His eyes were cold, glaciers set into a human skull and left to play the part of windows to a dark and terrifying soul. Hallie hesitated, revising her first impression. Maybe the point of the theatrics was to distract from those eyes, which had more in common with what little she’d seen of the mermaids before they attacked than they did with anything human.
“Yes?” she said, cautiously.
“We need you.” His tone was brusque, proprietary: he was clearly taking her attention as a given.
“We who, exactly?”
“My wife and I. We were told you are the voyage acoustician, and we need your skills.”
Hallie hesitated. It should have been nice to have someone remember that she was a trained scientist, as qualified to be here as anyone else on board. Under the circumstances …
“What do you need me for?” she asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.
“Trying to get a head count on those beasties down there. It seemed to follow that if we had someone who understood the behavior of sound give it a go, we might be able to isolate one voice from another.” Jacques looked at her expectantly.
Hallie stared at him. “You want me to listen to—well, for lack of a better term, crowd noise, in what is effectively an open-air amphitheater with unknown acoustics and no floor, and tell you how many people were speaking? When there’s no way of knowing whether most of the people present were speaking at all?” Tory could have done it. Tory had a different specialization.
“I wish you wouldn’t call those things people.” Jacques scowled. “They’re beasts at best, creatures at worst. Can you help or not?”
“I’m sorry, but I think the answer is ‘not.’” It was a relief to hear those words come out of her mouth and know they were the truth. She wasn’t lying; she couldn’t help, not with those starting conditions. Maybe if she analyzed the video first …
No. No, and no, and all the no in the world. Her sister was dead. That video might become Heather’s legacy, might be the thing she was remembered for, but Hallie wasn’t going to start studying it until she had to. Certainly not for this man, who looked at her with eyes like ice and had a bulge in the pocket of his shorts that spoke of gunfire and violence.
Jacques’s face hardened still further. “I was under the impression that all the scientists assigned to this journey were meant to help when asked.”
“Not at the expense of our own research, and not outside our fields of expertise,” said Hallie. “I can’t help you, because underwater modeling is not my field. Give me a crowd inside a man-made structure and I can pick it apart for you. I can tell you a hundred things about those people and what they’re saying and why. But I can’t map the entire Challenger Deep, and I can’t predict population density when I don’t know what the population sounds like, or how widely distributed it is. You need a statistician, and an acoustic engineer, and I don’t know, a marine biologist.”
He glared at her. “I thought you would be more eager to avenge your sister.”
Hallie looked levelly back, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing how uncomfortable he made her. “I am. But this is not the way I’m going to do it.”
There was a long pause. It stretched out between them like a tether, until Hallie tensed, afraid of what would happen when it inevitably snapped. No one else was coming into the cafeteria: all the other scientists were focusing on their work, and all the nonscientists were preparing for whatever was going to happen next. If Jacques wanted to grab her, there would be no one there to see.
(In an odd, distant way, she hoped he would grab her. She had taken several self-defense courses in college, preparing for the time when she’d be expected to take care of her sisters. A normal translator wasn’t meant to serve as a bodyguard, but a normal translator didn’t answer to her parents. If something had happened to one of her sisters because Hallie wasn’t able to stop it, they would never have let her live it down. They were never going to let her live it down. She didn’t want them to.)
Finally Jacques shook his head, a brisk motion that made Hallie itch to step away from the implied threat in his posture. “Fine,” he said. “But I’ll remember this, and pray you do not find yourself in need of assistance before our time aboard this ship is done.”
He turned and stalked away, leaving Hallie alone with a mug of coffee in one shaking hand. Carefully, she set it down next to the machine. She didn’t really want it anymore. The thought of drinking something—of drinking anything—made her stomach turn and bile rise in the back of her throat.
“That was unpleasant,” said an unfamiliar voice.
Hallie turned. The man behind her was tall, solidly built and covered in tattoos, with long brown hair and an amiable face. It was the sort of face that begged to be told stories, constructed by nature to listen. He was wearing tan slacks and a white button-down shirt, and while there was no possible way he could be a recent arrival on the Melusine, he didn’t look familiar in the slightest.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You are …?”
“Dr. Daniel Lennox,” he said. “I’m sorry we haven’t met before this. I’ve been working on a project that’s kept me fairly stationary, and there hasn’t been time for the proper pleasantries. But I’m excited to finally have this opportunity, even if it’s under terrible circumstances.”
“Oh.” She blinked. “You know who I am.”
“I do.” His expression smoothed, becoming solemn. “I’m sorry for your loss. I know how much this has to hurt. That’s part of why I’m approaching you now. Psychologically speaking, you’re in shock; you’ll be able to work for the next few hours, even if you freeze up after that. The situation hasn’t become fully real for you yet.”
“Work on what?” asked Hallie blankly.
“I’m a cetologist. We’re going to figure out how the mermaids talk to each other, and then we’re going to figure out how to talk to them. Will you help me?”
Hallie hesitated, looking over her shoulder in the direction Jacques had gone. One man wanted her to help kill the creatures that killed her sister; the other wanted her to help him understand them.
In the end there was no question which it was going to be. She would help him understand them. She would help them understand her, and when she told them why they had to die, they would know it was their own fault. “Of course,” she said, turning back to Dr. Lennox. “Where’s your lab?”
Dr. Lennox smiled.
“I think I have it.”
Luis and Olivia both looked toward Tory, the one with guarded optimism, the other with confusion.
“Got what?” asked Olivia.
“The mermaids—we need a better word for them as an aggregate; we don’t know their genders, we don’t even know if they have gender in the human sense of the word—have a hybrid language. Look, see?” Tory pointed to the video looping in one bottom corner of her monitor. “They sign, just like they did on the videos from the Atargatis. Part of their language is silent.”
“Makes sense,” said Luis. “Sound carries underwater, and everything we know about these assholes tells us they’re predators. You don’t want to warn everything around you that you’re coming.”
“Right,” said Tory. “So they sign, and that lets them communicate when they’re close together, and then, when they need to talk over long distances, they—”
“Do they sing?” blurted Olivia. “Like whales?”
“They do sing,” said Tory. “Or at least they hum, and they click, and they shout to each other. It’s just not as smooth as the signing. I think they reserve the singing for when they can’t relay things silently.”
Luis paused for a long moment, looking at her gravely. Tory nodded. Olivia frowned, looking between the two of them, trying to find the key to the things they weren’t saying.
Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. “What?” she demanded. “What is it?”
“If they have a language—not just one language, but two languages, one spoken an
d one not—and if the complexity of their spoken language is anything like the complexity of their signing, they must be sentient,” said Tory. She sounded reluctant, like this was the last thing she wanted to be saying. “There’s no way they’re not.”
“Cats meow and know what they’re saying,” said Olivia. “Birds sing. That doesn’t make them smart.”
“There’s a lot of difference between a song that basically says, ‘Hey, come fuck me’ over and over again and a distinct, signed language,” said Luis. “Especially one that didn’t get abandoned as useless after they migrated from shallow waters into the depths.”
“Assuming they ever lived in shallow waters in the first place,” said Tory. “There’s nothing about them to indicate that there was a migration. Maybe they evolved in deep waters. That makes a language based on gestures an even bigger sign of intelligence.”
“How could they—” Olivia caught herself. “Bioluminescence. They glow enough to see themselves talking.”
Tory nodded. “Exactly. I don’t think we can say, with any sort of certainty, that the mermaids aren’t intelligent. And if they’re intelligent, then we have to be very careful about how this goes from here.”
“Even if they attack the ship?” asked Luis. “The last time we encountered them, they attacked in a matter of hours. There’s no reason to believe that won’t happen again.”
Tory looked quietly miserable. Luis, who had known her for years, knew she was thinking of her sister again, and how easy revenge had looked when she was standing on the shore, thousands of miles from here, with no real choices to make. Here and now, on this ocean, in these waters, she had decisions in front of her. No matter what she chose, it was going to hurt.
“I hope they attack us,” she said, in a small voice. “If they attack, we can fight back, and maybe the Wilsons don’t have to live with what I’ve lived with. But we can’t go after them. We just can’t. They’re intelligent creatures, and we don’t … we don’t have the right. Even after everything they’ve done, until we know that they know they’ve been hurting people, we can’t go after them.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” asked Olivia.
Tory looked at her. “We tell the captain about their language,” she said, in that same small voice. “We tell Mr. Blackwell, which is basically the same as telling Imagine. We don’t hold anything back, and we let them decide what happens next. We document everything that happens.”
“After that?” asked Luis.
“We tell them that we need to get the hell out of here before we all get eaten,” said Tory. “And when people say that decision is above our pay grade, we pray we’ll live to see the shore.”
The fourth shutter test was conducted in the middle of the day, where success would be immediately obvious to the passengers.
Like the others before it, it failed. Quietly, faces grim, the engineering crew spread across the ship. The fault in the system had eluded them this far, but they were out of time. If they couldn’t fix the shutters, they were all going to die.
CHAPTER 15
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
Jacques stormed into the cabin. Michi looked up and frowned, hands stilling on the rifle she’d been reassembling. “I thought you went to retrieve the acoustician,” she said, making no effort to keep the accusation from her voice. “What did you say to her?”
“Nothing,” he spat, pushing past her to the table where their small, private sonar array chuckled to itself, spinning endlessly as it chased the sounds beneath the sea. It was a primitive thing compared to the sophisticated equipment used by the Melusine’s scientists, but that was part of its value: it could be dropped, jostled, drenched, and continue working as if nothing had happened. It was a poacher’s tool. While it lacked the power to pinpoint a single voice in a pod of whales—something more advanced, more delicate equipment could do with ease—it could find the pod, and for people like Jacques and Michi, finding the pod was all that was required.
Once they had located the whales, the rest was child’s play.
“You must have said something,” said Michi. “Did you tell her we needed her help? That we were going to hunt the creatures that slaughtered her sister like a dog? She should have beaten you here.”
“Yet clearly she didn’t,” said Jacques. “She said what I was asking was an impossibility—but that’s not why she refused me. I saw the revulsion in her eyes. She thinks of us as killers, and she wanted nothing to do with us.”
“To be fair, she’s not wrong.” Michi slotted the last component into place and leaned forward, looking down the barrel with a practiced eye. It was a custom job, designed for picking birds out of the sky over Tokyo. Like most snipers’ rifles, it was balanced to her exact specifications. It would be a lethal weapon in anyone’s hands. In hers, it stood a chance of killing gods. “We’re killers. Embrace that. Let it make you stronger.”
“I would rather have made this easier on the both of us. It could have been easier on the both of us, if she’d just been willing to do her damn job.”
“She’s a scientist. We were warned when we took this job that most of the scientists wouldn’t want anything to do with us.” Michi put her rifle aside, rising. She walked to her husband and draped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. “We’re going to go down in history as the first hunters with a confirmed mermaid kill. That’s worth more than all the money in the world.”
“But not worth enough to make me refuse the money,” said Jacques.
Michi snorted. “With all the bullets a million dollars can buy? I’d shoot you myself if you tried.”
“Good,” he said, and kissed her. Michi made an approving noise, molding herself against him as he slung an arm around her waist and scooped her off her feet.
Most of the bed was covered in weaponry. They still found room.
The pool deck was dim, lit only by the lights filtering through the water. It cast everything in an eerie blue light, unbearable and strange. “I don’t want to be down here.”
“I know,” said Theo, exiting the elevator. His leg ached. He needed his medicine, preferably before the nerves caught fire, but he wanted to sit down before injecting himself. Some things were safe to do when walking. This wasn’t one of them.
“I mean it.” Jillian glared at the back of his neck. “I don’t like that you have these dolphins here. It’s not right, it’s not fair to them, and I don’t want any part of it.”
“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Then why—”
“Because the mermaids are here, and that means it’s time to start putting the rest of the pieces into play. That includes the dolphins. Really, I’d expect you to be pleased.” The corners of Theo’s mouth twitched in what looked more like a death’s-head grimace than a smile. “I told you, they were offered a choice, just like the human members of this voyage. They had exactly as much opportunity to refuse as the rest of us.”
“Not all the rest of us,” said Jillian quietly.
Theo, who had long since learnt that there was no point in arguing when she got like this, said nothing. He kept walking, trusting his increasingly unsteady legs to carry him a little farther. Once he reached a chair he could give himself the injection, let temporary, transitory wellness sweep away the shakiness and the pain. Until then he needed to focus on the future, looking ahead to the place where he’d be able to call this mission either a success or a failure.
The door to his private lab slid open, revealing two people already at work. The blonde woman with the red roots was immediately identifiable as Dr. Hallie Wilson. The other person was less familiar. Jillian frowned, following Theo inside.
Behind the glass, the dolphins swam and twisted, performing their endless acrobatics for an unappreciative audience. It must have been difficult, being a captive-born dolphin, trained all their lives to perform for the amusement of capricious humans, and now thrust into a world where that k
ind of show was no longer considered politically correct or appropriate. It would have been better not to have them captive at all, but if they were, there should have been something for them to do.
You’re going to be doing something now, thought Jillian, and felt instantly guilty. The dolphins had earned a lifetime of leisure, if that was what they wanted, and a release into the big blue sea, if that was their preference. Cetologists had been able to converse with dolphins for almost a decade. It should have been easy to determine what, exactly, the dolphins wanted to do.
Primatologists had known the great apes were capable of conversation for longer than that; had been, in fact, carrying on conversations with them for almost fifty years. That hadn’t stopped zoos or poachers or private collectors from pulling them out of the wilds and putting them on display. Humanity was cruel. Of that, more than anything else, Jillian was sure. Humanity was cruel, and if you were prepared to try to find a bottom to that cruelty, you had best be prepared for a long, long fall.
“Dr. Wilson; Dr. Lennox,” greeted Theo. The two looked up, Hallie seeming briefly surprised to see Jillian before she straightened and folded her hands behind her back. Theo continued onward, heading for his chair. “You know Dr. Toth, I assume?”
“Only by reputation,” said Dr. Lennox. He took a step forward, extending his hand. “I’ve read all your papers, Dr. Toth. Your thoughts on mermaids were revolutionary even before we knew there might be something out here. I always believed you. Even when it got me laughed at, I always believed you.”
“You’re the cetologist,” said Jillian, taking his hand. It was easier to observe the niceties than it was to spurn them. It always had been. She’d had colleagues who didn’t want to, over the years, and had observed as their careers suffered from seemingly unrelated snubs and misconceptions, all of which could be sourced back to the time they refused to shake a colleague’s hand. Her own career had suffered for larger reasons, but she had never refused a handshake. “I knew you were on board. I’d expected to run into you by now.”