Matthew Silver and the Monster Hunters, Book One: The Darkest Waters

Chapter Thirty-Two

SilverCHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“So it was just a giant submarine?” Scott asked in disbelief about fifteen minutes later.

“Basically,” said Leila-something-or-other, a technician, “I suppose you could think of it as an extremely sophisticated robot and submarine. It mostly pilots itself, but it still needs us six to manage it.”

The monster wasn’t a real monster, if you haven’t figured out by now. It was actually just an extremely oversized robot and submarine piloted by a team of six Hunters.

So what exactly had happened? The mission hadn’t been a real mission. I’ll try to explain.

Nothing is more important for fieldwork than having a solid, coordinated team. In order to strengthen this, the Administrators would occasionally throw out a training exercise for you and your team. Training exercises were specifically designed to test you and your team in just about every single way possible. By doing this, the Administrators could keep track of your progress and see if you were almost ready for dangerous fieldwork. Training exercises were usually some of the hardest missions you’d ever receive as a recruit.

The hard part about training exercises was that you didn’t know they were only exercises, until the end. In the end, they’d reveal the big surprise and tell you if you’d passed or failed the test.

The Administrator would give you some big, fake mission, and you’d go through it like any other mission, not realizing that you were being watched and graded the whole time. The exercises were often much more challenging than missions, but they were engineered so that you’d never be in any real danger. In this case: the “monster”was just a robot/submarine manned by a Senior Agent team. As for Parker and all the other monsters we’d faced…

We were pretty shocked to hear that the mission had only been a training exercise. Ms. Amber had told us a very convincing story to explain why we were going on the mission. She had used the frequent monster attacks to cover for why she couldn’t send out a team of Senior Agents, saying that they were all too busy. She’d also thrown in a little danger to the CCU itself.

I was angry and impressed at the same time.

I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for it. Like she’d actually entrust the future of the CCU, and possibly the entire world, to a team of recruits! I had to hand it to her. She’d really laid it on us by mixing in truth with the lies to make it seem more convincing.

Training exercises were never supposed to be life threatening, but just seem like it. After the flight over the UK, I’d been pretty sure that it couldn’t possibly be a training exercise. In fact, the entire “exercise” had been filled with life threatening situations. I didn’t know what type of training they were giving out now, but I didn’t like it.

“You were jamming our sonar, weren’t you?” Jay said as it dawned upon her.

Leila smiled proudly and rubbed her hands together, then placed them back towards the crackling fire we’d built. “We couldn’t make it too easy on you guys.”

“So how did we accomplish the mission again?” Sandy asked.

The team leader, Jace Tiller, Leila’s partner, looked at us sympathetically. “Technically, you did and didn’t. This was supposed to be a training exercise, and they sent you in to try to capture ‘the monster’with warnings of threats against the CCU.

“Our instructions were simple. If you caught us, you’d pass. If you gave up and called for Extraction, you’d fail. Since you technically did have us captured, and you never called for Extraction, you passed, even if you almost killed us all with your method of doing so.”