by Serena Vale
This sensation too was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps it was the gentle rocking of the boat on the ocean waves, but she felt as if the tides of her own body were swirling within her like a typhoon. Dane clenched his fingers around hers and the feeling was both painful and pleasurable. She became aware of everything around her as their bodies fell into an unpracticed yet perfectly synchronized rhythm.
Every sound that the boat made presented itself to her as if she was hearing it for the first time. The constantly present but overlooked thrum of the engines, the sound of a buzzer as someone was summoned on an intercom, footsteps as they passed in the hall, even the sound of water as it lapped against the hull through the bulkhead were easily noticeable. And that she was able to take notice of it all filled her with a sense of wonder as to how she could not have noticed these things before.
There was an inherent beauty in them.
“On your knees,” Dane said after what felt a long time.
Though she didn’t acknowledge it aloud, she was grateful for the change in position. Her knees felt sore and stiff, unaccustomed as they were to such a repetitive motion. Her hands freed she slowly inched forward, her legs relieved of their delightful burden and she came to rest on all fours.
Dane scrambled behind her, seemingly filled with a reserve of energy. She found that admirable as well and as his hands found her waist, he again slid inside of her. The sensation was different this time. She felt him probing to new areas of her body, stirring her, making the typhoon that had already been growing inside of her into a hurricane. It was as if he was some primitive god of the sea and she was the ocean that he could bend to his will.
He reached out and took hold of her hair, bunching it in his fist and pulling back on it just enough to give her some small measure of pain, but not enough to make her cry out. She found that that too was something that no lover had ever done for her.
“Yes,” he said as he began to thrust deeper and deeper within her. “Yes.”
With her head tilted back lightly upon her shoulders she began to lose her sense of time. Other senses followed. Her vision became blurry, her ears began to ring, and the sounds that had been as numerous as the cells in her body seemed to diminish. All that mattered was the feelings that she had inside of her and so long as they remained, she was content.
Chapter 8
They lay together afterwards in a pile of sweaty clothes that had served as their bed with the dull noises of early morning all about them on the boat. She lay with one arm draped across his pelvis, gently stroking at his cock.
Their exertions had been something that she truly hadn’t anticipated. They had been so intense… so full of life… so full of something that had always seemed lacking before when she had been with her other lovers. She couldn’t put into words what the sensation was, except to say that somehow, it felt pure.
“You say that you do this only once every voyage?” she asked.
Dane’s arm curled up and gently stroked her hair. “Usually.”
That stung her a little. A pity, that. She was certain that she would have liked to do it again. She still had two weeks before they returned to shore. Maybe she could seek a second erstwhile diversion with another of the people aboard ship. She recalled Dr. Yao had been inclined to share a little time with her. Maybe she would try that?
He kissed her forehead, dragging her away from such thoughts. “Did that help you at all?”
She chuckled. “You know, I think it did.”
She wasn’t wrong.
By the time the call box was ready to take its first dive she had thought of the solutions to not only one, but all of the problems that she had been having. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, the answers to her problems had seemed obvious and positively laughable that she hadn’t realized them before.
“What did you do, exactly?” Dane asked her as she prepared to lower the call box over the side of the boat into the water.
She chuckled as the breeze of the sea kissed at her skin, spraying her with the delightful feeling of salt and open water. “I coated the electronics inside with nissaprine.”
“Nissaprine?” he asked.
“It’s a kissing cousin to latex, really. It’s used to make stinger barriers in Australia… you know how they say wearing a pair of pantyhose can protect you from the stingers of a jellyfish?”
He nodded.
“Nissaprine does the same thing, except you spray it on and it stays there until you rub it off with a solvent. I used the same thing to coat the electronics.”
“And it doesn’t muffle the signals?”
She shook her head. “Not at all, it keeps humidity that builds inside of the box if it’s in shallow water from affecting the gear and I used the same substance – but in a different medium – to line the seals of the box itself.”
“Double redundancy,” Dane said with an approving nod. “Impressive.”
She lowered the box into the water and the rope on which it was tethered lightly bit at her hand until the device sank into the surf with a loud plunk! She tied the rope off to a mooring hook on the edge of the boat and stepped to her laptop that was electronically tied to the call box.
She keyed a sequence and an image appeared on the monitor. The image was of a shifting series of blimps that Dane was quick enough to recognize.
“Sonar?”
She nodded. “The captain was kind enough to allow me to tether in for the experiment. It keeps me out of their way on the bridge and lets me stay close to the equipment in case something goes wrong.”
“Do you think something will go wrong?” he asked, his question a test.
She smirked. “With the gear? No. I don’t. With the whale song needed to see if this works… well, I liked to be surprised.”
He smirked back and watched as she typed away on her laptop. She almost wanted to laugh. Three days ago, she would have been pulling her hair out if she hadn’t solved the problems that she’d had before now. But with her mind cleared and her ideas executed she felt as confident as though she were about to ride a bike.
She keyed the final sequence and while her laptop ran a series of numbers across her screen she turned to Dane, who alone of everyone else on the boat, had turned up to see her experiment in action.
“Okay, those blimps,” she said, indicating the images on the screen, “is a pod of gray whales.” She pointed to the series of numbers traversing across the screen. “My software has identified them through the call box and is interpreting the warning signal I’ve fabricated to match their tones and thrums.”
“Alright,” he said, following along. “It’s like an interpreter for whales?”
“More or less. If this works,” she said, hoping that she didn’t sound doubtful, “the pod will change direction. They’ll turn about and head back in the exact opposite direction that they came from.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“Then they’ll probably stay right on course and ignore us,” she admitted.
“How soon before you’re ready?”
She looked back to her laptop, the variables were ninety percent completed. “About ten seconds.” She waited and watched her screen. According to the sonar the pod, which looked to have only six members, was nearly three hundred yards off from where the Sea Sprite presently swam through the sea.
Please, she silently pleaded, let this work.
Her laptop completed its calculations and chirped with a large Ready signal. She clicked on her execute button and from beside the ship, there was a thrum that sounded deep and bellowing. Yet it was undeniably artificial, like listening to a synthesizer rather than a piano. Yet there was more to it… it was… organic in nature.
“Signal’s sent,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screen.
“How long will it take for the signal to reach the pod?” Dane asked, leaning over to look at her laptop.
“When they’re this close they should get it almost instantly,” she said. “But that’s g
enuine whale song. I have no idea how they’ll respond to an artificial one. It might be that they have the equivalent of a spam filter.”
Dane chuckled.
She watched the screen intently, her eyes fixated on the dots on the laptop as if willing them to turn around. A lifetime of desire and aim had led her to this moment, and she wanted nothing more than to be able to say that it was all worth it. That all of the years of schooling, learning, dreaming had brought her here.
She silently counted the seconds as they went by. Eight... ten… fifteen… nineteen…
Slowly, the pod began to change direction.
She almost yelped with glee… but the feeling did not last.
The blimps on the screen changed their course, yes, but not in the way that she had hoped. They were simply heading in a new direction, but still mostly on their original course. Like sidestepping a puddle on a wet road, they were intent on keeping their heading and weren’t deterred by something in their way.
Their course shifted slightly, but still; their general direction remained unaffected.
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
She sighed and shut her eyes, trying to sieve the positive from the negative of this experience. “It means they heard it… but they’re not deterred.”
“Or they just didn’t understand it,” Dane offered consolingly as he put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t forget, whale song still isn’t a language you can learn in school. You’re trying to speak in gibberish.”
She almost chuckled at that, but the sound would not come.
“It’s not a failure,” Dane assured her. “Nobody gets it right the first time, remember?”
She sighed. She was still secure in the familiarity of scientific process, yes, but she couldn’t deny – at least to herself – that there had been some part of her that wanted to succeed on the first try. She wanted to be the first to accomplish something great the first time it had been tried in the field, like the Wright Brothers.
But alas, it seemed that it was not to be.
At least not today.
By the time the final week of the voyage was complete, Nya had found opportunities to test the box against a pod of Bryde whales and even on a lone Blue whale. The results had been just as she had feared: not at all what she hoped.
The animals had heard her call, but like a call from a telemarketer they simply chose to ignore it. They’d paused long enough to listen, but they chose to go on about their business as they had originally intended. Her artificial call had reached them, but it did nothing to deter them.
She sat in her cabin, looking at the coding on her laptop screen and trying to figure out where she could have possibly gone wrong when there was a knock on her door.
“Yes?” she said absently over her shoulder.
The door opened and she looked to see whom it was that had come in. She was pleased – and a little embarrassed – to see Dane standing there.
“Hi. Mind if I come in?”
She shook her head. “No, please do,” she said, turning away from the screen that was just as perplexing as ever. “Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine,” he said with a nod and closed the door behind him. “I just wanted to check up on you. See how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” she said with a shrug.
“Haven’t seen you in any of the labs or in the dining hall at all this week,” he observed as he leaned against her desk. “I hope you haven’t been locking yourself up in here. That’s not good for you.”
“I know,” she said with a sigh. She had been out of her cabin numerous times in the last week, mostly to have a shower or find something to eat. And the only times she had gone on the weather deck was to drop the box back into the drink for its second and third tests. Dane had been present for both and he knew full well that she hadn’t completely tucked herself away in her quarters. “I’ve just been…” her voice trailed off. She didn’t know what she was.
“Troubled?” he offered.
She nodded. That was as good a description as any. “Yeah.”
He knelt down on the floor in front of her. “You know, no one ever really gets it right the first time they try something that’s never been done before. Sometimes it doesn’t work the second or even the third time that they try anything new. Alexander Graham Bell… Tesla… Da Vinci… they had their failures too. And none of them were trying to attempt something as large as trying to speak to another animal.”
She managed a faint smile at that. If none of the greats had ever tried such a thing she supposed that there was room for error in there somewhere. Maybe she would go down in history as the first person to ever try.
“Well, yeah. There is that,” she conceded.
He put a hand on her knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’ll be okay. You got the other whales to at least change which direction their noses were pointed, didn’t you? I’d call that a success. Maybe not the one you were looking for, but it’s something.” He paused. “And I think it’s something that the Carver Group should consider looking deeper into.”
She turned an excited eye to him. “What?”
“I can’t make any promises, mind you,” he said, giving her knee another squeeze, “but I’ve seen what your gizmo can do and I think with a little tweaking and maybe a little more time and research it could be made to work. I’m confident that they’ll see this as a worthwhile project.”
She felt like she wanted to cry, but from gratitude or outright joy she wasn’t sure. “Thank you, Dane.”
He smiled at her and rose up to his feet. “We’ll be getting back to port the day after tomorrow. You’ll have enough time to collect your notes and your data and organize them into a presentation for the board. You’ll be fine.”
“Good to know,” she said with an acknowledging nod. It was pleasing to know that everything that she had been through in the last three weeks, the ups and downs and the hopes and disappoints weren’t a complete defeat. It was only a starting point.
“Good. Now, take off your clothes.”
She looked up curiously at him. “Excuse me?”
“Just as I said, take off your clothes,” he repeated as he began to pull his shirt off, revealing his tattoos.
“But…” she began.
“Hey… it’s mother nature calling, hon,” he said, unbuckling his trousers and pulling them down around his ankles. “I need to figure out what I’m going to say to the board on your behalf. And I’ll tell you something,” he added as he pulled off his underwear, showing that he was already hard and ready for her, “I hate talking to the board… and I need a little inspiration as to what I’m going to tell them about how amazing you are.”
She felt herself blush again at the sight of him naked and relished in it. “Hey… I thought you only did this sort of thing once every voyage.”
He cracked a smile that seemed almost boyish to her. “Yeah… well, I don’t usually attend the experiments of others aboard ship either. But for you, I can make an exception.”
She measured his words, wondering if this was some kind of a joke. But that his dick was hard and ready seemed proof enough that he was not being humorous in any way at all. He was being nothing short of honest, as usual.
“What’s wrong? I thought you liked surprises.”
She licked her lips hungrily at the sight of so much flesh. Why not? It wasn’t like she was making a whole lot of progress on her work otherwise.
She stood up and began to remove her clothing. “If I help you find your words to give to the board… might I be able to sweet talk you into letting me go back out with the Sprite for, uh, more testing?”
His smile would have melted steel it looked so warm. “I had hoped for nothing less.”
He reached for her.
The cold spray of the sea was a gentle reminder to her.
It was getting dark. She would need to go below deck soon.
She opened her eyes and looked out over
the open water. The sun was setting in the west, the golden orb of light touching the water. She pondered what ancient sailors used to believe about such a sight: that the ocean surely extinguished the sun like hot metal in a forge and that some god or other rekindled it every day at sunrise.
It was superstitious nonsense, she knew. But these days, she found that some of the old ways provided valuable insight. The idea of even entertaining the preposterous had seemed more like an anecdote than anything else.
“Hey,” Dane said, and she felt his hand on her shoulder.
She turned to see him and smiled. He wore his usual ragged looking jeans and no shirt, what she repeatedly referred to as his “pirate attire.” The only differences that he’d made in all the time she’d known him were the new tattoos on his chest, that his hair had gotten longer, and the ring on his finger.
“Hey,” she said, as he bent over to lightly kiss her. He knelt beside her chair and kissed her large belly that presently had a pair of headphones attached to them.
“Beethoven? Bach? Mozart?” he guessed, indicating the headphones. “What’s the baby listening to this time?”
She smiled and pointed at the cord that was presently draped over the side of the gently rocking boat. His eyes traced the line and looked back to her for an explanation. “The aqua phone?”
“Picking up dolphin chatter,” she explained. “There’s a pod of them about a mile off. I thought maybe the baby should listen to something playful.”
He beamed at her. “The baby’s going to be a fish himself, isn’t he?”
“She is going to be a marine engineer, like her mother,” she said. They’d had this debate before, if their child was going to be a boy or a girl, but she always found it cute the way he brought it up and was stubbornly determined to have a son.
