His smile disappeared. “You can’t be serious.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny. Really, though, I think you might be able to help me out.”
He scratched his head. “You really can’t think of another researcher? Maybe an actual caver? Or at least a certified scuba diver?”
“I’m not looking for a person to dive with me,” Val said. “I’m looking for someone who is good with ROVs. You’re the best sub operator out there, Eric. And your vehicle designs are perfect for caves—”
“Wait. Hang on. So you want to explore underwater caves, using an ROV?”
“Right.”
“That simply isn’t done, Val. It’s too hard to remotely maneuver a machine through tunnels, when your camera only faces forward. Every time it’s been tried, the machine gets stuck.”
“Maybe. But what about your work on oil rigs? And in Mexico? You’ve had pretty good luck with that one ROV model . . . what’s it called? Some girl’s name.”
He looked hurt. “Her name’s DORA, Val. You know that. That’s the same vehicle we used last year to film your school of squid.”
Eric had lent other researchers at PLARG his assistance and vehicles for a few projects in the past few years, since he’d started work there. Although he specialized in 3-D and photographic imagery of underwater structures—oil rigs, sea mounts, cenotes—there were safety benefits to using an ROV to study more dangerous or remote undersea animals.
“Sorry, Eric. I wasn’t very involved in that project, despite my name being on it. But I think you can do this. You and DORA.” She smiled.
He frowned and took off his glasses. He was still clearly insecure around women. But she knew he found her attractive, and had purposefully worn a tight sweater and slacks, her citrus-smelling hair spilling onto her shoulders.
He said, “I’ve read about the blue holes there. In the Bahamas, I mean. Geochemical processes create these huge passages off each hole. Did you know they can sometimes extend thousands of feet into the substrate? To other blue holes, and even out to the ocean?”
“Yes. I just learned about them this week. And I’m impressed by how much you know.”
He said, “I learned about them when looking for applications for my ROVs. There are like a thousand of them in the Bahamas alone, but only a quarter of them have ever been explored. Because it’s too dangerous to dive them.”
“But not for an ROV. You could be a pioneer on this, Eric. It could lead to more funding—”
“Well, I had already written them off as too difficult for my vehicles to operate in. But . . . I don’t know.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. It would take time.”
“I’m in no hurry,” she said.
“I’d need to get to know the caves, and work on maneuverability. But if I get her stuck . . .”
“You won’t.”
“Can you pay to replace her if I do?” he asked.
“About that . . . this wouldn’t be a salaried operation.”
Eric laughed nervously. “This just keeps getting better.”
“I’ll provide the lodging, travel expenses, equipment, you name it. Except for the ROV, and your salary.”
“All from your own pocket?”
She nodded. “It’s like a free vacation. And a chance to test the limits of your ROVs.”
“I’d only bring DORA. She’s the best.” He paused. “Does Rob even know about this?”
“No. Not yet.” Val would have to talk to their boss later. “This isn’t sanctioned by PLARG. Eric, let me back up. I told you I’m looking into what may be a new species of cephalopod. My hypothesis is based entirely on a single digital photo. Downloaded from the camera of two divers who went missing.”
“Really? Are they dead?” He leaned toward her.
“Probably. Nobody knows.”
“In a blue hole?”
“Yes.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Like I said. Those holes are dangerous.”
“They went missing in an inland hole on Andros Island. They were apparently exploring an arm off a main cavern, and never resurfaced.”
“How does anyone know what happened, then?”
“Another dive team followed the safety lines in to where one had broken off six hundred feet into the tunnel they were in.... Look, Eric. I’m not an experienced cave diver. And I don’t want to end up like them, or anyone else.” She smiled at him. “But you and DORA can help keep me safe.”
He blushed. “So you want my ROV to do the dangerous work. I get it. You also need samples? Oh-two? Salinity? Bottom composition?”
She shook her head. “Just footage. And 3-D images. I want to see if we can catch a critter on tape, and map the cavern contours. If you can get anything else, it’s a bonus.”
“So who else will be down there with us? No professional cavers, I guess. But at least someone to advise? Or help with logistics?”
She thought of her Uncle Mack, who last she heard still lived somewhere near Tallahassee. The man who’d taught her to dive. They hadn’t talked in years.
She said, “Nobody yet. But I’m working on it.”
“Why not bring your boyfriend? He’s a diver. You’re still with him, right?”
“Sort of. I don’t know. He’s been dealing with some . . . issues. It’s complicated. . . .” She felt herself redden, and ran her hands over her face, through her hair.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s all right. So, are you in? It’s a great opportunity. And you’d be in the Baa-haaa-maaaaas. Sun, warm water, girls. Better than the Central Coast in winter.”
He smiled. “You should have gone into sales. If I agree to do this, when would you want me to start?”
“How fast can you pack your bags?”
CHAPTER 10
The massive submarine plain, divided by a broad trench, was unlike most abyssal depths. Tucked into the topography of an impossibly shallow, expansive bank on which ringing islands rested, the plain lacked a prominent presence of the creature’s enemy—the larger, toothed leviathans that might seek even it as prey. Despite its formidable size, it sensed that, like all its living relatives, it was virtually defenseless against them in the open ocean.
As it blindly felt its way along the bottom, one of its snaking limbs made contact with a slow-moving, armored isopod lumbering along the bottom. It absentmindedly snatched up the oversized, insect-like creature, passing it slowly up to its maw and tucking the morsel into its sharp beak.
The beak closed. The shell cracked.
But the proteins and fluids from the crustacean’s body only made the creature hungrier. More impatient.
A curious and imaginative animal, it quickly became bored if not stimulated. Cruising through blackness but sensing nothing made it anxious. The pangs of hunger from its stomach increased.
A change in the current.
Chemicals, diluted in the flowing water, contacted its receptors. A cocktail of compounds. Wastes and secretions expelled by another animal. Not a dead one, although the organism sometimes scavenged on carrion littering the seafloor. No, this was living.
Prey.
It moved faster.
The scent was faint, and likely some distance away. In haste, the creature lifted off the bottom with a coordinated push of its limbs and contracted its balloon-like body, forcing a volume of seawater behind it as it jetted into the current. Prey was scarce. The animal it sensed ahead could not be overlooked once found. It felt its hearts momentarily cease to beat as its body contracted. It relaxed. It pulsed again, again stopping its hearts.
Swimming came at a cost. Its three hearts, working in concert to transport oxygen through its massive body, ceased to function with each expulsion of water. But it could move many times more quickly over short distances if it was free of the friction of the bottom.
In a rhythmic series of contractions, it hurtled forward into the light current, displacing tons of seawater with its huge form. Every few hundred feet, it
ceased propulsion and drifted back toward the bottom, halting a temporary state of cardiac arrest and allowing its hearts to resume beating.
But it could not rest for long.
As soon as oxygen could replenish the cells in its brain and muscles, it pulsed forward again. The taste of prey continued to increase, driving it forward. It was shallower, up toward mid-water. The great organism angled upward.
A swirl of the current. In it, a much denser mingling of fluids emitted by the animal ahead of it, and the organism again ceased propulsion.
It was close. They were close. Distracted, as they too hunted for much smaller quarry.
From the clicks emitted by the prey above, the creature sensed that there was more than one of them. Two, or more.
Its hearts quickened.
It infrequently encountered this, its prize prey. The animals were fairly large, though much smaller than itself. It had been weeks since it had come across them last. They were one of the only food sources that could now effectively sustain its great body.
It sensed the animals passing overhead, and gathering its muscular limbs beneath it, it thrust its body upward in the dark water. Jetting water to continue rising, it turned its expansive limbs above it and thrust them outward in all directions. Seeking . . . then finding.
Contact.
The tip of one arm struck something solid. The clicks in the water intensified.
The creature immediately twisted and thrust its body in that direction. It spun and plunged all of its limbs blindly toward where it had found the source of food.
But the prey had now become aware of its presence. Its arms swept the water desperately, and one of them again made contact with something. The limb reacted immediately, autonomously, coiling its tip around the undulating animal’s smooth, tapered body. But the prey animal was powerful. It thrust its powerful tail flukes, and despite the deceptive strength of the organism’s arm, the single limb could not maintain purchase on the thrashing body.
The prey escaped.
The organism lashed out its limbs, one final time, toward where it sensed the prey animals were rapidly departing. It swept the black water. Nothing.
The clicks faded. Then it was silent.
The prey was gone.
The creature relaxed its muscles, settling toward the bottom. Soon it again felt the cold current as it neared the unseen plain. It turned into the flowing water.
And continued to hunt.
CHAPTER 11
From inside a submerged metal room, Val watched pale shapes move past in the dark water. She was breathing through a regulator. The water was cold, dark.
Somebody was already gone. Someone she knew. They had taken him, his eyes bulging in terror.
And she would be next.
She exhaled through her regulator, the bubbles scrambling past her face as they hurried toward the surface far above. The ship around her groaned, its metal twisting as it struggled not to sink. She would never make it.
She realized she was holding something. Something small, wrapped in a blanket. An infant? But she was underwater—
A light. From above. It grew brighter. The shapes in the darkness retreated, and an urge to surface overwhelmed her. The light would keep her safe.
She lunged through the door. Kicked for the surface, holding tightly to the warm child in her arms. Exhaling as she ascended, she glanced down. Nothing was following her. She felt a pang of hope. She was going to make it.
The light winked out.
Inside her dive mask, Val’s eyes widened. She was again surrounded by blackness, but now she was in open water. She kicked harder. The surface was just above her. In the dim, she could see the white line of froth where a wave was breaking against an object floating on the water—
Something touched her leg.
She recoiled, but her fin was torn away from her foot. She clawed at the water with her hands, reaching for the surface, desperate, and felt something close around her calf. She screamed into the regulator, pulling the child tightly to her chest. No, they would not take her baby. But then something wrenched at her midsection, and the child was gone.
Val’s eyes popped open, her heart pounding in her chest.
She looked at the people around her, to see if anyone was staring, but they weren’t. It was daytime, in the airport terminal. Just a dream.
She was at the Miami airport. Slouched in the row of blue vinyl seats at her gate, she’d fallen asleep. She looked up and saw that they just started boarding the flight.
She’d spent the last few days with her mom, who still lived in south Florida, in a retirement community now, with a man Val didn’t like. She’d told her mom all about Will, and his problems, and asked for advice. How did you deal with Dad? she’d asked. Her mom, a gentle but weak woman, had simply said: I just avoided him. But Val wasn’t an avoider.
It had been well over a year since she and Will had nearly died that night, in the deep ocean off Southern California, but Val still sometimes had nightmares. Who wouldn’t, after what they’d been through? He’d helped her get through them. He’d been no stranger to many sleepless nights, and to years of nightmares, and he knew how to cope. There had been times when the man had actually known what to say to her.
She remembered how he had saved her. How they had saved each other.
But then, after the unexpected pregnancy, what even the doctor had called a miracle, and then the crushing blow of the miscarriage, things had changed. She couldn’t keep using Will’s past persona and actions, even if they were heroic, as an excuse to stay with him. Will Sturman was what he was. He was drinking again. He would always cope that way. And he would always dwell on the past. On Maria.
Outside the tidy new airport on Andros Island, a baggage handler helped Val’s taxi driver maneuver a large box into the back of the van. They loaded the rest of Val’s personal baggage, some of which spewed over into the backseat, and the handler nodded as Val handed him a few American dollars. He walked away, wiping sweat off his brow.
The subtropical summer heat hadn’t arrived yet, but neither had the rain, and it was pleasantly warm in the Bahamas. Humid, but not damp. Just as it had been in Florida, with her mom. A sweet woman, but meek, she had never moved past the not so surprising early death of Val’s father. Val had so little in common with her mom. But her mom’s little brother, Val’s Uncle Mack, was different.
“You ready?” the driver said.
Val blinked. “Yeah. Sure.”
“How are ya today?”
“Good. How are you?”
“I have no complaints. Hop in.” He smiled at Val, and she couldn’t help but stare at the man’s two upper canine teeth, jutting out past the others almost like blunt yellow fangs.
Inside the van, an ornate beaded cross hung from the rearview mirror, and a photograph of what appeared to be the driver’s family was taped on the dash near his license. Otherwise, the van was quite clean.
“The Twin Palms, please,” Val said.
His smile faded. “All right, den.” He began to pull forward. “Welcome to Andros Island, my friend. First time?”
“Yes. First time in the Bahamas, actually.”
“Well, you come to de best island. And de biggest.”
Val had researched Andros before she left. Although politically recognized as one island, it was technically a hundred-mile archipelago with more overall land area than all the other Bahamas combined. Shaped like the conical part of some enormous, elongated conch shell, it was equally as hollow. Because of its limestone composition and the actions of water moving through it over eons, especially during the Ice Ages when sea levels were hundreds of feet lower, the island had as many holes running beneath its surface as a Swiss cheese. In fact, most of the Bahamas’s blue holes were located on or near Andros.
Probably close to five hundred holes in all, between those offshore and the ones sunk into the island’s surface. Those holes had made Andros an important stopover for privateers and slave
ships, because rare sources of abundant freshwater accumulated almost daily in them, unmixed with the denser seawater below.
The snaggletoothed driver introduced himself as Mars.
“Like the planet?” she said.
“Yes. De big red one.”
As he drove the van down a paved road fringed by dense, uniform greenery, he told her that despite Andros’s size, its residents accounted for only about three percent of the population of the Bahamas. She wondered how much of their low-lying island might be lost in the coming decades, due to a rising sea level. Ford had explained that the urgency to explore the Bahamas’s unique inland holes in particular—freshwater caves that led to saltwater deeper down, where they connected to the ocean through a network of tunnels—was not only because of limited funding, but because a rising ocean would greatly alter their water chemistry. Even a modest sea level rise would ultimately inundate these inland holes with pure seawater.
Mars said, “What you got in de big box?” He thumbed toward the back of the van, and then turned to look out the window as he merged into traffic.
“Scuba stuff.”
“Ahhh. So you a diver, den. We still have alotta divers down here. Before Oceanus, dat about all we had for tourism. Dat and de bonefishin’. You diving our blue holes too?”
She wondered what he meant by “too.” She said, “Yes. Some of them, anyway.”
Mars reached cruising speed, driving on the left side of the road, despite the fact he also drove from the left side of the car, American style. Val figured it must be an American-made car, although these islands made up a former British colony. Cars headed the other way whizzed past her arm outside the window, just feet away on the narrow road.
“You will have much to see. Here on da island dere are tousands a dem holes. We call Andros ‘The Sleeping Giant.’”
“Why?”
In the rearview mirror, Mars’s eyes narrowed. “Because it lives. It breathes. It’s alive.”
Val smiled. “Is that supposed to scare me?”
He shrugged. “No. You look like a smart woman. Just don’t do nuttin stupid, ya hear?”
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