Down

by Ally Blue

  Fuck. Mo rested his forehead against the door and shut his eyes. Hannah’s luminescent blue stare burned into his brain from behind his lids. He opened his eyes and backed up, his heartbeat thumping in his throat. “Nothing. Nothing else.”

  “Do you wish to leave a message for Hannah Long?”

  He shook his head. “No message.”

  As he turned to go, a voice—low, deep, rough as lava rock—chortled in vicious glee. Mo glanced over his shoulder, though he knew he shouldn’t. Why give his hallucinations room to grow and breed? But he had to look because looking was part of his DNA.

  Once, when Mo was small, he’d gone fishing with his uncle. They’d caught a net full of eels. The creatures had wriggled and whipped and threaded through and over and around one another in a frantic attempt to escape the net. The memory of that living mass in constant, desperate motion had fascinated Mo ever since. Now the auto-port screen, previously blank, roiled in 3-D exactly like the mass of gray-black eels trying to work their way out of the net on that long-ago day.

  He about-faced and strode away from Hannah’s quarters as fast as he could go without running. The flat metallic taste of fear coated the back of his tongue. He had to get someone else into Hannah’s quarters right the fuck now. Her paranoid behavior made her a danger to herself and everyone else.

  Besides that, if he’d hallucinated the things he thought he’d seen, he needed to know—unpleasant as that might be—so he could take himself off duty and get help before it got any worse.

  If what he’d seen was real?

  Well. They were all in a shitload of trouble.

  He hurried toward the med bay as fast as he could.

  At first, each nonresult and new mystery surrounding the rock that wasn’t a rock had sent excited shivers up Armin’s spine. It all added credence to his theories. But the honeymoon was over now. He was tired of adding to the list of things the object wasn’t. He wanted to learn just a little about what it was. But despite his halfhearted hopes, the object behaved no more normally today than it had previously.

  Over at the scanner interface, Mandala drummed her fingers on the stretch of gleaming countertop and glared at the 3-D display. “Maybe the equipment simply needs adjusting. This display looks . . .” She shook her head, her brow furrowing as if she were searching for the right word. “I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s just off. I wonder if we could get Hannah back here to go over the settings with me since she’s familiar with this particular machine?”

  The odd hush to Mandala’s voice caught Armin’s ear and set his heart beating faster. “Do you mind if I have a look at the 3-D?”

  “Be my guest.” She keyed in the code, and a perfect hologram of the object in its sealed chamber materialized about one meter above the holo display pad on the floor.

  The image looked exactly like the thing they’d found in the seawall—perfectly round, perfectly black, perfectly featureless. The hologram lacked only the original’s sense of inconceivable life waiting to be set free.

  Armin walked around the image, studying it from every angle. Nothing changed as he did so. It didn’t move or shift the way it had in Richards Deep. It seemed flat and uninteresting—unlike its real-life counterpart in the chamber, which had left Armin with the distinct feeling that if he only stared long enough into it, if he only angled his eyes precisely the right way, he’d learn secrets never meant for the human mind.

  The idea both terrified and intrigued him. Having the scanner between the unearthly thing and the fragile human creatures in the pod—himself included—provided him a measure of comfort.

  He knew, however, that a feeling did not constitute scientific observation. “It looks exactly the same as the actual object to me. Can you try to describe what it is about the image that seems off to you?”

  Hopping down from her stool, Mandala skirted the counter and approached the hologram. She stopped a few paces away and eyed it with undeniable mistrust. “Hm. Well, it looks fine now. Which only bothers me more because given the same settings the scanner should project the same image every time.”

  Neil glanced up from his terminal. “And you haven’t changed the settings, I guess?”

  She shook her head. “Not for the 3-D display, no.

  The way the object defied every attempt to test it both elated Armin and frightened him. He turned away from Mandala and Neil so they wouldn’t see the churning chaos of emotions he couldn’t hide. “If you could possibly describe what you found off about the display before, I’d still like to know.”

  Ashlyn looked up from her workstation, showing interest in the conversation for the first time. “Why?”

  He frowned at her. “Because I think it might be important, that’s why.”

  She raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re the boss. I was just curious.”

  Deliberately turning his back on her, Armin focused all his attention on Mandala. “Do you think you can describe it?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll try.” She shut her eyes and stood silently for a moment in obvious deep thought before speaking again. “It seemed as though the image had a sort of twitchiness to it.” She opened her eyes, and the look in them was troubled. “Almost as if it were moving in tiny bits, where you couldn’t quite catch it, but your eye still knew it was happening.”

  The memory of the impossible movement Armin thought he’d seen before played itself out behind his eyes. His stomach rolled over.

  Neil approached them from his station, nodding. “I know just what you mean. It’s how things look inside sometimes when you first come in from the sunlight, right?”

  “Not exactly, but that’s a pretty good description.” Mandala circled the holo, surveying it the way Armin had just done. “I definitely want to have Hannah go over the settings with me. In fact, I think we should run a full diagnostic. This is too important to have anything go wrong.” She aimed a solemn stare at Armin. “It looks remarkably like the object from the Varredura Longa footage, Armin. I know you’ve seen it too. You, Neil, and Carlo. If the two are related, we must learn how, and if the object from the Antarctica video was the reason they called us. There’s absolutely no room for error here. If we don’t have fully functioning equipment, we have nothing.”

  Armin gazed into Mandala’s fearful, determined eyes and nodded, because she was right—about all of it. He studied the smooth obsidian curve of the image hovering in front of him, thinking hard. “There’s no need to bring Hannah back into it. I’ll run the diagnostic myself. In fact, why don’t the rest of you take a break while I do that?”

  Neil and Mandala both gaped at him. Even Ashlyn abandoned her work to stare at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. He’d expected that. He showed them all a bland smile.

  “Armin, no offense, but . . . what?” Neil spread both hands out to his sides and shook his head, his expression puzzled. “Why would we need to leave for you to run a diagnostic on the scanner? And why do you want to do it anyway? Why not call Dr. Poole? He knows the equipment, and he’d be tickled to death to be involved in this.”

  Because none of them would agree to leave if he shared what he actually planned to do, he went with a half lie to answer the questions for which he had answers. “I’ve used this type of scanner many times before. I can run the diagnostic perfectly well without dragging Poole into it. You know as well as I do that if we let him in here, he’ll want to run the whole show.”

  Neil’s eyebrows rose. “That doesn’t mean we have to let him.”

  Ashlyn rose and stretched. “No, but him hanging around trying to take over would be nothing but a distraction. I think Armin’s right. We should keep this operation among ourselves, like we’d planned.”

  Mandala nodded, her arms crossed and her expression hard. Neil let out a deep sigh. “I guess you’re right.”

  Relief eased some of the tightness from Armin’s muscles. They’d decided to minimize the BathyTech 3 crew’s presence in the lab, mostly t
o keep premature information from leaking out. Armin had begun to wonder if there might be better reasons, but his worries were vague at best and he didn’t want to share yet, though it seemed as though Mandala might share them.

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I missed breakfast and I’m starving.” Ashlyn’s voice was unusually perky, her grin wider and brighter than normal. “Let’s go get food. And coffee.”

  “I’m not sure you could call that swill coffee,” Mandala grumbled, but she headed for the door anyway.

  Neil trailed after her. “I could use more caffeine myself.” He shot Armin a questioning look as he and Mandala left the lab, but said nothing else.

  Ashlyn stopped on her way out and pinned Armin with a gaze that seemed to peel back skin and bone to delve directly into his brain. “You’re right to keep them away from here while you open the chamber, but you’re not immune to whatever’s in that thing. Be careful.”

  His heart thudded hard against his sternum. Torn between horror and relief that she’d guessed his intentions, he did his best to hide his reaction behind silence and a blank stare.

  She let out an impatient noise. “Fine. Be that way. But remember, there’s a lot we still don’t know.” She leaned forward, her eyes wide and intense. “I know you’re thinking about the Varredura Longa. So am I. If there’s a connection, then we have to be careful.”

  For a moment the lab faded away, replaced by the horrors he’d experienced in Antarctica. The flickering yellow light. The bodies. The smell of death. The one survivor, who could tell them nothing because—

  No. He wouldn’t think of it. Not here. Not now.

  He made himself smile. “I don’t know if there’s any connection. The object Dr. Longenesse carried away on the video looked similar to the one we’re studying, at least as far as I can tell. But the vid from the Varredura Longa was very poor quality. For what it’s worth, I agree with you. We must be cautious if there’s any chance of a connection.”

  “Good.” Still watching him, she took a step back, then pivoted and strode out of the lab.

  He waited until she’d left, then locked the door behind her. His team—including Carlo, if he ever felt well enough to show up—could think what they liked about that, if they returned before he was finished. He wasn’t letting anyone else in until he’d not only tested the equipment—it wasn’t a bad idea, after all, to make sure it worked correctly—but had seen the thing for himself once again. Not in the vast, tempting dark of the ocean depths, but in the harsh light of the laboratory, where the universe fell into orderly lines and mysteries were dissected, catalogued, and understood.

  He wouldn’t take the same chances Carlo had. He intended to prepare himself first. To be ready for whatever might happen.

  With his solitude secured, he turned toward the hologram. For a split-second, it squirmed like a fly-blown corpse.

  Pulse racing, sweat beading on his upper lip, he shut his eyes. It’s not real. Ignore your fear. Study it. Learn the how and the why. That’s the only way to understand it. To protect yourself, and everyone else, if it comes to that.

  He opened his eyes. The image remained obediently still. Steeling himself, he crossed to the locker holding the goggles and isolation gear and started suiting up.

  When the sampler skidded off the object’s evidently frictionless surface for at least the fourteenth time, Armin shoved his chair away from the apparatus and pressed both palms to his eyes. “Damn it. Stupid rock.” His voice echoed in the ringing quiet of the lab, nudging the throb behind his eyes up another notch toward nasty-headache territory.

  Of course, the hour or so he’d spent so far with the mysterious object had confirmed one thing for him: whatever it might be, it wasn’t a rock. The equipment—all of which performed perfectly on testing—continued to tell him that it didn’t even exist in the way one would expect. The readings were more consistent with energy than with mass.

  It seemed a ridiculous finding. The thing looked and felt as real as any other object its size. He’d not only seen it—watched the light glisten on its glossy black surface, in the ocean and here in the lab—but touched it. He’d felt the weight of it when he lifted it from its underwater niche to the container, and again when he moved it into the isolation chamber. But he couldn’t weigh it, and it cast no shadow, even though both the 3-D and the 2-D scanners produced images of it. Not terribly reliable images, but at least they recognized its existence. Best of all, to his mind, it exhibited definite quantum particle properties. He wondered if it would show entanglement ability if another of its kind were found.

  Through the excitement of the findings that continued to support theories Armin had developed over years of work, memories of the Varredura Longa wound like a dark and nebulous warning. As if he hadn’t worried about that from the first.

  As if when he’d laid eyes on the object perched like an abstract Neptune on that undersea wall, he hadn’t seen an echo of the single blurred image of the thing Klaudia Longenesse had carried with her into the icy black sea.

  They’d never found her body.

  A scream jolted him from his thoughts. He held his breath and stilled his hands, listening. Another scream—a woman’s voice, mindless with terror—came from somewhere outside the lab. It ended on a lost, hopeless sob.

  Armin took time only to pull the sampler out of the vault and seal the object back inside before running for the lab door, shedding his goggles and gloves as he went.

  He exited the lab just in time to nearly run right into a hover stretcher guided by two of the BT3 staff with medical personnel badges clipped to their shirts. More dual-role staff, he assumed; this pod employed many of them. He pressed himself against the wall, out of the way. The young woman strapped to the stretcher mumbled and cried behind the oxygen mask half-covering her face. Her skin was grayish, her hair plastered to her forehead and neck in sweaty clumps. He thought her lips had a purplish tinge, but it was hard to tell with the mask in the way.

  She looked so different, it took him a moment to recognize Hannah Long, the lab assistant.

  Shocked, he stared at her as she passed. Her eyes glowed a faint, luminous blue. She caught his gaze, craned her neck, and struggled against her restraints as the medics towed her away down the hall. “They’re eating you. They’re in you, and they’re eating you. They’re going to eat all of you, you know!” Her voice was high and hysterical.

  One of the medics pressed a hypo to her neck. She subsided, still muttering to herself.

  Armin watched them take her around the corner. “My God. What happened to you?”

  He hadn’t expected an answer, so Mo’s voice behind him startled him. “Doc Palto said she had some kind of psychotic break.”

  Armin turned, his pulse racing. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Mo let out a deep sigh, his shoulders slumping, and closed the distance between them. He let Armin wind their fingers together. His palms felt cool and damp against Armin’s. “I went to see her because Ryal was worried about her. And she was . . .” He shook his head. “She was paranoid. Talking about everybody on BathyTech being eaten.”

  They’re inside you. They’re eating you. A chill raised the hairs on Armin’s neck.

  Oblivious, Mo continued. “They’re taking her upside for treatment.” He leaned his forehead against Armin’s. “I don’t get it, Armin. Why would she just lose it like that?”

  Armin licked his lips. “Staying down too long is a stress on the body and the psyche. That’s why time in the trenches is strictly limited. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but Hannah’s only been down for three months this cycle. She wasn’t due for an upside shift for another three months. And before today, I would’ve said she was the least likely person I knew to crack. So what happened? Why her?” Mo’s voice was soft and calm, but a world of questions pooled in the puzzled crease between those deep brown eyes.

  Armin bit back the urge to assure Mo he knew nothing about it. That was true, as far
as it went, but answering rhetorical questions would only call attention to formless fears he couldn’t articulate to himself yet, never mind express to someone else.

  Mo must have seen a shadow of those worries on Armin’s face, because his eyes narrowed. He studied Armin, thoughtful, blameless, neutral, for now. “Well. I’m gonna go see Hannah off. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Right.” Armin pressed a swift kiss to Mo’s lips. “Let me know what happens. I hope she’ll be all right.”

  Mo gave him a wan smile. “Me too. Thanks.” He strode after Hannah and the medics, though they had to be pretty far ahead by now.

  Armin resisted the urge to go after him. They weren’t in a relationship, and he had work to do. If he was correct in his belief that the object Klaudia had taken from the Varredura Longa was of the same sort as the one they’d recovered from Richards Deep, then that work took on a whole new significance.

  Unless he was wrong. All he had to connect Antarctica to now was the brief, far-from-clear video of Klaudia Longenesse walking into the sea carrying an object that looked like the one they’d found in Richards Deep. It was entirely possible that a better-quality video would’ve shown them something far different.

  Wishful thinking.

  Turning his back on the brightness of the hallway, he went back inside the lab and locked the door.

  That night, Hannah visited Mo in his nightmares. The new Hannah, with her glowing eyes, her purple lips, and her long, long fingers that twisted and bent like seaweed in a current.

  It’s not so bad, being eaten, she assured him, her voice burbling, waterlogged. Just accept it, that’s all. Don’t fight. And you’ll see things you never imagined. Such terrible, beautiful things.

  He tried to follow her as she turned and moved away. But he couldn’t. His muscles were frozen. He could only watch as she smiled a smile full of translucent needle teeth and walked through the ooze of the seabed in slow motion, her hair floating behind her in the water. As she drifted away, her clothes fell off, her legs fused together into a powerful tail, her arms became fins, and her mermaid body whip-cracked out of sight, out of knowledge, into the cold forever night of the deep.