass’s boss, Linden. He says there’s a possibility there’s a control module over on this sinking ship that might help stop the Lusca.” Hakim put the tablet on a nearby table and looked at Martin seriously. “We’re thinking of sending someone over to look for it.”

  He wasn’t thinking clearly quite yet, but Martin was disappointed they hadn’t caught up with the Cudgel yet. A delay would make it worse. “Who’s still on the Adamant with us?”

  “Just the three of us in the room, plus Ben and Theo. Theo can go. He can handle it.”

  “You really need two divers, just in case something goes wrong.”

  “I know, buddy system, but we don’t want to…”

  “Leave me alone here? Christ, what if there’s still pirates over there?”

  “Rebels.”

  “Whatever the fuck we’re calling them now. If there’s anyone still alive, they’ll certainly attack Theo. So he can’t go alone.” Martin looked out at the ocean again. “Don’t worry about me. Ben will watch out for me. Besides, you said I was getting better.” He stared at Hakim as defiantly as he could. “Right?”

  “Right.” Hakim got up and headed for the door.

  “I’ll go with Theo.” Angela stopped him at the door. “You know better what’s going on with Martin. You should stay with him.” The pair walked down the hall and their voices faded.