From Below

by Darcy Coates

three days. The plan had always been for his ROVs to handle the bulk of the exploration and for Cove and the others to get just enough footage to round out his work. Instead, the ROVs had failed. All three of them. All at the same time. Devereaux had posited some rambling, half-baked idea about solar flares damaging the equipment. The others thought that was a reasonable suggestion. His ROVs were a thing of beauty: Alicia, the crawler; Hannah, the heavy-duty swimmer; and Judes, the tethered orb that could self-propel and responded to his joystick like a dream. Judes was his preferred vehicle, always. He could sit in the bridge, everyone gathered around him with bated breath as Judes relayed the first images of the Arcadia to his laptop. They would ask to look left or turn right with eager, hushed voices. They would gasp and jab fingers at his laptop screen—leaving prints on it, probably, but no one would care in the moment because the euphoria would be so great—as they found the ship’s landmarks. They would clap him on the back and exhale in relief as the ROV finished its mission and returned to the surface. It was a routine he’d done plenty of times before. Instead, he was alone in the mess hall while the rest of them got to view the Arcadia. The rub of it was that he could dive. He was damned good at it too. He’d been near the Arcadia’s depths before. Those dives hadn’t exactly been aboveboard, to be fair, but if you paid admission to a popular diving site and brought yo...