Sea Station Umbra

by JOHN PAUL CATER

  “Shh… don’t tell me , Chief, just enter it. What are you going to put in there anyway?”

  “Nothing. Just want to see if there’s anything in there for me.”

  He pulled open the locker and poked his head in.

  “Well, see anything?”

  “Two sheets of paper. One’s an unclassified crew listing and the other’s a Discovery One map.”

  He drew then out and studied them.

  “Only ten of the original crew are left on this list. Li and Edwards are marked through.”

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t change. We have enough problems as it is.”

  Briscoe checked his watch. “It’s a quarter till. Think we should go in?”

  “Nah. I suggest we wait for someone to arrive and show us the entry protocol. Could be tricky. We don’t want to set off any alarms.”

  “Agreed.”

  Sighing he sat in a chair by the lockers.

  Several minutes had passed when a short stocky Asian-looking crewman entered the room, went to Ivy’s panel and hesitated. He swiveled back to us revealing his badge: his name was Yung Ching and then in perfect English he said:

  “May I help you gentlemen? I see from your badges that you are cleared for this meeting. Are you waiting for someone in particular?”

  “N-no. We just don’t know how to get in,” I answered embarrassed at my ignorance.

  “Ni hao,” he said pushing his right hand toward me.

  I shook with a smile not knowing the proper Asian greeting etiquette.

  “Ni hao. Don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Matt Cross. But what does ‘ni hao’ mean?”

  “Oh, ‘hello’ in Mandarin. Sorry. I’m Yung Ching. Dan Li and I were trying to teach bits of Mandarin to the staff to better cope in the new Asian-American culture.”

  Shortly another crewman of Asian descent joined us.

  “Konnichiwa Yung.”

  “Ni hao Umi Shin. Did you get that message I sent you?”

  “We’ll talk inside,” Shin answered.

  Then from the hatch door came another voice, a female one:

  “Well fellas you think you can fit a few more in here. What? Is Ivy broken again?”

  Lt. Williams, laughing, edged into our group of four, cramped together waiting to enter the vault.

  Briscoe quiet until now spoke up, “We didn’t intend it this way, Lieutenant; we just wanted someone to show us how to get in. Can you do it? We’re gonna be late.”

  Smiling she nodded to Umi and Yung then walked to Ivy’s eye.

  “Ivy, this is Susan Pamela Williams. Requesting entry please.”

  Ivy’s eye began to pulsate at about a beat per second.

  “Greetings, Susan Williams. Please allow iris scan.”

  Williams placed her eye to the glowing sensor and waited.

  “Thank you, Susan Williams. Now please repeat after me ‘Thick rain falls through verdant rainforest zoos.’”

  She repeated the phrase and looked at us.

  “That’s an Ivy Captcha phrase. Different for each entry. Just repeat it back to her. Assures you’re not a prerecorded voice.”

  After a second of purring Ivy spoke:

  “You alone may enter, Susan Williams. Others with you must individually log through.”

  I turned from Briscoe as the vault door unlocked and opened. Williams entered a small chamber with criss-crossed laser beams then passed through into a larger room. Behind her, the heavy door slammed shut.

  “We should have arrived earlier,” I said.

  “Next?” Ivy called.

  Umi, Yung and Briscoe entered the vault before me so I was the fourth and final one through. Having never been in a top-secret meeting vault before, I marveled at the security gadgets surrounding the room and the anechoic foam wedge tiles covering the walls and ceiling. On the distant wall was another hatch door covered with foam wedges, leading to somewhere. Like a sound recording studio, it was dead quiet and the eerie lack of echoes really spooked me. I guess it was to keep our conversation from being overheard by unwanted ears but I thought it was a definite overkill. As I slid into my awaiting chair, Bowman began the meeting.

  “First I am required to say if any of you are not currently cleared to receive Top Secret SCI Umbra Z information you must leave the vault now under penalty of existing DOD espionage laws punishable by incarceration for life.”

  Pausing to scan our badges, he continued:

  “No? Then I’ll begin.” He pulled a folder from his briefcase, opened it, and placed it in front of him by his tablet.

  “First of all I’d like to welcome Mica Briscoe and Matthew Cross to our group. Sent down by HQ from Point Mugu they are top-notch divers and as they have recently shown excellent crime solvers too. They are here to investigate the strange disappearance of your friend and crewmate Dan Li. Their mission here is code-named Operation Deep Force but I’ll refer to it as ODF in public.

  “As you may know we’ve just had another accident here in Discovery One and Capt. Bill Edwards is missing. I will not yet call that an attack until we can prove it wasn’t from a random failure. Now, what I cannot overlook is the fact that both men are part of the TPCI group, our Transpacific Cable Intercept team. Within the next hour Cross, Briscoe and Williams will venture outside to the wreck, recover it, and bring the SeaPod’s debris back to Pod Bay 2.

  “Now, Shin and Ching, your workload has doubled with the loss of Li and Edwards so you’ll be busy completing the translations from our current cable attachment but you must hasten through them; headquarters has just issued us orders to change cables starting tomorrow.”

  Their eyes widened with their gasps.

  “Tomorrow?” Ching shouted frowning, looking at Shin. “But we still have ten terabytes of data to process from Unity. Even with the TrueNorth translators helping us that could take days.”

  “Do what you can now then save it for later,” Bowman said. “We’re relocating eighty miles north to the CHUS cable, the China-US Cable Network, for a top-priority intercept. You’ll have a week’s time to resolve your current data before we attach to CHUS and begin data collection. And that deadline is not flexible; several suspected Chinese national spies on the U.S. West Coast will be seeded with code-word disinformation at a DOD defense briefing on June 24. By then, we’ll need to be connected and scanning for those keywords and their internet addresses through the CHUS. There’s no leeway or we will miss the messages. NSA, the DIA and the CIA will all be waiting for our results so if we don’t collect them all hell will break loose. They told me that they’ve been searching for these spies for years and this new sting may work. In fact, we have to make it work. That’s why were down here. Discovery One may be decommissioned if we fail.”

  Lt. Williams fidgeting with her pencil, glanced at her watch.

  “We’ll have to retrieve the isotope collectors as well as the cable tap before then right?”

  “Of course, Lieutenant,” Bowman said, “as we’ve done before. You and Castro will attend to the Z disconnect while Norris, Alvarado and Turnbull will collect the isotope sensors. Just make sure you don’t accidentally bump into each other. But if that happens remember you’re removing a new experimental isotope sensor still under test.”

  “As we’ve done before,” she replied.

  “Correct. Now changing gears: As for progress on our Fukushima mission, I’m sad to report that our isotope sensors indicate the radioactive plume is growing, increasing in strength and moving faster than expected toward the California coast. Our instruments most recently produced readings of 7.1 becquerels per cubic meter for the Cs-137 isotope and 1.9 becquerels per cubic meter for Cs-134. Once these levels reach the beaches they could pose significant health risks for Californians. Because of this rather alarming data, we’ve notified the CDC and EPA to issue appropriate beach warnings. We’ll have a chance to collect new data as we move the station and sample a new part of the ocean.

  “The TPCI mission has been successful in
collecting the requested data from the Unity cable and is the process of translation from Mandarin and Japanese to English. That resolved data will be transmitted back to Point Mugu HQ before we pull anchor tomorrow.”

  Forty minutes into the meeting, as Bowman talked, Williams checked her watch again. Bowman, running through the cable disengagement procedure for the divers, noticed and stopped in midsentence.

  “Got a train to catch, Lt. Williams?”

  “Well no, Dr. Bowman, but we do have a SeaPod to retrieve. Your POD says we start at 1200 hours. We should be starting our pre-dive activities any time now.”

  “Very well then,” he quipped, “Be on your way and message me through Ivy when you return.”

  “Yes sir, will do.”

  “Wait. Before you leave I want to show our guests the Z-room. Follow me gentlemen.”

  He stood and walked to the back hatch door, punched a few numbers into a keypad, and pulled the handle, opening the door to a room that I would call a computer geek’s dream.

  Six ultramodern workstations occupied the room with three large monitors surrounding each keyboard. Four had nameplates on them: Bowman, Shin, Edwards and Ching and two simply had DV.

  “In the event you need a computer workstation for any task, use the DV stations. They’re for our visitors’ use. Our translators use the others for pulling data from the cables, searching for keywords, and translating the pertinent messages into English. They’re assisted in the tasks by sixty-four banks of IBM’s new TrueNorth neural processors courtesy of DARPA. Together they provide the capacity of a team of fifty expert interpreters working around the clock. All of that information is then sent back to our headquarters in Point Mugu via high-speed laser beams floating above us for the review of the task-originating agency.”

  Finished with the tour he turned to us.

  “Any questions?”

  “How do we get in,” Briscoe asked. “You just punched some numbers into the keypad out there.”

  “Since you’ve already passed through the vault’s security lock Ivy knows you’re in the vault and cleared for entry into the Z-room. Just punch in your ID number so we know who’s in the room. You’ll have to use it again to access the DV computers. Oh, and when leave the room be sure to log out using your ID on the keypad after you exit; a loud beeping will remind you if you forget.”

  With that, he led us from the room, slammed the door, and logged out.

  “Now, Matt and Mica, please join Lt. Williams in her recovery of SeaPod 2. I’ll be waiting for your return.”

  Chapter 12. SeaPod 2 Recovery

  In Pod Bay 1, we found Williams scurrying around the SeaPod checking seals and lights preparing for the dive. The stairs were rolled up to the hatch and, in the pod’s manipulator arm, a suitcase-sized object with a pair of long coiled hoses caught my eye.

  “Must be the cutting torch,” I told Briscoe as I pointed.

  “Used one before?”

  “Yes, but not at a thousand meters.”

  “I did once freeing a black box from a sunken Navy plane. Got some quirks at this pressure though.”

  “I’ll let you do the honor then. Just don’t damage the wheel. We have to roll tomorrow.”

  “Now, Marker, you know me better than that. And I promise not to damage your suit either.”

  “Good then button me up and let’s go.”

  As I dropped my legs into the half-suit now labeled CROSS, Briscoe went to the cutting torch, took the torch head in his hand and flicked the trigger. A loud pop echoed through the bay then a bright jet-blue flame spewed forward.

  “Works fine,” he said twisting the valve extinguishing the flame.

  “Coming, Marker. Raise your arms.”

  Pulling the upper half down over me, he explained that I could do it myself using the hand pincers in an emergency but it was much faster with two divers. As he fastened and tightened the final seal locks I felt like a superhero knowing that I looked like a storm trooper; such a refreshing change over my past dives using huge bulky mini-subs. Now I was a human submarine again able to travel anywhere under my own power for hours at a time… as long as I had water.

  Soon we were all in our places ready for flooding.

  “Hey, who’s going to operate the flooding and door controls?” Briscoe squawked from his suit’s intercom. “There’s no one up there to do it.”

  “Got the controls on my console Briscoe,” her intercom boomed. We use them for self-diving but they aren’t recommended for use without a spotter. Bowman knows we’re out. He’s our spotter. Plus Ivy always knows too. She watches the bays with her sonar.”

  I watched her hands move over the console, then she paused.

  “Ready for flooding guys? Make sure to lock your boots in the floor stirrups. Otherwise you’ll wash around in here. Show me a sign when you’re ready.”

  I had done it once before training with Briscoe but the boot stirrups were tricky. Below each suit were two boot-wide pairs of locking rails that required a diver to kick the aluminum boots into them. Then the rails locked onto the boot grooves much like snow skis locking onto a skier’s boots. Pulling them out was trickier. A Michael Jackson moonwalk maneuver was required to release the boots and I wasn’t a good moonwalker.

  Kicking my boots in until they locked I was ready for the flooding to begin. Seeing Briscoe’s arm go up I raised mine.

  All at once, we were standing under a powerful waterfall ribbon of water passing over our helmets into the bay’s center near the SeaPod. There was no torrential flow; just perfectly metered ribbons of seawater meeting together reflecting off each other raising the water level in the bay.

  Only my second time through the flooding sequence, I found myself holding my breath again as the water rose up over my faceplate and slowly covered it. It brought back a fear from my youth of going underwater unable to breathe and finally relinquishing my fate to the pain in my screaming lungs. I guess it was an autonomic reaction instinctive to life for self-preservation but to me it was from my childhood’s claustrophobic horror of the water surrounding me closing in for the kill. It had never happened to me before in the mini-subs but this was different: instead of a small viewport out the front like a small movie screen the Exosuit’s almost one-hundred-eighty-degree panoramic view put my peripheral vision into play, increasing my visual immersion. Diving for me had become an IMAX experience.

  Another thing I noticed was the chill that raced up my suit’s interior tracking the bay’s rising water. I had read from the POD that the outside water temperature (which stays almost constant a thousand meters down) was forty degrees Fahrenheit only eight degrees above freezing. If it were not for the internal suit heater, I would go into hypothermic shock in ten or fifteen minutes. But even with the suit’s thick aluminum exoskeleton around me I still felt as if I were being dipped into a bucket of freezing ice water.

  Suddenly the water noises roaring around my suit ceased. The bay had topped out leaving only a few shrinking overhead bubbles. Those soon disappeared as Lt. Williams opened the pod bay door to the ocean replacing the door’s white surface with the infinite darkness of the midnight zone.

  “Going out,” said her voice through my suit’s intercom. A spinning turbulence that vibrated my suit signaled her departure as she flashed the SeaPod’s floods and left the bay. Briscoe unlocked his boots and drifted upward and outward toward the darkness as he activated his forward floods.

  “Coming, Marker?”

  “Right behind you, Chief,” I answered trying to kick out of my stirrups. On the second try they released leaving me spinning in the bay’s currents still churning from their departures. Now I just had to remember how to navigate the suit as Briscoe has taught me. All by voice command, he had said. Just tell it what to do, he had said.

  So I said, “Quit spinning.”

  Nothing happened.

  Then frustrated I repeated louder, “Cease spinning dammit.”

  Still nothing happened but I knew I was get
ting dizzier with each revolution.

  Next, I said, “Forward one knot,” and to my surprise, my suit’s propulsion motors activated and accelerated me across the room crashing into the far wall.

  Fortunately, I was traveling so slowly the impact did no damage to anything but my ego. I was a clueless fool wanting a mini-sub’s comforting joystick for control. Yet now I was spinning out of control in the vortex on the other side of the room and still getting dizzier by the moment.

  “Where the hell are you, Marker? I hear you giving weird voice commands but I still can’t see you. Don’t think it knows ‘cease spinning dammit’ but it made me laugh. In my mind’s eye I saw you twirling in the bay to the Blue Danube,” Briscoe said, his voice growing weaker with each word.

  “Not funny, Chief. I can’t remember how to control this thing.”

  “Heads-up display to your upper right. Read its voice command list. Stop always works in any emergency. Just be sure to---”

  I figured his intercom must have gone out of range but I wanted to hear his last words. First, I had to stop my sickening rotation.

  “Stop!” I commanded.

  In one motion, the inertial navigator spun up the motors to stop my spinning.

  “Thanks, Chief, that worked,” I said, not knowing if he could still hear me.

  For the next few moments after my dizziness faded, I memorized the voice commands before saying anything else. But I knew the words were there on display if I needed them.

  “Rotate to port ninety degrees,” I tried first.

  That command turned me counterclockwise toward the open bay door facing into the darkness ready to proceed.

  “Forward one knot,” came next. I already knew that command worked; it had just slammed me into the opposite wall.

  Gently the suit’s propulsion motors edged me from the sanctuary of the lighted pod bay into the dark ocean blacker than a moonless midnight. I looked down and saw the lights from the SeaPod and Briscoe moving slowly downward toward the crawler base under the Pod Bay 1 where Edwards had crashed.