第15章 First Patrol

Their first patrol was scheduled for dawn, three days after their rescue from the trench. The Shinsengumi surfaced fifty miles east of Iwo-koa, in waters that were supposed to be clear of enemy activity. But "supposed to be" was a phrase Callahan had learned to distrust. In this war, nothing was supposed to be anything. It simply was. Callahan climbed into the cockpit of his Deep Darter, checking the instruments, running through the pre-flight checklist, feeling the hum of the engine beneath him. The aircraft was small — barely larger than a fighter plane — but it was built for a different kind of war. Its wings were reinforced for low-altitude flight, its hull was coated with the same absorptive material as the Shinsengumi's, and its weapons were designed to disrupt rather than destroy. "Remember," Sato's voice came over the intercom. "We are not hunting. We are observing. We are learning. The Deep Walkers are intelligent, adaptive, patient. They have been waiting in the deep for millennia. They can afford to wait a little longer. Do not provoke them. Do not engage unless engaged. Your mission is to map their movements, to identify their patterns, to find weaknesses we can exploit." "Copy that," Callahan said. "Observing. Learning. Mapping." He fired the engines and taxied to the edge of the submarine's deck, where the Deep Darter's ramp lowered into the water. With a surge of power, he took off, climbing sharply before leveling out and heading east, toward the trench, toward the darkness, toward the unknown. The ocean below him was blue and peaceful, the sun warm on his face, the sky clear and endless. It was easy to forget, sitting in this cockpit, flying this aircraft, that beneath the surface, in the crushing dark, something ancient and terrible was waiting. Easy to forget that the war he had been fighting — the war of bombers and fighters and battleships — was merely the surface manifestation of something far older, far deeper, far more dangerous. But he did not forget. He could not forget. Chen's face was still in his mind — the quiet radio operator who had wept at the beauty of the abyss and had then given his life to save them all. The B-24 was still in his dreams — the burning aircraft, the falling men, the endless blue ocean waiting to swallow them whole. And the voice was still there, faint and distant, whispering from the deep: *You are too late. We have been waiting for you. The war is over. The deep is coming.* He pushed the throttle forward and climbed higher, scanning the water below with his instruments, watching the sonar display for any sign of movement. The ocean was vast, endless, filled with mysteries that science had not yet begun to understand. And beneath it, in the darkness, the Deep Walkers waited. Two hours into the patrol, the sonar pinged. Callahan checked the display, his heart beating faster. A contact — small, fast, moving in patterns that were not random. A Deep Walker. Not the massive swarm he had encountered in the trench, but a scout, a guardian, a hunter. Alone. He followed it, keeping his distance, watching as it led him deeper, deeper, toward the trench, toward the darkness, toward something that was waking. The scout ran deep and clean along the shelf margin, angling steadily toward the trench line, and Callahan began to suspect it was not fleeing him at all. It was commuting. Every four minutes it rose fifty feet and flattened out; every fourth rise it swung west in a lazy arc, and the arcs described a boundary as neatly as a draftsman's compass. He was not following an animal. He was pacing a sentry on its rounds. At the top of the second hour he keyed the radio, low power, tight beam. 'Shinsengumi, LZ-Three-One. Contact, single, classification unknown, tracking southwest along the shelf margin. It knows I am here. It does not care. Request instruction.' Sato's answer came after a long pause, the static breathing. 'Your fuel says observe and return. Your orders say the same. Your judgment may say otherwise, Lieutenant, but remember what it is carrying in its skin — it does not need to surface to breathe, and you do. Do not let the sky run out before your curiosity does.' 'Copy. Observing.' He throttled back to loose formation anyway, trading altitude for silence, letting the Darter drift at the edge of the scout's awareness like a remora. Below him the water changed character — the shelf's blue giving way to a darkness with texture, the light bending oddly over a line on the seafloor that no chart admitted to. The scout slowed above that line, descended, and touched it — actually touched it, one limb extended to the seabed — and held there, motionless, for the better part of a minute. When it came up again it was carrying something. Small, pale, wrapped in membrane. Callahan photographed it through the canopy glass and marked the spot with a dye packet, heart drumming. Supply runs. Grave goods. A letter home. Whatever the deep did with its dead, this courier was doing it now, on a schedule, along a road, and the coordinates in his camera were worth more than any torpedo he might ever fire. He thought about reporting the grave-goods and realized there was no word for it in the reporting lexicon. Contact, positive. Classification: mourner. Somewhere in the war's vast paperwork such a creature did not exist, and yet here it flew its little route with more fidelity than most airmen he had known, and he found, to his discomfort, that he respected it. Chen would have understood that. Chen, who heard music in static, who had wept at the beauty of a place that wanted to eat them, would have looked at this mourning courier and called it proof of something. Callahan filed the thought where he filed all thoughts of Chen — deep, sealed, load-bearing — and gave his attention back to the instruments. The scout completed its arc, found its bearing, and started east at patrol speed, and Callahan settled into its wake for the long haul, mapping every yard of the road home.