CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

system had left a dark shadow over the Aquarius, and the importance of remaining
undetected had become a default second-to-none.
This was where Atlantis had died, and the ghosts would never leave. Why the ship‟s
orders had brought the Aquarius there, Hornsby had never been able to find out, and every
inquiry in the purpose and pursuit of the operation had been flatly rebuked by anyone with
even a hint of authority. She didn‟t appreciate being led around blindly by her nose, and had
simply been assured that a rendezvous would take place. With who, and why, remained
mysteries.
A shrill chirp from the sonar stations turned all three officer‟s heads (two of them
mercifully) at once.
“Captain?”
“Mister Mackenzie?”
Lieutenant Kathleen Mackenzie was an oddity – and one that Hornsby had never
been particularly pleased with. This was because she was the sister of the Aquarius‟s most
impetuous Wing Commander. In normal circumstances, the fleet would have prohibited the
two officers from serving together in the same command... but with demands being what
they were, Hornsby had not been willing to part with one of her most experienced senior
staff, and as head of ship operations, she almost never left the bridge. “Hypersonar contact
in the trench, ma‟am. Range twenty-two miles, dead-ahead. We caught it as we rounded that
last turn.”
“IFF? Matching records?”
“None, ma‟am. Solid mass, depth approximately sixteen thousand feet.”
Hornsby felt a rush of familiarity, and a momentary silence filled the command deck.
She hesitated before issuing her next orders, swallowing a lump that had risen sharply in her
throat. “Deploy WSPRS forward, send Curly in for a visual identification... keep Larry on
direct laser relay. I don‟t want to give our position away with active sonar.”
Mackenzie nodded solemnly. No one was saying what was on their minds, but it was
already clear, and there were very few things in the world that could give a sonar return so
quickly from that depth...
“It‟s her...” said an oddly distant, haunting voice from Hornsby‟s side. The Captain‟s
eyes shifted to meet the purple glow of the ship‟s AI. The AI stared at the view screen at the
front of the room, as if gazing in to the darkness at something that her human comrades
could not yet distinguish.
“Ari?”
“A personal matter, Captain, I apologise,” the AI replied curtly, meeting the Captain‟s
gaze momentarily.
Hornsby pursed her lips. She‟d managed to get used to the continuous presence of
Ari in her tenure as Captain of the Aquarius, but there were still times where the too-human
mannerisms caught her off-guard.
Aquarius‟s tiny, unmanned satellites – named Curly, Larry and Moe – moved about
their larger mothersub like fireflies, their spotlights painting the hull as they moved back and
forth, always scanning, watching and protecting her in the abyss. Obediently, they
disappeared in to the blackness of the trench far below, and the tense game of waiting
continued anew.
Aquarius herself never halted, still moving over the black pit below her on her way
through to the mission. That this passage of ocean remained the only way that submarines
could traverse the south pacific west-to-east without being detected sat uneasily with
Hornsby, and the presence of patrols remained a distinct possibility. Even without the three
“Whispers” probes – Wireless Sea Protection and Reconnaissance Satellites – Aquarius still
had three WSKRS – Sea Knowledge Retrieval Satellites – to cover her approaches.
The Polynesian trench was one of the scars left behind from two decades of
ecological chaos, first as the result of a catastrophic geothermal meltdown off the Australian
coast in 2019, and then by Macronesia‟s use of subduction weapons to annex most of the
South Pacific basin. When they claimed the expansive Tongan prospects, the use of so
many of the weapons had reduced layers of bedrock that had sat undisturbed for a million
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