SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"Thanks for the advice, ma’am," I said, "but we both have to survive the fucking war first."

The floating fire winked out. "Dismissed."

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I did my best to avoid Lieutenant Markey for the next several days. It wasn’t easy, since we were both stuck on the same three-hundred-foot, sixty-person submarine. And it wasn’t that I didn’t respect her. She clearly had major pull in OP-20-G to rate a teleport halfway around the planet. But she was calling as much attention to me as she was to herself, and I didn’t need that kind of exposure.

Fortunately, she spent most of her time in the control room or the conning tower, doing whatever she did to track down the mythical kraken, and I was assigned to the aft torpedo compartment. The captain had decided we would fire the fish from there once we were ready to wake the beast—we’d be facing away and ready to run like hell.

Markey had brought aboard divining bolts to replace the magnetic detonators in our Mark 14s. The magnets were supposed to explode a torpedo right underneath a ship’s hull, causing more damage than a broadside impact, but the damn things had never worked right. Markey’s instructions were to replace the magnets with D-bolts, which would make our fish detect monsters instead of metal.

The plan was to find the kraken, poke it with a couple of torpedoes, then skedaddle before it was fully aware of its surroundings. The kraken’s reported location was close enough to populated areas that it should— should— hear the noise from those cities and move toward Japan instead of anywhere else.

Working on the torpedoes occupied me for most of the time, but Markey’s questions kept bugging me. What was I going to do after the war ended?

Maybe I wouldn’t survive. Maybe that would be the best outcome for everyone: if I died in the line of duty, and my family didn’t find out until later what had happened to their daughter—that she’d given her life for her country.

Maybe they’d be proud of me. And maybe the good ol' U-S-of-A would stop questioning our loyalty then.

I hadn’t thought about my future in a while—not since I first enlisted. It had always angered me to know how limited my options were, and now I was angry at Markey for reminding me, for making me worry about things I couldn’t change. That’s what I was thinking about that day, when the COB pulled Roseler and me out of the torpedo bay for another special assignment.

"We’re submerged in hostile waters, less than a hundred miles from enemy shore," the captain said as I climbed into the conning tower. "We can’t surface, and we can’t outrun anything that swims. Anything goes wrong here and we are fucked ."

He was talking to Lieutenant Markey. Roseler was already crowded into the tight space around the periscope. I handed him the Bowfin 's codex, which I had retrieved from the control room. He gave me a clipboard and a frantic look as I wedged myself into a corner next to the captain and the COB. It didn’t seem like all five of us needed to be here, but I wasn’t going to debate that.

"This will be a one-way tunnel," Markey said. She might actually have looked better in trousers than a skirt. I tried my best not to feel jealous and failed. "There’s no danger of us being detected."

"But why does Rosebud have to do the spell?" the COB asked. "Aren’t you the professional, Lieutenant?"

"Seaman Roseler is doing the easy part," Markey said. "We don’t have a focus object, so I’ll need to guide the far end of the tunnel."

The COB did a double take. " You’re going to be his crystal ball?"

Markey sighed and looked at the captain. "We can spend all day discussing the finer points of scrying procedure, Captain, or we can get this done."

"Carry on, Lieutenant," the captain said.

I made as little eye contact with Markey as possible while she read off map coordinates for me to inscribe. I joined our target location and Bowfin 's mantic signature into the spell, combining sonants and inflects from the codex reference tables and triple-checking each finished sequence. In principle, writing up the scry tunnel was simpler than describing a teleport path, but I did not want to be on the hook if this thing went sideways.

A few minutes later, Roseler and Markey were holding hands, their eyes closed as Roseler recited the full incantation.

Next to me, the captain muttered, "I’ll be glad when we’re done with all this black magic bullshit."

"Yes, sir," I said.

He glanced over as if noticing me for the first time. "Your family have talent, Seaman?"

I thought of my grandmother. She had introduced me to the occult, sneaking some mystical instruction into my language lessons every week. We never told my parents. They would have disapproved, to say the least.

I said, "Not that I’m aware of, sir."

"Thank fucking God," the COB said, on my other side. "Give me science and engineering any day of the week. I don’t trust anything I can’t take apart and see how it works—"

Roseler started screaming. It came suddenly, without even an intake of breath, and the sound was inhuman. He shrieked like an animal caught in a trap. I dropped the clipboard and covered my ears with both hands.

"Get the doc!" Markey shouted. "We need a tranquilizer!" Roseler’s body began convulsing. She wrestled him to the deck. "Hatcher! Help me hold him down!"

The captain leaned down the ladder and yelled for the corpsman. I jumped over him and grabbed Roseler’s shoulders. His eyes had rolled back into his head. He was still screaming, and his legs kicked around despite Markey’s iron grip.

"What the hell’s wrong with him?" the COB asked.

"He made contact!" Markey said. "Dammit, COB, you didn’t tell me he was a sensitive!"

"How the fuck were we supposed to know?" the COB said.

My stomach knotted. Not because I was concerned for Roseler, but because I was afraid if he died, Markey would order me to incant her spells.

"As you were, both of you!" the captain said over the screaming. I could swear Roseler hadn’t taken a breath in more than a minute. "Doc’s on his way. Now how do we—"

Roseler stopped screaming. His mouth closed, then opened again, and he said a word which was not a word.

My head exploded with pain. No, pain’s not the right thing to call it. It wasn’t just that I hurt. When that not-word entered my brain, suddenly nothing in the world seemed right . What I saw, what I heard, what I felt—from the dinner I was still digesting to gravity itself—everything was wrong, and my body wanted it to stop.

I saw the captain fall to his knees, clutching for a handhold. A dark stain spread across the front of his trousers. Behind him, the COB vomited all over one wall of the compartment. Markey doubled over, blood dripping from her nose.

Roseler’s lips parted again. I slapped both hands over the bottom half of his face before he could make another sound. He kept shaking, and the only thing I could think was: I’ll kill him if I have to. How do I kill him? What’s the fastest way to kill him?

"Good," Markey grunted, pressing her hands over mine. She turned her head and spat out a mouthful of thick, dark blood. "Keep him quiet until we can sedate him."

"What the fuck just happened?" I asked.

"Our intel was wrong," Markey said. "They’re not kraken."

Some small part of me was happy that she’d screwed up. Most of me wanted to shit my pants. Then my brain finished processing Markey’s words.

"Wait, they ?" The urge to empty my bowels increased. "There’s more than one? "

By the time the corpsman had chloroformed Roseler and tied him down to the bunk in Markey’s quarters—she ordered him gagged and isolated; nobody argued—I had finished collecting all our gear out of the conning tower and cleaning it off. The captain and the COB had changed into fresh uniforms and regrouped in the control room. They argued with the XO in low tones as I stowed the codex above the weapons station, locked the safebox, and returned the key to the captain.