Embers in the Sea

by Jennifer M. Eaton

  A wry smile crossed his lips.

  Oh. Crap. “Stop doing that read my mind thing. I hate it.”

  “It’s not intentional.” There was that smugness again.

  Stop reading my mind!

  Then stop thinking at me.

  Ugh! You can be so annoying.

  Me? He raised an eyebrow.

  Okay, so I wasn’t perfect. But at least my thoughts were my own.

  Or they used to be.

  David turned his seat toward me and leaned forward. “I will make every attempt not to read your mind, but if you send me thoughts, I’ll hear them. There’s no way around that.”

  “Is this part of that connection thing?”

  He nodded and waved his arms over the console.

  So, can you hear me now, or do I have to push those thoughts at you?

  He looked toward the screen and then into the murky panel. Either he couldn’t hear me, or he was pretending not to.

  David seemed to read my thoughts as simply as he heard my voice. It wasn’t just a skill for him, but a sense, like smell, taste, and sight. How hard would it be to turn off a sense like that? Was it even possible?

  “So where is this trench again?”

  “About three miles ahead, and seven miles down.”

  “Seven miles down?” My heart fluttered. “Are you taking us to Mariana’s Trench?”

  “I’m not aware of this place having a name, but that is how far we need to dive.”

  Mariana’s Trench—the deepest of the deep. The real live boldly go where no sane person should go deep. So deep the sunlight can’t reach. Darkness with a capital D, hiding creatures we could hardly begin to understand.

  “The pressure down there is insanely strong. Are you sure this thing can handle it?”

  David sighed. “No. We are going to dive a step at a time to give the hull time to adapt. If we are careful, we should be fine.”

  Great. Just great. He couldn’t have stolen completely proven pressure-proof technology. He had to go for an untested Maserati.

  I shifted my foot under my butt and clutched my seat. Just how far would we have to dive before we’d crack, if we were going to crack? The ocean hung like a dark shroud around us, like looking out a window into a dark fog. “Are we moving now?”

  “No. We’re hanging at eight hundred feet, making sure the hull holds.”

  A black blotch appeared in the wall before Edgar rose from the surface. He scampered across the floor and jumped into my lap. With a light growl, he cuddled under my arm like a tired puppy.

  David scratched behind Edgar’s three hidden eyes. “You did good today, buddy.”

  “So I guess you two are friends again?”

  “In that he hasn’t tried to dismember me today? Then, yes.”

  Edgar rolled over and I stroked the coarse, jagged hairs on his abdomen. The three of us had been through so much. Blasting through space, getting stuck on a noxious green planet, and racing through a melting spaceship trying to save my dad. Now we were underwater, floating, hoping not to lose cohesion like we had on the way back home to Earth. I shuddered, warding off the phantom chill.

  How cold would the water be if the ship were to spring a leak? I shivered and continued to stroke Edgar’s belly. David wouldn’t have brought us down here if he didn’t think we’d make it.

  A high-pitched tone echoed through the chamber. Edgar lifted his head and peeked around my chair.

  “What was that?” David asked.

  The tone vibrated again.

  “It sounds like a submarine ping,” I said.

  “A what?”

  Ping.

  A few particles brightened by the illumination within our ship floated outside the window, but other than that, only darkness lay beyond our line of sight.

  Ping.

  I sat back. “Submarines are underwater ships. They send out pings to find other ships.”

  David scrunched his brow. “That seems very archaic, even by Earth standards.”

  I decided to ignore the hopefully unintentional insult. “It is archaic. Most subs use passive sonar now so they don’t give away their location.”

  “So why would they ping?”

  Good question. “Maybe they couldn’t hear us. Does this ship make any noise?”

  “A liquid ship in water? Probably not.” He looked over his glistening panel. “But even in silence, this ping will find us?”

  Crap. Maybe I should have paid better attention in class. “I don’t know.”

  Edgar stretched and poked his one gray leg into the console. The lights went out, leaving us in a soft blue illumination.

  “Good call,” David said.

  We sat in silence, staring out the window.

  Ping.

  My palms dampened on the arms of my chair. Who was out there, and why were they looking for us? Had the sentry ships adopted outdated Earth technology hoping to find us? And if they did find us, what kind of danger would they pose at this depth?

  A soft, yellow glow shone in the distance and became larger. David’s hand hovered over a pulsing crimson light within the console. A deep intensity trickled through our bond. A need to protect. His fingers twitched.

  Oh, God. Was he going to shoot them out of the water? What if it actually was a sub, and not the sentries?

  “No.” I grabbed his wrist. “It’s probably only coincidence. I bet they don’t even know we’re here, or they heard something and are just checking it out.”

  Ping.

  His hand formed a fist, but flattened again as his face hardened in the sapphire light.

  “David, please.”

  The glow in the ocean intensified, becoming a long, gray cylinder: a submarine.

  Relief flooded me. “It’s not the sentries.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re not a threat.” His hand still wavered over the controls.

  Ping. The sound echoed through the cabin as the sub drifted closer.

  Black, rigid characters that must have been letters were stamped deep into the hull just over one of the submarine’s search beams.

  Ping.

  The sub turned, and headed straight for us.

  5

  Edgar chittered, waving his two front legs in the air.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “How would I know?”

  “Haven’t you been talking to him?”

  “Yes, through the lights in the ship. I can’t understand what he’s saying.”

  Edgar jumped onto the panel, straddling the liquidic core. His hind section rose as he chirped at the screen. David leaned back, unable to reach the console with a giant spider blocking the way.

  The submarine became larger. And larger.

  “Is it going to hit us?”

  “Get out of the way.” David flailed his arm, probably hoping to shove Edgar from the controls. Instead, his arms met three bared fangs. He jerked back. “We have to move. That thing is going to hit us!”

  Ping.

  I covered my ears as the sound echoed off the walls. David cringed. The ship filled both our view screens. Tiny, fuzzy particles circled in the water between us.

  This was it. Times up.

  A deep crunch rattled our hull as we collided. Edgar slid off the console, scampered across the floor, and jumped into the wall as we drifted away from the submarine.

  A harsh, scrambled static filled the chamber.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A communication.”

  David sunk four fingers of both hands into the console and characters flipped and changed on the screen.

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know. The computers are trying to translate.”

  The walls around us started to glow, illuminating the compartment. The letters stopped changing and twelve ornate characters displayed across the screen.

  “Damaged,” David whispered.
/>   “Damaged?”

  “As in a question. They’re asking if we’re damaged.”

  Who was asking though? Those words stamped on the hull certainly weren’t English.

  David swirled his hands in the console again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Telling them we’re not damaged.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “If they’re friendly, it’s the truth. If they’re not, it tells them we are a formidable target, and it would be unwise to attack.”

  I soooo didn’t want to be involved in an undersea dogfight. Even if I was sitting inside superior alien technology. “But you wouldn’t hurt anybody, right?”

  David shifted his shoulders. “Underwater weapons functionality hasn’t been tested. It’s the one part of the design I’ve always questioned.” He glanced at me. “Unless we ram them, I don’t have anything proven to defend ourselves with at this depth.”

  Great. Just great.

  The buzz started again. More letters scrawled across the screen.

  “Another word,” David said. “Luck.” He held both hands over the console. “They’re ascending.”

  “You have to be kidding me.” Did the United Nations send someone to make sure we were okay? “Does Earth know you’re trying to find something to help stop the attack on the surface?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t have time to go into great detail.”

  The pinging grew less intense and faded to soundlessness.

  David scanned the black sea. “Okay, Edgar, let’s bring it down another sellec.”

  Already? Didn’t he want to wait? Take a breath? Think over what just happened?

  I guess that would be stupid. Gotta save the world and all. Sometimes I wish we could just slow things down a peg.

  The light emanating from our windows shone like a beacon challenging the sea’s infinite night. It could have been me, but the little fluffy things hanging out in front of the glass weren’t so tiny anymore. And not really fluffy, either. More like cone shaped with lots of little legs flapping a mile a minute behind them. Kinda like little baby squid, but … not. Very cool.

  I snatched my camera from my backpack and zoomed in. Each feathered creature was its own work of art. Like snowflakes wafting in the sea. Click. Incredible.

  “We’re doing okay,” David said. “You wouldn’t even know we were under pressure. We’re going to bring it down further.”

  The sea didn’t change. Just more … well, blackness. I guess once it’s pitch black, you can’t get much darker.

  Something fluttered before the window.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  David looked up from the console. “I didn’t see it.”

  A riffle of a huge tentacle flickered past the right of the screen, barely catching the illumination coming from my window.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes.” He stood. “Whatever it is must be attracted to the light.”

  The blue hue illuminating the six or so inches of sea outside the ship seemed to shrink, and my little fuzzy-fluttery buddies swam off like a scattering flock of birds.

  Sweat formed on my brow as the last of them skittered into the sea. What did they know that we didn’t?

  A blur of whitish-cream darted across the window again before disappearing in a wave of long, billowing legs. An octopus? A giant squid? I tried to snap a shot, but only a white blur appeared on my screen.

  I adjusted the settings on my camera. I was not about to lose a great shot because I wasn’t ready.

  A whomp rumbled against the glass, and the creature flew up from below us, filling the screen. Its legs launched out, splaying its underside in a flattened, eight-pointed star of wiggling ivory.

  I grabbed David’s arm. He barely flinched.

  “Should we be worried about this?” he asked.

  “How would I know?”

  “It’s your planet.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never been deep-sea diving before. It looks like an octopus, but that thing’s huge!”

  The creature twisted its underside, and the coloring began to take on a pale blue hue. The same color as the console. The blue traveled over its surface in waves. I raised my lens. National Geographic, here I come!

  “It appears it’s trying to communicate,” David said.

  My eyes narrowed. “Really? It just looks like a bunch of flashing to me.” Click.

  Dang, I hoped those colors came through.

  David waved his hand over the panel, and the blue faded out. The octopus-thingy faded too. David changed the room’s coloring to a shade of purple, and the octopus altered to the same plumy pallor.

  Damn. Was it mimicking, or really trying to communicate? I changed to video mode. Some aquatic scientist somewhere was going to kill over the chance to study this footage.

  A beaky-like protrusion jutted out from the animal’s center.

  “The sensors are picking something up,” David said. “Listen.”

  He tapped the panel and a sound seemed to seep through the glass. Kind of a mix between a quack and a squawk. A chitter echoed between us, like a kid making noises under the water.

  Wait. Edgar?

  The octopus spun twice and flared both purple and blue over its long appendages before closing its tentacles and disappearing into the darkness.

  I clicked off a dozen more shots. So. Darn. Cool. I hoped whatever Edgar had said was nice.

  “We found significant life signs in your oceans,” David said, “but I didn’t expect them to be so—interesting.”

  “Yeah, well, Earth—you know—full of surprises.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I’d like to keep it that way. Let’s dive.”

  Oh yeah. Right. Save the world. I hadn’t forgotten. But the sea was more amazing than I’d ever imagined.

  I slid my camera back into my pack, but left it open, just in case.

  David waved over the console panels, and this time the darkness actually managed to get darker, like adding the pitch of night to blackout an already charcoaled screen. The deep, murky depths seemed to bubble closer, like a monster lurking just out of sight.

  “How deep are we?”

  “Eighty-four sellecs.”

  “Which is how far in English?”

  He stared at the ceiling, like he was doing the math in his head. “About two miles.”

  Two miles, straight down.

  I leaned closer to the window. Since I was a kid, I’d loved going to the aquarium. Didn’t matter which one, or how big. When I was ten, I’d plastered myself against the glass of an enormous shark tank, and even promises of cotton candy couldn’t lure me away. And the Aquarium down in Myrtle Beach, with the real live mermaids? Dang. Mom and I couldn’t get enough. It didn’t matter they were just women wearing tails. It was awesome with a capital A.

  I smiled, wondering what Mom would think if she were here with me. Would she think all this was as cool as I did, or would she be scolding me, saying it was too dangerous? No—that would have been Dad. Mom was always the wild one of the pair. It was probably better that Dad had no idea where I was, because me being missing would be far less stressful than knowing I was deep-sea diving with my favorite alien.

  The ship jerked. Crashing forward, I smashed against my part of the control panel, knocking the wind out of me.

  Gasping, I flopped back in my seat. “Are we at the bottom?”

  “No. We hit something,” David said. “Something was there, and then it was gone.”

  “Is it another giant octopus?”

  “No. This registered a lot more bone. Something more dense and much larger.”

  The darkness outside seemed all the more ominous. I wasn’t quite so ready to splay myself against the glass as I was a few moments ago. What was it this time? A whale? Whales could go pretty deep, right? Nice big, cute, krill-eating whales?

  We jolted to the right and I flew from my seat a
nd thumped to the floor. A vertical tail the size of Wisconsin swam past the window. Pale. Ghostly. Definitely not a whale.

  David clutched his seat, staring straight ahead. “Jess?”

  “I’m okay.”

  I crawled up to my chair. David’s gaze was still riveted to the dark water. “Did you see how big that was?”

  I rubbed my sore skull. “Yeah, I saw it. Shouldn’t we be trying to get away?”

  “Probably, but which way do we go? It showed up a second before it hit us, now it’s gone.”

  Lovely. A giant, aquatic ghost. How many humongous fish lived down here? Giant squid, frilled sharks, God knows what else. Hopefully whatever it was wasn’t hungry.

  A white speck shone in the distance. It got bigger, ominously reminiscent of the submarine. The glow winked out, as if something swam in front of it, before lighting again. And again.

  The radiant dancer moved closer to the ship, like a lone Chinese lantern swaying in the breeze. But there wasn’t a breeze out there. Was there even a current at this depth?

  I swayed to the left as the orb shimmied in that direction, and to the right as it shimmied back. Everything was so beautiful in the sea. Tranquil. Peaceful. I wished I had a blanket so I could cuddle up and sleep under that light, have it watch over me, protect me from anything that might float by.

  Sleep. That was what I needed. It had been a long day. I deserved it.

  My lashes fluttered. Their weight hung, begging me to close them. Relax. Forget about the sea, and aliens, and … everything.

  “What the … ” David’s voice jarred me back.

  I squinted. The hypnotic brilliance had transformed into glaring, emotionless eyes and rows of needle-like teeth—if needles were the thickness of tree trunks. The windows filled with nothing but mouth.

  A scream ripped through the ship and I realized it came from me. I jumped away from the windows while David shoved his fists into the liquid console. We throttled toward the teeth.

  Toward?

  I stumbled back onto my chair as the windows collided into the massive, snapping jaws. We rammed, jumped back, rammed, and jumped back again. What was this, a macho pissing contest or something?

  “David!”

  “Working on it!”

  Oh, really. Was he working on it?