Location : Classified

Contract Holder : New California Special Action Programs

Every year, due to erosion, consumption, climate change, and more, Earth had less and less farm soil to work with. To make it worse, certain nutrients most commonly gotten from volcanos had a bad tendency to end up in radiation zones, which made them useless to human consumption. There were, however, plenty of volcanos that had never seen so much as a single photon from nuclear bombardment. They were just on the ocean floor, spewing their soil enrichment for the crabs and fish.

And Leviathan ships.

Over the last century, despite the damage to America’s primary economic resource, Bastion, the American military industrial complex had proven conclusively that some engineering problems truly got easier with scale. What came to life from that were gargantuan crawlers they sunk to the bottom of the ocean. With onboard fusion reactors, they could sustain human crews indefinitely, breaking down water into oxygen.

As far as the public was aware, they made blue whales look like minnows, and their primary job was the collection of ocean floor sediment and buoying it back to the surface on hydrogen balloons. Collection ships would come along and distribute the proto-soil to regions facing desertification, and stave off environmental collapse. Mostly in Australia.

Some people were aware that they were armed with hypersonic nuclear missiles, and could in fact buoy themselves to the surface with those very same hydrogen balloons. Just because she had been aware it was physically possible in no way prepared Iris for actually seeing the steel titan beneath her. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“Iris, you’re letting them get away. Whoever is on that sub is who we have to capture,” Silvy shouted.

She growled. “Oh come on, you want to be the one to jump in the water after them? Be my guest!” The vessel, an alien looking thing of black metal and glass, sucked in water, roiling the surface as it began to sink. They had already pulled in the bridge, shut the hatch, and shoved off from the UDS-Blue Key.

“This will be your only opportunity to get them. They could stay on that thing for years if they need to, and we have no way to track a Leviathan. Sorry, Iris, you gotta dive.”

She hesitated. She really thought about turning around and leaving, about not throwing herself into the murky water and exposing herself to the engineered beast below. It made her heart hammer, but she couldn’t bring herself to step back either. With a frustrated roar, she stuffed her weapons back into her pack and squeezed the air out. The wet dock had SCUBA gear, and she shut her regular breathing vents, which forced her breathing back through her mouth and nose. Felt like she was trying to breathe through a straw, but she didn’t need much air for her remaining organics.

Then she was faced with the edge, the splashing lip of grated steel, and that glowing eye beneath. The sub had already sunk down, a mere shadow in the water. “You had better have backup coming soon, Silvy.”

“I’m hoping I can get you the best backup of all, a call from their boss. That Leviathan is US owned.”

“So why are terrorists going into it!”

“How should I know? Jump in and find out.”

“This was not the plan. God damn it.” She dove in. She didn’t need to kick her feet, not at her density. She sank through the ocean and had to fight her instinct to inflate her suit every meter she went down. The water was cold, immensely frigid, as though the Levithan had brought the sea bottom up with it. The saline content changed as well. What she saw was like she was swimming towards the sea floor, not even fifty meters from the surface. It was bleak, muddy and rugged. Dotted with reefs and swarming with fish. It looked like an underwater mountain had broken off the bottom and come floating up, until the doorway opened amid the flood lights. That apertured opened like a camera lens, shooting a beam of blue light up towards the submersible and guiding it in like the pupil of an eye.

The Leviathan had no local defenses officially. Unofficially, it could have annihilated her with combined weapons fire, but the natural camouflage saved her. Had the turrets moved, the mud and sand and sealife would have been broken free and the defense systems exposed. Maintaining that to obscure UAAF scanning was more valuable than killing her.

So, with her little SCUBA set, Iris slipped in before the enormous gate could shut. She hit the aircraft carrier-like deck as they pumped the water out through grates. The tide shifted, flowing across the floor so strong it broke Iris’ boots free of the steel. Her cursing died in the water as she tumbled, rolling end over end to the drain. She it that with a crack and had to lay that until the water level dropped. Finally, she fell to her knees and shook her hair out and rose.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The inside of the docking chamber was smaller than she had expected, barely room for six small vessels. A small crew of men and women in waders came tromping out from doors, only to slow to a stop when one arcing wall turned into a display of a face. The man was old, and his skin so desaturated of life it looked more like rubber than Iris’ own skin. Behind his aquiline nose, he had a pair of eyes so dark and unflinching they exuded authority. He must have been the captain. “You must be the young Iris Haber, of Blumhagen, yes? You are currently trespassing on Leviathan-3. While your attack on the UDS-Blue Key could be overlooked, the American government has far stricter policies when it comes to national security stations. I ask that you surrender yourself, and perhaps we can reach an arrangement.”

Iris made a show of coughing to clear out her throat while she opened her chest vents again. It bought her a moment to try and reach Silvy, but of course her radio signal couldn’t penetrate the hull. She looked around, trying to spot the cameras that the captain was using, but failed. She spoke as she approached the sub sitting the middle of the room. “I simply pursued suspected terrorists. I was acting under the authorization of an arrest warrant issued by UAAF, and verified by the international courts. The US government had the opportunity to revoke it already… they didn’t.”

A squad of marines charged into the chamber, barking at the workers to retreat to safety. They spread out and took cover behind structural supports, shouldering mag-rifles and taking aim at her. As far as she could tell, they were all human; they’d only have human reflexes. She wondered vaguely where the Leviathans even kept robotic units aboard it, or if they were considered a security risk to cyberwarfare. “Miss Haber, my name is Admiral Verne. I am a two-star admiral of the United States Navy and Captain of this vessel.” She figured that once the Tribunal found an Admiral they could trust, they did whatever they could to keep him with the nukes, forever. “You are interfering with a matter of geo-politics, the scale of which you can only imagine.”

Iris frowned. She looked from the marines, to the sub, to the face of Captain Verne. “Are you saying it was the intention of the US government to blow up the Jian Line bridge to Korea?”

“That information is above your paygrade, and I only say this because Blumhagen has a respected history of cooperation.”

Iris dropped her bag of weapons and ripped it open. “You expect me to cooperate with people targeting civilians? Are you out of your fucking minds?”

Someone else started laughing. A loud, echoing cackle that came from the hatch of the sub as a woman crawled out of it. “God damn, you’re being a pain in my ass, but I gotta admit, I love that attitude,” she said, hopping up on top of the submersible. The woman didn’t even make a show of hiding her identification, it popped right into Iris’ visual feed. Roselyn Carter, a huntress from Brazil.

Iris winced. Not because Roselyn had some horrible and bloody past to her, but because she had only gotten rebuilt into a HAB unit a year prior. Everyone in full-body prosthesis tended to have heard of everyone else, and that included the girl who caught the blight in the Amazon and had to get a full-body amputation. Iris knew she had the advantage in experience, but Roselyn had nearly five more years of development in her body. “Not a face I was expecting. Didn’t you get poached to pay off your loans?”

Roselyn laughed and jumped down. There was something wrong about the way she landed. She didn’t hit hard, like she landed before she actually landed. Her outfit was also ridiculous. While she had a truncated combat suit on, which only went to her biceps and thighs, she had a Hawaiian shirt on and a straw sun hat. She looked like she had been sun tanning, despite it being night time, and synthetic skin not actually having the capacity to tan. “Yeah, yeah that’s pretty much what I’m doing. They’ve got me babysitting a nerd,” Roselyn said, pointing her thumb back at the sub behind her.

“This ain’t something we can just talk our way through, is it?”

Roselyn grinned. She had fangs for teeth, like a shark. “Where would be the fun in that? Fighting is the best way to feel alive, ain’t it? Now come on, put 'em up. Let’s see you try to stick that big sword deep inside me, eh?”

Iris glanced around at the marines, back at Roselyn. She gripped her micro-blade tighter. Bit by bit, she cranked her reflexes up. She puffed up her chest, let it out, and had to say, “I’m really uncomfortable with how you phrased that. I like, just the other day, had a sword rammed through my guts. It’s not remotely pleasant.”

Roselyn burst out laughing. “Aren’t you older than me? Are you sheltered or something, come on. You know what, whatever. This is going to be fun regardless,” she said, and snapped her fingers. Additional hatches across the sides of the submersible slammed open.

Iris jerked back, taking a defensive pose as a dozen orbs shot out of the sub and scattered across the chamber. They rolled and promptly did nothing at all. The moment she frowned, they started to hum. Each of them gave out high pitched warbling cries and began to shimmer. Light glittered from them as they seemed to get bigger, and the noise muffled.

“What the hell are these?”

Each of the orbs lifted up, floating like eyes within rippling masses of water like tendrils of an enormous amoeba. Roselyn pulled out a small object, some kind of mass on the end of a wire that she twirled in the air, playing it with her fingers. Electricity flashed from it whenever it swung past the ground. “Aren’t they pretty? Acoustic control. It’s amazing what you can do with the right noise.”

“Stop wasting time and kill her!” a middle-aged man screamed from the door to the sub. He made eye contact with Iris and leapt back inside, slamming the door shut.

Roselyn sighed. “He’s just no fun, and what’s life without a bit of fun?”

Iris could have named a thousand better ways to have fun, but the water drones swarmed at her.