Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “Wait, 2007?” Lito frowned, sure there was still a misunderstanding.

  Tuan raised an eyebrow, then made the same exploding gesture and noise that he had earlier. “Tokyo. No more.”

  Was he trying to say that the city had been destroyed six years ago? “Um, hate to break it to you, Tuan ol’ buddy, but you got some bad intel. Tokyo is just fi—”

  The radiation detector in Tuan’s pocket went haywire, clicking and squawking like an angry chicken.

  Lito raised the Walther and looked both ways up and down the hall. “Where’s it comin from?”

  Tuan waved the wand around in circles frantically. “All! All places! Close!”

  “Huh?” Lito pointed his flashlight down the hallway ahead of them, able to see all the way to where it dead ended at a T junction. Nothing. He pointed it behind them, and found the path just as empty. “I don’t see anything, man!”

  And then the first bulbous, squirming ship rat dropped from the ceiling vents onto Tuan.

  6

  The seaweed glowed brighter the closer Amber and Ray got to the beacon of light on the water’s surface, becoming a cool blue carpet beneath the speedboat. Tiny tendrils stretched skyward and reached for them as they passed, reminding Amber of fanatical concertgoers grabbing at a musician on stage. Of course the vegetation would’ve been exposed to the radiation also; she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before, connected it to Cherrywine’s claims that it held her back, or even the feeling Amber had herself that the plants were pawing at her after the yacht crash. Perhaps it was even the reason the seaweed was so abundant in the Bermuda Triangle, and why, as Eric had told them, early sailors feared it. When the radiance became too bright too look at, she concentrated on their destination.

  They’d circled the beacon several times at a good distance before approaching. Whatever it was, it appeared to be only a little larger than the speedboat. The closer they got, the more they could see through the shifting mask of pulsating, sparkling light that seemed to emanate from somewhere on top. Ray tested the air heavily with the radiation detector as she eased forward, keeping the boat throttle just a hair above neutral.

  He shook his head. No dangerous readings, but they both still felt like someone had tied their guts into knots every time they looked at it dead on.

  She found what she thought was the boat’s radio scanner, turned it on. The broadcast was crystal clear now, but with a whine of electrical interference, like a cell phone held up next to a speaker. She moved the boat even closer.

  When they got within ten yards, they entered a narrow shadow where the light was blocked, and she could see the object clearly.

  It was a craft, but it looked even more futuristic than Tuan’s boat. Dull, copper-colored metal reflected none of the early morning sunrays and even seemed to absorb the beams of their flashlights. The main section was as rectangular as a giant refrigerator box, with a rounded cone on one end that she took to be the front, and two blunted wings attached to either side; all-in-all, a functional, ugly design. It looked brand new, not a barnacle or spot of rust on it.

  A squat cylinder perched on top of the vessel, and it was from this that the blue light poured, like a spotlight at the premiere of a Hollywood movie. Since it faced upward, only a sliver of the radiance was visible to them. The angle eliminated the nausea, but the glare was so fierce, she was afraid it would give her flash burns on her retinas. The roots of her hair bristled from electricity in the air, but still the radiation detector was silent.

  “The Deep,” she whispered, hardly aware she’d spoken out loud.

  “What’d you say?” Ray asked.

  “The Deep,” she repeated. “We’ve been hearing this thing’s voice on the scanner all night. It’s been talking to us.”

  But it was more than that. It was her Rosetta Stone. She was sure of it.

  Amber directed the speedboat alongside one of its stubby wings as best she could.

  “What’re you doin?” Ray asked, panic in his voice.

  “Going inside.” She pointed at a round portal visible in the side of the vessel’s body, just above the wing. “I didn’t come all this way to admire it. If there’s answer’s to be had, I want them.”

  “Answers are overrated, college girl.”

  She sighed. “Look, this thing isn’t dangerous. It’s been trying to warn people. Anyway, you don’t have to come. It’s probably better if you lie still.”

  “The hell I’m not. Lito will do a lot worse than shoot me if I let you get killed.”

  He struggled up from the rear seats and helped her tie off the boat to the edge of the wing. The water below them, choked with seaweed, looked like a glowing soup. The leafy growths around the base of the ship clung to its sides, straining upward, as though attempting to climb toward the light from the dish on top. She was careful not to touch them as she stepped over onto the new vessel.

  Amber expected the strange metal to be slick, but instead it yielded subtly beneath her weight, providing traction for her shoes.

  She gave a few experimental bounces. “It’s like being on a trampoline.” She knelt and brushed her fingertips across the surface, found it slightly warmer than the air and vibrating.

  Ray climbed on behind her with the revolver and the walkie-talkie. “This thing wasn’t designed for the water. It ain’t a boat.”

  Amber had been thinking the same, but hadn’t wanted to say it. She walked toward the circular entrance, no more than a seam in the metal. A strange calm descended over her, equal parts exhaustion and curiosity. She had to know. Needed to know.

  When she touched the brown metal with her fingers, it irised open, the door seeming to melt into the walls. A whoosh of compressed air blew across her.

  She saw what was on the other side…and screamed.

  7

  Tuan slapped at the mass of hairless, glowing flesh on his shoulder. Lito saw it surge forward and sink its crooked teeth into the young man’s neck, peeling away a hunk of flesh the size of a dime.

  “Goddamn it!” Lito raised the Walther, putting the barrel right up against the animal’s putrid, melted side, and pulled the trigger. The rat exploded, splattering the corridor walls with its luminescent blood.

  But there were more, they were everywhere now, dropping from the narrow crawlspace above and streaming out of more vents along the sides of the hallway to cover the floor. Lito had always heard that cruise liners like this were home to thousands of vermin, and here was the proof.

  “Run!” Lito pounded down the hallway, dodging as many of the glowing rats on the floor as possible and stomping on those he couldn’t. One fell from the ceiling and managed to catch hold of his shirt, but he knocked it away before it could climb.

  Behind him, Tuan opened fire. Machine gun bullets whined and ricocheted. Lito looked back to see him shooting at the floor as the rats closed in on him. “Tuan, don’t! Just keep moving!”

  They were climbing his legs. Ripping at his jumpsuit with their misshapen claws and teeth to draw blood in tiny wounds, surely injecting their strange radiation poisoning. Lito saw several tear a hole in the fabric near his crotch and slip inside. The soldier began to scream and flail, firing wildly, the bullets somehow missing Lito. As the little beasts swarmed up his body and onto his head, Tuan crumpled to the floor.

  The rats split up, a huge contingent surging toward Lito in a half-foot deep wave.

  8

  Jericho stood hunched over the work bench, using a soldering gun from his tool bag to refit the ends of a metal pipe he’d found on the ground. Carlos straddled a bench to the right, with the rifle across his lap and the shotgun against the wall behind him, using the tip of Jericho’s machete to clean under his fingernails.

  “You muhfuckahs thought you was so funny,” the kid said. “Always doggin me, Rabid slappin me across the face, alla you laughin at me. Even you, Jericho. Well, who’s laughin now?”

  “Lito took you in,” Jericho said, without looking up from his work.
“When nobody else wanted you, he took you in, made you part of dis crew.”

  “Yo, I didn’t ask him to. You think I wanna spend the rest of my life like you assholes, scroungin around on that boat, robbin people for just enough cash to get by? Fuck no, I’m gonna be somebody.”

  “And you t’ink betrayin us and throwin in wit de Dominican is the way to do dat? You are one sad little shit.”

  “Yo, whatevah. How much longer till that thing’s ready?”

  The correct answer to that question was ‘never.’ There was no way to know if this pipe was even long enough to bridge the gap in the engine left by the missing fuel hose, but Carlos hadn’t been interested in hearing that. The Steel Runner was stuck, Jericho saw that now, and there was no getting out of this for any of them.

  “It’s finished,” he lied. “Come take a look.”

  The kid pushed up from the bench, laid the machete on the end of the table, and walked over with the rifle. Jericho waited until he got close enough, then tossed the pipe directly at his face. It hit him in the forehead, drawing blood. “Oh, you fuckin—!”

  Carlos swung the rifle up. Jericho launched across the distance between them.

  9

  Carlos meant to kill him, just…fuck the Runner and Santiago and his dream of being a drug smuggling sea captain, none of it was enough to quell his blind rage as he prepared to blow this island nigger away without a moment’s hesitation, but the bastard was on him before he could get the rifle up. Jericho grabbed the AR and wrenched, trying to rip the weapon out of his grasp. When that didn’t work, he brought a knee up into Carlos’ stomach hard enough to make his eyes water. The pain only served to feed his fury.

  He let go of the rifle with one hand and bashed Jericho in the side of the head as hard as he could, aiming for the lump by his ear that Jorge had given him. The heel of his palm came away bloody. The mechanic’s head rocked to the side, his grip loosening just long enough for Carlos to pull away.

  But there was still no time to get the long weapon swung around in time to fire. Jericho dove for the table to retrieve his machete, then sliced outward in a blind arc. It was everything Carlos could do to block the sharp edge with the butt of the rifle.

  Jericho came at him like the killer in a slasher flick, swinging the machete in short, overhead swipes, driving Carlos back against the wall. The rifle was his only shield as he thrust it out in front of him to keep the man away.

  And then one of the mechanic’s frantic blows sliced down the back of Carlos’s left hand where it gripped the AR.

  Carlos howled. The sound startled Jericho enough to make him pause, and Carlos used the opportunity to smash the rifle butt across his face.

  The mechanic crashed to the floor with a groan and crawled away. Carlos tried to get the rifle into position to shoot him, but when he attempted to hold the barrel with his left hand, it slipped from his grasp and fell to the concrete.

  His damn fingers wouldn’t close. He turned the hand over to look at the back, where Jericho’s last blow with the machete had landed, and found that he’d been skinned all the way from the second knuckles of each finger, nearly to his wrist. This stretch of his arm was nothing but mangled tissue now with a few gleaming white bones sticking out, like a cross-section drawing of the human body for an anatomy class. A river of blood coursed down his arm and spattered on the floor.

  Whattaya know, he thought in amazement. I got bottlecapped after all.

  Jericho was several feet away, still on hands and knees. Carlos figured he was trying to escape, but then spotted the shotgun against the bench and understood.

  Rather than manipulate the gun with his crippled appendage, he used his good hand to snatch up the rusted length of pipe from the floor. He walked over and kicked Jericho in the side once, twice, and on the third, the man was finally smart enough to get the idea and flop over on his back.

  Carlos straddled his legs, his mangled hand leaking blood onto the other man’s shirt.

  “Yo, when you see Lito in hell, tell ‘em I said hello.”

  He rammed the end of the pipe down into the soft part of Jericho’s stomach, just below the ribcage, then leaned over to look at the man’s face. This was the first time Carlos had ever killed someone in cold blood. Jericho’s eyes were wide, his mouth twisted in pain, but he wasn’t quite dead yet. It might take a while, but Carlos was prepared to wait. He had nowhere else to go.

  The swinging door slammed open behind him, and he twisted around to see Lito come pounding into the room.

  10

  Amber’s scream was small and flat on the open water. She backpedaled, bumping into Ray.

  On the other side of the entrance was a shallow alcove. A form had been scrunched in the corner against the inside of the door, curled up in a ball, and it flopped halfway out onto the wing when the round portal opened.

  “Hold on, it’s okay, don’t freak out,” Ray told her, keeping one hand on her so she didn’t topple backward into the water. It didn’t make her feel much better that he was using his other to sketch a cross on his chest again.“Whatever it is, it’s dead. Been dead a long time, from the looks of it.”

  She forced herself to move forward again, training her flashlight on the form lying across the threshold. The creature was small, barely larger than a toddler. If it was another mutant, she had no idea what it was before radiation deformed it. The closest comparison she could draw was to a squid. It had multiple tentacles growing from its underside in a gnarled tangle, and a puffy, bloated head that sported a host of antennae and mandibles like those of an ant. A ring of glassy, flat, disc-like indentions stared at her, like the glassy eyes of a doll. Its skin was shrunken and shriveled, a bland, no-color gray, but she thought this was from decay rather than natural pigmentation.

  Amber prodded it with the flashlight. The flesh had looked rubbery when it flopped out onto the wing, but now it crumbled beneath the slight pressure. A crack ran up and down its main mass, and then the entire form seemed to collapse in on itself like a punctured soufflé. It disintegrated as she watched, becoming no more than a pile of ash and dust that the sea breeze scattered.

  “It mummified,” she told Ray over her shoulder. “That happens to people buried in ancient tombs when they’re exposed to fresh air for the first time.”

  “Yeah? And how long does that take?”

  “A few thousand years, at least.”

  “That’s all, huh?”

  Stepping over the powdery remains, Amber entered the tiny ship. Before she could shine her light around, clean, white illumination blazed overhead. She blinked at the brightness until her eyes adjusted.

  The floor, walls and ceiling in here were smooth, featureless white, made of a glossy substance that almost resembled marble. There were no switches or dials or gauges, no way at all that she could see to control this craft, just those plain, clinical surfaces. She couldn’t even see where the light was coming from. The effect created an optical illusion that the landscape stretched to infinity on all sides, giving her a small flutter of panic; Amber had to touch the walls to confirm they were still there. In actual physical terms, the space was so cramped it made Tuan’s ship look like a suite at the Four Seasons. She could reach out and put her palms flat on both sides of the narrow enclosure at the same time.

  But underneath the panels, she could hear noises all around them. Small pings and whirrings, like the sounds of machinery starting, or computers booting.

  “We woke it up.” Ray slid into the ship behind her and leaned against the wall, holding his injured side. “Dios, I hope that’s a good thing.”

  At the front of the narrow room was a structure—the only object in this otherwise sterile room—that looked to Amber like a giant, black spice rack. It was a huge bowl on top of a narrow central column, which had ringlets on all sides running down its length. She had to stare at it for a few more seconds before she understood.

  It was a chair, just not a chair meant for human anatomy.

  S
omehow, looking at this structure—specifically designed for the creature at the door, so it could perch on the bowl and slide its tentacles through the holsters on the side to secure itself—brought the undeniable truth crashing down.

  “Cherrywine was right all along,” she said softly. “This is a spaceship. And that thing over there was its pilot.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say, or even think, the word pressing at the back of her lips, the one she and Lito had joked about just a few hours before.

  The shorter wall in front of the chair suddenly lit up in a display screen. It was only a blue background, with a narrow white band across the bottom and a series of strange symbols scrolling quickly above it. The sight of them thrilled her; yet another discovery that could easily make her famous. She tried to get a sense of them, even commit them to memory, but the alien (there, she’d thought it, no going back now) characters moved too fast. So instead, she took in the screen as a whole, tried to understand what message it was conveying rather than decipher the specifics.

  The band at the bottom was growing, she now saw, slowly crawling from right to left across the screen. Every few seconds, it would jump forward, eating up a little more area. It had a foot or so left before it would reach all the way across.

  The answer to this, at least, was glaringly obvious.

  A completion bar. She was looking at a computer completion bar meant to countdown the time to a certain event, like a program loading. Nice to know even technology throughout the universe works on Microsoft principles, she thought.

  From hidden speakers somewhere overhead, the Voice of the Deep began to play. The man from Lito’s crew that had come up with this name probably hadn’t known just how apt it was. This was a voice from the deep, just not deep in the ocean. Amber found it easy to imagine the harsh language being spoken by the mandibles that formed the dead creature’s mouth.

  Something above her clicked. Before she could move, a short pole flipped down from the ceiling in front of her face, phasing right through the surface as if it were no more substantial than smoke. A bulb at the end shone a short burst of green light the color of emerald directly into her left eye. She felt a tickle somewhere far back in her skull, like a feather moving against her scalp, but before she could even blink or jerk away, the pole disappeared back into the ceiling.