My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Flange

Emmett sets the flange before the Navy observers; Harlan calls it routine; Joan shows the Halcyon's depth reading has not moved by a hair in three hours.

Joan came down the stairs to the machine shop fast, with her reading glasses swinging on their cord.

"You walked out on a Navy review and your own mother," she said. "Tell me why I shouldn't pull your badge."

I held up the flange.

She stopped.

"That's not the one we installed," she said.

"No."

"Whose stamp is that?"

"Rask Marine's. It went in at 11:40."

Joan took the flange from my hands and turned it under the work light. She read the dock sticker twice.

"The Halcyon didn't call until 3:52," she said.

"Right."

She breathed out through her nose. "Okay. You don't carry this. I carry it, and you walk next to me."

"Why?"

"Because if you carry it, Harlan Rask says you planted it."

We took the stairs together.

The ops floor had not moved.

My father was still in the front row. Quist was at his shoulder. My mother sat on a swivel chair with a paper cup in both hands and wouldn't look up.

The two men in uniform were still there. One was a commander with a gray crew cut. The other was a younger man with a tablet.

Joan walked straight past my father and set the flange on the table in front of the commander.

"Sir," she said. "This part is on the Tern, and it should not be."

The commander looked at the flange, then at her.

"Explain."

"It's a replacement. Rask lot stamp. Installed at 11:40 this morning, nearly four hours before the distress call."

Nobody on that floor was typing. Forty people held still.

My father laughed.

It was a short, tired, reasonable laugh.

"Commander, Rask Marine holds the service contract on every Institute vehicle that dives on a record day," he said. "We swap seals before a big event as a courtesy. It's routine."

"It's in the contract," Quist said, and opened his folder like a waiter. "Section nine. Renewed in March."

He passed the page to the commander.

"Did anyone tell the Tern's pilot?" the commander asked.

"I'm the Tern's pilot," I said. "I signed for torque checks. I never signed for a flange."

"A clerical gap," Quist said. "We'll tighten it."

"There's a groove cut into the sealing face." I pointed. "It's about a fingernail deep, and it only matters past 28,000 feet."

My father turned and looked at me for the first time since he'd disowned me.

"You'd say anything," he said, "to avoid going down for your brother."

"Harlan," the commander said, quietly. "Let him finish."

My mother made a small sound.

"Stop it," she said. "Stop it, all of you. He's down there. Kit is down there."

I couldn't answer that. She believed it.

Joan answered for me.

"Ma'am, I'm going to play something. I need everyone to listen."

She walked to the console and pulled up the archive of the call.

She cued the first one, from 3:52. Kit's voice filled the room.

"Em. The ladder's loose. Please come."

My mother put the cup down on the floor.

"Now the second," Joan said.

At 4:10 the speaker had played another distress call, just as I reached the stairwell, and nobody on the floor had said a word.

She played it.

"Em. The ladder's loose. Please come."

She put them side by side on the screen.

Two blue waveforms, one over the other.

They matched. Every peak sat on a peak. The breath before "please" was identical, down to the crackle.

The young man with the tablet leaned forward. "That's a copy."

"A man who's scared repeats himself," my father said. "My son is at the bottom of the ocean, and you're doing audio forensics."

"Lowell, make a note," he added, without turning his head.

Quist wrote something down.

"Commander," Joan said. "Hold the flange. Don't let anyone from Rask touch it."

"Done," the commander said. He picked it up himself, and his aide bagged it.

"Emmett," my father said. "You've made your point to the room. Now get your suit."

"I'm not diving."

"Your brother is dying."

"No, Dad," I said. "He's breathing fine. He just doesn't know yet that we know."

I had not meant to say the last part.

My father's jaw went tight.

Quist turned a page in his folder very slowly.

Joan took my sleeve and walked me to the far end of the console, away from the room.

"There's something else," she said, low.

"Say it."

"The Institute runs its own array out in the Pacific. We've had it listening in the trench for three weeks."

"I know. I built the mount."

"It was switched off at noon." She kept her eyes on the screen. "A work order from the Rask contract desk asked us to stand it down, so it wouldn't interfere with their transponder."

"Who approved it?"

"I did," Joan said. "It had Quist's name at the bottom, and I thought it was a courtesy."

I looked back across the room.

Quist was already looking at me.

He smiled at me and lifted his folder an inch.

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