Kevin Anderson - Artifact

She continued her dive down to the hole. To Simon.

Just past 120 feet, she found the bottom.

She was very close to where the drill had entered the seabed. Swimming by, she noticed that the test well itself had been sealed with concrete. The entrance to the cave couldn’t be more than eighty feet away. Nitrogen narcosis would normally kick in if she lingered at this depth, but this dive was not about lingering. She had to find the cave and take an express train as deep as it went. Once there she’d have to quickly cut back her oxygen in time to prevent problems. That way at least she wouldn’t go crazy with the rapture of the deep. Although, she thought, she could probably do with a little rapture about now.

Right about then, she spotted a tall marking pole left by the drilling team at the edge of an undersea rift. The markers were usually used to track where samples were taken, or places to test for underground oil. In this case, it was a pointer to Simon’s destination, the underwater cavern.

She didn’t like cave dives, not at normal depth, and certainly not at a tech-dive depth. Once you were inside, your options closed. You lost both light and maneuvering room. One of her best friends once did a deep underwater cave in the Yucatán. They fished him out dead the next day.

She looked at the narrow entrance. Tight, but roomy enough to swim in.

Damn you, Simon, she thought. You should have known better. You shouldn’t be in there. You’re too old; it’s too dangerous.

Time to cut the oxygen—and fast. She reached behind and lowered the oxygen to below 20 percent, while bringing the nitrogen and helium mix up an equal amount. She took a breath. The air tasted a little metallic but otherwise fine.

Finding no further reason for delay, she kicked into the mouth of the cave. Her small light barely caught the walls, and she heard the clank as her tanks scraped the top. The cave twisted and turned, and she tried to check her depth gauge, but there was no room to reach behind and grab it.

She felt the familiar pull of a deep dive: stress, anxiety. It’s okay, she thought. Calm down. Focus. No problems here. I’ll just hope I have a good air cocktail going for this depth, because if it isn’t good, it could be too late for me to tell. Disorientation will hit, confusion, and it’ll be underwater mouse-in-a-maze time. And the maze always wins.

Stop it, Peta! Focus! she screamed inside her head.

She came to a fork in the tunnel and looked around. No Simon, no bubbles. Which way to go? One hole narrowed. No way he could have made it through that one. She looked at the other; the walls were smooth, almost polished. That seemed strange. They should have been rough, with coral fingers reaching out like the ones behind her. Instead they looked shiny. She wondered if it could be something volcanic.

She checked her watch as she swam down the strange channel. Ten minutes. That meant Simon had been down what? Fifteen or twenty minutes? He should be on his way back.

Ahead of her, the cave widened into darkness. She kicked slowly, tentatively, up to the mouth of the opening. When she was practically in the opening she became aware of a distant glow.

Using her headlamp to pick up what it could, she saw an enormous chamber, an underwater grotto. A cathedral, but unlike any she’d seen on her own dives or in pictures. It was as if someone had carved a giant, smooth bubble seventy or eighty feet below the seabed.

She shone her light on the glow—much closer now—and picked up another diver.

Simon floated near the far wall. Not moving. Suspended like a lifeless toy in a child’s fish tank.

Peta stayed at the entrance to the cavern, looking at the body of the man she’d come to save. Damn it, Simon, she thought. Why didn’t you let me talk you out of this?

When she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer, she tilted her body and gave a few small fin kicks to sail nearer to him. His lamp pointed down, dully, at the same meaningless spot, but the reflected glow bounced onto the walls. Peta let herself look up for just a moment to see the strange markings on the smooth surface.

They were…she searched for a word.Incomparable . There was nothing she had ever seen that even came close to them. She thought of the markings she’d seen on Mayan tombs, but they were like cave drawings. These weren’t primitive. They were stylized, with odd shapes that could have been metallic devices and—

She stopped. There was no time for sight-seeing. She reached out and turned Simon around. His eyes were wide open and had bulged, probably as he struggled to breathe, getting the mix wrong. She checked his tanks. They had plenty of air and looked like they were set to a good ratio of oxygen to nitrogen-helium blend. That meant it must have been his heart. It could easily have given out on him. The tension, the pressure.

Looking down, she saw that he had something clutched in his hand. A sharp chill ran through her. The material looked similar to the pendant that Arthur had given her. She reached out and tried to pry Simon’s gloved hand from the object, but his fingers were locked tightly around it. For one grisly moment, she wondered whether she’d have to use her knife to pry off his fingers, but one by one they snapped back like catches on a sunken treasure chest. The object tumbled free, spinning; Peta reached out and caught it.

As her fingers closed around it, she had the same sense of the heat being drawn from her skin as she’d had when she held the piece Arthur had given her. Stranger yet was the fact that the shape looked as if her piece could fit right into it…whateverit was. And she could see places for other pieces to fit, as well.

If McKendry survived and could find Selene and her piece of the artifact, that plus Peta’s and Arthur’s and the one Frikkie still had could be put together to make—what?

There was no time to think about that now.

She looked to see whether Simon had carried a specimen bag and spotted a mesh bag floating empty around his dive belt. Reaching out, she slowly untied it, taking care not to expend too much energy. That could change her breathing rate and—worse—make Simon’s buoyant body spin toward her.

Suddenly, she didn’t want to stay in this bizarre cave for another minute. The place gave her the creeps, especially with Simon’s body hanging there under the strange wall paintings. Briefly, she debated taking Simon’s body with her. According to her dive watch, she had a more than adequate window of time for her return—with or without Simon. Assuming, of course, that she missed the shark on the way.

She stuck the artifact into the bag, thinking, I’m going to leave you here, Simon. I wish I could have made it here in time to stop you, to save you, but you knew the risks. My guess is that this is how you chose to die.

Her contemplation was cut short by the sensation that there was something else in the cavern, and it was coming closer.

Eduardo Blaine watched carefully while Peta’s sleek form disappeared into the clear water. He followed her progress until the only sign of her that remained was the scattered trail of bubbles streaming to the surface.

When he was sure she was far enough down not to notice what happened topside, he moved to the front of the boat, peeled off his clothes, and slipped on a wet suit. He looked over at the man on the other boat watching him.

“You can go.”

“No, man. Mr. Brousseau told me—”

“I’ll bring him back. Don’t worry. Of course, if you’d rather wait for the Obeahman to send you an invitation….”

Blaine looked the man right in the eyes. The Trini blinked. He understood the message: Move or die. He quickly turned away and started his boat’s engine.

Satisfied, Blaine looked back down at the telltale bubbles on the surface. Assuming the currents weren’t pushing them around too much, they told him that Peta was angling away from the support leg and moving toward the center, where the test well would be.