Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  Michi and Jacques ignored all of this. Their own preparations were finished: rifles assembled, tranquilizers mixed, stun grenades and electric batons checked and ready. They had exhausted each other, working through the last of their nervous energy while surrounded by their armory, two dangerous beasts in the middle of a dangerous world. They lay in a tangle of limbs as the ship pulsed around them, waiting for the call that would tell them it was time for the real work to begin. Jacques ran his fingers up and down the serpentine curve of Michi’s spine, and all was right with his world.

  All over the ship, engineers worked as quickly and quietly as they could, chasing a mechanical fault that should have been enough to turn them around before they had ever reached this point. Their hands were steady, and their heartbeats were fast, and they knew that everything was riding on them.

  No pressure.

  Beneath the Melusine, in the devouring dark where the sun was a lie and a legend—or would have been, had the creatures in those depths cared about such things—other, simpler preparations were also under way. Even the smallest fry knew the surface was where food was found. Safety and comfort were deep things, dark things, but food? A full belly, a full mouth? Those were shallow things, found where the light sliced through the water like talons through the belly of a shark. They were swift enough, clever enough, to play the line between light and dark like a shield, using it to hunt without becoming hunted.

  (There were similarities between the hunting patterns of the mermaids and the hunting patterns of terrestrial lions. Both used their coloration and environment to make their tasks easier; both had a tendency to lie in wait for something to be foolish enough to come close. Once the prey had little chance of escape, they would strike, not necessarily to kill, but to wound grievously enough that flight became impossible. Then they could drag their victims into the deeper dark, where it was safe to linger over food, filling the belly slowly, savoring each drowned morsel. Eating high was faster because it had to be. Too much competition in the high waters, too many things that fancied themselves as predators, would try to catch and keep what was never theirs to have.)

  Group by group, they came together, forming hunting parties of sixes and eights, and began to rise toward the light.

  “Never seen the water like this before.”

  “It’s just water.”

  “You looked at it recently?”

  A grunt, a shrug. “Been a little busy.”

  Daryl and Gregory were electrical engineers, normally part of a team of five. With things as stretched as they were, the two of them were working alone, trying to finish their tasks before the sun finished going down. It was going to be close without taking the time to look at the water.

  “But—”

  “Get over here,” said Gregory. “I need more hands.”

  Daryl didn’t move.

  The Melusine was as self-sufficient as possible for a ship of her size. What most people didn’t realize was that “as self-sufficient as possible” wasn’t very self-sufficient at all. She sailed with an engineering crew of twenty, and all of them thought privately that she could have sailed with twice that number and not left anyone sitting idle. As it stood, they were down a man almost daily, thanks to cut fingers, scalded hands, twisted ankles, and all the little dangers that came of making repairs to a working ship.

  Right now every one of them was working, trying to get those damned shutters up and running before the order came from the Imagine man to turn them on. Most of the engineering team was of the opinion that the Melusine shouldn’t have been allowed out of port for at least another six months, an opinion that was reinforced every time one of the research teams blew another fuse. They didn’t seem to understand that overloading every circuit on the ship wasn’t going to get their work done any faster; they plugged their machines into every outlet they could find, and when they blew a fuse, they shrugged, unplugged, and moved on to the next one. Daryl was convinced that the word for a group of scientists ought to be a blackout, because that was what the fuckers seemed determined to cause.

  Gregory was both older and calmer; this wasn’t his first Imagine-sponsored voyage. He’d missed the Atargatis by less than a month, thanks to a parasite he’d picked up while accompanying a film crew on a quest for the world’s last living dinosaur. (They hadn’t found it. They’d found a fuck-lot of nasty biting flies and some exciting fungal infections, one of which still flared up when he forgot his toe cream. He was going to keep working for Imagine until he earned his pension, because by God, it owed him that. It owed him that and more.) He had a tendency to shrug and let it go when the scientists got out of hand.

  “They’re just big kids,” he’d said, time and time again. “They liked to play with toys when they were snot nosed and brownnosing their teachers, and now that they’ve learned to wipe up both ends, they still like to play with toys. Just more expensive ones. They don’t mean any harm, and the way they keep breaking shit means we’ll never be out of a job. Let it go.”

  “Let it go” might as well have been Gregory’s life philosophy. Most of the other engineers found him soothing. No matter what was going on—electrical fire, unexplained leaks, missing structural components—he could be relied upon to keep his cool. Normally that was a good thing.

  Not right now. Louder this time, Daryl said, “I’ve never seen the water like this.”

  Gregory paused, wrench in his hand, and turned to look at the other engineer. In a tone of profound weariness, he asked, “You going to let this go?”

  “No.”

  “Not until I look.”

  “Not until you look.”

  “Right.” Gregory put the wrench down and stood, grimacing as his knees popped. That pension from Imagine wasn’t as far in the future as he liked to think. Maybe that should have been a relief—wasn’t retirement supposed to be a dream? Something to aspire to?—but really, it was just confusing. Where did his youth go? That strong, straight-backed boy he saw in old pictures of himself, where was he?

  Gone to sea, like all the bright-eyed boys, and like all the bright-eyed boys, he was never coming home. Men might return, but the boys? Oh, they never did.

  The captain had ordered them to get the shutters working after that Wilson girl went under and didn’t come back. The mermaids were real and they were coming. Why they didn’t just turn and get the hell out of here was above Gregory’s pay grade, but he had some suspicions: a ship this size wasn’t made to accelerate on a dime, and if the damn shutters weren’t working, who was to say what else might have decided to break?

  The security staff was in a tizzy, seeming to have finally realized that they had jobs to do. Amateurs. They’d been hired to look good on camera, not to protect their charges cleanly or well, and not for the first time, Gregory questioned the wisdom of letting an entertainment company call the shots. You didn’t let Disney plan a war or Sony run a government. Why the hell would anyone let Imagine supervise a scientific expedition?

  Careful of his protesting joints, Gregory moved to the rail and leaned forward enough to look down into the water. The sun was descending, sending bright spears of light slashing across the surface. At first he thought the glitter in the waves was part of that sunset. Light refracted, after all; put light in the water, and it could do all manner of things it would never think of doing in the open air. Water was tricky like that. It could twist a perfectly sensible natural force into something strange and new, and once that had happened, nothing in the world could ever turn it back again.

  The glitter moved. Gregory frowned.

  This wasn’t light reflecting off the water; no matter how strange and new light might seem when it bounced from place to place, following the focus of the tide, it was still light. It had to follow certain rules. One of those was that light refracted through water couldn’t move against the water. It had to move with the water, following the laws of fluid dynamics. This glitter …

  It was moving on its own, darting from place to pla
ce as nimbly as a fish. And it wasn’t at the surface of the water with the rest of the light; it was deep, hanging low, almost on the edge of eyesight. It was mostly visible because the water was so calm, and because it was so wrong. It shouldn’t have been there, and so it stood out as strange.

  Gregory couldn’t help thinking that if he’d been alone, he would have convinced himself there was nothing there to see; he had a job to do, and frightening himself wouldn’t have gotten it done. He was a calm man because he was a simple one, and he was able to remain a simple man because he refused to contemplate things that would have required him to be complex. Let the younger men be complicated. They were still the shadows of the brave boys who’d set out to sea; they had time for complexity. They’d learn to be simple as they got older. They’d learn that sometimes it was best to let lights in the water be just that, and not ask questions about them, and not look, and not know.

  “What are they?” asked Daryl.

  “Fucked if I know,” said Gregory (who was simple, but not prudish). “One of the science kids might be doing something. Robots reflecting the sun or whatever.”

  “Why would they do that?” Daryl cast him an anxious look. “Couldn’t it be one of those mermaids?”

  “The captain said the mermaids were all the way down at the bottom. As for the kids, why do they do any of the things they do? There’s a girl on deck three who’s built a water sampler that looks like a robot shark. She says it’s because she wants predators to leave it alone, but that doesn’t explain why it chomps its jaws and chases fish. She built it because she wanted a robot shark, and she found a half-decent excuse for doing what she already wanted to do, so she did it.” Gregory shook his head. “You could tell me one of them was working on a way to turn the whole ship to sugar, and I’d believe you.”

  “I guess.” Daryl leaned farther forward, looking dubiously at the lights that flashed and glittered in the water. “It just doesn’t seem right. Look at how they’re moving. Like they’re alive.”

  “The science kids—”

  “They like their robots to look like robots,” said Daryl. “Anything that looks too alive starts a turf war with the biologists, and then nobody gets any work done. That’s almost like … I don’t know. It’s like the way anglerfish move. All jittery and bright. Lures. That’s what they look like. They look like lures.”

  “Anglerfish don’t swim in schools, and you’d need a whole damn school of them to account for that much glitter,” said Gregory. The hairs on the back of his neck were rising, tying themselves into tangles. Something about the situation was wrong, very wrong, and he didn’t want to have a damn thing to do with it. He wanted out.

  Maybe those devil fish weren’t down as deep as he wanted them to be.

  “That’s still what it looks like,” said Daryl sullenly.

  “Just because a thing looks like a thing, that doesn’t mean that’s what it is.”

  Daryl stopped, turning to look at him. Finally he said, “Worst part is, I followed that. I’m going to go tell the captain.”

  “If that’s what you feel is best.” Captain Peterman had authority over the vessel and that was where his command stopped; everything around him had been bought and paid for by Imagine. It was no secret that the captain couldn’t scratch his own ass without permission from the corporation. That didn’t stop the crew from reporting to him. They’d been raised on the usual structure of the sea, and they knew he should have been able to help them, to protect them, to tell them what to do. Daryl was going to be damned disappointed if he expected Captain Peterman to tell him what was happening with those lights in the water.

  But maybe that was for the best. Disappointment was an essential step in burying those bright-eyed boys, and leaving sensible men in their place.

  “It is.” Daryl bounced on his toes for a minute, excitement and anxiety warring in his eyes. “I know I’m supposed to stay here and help you, but would you mind if I …?”

  “Go.” Gregory turned his back on the water, relieved in an obscure, unnamable way when he could no longer see the glitter dancing below the surface of the waves. “I can take care of this on my own, and next time we have something to fix that you could handle without me, you can pay me back with an extra coffee break.”

  “Thanks, man, you’re the best.” Then Daryl was gone, racing down the deck with the speed that seemed to belong solely to the bright-eyed boys. He’d lose that soon enough. For now, let him have his glory; let him have his fun. The days of the bright-eyed boys were always numbered, and if there was one thing Gregory had learned in his time with Imagine, it was that you couldn’t get them back once they were gone. It was kinder to indulge them. There would be years and years to spend with the men they would become.

  Something caught his eye as he watched Daryl go. The glitter was still moving through the water, deep and quick and inexplicable. Looking at it made his skin crawl. Gregory turned resolutely away again, going back to his repairs.

  When he looked at the water again, the glitter was gone. That didn’t make him feel any better. Something like that … If it had disappeared, where did it go?

  “Captain?”

  On a normal voyage, having a hired engineer—not even an official member of the crew, a man who would be gone as soon as they got back to the dock—intrude without permission would have been enough to trigger a stern lecture, if not actual punishment. But they were all hired hands on this voyage, even the people who had multiyear contracts with the Melusine.

  (Most of the crew was reasonably sure Imagine had wanted to lock them in before any discoveries were made, so they couldn’t go blabbing to the tabloids without breaking some term of their employment. None of them cared. They’d be paid whether or not they were sailing, thanks to the terms outlined in that same contract, and if Imagine wanted to cut checks for their silence, that was fine. The mermaids were too big to stay secret for long. If they didn’t talk, the scientists would, and then they’d be able to say anything they wanted, while they got drunk on Imagine’s money and didn’t do a damn thing between here and their termination dates.)

  Right now, the crew was on high alert, and people were seeing mermaids everywhere they turned. Engineers, security staff, everyone under his command was racing to and fro, trying to get the damn shutters working. The ones who lacked the skill to work on the shutters were fixing the little things that had been allowed to slip, or hadn’t been tested frequently enough. A little lapse in propriety was only to be expected.

  “What did you want, Mr.… Cliff, wasn’t it?”

  “Daryl Cliff, sir. Engineer. Junior, that is. I’m assigned to work with Gregory Richardson.”

  “I know Gregory,” said Captain Peterman. He stood, reaching for his hat. It was a silly affectation, but the passengers felt better when he wore his hat. “Good man. Good head on his shoulders. No one better in a crisis. What’s going on, Mr. Cliff?” Gregory had sailed with him before. Gregory had earned the right to have his first name used in casual conversation. This strained-looking young man had not.

  Captain Peterman paused, reviewing the last few seconds. The young man did look strained. The flesh around his eyes was tight, creating an impression of shock or fear. The corner of his mouth was twitching. Something had given him a fright.

  Maybe they had less time than they thought.

  “Mr. Cliff?” Captain Peterman repeated, a sharp note in his voice.

  “Sir, there’s something in the water.” Some of the strain vanished, replaced by relief. By telling the captain—by telling the person in charge—the young man had rendered this someone else’s problem. “Gregory’s still there, but he agreed I should come and tell you.” That was only half a lie. Gregory knew he was coming to see the captain. He hadn’t endorsed it, exactly, but he knew, and that made it true enough to say.

  Captain Peterman went cold. Being the first to say the word mermaid would be to lose. He would not lose. Voice level, he said, “Something in the water? Son, I don
’t know if you’re aware, but we’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There’s lots of somethings in the water. This is their home. As far as they’re concerned, we’re ‘something in the water,’ and they’re probably pretty keen on us moving along.”

  “It’s not like that,” said Daryl. He stood his ground, even though every instinct he’d developed in three years as an independent maritime engineer told him to back down. It was never good to argue with the captain over anything but the safety of the ship—in part because an engineer who argued over little things was less likely to be listened to about the big ones. There might come a time when the survival of this vessel and her crew depended on the captain listening when he spoke. If he couldn’t guarantee that, he might as well turn in his resignation right now.

  But the glitter in the water had been wrong. Something about it had turned his stomach in a way he didn’t have the words for, had never needed to articulate before; something about it had seemed so inimical that he didn’t want to remember what it looked like. When he tried, his mind shied away, presenting him with images of sunlight on the surface, of Gregory frowning at his idle fancies. How could light be threatening? It didn’t make sense. It was just light, after all. It was just light.

  As an engineer, it was his job to speak for the safety of the ship. He was speaking for the safety of the ship now. He knew it all the way down to his bones, even if none of the people who heard him agreed. He was trying to protect them.

  On another vessel, another journey, the captain might have dismissed him. But the ship was already in a state of high alert, and Captain Peterman wasn’t a foolish man; he hadn’t established his reputation by ignoring danger or dismissing people who were clearly in distress. “All right, son,” he said. “Let’s go see your lights in the water.”

  Daryl grinned relief. “This way, sir,” he said.

  They walked side by side along the deck, the captain nodding to everyone who passed. Daryl barely noticed. He was jittery, jumpy, glancing by turns at the water and the sky. The sun was almost down. The water’s surface, which had been like glass in the sunlight, was dark, unbreakable; it could have been a foot or a mile deep, and made no functional difference. Anything could be down there. Anything at all.