Return To The Center Of The Earth

by Return To The Center Of The Earth (epub)

  “Do you think we should mention it to them?” Lerner asked. She too looked annoyed with Gruber, despite her not even being able to hear what he was saying.

  “What’s the point?” Eccleston asked. “Nest might take note that we feel like something is off, but Gruber will just ignore us. He’d say we’re not being paid to comment on the temperature, even though the changing temperature in this area is exactly why we’re able to be here.”

  Lerner turned to the water and held onto the railing as she stared out into the Arctic Ocean. “You ever get tired of working for the Skurzon Corporation?” she asked.

  “There certainly are a lot of other things I’d rather be doing with my know-how,” Eccleston said, “but the work is steady. I’ve had too many lean years in my life to ignore a paycheck when it’s offered to me. Maybe that sounds bad, but…”

  “Trust me, I understand,” Lerner said. “I grew up in a poor family with lots of mouths to feed. I had to work very hard to get my doctorate, and I had to pay for it with lots of loans and lots of shitty jobs. I’d never look down on anyone doing something just because they need the money. But sitting on a boat waiting to be useful, not really discovering anything, this isn’t what I’d always wished to be doing myself. I always wanted more adventure than that.”

  “There’s not a lot of adventure out there left to be had,” Eccleston said with a shrug. “The world’s been mapped and categorized and calculated by now. If you wanted that kind of life, you would have needed to have been born a lot earlier.”

  “Come on, you can’t really believe there’s not still something out there worth discovering, can you?” Lerner asked.

  “I bet you there’s still quite a bit of amazing things still left to discover out there below the surface,” Eccleston said, gesturing out at the open water. “Sometimes I’m disappointed that I didn’t specifically study marine biology instead of just biology in general. There’s probably some amazing things we haven’t seen. But up here, on the surface? There’s nothing left to map.”

  “I don’t know. That sounds like bullshit to me,” Lerner said. “If that were true, a major corporation wouldn’t be paying us to be out here.”

  Eccleston shrugged. Maybe that was the case, but his days of youthful idealism about that sort of thing were over. Lerner’s specialty would likely be useful to the Skurzon Corporation, but he himself felt like he was little more than a fifth wheel.

  “You know what? Let’s do an exercise,” Lerner said. She had him stand at the railing with her and pointed out into the open ocean. “Imagine with me. What do you think the most amazing thing we could discover out here would be?”

  “Uh, what would the point be?” Eccleston asked. “We’re not going to.”

  “Just play along with it,” Lerner said. “Think of the science behind it, and imagine the most amazing thing you could think of discovering out here in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.”

  Although Eccleston still didn’t feel like he got it, he figured there wouldn’t be any harm in taking a stab at it. “Okay, fine. Within scientific reason… a new species.”

  “What kind?” Lerner asked.

  “Aquatic, obviously.” He stood for a moment and really gave it some thought. “Something large. Something that was maybe deep in the depths before but has been forced closer to the surface by changing temperatures.”

  “What kind of large thing?” Lerner asked. She actually seemed bizarrely excited about what was little more than a game of let’s-pretend, but her enthusiasm was rubbing off on him. Eccleston stared off at the distant water, letting himself imagine that some of the breaking waves were actually being caused by something beneath it. There was even one particular set of waves that realistically could have been caused by something enormous below the water if he really strained his imagination.

  “A squid maybe,” Eccleston said. The more and more he stared at that distant point, the more transfixed he became. It had to be his imagination, but it really did seem like something was disturbing the surface. His first thought was an iceberg, but there would have been a more noticeable chunk protruding up. Whatever this was, if there truly was anything at all, kept disturbing the surface but never quite rose above it. “A giant squid, or some kind of previously undiscovered large whale, like a sperm whale.”

  Could that thing out there have been a whale? More and more that seemed likely, but the longer Eccleston stared at it the more uneasy he became.

  Lerner must have realized he was distracted by something, because she followed his gaze until she too was staring at the unusual disturbance. “A whale?” she guessed as well, but Eccleston found himself slowly shaking his head.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Something… Something’s very off here.”

  They both stared in silence for nearly a minute. Eccleston knew where there were some binoculars he could run and grab, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off of whatever was happening out there for fear that by the time he got back it would be gone.

  “Is it moving?” Lerner asked. “It almost looks like it’s moving.”

  “I think maybe it is,” Eccleston said. “It… yes, I think it’s actually coming this way.”

  For several seconds neither of them moved. Part of it, Eccleston thought later, was that it was far enough away that they didn’t have a sense of scale for it until it was closer. Once the thing was closer, staying below the surface but noticeable displacing water above and causing a wake behind it, they started to understand just how big it truly must be.

  Lerner was the one who first broke her paralysis. “Captain Nest!” she screamed over her shoulder. “Incoming!”

  Somewhere else on the ship someone with various detection equipment must have realized that something unidentified was coming for them, because the security klaxon suddenly went off. Those who were more experienced hands on the vessel ran for their stations, leaving people like Eccleston and Lerner to simply stand and watch as the unidentified underwater thing raced right for them.

  Eccleston grabbed Lerner by the shoulder and pulled her away from the railing. “Get away from the edge!”

  “But I need to see if…”

  “If that things hits us and you’re still here, you’re going to go tumbling into the water.”

  Lerner reluctantly let him pull her away. Gruber, being Gruber, did exactly the opposite, running up to the railing they had just vacated so that he could see what was going on. Although Eccleston didn’t consider himself to be the kind of person who ever wished harm on another, he found himself partially wishing that Gruber would suffer the same fate he was now trying to rescue Lerner from.

  Lerner and Eccleston were far enough away from the edge of the ship that they were completely incapable of seeing the thing, whatever it was, as it impacted the ship. The impact wasn’t nearly as hard as Eccleston would have expected, leaving Gruber still able to cling to the railing without falling overboard, but it was still enough that the entire ship shook. It felt like the ship hadn’t received a direct hit, but more like, whatever the thing was, it dived under the ship at the last second and scraped the bottom hard. It was still enough to nearly knock Eccleston off his feet, but Lerner held his arm and kept him steady.

  For several seconds after the hit, the entire ship was completely silent. For some reason the klaxons had stopped, leaving everyone onboard to contemplate what had just happened in eerie quiet. Then the alarms started up again. There wasn’t really anything different about their sound, but to Eccleston they felt like there was a much more frantic pitch to them now.

  And then, louder even than the alarms, Nest’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers as he screamed from the main cabin. “This is the captain! We have been hit and there is a hole in the hull. We are taking on water. Everyone abandon ship, now!”

  Chapter Two

  Eccleston and Lerner immediately went in the direction of the life rafts, although against his better judgement, Eccleston stopped to grab Gruber from where he wa
s still staring with wide, uncomprehending eyes at the railing.

  “Did… did you see…” Gruber stammered, but Eccleston didn’t have time to let him finish.

  “I saw enough. Whatever it was, we’ll have time to discuss it later. Hopefully.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Gruber said as he let Eccleston pull him away. “That thing, I think it was… um, it was…”

  “Later!” Lerner screamed at him, and that finally seemed to be enough to make Gruber come back to himself. “Do you not understand what is happening?”

  Her words seemed to wake him up from some dream state, like he only now heard the alarms. Nest ran up to them on the deck and began screaming for everyone to get the life rafts ready so they could abandon the Deacon. That, more than anything else, seemed to be what alarmed Gruber.

  “No, you can’t!” Gruber said. “Do you have any idea how much money the Skurzon Corporation invested in this ship?”

  “I do, just as I know how big of an insurance policy they put on it,” Nest said. “But you know what can’t be replaced with insurance money? People. So I’m thinking of their safety first.”

  Gruber continued to hem and haw, and did little to help with the evacuation, but at least he didn’t get in anybody else’s way. The inflatable life rafts came out quickly, but by the time they were ready, the Deacon had tilted in a noticeable and alarming fashion. There were three of the rafts altogether, and with fifteen people on board that meant five people to a raft. Everyone that wasn’t already wearing a life vest ran to grab one, and several of them also grabbed emergency packs from where the rafts had been stored. Eccleston himself took one of the emergency packs, and as everyone scrabbled to choose their raft, he made a cursory attempt to make sure that there were an equal number of packs per life raft, just in case the rafts got separated while floating at sea. Lerner was at the edge of the railing while several others climbed over and down into the first raft, but while everyone else was rushing to get off of the Deacon, she was acting like she wasn’t so sure the raft was the best place for her. Eccleston would have almost thought she was afraid of the water if he hadn’t seen her in and out of various rafts during past expeditions.

  “Lerner, what the hell are you doing?” he asked. “Get into the raft!”

  “Think for a second,” she said to him, having to shout to be heard over the alarms and the commotion from everyone else. “Whatever that thing was that hit us, it’s still out there.”

  While Eccleston had briefly forgotten about the mysterious thing that had caused this to begin with, he didn’t think that Lerner’s priorities were straight. “If we stay on this ship we’re going down with it. No matter what that thing was, we’re probably more likely to survive in the rafts with it around than if we try something on here.”

  “Sure, but do any of those emergency packs have weapons? Anything we could use to defend ourselves if that thing comes around again?”

  Eccleston opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. She was right about that. He’d gone through the emergency packs in the past just to make sure he knew what they had in the event they were needed, but there wasn’t anything that could be used as weapons other than flare guns. “Okay, but we don’t have any time to go searching for something to defend ourselves with.”

  “I’ve got a pistol in my cabin. Just hold our raft from being launched long enough for me to go get it.”

  Lerner ran off before Eccleston could say that wasn’t a good idea or even wonder why the hell she had a pistol on board to begin with. The boat was sinking now at an alarming rate, and the other two rafts were already in the water with their occupants desperately trying to row away as the sinking ship tried to suck them back. All that left on the Deacon was Eccleston, Macklemore, Lerner, an engineer named Jackson, and Captain Nest’s second-in-command Tanaka.

  “We have to go!” Macklemore said. “If we don’t go now we won’t be able to get away from the ship before it sucks us under with it.”

  “It’s not going to suck us under,” Eccleston said. “Just give her a few more seconds. She’ll be back.”

  Tanaka started to argue that he thought Macklemore was right, but before he could say more than a few words, Lerner was back with them, the lower quarter of her body already drenched with sea water.

  “I’ve got it in my pocket,” Lerner said. She patted the gun-shaped bulge in the outer-most pocket of her coat. “The crew quarters are almost completely flooded. Time’s running out.”

  There was very little else said as the last five people on the ship launched their life raft and began to paddle out with the others. Eccleston kept looking back behind them to see the progress of their boat as it vanished beneath the waves. It slipped below the waters and vanished from sight like it had never been there at all, and Eccleston, still in shock, finally let himself think about what he had seen to cause this.

  “What the fuck even happened?” Jackson asked them. “I wasn’t on duty. I was catching a nap, and then all of a sudden we’re getting the abandon ship order. Did we hit an iceberg?”

  “We didn’t see anything like that on the radar,” Tanaka said. “But there was something that came at us really quick.”

  “Really quick?” Macklemore asked. “Like what, a torpedo? Are you saying somebody in a sub torpedoed us?”

  “That’s not even close to what he’s saying,” Lerner said. “Look, Eccleston and I saw it. We don’t really know was it was, but it wasn’t a submarine, and it definitely wasn’t a torpedo. It looked more like, well, like it was something alive.”

  “Alive?” Jackson asked. “Like what, a shark?”

  “Whatever it was, it was bigger than a shark,” Tanaka said. “If I had to guess, it was something more like a whale.”

  “Not a whale, either,” Eccleston said. “It was too fast for a whale. Too fast for anything living that I could think of, really.”

  “Then just what was it?” Macklemore asked.

  He thought back to the thought experiment he’d been doing with Lerner immediately before things went to hell. She’d asked him to think of the most amazing thing he could imagine finding in the Arctic Ocean. The thing about biology, though, was that it had a way of subverting even the most learned expectations. No matter what he could imagine, biology and evolution could just as easily create something beyond his limited creativity.

  “I don’t know,” Eccleston said. “And right now, I have the feeling that we really don’t want to find out.”

  “Hey!” someone called from one of the other rafts. “Someone with some authority want to give us an idea of what we should be doing now so we don’t, oh I don’t know, freeze to death maybe?”

  Nest started to call back in response from the third raft. “We need to bring the three rafts together. We’ll have a better chance at surviving if we all stick…”

  The captain was interrupted as something else out on the water let out an ear-splitting, water-soaked roar. Eccleston’s first thought was that whatever had sunk the ship was still out there, and only it could be the thing making that noise, except that was definitely not any sound that could be made by a giant squid or a whale. There was a colossal splash somewhere in the water far behind him, and he tried to turn to see what had caused it, but whatever it was had already dove beneath the surface again before he could see it.

  Most of the people in the second raft, though, were already facing that direction, and whatever they had seen was driving them into a tizzy. “Jesus Christ!” someone in the raft yelled. “Did you see that? Did you fucking see that?! It looked like a…”

  From directly beneath the raft a huge serpentine head shot out of the water, capsizing the raft and sending the five passengers inside it tumbling into the ocean. The raft itself flew into the air and tumbled several times before the creature caught the inflatable sides in its teeth and shook the entire thing, instantly shredding it into hundreds of tattered canvas pieces.

  The very first thing that popped into Ecclest
on’s mind at the sight of the creature were the dragons out of the fantasy books he used to read when he was a kid. It took a moment for his adult mind to catch up and realize this thing, a slender reptilian head with a mouthful of vicious teeth at the end of a long albino neck, had less in common with those mythical beasts and was more comparable to ancient plesiosaurs. But even that wasn’t the best comparison, because this thing’s head was bigger than any plesiosaur skull fossil he had ever seen. If something this big really had roamed the seas in the times of the dinosaurs, it had mostly escaped being found in the fossil record.

  Of the five people that had been in that raft, one of them, a young woman, didn’t look like she’d had the time to put on a life jacket before the ship had sunk. All of the people in the water were screaming, but she was the only one outright panicking. She thrashed about trying to keep her head above water, but to Eccleston’s eyes she didn’t even seem to be freaking out about the creature. She barely even seemed to realize it was there. Instead she screamed about how she couldn’t swim, about how someone from one of the other rafts had to help her, about why everyone else was just staring instead of reaching out for her. The creature looked down at her from its ten-foot neck and apparently decided that she would be the easiest prey to start with. Its neck snapped at the water like a cobra biting its prey, and instantly the entire top half of the girl was gone. Her bottom half sunk from view, leaving only a cloud of blood spreading in the water where she had been.

  “Row!” Nest screamed from the other remaining raft. “Get away from it! Now!” A part of Eccleston wanted to object and try rescuing the four remaining people in the water, but instinct took over. He would try to ease his conscience later by telling himself there was no way to get at them without putting everyone else in his raft at risk, but it would be little comfort. Everyone in his raft took the paddles and desperately tried to put as much distance as they could between them and the sea creature. For its part, the creature barely seemed to care that the other two rafts were there. It had four other tasty morsels bobbing right in front of it. Eccleston turned his head, unable to look, as one after the other, in quick succession, the screams of the four swimmers turned into the loud crunching of bones. There was one final scream – “You assholes, get back h…” before that too was cut short.