by Ally Blue
Oh. Armin’s knees wobbled. “I’ll come to your room. I’m not sure what time I’ll be done in the lab.”
“Cool. I’ll be waiting for you, Doc.” Mo dropped his hands and strode away with a wicked smile.
Armin stood there, cheeks hot and heart hammering, until his legs regained the strength to walk, then he left the aquarium. Just one more look at the strange rock, and he could go to Mo’s bed without the mental image of the thing beating against the insides of his eyelids.
The next morning, with nothing but time on his hands, Mo decided to see what he could find out from Ryal about the work going on in the lab. Unfortunately, that meant playing Ryal’s favorite game: air hockey.
Mo sucked at air hockey.
Ryal sent the plastic disk flying across the table, straight past Mo’s defense and into the goal slot. He threw both arms in the air and let out a victory whoop that had heads all over the rec room turning toward him. “Oh, hell yeah! Ryal the Merciless is once more victorious!”
Mo had to laugh, in spite of having just lost his ninth game in a row. “Yeah, fine. It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is when you don’t have anything else to do. But hey, at least I don’t have to stand outside the lab pretending to be a guard today.” Still grinning ear to ear, Ryal skirted the table and slapped Mo on the shoulder. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”
Mo followed the younger man to the bar. He usually didn’t drink this early in the day, but Ryal with a few beers in him meant one chatty lab assistant. Mo wasn’t above taking advantage of that. Even though Ryal hadn’t actually been in the lab since Armin and his team arrived, he was pretty tight with Hannah—and she had been in the lab, for a short time anyway. With any luck, Hannah had told Ryal at least some of what was happening with the mysterious rock from Richards Deep, and a little alcoholic brain lube would encourage him to pass that information on to Mo. Not ideal, but at this point it looked like the only way Mo was going to learn anything beyond what little Armin had told him. Especially when that little bit turned out to be more disturbing than enlightening.
He had to figure out what was happening. He had to. That morning’s visit to the pod’s medical bay would’ve convinced him pretty damn quick that something extremely out of the ordinary was going on, even if the fear on Armin’s face last night hadn’t already. Dr. Palto said there wasn’t a thing wrong with Mo’s eyes, he showed no signs of physical or mental stress outside of what you’d expect in this job, and there wasn’t any medical reason to send him back upside. Of course, he hadn’t told Palto about the nightmares or the lack of sleep, but he hadn’t seen any good reason to mention it. This wasn’t the first time he’d had trouble sleeping, and he’d suffered occasional bouts of nightmares ever since the blackout. That was on his BathyTech psych profile. They’d never considered it a problem before, so why would they now? It was “known and stable.”
The way Mo saw it, if there wasn’t anything wrong with him, something must be wrong with the world. Something that made bugs and antennae and black shapes appear where they had no business being.
Not to mention Armin’s voice coming from the walker’s computer. Best not to think too much about that. And it had all started after they’d recovered that rock. To Mo’s mind, that meant the two things must be related one way or another.
Ryal leaned both elbows on the long plastic slab serving as a bar. “Hey, Dara. Two beers, please.”
“Comin’ up.” The bartender pulled two beer pouches out of the cooler, tore them open one at a time, and set them on the bar. “Enjoy, gents.”
“Thanks.” Ryal gave Dara a bright smile, took one beer, and slid the other to Mo, then pushed away from the bar. “Let’s get a Suicide Booth, where it’s private.”
He trailed Ryal to one of the booths along the outer hull, where the genius who’d designed this rig had decided to install portholes so staff could look outside, the idea being to boost morale. Most people avoided the booths, with their less than cheery view of the seabed, the occasional monster-movie fish, and the endless pitch-black ocean. Some smartass had dubbed them the Suicide Booths, and the name had stuck.
Mo grinned as the two of them slid into the last booth on the end, as far from the rest of the room as it was possible to get. “Wow, this really is private. Are you trying to get in my pants or something?”
“Listen, if I ever give up on the ladies, you’re still not gonna be my type.” Ryal leaned back against the bloodred faux leather, studying him through narrowed eyelids. “I know you, Rees. I know what it means when you get that look in your eyes.” He put his beer bottle to his lips and drank, never taking his gaze from Mo. “Information’ll cost you, you know.”
Mo sighed. Damn that boy. “Do you actually have any?”
Ryal shrugged. “Some. I don’t know if any of it’ll make sense to you. It sure as hell doesn’t to me.”
He considered. Maybe what Ryal knew was worthwhile and maybe it wasn’t, but there was only one way to find out. He drank deeply from his beer, set the bottle on the table, and fixed his gaze on Ryal’s face. “All right. What do you want?”
The self-satisfied, teasing mask fell from Ryal’s features. He leaned over the table, deadly serious now. “I want to know what you know.”
Sheer surprise left Mo floundering for a moment. “What? That’s it?” He’d expected money, or at least merchandise. Everybody knew Ryal loved the finer things in life.
“Yes.” With a quick, sidelong glance toward the closest group of people—at least three and a half meters away—Ryal lowered his voice to a murmur, barely audible over the latest orchestral rap blasting from the sound system. “Look. Something’s been off with Hannah ever since she came back from that walk to the Deep the other day. She swears she’s fine, but she’s not. Something happened that she’s not telling me, and I want to know what it is.”
Unease prickled the skin along Mo’s arms. He shook his head, puzzled. “Hannah was in the second go-cart with Dr. Douglas. She didn’t walk with us. If something happened in the go-cart, nobody told me about it.” He made a mental note to ask Hannah later. He’d been in charge on that walk. Any incidents, no matter how seemingly minor, should’ve damn well been reported to him.
“She said Dr. Libra brought the thing you found on board their go-cart in a box. She said she saw it later in the lab, and it was just a rock.” Ryal turned his beer bottle in circles on the table. His gaze held Mo’s. “Is it really? Because everything started with that so-called rock.”
Exactly, Mo thought. Because he couldn’t be sure, though, he said, “I don’t know.”
“But you suspect.” Ryal spun his beer bottle again, and again, and again. His gaze never wavered from Mo’s face.
Mo hitched up one shoulder in a so-so gesture. “Maybe. I’m not sure enough of anything at this point to commit myself. Which is one reason I wanted to talk to you.” He took a swallow of beer. “This would’ve been easier if you’d just gotten drunk and talkative like you were supposed to.”
Ryal laughed. “Sorry to screw up your plans. But I kind of think this is better. For both of us.” Lifting his bottle, he pointed it at Mo. “Admit it, you’re likely to learn a whole lot more with me as a partner than you would’ve if you’d tried to be all sneaky about it. You suck at being sneaky.”
Mo snorted. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right.” He glanced out the porthole. Something with far too many appendages jetted out of the range of the pod’s lights before he could get a good look at it. Some kind of squid, surely. Just because he’d never before seen a squid with hooks like that on the ends of its tentacles didn’t mean it couldn’t exist. He’d have to talk to the biologists about it.
Turning sideways, he put his back to the porthole, leaned against the wall and stretched his legs out on the seat. “So. I’ll tell you what little bit I know—and I’ll warn you, it’s not much—you tell me what you know, and we’ll try to figure this shit out. Deal?”
“Deal.” R
yal set down his beer and held out his hand. “Shake, brother.”
He shook, and that was that. They both drank, as if to seal the deal. Ryal’s enthusiasm made him seem frighteningly young and vulnerable. Mo hoped like hell he hadn’t just gotten them both in deeper than they could handle.
Ryal leaned forward. “So. Since you’re the asshole who tried to get me drunk and take advantage of me, I think you ought to go first. What do you know?”
He wished Ryal was wrong, but he wasn’t. Sighing, he polished off half his beer for courage, then passed on the few scraps of information Armin had given him. Only after telling Ryal did he realize how little it really was.
Ryal wasn’t impressed. “So it proves his theories. So what? I don’t get why that means they have to have all this cloak-and-dagger shit.”
“I figure they just don’t want information getting out early. That’s never good.” Mo took another long swallow of beer. “Okay, it’s your turn. What’s the deal with Hannah?”
“Well, she got kicked out of the lab yesterday because the upside scientists didn’t believe her when she told them she found live bacteria in that rock. They said she was wrong and made her leave.”
The equipment’s an upside problem now, she’d told Mo yesterday. He nodded as the pieces fell into place in his mind. “So you think something else happened in the lab that she’s not telling you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, it’s just . . .” Worry pulled Ryal’s brows together and drew down the corners of his mouth. “I ran into her earlier today. She was supposed to be compiling data for Poole, but he kicked her out too. She said he claimed she was picking fights with people and not keeping her mind on her work. She was really mad at him.” He trailed off, his gaze turned inward.
Mo stifled a sigh. “Ryal? What happened?”
Ryal blinked and focused on his face. “Nothing, exactly. But she was really jumpy. She kept looking behind her. Like she was afraid somebody was sneaking up on her.” He picked absently at a broken place on his thumbnail. “She was acting almost paranoid, saying how Poole and the upside people were all out to get her, and she was so nervous she couldn’t even stand still. It wasn’t like her at all. Something must’ve happened to her. I can’t think of any other reason she’d act that way.”
Mo agreed. Hannah was one of the least jumpy people he’d ever known, which was why she drove the go-carts when the mining team needed someone to fill in. She had the right kind of temperament for it. Nervousness was way out of character for her.
If she’d been experiencing any of the same things Mo had lately, he couldn’t blame her for feeling on edge.
He swung his legs off the seat. “I’m gonna go talk to her.”
Ryal’s eyes went wide. “Wait, what? You . . . I mean, you won’t—”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell her you snitched on her.” He made himself grin like it wasn’t a big deal as he slid out of the booth, but inside he felt anything but lighthearted. If he was the only one seeing things, that was a problem for him, but probably not a threat to the pod as a whole. A sudden rash of hallucinations, on the other hand, spelled potential disaster if they didn’t identify what was happening and stop it before it could gain momentum. “I think we should both keep this little talk to ourselves, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” Ryal folded his hands around his beer bottle and stared at nothing, his attention clearly no longer on Mo.
Mo sauntered out of the rec area as casually as he could manage. In the hallway, he broke into a jog and headed straight for Hannah’s quarters.
He realized the implications of what he’d been thinking. He’d dismissed the things he thought he’d seen lately as his imagination. Tiredness, lack of sleep, overwork—hell, sheer boredom—might make his eyes play tricks on him. He knew that. But was there any difference between imaginings and hallucinations, when you got right down to it?
If his grip on reality slipped, regardless of the reason, he knew damn well he wouldn’t enjoy the results. He’d never handled forced confinement well.
Maybe he’d started to crack, in spite of what Dr. Palto had told him. Maybe Hannah had too.
Wrong, whispered the part of him that saw things clearly.
Hannah didn’t answer her door, even after Mo told the auto-port he had important business and needed to speak with her right away.
He glared at the blank video screen in helpless frustration. “She’s there, right?”
“Hannah Long is in her quarters.” To Mo, the auto-port’s bland female voice sounded vaguely disgruntled. Which was impossible, but there it was. “However, she is not answering my summons. I am very sorry, Maximo Rees. How else can I assist you?”
Mo wrestled down the urge to tell the machine to go fuck itself. The damn thing would probably inform him, in that same soulless-yet-improbably-put-out tone, that it was not capable of human sexual activity and it was very sorry.
This time, the auto-port spoke in a voice like gravel and nails. “Oh, I know how to fuck. I can fuck your brain to jelly and suck it through a straw.”
Mo’s mouth went dry. He stumbled backward, his pulse galloping, and stared at the auto-port screen. It stared back, blank as ever, and silent again.
Well, of course it was silent. It obviously hadn’t spoken in the first place. Even if some joker had programmed it to say what he thought he’d heard, he doubted anyone would bother to reprogram the voice to one rough as a sanding belt and thick with cruelty.
Great. He was still hearing things.
Ignoring the auto-port as best he could, he stepped up to the door and pounded on it with his fist. “Hannah! Answer the door. It’s Mo. I need to talk to you.”
No answer. He counted twenty seconds to give her enough time to throw on clothes if necessary, then banged on the door again when it remained closed. “Damn it, Hannah, if you don’t open this door I’m using medical override. Come on.”
It was a bluff, and she ought to know that—he didn’t have the authority to enter her quarters using the medical override function—but it worked. The door slid open.
She grabbed his wrist and yanked him inside before he could say a word. The door shut behind him, and he stood blinking at her in the dimness of lighting set to the system’s lowest level. As his eyes adjusted, he noted with growing alarm the open drawers, the clothes scattered all over the floor, and, bizarrely, the mattress ripped from the bed and upended to form a barrier in one corner.
She slapped his upper arm hard, startling him. “What’re you doing here?” Her voice emerged low and half-panicked. “Did anybody see you?”
Stunned, he searched her tense face for his calm, level-headed friend. He saw no sign of her, which terrified him on multiple levels.
He took a step toward her. She skittered backward until she ran into the wall. He stopped, holding both hands up with the palms out. “I need to talk to you about what’s happening here.” Asking if she’d seen or heard anything unusual seemed pointless, given her hunted stare and the way she stood on the balls of her feet as if preparing to run.
She sucked in a hissing breath. In the space between one blink and the next, her eyes glowed a dark, bruised blue. “You know about it too?”
“I know I’ve seen some things I can’t explain.” He chose his words carefully, using her expression as a guide. “I’m guessing you have too.”
Her nostrils flared along with the weird incandescence in her irises. One hand shot out and caught his elbow in a grip painful enough to make him grunt.
“They’re gone, Mo. All of them out there. Ryal and Poole and everybody. They’ve been swallowed up. Eaten.” She blinked, again and again, until her shining eyes resembled strobe lights in the dark. Her fingers—long, long fingers, had they always been that long, that slender, that flexible?—dug into Mo’s flesh. “You can hide here with me. We’re safe here, for now. When everyone’s asleep, when they’re all asleep and dreaming, we’ll escape. Just you and me. Okay?”
She blin
ked up at him with those wide, round, shimmering eyes, licked her purple lips with a tongue gone thin and unnaturally nimble, and Mo’s mind put on the brakes.
He drew a deep breath. Blew it out. Forced himself to stand his ground, even though every cell in his body told him to run. “Hannah. Nobody’s been . . . um. Eaten. Everything’s fine.” He tried without success to pry her fingers off his arm. “Let me take you to the med bay, okay? Let Dr. Palto look you over.” If this was some previously undiscovered reaction to living at extreme depth for long periods of time, Palto would figure it out. That was the focus of his research here. Serving as the pod’s medical doctor was his secondary role.
The shine in Hannah’s eyes flared into a luminescent fire. “You’ve been eaten too. Just like them.” Her fingers dug deeper into his muscle, sending a sharp pain all the way down to his thumb. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.” She yanked his arm close, her lips pulling back to bite.
Tearing his arm free from Hannah’s grip, Mo spun and lunged for the door. He got the disorienting impression that it opened from sheer force of habit, then tried to close before he could get through. The damn thing clipped the back of his right heel as it shut. It hurt, but not nearly as much as Hannah’s outraged wail, cut short when the door slid closed.
For a second, Mo stood and stared at the blank, pale-gray rectangle, wondering what the hell had just happened. Had he imagined the weird glow in Hannah’s eyes and the abnormal length of her fingers? Her trying to bite him? Had he imagined all of it?
He looked around. The hallway was deserted. “Auto-port. Maximo Rees calling for Hannah Long. Urgent.” Fear turned his mouth bone-dry, but if he could see her on the screen, at least he would know whether or not he’d seen what he thought he’d seen.
“One moment.” The auto-port’s voice was perfectly normal now. The amber light beside the screen pulsed for several long seconds. Mo fidgeted and chewed his thumbnail. When the voice spoke again, he jumped. “Hannah Long is in her quarters. However, she is not answering my summons. I am very sorry, Maximo Rees. How else can I assist you?”
