Camouflage

—1—

Russell Sutton had done his stint with the U.S. government around the turn of the century, a frustrating middle-management job in two Mars exploration programs. When the second one crashed, he had said good-bye to Uncle Sam and space in general, returning to his first love, marine biology.

He was still a manager and still an engineer, heading up the small firm Poseidon Projects. He had twelve employees, half of them Ph.D.s. They only worked on two or three projects at a time, esoteric engineering problems in marine resource management and exploration. They had a reputation for being wizards, and for keeping both promises and secrets. They could turn down most contracts—anything not sufficiently interesting; anything from the government.

So Russ was not excited when the door to his office eased open and the man who rapped his knuckles on the jamb was wearing an admiral’s uniform. His first thought was that they really could afford a receptionist; his second was how to frame a refusal so that the guy would just leave, and not take up any more of his morning.

“Dr. Sutton, I’m Jack Halliburton.”

That was interesting. “I read your book in graduate school. Didn’t know you were in the military.” The man’s face was vaguely familiar from his memory of the picture on the back of Bathyspheric Measurements and Computation; no beard now, and a little less hair. He still looked like Don Quixote on a diet.

“Have a seat.” Russ waved at the only chair not supporting stacks of paper and books. “But let me tell you right off that we don’t do government work.”

“I know that.” He eased himself into the chair and set his hat on the floor. “That’s one reason I’m here.” He unzipped a blue portfolio and took out a sealed plastic folder. He turned it sideways and pressed his thumb to the corner; it read his print and popped open. He tossed it onto Russell’s desk.

The first page had no title but top secret—for your eyes only, in red block letters.

“I can’t open this. And as I said—”

“It’s not really classified, not yet. No one in the government, outside of my small research group, even knows it exists.”

“But you’re here as a representative of the government, no? I assume you do own some clothes without stars on the shoulders.”

“Protective coloration. I’ll explain. Just look at it.”

Russ hesitated, then opened the folder. The first page was a picture of a vague cigar shape looming out of a rectangle of gray smears.

“That’s the discovery picture. We were doing a positron radar map of the Tonga-Kermadec Trench—”

“Why on earth?”

“That part is classified. And irrelevant.”

Russ had the Tooling that his life was on a cusp, and he didn’t like it. Ho spun around slowly in his chair, taking in the comfortable clutter, the pictures and the charts on the wall. The picture window looking down on the Sea of Cortez, currently calm.

With his back to Halliburton, he said, “I don’t suppose this is something we could do from here.”

“No. We’ve chosen a place in Samoa.”

“Now, that’s attractive. Heat and humidity and lousy food.”

“I tend to think pretty girls and no winter.” He pushed his glasses back on his nose. “Food’s not bad if you don’t mind American.”

Russ turned back around and studied the picture. “You have to tell me something about why you were there. Did the Navy lose something?”

“Yes.”

“Did it have people in it?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“You just did.” He turned to the second page. It was a sharper view of the object. “This isn’t from positrons.”

“Well, it is. But it’s a composite from various angles, noise removed.”

Good job, he thought. “How far down is this thing?”

“The trench is seven miles deep there. The artifact is under another forty feet of sand.”

“Earthquake?”

He nodded. “A quarter of a million years ago.”

Russ stared at him for a long moment. “Didn’t I read about this in an old Stephen King novel?”

“Look at the next page.”

It was a regular color photograph. The object lay at the bottom of a deep hole. Russ thought about the size of that digging job; the expense of it. “The Navy doesn’t know about this?”

“No. We did use their equipment, of course.”

“You found the thing they lost?”

“We will next week.” He stared out the window. “I’ll have to trust you.”

“I won’t turn you in to the Navy.”

He nodded slowly and chose his words. “The submarine that was lost is in the trench, too. Not thirty miles from this … object.”

“You didn’t report it. Because?”

“I’ve been in the Navy for almost twenty years. Twenty years next month. I was going to retire anyhow.”

“Disillusioned?”

“I never was ‘illusioned.’ Twenty years ago, I wanted to leave academia, and the Navy made me an interesting offer. It has been a fascinating second career. But it hasn’t led me to trust the military, or the government.

“Over the past decade I’ve assembled a crew of like-minded men and women. I was going to take some of them with me when I retired— to set up an outfit like yours, frankly.”

Russ went to the coffee machine and refreshed his cup. He offered one to Halliburton, who declined.

“I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“Tell me.”

“You want to retire with your group and set up shop. But if you suddenly ‘discover’ this thing, the government might notice the coincidence.”

“That’s a good approximation. Take a look at the next page.”

It was a close-up of the thing. Its curved surface mirrored perfectly the probe that was taking its picture.

“We tried to get a sample of the metal for analysis. It broke every drill bit we tried on it.”

“Diamond?”

“It’s harder than diamond. And massive. We can’t estimate its density, because we haven’t been able to budge it, let alone lift it.”

“Good God.”

“If it were an atomic submarine, we could have hauled it up. It’s not even a tenth that size.

“If it were made of lead, we could have raised it. If it were solid uranium. It’s denser than that.”

“I see,” Russ said. “Because we raised the Titanic….”

“May I be blunt?”

“Always.”

“We could bring it up with some version of your flotation techniques. And keep all the profit, which may be considerable. But there would be hell to pay when the Navy connection was made.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“Simple.” He took a chart out of his portfolio and rolled it out on Russ’s desk. It snapped flat. “You’re going to be doing a job in Samoa…”