by Maggie Allen
It was going to be a long, boring stop at Trench 42.
A cluster of pop-eyed fish, no longer than Amari's thumb, sidled up to the viewport and peered inside, mouths pursing and relaxing as if they wanted to kiss her. Their unblinking eyes were huge in comparison to their bodies, and their dark scales flickered in the station's lights. Amari put a finger against the glass, opposite one fish's tiny face. It focused on the movement but didn't seem afraid. Then the station lurched in its sea-floor walk, and the school of fish skittered away. Outside, the station lights clawed a high column of rock and coral out of the shadows.
"Hey!"
Amari jumped, knowing, even as she whirled around, that it was Lem. If she'd been paying attention to anything other than the fish, she would have seen his reflection in the thick acrylic viewport as he crept up behind her. Her twin grinned, not at all sorry for startling her.
"What's so interesting?" he asked. "You look like you want to go right through the wall and out into the water. I don't recommend it without a gillsuit," he added with a knowing wink.
"Just some fish." Though she and Lem were alike in many ways, he loved the geology of the deep ocean—the trenches, the layers of sediment, the slow grinding of tectonic plates far below them—while Amari loved everything that lived here.
They started for the stairs up to their apartment in the habitat pod. The station had a central hub, where the science labs, hydroponics, algae beds, administration, and recreational facilities occupied five levels. Ten domed pods surrounded the hub, each of which held nine living units and a viewport lounge. The pods attached to the central hub via flexible accordion tubes, large enough for two adults to walk through side-by-side, but able to shift up, down, and sideways as the station plodded across the uneven geography of the ocean floor. Amari’s and Lem's family lived in Pod 6, Unit 2, Level 3. The viewport room was on Level 1, so they had to take the central stairs up in order to get home.
"We got a mail drop yesterday," Lem said as they climbed the spiral staircase. Their footfalls echoed off the metal steps. Packages and supplies came down to the Llyr periodically by mini submersible.
"I know. I didn't get anything."
"Are you sure?" Lem asked.
Amari turned to frown down at him. He was grinning. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Keep going," he told her, pointing upward. "You'll see."
Lem was such a tease! But Amari was eager to find out what he meant. She ran up the steps, Lem keeping pace behind her, their clatter filling the stairwell.
Their parents were still at work, their mom in the science lab, their dad in admin, so the unit was quiet when Amari opened the door.
"This way!" Lem pushed past her. They passed the doors to their parents' and Lem's bedrooms and went into Amari's.
"Ta-daa!" Lem said with a flourish.
On Amari's desk sat one of the small plastic aquarium tanks from the labs, filled with a few cups of water and a floating plant, the top covered with a bright orange lid. A paper packet leaned against the outside. It read, "Sea Monkeys."
"Sea monkeys?" Amari asked, picking up the packet.
Lem sat in her desk chair and spun around. "Technically, a species of brine shrimp. Since you can't bring any of the fish from these depths into the pods, I thought I'd get you a different kind of pet.” He stopped spinning and grinned. “It's an early birthday present!"
Amari shook the envelope gently and heard only a harsh, scratchy sound, as if the packet were filled with sand. She eyed her brother doubtfully. "And these shrimp are in here?" This must be one of Lem's elaborate jokes.
But he nodded. "Their eggs can go dormant for long periods of time and even dry out completely. When you put them in water, they'll hatch!"
Amari looked at her brother closely, but his brown eyes seemed more excited than teasing. "I just dump them into the water?"
"You have to purify the water first," Lem said, "but Mom and I did that in the lab. So yeah, dump them in any time you want!"
Amari tore the package open carefully and scattered the dust-like contents across the surface of the water. The flecks settled quickly to the bottom, lodging among the covering of small white pebbles.
"Now give it all a good stir, and tomorrow they should start to hatch," Lem said. Amari did, swirling the water around with the long stylus from her tablet.
"Tomorrow? That soon?"
"Twenty-four hours or less, supposedly," Lem said, peering into the tank.
"Hey," Amari said, "thank you. But now I have to come up with something amazing for your birthday present."
He grinned. "Yep. And you have only a week to do it. Anyway, I figure this will give you something else to do when you can't grab a gillsuit and go swim with your fish outside."
"That's really nice of you," Amari said. She eyed her brother skeptically. “What's the catch?”
Lem shook his head. "No catch. I just want to keep you busy so I can have some peace."
He laughed and dodged away when she pretended to smack him. Down the hall, they heard the unit door opening and went to tell their parents that the sea monkey project was underway.
Amari awoke the next morning to the realization that the habitat had stopped moving. In the two years that they'd lived on the Llyr, the motion of the station as it explored the deep ocean had become normal; it seemed weird to be motionless. The station moved slowly—you could swim ahead of it in a gillsuit, so you'd never be left behind. For the first year, Amari's mother had insisted that she and Lem wear tethers anytime they went outside the habitat, but when they'd turned twelve on their last birthday, she'd said they didn't need them anymore.
Amari turned her head to see the little aquarium tank on her desk and sighed. They must have reached Trench 42, so she'd be stuck inside. She squinted at the tank; no evidence of hatched sea monkeys yet. It was strange to think of them, trapped inside their tiny environment, inside her small environment, where she felt a little trapped, too. She loved living on the Llyr, despite the tiny living units and lack of many other kids. It let her get out into the ocean almost every single day to study its creatures. Now she'd have to be content with sea monkeys for a while.
There was a knock on her door. "You awake in there?"
Amari smiled. "Sure, come on in!"
Her father pushed the door open and stuck his head in. "Mrs. Cho is sick today, so she can't go exo. That means there's a spare gillsuit. Want to suit up and come with me for security sweep?"
"Yes!" Amari didn't spare more than a second feeling sorry for Mrs. Cho, who was a deep-sea marine biologist and a really sweet lady. She threw back the covers. "Give me five minutes—"
"Whoa, slow down," her dad said, the skin around his dark eyes crinkling as he laughed and put up his hands. "We have time for breakfast. Just get dressed and come join us."
Amari was at the counter in their tiny kitchen in under five minutes. Her mother passed her a plate of scrambled eggs and fresh sea-kale. The eggs were reconstituted from powder, but the greens were grown fresh in the hydroponics lab. Amari smothered the whole thing with ketchup and began to eat. Between mouthfuls, she asked, "Who’s doing the site plan today?"
“I think Dr. Peirce and Dr. Lagunov.”
Two things happened when the Llyr arrived in a new place—security sweep and the creation of a site plan. Outside teams would explore the new area and map it in detail, noting anything that might be of interest to the crew, or dangerous to them. From there, the scientists would decide what to study. While the instruments and cameras aboard the habitat could gather a lot of information, Dad always said, "There's nothing like getting a look with your own eyes."
Lem strolled in from his room just as Amari finished her eggs and bolted down a glass of orange juice. He looked at his twin suspiciously. "What are you doing up this early?"
She smiled. "I'm going with Dad to do security sweep. Mrs. Cho is sick."
Lem looked like he was about to protest, but their father said, "I've already arran
ged for you to spend some time with Dr. Hodge in the geology lab. Mr. Cho has the same stomach bug as his wife, so they're short-handed there today, too."
Her brother's complaint was replaced by a wide grin. Both twins would be perfectly happy with their jobs for the day.
A few minutes later, walking through the flexible tube-tunnel that connected their habitat pod to the main hub, Amari asked her father if he had known about the sea monkeys. He smiled.
"Lem told me about the idea a few weeks ago, and we ordered them. I guess you'll be anxious to get back inside and see if they're hatching today."
"They'll keep," she told him. "I want to see everything that's outside first."
"I think you were meant to be mer-folk, not human," her dad teased.
"But here I am, stuck with legs instead of a tail." Amari grinned back.
"Best I can offer you is a gillsuit," he said, and they clattered down to the lowest level of the main hub, where the moon pool waited.
The moon pool was a rectangular, water-filled opening in the bottom of the Llyr. The gillsuits hung in alcoves around the sides of the room. Air pressure was carefully set so that the sea water didn't rush in and fill up the room. This meant that the crew could slip into gillsuits, slide into the pool, and be outside the Llyr in moments. Amari thought of the pool as a magic portal, connecting the dry world inside the Llyr to the undersea world outside.
Two other people were in the room; Salak Peirce, a plant biologist who looked after the algae beds that supplied the Llyr's oxygen, and Miranda Lagunov, a biologist who specialized in extremophiles, creatures who thrived in places where almost nothing else on Earth could live. They both wore gillsuits and sleek, transparent helmets with their water-to-air filtration units on either side. These were the "gills." The filters worked like a fish's gills, allowing humans to breathe the oxygen they removed from the water. Oxygen was scarce in water, especially this deep in the bathypelagic zone, but the gills processed huge amounts of water in a short amount of time. The gillsuits themselves were made of a flexible, un-crushable graphene polymer fabric, protection against the incredible pressure at extreme ocean depths.
Amari got into her gillsuit quickly while Dr. Peirce and Dr. Lagunov said good morning and got into a discussion with Amari's father about the site plan. Amari sat on the edge of the pool, dangling her feet in the water, and waited impatiently to put on her helmet. She was burning to explore the new area. Finally she said, "I'm ready, Dad!"
He turned to her with a smile. "And there's our timekeeper. She won't let us stand around here talking all day when there's real work to be done." He slipped his helmet on, the bonding edges meeting his suit to form a waterproof seal, and Amari did the same. Then they checked each other's suits, and once her dad nodded to her, they slid into the water together.
Amari pushed along the walls to guide herself down and out from beneath the base of the hub, then floated up a few feet from the ocean floor to have a good look around. The exterior lights on the main hub burned at full power and illuminated all the habitat pods and the area around the Llyr with a green-tinged glow. A bright red crab, disturbed by Amari's sudden appearance, scuttled away through a waving patch of orange feather stars and disappeared at the edge of the light. The Llyr had stopped with the leading habitat pod about ten feet from the edge of the trench, where the floor sloped downward into the dark depths.
Her dad signaled to get Amari's attention, and she pressed the helmet's communicator switch just above her left ear.
"Perimeter sweep," her dad said. Amari nodded. They swam in a counter-clockwise direction, away from the trench, from one pod to the next. Someone in the viewport lounge of a pod waved to them. Amari lifted a hand in return, but her attention was fixed on their surroundings—the ocean floor, the water as far as the lights illuminated it—checking for anything that could cause problems for the Llyr or the crew. And of course, any sea creatures in the area. Drifting silt clouded the water. The Llyr had thrown up sand and debris upon stopping and driving the station's stabilizer rods several feet into the seafloor. The rods anchored the Llyr, an extra bit of insurance when they stopped somewhere potentially dangerous—like the edge of a trench.
"All clear," her dad said over the comm, "but one of the rods on the next pod seems to have malfunctioned, so we have to check it out."
"Okay," Amari answered. They'd passed the second pod and headed for the third—their own.
This brought them about halfway around the Llyr. On this side, a high rock and coral formation towered. It was probably what she'd seen in the distance as the station approached the trench. It reached up half as high as their five-level habitat. The rock was pitted and rough, riddled with holes and small passages. Amari saw movement as fish darted in and out of the openings. A cluster of jellyfish undulated across the surface. Amari smiled. She'd love a chance to explore this more closely.
"I see the problem," her father said, drawing her attention away from the coral. He'd settled his feet on the seafloor and leaned in to look underneath the habitat pod, switching on the light embedded in the chest of his gillsuit. It shone a bright beam where the external lights on the habitat didn't quite reach.
When Amari joined him, she saw it, too. Two of the stabilizer rods burrowed straight down into the sandy floor, but one veered off at a wild angle. It must have hit something buried in the silt and slid off, bending the rod.
"Odd," Amari's father said, swimming under the pod to test the bent piece of metal. "These will usually drive through rock or just stop if they meet too much resistance."
"It won't retract inside the pod like that," Amari said. "Will you have to cut it off?"
"I think so. I'll report to maintenance." He huddled under the pod, snapping pictures of the damage with his helmet's top-mounted camera, and then set off around the rest of the perimeter. Amari lingered for a minute, resting her feet on the silty bottom and examining the coral spire, watching a school of dark fish the length of her hand hover near the sea floor. She wished she could turn off the Llyr's external lights for a few minutes to see if the fish were bioluminescent—at these depths they'd glow blue. She loved watching the almost magical colors transform a dull outline of fins and tail.
A tremble shook the seafloor, and the fish flashed away. The rumble shivered up Amari's legs.
"Amari? Are you coming?" Her father's voice sounded inside her helmet.
"Coming, Dad. Did you just feel that?"
"Feel what?"
She swam up to him and told him about the tremor.
"I didn't notice it," he said, "but the sensors would have picked it up. We'll check the readings when we get back inside." His voice didn't give anything away, but Amari knew that earthquakes happened frequently on the sea floor. It might be dangerous if there was a big one while they were stopped so close to a trench.
The rest of their survey showed nothing else that might be troublesome. Peirce and Lagunov now wore tethers and had ventured out over the edge of the trench, shining large halolamps down into the depths and recording video and still photos. Later, after all the data had been viewed and evaluated and the plan assembled, the scientists would venture deeper into the trench.
"Hey, Jak, can you come over here?" Lagunov's voice sounded on their frequency. "Something strange here."
"Just wait here," Amari's dad told her, but she followed him. If they had discovered something strange in the trench, she wasn't going to miss out on it.
Her father pulled a retractable tether hook from his gillsuit's belt and clipped it to Dr. Lagunov's tether. Amari did the same onto Dr. Peirce's tether. As they swam out over the edge of the trench, her dad looked back and saw that Amari had followed him. He shook his head slightly, but he didn't say anything. Amari grinned. He probably hadn't expected her to stay behind, anyway.
Dr. Lagunov peered at a hand-held device in a special crush-resistant case. "There's something half sticking out of the wall of the trench," she said. "The halolamp's light barely reaches it.
"
Looking down, Amari glimpsed a reflective surface glinting far below them. The outline seemed rounded, but the distance and low light made it hard to see any details.
"Didn't we get any readings on it from the Llyr's sonar?" her father asked. "We should have known this was here."
"We didn't,” Dr. Peirce said, “and what’s really strange is that we're still not reading it, even this close. The sonar doesn’t see it, even though we can. That doesn’t make sense."
Amari considered some of the possibilities. A shipwreck. A natural rock or coral formation. A plane that had crashed into the water and settled into the trench, to be partially covered by silt and sand over many years. But any of those things would have appeared on the Llyr's sonar as sound waves bounced off it and echoed back.
Amari's father glanced back at the Llyr. She knew he'd like to get more tethers and descend right this minute to investigate—just as Amari would. But he was in charge of security, so safety protocol won out.
"Get whatever pictures you can, and we'll discuss it inside," he said finally. "We have to tell maintenance about the broken stabilizer rod, too. Amari, let's get going."
Amari felt a sharp pang of disappointment. In her imagination, she saw herself descending to the odd shape, halolamp in hand, ready to discover the answer to this minor mystery. She took one long, final look at the dim shape below. Something fluoresced briefly as it swam toward the thing and then veered off, giving it a wide berth. Amari frowned. What would spook the fish away from it?
"Amari," her dad said, in the voice that meant he was serious.
With a sigh, she turned and swam after him, back toward the boring safety of the Llyr.
They re-entered the Llyr and stripped out of their gillsuits. The suits went into the decon locker for five minutes to be dried and decontaminated for the next wearers. It was protocol to wait for one's suit to be ready and then hang it back on one of the waiting hooks so that the next person would find a clean and dry one. It was the longest five minutes Amari could remember. She couldn't wait to go with her father into the science labs and discuss the strange shape in the trench.
