“Listen, Specialist, I know you went to all those lab classes full of math and stuff, but I didn’t. What are you talking about?”
She took in a deep breath. “As you go deeper underwater, the pressure gets higher and higher.”
“Okay, I get that.”
“Well, this little, um railroad, whatever it is, this path keeps that pressure minimized. I realized it when I saw Sargon’s readings. He’s not under that much pressure. He’s at least two hundred meters down, but he’s experiencing about two bar—two atmospheres of pressure. Normally, he’d be at around twenty or so.”
“Huh… okay. So what?”
“So, when Cooper walked off the path, he was hit with all that pressure at once. It messed him up, gave him the bends, whatever. In fact, I think it must be worse that than. He shouldn’t have died instantly. Maybe the field itself somehow crushed him. I really don’t know.”
“That’s very weird, but okay, I can see how it fits the evidence. Let me contact Graves again.”
I did so, and I reported in like I’d discovered Christmas for the first time.
“That’s right, sir! It’s the damnedest thing. These aliens have built some kind of undersea railroad… what’s that?”
“Where does it go, McGill? This railroad of yours, where does it go?”
“Uh…” I said, looking down that long, long pathway. It seemed to me that it went straight down to Hell. “I don’t rightly know, sir.”
“Well, find out. March your whole unit down there. Leave a monofilament line paying out behind you, all the way to the surface. That way, if you’re crushed or something, you won’t be permed.”
“Always thinking of your troops, huh sir?”
“That’s right. Get going.”
With a sigh, I disconnected and relayed the good news to the rest of my unit. There was a lot of pissing and moaning and carrying on, but soon we were all marching single-file down that long, long pathway into the depths of an alien ocean.
-42-
“This has to top everything in recent Varus history,” Carlos complained to me. I was of the long-standing opinion that Carlos had remained my friend for decades mostly because I listened to his bullshit longer than most people did. “What, just what, has Graves ordered us to do that was worse than this?”
“Are you kidding?” Kivi demanded. “This is small-potatoes, Ortiz. Remember when we were sent out into the wilderness on Death World to follow Claver around? They called it a ‘deep patrol’ as I recall. Then they left the planet and forgot about us.”
“Oh yeah… but that hardly counts. That was punishment for McGill that we got caught up in. Besides, Drusus ordered that one, not Graves.”
“But Graves blew us all up with a missile in the end.”
“Ha-ha, yeah…”
They went on like that, but I was soon bored. I moved down the line, nudging past people to the front of the column where Barton and her lights walked with a paranoid demeanor. As I passed them, they reacted like I was going to shove them into the field, or something.
“Nervous nellies,” I laughed. “Your troops are whizzing in their suits, Adjunct.”
“With good reason, sir. One misstep and any of us is likely to be dead.”
“Yeah… but we don’t really know that, do we? Maybe it was a glitch.”
She looked at me darkly. “You can give it a try at any moment, sir. Just step over that metal line.”
I looked down at the tracks we were following. The gleaming, silvery metal lines were unbroken and seemed innocent enough. You couldn’t see the effects of the field holding back the water pressure—but you could feel them.
“We’ve got to be about a kilometer down now, maybe more. But I don’t feel a thing. Honestly, I think the pressure down here is less than normal water would exert on you ten meters down. It’s almost like walking in thick air.”
Natasha must have heard that, because she wandered near and started dumping nerd-data on me.
“We are in a low-density liquid region. It’s very strange. Almost as if the water has transformed into an unknown state.”
“Huh?”
“You do know that water has several forms, right? There are the familiar three: vapor, liquid and solid.”
“Solid…? You mean ice? You’re talking about steam and ice, right?”
Natasha suppressed her urge to do an eye-roll with difficulty. I’d noticed that people did that more frequently these days. It was probably due to my rank. Out of respect, they kind of stared and blinked a few times, instead of openly laughing and rolling their eyes at my dumb questions.
“That’s exactly right. But there is another state, one we don’t see often. It’s when water transforms into a kind of hot ice. That’s due to massive pressure, tens of thousands of meters down.”
“Uh… are you saying we might be marching that far? Because our suit-batteries will die way before that.”
She nodded, and her eyes looked kind of glassy inside her faceplate. “That’s a pity.”
I could tell the idea excited her. She wanted to see “hot ice” up close and personal.
As we kept going, the ocean became still and quiet. Overhead, it darkened to pitch black. That was partly due to the sun going down, and partly due to our great depth.
“Sir?” Harris said, coming to talk to me. “I’ve been doing some math.”
“Whoa! Don’t break your streak, Harris.”
He tossed me a look of reproach. “No, seriously sir. Think of our batteries. We can’t just march until we’re at half-power.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re going downhill. On the way back up, the exoskeletons my heavy troopers are wearing will have to work twice as hard.”
“So turn them off
