Sea Station Umbra

by JOHN PAUL CATER

  He then turned to me and glanced between us.

  “Now I must commend both of you for your excellent exploratory work with our strange occurrences. They now seem to be contained so we can move on with our operations and pull anchor later this evening. We are set---”

  “Dr. Bowman, you have a live transmission arriving from headquarters,” Ivy interrupted from her small console on his desk. “Caller has set message security to Umbra ZX, scrambler level to Black. Would you like to take the call? Your office guests are all cleared for the information.”

  Bowman turned to her console.

  “Yes Ivy. Please put the caller through to my desk console on speakerphone.”

  “Connecting…”

  A few clicks and buzzes preceded the scrambler-distorted voice roaring deeply, resonating through the room.

  “Hello Dave? Admiral John Franklin here at SSU headquarters. I just received your images and ran them through our international database of suspected foreign intelligence agents. Two of them hit immediately. The one on the left Xi Jin is a Chinese national working for the MSS, the Ministry of State Security out of Beijing. According to our passport records he is currently still in China. The middle photograph is of another Chinese national Ming Tse Tao who has visited the U.S. on temporary B1 visas numerous times negotiating for various China-US or CHUS transpacific cable repair contracts. We suspect him of counterintelligence activities during those trips. Finally, the third image on the right is of U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Dan Li, honor graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in 2012 and according to our records Dave he is now serving as a crewman on Sea Station Umbra. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Admiral, that is correct.”

  “May I ask how you came by these photographs, Dr. Bowman? The men all look deceased”

  “Yes sir, that is also correct. They are deceased.”

  “Then please explain why I’m holding the photographs of three dead men: one a USNA honor graduate and the other two known foreign spies”

  “Well, Admiral, it’s a long story.”

  “I have plenty of time. Try me.”

  “A few hours ago a Chinese mini-sub disguised as a sperm whale calf crashed into the station’s base. It did little harm to Discovery One but killed the three occupants of the whale-ship. Those are the men in the pictures. We suspect Li was taken captive on a service dive and used as a guide for their subversive activities against us.”

  “Wait. Whale-ship? Why did it crash? Was it a suicide mission?”

  “No, Admiral, we don’t think so. It went down under the control of a strange monopole object on the ocean floor near Pod Bay 2 and lost power suffocating the men inside. The whale-ship is still intact minus the cockpit bubble but it can be reattached.”

  Admiral Franklin took a moment to reply.

  “Dave, you do realize your story sounds rather fantastical don’t you? Have you checked your station’s air supply for impurities? Like cannabis? Or maybe your drinking water for hallucinogens?”

  “N-No, Admiral, it’s all true. Some very weird things are happening down here in addition to the Chinese espionage attempts. We’ve already lost our ROV and Edwards’ SeaPod to its power. All collecting down there around the monopole. Our clocks tick backward around it and it’s getting stronger by the hour.”

  Again a pause.

  “Hold a minute, Bowman. I need to check something.”

  “Sure, Admiral, I’ll be here.”

  Bowman’s description of our situation sounded as incredulous to me as the Admiral had suggested but it was really happening. I wanted to comment in Bowman’s defense but then Franklin might think we were all batty.

  Chapter 17. Code Deep Black

  The next voice from the speaker was Ivy’s, surprising us all.

  “Changing scrambler sequencing code to Deep Black at the Admiral’s request. Reconnecting….”

  “Dr. Bowman, I now understand your situation down there. I want you to postpone your station’s departure to the CHUS cable for a few days. I’ll be flying out with a particle accelerator physicist and arrive over your station in four hours around ten-hundred hours. While I realize I am violating your station’s daylight access rules, considering the urgency I feel it necessary. Can you send that beautiful Lieutenant Williams to pick us up as she’s done before? She supports my belief in mermaids in the sea.”

  I looked at her for a reaction and saw her blush. She smiled and nodded affirmatively then whispered, “What a prick.”

  “But why Admiral?” Bowman asked. “Everything’s back under control now. We don’t need your help.”

  “You may think not, Dr. Bowman, but you do. I just remembered a worldwide emergency alert our agency received a few days ago from the International Physics Consortium. That alert was issued to all world governments at the highest Code Deep Black security level. It may concern your station.”

  “Now you have my interest, Admiral. Can you tell me more?”

  “Yes. That’s why I switched the scrambler level, Dave. I think your station may be in grave danger. Two days ago CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland managed to create and physically contain an elusive Higgs boson, or God Particle, suspending it in a superconducting magnetic plasma. It was placed in a hundred-ton lead pig for transport from Geneva to the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Menlo Park for verification. The pig was then loaded onto a Super Galaxy C5M cargo plane and sent on an easterly route to the California lab to avoid flying over populated areas.

  “Everything was fine after it left Switzerland including an in-flight refueling over the Pacific north of Hawaii but soon after that things went drastically wrong. The escorting fighter planes reported that it began to drift off course to the south and from what I can tell head in your direction. Then in mid-air it just vanished taking one of the escorting planes with it. The remaining escort pilot who’s now in a mental ward for psychiatric evaluation said it started melting in on itself becoming smaller and smaller until it just disappeared. Simultaneously he saw his buddy’s fighter, which was flying nearer the C5, begin to dissolve in the air and swirl like a whirlpool into the melting C5 before it also disappeared.”

  “And you thought my story was weird, Admiral. That’s one hell of a doozy,” Bowman said writing on a notepad.

  “So, Admiral, do you think the plane’s debris went down near here?”

  “According to its last radar sighting, yes. Very close to where you are. And, here’s the kicker to that story. The few particle physicists that finally did manage to believe his story claimed that the plane exhibited spaghettification and they estimated an object smaller than a BB weighing around 400 tons fell out of that reaction into the ocean. They also said that it will continue to absorb mass and energy spaghettifying everything around it and glowing with particle interactions until it becomes unstable and finally goes black-hole… but that may take years or even centuries.”

  As Bowman sat frantically scribbling notes, I looked at the Chief sitting wide-eyed staring at the Ivy console and whispered:

  “No wonder it didn’t move when you kicked it, Chief. It’s a mountain in a BB.”

  Shaking his head he scoffed, “More like a volcano in a BB.”

  I had heard of the term spaghettification before on a Science documentary hosted by Morgan Freeman and it truly tweaked my imagination. But that was in a theoretical world full of wormholes, quarks and black holes safely across the cosmos from my reality. To learn that such a physical anomaly could be pulled into existence by some manmade creation on the other side of the world shook me to my core. We were hastily delving into a no-man’s land of science and beginning to feel the consequences of those ventures, leaving us helpless against the perils of our own scientific curiosity.

  “Are you there, Dave?”

  “Yes Admiral. I’ll be awaiting your arrival. I do think we could use your help. Thank you.”

  “Fine, Dr. Bowman. See you soon.”

  With Franklin’s sign-off, Bowman read
over his notes and directed his attention to us.

  “Lieutenant Williams, please prepare SeaPod 1 for a surface dive commencing at 0930 hours. You’ll pick up the Admiral and his guest as he requested at 1000 hours and be on time. We don’t want them floating in the waves for more a few minutes. See if you can track the helicopter in and forget the daylight rules. We’re disconnected from everything so we can roll at a moment’s notice if we need to.”

  Addressing Ching, he continued:

  “Yung, please see that our DV terminals in the Z-room and in Quad 2 are booted up and working. They’ll probably want to examine your recent translations so tidy them up a bit if you can. Also clear Edwards’ and Li’s quarters of personal items and send them up to storage on Deck 4 then prepare their rooms for visitors. They’re the only two empty berths on Deck 2 and I don’t really want to send them up to Deck 3 with the support crew.”

  “Now Matt,” he said looking at me, “I would like for you and Mr. Briscoe to inspect the whale-ship for anything I might have missed. If you see any new technology, take it and save it for analysis. I plan to replicate those Mandarin symbols from Li’s suit all over the whale ship and release it back to the depths. That should really piss them off.”

  “Good for you, Dave,” I said. “If and when they find their ship we should be in another part of the ocean far away. Can we do anything else in preparation for your guests?”

  “No. Not really. Bringing in that Chinese sub was quite an accomplishment. Go rest on your laurels before they get here. I’m sure it will be all assholes and elbows down here after that.”

  The meeting broke up minutes later and the Chief and I headed back into Pod Bay 2 to search the whale-ship for additional evidence. Ching had stayed behind in the Z-room moving among the high-security terminals preparing them for our new guests. Williams had veered off in the core room on her way to Quad 1 saluting us as she left.

  “See you guys later.”

  The ladder down into Pod Bay 2 led us back to the whale-ship appearing eerily like a slaughtered bloodless cetacean laying across the pod bay floor. Making things stranger, the room had begun to take on a foul odor we assumed to be from the still-uncovered dead bodies in the corner of the bay.

  “We need some body bags,” said Briscoe.

  “Well just hop in your cruiser and race down to precinct headquarters and get a few. I’ll wait here,” I joked.

  “No. Seriously, Marker, what do you suggest we do with them?”

  “I see no harm in leaving them here for another few hours until Franklin arrives. He may want to examine them himself.”

  “From the sound of his conversation with Bowman they will probably be the last thing he wants to see. But you’re right. We’ll give him the choice.” He put his hand to his head for a moment then added, “But he probably will want to see this ship. Maybe want to snap a few photos to take back with him. It all needs to be here. According to my rules we don’t mess with the scene of a crime.”

  “Well I’m afraid that ship has already sailed, Chief, when we moved it from the crash site into this bay. No telling what evidence we lost with that decision.”

  Sighing, he bent over and reentered the whale-ship’s cockpit.

  “I going in to see if I can find Li’s notebook that went missing with him according to the crew’s last accounts.”

  “Yeah I remember that. And how did that extra person get into the station before he disappeared. That’s yet to be explained by anything we’ve found. See if you can find evidence of that. I’m going back to examine Li’s clothes and pockets for more clues. Maybe he left a note.”

  Back with the bodies, I held my breath to keep from throwing up. Lt. Li’s face was distorted with the blood drained out and his pupils were dark holes with almost no iris showing. I quickly drew his eyes shut and began checking his pockets. After searching his coat and shirt pockets and finding nothing, I tried his jeans. From the left hip pocket, I withdrew a small folded piece of paper that seemed to be a page from a notebook. Quickly I dropped the note into my jumpsuit pocket and headed back to tell Briscoe.

  Subtly at first from the pod bay’s closed door, a bizarre moaning noise swept over the bay. An ominous sound I had heard before and dreaded, it gave me goose bumps and shudders that ran up my spine.

  “Did you hear that?” said the Chief, startled, poking his head out from the whale-ship’s cockpit.

  “What? That mournful growl? Hell yeah, I heard it. It’s the same sound I hear when I accidentally scrape my sub’s hull on a hidden ocean boulder.”

  Listening for more he stood motionless as I joined him by the sub. Shortly a high-pitched screeching noise like metal scraping metal reverberated through the bay.

  “That must be some big ass whale out there scraping its barnacles off,” he said. “Sounds like giant fingernails scraping a billboard-size blackboard. Sends chills up my spine.”

  “Me too. Except I always anticipate the final crunch of a collision with a dock or another ship.”

  “In my realm it’s always car versus car or 18-wheeler. Same sound but much faster and there are usually casualties involved.”

  Drifting down from Quad 2 through the pod bay’s open hatch, Ivy’s pleasant but firm voice echoed.

  “Alerting Condition Yellow! Repeat the station is now in Condition Yellow! I am detecting an unusual vibration in the station near Pod Bay 2 but there are no sonar signatures showing near the dome. This is a non-sequitur condition. Divers please investigate. Message will be repeated in five minutes.”

  Chapter 18. Dali Actualized

  “There’s our call, Marker. Let’s go. SeaPod 1 okay with you?”

  “Oh, but of course Chief. I’m driving though. You attend to the siren and PA.”

  We flew up the ladder through Quad 2 then the core room and into Quad 1 in seconds. Shortly we were in SeaPod 1 waiting for the bay to flood.

  Watching the pod bay door open into blackness, I wondered what we would find out there. Another crashed whale-ship? A sperm whale knocked unconscious by impact? Or something else. That something else worried me the most.

  Slowly I brought the SeaPod out of the bay and steered to starboard toward bay number 2 while maintaining a safe distance from the floor to avoid the monopole lying twenty meters ahead of us.

  “See anything yet, Chief?” I asked

  “Just midnight as usual. And maybe a few anglerfish off in the distance fishing for a meal. Wish I could be fishing for a meal right now on Big Bear Lake.”

  “What? And miss all this fun?”

  “Yes. I’d do it in a second. And since our mission here seems almost complete I’m already smelling the mountain pines and tasting the cold beer flowing down my throat.”

  “Oh stop it, Chief. You’re making me smell steaks grilling over a roaring wood fire. And that’s impossible in this sealed plastic bubble. Now pull yourself back to reality and find out what’s causing those sounds. Check the tractor frame and see if there’s anything rubbing against it. It has to be huge to create those grinding vibrations we heard and felt.”

  Briscoe went silent for moments peering out and down through the bubble. Then he jerked in his seat and pointed downward to the location where I expected the monopole to be.

  “Down there,” he said, “Where the ROV once was---”

  “What do you mean ‘where it once was?’” I interrupted.

  “There is something by the monopole but it’s not the ROV. Looks like a wax model of it that’s been in the heat too long. That quarter-ton pound ROV is melting flowing across the ocean’s floor in a brilliant glowing two-meter-long river of blue magma like lava seeping from a volcano. The water around the lava flow is boiling and bubbling up like crazy.”

  He repositioned himself in his seat and shielded his eyes from the control panel’s glare.

  “Can you turn the floods toward it Marker? I need more light down there.”

  “Roger that, Chief.”

  Carefully while watching the i
nstrument panel for changes I pivoted the SeaPod downward facing into the monopole. With the floods pointing down, we gasped when we witnessed a vision we were not prepared to see. As in Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory painting, objects around the monopole were acting strangely like the melting clocks on his surrealistic landscape. And, as my mind’s eye imagined that imagery the surreal drooping watches were ticking in reverse.

  “Can you see it flowing, Chief? Moving?”

  “No, it’s barely creeping like molasses on a cold morning.”

  “Well that’s comforting,” I said. “We still have some time left.”

  “Suppose that movement could make those creepy sounds we heard, Marker?”

  “Yes. They were weird, Chief, because we probably heard the sounds in reverse like a record played backward. Time is not flowing forward around it.”

  “Oh good God!” he exclaimed, “Look over there at that tractor wheel near the monopole’s glow. It’s beginning to melt too but it’s barely out of round so far: it’s just warping.”

  Thinking back to Franklin’s warning I uttered:

  “I’m afraid we’re watching the beginning of spaghettification of Discovery One. If the station remains here for very long we’ll all be sucked into its nucleus never to exist again.”

  “Or maybe tumbled through space-time into another dimension.”

  “Oh don’t be ridiculous, Chief. That’s impossible.”

  “You mean like the object we’re looking at right now?”

  His retort shut me up when I realized that our understanding of the monopole’s existence was far beyond the reach of any rational imagination. It couldn’t exist yet it did. We were observing a theoretical curiosity actualized into real life: a monopole, a God particle, a singularity, or whatever it was called; it was a physical impossibility. Yet, were drifting toward it slowly succumbing to its power.