by Mira Grant
There was a door in the far wall, locked with a keypad and a card reader. Theo produced his card from his pocket, punched in his code, and swiped them through.
The door opened to reveal a small room, the dim lighting making the bright water of the glassed-in diving tank all the more startling. Three bottlenose dolphins swam easily there, darting over and around each other as they played. A control panel to one side offered multiple screens, showing the dolphins from various points below the surface.
“The truck you saw was loading them onto the ship; the logo belonged to a large marine entertainment concern,” said Theo calmly, while Jillian gaped. “We feed them through a hatch. They’ll mostly be receiving fresh-caught fish, although Twitter—the female—prefers frozen shrimp.”
“Theo, you … I … How could you?” Jillian stared at him. “You’ve been protesting exploitation of marine mammals for as long as I’ve known you. You broke your damn spine trying to stop a whaling ship! This is—”
“Necessary,” said Theo. “We have submersibles and cameras, but those are machines; they can’t navigate like the dolphins can. These are well-trained, happy animals. They’re not being abused or used for entertainment. They have a job to do.”
“A job that’s taking them into waters they would never enter voluntarily, where we’re looking for an apex predator capable of ripping them apart,” said Jillian. “You’re signing their death warrants if you release them near the Mariana Trench. How could you?”
“How could I not?” Theo shook his head. “Science has costs. We’ve sacrificed so many people in the name of this discovery. What’s three dolphins added to the existing tragedy? There will always be risks. I can’t say with absolute certainty that all three of these animals will be coming home. But if there’s a chance that letting them scout for us will save human lives, I’m going to take it. I have to take it. This is so important, Jilli. This trip could change everything.”
“Why? Because if we find mermaids we’ll have something intelligent that has hands and looks vaguely like us, and maybe then we’ll respect it? We have that. Chimpanzees, great apes, orangutans—they have hands, they look vaguely like us, and they’re intelligent enough to be considered people in a court of law. Dolphins don’t get that courtesy solely because they look more like fish than like the girl next door. Mermaids split the difference. Finding them won’t make us treat the oceans any better, and it won’t magically turn them into a protected species. If anything, it’s going to make them the competition.”
“If you feel that way, why did you agree to look for them?”
“Because I owe the people who sailed on the Atargatis, using information I provided. Because mermaids have always been the competition when it comes to the sea. They’ve been luring us and drowning us for centuries. I want to see their faces. That’s all. I want to see them, and know I was right every time I said they were out there.”
“The film—”
“The film.” Jillian scoffed. “Imagine brings back proof, irrefutable proof, and what do we get? We get to hear how many ways the world can say hoax. I am going to be eyewitness testimony. I am going to make those people eat their words.”
Theo looked at her solemnly. “The dolphins will help.”
“Everyone else on this ship volunteered. The dolphins didn’t.”
To her profound surprise, Theo laughed. “I see,” he said. “Is that your issue? That the dolphins didn’t volunteer?”
Jillian nodded tightly.
“Let me set your mind at ease. You know dolphins can communicate, yes? That they have a language?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“We have a cetologist on board who specializes in marine mammal communication. We’re hoping he’ll be able to work with Dr. Wilson—the hearing Dr. Wilson—to establish the parameters of the mermaid ‘language,’ assuming they have one. All three of these dolphins are here of their own free will. They’ve been offered release into the open sea after the voyage is done, in exchange for their services now. These dolphins are buying their freedom. I’d expect you, of all people, to be pleased by that.”
Jillian looked at him coldly before she said, “I knew you’d changed. A man has to change when he goes from riding a deck to riding a desk. They’re not the same thing, and you can’t be the same person when you move between them. But somehow I thought you’d still have a sense of ethics.”
“Jillian—”
“You’re hiding this, which means you don’t want me shouting it to everyone else on board this ship, and I’m fine with that; if I keep your secret, you owe me. Stay out of the line of fire, Theo. Make yourself look good on the cameras, impress your employers, but for God’s sake, keep yourself safe. We have a daughter who loves you, even if I don’t always understand why, and I won’t have this voyage making an orphan out of her. Just leave me out of your bullshit justifications for selling your ethics to the highest bidder. I’ve heard them before, and they’re tired. So am I.” She turned and started for the door.
“Jillian—”
The door didn’t have any special security on this side. Jillian let herself out.
Theo stood in the dim room, the dolphins endlessly circling behind him, and wondered when, exactly, things had started to go so very wrong.
Olivia moved through the crowd of scientists with an ease that would have stunned the people she’d gone to school with, who remembered her as the timid, socially awkward girl from the back of the classroom, the one who read too many comic books and never made eye contact.
Now she was poised and confident, having traded her corset and pants for a white sundress that made her look young, innocent, and harmless. She directed her microphone with a fencer’s ease, eternally going in for the point. She still never made eye contact, not directly. She had just grown more adept at faking it.
Some things never changed.
“What are you hoping to gain from this voyage?” she asked Jason, smiling winsomely at him. “Do you believe the mermaids are real?”
“No,” he said. The word was flat and nonnegotiable. “None of us do. If something like that existed, we would have discovered it decades ago.”
“Then why did you agree to go on this voyage?”
“With the equipment and freedom Imagine is providing, we can push our own research forward incredibly, and as they only claim ownership of data directly related to something that doesn’t exist, this was an opportunity none of us were going to pass up.”
“Aren’t you worried about damage to your reputations?”
Jason smirked. “There isn’t a scientist on Earth who would blame us for going where the funding was. We’ll be fine. And who knows? Maybe I’m wrong, and we’ll find mermaids, and we’ll all get rich.”
“Here’s hoping,” said Olivia, and smiled again before moving on to find her next target. What she really wanted was a quote from the Wilsons, if she could get one. They were photogenic, striking, and unusual enough to make good B reel.
Almost all the scientists had been drinking since the speeches wrapped up, and their tongues were nicely loosened. She couldn’t use things like Jason’s flat denial of the existence of mermaids, which went against the narrative Imagine was hoping to craft, but the rest of it could be edited into something serviceable. Everything could be helpful, providing it was massaged the right way.
The girl with the brownish ponytail—Anne Stewart’s sister—was near the buffet, looking disinterestedly at a tray of cold cuts. Olivia angled toward her, already smiling.
“Hi,” she said, once she was close enough. “I’m Olivia Sanderson, from Imagine. I was wondering if I could have a moment of your—”
“No,” said Tory, and turned, and walked away.
Olivia stared after her.
“Well,” said Ray, stepping up next to her. “I think I’m in love.”
“At least this is going to be interesting,” said Olivia, and the Melusine sailed on, out of safe waters, into the uncertain sea.
CHAPTER 8
The Pacific Ocean: August 24, 2022
The passengers—loud, enthusiastic nuisances that they were—had finally made their way back to their rooms, and Captain Peterman was alone with his crew.
“Check the doors,” he said.
One of the engineers nodded understanding before making a circuit of the room, verifying that each of the outward-facing doors had been securely locked. It wouldn’t do for a passenger to wander in on this discussion. Elsewhere on the ship, he knew the Imagine security crew would be having a similar meeting, discussing its plans for the journey to come.
As if this sort of thing could be planned for. They would sail, and they would either find what they were looking for or they wouldn’t. Captain Peterman would never say so out loud, not on a ship with this many recording devices, but he hoped they didn’t find anything. The Atargatis was lost. Let her stay that way, and let the rest of them live.
“Locked, Captain,” said the engineer.
“Excellent.” Folding his hands behind his back, he turned to face the crew. “All right, everyone: we are on the maiden voyage of an untested research ship built to the specifications of an entertainment corporation.”
“Did you see their security goons?” demanded one of the navigators. She snorted, making an exaggerated cupping gesture with her hands. “None of them have any training, but damn do they look good. It’s like they were all hired out of a casting catalog. Models with guns.”
Another navigator laughed and mimed shooting a gun before striking a pose. Captain Peterman cleared his throat, waiting for the levity to die down. On a voyage like this one, a little nervous energy was only to be expected. They were being paid well for their time and expertise; they would all be set for at least a year when they made it back to shore.
If they made it back to shore.
Gradually, the laughter faded, and the captain began to speak again. “We are currently sailing under the ship’s automatic systems, which will get us past occupied waters before we need to begin manual navigation. Shifts have been posted in the break rooms, as well as sent to your individual mailboxes. Please remember to wash your hands and not to use the passenger restrooms.”
A general shudder ran through the assemblage. Ships were basically enormous petri dishes for disease, and no matter how educated or adult the passengers seemed to be, there was always one who wouldn’t wash their hands if there was a gun to their temple. Mermaids were one thing. Norovirus was something entirely different, and far more believably dangerous.
“This ship is outfitted with an armored shutter system, designed to be manually deployed in the event of an attack,” said the captain. “The code can be inputted from either of two authorized terminals: one in my quarters, one in the main control room on the top deck. Once the code is entered correctly, there will be a ninety-second countdown before the ship is sealed.”
One of the engineers raised his hand. “Sir, have these shutters been tested?”
“Only in dry dock,” said the captain. “We will be running an operational test tonight at midnight.”
“What about redundancies?” asked another engineer.
“Imagine didn’t see fit to provide any,” said the captain. “We have the shutters. We have the guards. That is intended to be enough. Now to your posts, everyone. We have a long voyage ahead of us.”
By bedtime, everyone had realized the Melusine was under sail—an archaic misnomer, since the great ship didn’t have so much as a mast. Even her lifeboats were battery powered, with lithium-based engines good for six days in open water. She moved across the water like she was being towed by an invisible hand, silent and steady enough that it was possible to forget she was a moving ship, that land was already leagues behind them and growing more distant with every moment that passed.
‘What do you think?’ asked Holly, sitting on the edge of the bed she’d claimed as her own. The three sisters had one of the largest staterooms on the Melusine, the sort of suite that could have held a whole family of tourists (and probably would, when the Melusine was inevitably repurposed as a luxury cruise ship).
‘Most of the people we’re going to be working with are competent,’ Heather replied. She yawned, covered her mouth, and continued, ‘I don’t know if I’d trust them with my baby, but I don’t have to. The other submersible operator has his own pod.’
‘Is he rated as deep as you are?’ asked Hallie.
Heather beamed, making a pair of V’s with her fingers and knocking them together before delivering a definitive pinching motion. ‘Fuck no.’
Holly laughed. It was the first sound any of them had made since closing the cabin door.
Virtually everything about Holly and Heather Wilson was identical, from their faces to their fingers. Even their hearing loss matched. Both had been born deaf. The precise cause of their deafness had never been identified. The girls were healthy, happy, and well adjusted; the family had already lived near a good Deaf school when they were born. The question of cochlear implants had been left until Holly and Heather were old enough to answer it for themselves, and by the time they’d been asked, they hadn’t wanted the surgery. They enjoyed themselves and their reality as they were.
Hallie was three years older than her sisters. She had been fascinated when her parents explained that the new babies couldn’t hear. They had already used some baby sign with her, taking advantage of the fact that in most infants, hand dexterity developed faster than vocal acuity. It was a small thing to keep teaching her, bringing in a tutor twice a week while Holly and Heather were still in their crib. By the time they’d started signing, there had already been a willing translator standing excitedly by.
The three of them hadn’t always been a unit. Holly had gone to graduate school for organic chemistry; Hallie had spent three years translating in a public high school as part of her extended thesis; Heather had gone to a private institute to hone her skills behind the wheel of a submersible. Her beloved Minnow had been paid for by the institute, putting her millions of dollars in debt. She was still buying it back from them, one component at a time, funding her loan payments with deep-sea footage, recordings, and more concrete discoveries. One private donation had totaled a quarter of a million dollars, and all the donor had wanted was some seashells guaranteed to have come from the bottom of the sea. People were strange.
People were also wonderful. The call from Imagine had brought them together at last, giving them an excuse to ply their various trades in the same space. Heather was under a six-month contract; if the Melusine returned to shore before her time was up, she’d be doing underwater cinematography for the Imagine files, to be used in whatever terrible science fiction movie the film division decided to cobble together next. Holly and Hallie were only under contract for the duration of the voyage, but that nice Mr. Blackwell had made it clear to both of them that if they wanted to stay with their sister, Imagine would find them a place.
‘I really do want to go down into the Challenger Deep,’ signed Heather. There was a wistful, almost dreamy look on her face, like she was thinking about a handsome man or a delicious cake.
Holly threw a pillow at her. ‘You are not going into the Challenger Deep! I don’t care how highly rated you are! People don’t come back from there!’
Hallie sighed. ‘Is there a chance we could go five minutes without fighting about the Challenger Deep?’
‘It’s only the deepest spot in the whole ocean,’ signed Heather, expression still dreamy. ‘There have been four descents ever, and only one of them was manned. That was a long time ago, too, before we knew there might be mermaids there.’
‘Wait—if people have been down there, how could they miss the mermaids?’
Heather shrugged broadly. ‘Not my department. Maybe mermaids migrate? Anyway, the submersible that went down there before was big and slow. It was a down-and-up. I can move like a fish. I can see what the bottom of the ocean really looks like.’
‘You ca
n pop like a grape from the pressure,’ signed Holly. ‘You’re not going down there, and that’s final.’
‘You’re not my mother.’
‘No, I’m your twin, and I think I get some say in whether you risk your life!’
Heather started signing faster and Holly signed back, their fingers flashing almost too fast for even Hallie’s practiced eyes to follow. Not that it would have mattered. Like so many twins, they had their own language, a form of streamlined, truncated ASL that left out most of the connective tissue of conversation. They could get their points across at dizzying speed, making it impossible for anyone outside their small closed unit to decode. Hallie rolled her eyes and got out of bed, heading for the door.
She paused long enough to sign, ‘I’m going to find the hot tubs.’ The twins ignored her, still arguing. She sighed, exasperated, and let herself out.
Orientation had included directions to the spa facilities on each floor. There were three “wet rooms” per occupied level of the ship, divided into male, female, and coed rooms. The coed wet room was by far the largest and nicest of the three, with large hot and cold tubs, as well as sinks and showers. It made sense. Most people didn’t care about gender-essentialist bathrooms, but they did care about bigger hot tubs.
Exhausted and overstimulated, Hallie made straight for the coed bathroom. She would normally have chosen the women’s room when she was this tired, hoping it would be less populated and hence less likely to force her into a social setting, but the ship had just gotten under way. The party was over, and this crowd didn’t seem like the type to move it to the hot tub. (Actually, most of this crowd seemed like the type to take water samples from the hot tub and tell her exactly what sort of terrifying bacterial soup she was soaking in. Holly had done that several times before she’d moved away from home. Sometimes having an organic chemist for a sister was a trial.)
As she’d hoped, the coed wet room seemed deserted. Hallie undressed, placed her things in a locker, and grabbed a towel. It only took her a few seconds to shower—more sluicing off than actually trying to get clean—and head for the hot tub.