CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Deep
I watched one of the gray ships move out from its picket and take up position right in the middle of the surface camera frame. Two sailors moved to the starboard rail and threw several bright orange objects over the side. These hit the water and sank fast, plummeting past two of the underwater cameras. Down on the ocean floor, they hit the bottom with a little cloud of sand.
I glanced at Evelyn. “Those look heavy.”
“The water will add buoyancy.”
“I suppose.” Still, I felt a twinge of relief that Korrapati and Wong had taken ownership of this design. I’d been flailing anyway. Airborne dragons spoke to me. The wing layouts, the body lines . . . I got those. A reptile in water felt different. We rarely got customized requests for water-friendly dragons, either. Maybe that explained why I was bad at it.
“Think they accounted for that in the specs?” I asked.
Evelyn laughed quietly. “I’m certain of it.”
Another ship maneuvered into position, this one smaller. Six steel cages sat on the deck. Dark shapes moved behind the bars with the pacing, predatory grace of dragons. They were olive in color, with long necks and slender bodies. That design had worked well on the previous test, so I wasn’t terribly surprised.
“Four dragons will do the retrieval exercise,” Major Johnson said.
The cage doors slid open simultaneously. Two of the dragons dove straight in. The other two seemed to hesitate—or perhaps were held by their trainers—and then followed suit. We started picking them up on the underwater cameras within seconds. They swam mostly with their strong back legs, both of them kicking in unison. Like a frog kick, and so they plunged into the ocean depths with a thrusting motion.
It was effective, though. They reached the bottom and took hold of the bright orange diving targets. Evelyn was right—the water buoyancy did help—but it was still slow going. A couple of the dragons really struggled with the weights. I was torn between grim satisfaction that it wasn’t a perfect performance, and a rising sense of dread at how tough this challenge might be for our own dragons.
“Payload delivery is up next,” Major Johnson said.
The top-right camera switched to a surface view of a lone ship. This one wasn’t a spotless gray or white Navy vessel, but the rusted hulk of what looked like an old container ship.
“That’s the target,” Johnson said. “It’s anchored about a mile out in slightly deeper water.”
The dragons had been lifted back on deck using a hydraulic arm device with a cargo net on its end. Now, with some encouragement from their handlers, they lined up on the deck facing the rail. Still more handlers appeared carrying small, dumbbell-shaped objects about a foot long. I recognized them from the set of DOD specs. They weighed just under three pounds. One served as a loop handle that the dragons gripped in their jaws. The other end held a plastic-encased cylinder about the size of a soda can. The edge farthest from the handle had a powerful magnetic ring, ideal for attaching to flat metal objects. Like tanks, or the steel hull of a ship. Inside the cylinder was an inverted copper cone—a void that would be packed with C-4. The safety ring for the explosive shock was a hundred yards. Once a payload was delivered, the dragon had thirty seconds to get outside of blast range.
Each dragon took a dumbbell in its jaws and then leapt back into the water. The last one fumbled its dumbbell to the deck. As it fell, all of the handlers dove to the floor and covered their heads with their hands. Evelyn gasped. Nothing happened, though, and after a moment they found their feet again. The dragon plucked up the dumbbell and jumped in after its littermates.
I looked at Johnson. “They’re acting like they’re live rounds.”
“That’s what they’re trained to do.”
“They, um, aren’t live rounds, are they?”
“We removed the detonators, but munitions specialists don’t like taking chances.”
“How much C4 does one hold?”
Johnson gave me a flat look, the one that I was starting to learn meant you shouldn’t ask that, son. Whoops. But this time he decided to answer. “Two pounds.”
“Is that a lot, or a little?”
“Enough to blow a serious hole in steel plate.”
I shared a wide-eyed look with Evelyn. In that moment, the reality of what we were doing caught up with me. This contract, if we won it, required us to build weapons. And the military planned to use them as such. The country wasn’t at war currently, but that could change at any time. Like reservists being called into active duty, our dragons would be deployed whenever and wherever the military needed them.
I’d managed to ignore that fact when the specs came in. When it was just a scientific and intellectual challenge that needed solving. Now, with dragons carrying real explosives to a real ship, I found it harder to ignore the implications of weaponized dragons. It bothered me, and these weren’t even my dragons. This wasn’t what I’d joined the company for. Then again, if I failed to win this competition and the funding that came with it, no one would be able to have dragons. Not even our customers, dwindling as their base might be. It was a tough spot and a shitty position to be in. I glanced at Evelyn, wondering if perhaps she’d had the same line of thought as me. Yet she only had eyes for the monitors.
“They’re approaching the target,” Johnson said.
“How’s the time looking?” Evelyn asked.
“A little slow.”
More screens switched over their views, and now we had a camera feed from the target hulk itself. A dark undulating spot in the seawater appeared off in the distance, followed by two others. The first two dragons approached the target. Honestly, even the lead animal looked like it was flagging. But they still had their “payloads” and attached them to the steel hull with a series of dull thumps. Well, at least the magnets work.
Then they were supposed to swim away quickly to reach the safety zone. Despite being relieved of their burden, they did seem to be moving a bit sluggishly. That wasn’t my professional jealousy talking, either. Evelyn noticed it, too.
“They’re tiring,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, they look drained.”
“It doesn’t make sense. They had good muscle tone.”
I let my eyes wander to the numbers in the bottom left quadrant of the nearest screen. I’d tried to ignore them thus far because two of the numbers were clearly GPS coordinates. The Navy might not expect it out of a civilian, but because of my hobby I could compute decimals to minutes and seconds, and convert those to distances, without even trying. Which is how I knew that these drills were happening in the Pacific Ocean a couple hundred miles northwest of San Diego. Yet there were other numbers, too, like surface temperature. And more importantly, water temperature.
“The water’s fifty-eight degrees,” I said.
“Cold,” Evelyn said.
“Especially for reptiles, if they’re not fully endothermic.” Most vertebrate animals—including humans and birds—maintained body temperature via their internal metabolism, hence the name endotherm. In contrast, ectotherms like lizards and frogs relied on the environment to help maintain body temperature. When they got cold, they sometimes entered a state of torpor to conserve energy.
“They did seem to swim like frogs,” Evelyn said. “But how would they inadvertently produce a dragon that’s ectothermic?”
“Might not have been intentional. If they were tweaking the metabolic systems and only tested the dragons in stable temperatures.”
“It’s strange that they’d risk altering the metabolic system,” Evelyn said.
“You saw the DOD specs,” I muttered. Greaves knew he had to tick every box for a shot at the contract. More than that, he had to produce dragons that were better than ours. He must have taken some chances with the metabolism to reach the energy requirements. So had we, actually. It occurred to me then that we had not thought to compute the effects of our dragons in cold-water environments. Or at least, I hadn’t. I prayed that Korrapati and Wong had thought of it.
As usual, Evelyn seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Did you alter our dragons’ metabolisms?”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel.
Major Johnson was checking his watch. “Mark.”
“Was that thirty seconds?” I asked.
“Yes.”
According to the monitors, only one of the test dragons had reached the safety zone by then. The other three still moved in almost slow motion, their frog-kicks coming at a notably reduced frequency. I did my best not to imagine them being caught in the shock wave from the explosion, but the images popped uninvited into my head anyway. The flailing when the blast hit them, then the limbs folding. Then the view from above as their bodies sank slowly into the blue abyss.
“They’ll be scored for a seventy-five percent casualty rate,” Major Johnson said.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Casualties are never good, Parker.”
That wasn’t what I meant. But I’d irritated Johnson enough today, so I kept my mouth shut.
Some weird instinct made me want to offer an excuse for the other team, and point out that the reason their dragons didn’t perform probably had to do with the Navy’s choice of running this trial in the cold Pacific waters. Where, let’s be honest, most military confrontations didn’t seem likely to take place in the near future given the state of global politics. Granted, saying so would reveal that I’d figured out the secret location, which probably wouldn’t win me any points with the Navy.
Evelyn gave me a pointed look at that moment, and offered the tiniest shake of her head. This was a competition, and there was a lot riding on it. Especially for us, as the current underdog in the field trials. I bit my lip and kept silent.
“They’re going to reset for the trial of your dragons, so we have some time. Feel free to visit the mess,” Johnson said.
I stood up, eager for an excuse to stretch my legs. “Want anything?” I asked Evelyn.
“No, thanks. But you go.”
I cleared my throat. “Can I bring you back anything, Major?”
He smiled in a kindly way. “That’s nice of you, son, but I’m good.”
I rather liked the way he called me son, and on that glowing note I made my retreat.