by Anne Renwick
Isa launched into action, tossing off her jacket onto a chair and rolling up her sleeves. Grabbing a Lucifer lamp, she hurried down the narrow stairs. There, in the underground gloom, a small stack of boxes covered by a dusty tarp shoved between outmoded and broken equipment, saved for parts. She tossed aside the tarp and pried off the topmost lid.
A circulator, an agitator, a hand-cranked fuge. One by one, she set them all aside, digging to the bottom and pulling forth a single cloth-wrapped notebook. Muscles quivering with barely suppressed anger, she investigated the other boxes, but found nothing more.
Hours passed as she sat in the study, paging through academic scribblings of hypotheses tested, rejected, refined and repeated. Her eyes grew bleary as the afternoon light faded into darkness, but she kept reading. Anton had indeed been studying the blood of Finn patients without their consent. Unethical, yet seemingly innocuous.
But as relief began to replace suspicion, one particular notation leapt from the page: secretory glycoprotein. Her pulse jumped. Secretory? Her eyes raced down the page of experimental data. Not only had Anton managed to isolate factor Q, he’d discovered it was not a glycolipid as expected, but rather a glycoprotein, comprised of both carbohydrates and protein.
At this point, his handwriting grew increasingly illegible as he wrote of a series of inoculated blood cultures. But there, among his fevered jottings, a single telling phrase: hypoxic conditions release factor Q into the blood’s serum.
Hypoxic. Low oxygen levels.
An unladylike string of curses worthy of a hardened sailor tore from her lips. How could he have kept such discoveries from her? Hypoxia was directly relevant to her own investigations into the effects of different surgical anesthetics upon their people. A large part of supplying a patient with anesthesia centered around ensuring that oxygen levels did not fall too low. He’d kept this from her knowing that further studies might elucidate why most Finn reacted poorly to a standard anesthesia mixture while others did not.
She shoved her fingers into her hair. Without a medical degree, without access to sufficient funds or the research facilities of the Glaister Institute, her work could proceed no further.
~~~
Cut off from the light of day and working under bright argon lights, Alec lost track of the hour. The coded brief had to be flawless. Everything rested on his shoulders. He would be breaking chain of command on two fronts—Naval and Queen’s agents—by sending a message directly to the Duke of Avesbury in London, requesting permission to engage the BURR team for a secret reconnaissance mission. If anything went wrong, it was his neck on the block.
By the time he was finally satisfied, the clock face on the far wall of the operations room informed him that it was twenty past midnight. He stretched out his aching leg, aware he’d sat for far longer than Dr. Morgan would approve.
Too late to visit Isa?
Yes, too late. He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“Done yet?” Moray pushed back from his own deck, stretching. “When are we going fishing?”
Alec grinned. “Soon as Shaw figures out where to dangle the hook.”
The HMS Beta Water Skimmer—responsible for the sightings—had been messaged for updates, and the Alpha and Gamma Skimmers contacted to see if they’d noticed anything unusually large about the fish population this winter. By the time approval came back from London—if it came—they needed to have the mission ready to execute.
The door to the operations room swung open and Shaw strode in, dropping a stack of paper on Alec’s desk. “This just in from HMS Alpha Skimmer. You need to take a look.”
Sightings. Depth readings and speed recordings. There was no way Alec was leaving the operations room, not even long enough to knock on Isa’s door for an overdue goodnight kiss.
He rubbed the back of his neck and grumbled at the piss-poor timing. Perhaps it was just as well. For the moment, there was too much he couldn’t share with her. He’d send a skeet pigeon with a note of apology and plead for her forgiveness.
~~~
Unable to sleep, Isa threw open a window to see what messages had come to roost. Outside in the dark, wee hours, five skeet pigeons perched on her window sill. Not many knew she had returned to Glasgow but, with only a handful of Finn working in the medical fields, word would spread quickly among them.
She plucked the canisters from the birds, unfurling the messages they carried. Three alone were from her mother, one message chiding her for involving herself in Larsa’s death, a second complaining about the Carrs, and a third praising Mrs. Carr’s efforts on Isa’s behalf and imploring her to return home to marry Elias.
Rolling her eyes, she unfurled the fourth message.
Rigid with frustration, but unable to leave work. Know my every stray thought lingers behind a boiler, behind a button. Or ten. May not be free for hours or days.
Heat curled low in her belly at Alec’s words. Perhaps it was just as well. She needed time to process the data in Anton’s laboratory notes. There was too much she wasn’t ready to share.
The fifth bird hailed from Achiltibuie, a tiny village north of Ullapool, and the words scrawled upon the paper raised every hair on the back of her neck.
Help. Husband found on boat, clinging to life. A tentacle is lodged in his neck. Fear blood poisoning is about to set in. Cannot call the local doctor. Please come immediately.
Gathering the pigeons, she stuffed them into a canvas bag and slammed the window shut. Correspondence could be attended to from her boat. Weather permitting, at full throttle she might reach his bedside before midnight. En route, she would pen a reply to Alec assuring him that her recently altered opinion of shipboard machinery still held, that she would write again when she’d returned from attending the bedside of a patient whose condition was relevant to their investigation.
Chapter Thirteen
“GRAB YOUR GEAR, we’re a go.” Shaw strode into the operations room. “HMS Beta Skimmer spotted the megalodon not far from the Summer Isles. They’ve wired an exact position. A Cormorant class dirigible is standing by on the strip. Time to get a bird in the air and hunt for shark.”
All five men—Alec, Rip, Moray, Rowan and Sinclair—straightened and grinned. They’d spent the better part of the last two days bent over a table littered with nautical charts and various sheets of paper, attempting to predict where the megalodon might surface next. They were beyond ready.
Shaw pointed a finger at Alec. “Observational status only. You’re not cleared to dive with that knee.”
He opened his mouth to object.
“Don’t even try.” Shaw’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an order straight from Mr. Black, who is pissed as hell you broke confidentiality and went over his head.”
Alec grinned. About time his brother surfaced. “Got his attention, didn’t it?”
~~~
Orange and brilliant, the sun dipped ever closer to the horizon, but for once the comforts of her houseboat failed to beckon. Ignoring the path leading to the shore, Isa turned toward the small cluster of buildings that lined a street and—after the slightest of hesitations—yanked upon the heavy wooden door of an unofficial tavern where Finnfolk gathered. She breathed in the smoky scent of the peat fire that burned on the grate and let the dark warmth of the room wrap around her. Scots might wander in, but they weren’t welcome and rarely stayed long. Women were barely tolerated either, but there was nowhere else in town to go, and she didn’t want to be alone with the thoughts swirling through her head.
Ignoring the pointed stares of three men who gathered in a far corner, she placed her medical bag on the floor and sank onto a stool to bury her face in her hands. She’d arrived too late.
The publican set a pint of ale onto the table before her.
She raised her head and met his sad eyes. “Thank you.”
“On the house, Mrs. McQuiston,” he said, his face long. “Heard what happened.”
The biomech creature had pierced the man’s neck, stabbing at it twice before tunneling into his external jugular vein and causing significant blood loss. Isa had anesthetized the man and removed the narrow, braided wire with its hooked tip, carefully storing it and the remaining cephalopod tissue in a vial of ethanol. Alec would wish to study it. A distant corner of her mind pointed out that she’d rushed here as much for Alec as for the poor fisherman, hoping to impress him by gathering a fact or two that would shed light on the strange attacks.
Performed earlier, the surgery might have saved the fisherman, but his body temperature had continued to climb, sending the man into feverish convulsions. When death finally arrived, when his teary-eyed wife had looked to Isa for an explanation, she was at a loss. Word of the octopus attacks was spreading, and all she could say was that the incidents were being investigated.
Wishing to leave the family to their mourning rituals, she’d not conducted a full postmortem, only taking note that the fisherman did indeed bear scars between his fingers, indicating a high probability that factor Q had flowed through his veins and arteries.
Hypoxic conditions release factor Q into the blood’s serum. The phrase from Anton’s notations kept running through her mind. Could this biomech octopus somehow detect factor Q? She pressed her palms to her eyes. Worse, did it drag its victims overboard first, the better to deprive them of oxygen—to induce hypoxia—before burrowing toward a man’s blood vessels?
She shuddered at the thought.
“Grateful you came, even if…” He waved his hand, unable to finish. “Well, there’s not too many Finn left in town, what with so many families packing up and heading north. Two more families left earlier today.”
“North?” Her head jerked up.
“Heading to the Shetland islands to build a community of Finn. Something about returning to their roots.” He tipped his head at a line of skeet pigeons that sat on a shelf. “So many have gone that I’m running more of a postal service than a pub.”
Spread thin about the western shores of Scotland, Isa could see the appeal of gathering together Finn who yearned to return to the old ways. But in doing so, they cut themselves off from the outside world, including medical care and education. And how long could they hope to live apart with technological advances of all kinds making distant corners of the globe ever more accessible?
“Ah, there’s one now,” he said. A skeet pigeon had landed outside a small window propped open with a stick. Ducking through the opening, it shuffled forward and held out its metal-jointed leg. The publican tugged off the brass canister and pulled out the paper, peering beneath his glasses to read the words. His face paled.
“Nikko!” he called to one of the men, waving the paper. “It’s the boat. The one to Lerwick. The Brown and Lovitt families are requesting a rescue. Their propeller malfunctioned and a giant shark is circling.”
The megalodon. Which might or might not be alive.
Adrenaline flooded Isa’s system, and her heart began to pound. A shark. Circling a boat of traveling Finn. Her people were under attack. This was all connected. It had to be.
“My boat,” Nikko called as he strode for the door.
Everyone moved to follow him. Including Isa. The publican cast her a look and opened his mouth, ready to set her aside like a fine piece of china, pretty but not particularly useful. But she was done letting others assign her value.
She held up a hand. “I’m coming. What if you need a healer? I could have saved that man, if I’d only been able to reach him sooner.”
He hesitated, then nodded.
Clutching her medical bag, she hurried after the rough-hewn fishermen. Some frowned, some ignored her, but not one stepped in her way to prevent her from boarding.
A cold wind lashed at them as the boat churned through the water, rising and falling with the waves, its helm pointed at a darkening horizon. Nonetheless, the men stripped down to their undergarments, providing access to the knives strapped to ankles and wrists. If danger lurked in the ocean, they would dive overboard to fight the creature and save those they could.
As would she.
She tossed aside her own cloak and pulled off her bodice. Her hands shook as she unhooked the clasps that held her skirt in place. Did she go too far? Would they stop her now? All wore tight-lipped frowns, but one man stepped sideways, waving her forward.
In nothing but her linen shift, her own dive knife strapped to her thigh, Isa stood beside the railing with the men, her hair whipping in the wind, as they searched for a boat in distress.
~~~
“An overlarge dorsal fin at ten o’clock.” Alec stared through the eyepiece of the inverted periscope. “Circling a large boat with a distress flag. Another smaller vessel is on course to intercept it. A probable rescue.”
The cryptobiologists aboard the HMS Beta Skimmer had called in a final sighting of the megalodon, and then veered out to sea while the pilot of the R14X Cormorant class dirigible maneuvered into position above the cloud cover.
Beside him, all the BURR men—Shaw, Rowan, Sinclair, Moray and Rip—were ready to drop in for a peek at this oversized shark. Dive masks and hoses hung around their necks, breathing bags and tanks on their backs. Harpoon guns were strapped to their legs. Self-defense only. Alec was similarly attired, prepared for things to go pear-shaped.
“You’re not to leave this dirigible,” Shaw had protested when Alec geared up, reading intent on his face.
“I won’t go down unless it’s safe,” he had promised, shrugging off Shaw’s concerns as he shoved an acousticocept into his ear canal. “I’m prepared to stand here receiving transmissions. But when the all clear comes, I need to get a look at this thing with my own two eyes.”
Shaw had scoffed. “I’m tempted to toss you in first as bait.”
Alec grinned.
The men ran a final check of their equipment along with a last test of the newfangled acousticotrans system. The Duke of Avesbury had given him clearance to run this mission, with the caveat that it would be billed as an exercise to test an experimental communications method. Proven on land, it had yet to be used in the water—though the devices were safe beneath thick layers of vulcanized rubber. Alec had his doubts about the transmission system but, as he pointed at each man in turn, he couldn’t help grinning at the profanities that cracked back at him.
“Ready?”
Thumbs went up.
Satisfied that everything was as it should be, Alec leaned into the cockpit. “Good to go. Hover and hold.”
“Yes, sir.” The pilot flipped switches and punched buttons. A moment later, the dirigible slowed, floating motionless.
Alec pulled a lever, sliding open the great door in the gondola’s side. He threw out five thick ropes secured to the dirigible’s undercarriage, ones calculated to end some two feet above the water’s surface and fifty feet away from the distressed boat. There, the team would drop into the water. If all went well, the megalodon would never notice them.
“Don’t belly flop,” he ordered and stepped back.
Lifting middle fingers as they passed him, each man grabbed hold of a ratchet handle, slid a booted foot into a ratchet stirrup, then jumped out, making a swift, but steady, descent.
Seconds later, noise crackled over the acousticocept as each crew member reported in.
“Shit,” Rowan barked. “Bodies in the water. Draw your weapons.”
“Same on port,” Moray said. “I’ve got a severed head. What the hell happened here?”
“I’ve got a partial torso,” Sinclair added. “With an attached tentacle.”
“I need that,” Alec yelled into the acousticotransmitter, pacing in the confined space of the dirigible.
“Do not let go! Gather any other remains that appear to have an octopus or fragments of an octopus attached to it in any manner.”
“Bagged it,” Moray reassured him. “Anyone got eyes on the fish that did this?”
“There,” Rip spoke. “Behind the stern of the boat. Twenty feet down.”
“Oh, hell,” said Shaw. “Its eyes glow. And its mouth is open. Sharp teeth, glinting… in a flood lamp?”
“It’s covered with standard shark skin,” reported Moray. “But has hinges on the tail, and I can see rivets anchoring the pectoral fins in place.”
“Portals on the sides. Aw, hell, they’re opening!”
Shaw swore. “They’re expelling hyena fish!”
“Back away!” Alec yelled. “Get out of the blood zone.”
Hailing from the South Atlantic off the western coast of Africa, hyena fish were bad news. Vicious, they swarmed carrion, stripping them to the bone in minutes. The human remains in the water would whip them into a feeding frenzy. Collateral damage was likely.
“The megalodon is diving,” Rip reported.
“I’m bit,” Shaw said. “Bleeding. Not impaired, but exiting the zone.”
“Time to leave.” Moray’s voice was deadly calm over the acousticocept. “The rescue vessel is attempting to pull alongside the first.”
Alec stared through the inverted periscope, straining to make out details. There appeared to be a single figure in distress, curled into a ball upon the deck of the original boat. Though that individual would have quite the tale to tell, now was not the time to demand it.
“Do not surface,” Alec ordered. “Allow the rescuers to assist any survivors.” If the BURR team were to board either boat dressed as they were, they would be met with fear and resistance. “Rowan, assist Shaw. Moray, survey the scene and estimate how many individuals are—were—in the water. Sinclair, collect samples. Rip, keep an eye on the rescuers. I’ll hover and monitor for further trouble. Prepare to retreat to rendezvous alternate point and await pickup.”
