Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust, Page 4

I'll navigate with sonar display, offering 360° awareness horizontally and vertically, complemented by a GPS signal and a home beacon back at the base submarine. Other subs have passed through this area, but even the quietest of them tend to frighten off the shy colossals, hence the long jaunt from the base ship.”

  “Wait, I’ve got a ping. 3D rendering shows an outline that could be a colossal, I’m turning off nonessentials to avoid unnecessary noise/vibrations that might scare him off. My god. He’s beautiful. Altering the pheromone mixture to induce passivity; the last thing I need is to explain an impromptu squid-tryst to Sherri. He’s stopping a few feet from me. Imaging shows his phallus is engorged; wuff; he’s arrived to the party dressed to the nines. Sorry about that, fella, no female mantle here.”

  “Incredible. He’s just… floating in front of me, so close I can, what the hell, I’m touching his mantle. His head is about at waist level, and his eye, larger than my hand with fingers spread, is looking up at me; the colossal has the largest eye in the animal kingdom. And, wait… his tentacle is reaching up… touching my chest. Hah. Observational learning. I’m changing the pheromone mixture to a warning of danger. He’s caught a whiff, and he’s off. By god, he’s quick. The colossal has clubs at the ends of its tentacles, along with razor-sharp hooks along the edges, so he was getting a bit too curious for comfort.”

  “1.3 bar. Danger’s a little higher, and it will cut into dive time. I’m going to follow him for a bit. I still have twenty minutes before I’m at bingo resources, that is, before I have just enough air to return to the base submarine. There’s a large rock formation up ahead, and it’s possible he’s got a little hole he’s staked out just for himself in it.”

  “Wow. Sonar’s pinging off things like crazy, and the visual is just… amazing. I’m stretching the processor resources, so my view depth is decreasing to thirty feet, but in the distance I can see parts of five, six, seven colossals. It’s nothing short of extraordinary. It would appear that the colossals here live communally, which is highly uncommon amongst cephalopods, with of course the notable exception of one of the eledone species, although I frankly can’t remember if it’s moschota or cirrhosa. But this… this is incredible. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of colossals.”

  “I’m turning down the resolution, we'll see if I can’t get a wider picture of the area. Heavens. There are… wait, focusing, there’s a group of them, four or five, dragging what I presume is a sperm whale carcass. I’m going to take a focused sonar capture to get a cleaner picture; the whale has lacerations and bruising similar to what has been observed in sperm whales with large quantities of indigestible colossal squid beaks in their stomachs. Incredible. They killed a sperm whale together. I have to get closer.”

  “1.4 bar. I’m at my maximum operating depth, with no more wiggle room left in the oxygen. Five minutes before I’ll have to turn back.”

  “I’m approaching the rock. Sonar isn’t picking up any kinds of caves at all, and all of the traffic seems to be flowing around the spire. I’m closing the distance to the rock. Sonar’s giving me some, strange formations. Focusing the sonar. I can’t, this is incredible. The, on the face of the rock are circular patterns. If they’re natural, wait-I don’t think they’re natural, they’re- they appear to be thin grooves cut into the rock. What the hell can, what can that mean?”

  “Monstro to Pinocchio, you are at bingo. Suggest immediate return.”

  “That is a negative, Monstro. I’m going to stay here. Five minutes. I’ll meet you halfway back.”

  “Come again, Pinocchio. Can you confirm you are of sound mind, and you want us to pick you up floating?”

  “I’m fine, Monstro. You’re starting to sound like Jiminy.”

  “Pinnochio, this is Jiminy, relay through Monstro. You will return to the base sub now.”

  “Not yet; and you’ll understand when I get back why. Now you’re wasting my batteries. Signing off.”

  “I’m… god, I’m touching the surface of the rock. There are grooves cut into the surface in circular motions. Whatever tools were used, it took repeated, strong cuts to produce these markings. I am certain, certain these were made, not formed. I’m, I wish I’d brought along tools, take a sample, a geologist could study it. We could find out where this structure came from. What civilization. It’s possible this was a mountain on the surface once, perhaps when Africa and Antarctica were still joined in the super continent Gondwana. But that would mean there had been intelligent life on the planet a hundred millennia ago. And that, that’s insane. The oldest possible human ancestor is 7 million years old, and even then, most people argue tchadensis as a cousin, not a direct ancestor.”

  “The carvings form very basic pictograms; it’s difficult to tell if they form a symbolic language, or artwork. And the scale is massive, they must have been painted, originally, because the work is too large to take in up close, but the carvings too faint to be seen farther… hold on, I think there’s a, there’s a tool stuck in the rock. It’s just a meter, there, it’s, it’s stuck in deep. I’m planting my feet; so if the suit tears, well, Sherri, it was, there. Damn, ah, damnit. Came out like a slug, and I nearly lost, it. Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s, it’s a tentacle claw. I’ve seen one of them on O’Shea’s colossal. Jesus. This isn’t right. Colossals aren’t social, and they certainly can’t. But it would be ridiculous coincidence, if someone used colossal claws to etch these things. God. It’s too big. And I need to…”

  “There’s a crease. It’s enormous, and could lead into a cave. Christ. I’m ten past bingo. Monstro’s going to kill me, presuming I can make it back. But this crease. The patterns all seem to lead towards this crease, like the designs all end here, or begin here- it’s, it’s opening. I’m focusing on a sonar pulse; damn, the first came in fuzzy, all I could make out was a hollow opening up. Focusing it shorter, because I can tell from the flow of water outside the suit that there’s something there. It’s rendering- it looks like, good lord. It’s, an eye, larger than the colossal, exponentially. I think I can make out a pupil, bigger than a whole squid.”

  “The pupil’s opening. I’m reversing direction, trying to get out of here, but the eye, it’s tracking me. I need to get a picture of this thing, because it, it can’t be what it seems, lowering the resolution, it has to be wide, wider than any image I’ve taken so far. It’s rendering. Heavens, it’s enormous. It’s building it out a piece at a time, it’s… my god, they’ve gotten around me, all around, me, everywhere, I think one of them just brushed against-”

  Audio recording ended.

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  Support

  Gloria-I miss you and the kids more than pizza, which may seem callous, but you have no idea how much I miss pizza. Oh God, and cookie dough ice cream. They have ice cream here, but no cookie dough. The heat, the lack of cookie dough, I think I may be in hell.

  Call it a roadside bomb. Call it an IED. It’s a goddamn monster in a hole, a trapdoor spider that swallows men and vehicles in a horror of light and sound. Something like a third of our casualties come from these damned things, and a lot of civilian dead, too. If it’s anything like the bomb that killed Kowalski last week, it’s crammed full of shipyard confetti: ball bearings, nails, metal pieces, anything they could find for shrapnel. Kowalski killed himself trying to use a pigstick to soak the electronic components, so if I don’t die today, he may have saved my life.

  Still haven’t had a chance to actually use the vest you sent; we were right to order it a little large so I don’t overheat like some of the guys. And that sweat wicking shirt you sent me works like a charm; I’ve seen some of the guys walking around without a vest on, because they’d “rather die from a bullet than drown in my own ball sweat,” sorry about the visual, but it’s worse for me, I work close enough to smell them.

  I’m better prepared for the work than most of the men here; I was trained to be an MP, and reclassed as EOD when I arrived. Some of the guys we’ve
met over here were reservists trained to hand out uniforms or hold a video camera, and they’ve been retrained on the fly to perform complex knock and announce searches inside a foreign, increasingly hostile country. Gunfire hits the truck from the rooftops. I’ve got my hand on the damned device, holding it in place, so I very gently ask over the radio for covering fire.

  To your question, we’ve got the Armor Survivability Kit installed on our truck, which is good. We get our hands on enough metal to reinforce the armor another foot, but they just angle up the next mine to blast over the top of the armor.

  Our interpreter, “Andy,” tries to clear the area. He was outed as a “collaborator” by someone he went to college with, so he stays in the barracks with us. We have to keep it quiet, because it’s a no no, but it’s better than finding out he got killed in his home. He wants to come to America when we’re done, and we dodge the question every time it comes up; if nothing else, we’re fighting for an Iraq he can be safe in now. A bullet glances off the truck behind me, and digs into the earth a few inches from the IED, and I fucking swear in my head in every language I’ve ever heard, but my hands don’t flinch.

  I hope Sergeant Wagner starts feeling