Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  “I’ve been down here, mostly,” said Dr. Lennox, freeing his hand from her grip. “The dolphins and I have been playing a very slow game of chess. Twitter is better at long-range thinking, Cecil understands the game, but Kearney is good at it. Could probably play professionally, if he wasn’t a dolphin.”

  “The bylaws actually have something to say about dolphins?” asked Jillian.

  “Not specifically, but they have something to say about robots, aliens, and the necessity that all players competing on a given level be human.” Dr. Lennox grinned lopsidedly. “Chess players turn out to include more than their strictly fair share of nerds. Who would’ve thought?”

  “Everyone who’s ever met a chess player,” said Hallie, and giggle-snorted at her own joke. The other three turned to look at her. She looked back, unembarrassed. “What? I am a delight.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jillian. She returned her attention to Dr. Lennox. “What are the pair of you doing down here? Other than playing chess with the dolphins.”

  “Dr. Wilson has just joined me. With the new audio footage we were able to … recover”—he paused, looking briefly abashed, before continuing—“we’ve been able to start figuring out how their language is structured.”

  “The mermaids.”

  “Yes, the mermaids.”

  “Even though they’re not cetaceans? There’s no way those things are mammals.”

  “They might be,” said Theo. He was unpacking his kit, preparing the injection to steady his leg. His hands still weren’t shaking too severely for him to deliver it to himself. Jillian averted her eyes. She didn’t care about the needle; she cared about the betrayal in his face every time he caught her looking. This was something he didn’t want to share with anyone, but especially not with her.

  “Once someone brings me a body, I’ll be able to tell you with certainty, but I can say with virtual certainty that there’s no way anything that moves like they do, and has the build they do, and lives as deep as they do, could possibly be a mammal,” said Jillian. “The endothermic metabolism simply won’t support it.”

  “Not all mammals are endotherms,” said Hallie.

  Everyone turned to look at her. She shrugged.

  “The naked mole rat is an ectothermic mammal. It regulates body temperature externally, not internally. Nature is bigger and weirder than anyone ever wants to think it is. The standards for being considered a mammal are narrow, and very specific: lactation, hair, and three bones in the inner ear. Nothing else is required.”

  “That’s oddly disturbing,” said Theo. “What about live birth?”

  “The echidna,” said Dr. Lennox.

  “Warm blood?”

  “Again, the naked mole rat,” said Hallie. “It’s also a hive organism, self-organizing in ways that would be more ‘normal’ in bees or termites. Some marsupials lactate through their armpits, by the way, and there’s even been debate as to whether intentionally premature live birth should be considered the same as full-term live birth. Like the snakes that do the live-birth thing.”

  Theo frowned at her. “Now you’re pulling my leg.”

  “It’s in no condition to be pulled, dear, and she’s serious,” said Jillian. “There are snakes that lay their eggs internally, incubating them inside their bodies to protect them from predators. They hatch inside their mothers, finish gestating without the benefit of either eggs or placenta, and are born alive and fully formed. So is that live birth? Is it oviparous birth? Or is it something completely different? Dr. Wilson is correct: the problem with trying to define nature is that nature is bigger than we are, and nature doesn’t care whether we know how to define it. Nature does what nature wants.” She paused. “But I still don’t see how they can be mammals. Whatever they are, they’re something new. They’re not skinny whales with fingers.”

  “No, they’re not,” said Dr. Lennox. “But they are deepwater creatures with a spoken language, which means they’re similar to whales in one regard: they have to account for fluid dynamics when they’re trying to speak.”

  “Which is where I come in,” said Hallie. “We knew from the original footage that at least half of their language is signed. The new footage supports that, and makes it clear how intelligent they have to be. They’re using at least thirty words during the time we have them on film—and that’s just what they’re doing with their hands.”

  “How long have you been analyzing their spoken language?” Jillian asked, looking to Dr. Lennox.

  “Since we left port,” he said. “I started with the Atargatis tapes, which are all from above water—not good, for someone who specializes in analyzing sound as it carries through water. But Victoria Stewart—the sonar specialist—has been doing dumps of the ambient oceanic noise since before we started this excursion, and once she signed on, I got access to her research.” He paused, grimacing. “I’d feel bad about that, if she had any interest in the specifics of how they communicate. She’s been working on isolating their speech, figuring out how it works, figuring out how it all hangs together—she wants the machinery of their speech. I want the filigree.”

  “Sounds like a lot of pretty self-justification for stealing what should have been her Nobel Prize for first contact with an alien race, but hey, who am I to judge? Everyone on this boat is studying mermaids now, because I managed to convince somebody with a checkbook that they were real.” Jillian hooked a thumb toward the tank. “You still haven’t justified the dolphins.”

  “The mermaids communicate through a mixture of signed and spoken language,” said Dr. Lennox. He was starting to look less certain of his place in the conversation. Jillian had that effect on people, especially when she was gearing up to becoming a human avalanche.

  That had been one of the things Theo had liked best about her, back in the days when their marriage was stable and her anger had never been aimed at him. The trouble with having a bear sharing your bed was that one day, the bear was going to notice that you were there; one day, the maimings would begin in earnest.

  “I am aware,” said Jillian coldly.

  “Most of their spoken language is in the band of sounds dolphins can reproduce, and as we mentioned, these are smart dolphins who really want to work with us.”

  “They’re learning to speak mermaid,” said Hallie. Jillian turned her attention to the other woman, who didn’t flinch. “We’re teaching the dolphins common phrases from both recordings and from Miss Stewart’s research. They should be able to open the channels of communication. If we can talk to them—”

  “They’ll still be the creatures who killed your sister, and Miss Stewart’s sister, and a lot of good men and women I was once proud to call colleagues.” Jillian’s voice was, for once, not hard or aggressive; she sounded almost apologetic, like she hated to be the one bringing reality back into the science of the moment. “Also, what in the world makes you think opportunistic oceanic predators capable of taking down a submersible wouldn’t eat dolphins? They’re going to look at your little friends as an offering of delicious treats. There’s not going to be a free and open exchange of ideas. There’s going to be a bloodbath.”

  “Why did you come on this voyage if you were only going to discourage every attempt we make at a nonviolent solution?” asked Theo.

  “Because you asked me to come. Because I know more about mermaids than anyone else on the planet. Because you were going to get yourself killed, and at least this way, I’ll know I did everything within my power to prevent it.” Jillian folded her arms. “Because I missed my first shot at seeing them, and by God, that wasn’t going to happen again.”

  “Even if you knew it could kill you?”

  “Even if I knew it already had.” She turned to Dr. Lennox. “What’s your first name, kid?”

  Daniel Lennox had three degrees in marine biology: one general, one focused on whales and dolphins, one focused on other seagoing mammals. His time on the protest vessels and the sabotage ships had come after Jillian and Theodore’s had en
ded, but he’d heard stories about them from the older hands, who spoke of Theodore like he was a Spartan hero, and Jillian like she was a cross between the Devil and Helen of Troy. He didn’t know whether the time he’d spent in their company was proof that one shouldn’t meet one’s heroes, or proof that one absolutely should. They didn’t know him from Adam. They never would. All their heroics had come before he had been a part of the picture, before he had left the classroom for the big wide world outside. It was freeing. There was room for him in his own story.

  But at the same time … Jillian Toth had been sailing the seas while he was trying to figure out whether he wanted the lab or the field. She had held a harpoon in her hand and screamed expletives at a whaling crew, salt in her hair and blood in her eyes, while he was arguing about his thesis with a bunch of bloodless advisors who saw no need to get passionate about anything that didn’t feed into their own research. She had been a demon of the sea, and she still was; he could sense that much. Let her wear all the sensible sweaters she wanted to, let her hide her fury under polite frowns and her compassion under sharp words; he saw through it. She was still, and would always be, his Helen of Troy.

  “Daniel, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good. I hate thinking of people younger than my daughter as Doctor. It seems dehumanizing. Yes, you did the work, and I’d never take that away from you, but I’m not stealing the rest of your life for the sake of your degree.” Jillian straightened, squaring her shoulders like she was shaking away some unseen shadow, some clinging phantom of those earlier journeys. “Hallie, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Hallie. Her eyes were bright. Too bright. It was like she had a fever consuming her from the inside, something neither contagious nor curable.

  Although it might well prove to be contagious in the days to come. Depending on where the world went from here. Depending on the waters ahead.

  Jillian looked at her steadily. “I know you don’t want my advice, but here it is,” she said. “Get out of here. Go upstairs, find the sister you still have, and hold her. You’re her voice when she needs to speak to the rest of the crew. More than that, you’re her anchor to the world. Without you she’ll drift, and if she drifts too far, you’re never getting her back. Don’t let that happen to her. Don’t let that happen to you.”

  “All due respect, ma’am, you can go fuck yourself if you think I’m going to do that.” Hallie signed as she spoke, habit and anger conspiring to move her hands, and her gestures were so broad and so sharp that it was clear to everyone around her that she was shouting, screaming her displeasure into the soundless world. “Heather is dead. Heather is gone. Those things took her from us. I can’t even bring a body home to my parents. They trusted me to keep my baby sisters safe, and I failed in the biggest way possible. I lost one of them. I am damn well going home able to tell my parents I avenged her.”

  “Then why, for the love of God, are you trying to talk to them?” Jillian demanded.

  Hallie’s eyes were still bright. Maybe that was the worst thing of all. “Because I want to tell them why,” she said. “I want to look at them, and know they’re listening to me, whether they’re doing it with their ears or their eyes or something else. I want them to hear me when I tell them we’re going to kill every fucking one of them, and I want them to know why. I want them to know they did this to themselves.”

  “Conservation—” began Daniel.

  “Screw conservation,” said Hallie. “I’ll help you learn their language. I’ll help you tell the dolphins what to say to make them understand that we want to talk. And then I’ll help you blow them out of the water.”

  “When a man undertakes a journey of revenge, he needs to dig two graves,” said Theo, interjecting himself back into the conversation. The others turned toward him. He stood, and his leg was no longer shaking.

  He looked between them, one after the other, and his face was calm, like the things they were discussing weren’t life and death, but were no more important than the weather. “This,” he said, “is how things are going to happen.

  “Hallie, I understand that you’re distressed. Anyone in your position would be. I am truly sorry for your loss. I do wish to remind you that Heather was aware of the risks when she signed on for this voyage—as were you. However compelled you may have felt by your obligations to your sisters, the fact remains that you signed the same waivers as the rest of the people on this vessel. You knew loss of life or limb could occur in the normal course of our work. We are not, as you so charmingly put it, going to ‘blow them out of the water.’ We’re going to reach out to them. We’re going to find common ground. And when we’re done, we’re going to take them in for study. These are one of the great mysteries of our age. We will not do ourselves or our heirs the disservice of destroying them before we understand them.”

  “That’s exactly what I want,” said Daniel. “Mr. Blackwell, it’s an honor to know that we’re going to be working on one of the last great linguistic mysteries. I promise you, we will solve it.”

  “In the time you have? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, we’re going to continue on the course I’ve charted. If you don’t like it, feel free to leave.”

  “We’re on a ship in the middle of the ocean,” said Hallie.

  “I know,” said Theo. “Good luck finding somewhere to go.”

  Silence fell, broken by the low, steady hum of the ship’s engines. Behind the glass, the dolphins continued to circle, waiting for the word to go. They were still smiling. They were the only ones.

  CHAPTER 16

  Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022

  Little dramas played out all over the ship as the Melusine’s residents—the crew, the scientists who’d come to the middle of nowhere to make a name for themselves, or to chase one of the greatest mysteries their field had to offer—whispered and shouted and rejoiced at the news that yes, mermaids were real, yes, mermaids were here, yes, they were going to see them. They were going to see them. The mermaids were directly below the ship, so deep they could have passed unnoticed, but now? Now there was no way they were getting away.

  The ones who had believed in the tape were vindicated; the ones who had believed it to be a hoax, who had sailed with the Melusine purely for the scientific opportunities, grumbled and tried to deflect the taunting of their peers. Money changed hands as decade-old bets were settled, over and over, in favor of a myth.

  (Hallie and Holly would have been horrified to learn how few of their “colleagues” cared about Heather’s death. To them her sacrifice had been a necessary part of the scientific process. She had attracted the attention of the mermaids, and opened a new world of research for the rest of them. Some of them were even almost jealous of her. Sure, she was dead, but her name would be associated with this discovery forever. She might even wind up immortalized in their name, something like Sirenus wilson. It was a small price to pay, trading a temporary mortal life for something like that, living forever in the pages of every book on marine biology that was ever going to be written.)

  Some people pointed out that their lives were officially in danger. Things that were real could hurt them. They were quickly shouted down by the delight of discovery. Danger was everywhere. You could go out for lunch and get hit by a crosstown bus. Besides, the ship had a fully functional shutter system: they were safe. But mermaids …

  Biologists made bets on what the creatures would prove to be, fish or reptiles or mammals or something new. One ambitious scientist set himself up in the cafeteria with his monitoring equipment, making the case for a relict population of highly evolved stomatopods from the pre-Mesozoic era. It was such a specific and bizarre theory that amused onlookers had been dropping by for hours, swinging through long enough to grab a drink and a sandwich and listen to him expound on his increasingly detailed ideas.

  Chemists grabbed water samples from the surface and from each other, bartering sampler time and probe control with t
he speed of professional gamblers. An ounce from more than thirty meters down could buy a gallon from ten feet, along with computer time, analysis details, and foot massages. It was like standing on a stock market trading floor, listening to the deals go on, words breaking like waves against every surrounding surface.

  While there were still ROVs available, the loss of Heather’s Minnow meant there was no submersible on the Melusine capable of making it to the bottom. It seemed like an oversight now—a mission this size with only one deep-rated submersible? Whose decision was that?—but the fact was, submersibles were expensive and most were privately owned, meaning that unless their drivers had been willing to sign on for the trip, they couldn’t be acquired. Remotely operated vehicles were safer and easier, even if they lacked the emotional punch of actually diving.

  The two remaining submersibles on the Melusine each took three people to crew, and couldn’t be launched with less than six hours’ prep time. The prep was under way; the prep would be under way for hours. Every twenty minutes of submersion cost something on the order of twelve hundred dollars, and as they were less nimble than the Minnow, the ascent and descent would have to be taken in stages, allowing the pressure time to equalize. It was far from an ideal solution. This did nothing to stop scientists from queuing up for the opportunity to claim the open seats.

  The first name on the sign-up sheet was Luis’s. Holly’s name was written above his, on what wasn’t technically a slot. That didn’t matter. Much as everyone on the Melusine wanted a chance to go down, no one was going to question her right to get as close as possible to her sister. There would be other descents. There would be other chances. The first contact was already over. What came now was the real work.