“Miss Sanderson—”
“Do you think Victoria is dead?”
No reply.
“Because I think Victoria is dead. That means she died to get me here, so I could close the shields. If I don’t do this now, she died for nothing, and everyone on this ship who’s still alive is probably going to die with her. What’s the code?”
He took a breath before beginning to recite, “Eight-alpha-bravo-ten—”
The code was twenty characters long: not the best choice for something that was supposed to be the answer to any major danger. Even if the captain had been keying it in when the sirens swarmed the control room, it was no surprise he hadn’t been able to finish. She could see where some programmer, safely back on dry land, would have considered it a good idea; after all, closing the shutters would use a lot of power, both electrical and processing, and would grind many of the ship’s systems to a halt. It would make it harder for rescue to be offered. The shields would have to be opened manually, deck by deck. No one wanted them to come down because someone hit the wrong button on the board.
Olivia typed the last character and hesitated. “You’re sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Are you?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “Now wish me luck.” She hit the ENTER key.
All around her, systems whirred to life, clanking and clunking and beginning the rapid process of locking into place. She could hear Daryl and Gregory exclaiming from the doorway, and then whooping with delight as the shutters started coming down.
For you, Tory, she thought, and closed her eyes, and waited for the doors to close.
The Melusine had been designed to be as self-sustaining as possible. Her air and water filtration systems were top of the line; she could keep her passengers alive for weeks with no access to the outside. Her shutters were a key component of this feat of nautical engineering. They sealed the top deck from the rest of the ship, rendering the lower decks accessible only via keycard; nothing got in or out without authorization. The stairwell doors followed a similar lockdown process: someone on deck three could open the stairs to descend to deck two, but would find the door to the deck four stairs magnetically sealed. Anyone who chose to move around the ship would be inexorably driven lower, unless they did the intelligent thing and stayed where they were.
Already-dim decks became dark as the shutters slid into place, blocking out the moonlight. Sirens shrieked and fell from the sides of the ship as the metal plates of the shutters extended down and knocked them loose, sending them back into the blue.
More were knocked off the hull than were trapped on board. That was a small and almost useless consolation. The sirens that had been trapped were driven to an almost immediate frenzy as they realized they could neither escape nor carry their kills back to whatever was increasing the brightness of the waters around the ship. They tore along the halls, wailing, focusing their attacks on the few scientists and crewmen foolish enough to still be out in the open.
In the water next to the Melusine, Tory’s head broke the surface. She gasped, a deep inhalation that devolved into a hacking cough. The sirens around her mimicked the sound, turning interested eyes her way. Sirens didn’t cough—or if they did, they didn’t do it with the force of an air breather’s lungs. She clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to tread water with increasingly numb legs while also holding her breath.
There was a clang from above. Tory looked up, eyes going wide as she realized the shapes moving rapidly toward her were sirens, knocked off the side of the Melusine and plummeting toward the waves. She uncovered her mouth and dove, swimming as hard and as fast as she could to get away from the point of impact. Kicking might attract attention. Being landed on would definitely attract attention.
Her lungs were burning. She couldn’t see. The sirens around her were visible as dark slices cut from darker water, lit from below by whatever was rising—more sirens, probably, or some sort of bioluminescent fish, moving in a great, panicky school. It didn’t really matter. She was going to be dead long before they reached her.
The shutters are down, she thought. That was it; that was the ball game. With the shutters down, there was no chance anyone would come out on the deck and see her bobbing near the hull. She wasn’t going to get saved. She was going to die down here.
Unless …
The swimming pool under the ship had channels connecting it to the open sea. There was a chance she wouldn’t be able to fit through them; more, there was a chance she would fit just long enough to get herself well and truly stuck, consigning herself to a death by drowning that would only be discovered when they made it back to land. They’d have to identify her body by her dental records. But they would have a body to identify. She would make it home to her parents. They wouldn’t lose two daughters to the same stretch of open sea; she, at least, could be buried.
And there was a chance—however slim, however small—that she’d be able to navigate the dark, drowned tunnels and make her way back onto the ship itself. She could survive this, if she was quick and clever and very, very lucky.
Tory opened her eyes, orienting herself, and looked down into the abyss, where the rising light was getting brighter. She could see an outline there now, a shape sketched out of darkness and illuminated by a single biological lantern the size of an adult man. Her eyes widened against the stinging salt. Suddenly, finding a way back onto the ship wasn’t just a matter of survival for her. It was a matter of survival for everyone. She had to find a way. She had to tell them what was coming.
She didn’t have a choice. Everything in her life had been building to this moment. Lungs and throat aching, she drove herself toward the surface. She needed to prepare for the greatest dive of her life. If she failed …
If she failed, then all of this had been for absolutely nothing.
Jacques prowled the deck like a man possessed, hunting the creatures that had taken his Michi. How dare they. They’d had no right to kill her. She was more than they could ever be, in every regard; she was a goddess walking, and she was not dead. She was not gone. She could not be wiped so easily from the fabric of his life. She would be with him always. She was with him even now. If some of the people on this petty, puerile ship were too small-minded to see that, let that be on their heads.
Something reared out of a shadow. He fired without waiting to see whether it was siren or human. The head was in roughly the same place, when the damned things clung to the walls; if it was a member of the crew, they shouldn’t have been jumping at him without declaring themselves.
(The thought that he might not have heard them if they had declared themselves was more academic than anything else. He’d been firing his guns in enclosed hallways and stairwells, without ear protection, since leaving the medical bay where his Michi—his Michi, who was meant to be immortal, if any living woman could be—lay, rotting from within. Anyone yelling for his attention might go unheard, and whose fault was that? Really, he could not be bothered. Let them die. Let them all die. All that mattered was how many of the monsters he could take with him before he was taken down.)
Jacques Abney had been hired to accompany the Melusine into uncharted waters because he was a dangerous man. Like many dangerous men, he came with his own safeguard: Michi, who had always been the better of the two of them at handling the places where civilization insisted on rubbing up against the calm simplicity of their chosen lives. This had been the big job, the one that would take them from well off to wealthy, putting them in a position to buy their way onto every game reserve and hunting ground left in the world. Oh, they would have retired for a while, but a lion never puts aside his claws. One day, the job would have called them back. They could have painted the horizon in blood off the take from this one assignment, and the fact that their contracts had come with clause after clause after clause regarding the chance of accident or other misfortune had seemed almost pointless. There were always clauses. They were never true.
But t
his one had been. This clause had borne bitter fruit, and Michi had eaten, and now she was lying still as stone in a room full of soft fools who could only watch as she disappeared, one piece at a time.
They would pay. Somehow, they would all pay. But first the monsters would pay, because for monsters there was no point in waiting. The people would learn to be afraid. The people would dread his return, because they had the capacity for such things. The monsters … If he let them, they would forget what they had done. They would fail to appreciate the gravity of their trespass. He needed to show them.
Something moved in the dark ahead. He fired again. He kept walking.
The shields’ coming down had been an inevitability, too late to do any real good, too late to save the dead, but still, the sort of thing he had known would have to happen eventually. It was the last thrash of the doomed and the dying, grabbing for anything that might keep them alive a little longer. He would have sneered at them if he’d possessed the energy. His Michi was gone. His Michi was gone, and he was so damned tired.
If Jacques had possessed the clarity of thought necessary to step back from the situation and truly look at what he was doing, he would have realized his mistake. He was cutting a straight swath through the ship, shooting everything that moved, stopping only when he needed to reload. He had already descended two decks, clearing the stairwells and the open rooms along the way. More than thirty sirens lay dead in his wake, felled by bullets to the head and throat. They might be monsters from the watery deeps, but not even monsters could survive that sort of damage.
He hadn’t been checking the rooms to either side for sirens smart enough to hang back while their braver companions lunged for him. He hadn’t been looking up, to find the dark shapes packed into corners and clinging to the ceilings. He hadn’t been careful. That, in the end, was what turned his shortcomings from mistakes into tragedy. He hadn’t been careful.
There was a soft, slithering sound. He turned, rifle raised. Then he froze, staring at the mass of sirens that had gathered behind him, following their schooling instincts one last time. They were going to die on this ship. There was no way out for them, any more than there was a way out for anyone else. But they weren’t going down without a fight.
“Soon, Michi, soon,” Jacques breathed, and began firing.
He was still firing when the first wave of sirens washed over him, bearing him down to the floor. His last shot passed through three sirens before ricocheting off the ceiling, finally coming to rest in the nearby wall. He did not scream. He didn’t need to.
The thrashing mass of sirens writhed atop his body, their hands rending him into pieces. In the end, he was barely a mouthful for each of them. Those who had survived the encounter slithered on, lips bloody, bellies empty, looking for something more to kill.
CHAPTER 36
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
It worked,” breathed Daryl, looking out the window at the deck. Moonlight washed it silver, glinting off the blood and slime. “It fucking worked.”
“The shutters are down,” said Olivia almost dreamily. She looked around the control room. The windows were intact. That was good. That might be enough. “Is there a mop? We need to get these pieces out of here, and I don’t want to touch them.”
“What are you going to do with them?” Daryl asked. “The doors locked when the shutters came down, and I don’t want to attract attention.”
Olivia shrugged. “We can push them over the side—don’t look at me like that. The captain isn’t coming back to get his hand. He’s dead. Dead people don’t need their bits.” Dead people didn’t need anything at all. It must have been very peaceful, being dead. They were free of all the complications that still waited for the living.
“And then what are you going to do?” asked Gregory, finally snapping out of his own quietly relieved amazement.
“Mop the floor, I guess, since I’ll already have a mop. Clean as much of the mess off the controls as I can. The sirens have bad things in their bodies, toxins and stuff. They can hurt people. So I don’t want to touch them if I don’t have to.” Olivia looked toward the windshield. It was remarkably clear. Most of the slaughter had happened in the middle of the room, well away from the glass, and while there were a few arterial streaks, she could still see. “I need to stay here. I’d like it if you stayed here, too, so I wouldn’t have to be alone, but I need to stay. So if you could find me a mop, I’d appreciate it.”
“Now, hold on,” said Gregory. “Why do you need to stay here? Those things will find you if you stay here.”
“Those things will find us if we don’t move soon,” hissed Daryl.
“I don’t think so,” said Olivia. “I think they went lower, looking for things to eat, and then the shutters closed, and the ones in the water haven’t had time to climb this far.” But the ones in the water would climb back to the top, and when they did, that would be it, because there was nowhere to hide up here. The top deck was as close to featureless as possible, save for the control room; it had been designed that way, in case of storms. There was nothing that could be washed away.
Olivia would have welcomed a storm. It would have cleaned the wood, rinsed off the blood, and if it took them too, well, at least drowning would be a merciful death compared to what the sirens were offering. She wasn’t ready to jump over the side and let the water have her, but she could see the appeal. Was it suicide when death was inevitable? Or was it just refusing to let someone else—something else—decide the way she ended?
“But they will find us,” said Gregory.
“Yes,” said Olivia. “It was the word soon I was objecting to. If you need to go, go. Just help me find a mop first. I want to be here if someone responds to our distress call. I want to be able to tell them what’s going on. I can’t save myself. I can still save this ship. I think that would be enough.”
Gregory hesitated before saying, “I think I know where I can find a mop.”
Olivia smiled.
Tory hadn’t been free diving in years. It wasn’t a hobby that appealed to her, and the dangers—the risks—far outweighed any joy she took in it. Still, she braced her hands against the hull of the ship, trying to avoid the places where the metal had been shredded by the sirens, and hyperventilated to overoxygenate her lungs. Finally she took a breath so deep that it ached, and dove, swimming toward the center of the ship.
She didn’t dare look down. This was already going to be a tight deadline, and if she wasted time and oxygen gaping at a horror from below, she was going to die here, pinned against the bottom of the Melusine until the current came and took her away. Sometime in the last five minutes, between the cold in her limbs and the terror rising toward them, she had stopped fearing death. Now she only feared being swept away.
We should have known, she thought, as she pulled herself along the hull toward the intake ports for the pool. How big was the Melusine? The size of a floating football field, easily, and those ports were located almost dead center. Her air would be half-gone before she even started the complicated part of her journey. And that navigation would have to be performed in total darkness, because the light (the light, the light, oh God the light) wouldn’t be able to follow her inside.
If there was any blessing to her current situation, it was that the light wouldn’t be able to follow her inside.
All the sirens on the original Atargatis recording had been similar in size and build, showing no signs of sexual dimorphism. That wasn’t so strange, for fish. Fish often demonstrated little to no sexual dimorphism. There were exceptions—the anglerfish among them—but so many looked alike across genders and age ranges that no one had flagged that as strange. Not even Dr. Toth, who should have caught the problem, if anyone was going to. Dr. Toth was the one who should have seen, should have said.
They weren’t fish. They were amphibians, impossible oceanic amphibians, and their life cycles and transformations were the stuff of biological insanity,
taking place so far below the surface of the sea that there was no convenient map to compare them to. Tory’s fingers felt for purchase on the hull, pulling herself hand over hand faster than she could have made the swim. It also kept her from being as visibly “other.” The sirens hadn’t attacked her yet—and that didn’t make any sense, that didn’t make any sense, unless they were so blinded by the light from below that they no longer cared what was in the water with them. Which they might be. Many species of amphibian experienced mating frenzies.
The light from below belonged to something so much bigger than the sirens that Tory’s mind kept balking at the thought of it, trying to ignore the evidence of her eyes. She didn’t want to have seen what she had seen. But she couldn’t let that stop her. She needed to warn the others. They needed to turn on the lights.
The port was large enough to scoop up sharks and sunfish. It had to be large enough for a human body. But the ship was huge and the port was small in comparison, and if she missed it, she was going to have to make it to the other side and start all over again. The ache in her lungs was shifting from “overfull” to “running low on air,” and she knew that this was her best, if not only, shot. She needed to do this.
Middle of the ship, she thought, and adjusted her position. Her fumbling fingers met a sudden lack of resistance as they slid up and into a trench cut into the hull. She closed her eyes and reached in with both hands, pulling herself up, easing herself out of the open sea and into the machinery of the saltwater scoop.
The shields are down, she thought. It was such a science fiction phrase that it made her want to giggle—although that might have been the early stages of hypoxia speaking. Normally when a ship’s shields were down, that meant it was vulnerable to attack by sneering villains with lasers that somehow made a sound in the vacuum of space. Now it meant the Melusine was supposed to be protected from all attackers, shut off from the world outside. What did that mean for the water intake system? Had it closed off, somewhere deep inside the mechanism? Was she pulling herself, even now, toward her inevitable watery grave?