by Chris Howard
“Sure. Thanks.”
Andreden waited for the sheriff’s deputy to leave before turning back to the bay and pulling out his phone. One voicemail from Mark Rasanen, hours ago. He hadn’t felt or heard anything on the rough, full-throttle boat ride in the morning, and hadn’t even thought of checking until now. Thumbing it on, he gave Laeina a glance before pushing the phone against his ear.
“Hey, John. Mark. I think I’ll have something big for you later today, but didn’t want to sit on this until then. Adista may have worked—may have actually been first officer—on a ship that ran cargo and did other tasks for oil platforms in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Problem is, the ship sank mysteriously. Two . . . or two-and-a-half months back. No distress call. The ship was called the Serina Beliz, and she up and vanished one day in normal weather somewhere between Cuba and the US Gulf Coast—Louisiana was where she was headed. There are duty records for Coast Guard and Mexican naval forces looking for wreckage, remains, anything. They came away empty-handed. That’s all I can tell you at the moment. Still digging, but on to something. Expect another call and notes dump end of the day. Talk soon.”
Laeina’s concerned voice broke into his nightmare. “Are you well, Mr. Andreden?”
He was leaning heavily on the railing, eyes closed. He had absently pushed to replay the message. He almost dropped his phone when Laeina’s voice penetrated the haze of sorrow and pain.
He stared at her for a second, then straightened. “Yeah. An investi—” he cleared his throat. “I hired an investigator to research your sister’s disappearance.”
She brightened.
“He’s dead.”
Horror replaced the surprise on her face. She grabbed the railing, almost violently.
“I think—and law enforcement thinks—” He waved at the doors. “That the two are related. The attack this morning and Mark being killed.”
She backed up against the rail, looking hunted, whispering, “I’m sorry.”
“He did find something out about Adista.” That snapped her around.
Andreden put his phone away and relayed everything from Rasanen’s voicemail, staring out at the bay.
Laeina was at the edge of his vision, nodding back at him, pointing at the sky. “We have to go east. The answers are there. Not out here. Do you fly?”
There was something strange about the question, almost as if she was asking if he had wings. “Not going commercial. No guarantee I won’t be followed and killed along the way. The company has aircraft. We’ll take . . . ”
His voice trailed off, and Laeina spun to follow his gaze out to the horizon. “What is it?”
Pointing straight out at the bay, he said. “That’s where we were earlier, the coordinates you gave me.”
“You mean that blue-and-white boat?”
He glanced at her, wondering how sharp her eyesight was. He could just make out the two tones, but it was as if she had instantly locked onto it, almost telescopically.
“Yes, there are divers there. What do you suspect them of doing?”
He tapped the phone at his front pocket. “I passed Martin a scan of your note. With the long and lat you wrote on it. That means they have it.” He pointed out at the boat. “And a couple of hours after Knowledgenix is attacked—where they were looking for me—there’s a boat sitting right on the coordinates where we met this morning.”
Eyes widening, Laeina turned back to the water, leaning halfway over the railing with her hands reaching out. Andreden jumped toward her, thinking she was going to topple over the side, a twenty-foot drop to the docks. Then he followed her line of sight. A wobbly cup of the sea slowly lifted and detached from the rippling surface, flying through the air, right into her waiting hands.
Andreden froze, watching as Laeina cupped her hands, letting the sun’s light flash across the piece of the bay she had captured. She stared down into it for ten seconds, breathing softly. Then she bent forward, dipping her tongue into it.
She screamed, a short burst of fear she cut short, her eyes going wider as she threw the water from her hands, rubbing the wet off on her shirt.
He stepped in to hold her by the shoulders because he thought she was going to collapse, but she shrugged him off, pointing out at the bay, hands shaking. “There!”
Andreden turned to the blue horizon, focusing on the shape of the boat adrift over Laeina’s meet-up coordinates. Darting groups of seagulls veered off to the north. A dark net of shapes rose out of the water, meeting a hundred feet above the boat, scribbling lines across the sky. There were wedges of pale clouds coming through the spaces, but shifting lines of the structure on the far side of the boat thickened—almost organically, closing off the gaps. Angled shapes that couldn’t be larger than a foot across shot out of the water, coiling over the hemispherical structure, shutting out more and more of the light. In seconds the shape went solid and slid beneath the waves.
Nothing but blue and a few angry seagulls circling overhead.
Laeina whispered a word, “Ekhidnadai.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Hands
Bolts of sunlight shot through the sea from the surface, bands of blinding white rolling over the diving bell and divers. Tired as he always was after a dive, Wilraven leaned against one of the cage’s posts, listening to his own breathing: hoarse sawing sounds in his ears.
It took him a minute to notice that no one was speaking over the comm, and hadn’t been for a while. The cranes were still going, lifting the cage, so it wasn’t a complete disaster topside.
“What the hell’s happening up there?”
He glanced over at Telly, shrugging, then leaned out and looked up at the dark outlines of the Irabarren with the Marcene tied up on one side.
Andres came back a few seconds later, apologizing. “Just dealing with a few other things going on. No problem. We’re ready for you, Damien.”
The surface came at them bright and sharp, seawater rolling off their suits, the dive bell jerking and wobbling on its cables. Andres and his team grabbed Damien, helping him with his helmet. Then he was out of his dries and down to his shorts, heading for the Marcene with Dr. Kozcera.
Wilraven pointed at Royce as he was helped out of his helmet. “Go with them, see if the doc or Damien needs anything.” Royce was on the lift team, and medicine wasn’t anywhere near his set of skills. Wilraven just didn’t want Royce around if they found the pod.
Andres caught his eye and then jerked his chin to the east side of Irabarren’s deck, which Wilraven took to mean that Levesgue was over there. “They’re bringing up Aro’s haul from Wendolyn.” Nodding, he said, “Coins, looks like silver. I didn’t get a good look, but that’s where everyone is.”
The captain was pulling his legs out of his suit, turning back to Andres, just about to ask if he had seen anything strange surfacing, when the pod bobbed in the waves next to the Irabarren.
Without thinking, the captain kicked out of the rest of his suit, wheeled, and dived in the sea, the dive master’s hoarse “What the fuck is this?” behind him.
Wilraven surfaced on the far side of the pod, spinning in the water to push it toward the rest of the dive team and the platform’s edge. It felt heavy in the water, and as he kicked he made his way around one side, looking for any kind of handhold, some way to get the thing out of the water without resorting to a sling and crane.
If it could withstand the pressure at twelve hundred meters, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be easy to get into. Getting it onto the deck and opened was the clear first move.
Passing his hands over the pod’s surface just above the waterline, a dinner plate-sized chunk of the shell came away, dropping in the water. He wiped the water from his eyes to get a better look at the pod. Cracks and lines of stress branched in dark lightning lines across the exposed surface; the pod was deteriorating in front of his eyes.
“Help me!” he called to Andres and the others on the surface support team. In seconds there were hands pr
ying pieces of the pod apart. The portion below the water remained intact, but everything exposed to the air was breaking down, allowing them to get inside.
A hiss of air rushed from the wedge of torn-away pod shell, and with it the stink of decomposition. Wilraven closed his stinging eyes, spinning away from it, sliding under the water and coming up on the other side to get fresh air.
The other two in the support team, Levi Fogel and Rossana Garceau, both of them trained divers, were on their knees, retching on the deck. Andres had been joined by Adam DuFour, wearing his old hard hat askew. They were squinting and grimacing against the stench, but they continued to reach down and tear off pieces of the pod, opening it up to the sunlight.
Wilraven climbed up one side of the dive bell, still hanging half in the water, to see what was inside. There was a badly decomposed man in denim pants, work boots, and a rot-stained T-shirt, his fingers whittled down to bone in places, his face sunken in like wet newspaper pasted to a skull, hollows of his cheeks opening into his mouth, a twisted stub of tissue where his nose was supposed to be.
There were two others, a man and a woman, both still alive by the looks of it.
Or, if they were dead, it was a hell of lot more recent than the third member of the pod.
Getting his footing on the dive cage, Wilraven leaned out and kicked the pod around so that the two living—or the less dead of the three—were facing the Irabarren. DuFour leaned down at a difficult angle, reaching for the nearest, and gave Levi a stern look. “Keep your puke down and get over here and help me.”
With Levi hanging off the Irabarren, one leg in the water, the two of them wrangled the first of the survivors out of the pod, a dark-haired man in jeans and a Ron Jon Surf Shop shirt. He was barefoot, and wore a bracelet with links of gold. He was hooked to some intravenous support gear, tubing that ran to the pod with little valve controllers, which snapped apart and disintegrated as if they knew they wouldn’t be needed anymore.
The captain was on his knees, leaning out from the dive bell to spin the pod toward the Irabarren’s edge for the next occupant. So, a weird, otherworldly pod that fell apart when it was exposed to air.
But not aliens.
“Well, that's a relief.”
Wilraven jumped to the Irabarren’s deck to help Andres pull the other survivor out of the pod, a woman with dark hair in a few thick, long braids. She was also dressed like she had been hanging out in the Florida Keys prior to being snatched and placed in the pod, jeans and a T-shirt over a vivid pink bathing suit top. She was also barefoot, and wore a similar gold bracelet.
She was definitely breathing, but it was shallow.
The third fellow, still in a fetal position, bobbed in the quickly deteriorating pod, now almost completely exposed to the air. Wilraven stared down at the corpse for a few seconds, not knowing what to do about him, and then he took in the whole thing, what were clearly spaces for three people around a central structure, organic lumps with flexible tubing coiling out of them, sections of carved parallel slots that curved around the base of a thick stalk and looked to Wilraven like part of a life-support system.
Rebreather?
Whatever it was, apparently it hadn’t worked for the third occupant. Or maybe he’d been fatally injured before he went in.
Wilraven was out of breath. Shaking with the wearying aftereffects of the dive, the effort he had spent on opening the pod, and now the full view of a decomposing body—possibly one of the crew of the Serina Beliz—he just waved toward the Marcene, barely managing a whisper to Levi and Rossana of the support team.
“Get the doc. Now.”
Andres bent down over the woman, his fingers at her throat. He didn’t sound enthusiastic. “I think I feel a pulse. Not much if there is one.”
Wilraven knelt to get a better look at her face. He didn’t recognize her, didn’t know if she had been one of the Serina’s crew. He knew Captain Nersesian's first officer was a woman with an unusual name. He would have to go back into his emails to find out. Later, because he was suddenly angry at the revelation that Levesgue or one of his boys had probably hacked his Mac and would be able to see what he was looking at.
Levi tried to find the other survivor’s pulse. “I got one; it’s like yours. Not much there.” He looked over his shoulder in the direction Rosanna had run. “We got to get the doc.”
DuFour, still standing and looking down into the pod, folded his arms, lifted one finger away to indicate the corpse. “I don’t know what we should do with this one, though. Captain? Whatever it is, it should be done fast.”
Wilraven climbed to his feet to stand beside him, the death and rot turning his stomach. The pod had dissolved down to the waterline and was starting to fill with seawater. “Oh, crap.” He turned to Andres. “You have your phone?”
The dive master tossed it to him. “No signal, no net.”
“Don’t need it.” The captain held it up, thumbed on the camera app, and started taking shots of the pod and its final occupant. He had seven from different heights and angles before the sea took back what had been hers.
There were a few swirling remains from the corpse, and an oily skin that slid across the surface of the water, but everything from the pod had decided to become heavier than water and had vanished from view. Wilraven lowered the phone, gripping it angrily.
It was pretty damn clear.
The Serina sinking wasn’t an accident—someone put these people in the thing and glued it to the deck. For what reason? He had no answers. And Corkran wanted these people to disappear, die somewhere in the deep? They’ve been inside this thing for two-and-a-half months? At twelve hundred meters down? Why?
The reasons and answers had to be locked away in the heads of the two unconscious people on the deck.
All signs of the pod had drifted off or vanished from the sea's surface.
DuFour leaned forward to catch his eye, put one hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze. He kept his serious look and nodded. “I believe that was appropriate, Captain.”
Dr. Kozcera jogged up, with the dive support team trying to catch up. “What is it now?” He didn’t wait for an answer, crouching down beside the nearest of the two unconscious forms on the deck.
Wilraven was about to explain the pod and its contents but got a sharp jab in the back from DuFour that made him glance around for trouble.
Levesgue chose that moment to show up, striding up like he owned the deck.
Wilraven let his building anger flow into his expression, straightening up as he faced Levesgue. He took a menacing step toward him, arms out, one hand curling into a fist, the other slashing the air like a sword. The soldier backed up and went fluidly into a combat stance, eyes locked on his enemy.
The captain reined it in, turning to the south side of Irabarren, where some of the crew were presumably working on the haul brought up by Aro and the ROV Wendolyn.
Wilraven could be reserved, close-mouthed, stern, but he had never been a good liar. Even so, the opportunity presented itself and he went with it, keeping his anger dialed up to feed the reproach he hoped would come convincingly through in the message. He opened it up on Levesgue. “You’re over there with my crew, fucking around with sunken treasure, while the real—and dangerous—work is being done over here!”
He wheeled away from Levesgue as if he hadn’t noticed the guy was ready to kill him.
He gestured angrily, chopping through the air again. “Lev. Rosanna. Bring the gurneys from the Marcene. Now!” He noticed right then that Royce hadn’t returned with the doc, and knew automatically that the asshole had made a detour to see the treasure.
Good.
Wilraven pointed at one of the Shantz brothers—he couldn’t remember which at the moment. “Go with them. I need the gurneys here double time.”
Andres got up and started moving dive gear. He grabbed the captain’s Kirby and dry suit off the deck, stowing them against the tank rack. Diversion was the game. Andres seemed to have picked up on the
captain’s plan, and went with it, making a lot of noise and moving heavy equipment around the deck, with a big spool of air and comm line shoved toward Levesgue to throw some chaos and commotion into the mix.
Kozcera glanced up at the captain with a questioning look—probably Who the hell are these two, and how did they get on board?
Wilraven was on a roll, kept his angry tone. He also didn’t want to give Levesgue the opportunity to get a better look at the newcomers. “Get them on their sides. They went in the drink, sucked in water.” He spun around, arms raised to the sky, thinking of something to say that would shift attention away from the two on the deck or anything that still might be floating in the water. “Where the fuck is the crane?” He waved madly at the dive bell hanging half off the deck next to Levesgue. “Get this shit out of the way!”
Wilraven glanced at the soldier to see if he could read some kind of reaction, but there was nothing there, just focused intensity and no sign of Levesgue believing any of the charade.
Chapter Twenty-three
Thwarting
With the two pod occupants carted up to the Marcene’s medical station and the deck cleared, Wilraven headed immediately for the Irabarren’s galley to talk to the cook. The Marcene had a proper kitchen and space for dining, but the big crane platform went a bit home-brew. He ducked into the shipping container that had been fitted out with a propane stove, sink, stock cabinets, and stainless steel counters.
“Ranav?”
The place was clean and empty, which meant that Ranav, who was actually the Irabarren’s radioman—he just happened to enjoy cooking and he was really good at it—was over in the radio room, across the deck at the platform’s fore.
After the two from the Serina had been carried off and the dive area had been cleaned up, Levesgue had wandered off without a word, which left Wilraven with the clear feeling that the soldier was suspicious, knew something was up, but wasn’t ready to start hurting people yet.