If these were the natural parasites of the sirens, the toxins they secreted couldn’t be fatal to the creatures. That meant there were answers in these protein strings, in these tiny, chitinous scraps of marine life. And she was going to find them, before they ran out of time to find anything.
All over the Melusine, the work continued. All over the Melusine, people looked for answers. Some of them were available to be found. Some of them were not. All of them were essential.
Tory looked up from her screen, covered once more with the curling sine patterns of recorded sound, and said, “We’re not getting anywhere. I need more data. Luis?”
“I’m feeding you everything I have, but they’re not talking,” he said. “It’s just water down there right now.”
“Wait.” Olivia looked up. “They left?”
“I don’t think so, although I guess they could have gone back to the Challenger Deep,” said Luis. “We haven’t been able to get proper sonar going down there. Too many walls, too narrow of a space. They’re just quiet. They’ve stopped talking.”
Tory frowned. “We figured they switched to using other sounds when they were hunting. What does it mean when they’re quiet?”
Olivia, for all that she was the nonscientist of the three, was the first to realize the implications of Luis’s words. She jumped to her feet, camera clattering against the floor, and ran for the door. Tory and Luis gaped at her.
“What are you doing?” asked Luis.
“Cats,” she said, flipping the deadbolt.
“That … isn’t an answer,” said Tory.
“Cats chitter when they see a bird,” she said. “They make this little squeaky noise. People think it’s adorable. I’ve used it in videos. Cats chitter, because they’re excited, because they’re about to start hunting. But when the hunt begins, they’re silent. They don’t make a sound. They come at their prey as quietly as they can, because a hunt only counts if there’s a kill at the end.”
Tory and Luis exchanged a horrified look.
It was a simple thing, after a life spent swimming through the crushing depths, to climb the side of a reef-that-should-not-be. It might rise out of the water, steep and hard sided, but it was only a reef, and reefs were made for ascending. From all sides the sirens came, their claws digging into the metal, their bodies draped against the steel, passage smoothed by the mucus secreted from their skins.
Some cut themselves on the holes made by their brethren. But every cut, every scrape, just encouraged the production of more mucus, covering the metal in a thicker and thicker layer of slime. By the time the third wave reached the ship, it was like grayish jelly, inches deep, shielding them completely. It did nothing to slow their ascent; they did not slip, did not slide, did not fall back into the water. They simply came, one after another, moving with steady relentlessness toward the rails.
For all that they seemed to move as a single body, an observer would have seen that the sirens were not cooperating with one another for any reason beyond biology. When one drifted too close to another, they were likely to be warded off with bared teeth and displayed claws. There was no actual fighting, but that may have been a matter of necessity more than anything else; by the time the first wave had reached the rail of the lowest deck, they still hadn’t made a sound.
A dozen gripped the rails of the lowest deck, hauling themselves up and over, bodies striking the wood with a soft thudding sound. The rest moved toward the steel strip that concealed the ship’s as-yet-undeployed shutters and continued upward, scaling the Melusine one level at a time.
On the lowest deck, a team of Imagine guards walked, Jacques Abney at the front. Like his wife, he carried a rifle. Unlike her, he had it in front of him, not seeming to care who he pointed it at. It was a loaded weapon, yes, but his fingers were far from the trigger, and he lacked Michi’s ease in moving a rifle into position. The time he lost in disengaging the safety was more than balanced by the time he gained in having the gun already braced to fire. When they went into the veldt, he was the one who fired first, while she was usually the one who fired best. They balanced each other.
In a situation like this, where keeping them together would have been a misuse of limited available resources, he simply had to hope that whatever might come at them would come at a speed Michi could respond to, and in a line of fire that didn’t require particular finesse on his part. It was a gamble. It was always a gamble. That was the beautiful thing about it. Here and now, on this ship, under this glorious and unending sky, he was fully alive. He knew his bride would be as well.
This might be the last real hunt for both of them. They had traveled the world, taking their prey from every environment, every ecosystem. They had bribed, bartered, and trespassed to line up the perfect shot, creating their own Noah’s Ark of ghosts. Two by two, that was how they’d taken the animals; two by two, and all for the sport of it, the thrill of it, the God-given necessity of it. Mankind was designed for the hunt. People who forgot that might as well have been prey animals themselves. But all things came to an end. There was no thrill in a hunt repeated. Even Michi, with her whaler’s background and her endless bloodlust, recognized that. They would shoot sirens in the defense of Imagine’s mealy-mouthed scientists, and they would return home as legends, living off the spoils of their greatest job and hanging up their guns until something else came along to shock them out of retirement.
The guards with Jacques cast glances in his direction as they reassured themselves that the volatile French-Canadian was still on point. He unnerved them. They were doing their best. Imagine had paid to train them, and they wanted to do a good job. But …
Jacques Abney was a killer. In another life, another world, he would have been a serial murderer, carving bloody smiles into throats across Quebec. In that regard it was fortunate that he had somehow found his way into big game hunting—and even then, boredom might have set in had he not found Michi, the only woman who could keep him distracted long enough to keep the razor blades out of his hands.
Uncomfortable as the guards patrolling with him were, they knew they would have been even less comfortable with her. He was a killer, brute force and bullets. She was something more subtle, more vicious, and hence much more terrifying.
Jacques stopped abruptly, signaling the rest of them to do the same. All motion ceased. He raised his chin, sniffing the air, eyes narrowing. Then, with an expression of deep and absolute pleasure, he smiled.
“Ah,” he said. “I cannot say whether it is accident or tactics, but regardless, perhaps we are facing in the wrong direction, no?”
The men around him looked confused. Jacques sighed.
“Turn around,” he said, and spun.
The three sirens that had been slithering their way along the deck stopped when the men turned. The men were equally still, even Jacques, all of them regarding the face of their enemy.
The sirens were arrayed in a rough V on the deck, one leading the pack by almost two feet. It was the largest of the three, arms thick with muscle and lips barely able to contain its teeth. It peeled back those lips, baring a forest of knives at the humans. Then it lunged, pulling itself hand over hand with a speed as alien as it was terrifying.
Jacques’s gun spoke, loud and ringing over the water. The top half of the siren’s head disappeared. He racked the next shell and fired again while the guards were shaking off their shock, blowing a hole through the shoulder of the next siren in line. It shrieked, loud and shrill and strangely honest: this was not a sound the creature had stolen from some other denizen of the deep. This was its voice, its true voice, for the first time.
The uninjured siren reacted instantly, grabbing its wounded fellow and hurling them both at the rail. They’d come over it to reach the ship, but they went under it now, the lead siren flattening itself in a way that spoke clearly to its amphibian origins, dragging the other with it. They fell to the waiting sea, vanishing without a splash before the first guard snapped out of his shock and ran to se
e where they’d gone.
The other guards fell into a defensive position, guns drawn, watching for a second wave. Jacques walked forward and knelt next to the siren he had killed, careful not to touch it. He might not think much of the scientists running this voyage—as if scientists knew the first thing about safety, when they spent their professional careers courting disaster like they were hoping to take it to a school dance? Giving scientists control of safety was like giving apes control of the banana supply—but he believed them when they said the creatures contained venoms that could kill a man. Scientists were very good at finding things that could kill a man. It was, along with the creation of more and better guns, the greatest benefit of science.
His shot had been clean from a killing perspective, if not from a trophy-taking perspective: the thing’s head was effectively shattered, leaking blood and brain and other, less identifiable fluids out onto the deck. Tiny crustaceans fled the tangled mass of its hair, scuttling for safety. Most died before they traveled more than a foot, done in by the alien environment in which they found themselves marooned. He chuckled.
One of the guards looked at him sharply, face broadcasting fear and dismay. “Something funny?” he demanded.
“Look.” Jacques pointed to one of the larger crabs. It was scuttling for the rail, moving slowly but still trying to survive. “These things, they’re ships too. See? It brought us passengers, and now it is sunk, and they drown in open air.” He laughed.
The guard shook his head. “Right,” he said. Anything more might have come off as criticism, and he didn’t want to anger the man. Instead he looked uneasily at the slime trail the sirens had left in their wake, and said, “I didn’t even hear them come. How the hell can something without legs move so quietly?”
“I heard them.” Jacques straightened, pulling the walkie-talkie from his belt and pressing the SEND button. “Michi, my dearest, are you there?”
A hiss of static before: “All’s clear so far. I heard shots. What’s your situation?”
“Three of the things came up the side. Shot two, killed one. The one I didn’t have time to hit grabbed the wounded and went under the rail. Watch yourself. If there were three, there will be more.”
“I’ll let my boys know. They’re uneasy enough as it stands. Somebody’s going to wind up getting shot.” Michi chuckled low, making sure he understood she wouldn’t mind, as long as the person catching a bullet wasn’t her. “Honestly, I’m hoping we get a few nasties up here soon. It’s boring, walking around with nothing to shoot.”
“Have faith; you’ll be swarmed soon enough.” He clipped the walkie-talkie back to his belt and indicated the slime trail. “We go this way.”
“Why?”
“Because mucus is an easing agent. It makes the path smoother. Things that slither—snakes, alligators, anything that likes to crawl—take the smoother path every time. It’s not laziness. It’s tactics. They stick to the path, they save energy for more important things.”
“Important things like what?” asked one of the guards.
Someone screamed.
Jacques smiled, as if that had been answer enough, and stepped carefully over the puddle of slime before breaking into a run. The guards followed, letting him take the lead. They might not be slithering things, but they knew the wisdom of letting someone else blaze the trail. Those who came in first often died that way.
Jacques Abney would not have the privilege of dying first tonight. Even if Jason Rothman had not already claimed that dubious honor—even if his corpse hadn’t lain, silent and staring, in the wet lab—there would have been someone ahead of him in line.
Everyone on the Melusine knew about the increased security, and knew it had started with the death of Heather Wilson. The captain had ordered them to stay together and in their labs. Unfortunately, orders have never changed human nature, and it was inevitable that some people would think the warnings were just hyperbole.
Michelle Lawrence and Andrea Hoffman had been assigned to share a lab with Holly Wilson. They were organic chemists, focused on finding the shifts in the pH balance of the water. Michelle had a minor in climatology, and was hoping to find keys to help her project long-term change to the ocean. Andrea was planning to go into pharmaceutical development, and was using the Melusine mission as the opportunity to test and sample water that was as close to untouched as anything left on the planet.
At first they’d enjoyed having a lab essentially to themselves. Holly frequently took her computer to wherever her sisters had decided to congregate. When she was in the lab at all, she was silent, shut in her own little world. They wrote notes when they needed to ask her for something, and she used the text-to-speech function on her phone when she needed to talk to them. It was a pleasant sort of isolationism.
(Neither of them had ever stopped to ask themselves if she wanted to talk to them, whether the company of her peers might not matter as much to her as the company of her sisters. It had seemed like an easy answer, after all. She was deaf and they weren’t. Even if they were all organic chemists, the fact that she couldn’t hear meant they couldn’t possibly have anything in common. Really, they were doing her a favor by not insisting on trying to spend time with her.)
Now one of her sisters was dead. They’d left a Post-it note on her monitor to express their regrets. She had crumpled it and thrown it on the floor, which seemed remarkably uncharitable. It wasn’t their fault her sister had decided to drive a ball to the bottom of the sea and get killed. Her other sister, the translator, was sad and sulking somewhere on the ship, leaving Holly alone. Which meant Holly was in the lab. Constantly. She was this silent, almost sullen presence in the corner, running tests, making them feel like monsters for laughing, for trading jokes that had grown up over the course of the voyage, for living. They were alive. So was she! So why did she make them feel like it wasn’t okay to act like it?
In the end, Holly’s presence had been too much to take, and they had fled to Andrea’s room, where there was a bed to sit on, and a bottle of brandy to spike their coffees with, and science to do. Always science to do.
“See, that’s the problem with most of the people on this ship,” slurred Andrea, pouring more brandy into Michelle’s cup. She had a heavy hand with the pour; their coffee had been getting increasingly transparent. “They don’t understand how to have fun. You think Einstein was a stick in the mud? Curie? Lovelace?”
“Her daddy was Lord Byron,” giggled Michelle. “He knew how to party.”
“And party we shall,” said Andrea, with artificial gravity. Then she, too, broke down in giggles. “We found them.”
“We did.”
“We found the mermaids.”
“We did!”
“They’re real and we found them.”
“We did, and we’re gonna be famous.” Michelle offered a sloppy salute with her cup. “We’re gonna have any jobs we want, and all because we went on a cruise. Prolly the only one I’m gonna go on.”
Andrea blinked at her owlishly. “Really? Why?”
“Because this is a hard act to follow, ’s’why. Give me more brandy.”
Andrea obliged.
Both women were so wrapped up in their two-person party that they hadn’t been paying attention to the sounds outside the door, which was propped open in clear violation of the captain’s orders. They had intended to let the night air in.
The night air hadn’t come alone.
Something scraped the door frame. Michelle looked up, laughing, ready to welcome the newcomer. Then she froze, mouth rounding into a shocked O, every muscle in her body locking up. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.
The siren pulled itself forward a few more inches, looking at the two human women. They were so soft, so defenseless, with no weapons to speak of. They had soft coverings on their bodies, like kelp, but layered, loose and flowing. It might be skin or it might be ornamental. Either way, it looked unlikely to present much of a challenge.
“Wh
at?” asked Andrea. She followed Michelle’s eyes to the door. Her cup slipped from her fingers, spraying coffee and brandy in all directions as it broke against the floor.
The siren flinched. Then it hissed, and lunged. Two more appeared behind it. Michelle remained frozen, apparently unable to process what was happening. Andrea had no such limitations. She stumbled backward, beginning to scream.
Michelle found her voice when the first siren reached her and closed its terrible teeth on her hand, slicing off three of her fingers and gulping them down like a child taking a bite of ice cream. Her eyes bulged. Her mouth worked. And then the screams began, high and keening and terrible.
The screams didn’t last long. The siren’s head snapped back, mouth opening to an impossible width before it snapped closed on her throat, ripping out larynx and vocal cords in a single convulsive thrust. Andrea continued to scream, until the two unoccupied sirens grabbed her and yanked her to the floor.
Their claws had not been blunted by the climb up the side of the Melusine. One ripped open her abdomen while the other slashed at her chest, spilling blood and fat and organs out onto the carpet, which turned a deep shade of red, verging on black. The two sirens buried their faces in the hole that had been her abdomen, gulping and rending, digging deeper and deeper into her flesh. Their hair hung lank around them, growing newly wet with blood. The siren feeding on Michelle continued to gnaw at her throat, slicing through cartilage and finally miring itself on bone.
“My God,” breathed a voice. The sirens pulled themselves free and turned. The guards stood there, clustered together so closely they could barely raise their weapons. Jacques hung back, scanning the deck, watching the rail. This was only the beginning, he knew that, and those girls—those poor, unwary girls—were already lost. Better to leave a kill for the weaklings, to give them an idea of what was to come. He already had the shape of it. They still needed to be shown.
Gunfire started behind him, accompanied by the shouts of the guards. One of them howled, following the sound with a bellow of “Oh God oh Jesus it’s got my hand.”