“These are autonomous drones—probably cousins of yours,” she said, picking up one of her gleaming contraptions and nodding toward Luis’s remaining microphones at the same time. “They’re designed to dive, take their samples, and return. As long as they can find the homing signal, they’ll find their way back to me.”
“Why couldn’t you release them from the ship?” asked Tory.
“For the same reason you couldn’t set your microphones there,” said Dr. Toth. “We’re tainting the water by sitting in it. We create an artificial dark spot, which is interfering with plankton and algae in the area surrounding the ship. We’re filtering the water we take in for the pool. That means the wildlife density is changing, too. If I want a clean picture … Well, if I want a clean picture, I need a time machine and access to preindustrial waters. Since I’m not going to get that, I need to take the next-best option, which is distance. Besides, it’s a beautiful day. I couldn’t spend it cooped up on a ship.”
“Yes, because spending it crammed into a RIB is so much better,” said Luis.
Dr. Toth looked at him. “Yes, it is,” she said. “Out here, we’re free. We can go our own way. The fact that we’re planning to return doesn’t matter. Right now, if we wanted to, we could choose to run. We could hit the gas, angle toward the islands, and get the hell out of here. See the world. See something other than this patch of blue.”
“Is that what you want?” asked Tory.
Dr. Toth shook her head. “I’m in this for the long haul. I just want to get my samples. But not wanting to be free and not wanting to feel free aren’t the same thing. When you get to my age, you’ll learn to hold on to any illusion of freedom you can get.”
Tory’s laptop beeped. She looked at it before smiling, half in satisfaction, half in relief. “Software’s ready,” she said. “Luis?”
“On it,” he said, and tossed the rest of the microphones into the water. The waves swept over them and carried them away.
Most people thought the lights on Heather’s submersible were surprisingly soft. Given the depths to which she was descending, deep places where the sun never reached, they expected her to be packing floodlights, powerful things strong enough to send a vampire scurrying back into its grave. Instead, her light array cast a soft white light, more like a glow than anything else. They had been calibrated that way so as not to alarm the fish. As she sank deeper, she would switch to red light, which was virtually invisible to most of what she was likely to encounter.
Cameras on the Minnow’s hull filmed everything around her, transmitting it to the Melusine, where one of the technicians was monitoring the feed. If she saw anything they wanted a better look at, the message would come down, and she’d find herself spending half an hour following some exotic fish around the ocean. Not the most exciting part of her job, but not the worst, either. There were sampling tubes built into the bottom of the submersible, allowing her to bring back water and live specimens. It was best to avoid sampling on the way down if possible. Better to increase her weight when she was already on the way back up, and didn’t need to worry about putting an excessive strain on her engine.
A school of silvery fish flashed by, bodies glinting in the light. Heather turned the submersible to track their progress, then turned back to the real business at hand: descending. Even in a submersible pod designed to withstand the crushing depths, descent was a delicate business, best taken slowly, methodically, and with the utmost respect for the drowned world around her. This was not where she belonged. This had never been where she belonged. Humanity had chosen the land over the sea millennia ago, and sometimes—when she was letting her mind wander, when she was romanticizing what she did and how she did it—she thought the sea still held a grudge. Breakups were never easy, and while humanity was hot and fast and had had plenty of time to get over it, the oceans were deep and slow, and for them all change had happened only yesterday. The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.
The waters grew darker as she sank, one eye on the view port, the other on her controls. The “glass” she looked through was a specially treated blend of titanium and clear metallic compounds. She didn’t understand its chemical composition—she was a pilot, not a chemist or engineer—but it had been designed to withstand crush depths even deeper than those the rest of her sub could withstand. A window was a frivolous design element in a research sub. For a documentary setup, like hers, it was necessary. Much of the development budget for the Minnow had come from companies like Imagine. At least one large entertainment concern was hoping to turn the submersible into a unique theme park ride, one where guests could descend into the dark of specially designed and maintained “oceanic vents,” seeing deep-sea fish in a parody of their natural habitat. Another company, this one specializing in romantic couples cruises, wanted to turn the submersible into a strange new date location, one where champagne could be shared while a silent driver steered lovers into the abyss.
With all that money coming in from sources that wanted—no, demanded—a show, it had been essential the view port be made capable of withstanding the depths. It was frivolous and silly, and privately Heather was grateful. She liked the cool mystery of the deeps, but it was nice to be able to see where she was going without depending on the cameras. Mechanical failure was always a risk, especially when she was cruising hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the sea. If something happened to breach her hull or compromise her window, she’d die almost instantly. If something happened to her cameras, on the other hand …
Every submersible operator knew the stories of the ones who’d gone down but never come back up, the ones whose engines had stalled or whose cameras had gone wonky, telling them everything but which way to go if they wanted to survive. Not all of the missing submersibles had been recovered. Some of them were still out there somewhere, metal coffins resting at the bottom of the sea, unfindable thanks to the depths where they had settled. A window couldn’t go to rolling static and unanswered questions. A window showed you what was there.
A red flash from the console caught Heather’s attention. She glanced to the text scroll.
‘Everything good?’
‘Fine and dandy,’ she replied. ‘About to drop again. Some fish, but no mermaids so far.’ She added a winking emoji. Her operators would appreciate that. They were a good bunch of people, not humorless bureaucrats like the ones she’d worked with when she was doing drops to check for precious minerals on the seafloor. All things considered, if she couldn’t be doing purely scientific work, she’d take entertainment over government contracts any day. At least the people who worked for Imagine knew how to laugh, and didn’t treat her like some sort of affirmative action hire. She had her job because she was good at her job. Not because she was a woman, or a twin, or a redhead, and certainly not because she was deaf. But try telling that to some of those assholes. As far as they were concerned, she’d either been hired because her ears didn’t work, or because her tits did.
‘Keep an eye open!’ came the return message. A light turned green above it. She was good to continue her descent.
Heather flipped a few switches and tilted the nose of her submersible down, easing her way into the depths. The water continued to darken. The fish grew stranger with every meter of her descent, flattening, lengthening, acquiring a profusion of teeth and tendrils and glowing fins. There was nothing in the world like the deep ocean, where life was rare and its hold was tenuous but tenacious, refusing to let go. She breathed deeply, letting the canned, slightly stale air of the submersible fill her lungs. She was a surface creature where surface creatures had no business being, and it delighted her.
Down she went, down and down and down, until sunlight seemed like something from another world, impossible and easily forgotten. A jellyfish drifted past, diaphanous tendrils dangling, and for a moment she could see the outline of a human form in the way its membranes pulsed, the ghost of a drowned girl forever doomed to haunt the res
tless sea.
When Heather and Holly had been young, still learning the way to navigate their closed, silent world, Holly had been the practical one and Heather had been the dreamer. There were people who thought those positions had been reversed as they’d grown, with Heather going into the concrete solidity of engineering while Holly moved into the fluidity of organic chemistry. Those people couldn’t have been more wrong. Holly was a scientist to the core, focused on the practical, the achievable, and the understandable. Heather was still a dreamer. She’d known she could never be an astronaut since she was a child, that no one would put a deaf girl into a rocket and tell her to reach for the stars, so she’d looked around until she’d found the next best thing, and then she’d done what she had to do to make it her own. She was one of the best in her field, and a lot of that was because after giving up on one dream, she’d be damned before she gave up another.
Machines beeped and buzzed around her as she dropped into the dark, leaving the last of the mesopelagic layers of the ocean behind her. She heard none of it. When something needed her attention it flashed, green or red or amber. In that regard she was already a creature of the deeps. Light, more than sound, caught and held her focus. She couldn’t be distracted unless she wanted to be. Everything she was, she focused on the drop, and on the promise of the Challenger Deep.
The light at the front of her submersible touched the trench wall. She had reached the first milestone. From here she would be moving through barely charted waters, passing through channels that virtually no human eye had ever seen. Certainly no human eye protected by a machine as sturdy and nimble as hers. She could spend a year exploring this trench without ceasing to discover things that science didn’t know. She was breaking new ground. She was answering the unanswered questions.
‘Dropping,’ she typed one handed, and pulled back on her steering wheel, heading down, down, down into the dark.
CHAPTER 12
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
Tory climbed out of the RIB and nearly walked into Olivia. She stopped, blinking. Olivia—dressed today in white jeans and a faux corset—blinked back.
“Uh, hi,” said Tory.
“Hello,” said Olivia, cheeks coloring faintly pink. She paused before asking, “Did your science go well?”
“Oh. Uh, yes. Very well.” Tory resisted the urge to rub the back of her own neck. She was here for science—she was here for Anne—not for some schoolgirl crush on a woman who couldn’t stop bleaching her laundry.
Honest.
Olivia smiled, blush fading. “Excellent. Hello, Luis.”
Luis, who had just stepped off the RIB, offered Olivia a jaunty wave. “Hey. Where are you off to?”
“Heather Wilson is making her first descent into the Challenger Deep. I was heading for the lower deck to watch the video feed. Did you want to come?”
“I’m good, but you should take Tory.” Luis pushed his partner’s shoulder, knocking her forward, ignoring her glare. “She loves a good dive, don’t you?”
“I hate you and everything you stand for,” said Tory.
“That means yes,” said Luis, and turned to help Dr. Toth out of the boat.
Olivia bit her lower lip, looking at Tory for a moment before asking, “Did you want to come?”
Tory reviewed her possible excuses quickly before throwing her hands up and saying, “Why the hell not? Lead the way.”
Olivia’s smile was quick as she turned and resumed her walk. Tory followed.
They didn’t speak as they walked along the deck and took the elevator down to the pool deck. They weren’t the first ones to show up wanting to watch the dive; when they got there, Holly and Hallie were already standing next to the monitors, so close together that their shoulders were touching.
“Hey, Hallie,” said Tory, stepping into position. Olivia stopped a foot or so away. “What’s going on?”
“Heather’s on a deep dive. Holly came to get me so we could watch.” She shook her head. “It’s always tense.”
Holly kept her eyes on the monitors and didn’t say a word.
Hallie sighed.
Hallie sometimes thought things would have been easier if she, and not Heather, had been a twin. Let everything stay the same except for birth order. She could still have been the translator for her sisters, but she would have been the one with a constant friend, companion, and busybody glued to her side, while Heather could have gone off and lived life her own way, not worrying about upsetting Holly.
The leftmost monitor was set up with a caption crawl along the bottom, relaying Heather’s conversation with the operations team. Hallie recognized the typos as belonging to her sister; this was a live feed.
“Hey,” said Olivia, leaning forward to see Hallie around Tory. “The two of you feel like being interviewed about Heather’s descent?”
Holly’s eyes were fixed on the captions, wide and bright and frightened. Hallie glanced at her before shaking her head apologetically.
“Maybe later,” she said.
Olivia nodded. “Ray’s supposed to be taking a nap anyway. He was up late last night, getting footage of the midnight research team.”
“Of which I was one, so if I can be out of bed, he should be too,” said Tory primly.
“Shut up.” Olivia leaned over to bump Tory’s shoulder with her own. “It’s not his fault that you’re a biological sport who doesn’t require sleep.”
“It’s his fault that he isn’t,” said Tory.
Hallie signed the whole time, more out of habit than from any belief that Holly was paying attention to her hands. Holly’s eyes were glued to the screen, watching the fish swim by, seeing what her twin saw as she went down, down, down into the dark.
Heather was ten meters past the mouth of the Mariana Trench and descending. The pressure outside her submersible was such that if she’d opened the hatch—if the machinery keeping it locked had allowed her to open the hatch—she would have been crushed before she had the opportunity to drown.
On the surface, thirty feet was nothing. She could walk thirty feet for a cup of coffee, moving horizontally, making no real effort. Underwater, everything changed. Every foot she descended was another foot of water piled on top of her, another foot of weight and pressure and danger. She was far past the depth that the greatest free divers in the world could survive. She was approaching the depth that had, for decades, been the deepest mankind could safely go—not that there was anything safe about what she was doing. Safety had been left far behind her, and she was flying.
Nothing had passed her cameras in almost five meters. The last thing she’d seen had been some sort of squid, glowing pearlescent under her lights, moving fast enough that it was almost as if it had registered and was objecting to her presence. Things this deep usually didn’t care about her. She could startle them with sudden motions, but a calm, controlled descent was something for them to ignore. The squid had been fleeing.
‘Getting an audience up here,’ said the display. ‘Both your sisters came to see the show.’
‘Tell them it’s just getting started,’ she typed back. At this depth, there was going to be a several-second delay on each end: she could respond instantly when something came through, but she had no way of knowing when the first message had been sent. She pulled gently on her controls, forcing the submersible deeper into the black. The Challenger Deep was ahead, and with it, sights no human eye had ever seen. She was going to be the first. She was—
Something flashed by her window, moving into the light and then out again too quickly for the eye to follow. She pulled back, stopping her descent, and hung suspended in the water as she typed, ‘Did you get that? Can you slow it down?’
The reply would take at least thirty seconds: time for them to get the request, slow the footage, watch it, and send back an answer. Heather began to turn slowly, lights bouncing first off the wall of the trench itself, and then off the nothingness beyond, illuminating absence.
The water was crystalline and clear, lacking most of the high cloudiness of the photic zones. It was a lack of plankton and larval animals, which accounted for much of the usual distortion. Down here, it was just her, and the sea, and whatever had swum past.
Her console flashed. The answer was coming through.
‘Heather,’ it said.
‘Heather, please,’ it said.
‘Heather, please remain calm,’ it said.
Heather frowned. This piecemeal method of communication was nowhere near good enough. They’d have to drop some sort of signal booster for her next descent, something that could bounce the wireless between her and the ship. This sort of stuttering delay did no one any good.
‘Heather, please remain calm and return to the surface,’ said the full message.
Heather’s frown deepened. She hesitated with her fingers above the keys, trying to decide on her reply. If she said ‘no,’ they would argue. If she asked ‘why,’ she’d be as good as agreeing to return. And she didn’t want to return. It had taken time and effort to get this deep, to enter the stretch of sea that she’d been dreaming of since the day she signed on for this mission. She could descend again, but there was only one first dive in any one location. One chance to make a first impression. Without a clear and obvious danger, she didn’t want her first impression of the Challenger Deep to be undefined motion on a monitor and fleeing like a scared puppy with her tail between her legs. She wanted to know.
Heather pulled back her hand. The communication channels were bad enough, attenuated and stretched thin by the water, that it would be at least a minute before anyone could say for sure that she wasn’t responding. She could cover a lot of ground in a minute.