Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  He’d tried, on several occasions, to make himself feel bad about that, to find it in his heart to pursue another passion, something more immediately beneficial to humanity. In the end he kept coming back to the things he loved, and to the calm understanding that even if his work wasn’t going to save the world, the things it created might. Tory’s recording equipment had improved a thousandfold because of him, and those recordings didn’t just help her; they were used by hundreds of marine biologists, climatologists, and statisticians. When he’d paid for a hundred trackers to be put on colossal squid, for the sake of determining whether something even more colossal might be devouring them, he had funded a dozen research products and created a pool of data that was still being mined for its practical applications.

  The human race had always created dreamers whose seemingly frivolous dreams forced the creation of infrastructures and innovations that benefited everyone around them. He was just the latest in a long line of people who, by wanting something they could never have, dragged the rest of the world kicking and screaming into a new phase of the future.

  Luis called up the sonar readings, spreading them across three monitors with an artist’s skill. Each greenish screen showed the sound waves radiating as a faint ring of vibration, breaking into sketchy outlines when they hit something. He checked all three windows several times as he calibrated his settings. The sonar pulses weren’t his—those were a part of the Melusine’s standard array of sensors—but he had access to the data they were returning, and he was grateful for that. Getting Heather to drop sonar probes for him before she did her dive would have been both expensive and time consuming. Worse yet, it could have led to her encountering the mermaids even sooner, when they had less data, and less of a chance of learning the things they still needed to know.

  Two people were dead. At least two people; for all he knew, half a dozen more could have been pulled off the sides of the ship during the last hour, while he was staring at a creature out of his dreams (out of his nightmares) and wondering whether she’d ever be able to admire him the way he admired her. Two people were dead, and three dolphins were dead, and he was still going to be a hero when he got back to California, because he was a cryptozoologist who had actually gone out and found something. He’d argued for the existence of mermaids, and by God, he had found them.

  The whole world changed when you found things.

  One by one, he flipped the camera feeds on, letting them roll until they stabilized. There were lights mounted on the bottom of the Melusine, but he lacked the authority to activate them: they could be activated only by someone with full system access. He assumed the captain could do it, but the captain had other things to worry about, and besides, what would he say? “Hey, can you turn on the lights so I can get a better look at the fish”? No. It wouldn’t do him any good. Other methods had to be used.

  Some of the cameras utilized red lights, letting him see the marine life without disturbing it. Others were set to show motion and temperature differentials. They were more useful when observing mammals than when trying to get a clear look at fish, but they were better than nothing. One by one his windows into the underwater world flickered on, showing him the sea.

  The water was dark and calm. Even in heavy storms, deeper water remained undisturbed; there were currents, there was natural movement, but storms were, by and large, a concern for the surface. There was something important in that. The things that could swamp ships and drown sailors were almost unnoticeable a few meters down, where the water did as it would and paid no attention to the turmoil. A few fish flashed by, and he followed them from window to window, automatically making the mental adjustments to recognize them in each visual frame. It had taken a long time to learn how to do that, but after years spent interpreting the input from differently calibrated cameras, it was no longer conscious.

  Fish. More fish. A drifting squid; he would have thought it was dead if not for the occasional pulses of its mantle, propelling it away from the ship.

  And there, in the depths, a spray of glittering light, like someone had lit a sparkler fifteen feet down and without access to the air. Luis sat up straighter, watching the specks of light dance and swirl. They weren’t moving very fast; he wouldn’t have been sure they were moving at all if not for the fish that shared the frame, higher up and darting quickly out of the way. That gave him a frame of reference, and confirmed that yes, the specks were rising, slow, slow, cautious as anything.

  His hands moved on the keyboard, redirecting three cameras in the area, moving one of the downward-facing probes up a few meters and shifting it toward the lights. Moving the cameras was a complicated matter. Most were motorized; some were attached to drones he could move in the water, anchored to the ship by thin cables, assuming they were anchored at all. If he moved them too fast, he risked snapping the cables. Worse, he risked startling the things he was attempting to film. What good was it to reorient the cameras if he lost the target in the process?

  Holding his breath, he drove the probe closer to the lights. More of the lights appeared in the frame; they were covering each other, ducking in and out of view. He could see the thin threads of “hair” connecting them now. It was a mermaid. He was sure of that. But mermaids were like lightning; they moved fast enough to catch dolphins in the open sea. Why was this one moving so slowly?

  Maybe it was hurt. Maybe it was dead. If he could retrieve a dead mermaid, their biologists would have something to work on, and he would be there again; he would be in the room, because it would be his mermaid, his great new find. The lights continued to drift. Luis nudged the probe closer.

  The mermaid turned its head, looking directly into the lens.

  Luis gasped, slamming back in his seat. There was no way the creature could see him—no way it could even know he was on the other side of the camera—but that didn’t matter; again instinct was taking over, telling him this was the bigger predator. Telling him to run.

  Intellect overrode instinct. Fascinated as always by the mechanics of the mermaid, he leaned forward to get a better look.

  The body of the mermaid was obscured by water; the lens could only contain the face and drifting cloud of “hair,” the bright points of twinkling light that tipped each strand moving in and out of view like stars on a cloudy night. It was beautiful. It wasn’t human—it wasn’t anything like human; a manatee would have been closer, since a manatee would at least have been a mammal—but it was beautiful. The slope of its forehead, the angle of its cheekbones, the soft, distressingly human pout of its lips …

  The lovely ladies of the sea weren’t what anyone had expected or wanted them to be, but they were still amazing. Something about them spoke to a thousand years of cultural literacy and conditioning, reminding him of all the stories of sailors who’d found their true loves beneath the waves. The fact that this creature would have eaten him as soon as looked at him didn’t matter. It was in its element, it was moving as fluidly and easily as the water itself, and it was incredible.

  It tilted its head, studying the camera. After a moment’s contemplation, it reached out and tapped the lens, setting the camera rocking in the water. The motors that drove it had internal stabilizers, designed to keep it as steady as possible (and based on the motor function of a chicken’s head and neck). They couldn’t stand up to an actual impact. The picture moved, bouncing with the lens.

  The mermaid tapped the camera again. Luis frowned.

  “What are you trying to do?” he asked.

  The mermaid leaned closer, lips opening to show those terrible, inhuman teeth. It was still beautiful. It was just easier to dismiss that beauty, because this thing—this thing—was no sailor’s dream. It barely qualified as a nightmare. He could see tiny shrimp moving in the mermaid’s hair, white, eyeless things no more than an inch in length, claws picking at the strands, cleaning them, grooming them. No simple hairbrushes or shell combs for this creature; like all that lived in the sea, it had found biological solutions to i
ts needs.

  The mermaid surged toward the camera, moving with sudden intent. It swatted the camera away. The servos kicked on, trying to move the camera back into its original position. The mermaid hit it again, driving it farther down. The signal crackled into static before dying. The window that had been displaying its feed snapped closed, the other windows shifting to fill the gap it had created. They presented a picture of the mermaid moving through the water, moving toward the ship, ceaseless and unrelenting.

  There were no others. Only the one, rising by itself. Luis checked the feeds, angling the lenses so as to chart the mermaid’s ascent. It was going to come up on the port side, not far from his lab.

  “This is stupid,” he said to himself, as he stood and reached for his digital camera. It was next to a dart gun, designed for tagging fish and squid as they dove. He grabbed that as well, stuffing it into the waistband of his jeans. It was an unfamiliar weight. There were probably people in the world who found carrying a gun to be comforting, even necessary to their peace of mind. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet any of them.

  Jacques and Michi probably qualified. They walked like people who were ready to shoot the whole world to get what they wanted. He tried to avoid them as much as possible. He didn’t want them near the mermaids, either, although the deaths—two so far, and first contact was only just now being formally made—were enough to explain why they’d been asked to come along. Imagine had known from the start how contact was likely to go. It had seen it before, after all.

  Not for the first time, he wondered how much of the footage from the Atargatis incident had never been released to the public. Something must have been held back, some telling piece of damning documentation that made it possible for Imagine to come out of the situation with clean hands. Cleaner, anyway. There was no way any of them were walking away completely clean. Not the first time, when the seas had run red and the ship had become a haunted house. Not this time either.

  Luis stepped out of the lab and onto the deserted deck, pausing with his head cocked, listening. No alarms were ringing. The ship’s engines were a low, steady hum, so constant that it had become inaudible over the course of the journey. He only noticed it now when he was actually looking for it, or when he was adjusting the equipment to balance it out. He was sure the engines drowned out many smaller, subtler sounds near the surface, but since he and Tory were almost always looking deep, it didn’t matter as much for them as it might for some of the other researchers. Anyone who wanted to do shallow-water work on a ship like this one was guilty of thinking small, and probably deserved the distortions they would get.

  Under the engines were the other steady sounds—the whistle of the wind, the lapping of the water against the hull, the things that kept the ocean from being truly silent. No dynamic system could be soundless without existing in a vacuum. The Melusine was a part of her environment now. Man-made and artificial, yes, but subject to all the same rules as everything else around her.

  Luis wondered whether the mermaids knew what a coral reef was, whether their normal migrations ever brought them into waters shallow enough to support that sort of ecosystem. He wondered whether they looked at the Melusine and saw a sort of floating reef, something that served the same purpose for its air-breathing inhabitants as the coral structures did for those beneath the sea. It was a charming, whimsical thought, and it would have seemed a lot more reasonable if the mermaids hadn’t turned out to be flesh-ripping monsters that wanted to eat everyone in sight.

  Oh, well. Couldn’t win them all. He stayed where he was, wishing he dared close his eyes, and kept listening.

  There: a soft slapping sound, coming from about fifteen yards away. Hand on the butt of his tagging gun, Luis started cautiously in that direction. He was following a hunch as much as he was following the sound, hoping what he’d observed so far would pay off in some small but measurable way.

  He came around the bend in the hall. The sea spread out in front of him, framed by the metal poles that supported both this deck and the deck above it. Parts of the ship were more like a grid than anything else, a fine lattice of interconnected walkways that looked impossibly delicate, like they would be lost in a matter of seconds if a real storm blew up. The whole vessel seemed impossibly delicate at times. In reality, the Melusine had plated shutters that could be closed from the control deck if necessary. With the entry of a code and the press of a button, the ship would become an armored fortress, impervious to attack from outside.

  The mermaids weren’t going to get them the way they got the Atargatis. That had never been a risk. A few people might die—a few people always died when there was a discovery to be made, and every single one of them had signed contracts indicating that they understood precisely that—but the ship would survive, along with almost everyone on board. There was something comforting about that.

  A hissing sound told Luis he was on the right track. He walked along the deck, getting as close to the rail as he dared, and looked along the line of the hull to the water.

  The mermaid, which had already managed to climb more than halfway up the side of the ship, clung there glaring at him. It didn’t have human eyes, but it could still make itself understood. It was angry. It was looking for something to take that anger out on.

  He would do.

  “Howdy, Ariel,” said Luis, and held his camera over the rail, snapping several pictures. He didn’t bother to turn off the flash. These were the first out of water pictures taken of one of these creatures since the Atargatis; they were going to be the first pictures accompanied by a living photographer who could attest to their authenticity. They were going to be clear.

  The mermaid snarled before echoing, “Howdy, Ariel, howdy, howdy,” in a passable imitation of his own voice. It began climbing faster, swarming up the side of the ship like it was on a mission.

  To be fair, it probably was. It just wasn’t a mission Luis had any intention of going along with. He danced back along the deck, trying to estimate how long it would take the now-enraged mermaid to make its way to the rail. He’d just finished counting down from eight when a hand reached up and grasped the metal. He took several more pictures, zooming in on the knuckles, which bent in a way that was subtly wrong to his eye. The ichthyologists were going to have a field day with this one.

  So were the cryptid chasers of the world, and he was about to become their king. Out of everyone on the planet, Luis Martines was the one who’d gone out and found something. Every scrap of additional material he got now was icing on the cake of what he had already accomplished.

  Let Tory have her vengeance and Mr. Blackwell have whatever he was looking for. Let all of them have whatever they wanted. He was going home at the head of his field, and every choice he’d ever made was going to be justified by this moment.

  The mermaid’s arms looked wiry and weak, but they pulled it over the rail with surprising strength. It hit the deck with a sick slapping sound, like a barrel of dead fish being emptied. It was still for a moment. Luis wasn’t sure whether it had actually hurt itself or was just lying in wait. Then it rolled over, making a retching noise, and vomited what must have been a gallon of water onto the wood.

  He took pictures of that, too. It told him more about the creature’s biology than he would have thought possible. The gills in the mermaid’s neck were still half-open, pulsing with every breath it took; at the same time, the mermaid was visibly breathing through the narrow slits of its nose, which pulsed in time with the gills. It was probably an excellent method of fighting off aquatic parasites. Anything that tried to attach to the mermaid’s gills would be either blown loose when it exhaled, or would suffocate, unable to deal with the change between water and air.

  Everything about the mermaid was a biological miracle, designed to take advantage of its environment. It had no reason to become anything other than aquatic, but it wasn’t the first fish to learn how to deal with oxygen. The snakehead, the lungfish, those had pioneered the art of moving between
environments. Its hands, its arms, the strangely simian curve of its spine, all those things had precedents elsewhere in the sea. But like the human body, which collected some of the best innovations evolution had come up with for the land, the mermaid combined them in a new, and terrifying, way.

  As Luis watched, the mermaid got its arms under itself and braced its hands against the deck. It had no dorsal fins to speak of, but the small fins on its sides waved constantly as it oriented itself. Whether that was a function of movement or something automatic didn’t matter.

  It turned its head. It saw him. The lights around its face danced and swayed with the movement of its hair. It would have been easy to see the mermaid, at any sort of distance, as something out of a fairy tale. Something to be idealized and pursued.

  It opened its mouth. “Howdy, Ariel,” it said, still using his own voice. It was an oddly disturbing sound. Even knowing that the mermaids were mimics couldn’t stop him from feeling violated when it didn’t stop.

  The mermaid moved.

  It should have been slow, graceless, unwieldy: all the things he’d always assumed of marine animals on land. The few that were actually fast were terrifying. He’d seen a video once, of eels in a billabong in Australia that had learned to hunt birds. They were like arrows, launching themselves skyward, their tails anchored in the mire. They moved faster than anything aquatic should have been able to move in the open air. He’d watched that recording and silently swore he’d never go anywhere near a billabong, never go anywhere near creatures that could think like that and hunt like that, in ways no fish had any right to hunt or think.

  The mermaid moved like those eels were its ancestors, like it had studied at their fins and learned how best to take advantage of the change in its circumstances. It didn’t slither so much as it undulated, pulling itself along with its hands while its lower body somehow found traction on the slippery deck. Luis gaped in openmouthed awe for a split second before he realized it had closed more than half the distance between them, and was working fast on the rest of the gap. He turned and ran.