And harbor clearing?

That was not a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn’t just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deepwater shipping. That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun. I helped clear Charleston, Norfolk, Boston, freakin’ Boston, and the mother of all subsurface nightmares, the Hero City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of debris imaginable. During the evacuation, when a lot of container ships were trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes. Plasma TVs always crunched when you walked over them. I always imagined it was bone. I also imagined I could see Zack behind each washer and dryer, climbing over each pile of smashed air conditioners.

Sometimes it was just my imagination, but sometimes…The worst…the worst was having to clear a sunken ship. There were always a few that had gone down within the harbor boundaries. A couple, like the Frank Cable, big sub tender turned refugee ship, had gone down right at the mouth of the harbor. Before she could be raised, we had to do a compartment-by-compartment sweep. That was the only time the exo ever felt bulky, unwieldy. I didn’t smack my head in every passageway, but it sure as hell felt like it. A lot of the hatches were blocked by debris. We either had to cut our way through them, or through the decks and bulkheads. Sometimes the deck had been weakened by damage or corrosion. I was cutting through a bulkhead above the Cable ’s engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed under me. Before I could swim, before I could think…there were hundreds of them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I’m not saying I do, because I don’t, but if I did, I’d be right back in there, only this time I’m completely naked…I mean I would be.

[I am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the living dead.]

There they are.

[I look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of the desert night.]

And here we go.

[Choi maneuvers us above them. They reach up for our searchlights, eyes wide and jaws slack. I can see the dim red beam of the laser as it settles on the first target. A second later, a small dart is fired into its chest.]

And one…

[He centers his beam on a second subject.]

And two…

[He moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal shot.]

Kills me not to kill them. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources to clear them all we would. still …

[He darts a sixth target. Like all the others, this one is oblivious to the small hole in its sternum.]

How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world corrodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes sure did, anything organic like cloth or leather.

[The figures below us are practically naked.]

So why not the rest of them? Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway? At this depth the human nervous system should be completely Jell-O-ized. They shouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone walk and “think” or whatever their version of thinking is. How do they do it? I’m sure someone real high up has all the answers and I’m

sure the only reason they don’t tell me is…

[He is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument panel.]

Hey, hey, hey. Check this out.

[I look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible.]

We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down off Manihi. How about that?

[He fires another dart.]

You’re lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it’s all ROV, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23