The Tide_Ghost Fleet

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  This place was the literal heart of the Huntress. Despite the liberal use of duct tape in some places and the tangles of wires overhead, it was beautiful. She felt as if she was inside the guts of a giant beast, and she couldn’t wait to learn how it all worked.

  She was in love with the engine room.

  After the brief orientation, Alden ushered her over to a relief valve on a pump. He’d told her previously that he wanted to perform some preventative maintenance on it. It wasn’t a horribly complicated procedure. After diverting all power to one of the backup pumps, he took out the valve and then let her replace the O-rings and secure the valve back in. He checked her work and gave her a thumbs-up.

  They left the engine room, and Kara took off her earmuffs and wiped the perspiration off her forehead with the back of her hand. She felt a thin layer of oil across her face, and the taste of diesel fuel lingered on her tongue.

  “What did you think?” Alden asked her, brushing back his jet-black hair.

  “That place is amazing. Thanks for taking me down there.”

  Alden laughed. “Glad you think so now. We’ll see how you feel about it after spending a few hundred hours down there.”

  “I’m really going to get to go back?”

  “If you’re up for it,” Alden said, leading them back up the ladders to the main corridor.

  “Definitely,” Kara said. “I’m not a scientist, so there’s not a hell of a lot I can really do to help in the lab. My dad’s not going to let me out in the field as a Hunter anytime soon. But I’d love to do what I can to help in here.”

  “We can make that happen.” Alden guided them into the mess and started preparing coffee. Grease covered one of his cheeks. There also seemed to be a permanent layer of black oil under his nails. Kara wondered if that was her future. She realized she was fine if it was. “But just like those others’ skills, don’t think you can just learn this overnight.”

  Kara took a cup of coffee from Alden, and they sat at one of the tables. “That’s not going to be an issue. I was planning on becoming a veterinarian before. That meant at least another eight years of schooling for me.”

  “It takes several months of training to become an engine tech so that you can do the basics. If you want to become an engineer like me, you better add a few years.” Alden traced his finger around the lip of his coffee mug. “Gaining true expertise takes a lifetime, though.”

  Kara sighed, putting her mug down on the cable. “At the rate this war is going, it looks like I’ll have more than enough time to become an expert.”

  -24-

  The Karlstad had disappeared beyond the horizon, but Thomas would not let it get away. He stood at the chart table in the bridge, his palms spread over the map before him. Cliff Slaton, officer of the watch, gave Thomas a nervous glance from behind his position at the controls.

  “Where do you think they’re headed?” Cliff asked.

  “Hard to say.” Thomas traced his finger over the route the Karlstad had taken so far. They’d punched straight through the Strait of Gibraltar, close enough Thomas imagined he could hear the shrieks of the Hybrids in Tangier. Now they seemed to be on a collision course with the Mediterranean. “I doubt they’re planning on taking us to Santorini.”

  “I could use a glass of wine,” Cliff said. The man looked like he belonged on the beach with his tanned skin, watery blue irises, and sandy hair. His surfer-dude appearance, though, belied his skill as a ship’s pilot. “Even if we don’t get to visit a nice resort, at least we didn’t go north to the Baltic.”

  “A bit too chilly for my bones,” Thomas agreed. “Wherever they’re headed, it’s a dead end.”

  Cliff nodded. It would be harder for the Karlstad to lose them here than in the Atlantic. The second drone was still tracing the Karlstad’s path, albeit at a more cautious distance this time. Thomas had hoped the rest of the Hunters would soon be joining them in this chase, but it seemed that was not to be.

  “We’ve got a Goliath incoming.” Dom’s voice sounded from the radio. “Headed our way, along with enough gunfire to attract a pack of Skulls.”

  “Damn it,” Thomas said. One shitty situation after another. He’d once sailed across the Atlantic in an old cutter. The whole damn time they’d been pounded by storms and rogue waves. That had been an exhausting week. But this? This was worse than scuba diving in shark-infested waters with a bleeding wound. “If you guys need to leave, I can still turn around.”

  “You won’t be here before Ronaldo,” Dom said. “Stay on the Karlstad. I just want you to be aware of our situation so you’re not waiting up late for me when I come home, old man.”

  “I gave up on a curfew for you long ago,” Thomas shot back. “You’re worse than the teenaged son I probably have in some distant port.”

  “Well, I hope Samantha and Chao aren’t getting bored of changing your adult diapers back there, because it looks like we’ll be busy for a while.”

  “I’m not much of a diaper changer,” Samantha said, hopping on the channel. “Never liked kids or old people.”

  “What are you going to do when you are one?” Thomas asked.

  “Already was a kid. Didn’t like myself then.”

  “I mean when you’re old and wrinkly and gray like me.”

  “Don’t plan on getting old,” Samantha said. “It’s why I do crazy shit like work on this crew. Pretty much guarantees I won’t end up like you. Speaking of my work, we still have no indication the Karlstad has spotted our drone.”

  “We’ll stay on them then,” Thomas said. There was silence from Dom’s end. Thomas wondered if he was preparing for the incoming Goliath or if what Samantha had said struck a nerve. The skilled tech specialist wasn’t so skilled when it came to social cues, and with Spencer’s death still raw, her joking about an early demise probably didn’t come across as she’d intended.

  The tense minutes stretched into hours as they stalked their quarry. The drone maintained a healthy distance, and the Karlstad showed no sign of evading their pursuit.

  “If they hold course like this, we’ll be looping southward around Malta,” Cliff said. “Maybe we’re going to Greece after all.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas said. “Or we’re headed to Lebanon or Syria or Istanbul or Ukraine. I don’t much like those options.” Now that they knew the Iranians were working with the FGL, he wanted to be as far from the heart of enemy territory as he could get.

  “It’s a good thing we’ve got the drone to do our dirty work,” Cliff said.

  “Yeah, good thing,” Thomas said, studying the map. Something about this didn’t sit right with him. He looked up from it. “Cliff, would you say it has been remarkably easy to follow them?”

  Cliff cocked his head. “For me, sure. It’s been the drone doing all the work. Chao and Samantha are the two responsible for that.”

  “I don’t like it,” Thomas said. “Nothing in this war has been easy. The FGL has made sure of that. So why are we able to track a clone of our ship like this, all by ourselves, into the Mediterranean without breaking a sweat?”

  “They want us to follow them?” Cliff offered.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Thomas said.

  Cliff considered that for a moment, his eyes glued to the horizon. “Full stop? Reverse?”

  Thomas hesitated. Whether the Karlstad knew they were being followed or not, he couldn’t abandon their pursuit. The ship was carrying enough nuclear arms to wipe out a couple of small countries. Maybe the FGL was drawing them into a trap. But if they turned back now, they’d lose the Karlstad.

  “No, for better or worse, we’re committed to tracking these bastards.” Thomas inhaled, puffing his chest out. “Alert the ship. All hands to battle stations. If this is a trap, I want to be ready.”

  “Aye,” Cliff said, sounding the alarm. For a while they carried on with no indication anything had changed. But the monotony of the chase was soon broken, confirming Thomas’s darkest fears.

  ***


  Under the glow of the laboratory lights, Lauren deposited tiny droplets of liquid into individual plastic microcentrifuge vials. Each of those droplets contained isolated samples of the specialized chemicals they’d extracted from O’Neil’s biopsy. She could’ve had a machine spit the samples into their little vials, but she didn’t trust the automated processes the Germans seemed to love. While the autopipetting machines were efficient enough, if they made one small mistake, the entire batch of isolated pheromones could be wasted. If she did this dropwise, at worst she would ruin only a single sample.

  All the same, it was monotonous work moving one drop of liquid at a time.

  “They say it’s meditative,” Navid said as he sat next to her and performed the same task.

  “Who says that?”

  “My old professor. She used to ask us if we enjoyed bench work like this, and I’d say the multihour pipetting experiments were boring as hell.”

  “And your professor said it was meditative?”

  “Yep.”

  “And how often was your professor in the lab?”

  Navid laughed. “Almost never.”

  “That’s why she said it’s meditative,” Lauren said.

  “Kind of like Tom Sawyer convincing everyone else to paint the fence for him.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.” Lauren inserted her pipette into a source vial with the stock dilution solution. “But I understand the rationale. Grant money is hard to come by. Difficult enough to get funding for a couple of grad students, let alone a piece of automated pipetting equipment.”

  “True,” Navid said. “I cost my professor—what?—maybe fifty thousand bucks a year for my tuition and stipend. But an automated pipetting machine could be a cool million.”

  “Exactly,” Lauren replied. “No problem if you’re a company like this, though.”

  “Man, if the rest of my cohort could see this place now,” Navid said, taking a break to look around the vast lab. “It’s a grad student’s wet dream.”

  They both laughed. The door to the laboratory opened with a start. A few of the German scientists looked up in surprise, as did Lauren and Navid. The scientific lead of the operation, Felix Becker, strode in.

  “It is good to see you two delving so furiously into your work,” he said.

  The smile faded from Lauren’s face. She couldn’t tell if he was sincere or chastising them for laughing. She figured the best course of action was to say nothing and wait for the serious German to explain why he’d come barging in.

  Becker examined the trays full of vials. “Our machines are not good enough?”

  “It’s not that,” Lauren said. “It’s just this is highly sensitive. It took a lot for me to get these biopsies. I felt a little more confident in my own abilities.”

  “That’s what all the scientists and lab techs say before they use these.” Becker patted one of the automated pipetting-distribution machines. “And then once they use them, they fall in love. I guarantee you every person in this room would swear by it, and these are some of the most talented researchers you will ever meet.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Lauren said.

  “You don’t already know? Does that mean you haven’t talked with the others much?” he asked.

  For some reason, it seemed to Lauren like he was probing her for information. Maybe it was the way he narrowed his eyes or how his lips tightened after he asked a question. Maybe it was just the way he said those words through his thick German accent.

  “We haven’t had much of a chance,” Navid said. “We’ve pretty much been swamped with our pheromone research.”

  “That is a good thing,” Becker said. Again, Lauren couldn’t help but think he didn’t just mean it was a good thing they’d been focused on their research, but rather that it was a good thing they hadn’t talked much to the other researchers. She didn’t like the vibe she was getting from him. It was like when she was growing a culture full of cells but sensed something was off. The cells looked slightly misshapen or they divided and grew at a slower rate than normal. Invariably, a couple days later she would find evidence of a bacterial or fungal infection after the cell culture media turned a sickly yellow or a bunch of dead cells rolled off the plate. There was always something bad hiding in those suspect cultures.

  So what was Becker hiding?

  “All the time we’ve been here,” Lauren said, trying her luck, “we haven’t been asked anything about the Phoenix Compound. I’m starting to wonder why you need us here.”

  “Ah, well, it is insurance,” Becker said. “I will admit, the manufacturing has gone much smoother than I had expected.”

  “That’s a surprise?” Navid asked. “You seemed pretty confident in Mueller’s manufacturing abilities.”

  “Yes,” Becker said, “but what I wasn’t confident in was the so-called Phoenix Compound.” He waved his hand in the air. “But enough about that. The compound is a purely defensive tool.”

  That caught Lauren’s ear. “Defensive? It can function as a vaccine, which in my opinion is more proactive and preventative than your typical reactive treatment.”

  “Prevention is not the same as offense,” Becker said. “You see, we’re not interested in just defending our civilian populations. We’re also interested in taking steps to ensure their safety.”

  “Such as?” Lauren probed.

  “Our priority is developing vaccines and therapies for the Oni Agent,” Becker said. “But that does nothing to help subdue the population already suffering from chronic, irreversible Oni Agent damage.”

  “You mean Skulls,” Navid said.

  “No vaccine or therapy is going to help someone who has been mutated to such an extent.” Becker leaned back against a lab bench. Lauren’s stomach twisted at his casual manner, praying he didn’t accidentally bump into one of their sample sets. “We need better ‘therapies.’” He added air quotes with his fingers around that last word.

  Now Lauren could tell her instincts had been on the mark earlier. Something was definitely up with Becker. “What exactly were you thinking?”

  “I’d like to take this project of yours further,” he said. “I can assign a couple of our researchers to it.”

  “Sure, we could use the help,” Lauren said. “I’m very interested to see how we can deploy this in the field. We can put batches in devices like smoke grenades to calm the infected. Make them slower, calmer targets or easier to avoid.”

  Becker picked up one of the handheld pipettes. It was the size of a large pen. “See, you are thinking small again.” He motioned toward a pipetting machine that took up a whole bench. “We must think larger. We must think outside our zones of comfort, yes?”

  “Okay then,” Lauren said. “What did you plan on doing with our findings?”

  “I want to deploy it as a large-scale weapon. Our friends at the FGL were and probably still are planning on controlling massive armies of these so-called Skulls. Why can’t we do the same?”

  Good lord, Lauren thought. Mobilizing the enemy’s weapons against them. “Do we have the capability to produce that much of the pheromone when we’re working on the Phoenix Compound, too?”

  “We will find a way,” Becker said. “But that is not your concern.” He tapped one of the plastic vials with the biopsy samples. “Let me know as soon as you’ve isolated and identified the chemical constituents of these samples. My team can scale them up to weapons-grade standards.”

  Navid stared wide-eyed between them, probably imagining what it would be like for them to control the bastards that had plagued them in their quest to stop the Oni Agent. She took a certain, although probably premature, satisfaction in turning the FGL’s bulldogs on themselves. But even if they did fully characterize the pheromone cocktail, there were many steps to take before translating that into a workable weapon.

  “Do you have access to Skull tissues? We’ll need some samples to try the pheromones out on,” she said.

  Becker grinned, drumming his fin
gers along the lab bench. “Tissue samples? We’ve got plenty. In fact, we’ve got our very own army of Skulls waiting just for you.”

  -25-

  Meredith knelt behind the crates near the hangar’s entrance, her fingers wrapped around her rifle. The rain no longer fell in gray sheets. It had dwindled instead into scattered showers. Puddles covered the tarmac, where a few single-prop planes waited for pilots that would never return. Empty barrels and tanks lay scattered about the hangar as cover. The main door had been shut. Meredith stared out of the cracked glass of the personnel entrance.

  Another deafening roar shook the building. Trees shifted across the tarmac. The blast of gunfire came next.

  “Whatever they’re firing, it doesn’t sound like it’s working,” Meredith said.

  Andris shifted beside her. “It does not sound like there are many people firing, either.”

  The others were positioned around the entrance to the hangar. So far it sounded to Meredith like there had only been a single weapon discharged.

  “If that Goliath gets any closer, it’ll compromise Ronaldo’s LZ,” Dom said, glancing down at his smartwatch. “Ronaldo’s people will be here within the hour. The last thing we need is a Goliath attracting all the Skulls in the area.”

  “What do we do if it does bring all its friends, Chief?” Miguel asked. “Find a new airport?”

  “No,” Dom said through gritted teeth. “We’re going to need to hold this one.”

  With Spencer’s death fresh on their minds, Meredith knew that Dom didn’t want to risk any more lives. She would have to do it for him.

  “Send us.” She motioned to Andris. “We can take care of it.”

  Dom looked hesitant. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Andris gestured at his pack with its stock of explosives. “We are faster by ourselves, and Meredith has taught me much about stealth. We can do this.”

  The rustling of bone plates sounded behind them. “You two aren’t going out there alone,” O’Neil said. “If that thing is bringing friends, I’ll send them back.”