Ke glared into the black. Her experience underwater had fine tuned her skills in seeking out body shapes in unlikely places, but she was paranoid about how the old school diving suits might confuse her ability to quickly spot human silhouettes. She continued listing her bag of tricks in her mind, making the mental inventory and reminding herself how to use each tool. Perry hovered above them, his eyes scanning the rim of the rising mud, trying to peer past the yellow-green illumination, waiting to drop like an eagle in a dive into any trouble. Wells was having the most issues.
“It’s not cutting.” Wells seemed flatly annoyed.
Ke offered some friendly advice, “is the machine on?”
“I like you, Coastie, but I’ll bury you fins up down here with the nazis.” Wells could barely keep the smile off his face.
Having a good team made a massive difference in everything, that wasn’t a secret. Good teams could be judged by many things, by how fast and how quickly they accomplished tasks was how clients judged a team. How fun it was to work with the team was how the teammates valued the team. Perry was silently thrilled that Ke was augmenting to the group so well and even more impressed by her apparent professionalism, even with a bit a cheek.
Wells reached back to enhance the energy output to the cutter, dim visor lifted and eyes scanning the newly polished steel. The reward for five minutes of sustained cutting: a slightly darkened and gleaming streak. He tried to guesstimate what the hull could be made of, the cutter was designed to slip past most kinds of metals. Nazi space magic? He tried another location with the enhanced voltage to help and pressed the probe to the hull, brilliant and blinding light sending ghastly shadows out into the light-green surroundings.
A deep groan. Like a tree yawning before crashing to the earth. It’s pitch became higher, quickly becoming a hum and then disappating into the watery silence. Wells leaned back on the warm hull. The entire ship was shuddering. Both Wells and Perry had worked around subs that had been operational before, the din of internal machinery was instantly recognizable. A low rumbling churned out from inside the Brunhilde and the yellow-green world was suddenly ungulfed in swirling and clouding mud.
Perry began to have flash backs to writing those four letters.
“Get clear of it, get up here!” Perry watched helplessly as the pair were suddenly devoured into the encompassing soil.
Ke replied and Perrt audibly breathed a sigh of relief as she spoke, “Snagged Wells, rising up now, let us know where we come out.”
Being blind underwater could be stunning with now disorienting it was. With a full face mask and no water flooding into the nose it was downright impossible to tell which way “up” even was. As the soot and mire swirled over the hull Ke spun and snatched up the drag handle at the top of Wells’ tank rig, quickly paddling up to get clear. It hadn’t mattered much, they were swarmed in sand instantly, but Perrys voice and Wells swimming freely helped Ke keep her cool.
As they broke out of the roiling ball of kicked up sand they stared down into the fuzzy yellow green glow, hearing metal clack into place rhythmically. Perry tightened his grasp and began to swim at an angle to the chaos, wanting to get clear of whatever was about to happen.