Everlast, TX

Nightmare on the Surface

Colt dropped into his seat at the helm of the Water Bear. “Think it’ll work?”

Gideon shot back, “It’ll take a miracle.”

“Enough with the Princess Bride quotes. I’ve never seen two guys so—”

“Comfortable with their masculinity?” Colt punched up the main systems. “Pilot ready?”

Maddox rolled her eyes. “Ready pilot.”

Colt sped through the rest of the launch sequence. “Big Jeb is going to flash burn the dock with us in here if we don’t clear out in the next couple of minutes.”

“He’ll do it too. I’ve no doubt.”

Gideon switched through his systems check. “Of course the external camera is still out. But everything else looks good.”

“Course to the surface has been charted.” Shasta offered.

“Ready?” Colt asked the crew.

They exchanged glances and Maddox shrugged. “I have to admit, I’m curious to check out the surface.”

“Good enough.” Colt flipped open an external microphone. “We’re good to go, Mr. Love.”

Instantly, the chamber flooded with water. Within seconds, the Water Bear crew found themselves piloting out of the docking bay and into the dark upper regions of the Sigsbee Deep. There hadn’t been time to discuss their current predicament while carrying out repairs on the sub. Each member had to work quickly and individually to finish patching the Water Bear together during the fifty-three minute window.

Everyone held their breath for the first minute in the water—anxious to see if they had remembered their nautical shop class as well as they hoped. After they rose past the ledge where they had crash-landed an hour earlier, Colt let out a sigh of relief. “I suppose we would have sprung a leak by now if we were going to.”

“Yeah, hull pressure is dropping steadily and the welds are holding fine.”

Colt laced his fingers behind his head and spun his captain’s chair around to face the others. “Gideon? Shasta? What do you guys make of the whole Oleg theory?”

Shasta hemmed and hawed before answering. “Well, microbiology and xenology fall within his fields of expertise.”

“A pandemic precision-tuned to severely impact petroleum-based economies? I’d be shocked if Oleg wasn’t behind it, or trying to control it at the very least. It sounds like a movie-tailored plot line to bring down the Texicas Oligarchy that supposedly burned him a hundred years ago.”

“Yeah,” Colt nodded, “those were sorta my thoughts as well. It seems a little too much on the nose.” He spun his chair toward the helm and pretended to fiddle with trim and ballast gauges in order to mask his emotions. He’d lost his older brother in the mission Big Jeb had led against Oleg two years earlier. Or at least, that’s what he had always thought. With Big Jeb alive, along with half the team…

But if the news had been good, would Jeb have withheld it? And why would the team have let everyone in Everlast assume they were dead? Who were they hiding from? The freshness of the wound surprised Colt. He had steadily progressed to the point where he didn’t think of his brother, Randal, every day. Recently, he only dwelled on the loss a couple times a week. But the fact remained, if Randal could die, anyone in Colt’s life could be gone in the blink of an eye—even Maddox.

He had to distract himself before he lost containment of his feelings. “Time to the surface?”

“Forty-eight seconds and counting.”