Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  The men around her had come because they’d been ordered to do so, and they stayed because they were coming to trust her, a little bit at a time. With every order she gave that didn’t get them killed, their confidence in her grew. If she could keep them in line long enough, continue to smile and flatter and exchange pleasantries for another few circuits around the ship, they would follow her into Hell itself. That was a good thing. With the way this night was unfolding, Hell itself wasn’t far away.

  They moved in a diamond formation, with Michi in the lead, rifle now held at the ready. Their footsteps were damnably loud on the wooden deck; it felt like there was an accompanying echo, signaling their presence to every terror the deeps had to offer. Michi tried to tread as lightly as she could, but it wasn’t easy, not with slime coating the decks and four large men following at her heels, their own steps clumping and heavy. She would have tried to get away from them if not for the fact that there was safety in numbers. If she needed to, she could leave them and run, buying herself time to make an ignoble escape.

  Nobility was for those who never stepped into the line of fire. Given the circumstances, she would gladly accept survival over anything of the sort.

  The slime trails were getting thicker. The slime didn’t dry quickly, but it did deflate, losing volume and shriveling in on itself. This trail was still plump and moist, freshly laid. It continued to the middle of the deck, where it stopped easily two feet from the rail.

  “Where did it go?” asked one of the men.

  Michi didn’t have an answer. She looked around, trying to find some trace of the creature’s passage. They couldn’t fly. Whatever else the damned things were, they were still sea creatures, still unable to do much on the land other than pull themselves along, hand over hand, slithering toward their prey.

  But they had incredible upper body strength. They could pull themselves up the side of a ship. Up …

  Michi looked up, and then, before her eyes finished registering what they saw, she dove to the side, raising her rifle and firing twice. The siren wedged in the bend between the wall and the bottom of the next deck hissed, mouth gaping wide. Then it let go of the wall and fell, landing on one of the men who had been walking behind Michi in the formation.

  He screamed. The siren bit down, burying its teeth in the soft flesh of his throat, cutting off the sound.

  “Fire!” howled Michi.

  It was an enclosed space. Ricochets were inevitable. Six bullets caught the siren’s body, joining the bullets Michi had already put there. It howled, the sound bright and electric and horrible—and most of all, loud enough to drown out Michi’s own scream, which was human and hence almost irrelevant. The siren went limp. The man under it thrashed once and was still.

  Michi clapped a hand over her upper arm, swaying. “I don’t feel well,” she announced, and collapsed.

  “I don’t like the way this thing is looking at me,” said Daniel, eyeing Mr. Blackwell’s captive siren. It was hanging in front of the glass again. It tracked him with its eyes, watching him move around the room. “Why does it keep focusing on me?”

  “Maybe it’s female after all, and showing solidarity: it only wants to eat you.” Hallie started another video playback, trying to mirror the way the creatures moved their hands. “You’re taller than I am. It’s a predator. It knows how to be careful. It probably assumes you’re more likely to eat it than I am, so it wants to know where you are.”

  “That’s great,” said Daniel. “What wonders will it reveal next?”

  “Unless it can break glass, probably nothing,” said Hallie. There was a trick to the way the sirens moved their hands. They had long fingers, but only one extra knuckle, functionally speaking; their first two knuckles were held in place by the webbing, keeping them from moving much during normal use. She twisted her wrists to the sides, trying to mimic the finger placement from the video. She was so close …

  There. A flick of the thumb, and the phrase closed. She didn’t know what she was saying, but she was saying it. “I want to try something. Stand in front of the tank.”

  “Stand in front of the deep-sea horror that wants to eat me, you mean.”

  “Yes,” she said serenely. “I mean exactly that.”

  Daniel glared at her. “I have a PhD.”

  “That’s nice. So do I.”

  “I also have two master’s degrees, and I’ve addressed the United Nations.”

  “I can run in four-inch heels. Are we done playing ‘who has the bigger dick’? Because I have things to accomplish, and I need you to stand in front of the siren.”

  Daniel kept glaring as he moved into position in front of the tank. The siren swam over to hover in front of him. He shuddered.

  “That is one ugly freak of nature,” he said.

  “I thought you were the biologist,” said Hallie, moving next to him. “Aren’t you supposed to find beauty in all living things?”

  “I find beauty when it’s there. There’s no beauty here.” Daniel knew he was wrong. Dr. Toth saw the beauty, and Dr. Toth was less of a romantic than most people took her for. If she said there was something to admire, she was telling the truth. But he couldn’t get past the reality of those terrible teeth. The creature—mermaid, siren, whatever she wanted them to call it—was a predator from another world, and it would kill him if he gave it the chance. He knew that, and deep down, in the part of his soul that would never come out of the trees, he was afraid.

  “These things killed my sister. I want to agree with you. But I can’t, because I found the beauty. It’s in their hands.” Hallie held up her hands, wiggling her fingers in a beckoning wave until the siren looked at her, attracted by the motion. Before it could look away, she made a complicated gesture. It involved both hands, and while it lacked the fluidity of the siren’s own gestures—the fingers that shaped it were too short, too bound to gravity—it was enough to make the creature go still.

  Hallie repeated the gesture, more emphatically.

  “What are you saying?” asked Daniel.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But these things are mimics. They’re used to the idea that intelligent creatures can steal words from one another. I’ve stolen something from it. Let’s see what it does.”

  The siren’s mouth closed as its gills flared, making its neck seem twice as thick, making its outline somehow less delicate. It raised its own hands and made a short, choppy gesture.

  “We have no shared culture,” Hallie said. “I can’t spread my hands and expect it to know I mean I don’t understand.” She pressed one hand flat against her sternum instead, before making her name sign. When she was done, she touched her chest again.

  “What did you say?”

  “My name.”

  The siren hung motionless for a moment. Then, almost cautiously, it touched the glass in front of Hallie before echoing her name sign and touching the glass again.

  It was all Hallie could do not to punch the air in triumph. Instead she smiled, lips closed in case the siren took showing her teeth as a sign of aggression. She touched her chest, repeated her name sign, touched her chest. Then, moving with deliberate care, she touched the glass.

  The siren made a new sign before touching its chest.

  “What did it say?” asked Daniel.

  “Its name,” said Hallie softly. “We’re communicating. We’re communicating. I got it. We can do this.”

  “Great,” said Daniel, blissfully unaware of what was going on above them. “Maybe we can get out of here without anyone else dying.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022

  Michi was moaning when her boys carried her into the medical bay. The sound was low and constant, like an animal with its leg caught in a trap. She had resisted all efforts to bind the bullet wound; it was too high for an effective tourniquet, unless she wanted to risk losing the limb. Instead she was just bleeding out. Her eyes were closed, and she had stopped responding
to questions halfway down the stairs.

  The two doctors on duty looked up when the door banged open. The guards keeping watch over them drew their weapons, falling into a defensive posture. Michi would have been impressed, if she’d been able to open her eyes long enough to see them.

  “Medic!” shouted the man holding her shoulders. Her head was lolling, and he was starting to worry about her breathing. “We need help here!”

  “What happened?” demanded the senior doctor. She’d worked in a major city hospital before being hired by Imagine; she’d expected this trip to be a chance to relax, treating nothing worse than dehydration, sunburn, and the occasional case of norovirus. This—a woman with her shoulder bleeding so copiously that the entire left side of her body had turned black with blood—was a step beyond. “Put her down here.”

  “Here” was an open cot, with plastic sheets as morbid as they were practical. The men lowered Michi carefully onto it, getting a pillow under her head. She moaned again, but didn’t otherwise react.

  “Bullet to the shoulder,” said the leader, turning to face the doctor. Michi’s blood was smeared across his chest, making him difficult to look at directly. “We were fighting one of those damned sea monsters, and there was a ricochet.”

  “And you just let her bleed?” demanded the second doctor, sounding horrified. “What were you thinking?”

  “We were doing what she told us,” said the guard. “The bullet went through the thing before it went into Ms. Abney, and we don’t know jack about their biology. Could be laden with all sorts of nasties. She asked us to let her bleed, in an effort to flush the wound, and we were close enough to here that it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.”

  The first doctor was already cutting Michi’s clothes away from the bullet hole. She frowned at the sight of Michi’s skin. It was streaked with blood—not quite red washed, but close enough so as to obscure its original color in places—but there seemed to be something wrong apart from that. “I need a sterile wipe,” she snapped.

  The second doctor went to get what she had asked for. The men who’d brought Michi arrayed themselves around the door, guarding it, their eyes never leaving the wounded, motionless woman. She had earned their loyalty. She would have been pleased, had she been even slightly aware of her surroundings.

  “You said the bullet passed through the creature,” said the first doctor, voice low and tight and urgent. “What do you mean, exactly? Where was it shot?”

  “I didn’t see, Doc,” said the lead guard. “The bullets were flying all over the place. Why? What’s wrong with her? Whatever it is, you can fix it, right?”

  “You have a walkie-talkie, yes?”

  “Yes,” said the guard, and frowned. “Why?”

  “I need you to find Dr. Jillian Toth.” The doctor looked back to Michi. “You may also want to locate Mr. Abney. I think he’s going to want to be here.”

  A war was being waged inside Michi’s body. The battle was complicated; the siren had no venom to speak of, no toxins designed to take down its prey. That would have been more straightforward, and easier for the medical team to combat. No. The siren, being a deep-sea creature of unique and unstudied biology, had other surprises to deliver, and more subtle poisons to bring to bear.

  Like the flamboyant cuttlefish, the siren was poisonous. Not venomous; poisonous. The flesh of the creature was relatively inert, but the mucus it secreted contained a complicated mix of anticoagulants and neurotoxins, designed to slow and sedate anything foolish enough to bite it. Whatever ate a siren would become prey to the rest of the school, unable to build up the speed to escape them.

  In something the size of a sperm whale, with the attendant circulatory system, the amount of mucus that had entered Michi’s body would have been negligible. It would have done some damage, sure, but nothing catastrophic. For someone Michi’s size …

  Her red blood cells were shredding. Her white blood cells attempted to rally, only to find themselves similarly destroyed, filling her veins with gunk. Her shoulder still bled, faster than it should have, her body pumping out plasma and antigens as quickly as it could. At the same time, synapses in her brain were starting to misfire, unable to contend with what was happening to them.

  It was sheer bad luck that saw Jacques running into the room as the first seizure began.

  “Mon dieu!” he cried, too shocked to remember his second language. He ran to his wife’s side, knocking the doctor away as he grabbed for her hands. “Michi? Michi!”

  She didn’t open her eyes. The doctor tapped him on the shoulder and he turned, eyes wide and almost devoid of comprehension.

  Dr. Vail had served in the army before going into private practice. She knew the eyes of a man on the verge of losing his senses. She shook her head, holding up the syringe she had been preparing. “You need to let me work,” she said. “Your wife has been injected with an unknown toxin. If you do not let me work, she is going to die. Stand aside.”

  Jacques stared at her for a few more precious seconds. Then, shaking, he stepped to the side and let her in.

  The race between medical science and natural poison was a swift one, and one that had been run over and over again since the dawn of mankind. Inside Michi, the siren toxins and the broad treatments Dr. Vail was able to prepare without more information hammered against one another, waging brute force attacks for ownership of her circulatory system. More blood cells shredded. Another seizure began, this one violent enough to bring her back off the cot, arching upward in an almost perfect half circle. Jacques shouted in French. One of the guards moved to restrain him before he could strike Dr. Vail, and he turned, punching the guard in the nose instead. The guard, who outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, looked at him impassively before grabbing his hand and squeezing. Jacques howled, and the guard enveloped him in a tight hold.

  The door opened. Dr. Toth stepped inside. She stopped for a moment, taking in the scene: the struggling Jacques, the harried Dr. Vail, the seizing Michi. The other guards stood around, watching helplessly.

  Dr. Toth placed two fingers in her mouth and whistled. All motion stopped, save for Michi, who could no more stop seizing than she could heal her wounds through sheer force of will. Michi continued to thrash, more weakly now, her body no longer accurately interpreting the signals it was receiving from her oxygen-starved brain.

  “Status report, now,” said Dr. Toth. She pulled on her gloves as she walked toward Michi, snapping them tight before leaning forward and prying open Michi’s left eye. It had rolled so far back that only the startlingly red sclera showed. Dr. Toth allowed Michi’s eye to close again before Jacques could see. “Muscle relaxants and fluids, now. What have you given her so far?”

  “Broad-spectrum antibiotic, injected intramuscularly, and a dose of pit viper antivenin, based on the anticoagulant properties of whatever she’s got in her system.”

  “Good, good,” said Dr. Toth. She pressed on Michi’s shoulders. The other woman’s back did not unbend. “I need that muscle relaxant. Be ready with a shot of epi. She may go into cardiac arrest at—Why the hell are you people standing around? Move!”

  Dr. Vail moved. So did the other doctor, who had been standing near frozen since Dr. Toth’s whistle. The medical drama sprang back to life, all three of them clustering around Michi, blocking her from view, fighting the age-old fight between medical science and trauma.

  “My wife,” said Jacques, clawing at the air. “Please. You must let me go. I must go to her. I must be with her. And her! Why is she commanding the doctors? She is no doctor! This is her fault!”

  “You’ll get in the way,” said the guard who was holding on to him. “If you want her to live, you’ll stay where you are.”

  Jacques went still. Finally, in a tight voice, he said, “You may put me down. I will not do anything to compromise my Michi’s safety.”

  The guard looked at him dubiously. “You know I don’t believe you, right?”

  “Have I done anything—anyth
ing—on this voyage to make you think me a liar? Non. Put me down.”

  “Put him down, Paul,” snapped one of the other guards. This one was taller, bulkier, with a larger Imagine-logo pin on his shirt. That alone denoted him as higher in the pecking order, which was opaque to anyone not actually involved in the chain of command. That was how Imagine wanted things. The more this could look like a normal scientific expedition, the better it would be for everyone. “Dr. Toth is managing things because she’s the one with the best idea of the damn things’ biology. She isn’t doing open heart surgery. She’s trying to figure out how to stop the fucking poison.”

  Someone outside screamed. The sound was shrill and terrified, and quickly cut off. This no longer seemed like a normal scientific expedition.

  Paul put Jacques down. The smaller man took a step to the side, putting himself out of easy snatching distance. His eyes went to the crowd surrounding Michi, who was blocked almost entirely by the bodies around her; he could see the sole of one foot, jerking randomly as seizures continued to rack her body. They seemed less pronounced than they had been. He honestly couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing, or whether it was a sign that she was running out of strength.

  “Fight, Michi,” he whispered. “Fight as you have fought everything since the day you were born. This is not the beast that kills you.”

  A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. He turned. The man who had ordered his release was standing there, looking at him with a mixture of steel and sympathy.

  “We can’t do anything here,” he said. “Want to help me save some lives?”

  “Oui,” said Jacques, relieved beyond coherent thought. This, at least, was something he could do. The sirens were concrete enemies. They could be seen. They could be killed. “Only we had best hurry. Michi will want to join the fight if it is still going when she awakes, and that would not be good for her.”

  The guard, who had gotten a good, clear look at Michi before she was blocked from view, said nothing. He simply nodded, and motioned for Jacques and the others to follow him as he walked toward the door. Jacques, blessedly, came without complaint.