Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  Other sailors flash by, most of them carrying bags or wearing floodlights strapped to their foreheads or chests; some holding spear guns, which work better at these depths than traditional rifles. We’d be defenseless if someone were to fire a torpedo into our midst, but thus far, all the troubles we’ve encountered have either been native—squid and sharks who see our altered silhouettes and think we look like prey—or our own kind, mermaids from rival militaries, trying to chart and claim our sea beds before we can secure them for the United States of America. We might have been the first ones into the sea, but we weren’t the last, and we’re not even the most efficient anymore. The American mods focus too much on form and not enough on functionality. Our lionfish, eels, even our jellies still look like women before they look like marine creatures. Some sailors say—although there’s been no proof yet, and that’s the mantra of the news outlets, who don’t want to criticize the program more than they have to, don’t want to risk losing access to the stream of beautifully staged official photos and the weekly reports on the amazing scientific advancements coming out of what we do here—some sailors say that they chose streamlined mods, beautiful, sleek creatures that would cut through the water like knives, minimal drag, minimal reminders of their mammalian origins, and yet somehow came out of the treatment tanks with breasts that ached like it was puberty all over again. Ached and then grew bigger, ascending a cup size or even two, making a more marketable silhouette.

  Here in the depths we’re soldiers, military machines remade to suit the needs of our country and our government. But when we surface, we’re living advertisements for the world yet to come, when we start shifting more of the population to the bubble cities being constructed on the ground we’ve charted for them, when the military gene mods become available to the public. I’ve seen the plans. We all have. Civilians will be limited to “gentler” forms, goldfish and angelfish and bettas, all trailing fins and soft Disney elegance. Veterans will be allowed to keep our mods as recognition of our service, should we choose to stay in the wet—and again, no one knows whether reversal is possible, especially not for the more esoteric designs. Can you put the bones back into a jelly’s feet, just because you think they ought to be there? Questions better left unanswered, if you ask me.

  Adjustment is done: My gills are open, and my chest is rising smooth and easy, lungs filling with seawater without so much as a bubble of protest. I jackknife down and swim toward the current patrol, feeling the drag from my weight belt as it pulls me toward the bottom. One more reason to dream of that coming return to the labs, when they’ll take me one step deeper, and this will be just a little more like home.

  The blues return to join me; two of them grab my hands and pull me deeper, their webbed fingers slipping on my slick mammalian skin, and the captain and her bogeys are forgotten, for a time, before the glorious majesty of the never-ending sea.

  • • •

  We’re deep—about a hundred, hundred and fifty feet below the waiting submarine, our passage lit by the soft luminescent glow of the anglers and the lanterns—when something flashes past in the gloom just past the reach of the light. Whatever it is, it’s moving fast, all dart and dazzle, and there isn’t time to see it properly before it’s gone.

  The formation forms without anyone saying a word, the hard-coded schooling instinct slamming into our military training and forming an instant barricade against the waiting dark. Anglers and lanterns in the middle, blues, makos, and lionfish and undecideds on the outside. The five of us who have yet to commit to a full mod look like aberrations as we hang in the water, almost human, almost helpless against the empty sea.

  One of the blues clicks, the sound reverberating through the water. A moment later her voice is coming through the implant in my inner ear, saying, “Sonar’s picking up three bodies, all about twenty yards out, circling.”

  Another click, from another of the blues, and then: “Marine or mer?” Shorthand description, adopted out of necessity. Are we looking at natural marine creatures, sharks or dolphins—unusual at this depth—or even the increasingly common, increasingly dangerous squid that we’ve been seeing as we descend into the trenches? There are a dozen species of the great cephalopods down here, some never before seen by science, and all of them are hungry, and smart enough to recognize that whatever we are, we could fill bellies and feed babies. We are what’s available. That has value, in the sea. (That has value on the land as well, where women fit for military service were what was available, where we became the raw material for someone else’s expansion, for someone else’s fairy tale, and now here we are, medical miracles, modern mermaids, hanging like apples in the larder of the sea.)

  Click click. “Mer.” The sonar responses our makos are getting must have revealed the presence of metal, or of surgical scars: something to tell them that our visitors are not naturally occurring in the sea. “Three, all female, unknown mods. Fall back?”

  More clicks as the group discusses, voices coming hard and fast through the implants, arguing the virtues of retreat versus holding our ground. There are still crewmen in these waters, unaware of the potential threat—and we don’t know for sure that this is a threat, not really. America isn’t the only country to take to sea. We could just be brushing up against the territory claimed by an Australian crew, a New Zealand expedition, and everything will end peacefully if we simply stay where we are and make no threatening movements.

  One of the blues breaks formation.

  She’s fast—one of the fastest we have, thanks to the surgery that fused her legs from crotch to ankles, replaced her feet with fins, replaced the natural curves of a mammalian buttock and thigh with the smooth sweep of a blue shark’s tail—and she’s out of the light before anyone has a chance to react. My sonar isn’t as sensitive as the blues’; I don’t know what she heard, only that she’s gone. “After her!” I shout through the sub-dermal link, my words coming out as clicks and bubbles in the open water. And then we’re moving, all of us, the blues in the lead with the makos close behind. The jellies bring up the rear, made more for drifting than for darting; one, a moonie with skin the color of rice paper that shows her internal organs pulsing softly in her abdomen, clings to a lionfish’s dorsal fin. Her hands leave thin ribbons of blood in the water as she passes. We’ll have sharks here soon.

  With the lanterns and anglers moving in the middle of the school, we’re able to maintain visual contact with each other, even if we’re too deep and moving too fast to show up on cameras. This is the true strength of the military mermaid project: speed and teamwork, all the most dangerous creatures in the sea boiled down to their essentials and pasted onto Navy women, who have the training and the instincts to tell us how they can best be used. So our scouts swim like bullets while the rest of us follow, legs and tails pumping hard, arms down flat by our sides or holding tight to the tow line of someone else’s fin, someone else’s elbow. Those of us who are carrying weapons have them slung over our backs, out of the way. Can’t swim at speed and fire a harpoon gun at the same time.

  All around me, the school clicks and whistles their positions, their conditions, only occasionally underscoring their reports with actual words. “She’s not here.” “Water’s been disturbed.” “Something tastes of eel.” This isn’t how we write it down for the brass. They’re all drylanders, they don’t understand how easy it is to go loose and fluid down here in the depths, how little rank and order seem to matter when you’re moving as a single beast with a dozen tails, two dozen arms, and trying all the while to keep yourself together, keep yourself unified, keep yourself whole. The chain of command dissolves under the pressure of the crushing deep, just as so many other things—both expected and unimagined—have already fallen away.

  Then, motion in the shadows ahead, and we surge forward again, trying to find our missing shipmate, our missing sister, the missing sliver of the self that we have become as we trained together, schooled together, mourned our lost humanity and celebrated our dawnin
g monstrosity together. We are sailors and servicewomen, yes; we will always be those things, all the way down to our mutant and malleable bones. But moments like this, when it is us and the open sea, remind us every day that we are more than what we were, and less than what we are to become, voiceless daughters of Poseidon, singing in the space behind our souls.

  The taste of blood in the water comes first, too strong to be coming from the sliced hands of those who chose poorly when they grabbed at the bodies of their fellow fables. Then comes the blue, flung out of the dark ahead, her slate-colored back almost invisible outside the bioluminescent glow, her face and belly pearled pale and ghostly. One of the other blues darts forward to catch her before she can slam into the rest of us, potentially hurting herself worse on spines or stingers. A great cry rises from the group, half lament, half whale song. The remaining two blues hurl themselves into the dark, moving fast, too fast for the rest of us to catch them … and then they return, empty-handed and angry-eyed. One of them clicks a message.

  “She got away.”

  We nod, one to another, and turn to swim—still in our tight, effective school—back toward the waiting vessel. Our crewmate needs medical care. Only after we know she’s safe can we go out again, and find the ones who hurt her, and make them pay.

  • • •

  So few of us are suited for walking anymore, even in the safe, narrow reef of the submarine’s halls, where there is always solid metal waiting to catch and bear us up when our knees give out or our ankles refuse to bear our weight. So it is only natural that I should be the one to stand before the captain—anxious creature that she is—at the closest I could come to parade rest, my hands behind my back and my eyes fixed on the wall behind her, reciting the events of the day.

  “So you’re telling me Seaman Metcalf charged ahead without regard for the formation, or for the safety of her fellow crewmen?” The captain frowns at the incident report, and then at me. She is trying to be withering. She is succeeding only in looking petulant, like a child in the process of learning that not every fairy tale is kind. “Did anyone get a clear look at the bogey? Do we have any idea what could have caused Seaman Metcalf to behave so recklessly?”

  She doesn’t understand, she is not equipped to understand; she has not been sea-changed, and her loyalty is to the Navy itself, not to the crew that swims beside her. Poor little drylander. Maybe someday, when she sees that there is no more upward mobility for we creatures of the sea, she’ll give herself over to the water, and her eyes will be opened at last.

  “No, ma’am. Seaman Metcalf broke formation without warning, and did not explain herself.” She’s in the medical bay now, sunk deep in a restorative bath of active genetic agents. She’ll wake with a little more of her humanity gone, a little more of her modified reality pushed to the surface. Given how close she looks to fully modded, maybe she’ll wake as something entirely new, complete and ready to swim in deeper waters, no longer wedded to the steel chain of the submarine.

  “And the bogeys?” The captain sounds anxious. The captain always sounds anxious, but this is something new, sharp and insecure and painfully easy to read.

  “No one saw anything clearly, ma’am. It’s very dark when you exit the pelagic region, and while we have bioluminescent mods among our crew, they can’t compensate for the limited visibility over a more than three-yard range. Whatever’s been buzzing our perimeter, it’s careful to stay outside the limits of the light.” I don’t mention the sonar readings we were getting before. They’re important, I’m sure of that, but … not yet. She’s not one of us.

  There was a time when withholding information from my captain would have seemed like treason, a time when the patterns of loyalty were ingrained in my blood and on my bone. I had different blood then; I had different bones. They have replaced the things that made me theirs, and while I am grateful, I am no longer their property.

  It’s strange to realize that. Everything about this day has been strange. I keep my eyes fixed straight ahead, not looking at the captain’s face. I am afraid she’ll see that I am lying. I am afraid she won’t see anything but a man-made monster, and her future in fins and scales.

  “I want doubled patrols,” says the captain. “Seaman Metcalf will be detained when she recovers consciousness. I need to know what she saw.”

  “You may want to request that one of the other blue shark mod sailors also be present, ma’am,” I say. “Seaman Metcalf no longer has vocal cords capable of human speech.”

  The captain blanches. “Understood. Dismissed.”

  “Ma’am.” I offer a respectful salute before I turn and limp out of the room, moving slowly—it’s always slow right after I leave the water, when my joints still dream of weightlessness and my lungs still feel like deserts, arid and empty.

  The door swings shut behind me, slamming and locking in the same motion, and I am finally alone.

  • • •

  The captain has ordered us to double patrols, and so patrols are doubled. The captain has ordered the medical staff to detain Seaman Metcalf, and so she is detained, pinned clumsy and semi-mobile on a bed designed for a more human form, her tail turned to dead weight by gravity, her scales turned to brutal knives by the dryness of the air. I know how I feel at night, stretched out in my bunk like a surgical patient waiting for the knife, too heavy to move, too hot to breathe. Seaman Metcalf is so much further along than I am that the mere act of keeping her in the dry should be considered a crime of war, forbidden and persecuted by the very men who made her. But ah, we are soldiers; we signed up for this. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

  The captain has ordered that we stay together at all times, two by two, preventing flights like Seaman Metcalf’s, preventing danger from the dark. I am breaking orders as I slide into the water alone, a light slung around my neck like a strange jewel, a harpoon gun in my hands. This is a terrible idea. But I need to know why my sailors are flinging themselves into the darkness, pursuing an enemy I have not seen, and I can survive being beached better than the majority of them; I am the most liminal of the current crew, able to go deep and look, and see, yet still able to endure detention in a dry room. If anything, this may hasten my return to land, giving me the opportunity to tell the Naval psychologists how much I need to progress; how much I need the mod that will take me finally into the deeps. Yes. This is the right choice, and these are orders almost intended to be broken.

  It is darker than any midnight here, down here in the deep, and the light from my halogen lamp can only pierce so far. Things move in the corners of my vision, nightmare fish with teeth like traumas, quick and clever squid that have learned to leave the women with the harpoon guns alone. There is talk of a squid mod being bandied about by the brass. I hope it comes to something. I would love to learn, through the network of my soldier-sisters, what the squid might have to teach us.

  The captain has ordered that patrols be doubled, but I don’t see anyone else as I descend into deeper water, the darkness closing around me like a blanket full of small moving specks. Every breath I take fills my throat with the infants of a thousand sea creatures, filtered by the bioscreens installed by the clever men who made me what I am today. I am not a baleen whale, but the krill and larvae I catch and keep in this manner will help to replace the calories my body burns to keep me warm this far below the sea. (Easier to line our limbs with blubber, make us seals, fat and sleek and perfect—but we were always intended to be public relations darlings, and fattening up our military women, no matter how good the justifications behind it, would never have played well with the paparazzi.)

  Something flashes through the gloom ahead of me, too fast and too close to be a squid, too direct to be a shark; they always approach from the side. I fall back, straightening myself in the water so that my head points toward the distant surface. The water has never encouraged anyone to walk upright, and the changing weight of my body discourages this choice even more, tells me not to do it, tells me to hang horizontal, li
ke a good creature of the sea. But I am still, in many regards, a sailor; I learned to stand my ground, even when there is no ground beneath me.

  She emerges from the dark like a dream, swimming calm and confident into the radiant glow of my halogen light. Her mod is one I’ve never seen before, long hair and rounded fins and pattern like a clownfish, winter white and hunter orange and charcoal black, Snow White for the seafaring age. Clownfish are meant to live in shallow waters, coral reefs; she shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t exist at all. This is a show model of a military technology, designed to attract investors, not to serve a practical purpose in the open sea. She smiles at me as I stare, suddenly understanding what could inspire Seaman Metcalf to break formation, to dive into the oppressive dark. For the first time, I feel as if I’m seeing a mermaid.

  Seaman Metcalf dove into the dark and was thrown back, battered and bruised and bleeding. I narrow my eyes and whistle experimentally. “Who are you?”

  Her smile broadens. She clicks twice, and my implant translates and relays her words: “A friend. You are early,” another click, “no? Not so far along as those you swim with.”

  “You have harmed a member of my crew.”

  The stranger’s eyes widen in wounded shock. “Me?” Her whistle is long and sweet, cutting through the waves; the others must hear her, no matter how far above me they are. Some things, the water cannot deaden. “No. Your crewmate asked us to strike her, to push her back. Voices can lie, but injuries will tell the truth. We needed your,” another series of clicks, this one barely translatable; the closest I can come is “dry-walkers,” and I know then that she is not military, has never been military. She doesn’t know the lingo.