by Brian Tissot
Georgia shrugged as she grabbed the mechanical arm and tried to collect a frond. “Well. Like I said, it’s a young planet, and these are primitive early life forms.” When she touched one of the small yellow ferns, it disintegrated among the claws into a sand-like substance. “These are similar to Earth’s earliest primitive multicellular life forms, the rangeomorphs, which many scientists believe were primitive animals or even fungi, perhaps even lichens. I was looking them up last night. They lived on dissolved organic matter. But I need a sample to check out their anatomy to be sure.” As she tried again to collect a sample, she got the same result.
“OK, can we keep going, please?” Sage said.
They headed west, and at about 300-foot depths, they watched in amazement as the seafloor changed dramatically into a rich diversity of living creatures covering the landscape in all directions.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Sage. “What the hell happened? There’s a shit ton of critters here. It’s like we entered a different world. What would create such a change at this depth? Is it from the waves?”
Georgia appeared puzzled by the abrupt change. “Well, it’s too deep to be waves. It looks like an old shoreline, but this is recent.”
As they continued moving, Georgia narrated her observations to the camera. “There, off the port side.” She pointed to a foot-high volcano-shaped mass composed of small yellow-red objects. “That critter looks like a sponge, a primitive colonial animal and one of the first multicellular life forms on Earth. That makes sense.”
However, as they approached the “sponge,” Sage saw it eject a stream of marbles filled with red specks into the water from its volcano-shaped top; each was propelled by a long tail that rapidly swam away. The creature erupted until its entire body transitioned into a mass of swirling, swimming balls. The swarm formed a twisted stream that pulsed 30 feet away, then reconstituted on the seafloor into another stationary, volcano-shaped mass.
“What the—did that thing swim away from us?” Sage said. “Well, I guess it isn’t a sponge, Georgia. At least not one that I’ve ever seen. Let’s call it a…marble sponge.”
Milo smiled. “That’s fine, but I want a few cool ones named after me.”
“We should get some data,” Sage said. “Georgia, can you turn on the molecular analyzer?”
Georgia reached over and flipped on the elemental and DNA/protein analyzers, which booted up and whirled into action. “eDNA is on!” The instrument analyzed the chemical composition of seawater, extracted an array of biomarkers from organic material, and compared them to DNA, RNA, and protein sequences found on Earth. The data would serve as the first of many biological profiles of the planet and indicate the potential for existing life and novel genetic sequences.
Georgia pointed to a small, bluish circular object near the starboard side of the sub. “That looks just like an anemone. There’s a circular ring of tissue surrounding an array of small open mouths with long tentacles.”
As Sage scanned the limits of the lights, she saw a pastiche of colors and shapes on the bottom: marble sponges, the “anemones,” larger versions of the fronds that formed a small forest several feet high in some places. There was also a wide diversity of other benthic creatures attached to the seafloor.
Georgia raised her eyebrows. “We could spend a lifetime here, just exploring all these creatures!”
“Yeah, I guess,” Sage replied; her mind picturing waves breaking across the reef. “But we’re wasting time on this bullshit instead of exploring the surf break.”
Georgia glared at Sage. “It’s part of the mission. Milo, let’s take some benthic samples here, and then we’ll head west and take one every 100 meters. But stay away from the canyons.”
“Roger that,” he said.
Sage watched as he moved over to the robotic panel and a mechanical arm appeared on the starboard side of the sub with a foot-long tube that pushed onto the seafloor, penetrating a few inches. She heard a whirring sound when the sample was withdrawn, capped, and automatically stored in an array of cores attached to the side of the ship. Later, she would describe the creatures and culture the microbial components.
After an hour, as the sampling droned on, Sage became frustrated at the mundane process so early after their arrival on the planet. Although she knew this was important work, she was focused on the surfing and anxious to check out the thumb-shaped reef and canyon. I need to be ready if a big swell comes up. “This is a waste of time. Let’s head into the canyon and check out the reef!”
“No,” Georgia said. “I’m doing your job here, and you should be grateful.”
“Grateful?” she replied. “This is boring as hell, and we don’t need to do this right now. The swell could come up at any moment, and we don’t know shit.”
Georgia cut her off, and they argued until Milo turned around to intervene. Seeing an opportunity, Sage reached over and pushed Milo out of the pilot’s seat, grabbing the controls to the submersible.
“What the hell, Sage!” Milo said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
For a long minute, Milo and Georgia tried to wrestle the controls from Sage, but she wouldn’t let go, and their tug of war became dangerous as the sub headed toward the edge of the submarine canyon.
Finally, Milo held his hands up in surrender. “All right, all right. Damn it, Sage! You sure are stubborn. And you call me reckless. The reef it is.”
Georgia sat down, her face red with anger. “We’re going to die. Do you even know how to drive this thing?”
Sage smirked at her victory. “I know enough. I piloted the sub in the simulator, and I’ve been watching Milo. Besides, exploring this canyon is part of the mission.”
Byron radioed from the lander, “Everything OK down there?”
“Yep,” Milo replied. “Just peachy. We’re heading to the drop-off and then to explore the surfing reef.”
“Roger that,” Byron replied.
As Sage piloted the sub past 400 feet, they reached a point where the seafloor vanished along a vertical cliff into a dark abyss. As she drove along the edge, she gasped as a school of larger fish-like animals spun and darted wildly along the cliff edge, apparently swimming away from something. She saw flashes of brown in the distance as several large objects changed direction and disappeared with a chorus of sounds on the underwater speakers, including loud clicking noises.
“Did you see that on the port side?” she asked. Both Milo and Georgia looked to their left and shook their heads in unison.
Sage began to ask about the sounds when another larger school of the fish-like animals surrounded the sub.
“This place is wild,” Milo said. Then he looked at Sage, who was stunned into silence. “What the hell are those things?”
Sage was staring intensely at a foot-long version of the tiny “fish” they had seen at their surfing spot. But here they were in a large coordinated school with hundreds of individuals. But they weren’t swimming like any fish she had ever seen. Instead, each had a long fleshy fin lined with tiny flagella-like tails running obliquely along the length of their bodies, causing them to corkscrew through the water. Below the lines of flagella were a row of open pores. Maybe their mouths, she thought, running the length of their bodies. Two eyes dotted the head region.
“Humph, they don’t have jaws or teeth,” Sage replied. “But those holes along their body probably filter out plankton in the water column pulled in by their fins and flagella. I don’t know why they’re spinning, but it must work for them.”
Georgia was ecstatic. “I remember something like that from my vertebrate paleontology class. They’re like primitive animals that existed before vertebrates, the cephalochordates, things such as amphioxus or the Cambrian Pikaia.”
“Perfect,” Sage replied. “Let’s call them pika. I’ll keep moving.”
“I hate to ask,” Milo said, staring wide-eyed out a po
rthole. “But since these are plankton eaters, where are their predators?”
Before anyone could answer Sage saw a single unusual creature, about two feet long with blinking lights, dart out from the black depths, grab one of the pika with long tentacles, and eat it.
“Predators!” Georgia said as she stared at the creature. “It looks superficially like a squid with all those tentacles, but it’s all mixed up and pointed the wrong way.”
Sage described the new creature to the video feed. “The squid-like tentacles are facing down and to the rear and are covered by rows of glowing light organs, perhaps to attract or disorient prey. There’s a small mouth on the head facing forward and down, surrounded by a series—it looks like three, no, four sets—of movable arms just like a crab. I see at least four eyes, two pairs, and a pair of antennae on the head. But the coolest thing is the pair of claws—no, correct that—a pair of sharp knife-like appendages like those on a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp, used to spear prey.”
Georgia bounced up and down in her seat. “They’re like a mixture of squid and mantis shrimp. But yet, not completely like either one. Hey, I’d hate to be caught underwater around one of those things. How about ‘mantis squid’?”
Sage liked it, and Milo agreed and began to say something, but stopped when the school of pika became overrun by a large school of mantis squid shooting out of deep water.
“Holy shit!” Sage said as the pika school was shredded as they watched in awe. The mantis squid stabbed them with their appendage, then pushed the withering bodies into the mouth, which ripped the pika into small pieces. She observed that while they were eating, they would keep spearing others and hold them with their tentacles like a conveyer belt until they were ready to eat. Each mantis squid, she saw, also generated distinct color changes along its body as it grabbed and ate the prey. Some were flashing bright-red colors, while others propagated waves of black and red down the length of their bodies. The water, discolored with pika blood, made Sage nervous as the surviving pika banged into the sub trying to escape the predators.
“Hopefully these are the top predators,” she said. “But I’m heading deeper into the canyon, so we can check out how the canyon walls will influence the swell.”
“Are you sure you want to go deep on the first dive?” asked Georgia. “We need the sub to conduct scientific research, not look for wave potential. If anything happens…”
Sage gave her a searing look. “Surfing is part of our mission. Besides, it’s not like you’ll ever end up here on the reef, blasted down by a 200-foot wave.”
Sage chuckled while piloting the submersible out of the remains of the pika school and down into the black abyss. As they descended along the vertical cliffs of the submarine canyon, Sage noticed large black holes lined both walls of the narrow canyon.
“Sage,” Milo said. “Aim the lights toward the wall.” The lights showed large caves extending deep into the cliff face.
“More lava tubes,” Georgia said. “The planet is covered with them. See the step-like marks on the walls? Those are signs of flowing lava in the past when the tubes were above water. Wow, some of these tubes are massive! The Bulge had some serious volcanic activity.”
Sage watched the light fade to black as she descended the canyon wall. After 10 minutes, they touched the bottom at 1,200 feet, and she saw flat, gently mounded mud in all directions. Georgia took a few samples, but Sage wanted to move on.
“All right, I’ve seen enough,” she said. “I’m heading up to the reef.”
Milo shrugged his shoulders. “Works for me.”
Sage filled the ballast tanks with air, and the sub slowly lifted off the bottom as she followed the vertical walls back toward the surface. “These walls are ideal for wave refraction. They’re steep, smooth, and orientated toward the surfing reef. They should significantly amplify the swell.”
“Yeah,” Milo added, “just like Nazaré.”
Sage scowled at him over her shoulder as a school of mantis squid shot by and disappeared into the abyss below, followed by large blinking lights next to them.
“Shit, I see something,” she said. “Milo, kill the lights.”
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Sage sat breathlessly watching the sights below. At first, all she could see was a small blinking light fading into the blackness. Then a veritable sea of tiny lights filled the water below the sub, moving in different directions, with a few big blinking lights mixed in with constellations of smaller ones. They must have missed these creatures on their way down because they had kept the submersible’s lights on. Deep-sea creatures, she knew, were adapted to constant darkness, and avoided bright light.
As she sat transfixed on the light show below, Sage almost missed the action unfolding in the cave next to them as bright lights on massive black arms reached out toward the submersible.
Chapter 10.
Ocean of Nightmares
Tentacles covered with softball-sized suckers grabbed the sub and shook it. Sage sat frozen in shock as the sub was pulled into the cave toward the body of a giant black-and-red creature covered with blinking lights.
Seeking guidance, Sage glanced at Milo, but he was cowering in the corner, shaking in fear. Georgia screamed, “Get us the hell out of here!”
Sage jerked into action and tried to power the sub out of the cave. At first, nothing happened, and the horror of being held and trapped by the creature became real. Then she remembered her biology training. “Milo, turn on the lights!” Instead of responding, he crumpled to the ground with fists held to his head. Georgia reached over and turned on the sub’s lights. Bathed in bright light, the creature weakened its grip, and she maneuvered the sub out of its arms and filled her ballast tanks. The creature followed them, its monstrous head with grinding mouthparts and twitching antennae staring through the portholes. As the sea lightened and they approached the surface, she watched the monster drop away, back into the dark depths.
“That was a giant mantis squid!” said Georgia, sweat pouring down her face and her hands visibly shaking. “It must have been at least 40 feet long!”
Milo broke out of his trance, “My God, that was scary.”
Sage trembled in her seat as she maneuvered onto the shallow thumb-like surfing reef. The surface of the reef, 50 to 100 feet deep, was a series of sharp, jutting ridges with boulders filling the channels between the valleys. Swimming among the jagged reef were schools of large pika hiding in forests of fronds extending dozens of feet toward the surface.
It was a dangerous surfing reef, far scarier than whatever it was that had attacked the sub. This reef could cut, ensnare, and trap a surfer pushed to the bottom by big waves. And was it full of marine life. “It’s like a rugged kelp forest,” she said with an ashen face.
Smiling, Georgia leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Is this what you wanted? Happy now?”
Sage shook her head and spoke to Milo, who quietly whistled at the sight of the nightmare reef. “I’ve seen enough. You want to take over?”
Milo swapped seats, and they began their final ascent as Sage watched the craggy frond-forest reef disappear from view. They popped up at the surface and hailed the lander, which had been tracking them from above. It dropped a surface buoy and reconnected the sub to its cables.
Milo radioed to Byron. “OK, we’ve engaged. Bring us up.”
“Roger that,” said Byron. He hoisted the sub into the lander and locked it into position. As the lander finished docking, Dina opened the hatch, and Milo, Sage, and Georgia piled out of the sub. Sage was glad to be back safely on Da Bull, shaking with a mixture of fear and excitement at the discoveries, particularly the giant mantis squid.
As they settled down, Byron said, “It looks like you had some fun down there.”
“Yeah,” Georgia replied. “Sage almost got us killed in the canyon when that giant creature attacked us.”
Sage shrugged it off. “I thought it was worth checking the wave potential of the reef. We’ve confirmed what Georgia thought earlier: the smooth canyon walls should reflect incoming swells right onto the reef.
“And the reef is the perfect shape for waves except for the sharp bottom,” replied Georgia.
The normally low-key Byron couldn’t stay still in his seat. “But you’re all missing the big picture. I know surfing is important, but we discovered some amazingly complex life forms today. Things beyond imagination that will be huge news on Earth.”
Georgia joined in the excitement. “I know, I agree. And on a planet half the age of Earth. It’s a stunning discovery.”
Milo showed a smile, but appeared lost in thought.
“We got some excellent footage, too,” Byron said. “Do you want to send a broadcast out tonight?”
Much to everyone’s disappointment, Milo disagreed. “Look, I’m also very excited about our discoveries today. But no, let’s wait until we get a big swell, then we’ll hit ’em with all of it at once. I don’t want to preempt the big waves with the discovery of life on another planet. That will be on the news for weeks. But if we wait and give them giant surf and deep-sea monsters, that will make the news for months. What a planet! This is gonna be awesome.”
As they ascended into orbit, Byron pointed to the readout from the DNA/protein analyzer beamed up from the sub. “What do you make of that, Sage?”
She looked at the screen and the few lines of text. “Dang, it stopped working. Did that giant thing break it? Or perhaps the pika ran into it?”
“Yes,” replied Byron, smiling. “Something took the sensor off the sub.”
Sage looked at the meager readout. “Well, we did get a few results before it stopped.” As she spoke, she noticed something else. “That’s intriguing. It was analyzing the proteins when it broke.” Then she looked closely at the last line of text. “This is weird—”
“What?” asked Georgia.
Sage pointed at the printout. “Most of the eDNA is unique and not common with Earth. However, it detected some vertebrate-like DNA. The sequences are similar to, well…mammals. A 95 per cent match. Hmm, that doesn’t make sense, but there’s only a tiny bit of it, so maybe it’s an artifact.”
