The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  “I know. I was there.”

  The rest of the team began to file out, slowing down only to wait for Cass to step in. She’d been standing at the door, but Martin had no idea for how long. They all nodded, but said nothing to her.

  66

  “Seems like they’re not too fond of you,” Martin said.

  “It’s kind of a bad time to judge how people feel about each other right now, Martin. I think we’ll be fine, given enough time and distance.” Cass sat down with a thump on the plastic-covered chair in the corner. “It looked more like they had an issue with you. So thanks for taking the heat off of me just a little.”

  Martin laughed weakly.

  “Looks like you’re not dead,” Cass said. “That’s a good thing.”

  “Depends on who you ask, I guess.” Martin adjusted himself in his bed and looked away from Cass. “Right now, this stuff they put on the wound itches like a mother. And…” He nodded toward the tiny IV stuck to his arm. “I still have to lug this thing around when I go to the bathroom.”

  “But you’re going to be fine?”

  “For the most part. They’re growing some kind of tissue to make my abdomen stronger.”

  Cass stared at him for a moment. She had no speech prepared, no real questions, she just wanted to see him and make sure for herself that he was okay. “All right, well…”

  “Yeah…”

  “I’ll see you. Take care of yourself.” She gave him a wave and turned to leave.

  “It’s been suggested that I’m good at that,” Martin said. “And I suppose it isn’t far from the truth.”

  Cass nodded, not sure how to respond to that. It was true, but he also took good care of his crew, was generous with the splits he gave them of the treasure or finder’s fees. He may have been self-centered, but selfish wouldn’t have been the word she would have used.

  “Thank you.” Martin shifted in his bed, still not exactly looking Cass in the eye. “I wanted to say thanks for everything you did. I know that put you in a bad position. You could have said no and none of this would have happened.” He quickly moved on from his apology. “Do you know what they’ll do with you?”

  It was a question that she mulled over all the way to the hospital, but really it was impossible to tell. “I don’t know. They could make an example of me, but I would imagine they will try to keep as much of this as quiet as possible. I could be their hero, if they decide to make me one. There’s been a job open in Geneva for some time. I suppose they could give me that position if they really wanted to sweep me under the rug for a while.” Cass shrugged. “I turned in my resignation, but I’m not sure it’ll be that simple.”

  She watched Martin nod a little, but he didn’t say anything. “Well, I’ll let you rest.”

  “I’m getting out of the treasure-hunting game… well; I’m getting out of the field at least. This was kind of an eye opener.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Would you ever consider a less structured, more treasure-oriented position? One outside the agency?”

  Cass laughed. “You mean would I like to be a pirate?”

  “I was thinking more along the line of captain, but you could call yourself a pirate if that’s your thing.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I mean, we have to get a new drone to replace Mister Punchy. Someone will have to get that into shape.”

  It seemed like the least thought-out plan she’d heard since the crew came to her with the idea of stealing the Cudgel. And that turned out horribly in her opinion. “Are you honestly offering me a job right now?”

  Martin shrugged.

  Cass looked out the window at the mass of activity, drones, ships, people scattering to put out fires and help wherever they could. “What kind of drugs do they have you on?”

  “Good ones.”

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Kaijunaut.

  Bio

  Each night Matt Betts fills a bathtub full of pop culture and then soaks in it, absorbing it through every pore. It’s not pretty. The Ohio native is the author of the novels Odd Men Out and Indelible Ink, as well as the speculative poetry collections Underwater Fistfight and See No Evil, Say No Evil. He lives in Columbus with his wife and their two boys.

  Chapter One: Crashing into the Cosmos

  1

  “This is totally ridiculous. I’m gonna die.”

  Cole followed his wife, Emily, and C.C. into the DSMU dock. He hoped he wouldn’t die. He didn’t want to die. He had so much to live for: a beautiful and highly intelligent wife, his family, his xenolinguistic studies, and a vintage collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Maybe it wasn’t a life for everyone, but it was one he enjoyed, and he didn’t like the idea of how dying would negatively impact his ability to enjoy that life.

  The rest of the crew, Mathieu and Anna, were already in the dock and suited up in their Advanced eXploration Environmental Survival (AXES) suits. The closed-in room was full of large, floor-to-ceiling, white-and-black domed structures set into concave platforms. Cole thought they looked like giant dinosaur eggs set into satellite dishes.

  The airlock shut and sealed behind them. From this point forward, there was only one way out of this room: exploding out of the spacecraft.

  Cole took a deep breath. He pulled on his AXES suit. The AXES suits were full-body suits with protective padding for the joints. They also came with a full-filtration helmet and a small distiller tank. Each suit was highlighted in bright blue markings.

  Emily said, “Take it easy, baby. This will be just like the simulators.”

  “I failed the simulators.”

  “How do you fail the simulator?” C.C. asked. “Isn’t it autonomous? You press a button and then you sit back.”

  Anna said, “Cole pressed the wrong button and ejected himself from the EDLS before we left the ship.”

  “Oh, that’s right…”

  “Ignore them,” Emily said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Right. Except for the part where I’m about to be jettisoned out of a ship that is itself orbiting an alien planet at about, what—six and a half kilometers per second? That’s three hundred ninety kilometers per minute, which is roughly twenty three thousand kilometers an hour.”

  “Twenty three thousand forty, to be exact,” Mathieu added.

  “Twenty three thousand four hundred,” Emily corrected.

  “You and numbers,” Cole said to Emily.

  “You and letters.”

  Emily continued. “Taking into account the DSMU’s burn rate, that means in the low gravity of the planet, the thrust-to-weight ratio is roughly 500:1. It is the safest landing possible. See, if you have a problem, you do the math, and the math will solve it.”

  “Erratic winds, alien planet with an unstable atmosphere. My words trump your math.”

  “I thought you were looking forward to this, hey” Mathieu said. “‘Exploration is the destiny of mankind,’ you said.”

  “I am. I’m just not looking forward to being dropped into an alien planet’s upper atmosphere.” He rubbed his stomach.

  “Did you take the antacid?” Emily asked.

  Cole nodded. “But I’m not sure it was enough.”

  “You’re cute when you’re nervous. Do you need help into the EDLS?”

  He shook his head. Emily kissed him tenderly. For a brief moment, he held her lips to his, like he could hold her safe and close to him. Like he could hold their lives together.

  She pushed away and crossed the room to her Entry, Descent, and Landing Shell (EDLS), where she pulled herself into the polished metal structure. Like butterflies reverse-engineering themselves into their cocoons, the astronauts pulled themselves into the domed EDL structures.

  “This way to the EDLS, sir,” JEVS said to Cole. JEVS, which was short for “JPL EVA System,” was the robot custodian of the Anchor while the astronauts were away.

  “Thank you, JEVS.”

  Cole had a little more trouble than
his compatriots with climbing backwards into the EDLS. Granted, he hadn’t had half their training.

  “Here we sit like birds in the wilderness,” C.C. sang. “Birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness! Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, waiting on Cole Thomas Musgrove.”

  While the others chuckled, JEVS buckled Cole into his seat in the DSMU. Cole shot back, “I’m late cause I got to kiss the commander. She’s a damn good kisser, by the way.”

  “Stop it,” Emily said.

  Cole said, “I want that on the record before we plummet into history, or to death. My wife’s a damn good kisser and I would follow her to the ends of the galaxy if she asked.”

  “Got it,” C.C. said while the rest of the crew chuckled.

  Emily checked the status of her equipment. The screens and joysticks were all operating normally. She stretched her arms into the DSMU’s revolutionary dynamic chair. It was a multi-axis gimbal chair that allowed the user to sit in virtually any position and move freely while communicating with the DSMU.

  While she completed her status checks, C.C. said, “Hey, you’re not in charge yet. I’m still the commander of the Anchor.”

  Emily exhaled sharply. “C.C., are you going to give me any crap?” Her tone implied a cornucopia of bad things if C.C. responded incorrectly.

  “Not giving you any crap, sir. Just not ready to relinquish my command, I guess.” He cleared this throat and said to everyone: “Ahem. It’s been three years that I’ve been your commander onboard the Anchor. I want you all to know that it was an honor and a pleasure serving you. Thank you for flying with Titan Space. Please place your trays in the forward upright position. Bad jokes aside, I’d like to thank Mr. Dan Deerfield, the CEO of Titan Space, as well as the board of directors, chief engineer Rick Render, and all the hard-working engineers at Titan Space and NASA who developed and tested the Anchor.”

  “Gracias, C.C.,” Anna said.

  “Yeah, thanks, man,” Cole said.

  “Three big cheers for C.C.,” Mathieu said over the communications network, clapping.

  C.C. said, “Commander Musgrove, the mission is yours.”

  “Thank you, Commander Crenshaw. Crew, prepare for EDL.”

  “Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Anna said. “I want to get off this ship. It’s time to see some wide open spaces.”

  “At least as much as you can from inside a DSMU,” Mathieu said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Emily pulled up her crew’s vitals. Everybody looked good except her husband, whose heart rate was elevated. “Cole, I need you to breath slow and deep. Your vitals are too high.”

  “I guess I’m nervous. I’ve never jumped from orbit before.”

  “Neither have any of us.”

  “Technically, I have,” Mathieu said.

  “Except Mathieu,” Emily said. “Mathieu’s done it all. He could probably do this all without any of us, but NASA won’t let him work alone.”

  “She’s right, you know. I met with Director Craft about it. He said NASA policy hasn’t caught up with me yet. Cole, let me give you some advice. The trick is to not throw up on the way down, hey. Because if you do, your vomit will first hit the ceiling, but then eventually gravity will suck it right back down onto your face.”

  “Not helping,” Cole said.

  “Come on, Cole,” Anna said. “It’s ten minutes of the best thrill ride ever invented. Think of it like being on a roller coaster dreamed up by the best minds on earth. It is perfectly safe.”

  “So long as all one hundred pyrotechnics go off according to plan and nobody was sleeping on the job when they installed them,” C.C. said. “Also, there are the five hundred thousand lines of code that—fingers crossed—all work and haven’t been affected by radiation.”

  “Those codes have been checked and double-checked by JPL,” Emily interjected. “Not to mention, we have radiation recovery protocols in place.”

  “Don’t forget, it’s all built by the lowest bidder,” C.C. added.

  “Really not helping, C.C.,” Cole said.

  “I don’t want to make you nervous, Cole, but there’s basically a zero percent margin of error or we die,” Mathieu said.

  “Mathieu, do you want to stay on this ship while the rest of us explore a world never before visited by mankind?” Emily barked. “Zip it. Cole, your blood pressure is elevated. I cannot start the EDL sequences until your blood pressure has gone down. So I need you to find a happy place. Use the words the brain trust at JSC gave you. The rest of you, I appreciate you taking the chance to get back at my husband’s humor, God knows I’ve wanted a little vengeance there myself. But you’ve had your fun. Enough.”

  “Mellifluous,” Cole said to himself. He thought of the DSMU frame at a station at the JPL, hung up on a giant crane in the Robot Assembly Building along with the other twelve DSMUs. Contractors wearing clean suits installed the wiring harnesses, the radio assemblies, and weeks later, the carapace. They would bolt the DSMUs to their heat shields. Hell, they would glue the tiles to the heat shield. He hoped they installed everything probably. He hoped they were clearheaded. He hoped that if they saw something wrong during the installation process, they reported it. He hoped that the testing was as thorough as possible and that all the bugs were discovered. It was a lot of hope, but he trusted them.

  With your life, his inner monologue reminded him.

  Cole stuck the photo of his family between the screens. There was him, Emily, and his sister Clara, who was holding a newborn child. Cole focused while a tear ran down his cheek. “Calm, balanced, serene. Mathieu, C.C., and Anna can go fuck themselves. Mellifluous.”

  Emily watched her husband’s heartbeat lower from 149 bpm to 118 bpm.

  “Much better, my love,” Emily said. In her EDLS, she toggled away from the abort menu that she had pulled up while everyone was razzing her husband. She moved to the sequence menu. “JEVS, you ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “DSMU 1 go for EDL.” She punched a button.

  The others sounded off.

  “DSMU 2 go for EDL.”

  “DSMU 3 go for EDL.”

  “DSMU 4 go for EDL.”

  Emily waited a second. “Cole?”

  “Mellifluous,” he said. She could hear his slow inhalation over the com, then, “DSMU 5 go for EDL.”

  Emily said, “JEVS, initiate EDL sequence in 3…2…”

  “Mellifluous,” Cole said, looking at his family. On his screen Distance from Ground read as 177 kilometers.

  “Oh, shit.”

  There was a loud boom and the floor fell out from under his EDLS. Cole was in gravitational freefall.

  2

  The group of school children sat quietly in the large theater auditorium. Normally, they would be picking their noses and squirming in their seats, but not that day. That day they were visiting an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The astronaut had their full attention.

  Dr. Emily Musgrove, who was introduced as the commander of Exo-Planetary Space Expedition (EPSP) 18, stood in a sky blue jumpsuit on a narrow stage above her rapt audience. Behind her, on the giant screen, was that universally revered symbol of space exploration, the NASA logo. A blue circle of the cosmos with the agency’s name orbited by some unknown space vehicle—perhaps it was John Glenn in the Friendship 7. The acronym “NASA” floated weightlessly among the stars and in between the lines of a bright red chevron, a tip of the hat to the aeronautic purpose behind the agency.

  The crowd of children had just finished watching a short video showing kids building all kinds of things using toys, including toy robot build kits, popular world-creation games, and even the old stalwart, Legos. In the video, the toys were always being used to build science fiction playsets or toy space vehicles.

  “Do you like the toys you get to play with?” Emily asked the room.

  “Yes!” the enthusiastic crowd shouted back at her.

  “Well, these are the toys I get to play with, and
these are the things I get to build.”

  The NASA logo faded, and the agency-created sizzle reel started with old, historical footage of the Mercury and Gemini capsules and NASA’s early missions. The children oohed at the large booming thunder of Saturn rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral. They awwed at the footage of a space shuttle landing at Kennedy air strip. They got silent as they watched space stations hurtling over the Earth and cheered with the first rockets to Mars. In less than two minutes, the entire history of NASA was provided to them in a historical perspective of space hardware: landers, robots, rovers, submarines, drones, and super drones. The footage video culminated in views of elegant interstellar vehicles and finally, the giant robotic mechs. Kids stood up to get a better view of the mechs. Emily smiled from the stage.

  As the video ended and the screen faded to black, a spotlight fell on Emily. “NASA is about exploration. But it is also about perspective.” She pressed the button on her clicker, and a life-size model of a Crawler appeared on the screen. The Crawler was too wide to fit on the screen.

  “This is a Crawler. It sits over two stories tall. Similar versions of the Crawler were used to move rockets over a hundred years ago.” As she spoke, the Crawler shrunk so that it could fit on the screen. The bottom of a rocket appeared to stand on top of the Crawler.

  “This is a Delta heavy rocket, which was the rocket that helped us get to Mars.”

  The Delta shrunk so that it could fit onto the screen. Now the Crawler, which seconds ago was too large for the giant screen, was no more than a small wedge at the bottom.

  “Now we have a better rocket, an Omega. These are the workhorses of the Exo-Planet Search Program, the EPSP. Like with your toys where you sometimes have to build one part of the set, then connect it to another part of the set, the Omegas deliver large payloads into low earth orbit, where robots and astronauts at Space Station Hephaestus assemble the interstellar vehicles.”