by Ally Blue
Behind him, Ashlyn made a scornful sound. He glared at her over his shoulder. She pursed her lips and stared out the round porthole at her side.
Mo eyed him with an odd intensity for a moment, then turned his attention back to the cart’s controls. “Okay. Well. We’ve got coordinates for this thing, whatever it is. Shouldn’t take too long to retrieve it.”
“Excellent.”
“Now. About the mapping tech.” Mo touched the flat-screen readout on the dash. It popped up into 3-D. “The walker helmet hooks into the BathyTech satellite automatically. It’ll show you a map of the seafloor if one already exists, and if there isn’t one, it’ll make one as you go and hook it up with what’s already known of the area. What you’re looking at here is a map created during our initial mining operations several years ago.”
Armin studied the readout, impressed. “It’s amazingly detailed.”
“Yeah. The suit’s automatic camera isn’t as good as the extra one we added for scientific purposes—that one records in way more detail, and in parts of the spectrum the human eye can’t see—but the built-in camera has a wide-angle lens, and it’s integrated with the mapping software, so it produces a pretty damn good readout.” Mo pointed at the flat-screen in front of Armin, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Ashlyn. “You each have your own readouts you can study if you want. Dr. Timms, I know you’re not walking, but you can still have a look at the map if you’re interested.”
They lapsed into silence. Armin brought up his personal data display and studied the digital map of their destination. Whatever it was they sought, it lay in a part of Richards Deep less than a kilometer from the official boundary of the Deep, on a shelf above a narrow chasm.
He stared at the soft white dot on his display and wondered, as he’d done ever since he’d first seen it, what it might be.
Ashlyn tapped his shoulder, and he barely managed not to jump. “Yes? What is it?”
“We’re here.” She sounded amused. “Thought you might be interested.”
Mo aimed an assessing gaze at him. A rush of blood turned his cheeks hot. Maybe it didn’t matter what Maximo Rees thought of him back on the BathyTech pod, but out here, Mo’s good opinion was law. If Mo thought he wasn’t mentally up to the walk, he’d be forced to wait in the go-cart. And he could not let that happen.
“Of course. I was just studying the readouts again.” With a smile he hoped didn’t look too forced, he turned off the display. “Well. Shall we?”
Mo watched him while the two of them stripped to their skins and donned their walker suits. Examined his every move while he fastened into his helmet and started the flow of Mist. Armin tried not to cough as the thick, wet gas mix that would keep his lungs expanded and his body chemistry normalized crept into his sinuses and alveoli. It was fine once you got used to it, but those first few seconds never became any easier.
“Readout on.” His voice was muffled by the Mist. His display popped up on the walker’s faceplate, crisp and clear. He glanced sideways. Mo was going through his own systems tests but still watching him, and his patience ran out. “What in the hell are you looking at?”
If his outburst swayed Mo’s opinion one way or another, it didn’t show. His face was expressionless. “This is Rees in Walker One to walker team. Testing coms. Acknowledge by number. Over.”
Armin knew his temper was being tested as much as the communication systems. He intended to pass.
Calling on his trusty scientific discipline to suppress his frustration, he answered with a calm he hoped his companion would note. “Walker Two, over.”
Behind his faceplate, Mo hitched up one corner of that damned sinful mouth. Armin stared into the inky water of the large, round moon pool in the middle of the floor instead. Something salt white and roughly the size of his thumb skittered across the underside of the clear GlasSteel cover before vanishing into the blackness.
He wanted to follow it.
Carlo’s voice from the other go-cart came through his com with perfect clarity. “Walker Three, receiving both of you. Over.”
Armin made himself meet Mo’s gaze and nod. He thought he caught an echo of his own exploratory yearning in Mo’s eyes before he blinked his attention back to his work.
Mo methodically tested the links between the walkers and Ashlyn, Neil, and Hannah in the go-carts. Meanwhile, he managed, without so much as a glance in his direction, to make Armin feel as if he were still being watched.
Annoyed with himself, he did his best to ignore it. If he’d known how a tryst with Mo would affect his concentration, he might not have given in to the temptation.
On the other hand, remembering the clutching heat of that beautiful body, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.
Finally, when he’d gotten affirmatives all around on the com connections, Mo declared all systems go. He grinned behind his faceplate. “You geeks ready to walk?”
An answering smile spread over Armin’s face as he pictured the scowl he knew Carlo was wearing right now. The man hated being called a geek. “Let’s go.”
“Computer: Pressurize chamber.” At Mo’s command, the edge of the moon pool room door glowed red, indicating the go-cart’s computer had sealed it and upped the air pressure in the chamber to keep the sea from bubbling up to flood it when they uncovered the pool.
The computer’s voice was bland and sexless. “Chamber sealed and pressurized. Shall I uncover the pool now?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The cover drew back from the moon pool, revealing a round well of black water cold enough to stop a human heart instantly and heavy enough to stomp their bodies flat without the protection of the walkers. Up front in the pilot’s compartment, Ashlyn switched on the lights on the underside of the go-cart, illuminating a flat slurry of mud and organic detritus two and a half meters below.
Staring down at the first step in his journey to the thing he’d come here to find, Armin felt a vague dread seep into his blood. He shoved it away. He didn’t want anything to poison his excitement over what could be the greatest find of his career.
“I’ll go first. You follow as soon as I give you the A-OK. Got it?”
Armin blinked and looked up at the sound of Mo’s voice in his ear. He nodded. “Roger that.”
Mo flashed that heart-stopping grin again. “See you on the bottom, Doc.” He switched on his walker lights, stepped to the edge of the pool, and plunged in.
He gave the A-OK a few seconds later. Armin switched on his lights and leaped into the deep.
He landed on the ocean floor with a silent ploof. The fine silt rose in a cloud around his knees. Mo stood beside him in a similar cloud. Carlo was walking toward them from the other cart like a misplaced astronaut, holding an equipment bag with its buoyancy adjusted so it floated along beside him. The dive legs of the side-by-side carts cast spindly crisscrossing shadows on the seafloor.
Beyond the reach of the lights, solid blackness hunched like a living thing. He imagined it flexing curved claws and licking long, bloodstained teeth, watching them with pitiless patience, waiting for its moment to pounce, rend, and devour.
He thought he saw the gleam of hungry eyes on the edge of the light. But it was probably just one of the delightfully unusual creatures that called this cold, unforgiving place home. There were wonders enough here without imagining the dark itself as something with thought and intent.
Mo’s calm voice brought Armin out of mental pathways best left untraveled and back to the safe, sensible world of the real. “Okay. We’re heading south-southwest from here. We’ll hit the start of the ledge in about fifteen meters. After that, it starts sloping down a little. Not too bad, maybe five degrees. The ledge narrows down fast to only a couple of meters wide, though, so watch your footing.”
Carlo nodded inside his helmet. “What’s our order?”
“I’m leading. You’re second. Doc Armin’s taking the rear, since he has the most experience out of the two of you with walker suits. O
nce we get near the thing, whatever it is, I’ll let the two of you at it.” Mo studied each of them in turn, his expression serious. “Any questions? I want everything crystal clear before we go.”
Carlo shook his head. “No questions. We’re clear.”
Mo looked at Armin, who nodded. “Everything’s understood.”
“All right, then.” Mo turned to face the direction they were heading. “Go-carts, Walker One here. Walker team moving out.”
Ashlyn’s cool voice crackled in Armin’s helmet. “Cart One, acknowledged.”
“Cart Two, acknowledged.” Hannah sounded excited as a child. “Keep the feeds on, guys. Neil and I want to see!”
Mo laughed. “You got it, Hannah.”
The three of them moved beyond the comfort of the go-cart lights and into the dark. Armin tried not to imagine the creep of silent footsteps in the expanding swath of blackness behind him because really, what could be there? Tiny shrimp? Miniature squid flashing neon colors? Translucent fish with their needle teeth, too small to hurt anything so massive as a human being?
All those things might hover in his wake, certainly. But none could stalk their team with intent to harm, or indeed any intent at all. None could create the deliberate, plodding floop . . . floop . . . floop . . . his brain insisted on hearing at his heels—despite the fact that his helmet’s sensors weren’t configured to pick up external sounds. Even if it were possible for this sound to exist. Which it wasn’t.
Eventually, his stubborn refusal to look paid off. The impossible noise stopped once the team started down the sloped path, an ever-rising wall of rock to their right and the abyss to their left. He peered into the void less than a meter away. The dark water felt charged, as if on the verge of revealing some forgotten horror older than human memory.
For one heart-stopping moment, he knew—knew—the thing was about to rise from the murk, white and bloated as a corpse.
He shook his head, as if he could physically knock the unwelcome visions out of his mind. Clearly the atrocities he’d seen a few weeks earlier in Antarctica had affected him more than he’d thought.
Mo slowed, one hand held out behind him. “All right. The anomaly is just ahead, about three meters. You guys go around me. Very carefully, all right? I don’t want anyone going over the edge.”
“Copy that.” Carlo tweaked the buoyancy on the equipment bag, and it drifted downward to rest on the ledge behind Mo. “I’ll leave that here. You can bring it up when we’re ready.”
Mo nodded. “Sure.”
Mo and Carlo flattened themselves against the wall. Armin edged forward, taking small, cautious steps. He put a hand out to steady himself, and Mo grasped it. They looked at one another through the faceplates. Mo smiled, excitement equal to Armin’s shining in his eyes, and Armin’s heart turned over. He smiled back, savoring the moment of connection.
“Go on, Doc.” Mo’s voice was soft and eager. “Go get your mystery thing.”
Laughing, Armin stepped around Mo and reluctantly let go of his hand. “Yes, indeed. The great mystery.”
He faced forward and made his way along the ledge. His helmet and wrist lights picked up an outcropping of the wall, and sitting atop it was a plain, round, jet-black stone. The lights glittered on its surface.
I’ve seen this before.
The thought was so out of place, it stopped Armin cold. But it was true. He had seen this before. Or rather, something remarkably like it. The grainy, three-second bit of footage from the Varredura Longa’s outside camera was the only clue to what had happened there. The sheer improbability of what seemed to be the same type of object showing up both there and here kept Armin’s feet glued to the seabed and his gaze fixed, unbelieving, on the thing that appeared to be a rock but wasn’t.
“Oh my God,” breathed Carlo through the walker’s com system. “That looks just like—”
“I know.” Armin cast him a keep quiet glare. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
Mo, who’d crept up behind them, leaned around Armin’s shoulder to study the object with fascination. “Looks like what?”
“Nothing.” Armin touched Mo’s chest. “Could you give us a bit of room, please?”
Mo obediently backed up a couple of steps. “So what is this thing? Poole said Rover was working fine, and so was all the equipment on the Peregrine, so how come it acts like it doesn’t exist?” He turned his curious gaze to Armin. “If the tests bear it out, it’ll pretty much prove your theories about the potential for macroquantum behavior of some materials under extreme pressures, right?”
Armin looked at him, surprised and pleased. “You’ve read my paper?”
“Yeah.” Mo grinned. “Can’t say I understood all of it, but yeah, I read it. Everything about marine science fascinates me.”
A sweet warmth rose in Armin’s chest. He returned Mo’s smile, and for a moment it was only the two of them, alone in the vastness of the sea.
Carlo cleared his throat. “Any time you’re ready, Romeo.”
If it weren’t for the Mist, Armin would have blushed. Ignoring Mo’s low chuckle, he walked the last couple of meters to the mysterious object. Pulse pounding in the base of his throat, he stroked the thing with one hand. The bulky glove kept him from feeling anything, of course, but he imagined the smoothness of it anyway. The idea that he might be touching something new to science, something unique—perhaps something extraterrestrial?—sent elated shivers through him.
“Can we retrieve it?” Carlo asked. “I mean, are you able to just pick it up, or will we need to blast it loose?”
“Whoa, hang on there.” Mo held up both hands, palms out. “We’ve got incendiary paste back at the pod, but we’d need to do more extensive testing on this wall before you could safely blast it.”
Carlo gave him a sour look. “I’m well aware of that. I was asking Armin, who is also well aware of the precautions we’d need to take, whether or not we can retrieve this thing without blasting.”
Armin spoke up before the other two could get into a completely unnecessary argument. “I believe so. It doesn’t seem to be attached to the wall.”
“Good.” Carlo moved closer. “Let’s do the scans, then grab it and go.”
“Of course.” Armin glanced back at Mo. “Switch to infrared lights, Mo. We’re going to scan on IR first.”
“Roger that.”
All three of them switched their suit lights to IR. The specially made IR sensors in the walker’s faceplate allowed Armin to see the reverse-image ghost of Carlo’s faceplate display. It lit his features in a sickly pale green that made him look dead.
A hard chill ran down Armin’s spine. Doing his best to ignore the unease tickling the nape of his neck, he leaned forward, one hand on the outcropping blocking the path, and peered at the back of the object. The IR light reflected off the curve of the rock. It was utterly featureless, and produced no heat or other radiation visible on infrared.
Armin found it strangely beautiful in its blank, perfect symmetry. He stared at it until he could no longer fight the instinct to blink. As his eyelids swept down, feeding his weak human need to lubricate his weak human corneas in spite of the Mist in his helmet, the thing seethed like a nest of worms.
He froze. Stared again, harder. This time it held still, like an ordinary—if uncannily round and smooth—rock.
He swiveled to look at Carlo. “Go ahead and get out the transport box while I complete the scans.”
Carlo switched to regular light, then opened the bag and fetched the box they’d brought to transport the object, while Armin activated his walker’s built-in scanning function. His gut told him microbes and radioactivity would not be among the dangers this thing brought with it, but a scientist couldn’t afford to operate on instinct. So he scanned for everything modern technology allowed.
Absolutely nothing showed up. Less than nothing, in fact. As far as his suit could tell him, the object he’d been staring at for several minutes, that he’d touched with his own
hand—albeit through a walker glove—wasn’t there at all.
Because that was clearly not the case, he lifted the stone carefully, reverently, and placed it in the box.
Carlo engaged the box’s seal, and Armin switched back to regular light. Mo had already switched. He watched with a million silent questions in his eyes as Armin unfolded the webbing around the container and prepared to carry it back to the go-cart.
Armin pretended not to notice. Now that they’d retrieved the thing they’d come here for, Mo’s part in this was at an end. He wouldn’t like it, but that wasn’t Armin’s problem. His only concerns were keeping this one-of-a-kind object safe, and learning everything he could about it.
Back on the go-cart, Mo sidled up to Armin while they were changing and ran a single fingertip down the side of his neck. “Interesting rock you got there, Doc.”
“Yes, it is.” Armin leaned briefly against Mo’s bare chest, enjoying his warmth. “I’m anxious to begin studying it.”
“I bet.” Laying a gentle hand on Armin’s cheek, Mo angled his face sideways and up until he was forced to meet Mo’s intense gaze. His lips curved into a smile that made Armin’s heart thump. “I know you probably don’t want to share with a walker jockey like me, but I’d sure love to hear all about what you find.”
Armin couldn’t help returning the man’s rakish smile. “We’ll see.”
“Translation: No.”
Before he could think of a suitable answer, Mo cupped his chin and kissed him: a deep, open-mouthed kiss that left him breathless and uncomfortably aroused. He turned in Mo’s embrace and clutched the belt loops on his pants. “I’m sorry. It’s simply that I have no idea what we’ll find, if we find anything at all, and I don’t want any premature information getting out.”
Mo’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t gossip, Doc.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you do.” He cast about for the best way to explain without making it sound as if he were indeed implying that very thing. “Information takes on a life of its own if you’re not careful with it. And when it comes to scientific research, we have to take great care not to allow incomplete or unverified findings to get out because that can discredit the final findings.” Following a sudden instinct, he took Mo’s hand and laced their fingers together. “I like you very much, Mo, and I admire the way your mind works. I wish I could share more of what we’re doing with you. Please understand why I can’t.”
