Cooper reported back via radio. “It’s strange out here, Centurion. There are some metal lines under my boots. They look like two rails—like old-fashioned train tracks, you know?”
“I can see them through your tapper feed. Keep going.”
Cooper walked along down the middle of the tracks. “It goes a long, long way ahead. I can see a hundred meters or more into the water. The tracks are straight, and they go down steeply.”
“Keep going.”
“Sir, it’s already going to be work to get back to the—”
“You should have stretched out your legs and eaten a hearty breakfast, Cooper! Keep walking, or I’ll come down there and kick you in the butt.”
Cooper grumbled, but he kept moving. This was, after all, the exact reason why every unit had scouts like him. We needed recon, and he was it.
Naturally, it was a stone-cold fact that ghost specialists tended to die at a higher rate than most, but that just came with the job. No one else got to stand around in stealth suits gawking during battles. Sometimes, a military man just had to take the good with the bad while serving in any combat role.
Things went badly when he reached the two hundred meter mark. The water was pretty clear, and we could still make out the dim outline of his figure in the dark sea.
But something happened. Suddenly, his name went red inside my officers’ helmet, which displayed troop status.
Harris saw it, too. “Shit. He’s gone.”
Leeson walked up and cackled behind me. He’d brought his specialists down to mill around with the rest of us in the underground chamber. “He was as good as dead as soon as you sent him in, Centurion.”
“You want to go down there next?”
“Hell, no!” Leeson said, and he quickly retreated.
I contacted Graves then, and I made my report. I sent along videos and all the data my techs had gathered.
“Very interesting... Where do you think that shaft under the ocean goes to, McGill?”
“Uh… it’s not exactly a shaft, sir. It’s more of a pathway. A trail that leads to the bottom of the ocean.”
“How come no one has ever found it before?”
I thought about the various expeditions we’d sent to this island in the past. We’d never done a detailed survey of the place. “Sir, we only just found out where in the cosmos Green World was in the last month or two.”
“That’s true… okay, you’ve got my curiosity up. Good work. Keep going, McGill.”
“Uh…”
I’d been thinking this experiment was over and done with. I was planning on returning to the lifter and pretending a bad day had been a good one. Graves clearly had other ideas.
“Sir? How are we supposed to proceed? This water-tunnel, or whatever it is, appears to lead to a certain point, and then it kills the guy walking in it.”
“Exactly. You’ve got two ghosts, right? Send the other one down there. Have her investigate and report on what happened to Cooper.”
That didn’t make me happy. My other ghost was Della, who happened to be the mother of my only daughter Etta. Ordering her to a pointless and possibly heinous death might put a damper on any Thanksgiving celebrations in the future.
“But sir, maybe the thin nature of Cooper’s kit is what killed him. The pressure down at a couple of hundred meters—”
“McGill, I don’t care if you send down Harris, or Sargon in an armored weaponeers’ kit—hell you can go yourself, dick-first. Just find out what happened and keep moving. This entire campaign so far is a cluster, and the brass wants a win out of it. Give me something. Something good.”
I accepted my orders and sighed.
“What? What did he say?” Harris asked me.
“He said he wants someone in armor to go down there. A kit that can take pressure—like yours.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
“I’ll do it.” said a third voice.
We both turned to see Sargon. He was standing there in a veteran’s kit, which was a pretty big chunk of metal. I found it hard to argue.
“Leave your rifle behind,” I told him. “Let’s pay out a monofilament line clipped to your belt—we should have done that with Cooper, actually. We could have reeled him back in.”
Soon, Sargon was walking down between the two metal rails. He moved faster than Cooper had—at least at first. After all, he knew it was safe up to a point.
A few minutes later, Sargon’s labored breathing came back to us.
“I’ve reached him, sir—or almost.”
Using the monofilament, we were able to get video. Seawater interferes with radio transmissions, but a direct line got past all of that.
From Sargon’s point of view, I could see that Cooper was lying on the seabed. He was kind of twisted-up looking.
“What do you think happened to him, Sargon?”
“I don’t know. He looks… like he died in agony, honestly. He’s wound up like a pretzel. But I’m not reading any special pressure levels. I’m not sure what happened.”
Sargon turned and took a single step toward the corpse, but Natasha suddenly shouted at us. She’d come up and was watching the video feed like the rest of the officers were.
“Freeze, Veteran!”
Sargon obeyed. He didn’t move a muscle. In fact, it looked to me like one of his armored feet was suspended in the water over the sandy bottom.
“Step back to where you were, Sargon,” Natasha said in calmer voice. “Don’t go out there. Don’t leave the space between the two metal rails.”
“Uh… okay.”
I turned to Natasha. “What’s wrong, girl?”
“That’s how Cooper died. He stepped away from the two metal rails. It took me awhile to figure it out, but I finally—I think I have it.”
“Explain it to me. Quickly,” I told her.
“It’s about the pressure—the sudden change of pressure.
