“Captain, we have some external damage on the left flank!”

            “How much?”

            “Calculating now.”

            “Christy,” the captain barks, “what is causing it?”

            “Scan has come up negative, sir, the camera’s are aren’t showing anything either,” Christy reply’s quickly, “I’ll keep searching, Captain.”

            “The damage is a foot long gash that has taken seventy-six percent of the outer, pressure resistant metal off. We need to begin the rising procedure immediately, sir.”

            “Accepted and verified, begin rising. Christy?”

            “Nothing, sir.”

            Christy bites her bottom lip gently in anticipation and concentration. It is a gesture that subconsciously rises to the surface when she is entirely focused, and alert. Her cerulean blue eyes, shining with intensity, dart from one of the seven screens facing her to the next as she seeks to find something lurking in the deep shadows of the water that the sonar tells her is non-existent. Yet she continues to search.

            “Five percent of rising complete.”

            “Still nothing that could have caused it, captain,” Christy reports. She glances away from her screens for a moment, then her eyes shoot back.

            “Continue rising at eighteen knots. Christy, keep on full alert until we get beyond the pressurized regions.”

            “Yes, captain!”

            Christy views the screens one at a time from left to right from bottom to top as she listens to the sonar as it plays directly into her ear. She sees nothing on screen one, nothing on screen two, nothing on screen three, and there it is on screen four.

            Christy hadn’t actually seen anything, except a flash of what she thought was movement, but could have just as easily been the glint of reflected light that shimmered on the camera’s lens from a deep sea creature luring its prey to it using the glowing parts of its body. The sonar verifies that there is a small creature nearby. Instantly, Christy replays the camera recording that was being displayed on screen four. She slows the recording to a speed at which she can analyze exactly what it was that created the movement like sense that now has Christy in wonder and an almost insane search for what caused, what may just be, an optical illusion. Slowly the recording steps forward revealing the time just before the intended screening.

            There, Christy can see the first part of it, a fin. Then more, back legs with webbed feet? She isn’t sure, the screen is blurry, implying the immense speed that the creature surely must have been going for Christy to have not been able to recognize, even remotely what it was. Then again, perhaps it isn’t a leg but a fin sticking out off of the belly of the fish, slightly disproportioned only because of the pixilated, inaccurate picture. More of the animal is revealed; A stomach and another leg or fin, then, the head. Christy pauses the replay and gapes at the screen because of the image before her. She could swear that it looks like the face of a cat; slightly slanted eyes that give the animal a prideful look, a tiny triangular nose and a curved, almost smiling, feline mouth. Then again, maybe she is being over imaginative and the twisting, swirling, shadows of the water are creating fantastical thoughts of insanity and putting them directly into her mind.

            Christy begins to get enthralling, yet disturbing chills down her spine and she calls out, “Cassandra, come over here, could you?”

            Christy’s friend and co-worker joins her almost immediately. At the moment she has nothing to do, and her expertise is useless in the dramatic situation being played out. Cassandra stares at the screen for a moment wondering why Christy had called her over to help, and hasn’t verbally addressed the reason yet. She stands in silence for a moment beginning to think that Christy hadn’t yet realized her presence.

            “Doesn’t it look like a house cat?” Christy finally speaks

            “What?”

            Christy gestures to the screen that Cassandra had been starring at only moments before.

            “Umm, well, I suppose it does a bit, but I don’t know, don’t you think that that is just a little too weird to be real? I think that either it is just the water playing mind tricks on you, or the creature you are looking at is simply being distorted on the monitor, honey.

            “Maybe you are right.”

            “Did you find something, Christy?” the captain pries.

            “Just a small deep sea creature. It is improbable that it caused the damage because of its size. Either that or it is far stronger than any creature its size on the surface could be.”

            “How close to the submarine is it?”

            “It is already out of sonar range.” Christy says almost disappointedly.

            “Good.”