The submersible crawled out of a billowing cloud of sand that seemed to be flushed away by the Gulf Stream. Cabrillo got his first look at the wreck with his own eyes. The old Navy ship appeared as haunted and forlorn as any wreck he’d seen, and with the rotting nets waving in the current, she looked like an old castle draped in cobwebs. He felt a shiver run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.

The ship itself was a slender, arrow-bowed craft, with good proportions to her superstructure and a single up-and-down funnel placed just aft of amidships. She had no name, but under the accumulated rime of sea growth the number 821 could be seen painted next to her main anchor hawsehole. It appeared that she’d settled evenly. There were no crushed hull plates, but the superstructure was showing signs of decay as portions of some decks had collapsed after nearly seventy-five years of the ocean’s corrosive assault.

“Would you guys turn on your helmet cams so we can get a visual up here?” Max prompted.

Juan turned on both his camera and his own lights while Mike Trono did the same.

As they edged closer, more details emerged, and Juan saw the odd frame built around the ship that Eric Stone had mentioned. The metal trusswork looked like it extended to just below the waterline and covered the entire ship in what was essentially a cage with openings of about two feet square. It was going to be a tight fit to get through the frame and actually explore the ship.

There was something really strange about the structure, whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. And then it occurred to him. While the rest of the ship was rust-streaked and matted with marine growth, the frame was shiny, and not a single organism had tried to make it their home. No clams grew there, like the colonies infesting the ship’s deck, no starfish clung to it, not even a stray coral polyp. It was as if the sea creatures shied away from the metal scaffold.

“Mike,” Juan called, “take a sample of that frame. Priority one.”

“Copy. You want a sample of the frame,” Trono repeated back so there was no confusion.

Eddie settled the Nomad onto the seafloor about ten feet from the wreck. Cabrillo and Trono switched over to their own trimix tanks, waiting a minute to make certain they had regular airflow, then they pushed off from the mini-sub.