Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3)

by Elsa Jade

  ‘We are that power. It is time for the Abyssa to rise as well. For too long, we’ve dreamed in the deeps and hidden our light. If this is Tritona’s last gasp, then let it be ours as well.’

  Lana shook her head hard enough to fling droplets in all directions that caught the shimmering glow of the crystal though they were but water. “You’ll die, all of you,” she said fiercely. “Again and forever. We don’t have time to synthesize enough gel to recapture all your memories, follow your dreams.” Her breath caught, and the waves of anguish around her stilled. “But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

  ‘You always have a choice,’ the Abyssa said, and to Sting’s admittedly inexperienced ear, the myriad octaves of the crystal jellyfish’s voice for once sounded simple and clear. And infinitely gentle. ‘Titanyri, will you hold the burning tide and be her path though it demands a strength you’ve never known?’

  He did not hesitate. “I’ve been blown out windows for her. I crashed a spaceship for her. I would’ve left this world and never looked back for her.” He met her dark and stormy gaze. “I rise and burn for my fire-witch.”

  “Sting,” she whispered.

  “No words this time, i kharea nul’ah.” Whatever else she was, he would always know her as his sweet fire. He held up his hands to her. “This time, we bring peace to our home.”

  With one last breath that shimmered the waters, she reached for him, and though the song in his heart had no words either, he knew it would echo with him forever.

  Chapter 21

  If ever there’d been a time when she wanted to run away…

  Lana hung suspended in the dark waters just beyond the entry to the Abyssa’s grotto. Part of her e-suit had been stripped away to expose her scent and electrical presence, and a sprinkling of scales from Sting’s armor decorated her bare skin. Just a few dots and whorls of blue-violet luminescence glowed across the backs of her hands and spiraled up both arms like a pale lure, but in the inky black, she might as well have been yelling…

  Eat me.

  Which she was.

  She breathed shallowly through her gill, and the tight fist of water pressure felt even tighter around her heart. Out in deeper shadows, something floated past, slow and mighty.

  She felt its hunger in one sonorous ping, like a whale’s cry but lowered almost beyond the range of sensation. Atavistic terror swirled through her, and she let her fear out in a trilling cry that pulsed through the water.

  The boundary beast charged.

  As her pings bounced back to her in a scattered wave, she had half a heartbeat to envision its narrow head and sinuous body, feathery fin-wings to either side, but tentacled, like a monstrously mutated seahorse with colossal jaws gaping wide—

  And then Sting was there.

  For all the times they swam together, she’d never seen him like this—in his element, on the attack, his skinshine bursting like a shooting star across the dark.

  He spun past the beast, snagging its attention. When it turned to follow him, Lana clamped her teeth on the gill and surged forward. This deep, the water was so cold and thick it was like doing laps in the Y pool filled with half-frozen jello.

  One diaphanous tail fin hovered just out of her reach, and summoning the memory of every muscle she’d ever seen on Sting’s mostly exposed body, she lunged at the beast—at its unsuspecting backside, anyway.

  The tether she clamped around the beast’s fin had seemed huge when Sting gave it to her. Now, compared to the beast itself, the line looked flimsy as dental floss unspooling next to a megalodon.

  But the beast noticed. It bent itself almost double to snake back at her, and she had an even more horrified view of rows and rows and rows of spiraling teeth—

  But Sting was there again. With a vicious pulse through the water, he thrust the beast aside. It broke off the attack, hesitated when the tether tugged at its tail…and then sped upward.

  Sting grabbed her with one hand and the beast with the other, and together they zoomed toward the sun.

  She could only tuck herself close to his chest as the water tore at them. He’d told her the boundary beast, like blue whales and squid on Earth, hunted all through the water column. It would seek to lose them by changing its depth, and they needed a fast ride since the beast had eaten their spaceship.

  Of all the things she might’ve wanted out of life, taming a monster alien seahorse had not made the cut.

  Just as well, since the boundary beast wasn’t actually tamed. It kept trying to spin and dive again, snaking its tentacles at them, but Sting harried it onward with his powerful pulses. When she glanced back, the tether arrowed down into the darkness. Even light and strong as the tensile cable was, that length should’ve been a terrible drag, but the beast never slowed.

  With a twinge of sympathy, she wriggled one hand between Sting’s body and the beast to brush her fingertips against its skin. Smooth hide stretched over bony plates, surprisingly warm and not so unlike Sting himself. This world was so strange and beautiful, and she had the chance to save it.

  Even if the boundary beast didn’t appreciate the effort.

  Resolute, she turned her face to the first gleam of light from above.

  It was a shock to burst into the sunlight.

  As the beast breached, roaring its fury, Sting dove aside, holding her tight. They cut the water at a shallow angle and separated. He pulsed the beast again, holding its focus, while Lana pulled her utility knife and sliced the line free. She quickly inflated the emergency buoy Sting had produced from one of his battle skin pouches. For all those times a merman needed floaties…

  The buoy expanded with a noise like a bullfrog, and she bit back a hysterical giggle, lost anyway as the boundary beast roared again and slammed the water with its fins before it dove. It disappeared with a final flick of a tentacle tip above the waves like a vigorous middle finger.

  If it came back, it could swallow them all in one gulp, and she wouldn’t even blame it.

  She might actually welcome it because the other choice…

  With a gulp that was mostly seawater, she stared up at the sky.

  Because it wasn’t daytime—it was war.

  Horizon to horizon arced with plasma fire against the night. The Cretarni armada was making its final assault. She and Sting had taken too long.

  The immensity—of the sky, the task, the dangers—made her head spin, and if she hadn’t been floating, she would’ve fallen.

  Strong arms encircled her, blocking the slap of waves, like the caldera of a sunken, slumbering volcano protecting a quiet cove. She closed her eyes, calming like the waters, even though she knew the moment couldn’t last.

  Not only was there no place left to run, she didn’t want to run again.

  With another breath, she scanned the situation. At sea level as they were, it was hard to get a view of the Tritonan forces, but she knew somewhere out there, Coriolis and Maelstrom would be fighting with the rest of the Tritonyri. And Marisol and Ridley would be with their mates, because no way would they stay behind. The Tritonans had submarines, and at least one command deck—partly submerged and partly above the water—was returning fire from its own cannons. But the counterattacking bursts were the bluish hue of low energy expenditure. Running out of power?

  “Those flashes are meant to confuse the Cretarni targeting while the Tritonyri get our people into deeper, safer waters, but they don’t know the target is our water itself.” The growl in his voice roughened. “And that target is too vast to protect.”

  Her gaze jumped frantically across the sky, marking the Cretarni ships. There had to be close to a hundred ships, some in atmosphere, some at low orbit. After centuries of war, the Cretarni had depleted their resources too, but they’d brought everything they had to this last fight.

  “They didn’t have time to synthesize the fire-switch elements into weapons for every ship,” she said. “Would Cinek have kept it for himself or handed it off to a higher-ranking officer? I’m not sure I’d re
cognize his ship since I only saw it very briefly from the outside…”

  While she’d been dying in space. She broke off the thought as Sting tightened his grip around her.

  “I’ll never let you fall again,” he murmured in her ear.

  Snuggling closer, she had to remind him, “Can’t fall in space or in the water.”

  “But gravity, surface tension, and cohesion can bring objects closer together.”

  She looked up at him. “Is that why we’re together?”

  His dimple flashed. “That and electrical charges. Opposites attract, like water and fire.”

  She cupped his cheek as if she could capture that mark of his smile. Had she ever really been afraid of his sharp teeth, or just wished he’d nibble her?

  “There.” He pointed at a ring of ships with a larger vessel at the center. “We can’t see it from here, but they’ll be running cables to draw power from the smaller ships to the cannons of the larger one. They used that technique to calculate for refraction and gain better penetration through the water to reach our submerged ships.” His white-hot stare at the sky was furious enough to bring down ships on his own. “But I’ve never seen so many ringed at once. That’s not a safe distance, and any miscalculation could be a threat to all the ships in the configuration.”

  “That was nice of them,” Lana murmured. “Shortsighted, but nice.”

  He glanced at her. “Is this what you want? To take on this fight? It will hurt, body and soul. Some will die, at your hand and by your power. If you choose to dive, there’s a line right there that will take you back to that cavern. It’s deep and pure enough that you could survive there.”

  Run and survive, alone. Yeah, she’d done that.

  “I don’t want this,” she admitted. “Who would want war and pain and death? But the Cretarni made this weapon and used it against us, and they want the world to die rather than just let it go.” She shook her head, flinging back her hair. “Maybe I wasn’t always great about figuring out what I wanted, but I know what I don’t want here. We can’t let them destroy the waters.”

  He kissed her. Maybe he didn’t have the pheromones for the breath of rising desire, and maybe she still hadn’t manifested the gills of her Tritona heritage that would let her breathe underwater, and yeah, maybe the sky and the water were burning all around them as their enemies amassed for the last assault, but in that heartbeat, their flaws and their failures meant nothing, and they could float only on their hope for what came next.

  When she broke away with a gasp, the bits of scaled armor he’d given to her had brightened to an almost neon hue.

  He smiled. “Your power is rising,” he whispered over the susurration of waves and the piercing whine of laser fire.

  “It’s what I am.” It was what she’d always been, but she’d been too afraid to want. She wasn’t going to let that fear rule her anymore.

  The kiss had left her pulse buzzing, but now she realized it was more than the kiss. “I feel it.” The water began to swirl around her, a slow counterclockwise churn that displaced the water, like the dimple in his cheek, so that they sank lower than the sea level, until it was only the two of them and the sky full of enemies. Her blood seemed to swirl the same way, but faster. Every nerve felt like a live wire, awaiting only a touch to spark and burst into flame.

  But she’d never called on the power deliberately. She’d always held it back. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed. “I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve believed—”

  He kissed her again, stopping the flow of negative words. “You know,” he admonished her. “You’ve done it before. When you crashed the Diatom. When you blew me away. Once or twice. Every time you kiss me and set my blood on fire.”

  His words lilted like a song she only half knew. Okay, but maybe if she didn’t know, she’d figure it out on the fly—or on the swim—just like everyone else who wasn’t a bioengineered killing machine. Taking a breath she nodded and let him ease her away until she was holding onto the buoy by herself.

  The waters swirled faster, carrying him in a circle around her, and she closed her eyes against the dizziness.

  And against the fear rising faster than the power.

  Yes, she’d blown him away and even crashed one spaceship with her zaps. But downing an armada? Out of orbit? While they were shooting at her?

  Or not at her, specifically, since they thought they’d taken what they needed from her and left her to float off into space shackled to a makeshift bomb. As far as Cinek and the rest of the Cretarni knew, she was a thin trickle of debris circling Earth.

  The whirlpool had dragged her buoy and her deeper, as if she were drowning in the air. When she looked up, the only circle of sky visible contained that center ship—Cinek’s?—and its ring of battery ships. The finest tracery of lines, like the spokes of a wheel, connected the ships. Sting had said they wouldn’t be able to see those power cables, but…

  Somewhere, beyond the horizon, the sun must be coming up, glinting on those lines.

  Would the new day dawn on a new chance or the Last Tide?

  No, that was too overwhelming for words. She was only in charge of this moment, with the power she had right now.

  And she did have power. It sparked in the electrical bonds between her atoms, in the kinetic energy of her muscles, in her love for her friends somewhere just out of view and her mother on Earth far away.

  In how much she wanted Sting as he spun through the vortex around her, somehow always facing her, there for her…

  The first zap was small. Some free-floating fleck of mica in the spinning water was the imperfection that broke the flow of the rising power, and a spark—small as a firefly—arced across the funnel over her head with a faint but pure note of sound, almost lost in the cacophony of the whirlpool.

  Her heart pounded, its cadence like a double kick drum off one of Marisol’s lady death metal albums. Abruptly, Lana remembered a trio of guys who frequented a shop where she’d worked briefly during her wandering that specialized in appropriating indigenous therapies for recreational purposes. They’d wanted the shop to carry CDs of their experimental music made with a resonant transformer. The shop owner had said the music sucked but sold them some mushrooms. Curious, before she’d left town, Lana had gone to their show.

  In the dingy club, the transformer had been brighter than the beer signs, louder than the guitars, throwing wild sparks as the sound tech tried to control the tuning of the high voltage discharges.

  In retrospect, she knew now why she’d been so intrigued: as a nul’ah-wys, she was basically the coil of a lightning machine.

  As if rewarding her insight, a second silver-white zap shot across the whirlpool and climbed halfway up the funnel walls before fizzling out in a mournful descant.

  But now she felt the rising power.

  This was what the Abyssa had envisioned: not a cursed weapon to burn a world, but a living being to be a pathway for the power, a conduit for the waters to become a source of pure, endless opportunity.

  If she could just control it before the Cretarni boiled the sea around her friends, the Tritonyri and Tritonesse below, and even the poor boundary beast.

  Around her, the whirlpool had deepened until her vantage point in the still pool at the very bottom framed only the central Cretarni ship. Maybe Cinek was up there—now that he was done with his closed-world rule-breaking and innocent-Earther abducting—staring down at the unexpected hole in the sea, wondering.

  Reaching out to either side, she trailed her fingertips in the whirling water. So cold, as if it had come from the bottom of the ocean. The lingering iridescent scales on her knuckles flared—

  And violet-silver plasma crackled through the vertical waves in a discordant scream.

  Her nerves blazed in answer. She plunged her hands into the turbulence, fisting against the icy cold and lightning burn, bruising from the beat of the water.

  The plasma spun higher through the vortex—threads of light fi
ne as cotton candy thickening into torrents of lightning that licked toward the rim of the whirlpool.

  Once the burning tide emerged, the Cretarni would have an irresistible target. And her body alone wasn’t enough to power the counterattack.

  Freeing one fist from the whirlpool, she slammed her hand down on the buoy. The hollow clang was imperceptible against the howl of wind and water—but the reverberation reached down past her toes, following the tether that the boundary beast had brought to the surface.

  Down, down, down.

  Lights glimmered below her feet, and the upwelling water surged at her soles. Knowing what was coming, her heart squeezed harder, remembering how she’d felt to see her mother in Sunset Falls.

  The Tritonans fighting for their home had no idea that all their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers were coming to save them.

  Following the tether to this point beneath the constellation of their enemy, the Abyssa rose from the lost deeps, its crystalline shimmer of lights brightening the waters like a dawn from below. The inverted funnel of the whirlpool began to widen as the pressure wave of the approaching bell forced the mouth wider. More of the sky opened up above her… A sky on fire with plasma arcs.

  The spokes in the wheel of the Cretarni attack formation were brighter too, and not just with the coming sunrise. They were pumping massive amounts of energy along the cables until the fiber optics glared across the low orbit like ruthlessly straightened lightning bolts that never faded.

  How could a crystalline jellyfish and a runaway fire-witch match that impending doom?

  Not simply because she wanted to or because she had no choice, or even because she believed in herself, but because she had this power and she would use it—standing with her friends—to save them.

  Or not standing with, exactly, but standing on…

  The Abyssa crystal gently bumped her soles and she bent her knees to take the shock, and then she was rising through whirlpool. As the mouth widened, the silvery fire she’d called from waters wove into brilliant comets, spinning ever faster around the circle. The resonant light sang across every octave in a multitude of voices—all the Tritonans who’d given their memories and dreams to the crystal.