Fucking Lake Erie

"Horses have iron feet?" The Autopilot inquires, confused.

"No, they have iron shoes. Just get the damned magnetic tiedowns, already. We've got to move quickly." The professor argues with android. He turns to Doc, frustrated. "I swear I have to reprogram that scrap pile one of these days. What we need is a real pilot. I had to clear his heuristic learning systems just to hold all the basic information about piloting the ship. Now he can't learn anything, anymore."

Doc watches the blipping dot, once again on the map. It's still moving. "They're going way off course. They should be hugging the coast, but they're going towards the middle of the lake. There's no weather systems anywhere near them." Doc gets up and scratches his head. "How does a ship like that just disappear?"

"Well, I'm hoping its something easy, like they decided to go to Canada instead. Second best is that they just sank, maybe due to methane gas bubbles rising from the bottom of the lake and creating an area of low buoyancy. But the worst case scenarios are the most likely."

"And those are...?"

"Someone either disassembled the Q-TIP improperly, disabling the anti-matter containment field and blowing the ship into sub-atomic particles with the resulting 800 kiloton blast. Or someone threw the thing into the water, shorting out the circuitry and turning the entire lake into a giant wormhole, flinging them and everything in it sometime near the ice age after the lake was formed."

"Great."

"We should know for certain if they expose the anti-matter."

"Well, history doesn't record any nuclear explosions in the middle of Lake Erie. I'm sure that would've been at least a footnote on the nautical records."

"That's a relief. What about other missing ships?"

"There's quite a few mysterious disappearances on Lake Erie. No others were recorded today, though."

"The surface tension of water has a strange effect on the wormhole. It's rather unpredictable. I haven't really tested it. The effect might be localized to the ship, or it could be intermittent depending on the water levels and a million other factors. It might explain some of the other disappearances."

"Wouldn't divers and swimmers and fish and things like that disappear, too?"

"I said it was unpredictable. Maybe they do. May be they have. Maybe every fisherman in Lake Erie is catching fish born ten thousand years ago. I don't know."

"Wonderful. We've got to get out there. Now."

The Autopilot returns. Thunderhorse is behind him. "Alrighty, sirs, the horses are secured. Y'all get strapped in and I'll light 'er up. Yeehaw!" his electronically tinged voice echoes through the cockpit.

The crew gets seated and ready. The Autopilot flicks switches and hits buttons. The engines rumble and whir to life. The trees around them begin to rustle with the wind of the turbines. They start to rise. The landing gear raises and shuts its self away. They rise above the trees, and they begin to move forward across the purple sky of the setting sun.

"Vectoring thrusters for lateral motion. Hang on to your hats!" The Autopilot warns them as the ship rapidly begins to accelerate. They can hear the engines roaring. The ship shudders with the unmistakable shock of a sonic boom. Doc is in the copilot's seat and watches the city of Toledo rush by beneath them. They're way too close to the ground, someone had to see them. At least they didn't hear them, not right away at least. He makes a note to check the records later for UFO sightings.

The trip is pretty short. Hardly five minutes later, they're over the lake. The Autopilot decelerates the ship as they approach the red blinking dot on the tracking screen. They can see the Chesapeake below them in the water. The boat is stopped, but is still steaming.

Doc switches on the thermal cameras as they descend into the water. The steam from the ship and the jetwash from the landing Pu clouds and distorts the view. All he can make out for certain are the white-hot boilers.

The Autopilot put the Pu gently into the water next to the Chesapeake. The crew unbuckles.

"Nice landing. Next time try to keep it under Mach One for such a short trip." Dr. Ritenrong tells the android.

"Will do," it says as it immediately forgets what it's been told.

With the engines off and looking beneath the steam, Doc can see that no one is on the deck of the ship. All the warm bodies are below decks. There's fifteen people on board, according to the computer. There seems to be a bustle of activity, but some of the people are looking at them through portholes. The landing must've scared the shit out of them.

"C'mon," leads Dr. Ritenrong. "We've got to go out the cargo bay."