Saturday Afternoon

Mara wasn’t supposed to be diving that grid.

She was supposed to be collecting seafloor sediment samples for methane hydrate mapping on the continental slope off Alaska – basically boring geology, the kind of grant work that pays your rent but doesn’t give you bragging rights at academic conferences.

The coordinates she drifted into weren’t part of her assigned transect.

The ROV pilot on deck didn’t even notice for the first three minutes – she’d switched off the telemetry ping so she could see the sea floor without overlay chaos.

So she was the only one who saw the shape first. Not a rock, not a subduction slump.

A perfect right angle. Then another. Then a corner. She killed her thruster. Let the current slide her sideways.  There – a metal square. Bolted. Four feet across.

Then her heart started beating like metal struck against metal. She opened a private comm channel back to the boat, just to her friend Velez, topside.

“Hey I found something. You seeing this?”

“No. Your feed’s dark on my end,” Velez said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Nothing. Hold on.”

She flicked the feed back on.

The topside monitors lit up.

All at once – five voices on the boat started talking at once.

“What is that –?”

“Platform –?’

“No way that’s civilian –”

“Looks like a hatch –”

“Mara, pull back –”

They all know it immediately. Not because the thing was labeled. It wasn’t.

But because nothing that precise, that engineered, sits on the sea floor unless it was put there intentionally and secretly.

The hatch had no markings. Not Navy. Not NOAA. Not Russian. No embossed numbering.

Just – a symbol.           

Three triangles, nested.

Mara didn’t recognize it.

Velez did.

Oh my god. That’s the old Sandstone Directorate mark.”

Mara blinked.

“You’re kidding.”

“No that’s real. The Sandstone prototypes? That’s Cold War energy weapons research. That division supposedly shut down in the 80’s. I wrote a paper on them.”

“What do you mean supposedly?”

“Well, no one ever proved they actually shuttered.”

Mara got closer. She could see the bolts on the hatch rim.

They were not corroded.

That part made her stomach go cold. Anything down here since the 80’s should be pitted, half-eaten. These bolts looked like they’d been placed… recently.

Her blood suddenly felt like it was draining out of gravity.

Somebody had been down here.

Sometime in the last decade.

Maybe even recently.

Then the sonar ping came back through the cabin speaker – urgent, triple beep, the code that means big metal moving.

Something massive, with a hull signature, was coming in fast from the southeast – below the thermocline – silent running.

Velez’s voice: “Mara, get out of there NOW.”

She pulled thruster. Hard.

And as she rose, she saw the silhouette sliding into view – long, sleek, unlit.

Not a US Navy signature.

Not any NATO signature she’d ever seen in training.

This sub was dark in the database.

The unregistered kind.

The “black budget/existence denied/nothing to see here” kind.

The last thing Mara saw on her dive feed before she rocketed up was a manipulator arm come out of the sub’s underside cradle – not toward her – toward the hatch.

Someone down here was opening it.

She broke surface. They got her into the boat fast. They tore her suit off half-zipped, didn’t even follow protocol.

She was shivering uncontrollably, and not from cold.

Velez put a towel around her shoulders and said quietly:

“That hatch wasn’t a relic.”

Mara whispered: “I know.”

Velez: “That program never died.”

Mara: “Worse.”

She looked at the dark water.

“It’s active. And they know we saw it.”

When they got back to port, there were two men in suits waiting at the dock, not Coast Guard, not NOAA.

They knew Mara’s name.

They knew her dive schedule.

They asked exactly one question: “How much did you see?”

Mara felt a strange calm.

She looked at them with a kind of boldness she didn’t know she had five hours ago and said:

“Enough to know you’re still testing things you lied about retiring.”

One of the men nodded like he respected the honesty.

The other said: “Ms. Beltran, some discoveries do not get published.”

Mara didn’t sleep that night.

She stared at the dive footage she had secretly hard-copied to her laptop – the angle right before the sub cut her off. You could see a shimmer in the water above the hatch – like heat distortion.

Energy weapons don’t leave visible shimmer in water – unless the medium is being displaced. 

Which means it wasn’t an energy platform.

It was a gate.

A power coupling for something that isn’t supposed to be built yet. She closed the laptop and whispered into her hands: “They’re not hiding something dead.” She swallowed hard. “They’re hiding something new.”

Two days later, Mara’s department chair called her into his office.  He was red-eyed, jittery, too polite.

“Mara, we’re going to pause your field work.”

“Pause it? Why?”

“Funding reviews. Administrative concerns. Insurance requirements.”

All lies.

He wouldn’t look directly at her.

She left his office knowing the phone call had already happened – the men in suits had contacted the university. Whatever she had stumbled into was already reaching into her life and closing doors.

She walked out of the administration building with her hands shaking.

Not fear shaking. Anger shaking.

That night she drove to Velez’s apartment. He let her in, dead quiet, lights off.

He had two laptops open and a cork board full of declassified FOIA printouts.

“Sit,” he said. “I’ve been busy.” 

He pointed to the weird nested-triangle symbol from the hatch.

“These marks appear in two other places in the historical record,” he said. “Once in 1979 at White Sands. And once in 1993 on the FDNAVA test range in the Indian Ocean. Both times are associated with directed-energy coupling experiments. Both times are associated with direct-energy coupling experiments. Both times reported as failures.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“The kind where you don’t just blast energy – you move it. You displace it. Across mediums.”

Mara felt sick.

“Displace to where?”

Velez shrugged.

“No papers confirm the endpoint. Just power transfer.”

Mara started at him.

“Like a wormhole.”

He didn’t laugh.

He didn’t say no.

That same night, 2:14am her phone buzzed. Unknown number. One text:

YOU SHOULD NOT PURSUE THIS.

Mara screenshotted it. Sent it to Velez. He responded instantly.

We must go back out there. 

Mara typed back:

That sub will be gone. And they will be waiting.

Velez:

I know a guy with an independent research vessel. One that’s not in any academic registry. He owes me a favor.

Mara:

Why would he help?

Velez:

Because he hates black-budget spooks more than you do.

48 hours later, they were back at sea.

Not in a university research vessel.

In an ugly, diesel-smelling, privately owned oceanographic boat with mismatched hull paint and no AIS transponder turned on.

No one to report to.

No one to warn.

The ocean was flat as hammered glass.

And Mara realized – with absolute certainty – that she wasn’t just a diver anymore.

She was a witness.

The kind who doesn’t get to go back to being normal.

She suited up, clipped into the tether, and as she slid backward into the cold black water she one thing into her comm for Velez to hear:

“If they’re building something that can tear a hole in the ocean – we’re not just uncovering a secret.”

She let herself sink toward the abyss.

“We might be uncovering the next war.”

The descent felt different this time.

Last time, Mara had been curious.

Now she was cautious – and angry.

Her dive lights sliced through the cold, blue-black void. The silt clouds rose like ghosts.

The hatch site was only a few hundred meters ahead, but it felt like she was dropping into another world entirely.

Velez’s voice crackled over the comm.

“Telemetries clean. No sub signature yet. You’re clear.”

“Copy”, she said, eyes fixed on the shadowed ridge. “Approaching site.”

Her pulse quickened when the seafloor came into view. But the hatch wasn’t there anymore.

In its place was a scar – a long, blackened trench, like the metal had been pulled out of the ground by something unimaginably strong. The sediment was scorched. And at the edge of the pit, a faint luminescence rippled across the sand, like heat waves underwater.

“Velez you’re seeing this right?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Mara, back off. I’m getting radiation pings – very low, but no background. This area’s hot.”

“I’m fine. Give me a minute.”

She drifted closer. The water vibrated against her suit – a low hum, too regular to be natural. Her dive computer spiked and then froze entirely.

Then the hum stopped.

And she heard something she couldn’t possibly have head underwater – a voice.

Faint. Metallic. Not on her comm channel.

“ ..authorized.. containment breach… return to –”

Then static.

Her light flickered, and for a split second, she saw movement inside the trench – a shimmer, like liquid metal folding over itself.

She yanked her tether. “Velez, pull me up! Now!”

No response.

“Velez?”

The line stayed silent.

Then another voice came through – calm, deliberate, the same cadence as the one that had texted her.

“Mare Beltran. You were warned.”

The water around her went still, unnaturally still. Every sound dropped away.

She looked up – and saw a shape rising from the trench.

Not a sub. Not a machine.

It was a sphere, maybe six meters across, made of the same liquid-metal shimmer. It hoovered just above the seabed, humming softly, the triangles from the old Sandstone symbol glowing faintly across its surface.

Her oxygen gauge flickered – and then the sphere spoke again.

“You should not have come back.”

Then a pulse of light burst from it – blinding – and Mara’s comm cut out.

Velez screamed her name through the static as every monitor on the ship went dead. And down in the dark, Mara vanished into the light.

At first, there was nothing.

No sound. No cold. No gravity.

Then, slowly, she realized she was breathing – not through her regulator, not through her tank, but normally.

She opened her eyes.

She wasn’t underwear anymore.

She was standing on a surface that looked like glass – black and endless – surrounded by a faint blue glow. 

Her dive suit was gone.

The hum was still there, faint and alive, coming from somewhat deep below the glass floor.

“Mara Beltran,” said the same voice – not from any direction, but from everywhere.

She spun in place. “Where am I?”

“You are within the containment frame,” the voice said. “An access point, designed for authorization observation.”

“Observation of what?”

There was silence – then the light beneath her shifted, revealing shapes under the glass: columns, chambers, massive conduits glowing with the same energy she’d seen at the trench.

“Humanity buried with it did not understand,” said the voice. “But it could not bury its hunger to reclaim it.”

Mara took a step back. “This is part of the Sandstone project, isn’t it?”

“Sandstone was an echo. A failed imitation. The original research predates your governments.”

She froze, “what do you mean ‘predates’? Who built this?”

The light pulsed, and for a moment she saw faint outlines of figures – tall, indistinct – moving within the glow.

“They did. Those who shaped your oceans long before you learned to sail them.”

Mara felt her heartbeat hammering. “You’re saying this isn’t human tech?

“Your species found fragments. Reverse-engineered patterns. You called them weapons. They were bridges.”

“Bridges to where?”

“To themselves.”

The floor beneath her feet began to ripple like disturbed water.

“You have seen enough.”

“Wait!” she shouted. “Why show me any of this?”

“Because you were curious,” the voice said. “And curiosity has a cost.”

The hum rose – deafening – and then the world inverted.

When Mara woke, she was on the deck of the ship, coughing up seawater. Velez was kneeling beside her, shaking her shoulders, yelling her name.

“Jesus, Mara – you disappeared off sonar for eight minutes. Eight. Then your line went slack. What happened?”

She stared up at the overcast sky, gasping, the word bridges echoing in her head.

“I don’t know’” she whispered. “But it wasn’t just a hatch.”

“What was it then?”

She turned toward the open sea – where the water was strangely calm again, like nothing had ever happened.

“It was a door,” she said “And someone opened it.”