Nick Cutter - The Deep

Al craned her head around to see if Luke was taking it all in—Luke diverted his gaze. He’d been focused on the scar that went all the way around the back of Al’s neck, a pink band that petered out at her right earlobe. It looked as though someone had tried to slit her neck, starting at the back. If she noticed him looking, she was tactful enough not to mention it.

“Who paid for all this?” Luke said.

“Everyone who earns a paycheck,” Al said. “You, me, the butcher, the baker. Not just American greenbacks, either: Japanese yen, British pounds, Chinese yuan, German deutsche marks.”

“That would be euros,” said Felz, fussily. “They replaced the deutsche mark in 2002.”

“Thank you, Dr. Felz, for your scrupulous attention in regards to matters of international currency.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Anyway,” Alice went on, “what you see here is the whole world, holding hands. We got a lot of support from private enterprise, too. CEOs, CFOs, magnates, philanthropists. Everyone’s smashing their piggy banks. Everybody’s lost something to this by now, y’know? And what’s money worth if there’s no future to spend it in?”

“Why is it all Americans, then? I mean, down on the Trieste ? Dr. Felz said the researchers are all from the U.S.”

“I guess because America always rides point,” Al said.

They stopped beside a compact submarine. Fifteen feet long with a porthole window at one end. It lay in a massive canvas hammock. It looked like a huge lozenge—a vitamin pill for Neptune.

“ Challenger 5,” Al told Luke. “It’s being prepped for your descent.”

Luke said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have no idea how to operate this.”

“Yeah, that would take some serious training. Thankfully, you’ll be in the company of a skilled pilot.” Al thumped her chest. “Like I said, tight squeeze.”

She leaned over the seat, jammed her face close to Luke’s own.

“Breathe on me.”

“What?”

“I said, breathe on me. Come on, don’t be shy.”

Luke did as she asked, too startled to refuse. Al sniffed.

“Okay, good. Nothing worse than being cooped up for hours with a guy with bad breath.”

Luke exhaled, chuckling now. “I’ve got Tic Tacs in my bag.”

She winked. “Even better.”

If I have to journey eight miles beneath the water’s surface, Luke thought, this Alice Sykes seems as fine a companion as any.

“Dr. Westlake came up in Challenger 4,” Al said. “It’s still under quarantine.”

Luke said, “Dr. Westlake?”

“Dr. Felz hasn’t mentioned him yet?” Al darted a glance at Felz, a darkness settling into her eyes. “He was the third member of the team. Dr. Cooper Westlake. He was a—remind me what was his job again, Doctor?”

“Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.

“I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”

Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”

“I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.

The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.

“What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look… but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”

“What happened to him?” said Luke.

Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.

“It’s still our world down there, Dr. Nelson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it is , but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”

“It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”

Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.

THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLDon the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.

The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.

“Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”

They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.

“Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the Trieste . The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.

“Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.

“There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then… well, Westlake went off the grid.”

Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.

“Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing… or what was being done to him.”

Done to him? Luke thought.

“We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”

“Current ring?”

“An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”

“And you expect me to go down into that?”

“The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “ One , because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and two , because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning, Challenger 4, which had been docked to the Trieste , began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.

“A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the Trieste altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”