“There’s my favorite kitty cat,” Shane boomed as he stepped in the door. 

Haru squealed with delight and threw herself in his arms. Shane scooped her up without any noticeable effort and nuzzled her close before setting her down again. She purred happily and hugged him again, this time grabbing hold before her feet had the chance to leave the floor.

It was hard for normal people to accept that humans could naturally grow as large as Shane. At nearly six and a half feet tall, he towered over just about everyone, but it wasn’t just his height that gave passersby the impression that they’d just witnessed a giant in the flesh. 

He’d put on a bit of a gut after he got out of the Army, but even in fighting trim, he was so broad at the shoulders that he had to turn ever so slightly sideways to fit through most doors. One might be forgiven for not noticing the gut at first; his barrel chest was so massive that the 2XLT T-shirt he wore practically screamed in pain as it struggled to defend his modesty. Clothing companies just didn’t design garments for people built on geological scales.  

For all that, though, he could be surprisingly stealthy when he wanted to. Shane had mastered the art of disappearing in a crowded room, and he moved with the quiet grace of a man used to sneaking up on bad guys in dark and dangerous parts of the world. 

Jen was only faintly aware of Shane’s true profession. She knew those skills were earned the hard way, and she knew he was semi-retired. Combat, she supposed, was a young man’s game, and at 36, Shane was positively ancient by military standards. It made sense that he’d be less willing to venture into undisclosed hellholes for a paycheck these days. 

Exactly what he did when he vanished for weeks at a time, though, she couldn’t say. But he always seemed to come back with a new scar to add to his collection. 

Jen found herself dreading his absence almost as much as Haru. If he was seriously hurt or even killed, Haru would be devastated. She’d miss him too, in her own way, but that was the part that truly worried her. Haru needed Shane to stay on an even keel. He was her emotional anchor. If he just didn’t come home, it might take years for Haru to recover from the loss, if she ever did.  

“Thanks for coming over on such short notice,” Jen called from the couch in the living room. 

“No worries,” Shane said. “I was gonna see what you guys were up to anyway.”

Shane lived a few blocks down in the house he ostensibly shared with his wife. Jen had only met Penelope a handful of times. She was a traveling nurse practitioner, and spent months, even years, away in remote parts of the world providing medical care to disadvantaged communities. It was an admirable career, but one that left Shane with entirely too much time on his hands. There was a 50/50 chance that either he’d come to visit Jen and Haru, or they’d come and visit him, on any given night of the week. 

“I’m making mapo tofu for supper tonight,” Haru said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Your mapo tofu is wonderful,” he replied. 

Haru insisted on cooking most nights, and when company was over, she pulled out all the stops. Needless to say, her meals were a hit, and the fact that she tended to wear only an apron in the kitchen only sweetened the deal. 

Jen and Shane both turned to watch as Haru hustled back towards the kitchen, naked hunger in their eyes that had nothing to do with the tantalizing aroma that wafted around the house. 

“Goddamn, she’s hot,” he murmured. 

“Isn’t she?” Jen said. 

“You know, if you told me ten years ago that I’d end up dating someone like her, I’d have said you were out of your goddamn mind,” he said. 

“Haven’t you been married to Penny for 15?” Jen asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“Eh, that’s different,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “She’s more like a stray that comes home when she’s horny.”

“Still cute though.”

“Oh, sure,” Shane said. “I just can’t quite see her doing the naked apron thing.”

“Have you asked?” Jen replied. 

“Once, but I was young and needed the money,” he said. 

The mystery of how Shane managed to attract a pair of world class beauties as partners was one that Jen had solved a long time ago, even if he hadn’t. If you liked your men strong, affectionate, and dependable, and didn’t mind if they were a little on the gruff side, he was a solid choice. Of course, she only liked men in yaoi, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t understand the appeal. 

“Hey, you mind if I pick your brain about something?” she asked. 

“Sure,” Shane said, sitting down on the couch. 

He left a cushion in between them. That spot was Haru’s by default. That way, she was free to decide who she wanted to cuddle up next to. These days, that usually meant both of them. 

“So, I was hunting down an error in my AI,” she began, and carefully laid out all the details she knew for sure, without inserting her own biases or assumptions. 

Once she was finished, Shane stroked his beard thoughtfully. It was getting on the scraggly side. His beard, Jen had learned, was an excellent indicator of his mental health. The more frazzled it was, the more frazzled he was. Judging by the state of it, throwing a problem in his lap was probably doing him a favor. He needed problems to solve, or he got too wrapped up in his own head for his own good. 

“Hmm,” he said. “That’s a tough one. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any way to produce that much water. Maybe some kind of reactor on the seabed that breaks down the seafloor into its constituent elements? But then you’d have one hell of a time trying to come up with enough energy. Hydrothermal vents? Hell of an undertaking either way.”

“I’m just relieved that you don’t think it’s possible,” she said. 

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Shane said. “There’s a lot of hydrogen and oxygen trapped in the crust and mantle. If you came up with some sort of catalyst that could break them out, and then had some way to store them, it’s possible. Now plausible, that’s another story altogether. I imagine the pressure on the ocean floor would make it a lot easier. In theory, if you could get the tanks full, you wouldn’t need nearly as much material as you would for, say, a scuba tank, to store them. But the sheer volume is pretty much unimaginable. All the water in the atmosphere would be enough to raise the sea level by about an inch. We’re talking numbers so high, I don’t even know what you would call them. We’re well past googleplex territory. I guess it’s always possible that there’s some kind of subocean buried under the seafloor, but shit, I don’t have the first fucking idea how they’d go about finding it, much less breaking it out.”

“That’s mildly more concerning, but only just,” Jen said. 

“Seems like exactly the sort of mad bullshit we’d think up back in the Cold War to trick the Ruskies into bankrupting themselves,” he said. “I mean, just look at Star Wars. Half that shit was pie in the sky dreaming that we couldn’t do today, but that didn’t stop the Russians from trying like hell to keep up.”

“That was more or less my assumption,” Jen said. “But that doesn’t answer why NOAH thinks it’s a viable possibility, or how it found out in the first place. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Yeah, me neither, and I doubt a FOIA request would turn up much, either,” Shane said. “You’d have better luck finding an old fossil from the Cold War DoD and beating it out of them.

The Freedom of Information Act made it possible for Americans to request just about anything from the government, and they could expect a response of some kind. Sometimes, the documents were redacted to the point of uselessness, and it could take years to get a reply, but unless the request posed a serious national risk, it had to be honored. 

“I thought about that, too,” Jen said. 

“The beating or the FOIA request?”

 “I’m not prepared to rule out either, but for now, let’s stick with FOIA,” she said, chuckling. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” 

“Usually by sacrificing a goat,” Shane said darkly. “Seriously, trying to make FOIA work is more magic than anything. I know some guys that might be able to pull it off, but I doubt they’d bother. Trying to find black programs from the 70s or 80s is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. By the time they turn up anything useful, either we’ll already have an answer, or it won’t matter anymore.”

“I’m not sure which outcome bothers me more.”