The Ocean Dark

74

Alena Boudreau stood amidst the jagged rubble at the front of the grotto, where the surf roared in and out, and tried to get a sense of what the grotto had looked like prior to the collapse of its outer wall. At this corner of the island, a secondary volcano mouth had opened, creating the craterlike bowl. The lava outflow must have been massive, building up a small, jagged hill at the shore. Over the years, the lashing of waves had caused slabs of rock to break off and slide into the surf like the calving of an iceberg. What they now saw as a grotto had once been a black volcanic bowl. Over time, more and more of the mountain of volcanic rock had broken off and tumbled into the water, until the side of the bowl had collapsed, slicing an entrance into the chamber within. The tides had continued that work, carving and smoothing the opening and creating the grotto.

Or so it seemed. Ridge had confirmed within minutes of their arrival that ordinary erosion had not caused the side of the bowl to give way. A hurricane might have done the damage, but he had warned her that a volcanic tremor might have been the culprit, and that worried her. Aside from the steam that rose from various vents and caves and drifted up in some spots that seemed nothing but thick vegetation, the island gave every sign of being dormant. But Ridge would have to be the judge of that.

Alena took another step back, watching her team. Men and women from the Hillstrom worked quickly and efficiently. Several sailors were busy photographing every angle of the grotto. Others dredged human skulls and other bones from among the shells in the narrow grotto opening. Another team, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Cornelius Sykes — a serious man Alena had instantly warmed to — lined the top rim of the grotto and manned the lines from which others hung into the darkness below.

The descent team had gone to work immediately upon her arrival, planting explosives around the inner walls of the bowl, deep in the chamber, and the walls of the grotto. She liked working with experts, and relied upon Sykes’s assertion that his explosives man knew what he was doing. Ridge had examined the geology and agreed that the deep placement of explosives, along with others higher up on the walls, would bring the whole thing down upon itself, filling the hole and closing the grotto off from the ocean for years. According to Ridge, it might be centuries before erosion brought the ocean back in — if ever.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it would do.

“Dr. Boudreau, take a look at this,” Ridge said.

She turned to find him crouched, staring at a chunk of volcanic rock among the rubble. The slab was inscribed with symbols and runic-style carvings unlike anything she had ever encountered before, and she bent slightly to study it more closely.

“What do you make of it?” Ridge asked.

“You’re the geologist,” she replied, straightening up. “What do you make of it?”

He uttered a soft laugh. “I study rocks, doesn’t make me an anthropologist.”

“I hired you, Paul, remember? I know what’s on your resume. You’ve studied tile mosaics in Pompeii and everything from Mayan ruins to hieroglyphics.”

“Yes, but all from a geological perspective, mostly in helping to date the writings or art in question. I’m no expert on the societies that made them.” Ridge crouched and traced his fingers over the symbols. “Did you find anything like this in the other two habitats where you’ve located these things?”

Alena shook her head. “No. Plenty of evidence that humans had died on those two islands, but no sign that any had ever lived there.”

Ridge remained in a crouch but he had fallen silent. From the way he held his head, cocked slightly to one side, she recognized that he was deep in contemplation. But Dr. Ridge tended to work things out aloud, and his silence troubled her.

“What is it, Paul?”

He looked up at her, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Why are you so sure that people did this?”

Alena stared at him, staggered by the suggestion. Could the sirens have engraved these symbols in the black stone? For several seconds, she let the question linger, but then the arguments began cascading through her mind.

“The alternative is impossible,” she began.

Ridge stood and glanced up into the grotto, then turned toward her again. “Impossible?”

She nodded, relenting. “All right, highly improbable, then. Think about what I just told you. We discovered no writings, no engravings of any kind on either of the other two islands where I’ve encountered these things. But more than that, nothing I’ve seen so far has indicated that they have any kind of culture. They don’t build, or create anything resembling society as far as we can tell. Humans are the only species on Earth with written language, and it’s a huge leap to think these things are that developed. They seem utterly savage, and we’ve never seen them use tools of any kind.”

“But?” Ridge persisted.

Alena bit her lip for a second, studying the engraved stone. “But these writings may well be ancient, and we have no way of knowing what they were like a couple thousand years ago.”

Ridge nodded. “Yeah, but you’re probably right.”

“Almost certainly.”

“Good. For some reason, I’m really spooked by the idea of them being able to write,” Ridge said. “So, back to my question. What do you make of it?”

Alena looked up at the grotto. “Possibly a burial chamber, but there’s no way to tell. The engravings could be story art, like cave paintings, though that doesn’t feel right to me. Without more research and at least some translation, we can’t know.”

“What about worship?” Ridge asked.

“The thought had occurred to me,” Alena replied. “If people did live here alongside the sirens at some point, they wouldn’t be the first predators to be worshipped by the humans they preyed on.”

“A lovely thought,” Ridge said.

Alena smiled. “Hey, you asked.”

“And on that note, I’ve got to get back topside. You coming? I’ve got a lot to show you.”

Alena frowned. “A lot of what?”

Ridge gestured at the rock. “There’s plenty more where this came from.”

Alena took that in, then turned to one of the sailors taking pictures. “I want this rock.”

The man, a heavily muscled Latino with bright, intelligent eyes, turned his camera toward the carvings she had been looking at.

“No, not a photo,” she said. “I want the rock itself. Please have it brought back to the Hillstrom.”

The sailor hesitated, bulky camera in his hands reminding Alena of crime scene photographers.

“I know it’s not your assignment,” she told him, “and I’m not making it your assignment. But I am tasking you with making certain that it gets done. Handle it for me, please.”

Alena spoke to him politely and as charmingly as possible, but she also made sure that he knew that it wasn’t a request.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Satisfied, she nodded to Ridge, and the two of them started to pick their way across the rockfall toward the other side of the grotto as the low surf rolled in around them. In the clear blue water, she would have seen any sign of movement, and the creatures would not come into the shallows while the sun still shone. Still, as they crossed, she treaded carefully on the rocks.

“Watch your step,” she warned Ridge.

“Oh, I’m watching. No way am I putting even a toe in.”

It couldn’t have been any later than three p.m., so night was still hours away, but as they moved into the cooler shadow of the rock face, the presence of darkness unnerved her. The last time she had encountered these things — they had called them Bio-Form CMA-2 then, the CMA standing for Carnivorous Marine Amphibian — the sirens had left skeletons arrayed on the sandy shore of a South Pacific island as if to frighten people away. Some of those skeletons had been her friends, taken the day before, right out through the wooden hull of their research ship — an attack that young David had barely survived. Bio-Form CMA-2 had stripped the flesh and muscle from their bones in a single night.

These things — the ones the people from the Antoinette had christened “sirens”—would be Bio-Form CMA-3. She wondered how long they had been here, reproducing in the warren of watery caves in the subterranean heart of the island, until the outer wall of the chamber collapsed and freed them to spill out into the ocean. She could not believe that any single generation of a species could survive thousands of years, though David had suggested that volcanic activity might have woken them from some hibernating slumber.

Not that it mattered much to her how they managed to be alive. Alena wanted the sirens dead. If she could preserve one for study, and the Department of Defense could intuit or reverse engineer some deadly, controllable biowar effort from the creatures, that would be on their heads. For her own part, she knew she had to exterminate the things, to keep anyone else from dying like Harry Oliver and the others had, all those years ago.

David, though, wanted them dead for an entirely different reason. Ever since his first glimpse of Bio-Form CMA-2, he had suffered from terrible recurring nightmares of drowning, during which he felt the presence of the things in the water. In his dreams he never saw them, but knew they were nearby, about to tear into him, and in those dreams he would hope to die from drowning before they touched him.

“This way,” Ridge said. “You need a hand?”

Alena glanced up the steep, rough slope that would take her to the top rim of the grotto, where she spotted Tori Austin and Agent Hart watching her team at work.

“I’ll race you,” she said, not knowing whether to be pleased that Ridge thought her fit enough to make the climb, or to grumble about having to make it.

You can decide when you get to the top, she told herself, depending on how your knees hold out.

But her knees were just fine, and they made the climb in a handful of minutes. Tori and Agent Hart greeted them at the top, and then Alena turned to Ridge.

“All right,” she said. “What’ve you got?”

Ridge stepped right up to the edge of the rim — which, here, sloped upward toward the back wall of the bowl — and gestured below. Alena followed his lead and noted with surprise that crude steps led downward. Once they might have been more substantial, before time and the elements had worn them away. The steps led down into the bowl.

And it truly was a bowl, sloping inward toward the center. The front of the grotto, where the oceanward wall of the chamber had collapsed, was only about twenty feet across. But that represented merely the opening in the bowl. The bowl itself stretched a good eighty feet from side to side. Twenty feet down from the rim, the slope began. But at its center — at the bottom of the bowl — there was only open space. A fifty-foot-wide drop into darkness, because far below the bowl itself was the yawning mouth of a massive cave.

Ridge pointed toward the grotto opening, where the waves rolled in and out.

“Notice the water level there,” he said. “The tide’s coming in slowly, and right now the surf is fighting an uphill battle to get into the sub-chamber.”

“The cave,” Alena corrected.

Ridge nodded. “Exactly. It rolls up into the grotto, then back out. But when the tide gets higher, the water reaches the mouth of the cave and pours into it. Not long ago, let’s say less than a century, but maybe even less than that, the water had no way of getting in or out. There was this upper bowl, and then the lower cave, the sub-chamber.”

Alena looked at him. “We’ve established all this, Paul.”

He smiled. Ridge did not smile often. He started carefully down the worn steps toward the bowl below and waved for her to follow. Alena hesitated. She trusted her balance and her own feet, but not those stairs.

“I’ve already been down here,” Ridge reassured her. “Just watch your step and you’ll be fine.”

Warily, Alena started down. She risked a glance at the Navy personnel who had set up on the bottom shelf of the bowl. They had sunk anchors into the rock and were playing out ropes for the descent team, who had gone over the edge and lowered themselves partially into the sub-chamber — down in the dark where the sirens would be waiting out the sun — and it struck her how much courage that had to have taken.

Of course, none of them had ever seen the creatures.

But Tori and Agent Hart had. Alena glanced up at the rim and saw that they were not following her and Ridge down to the bowl.

“You two aren’t coming?” she asked.

Tori shook her head. “I got you here. I don’t need to get any closer.”

Alena smiled. “I don’t blame you.”

As she picked her way carefully down those rough-hewn stairs, she let the fingers of her left hand trail on the inner wall of the bowl to steady her. Ridge reached the last step and paused to wait for her on the shelf of black, sloping rock that formed the bottom of the bowl. Movement off to her right caught her eye and she glanced over to see Lieutenant Commander Sykes working his way around. The powerfully built officer moved purposefully back and forth from the sailors who were planting charges on the walls of the bowl to those who were at the edge of the shelf, anchoring the members of the descent team.

Sykes had a cool efficiency that she admired, not only doing his own job but making sure everyone else knew how to do theirs, pausing to make a quiet recommendation or adjustment here and there. In that fashion, he made his way around the open hole at the center of the bowl, so that by the time Alena reached the last step, Sykes had arrived at a spot perhaps a dozen feet away, where he checked the safety of several black ropes that vanished over the edge. Down below, the descent team would be setting other charges, and a kind of calm swept over Alena. With Sykes there, and the speed of the sailors working in the bowl and the sub-chamber below, they’d be out of the grotto in three-quarters of an hour at most. By then, many of the island’s other caves would also have been lined with explosives.

This would work. A grim satisfaction took hold of her as she followed Ridge along the inner wall.

“I expected to find more of the writing on these walls,” Ridge said, “but I confess I’m amazed by the extent.”

At first glance, Alena had trouble making out much detail thanks to the angle of the sun, but when she shifted position, cutting the glare, she understood why Ridge had made her climb the hill and risk the stairs into the bowl. Whatever the language of the island’s original inhabitants, it had been carved into an incredible expanse of glassy black rock at least fifteen feet high, and in apparent panels six to eight feet wide that stretched into the shadows at the rear of the bowl, and perhaps even around to the other side. There were images as well, and — though absent of any Egyptian influence — they communicated thoughts almost as well as hieroglyphics. Perhaps, after some study, they would prove even more eloquent than the Egyptian picture-writing.

“Alena?” Ridge prodded, awaiting her reaction.

She unclipped the two-way radio from her belt. “Lieutenant Commander Sykes—” she began, before remembering that the officer was right behind her. She turned to see him glancing down at his own radio, then up at her. A moment’s irritation creased the corners of his eyes, but then he must have seen something in her face, for he strode quickly over to join them.

“What is it, Doctor?” Sykes asked as he approached.

“The photographers who are documenting this,” Alena said, gesturing to the wall. “I need them all up here on the bowl, and right now. I want pictures of every mark on these walls that nature didn’t put here.”

Sykes started to balk. “Is that really—”

Alena shot him a hard look — one that brought him up short. “This is the third time in my life I’ve encountered creatures like this, and I don’t have any better idea of their history than I did the first time. What’s on these walls could give us clues to finding other habitats, if they have any, and to exterminating them for good. For science, for history, and for national security, I need a record of all of this. And since we’re going to blow it all to hell in a couple of hours—”

“I get it,” Sykes said, holding up a hand in surrender. “Sorry, Dr. Boudreau. I wasn’t thinking.”

He unclipped his own radio and started barking orders. His gaze was fixed on a point behind her, and Alena turned to see that curiosity had gotten the better of Tori and Agent Hart, who were working their way down the stairs and trying to get a glimpse of what Ridge had called her up to see.

Alena turned to Ridge. “Paul, I want rubbings of as much of this as you can get before we have to dust off.”

He nodded but did not turn, his focus entirely on the wall markings. “You got it.”

The explosion shook the entire grotto, from sub-chamber up through the bowl to the rim. The stone shelf bucked beneath Alena, knocking her off her feet, and she let out a scream as the black rock splintered and gave way beneath her. A cloud of dust billowed up through the old volcano’s throat and though the blast had muffled her hearing, the shouts and curses reached her even as she fell in a tangle of limbs and stone, flailing for a ledge that had been part of the broken shelf.

She held her breath as she fell, and a tiny, incoherent prayer filled her mind.

Then she hit the water and plunged into darkness, and the real fear began.