“They’re shaking hands,” reported Olivia. “Victoria looks like she’s about to pee her pants, she’s so excited. That makes sense. Dr. Toth is kind of a big deal.”
“Dr. Toth being …?” Ray prompted. “Talk to the camera, Liv. The camera needs to hear from you.”
“World’s foremost scientific expert on mermaids—no, really, that’s an actual thing an actual human decided to do with their life, and I guess I’m not one to talk, since I’m out here dressed like an off-brand Emma Frost to avoid Marvel’s copyright lawyers—and pretty much the only person who turned down a spot on the Atargatis, which means she’s also incredibly sane. If this ship starts going down, get next to Dr. Toth. She’ll glare the water into staying away from you.”
“I don’t think that’s physically possible.”
“But won’t it be fun to find out?”
On the dock, Dr. Toth had extricated herself from Victoria and was handing her equipment to the porters. More cars were appearing, faster now, like the first two arrivals had broken some sort of invisible seal. Victoria kept hold of her mass spectrometer like it was her baby and she was terrified of what anyone else might do; Luis annoyed the porters by trying to help them, and Dr. Toth …
Dr. Toth paced toward the Melusine, hands by her sides, eyes raking along the sides of the great ship. Whatever she saw there didn’t seem to impress her; her scowl never wavered, as etched into her face as the lines between her eyebrows and at the corners of her mouth. Ray zoomed in on her, trying to get a decent shot. The light must have glinted off his lens when he moved the camera, because Dr. Toth turned to look directly at him, raising an eyebrow in silent judgment before she calmly, deliberately flipped him off and walked back toward Victoria and Luis.
“Shit,” said Ray, lowering the camera. “We’ve got a postproduction problem child.”
“Hmm?”
“Dr. Toth just gave me the bird.”
Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Well. Isn’t that just dandy.”
Imagine wasn’t a cheap company; it was, as it had always been, willing to throw money at projects that needed it, providing the need was genuine and not a case of mismanagement or embezzling. That didn’t mean the accountants appreciated spending money when they didn’t have to. Postproduction problem children did things on camera to make it harder to use the footage. They swore or made obscene gestures or exposed parts of their body that weren’t supposed to appear on prime-time network television. They required that footage be censored, whether it was with beeps or blurs, and that took both time and money, and could call down the wrath of the programming directors. Especially when those problem children appeared on a supposedly “unedited” program, like this one. Every blur was a reminder to the audience at home that this “unfiltered reality” was as carefully staged and managed as any scripted show.
It wasn’t good. If Dr. Toth was one of their senior researchers, she was going to have to appear on camera, and if she was going to make a habit of flipping off the lens, she was going to need to be managed.
“Isn’t this going to be fun?” muttered Ray, and kept filming.
Car after car arrived on the dock below the Melusine. Imagine porters swarmed from vehicle to vehicle, grabbing luggage and equipment, tagging it with the appropriate markers—green for private bags, which would be piled up in the dining hall for individual passengers to collect once they knew where their bunks were located; red for public labs; yellow for private labs—before dragging it away, leaving the people behind. There was a horrifying amount of luggage. Everyone Imagine had selected to sail with the Melusine was a professional, from chemists and biologists to radar and sonar technicians. There were analysts, technicians, even administrative assistants who’d be helping to coordinate the research being done on the boat. That didn’t mean any of these people had known exactly what to pack for a task of this size, or really knew what they were getting into.
A battered Jeep pulled up to the staging area, disgorging two people in khaki uniforms that would have looked more reasonable on a jungle safari than they did at a suburban dock. The shorter of the two slammed the driver’s side door, put his hands on his hips, and eyed the ship speculatively.
“Think she’ll float?” he asked. He had a French-Canadian accent to go with his fish-belly complexion, and the easy stance of a man who’d never met a challenge he couldn’t handle, one way or another. A slouch hat dangled halfway down his back, held in place by a rawhide cord.
“If she doesn’t, this’ll be the easiest payday we’ve ever had,” said his companion, a striking woman of Japanese descent. She was easily a foot taller than he was, and her hair was cut in a no-nonsense buzz. Her accent was Australian, thick enough to smear on toast. She removed a long case from the back seat of the Jeep before waving the porters imperiously toward the vehicle. “Careful not to drop anything, all right? About half of it explodes if you annoy it, and it’s all been sanctioned by Imagine, so no ‘accidentally’ forgetting to carry my grenades.”
The nearest porter stopped in the act of reaching for a box. “Which one has the grenades?” he asked, in a strained tone.
The woman flashed a gregarious smile. “Not telling,” she said. “If you don’t drop anything, it shouldn’t matter.”
The porter blanched and grabbed the box, scurrying away. The woman laughed as the man gave her a reproachful look.
“Now, Michi, what did we say about torturing the hired help?”
“That it’s damned funny, and I’m not going to stop unless I’m given a solid reason to do so.”
The man opened his mouth like he was going to say something. Then he stopped and grinned. “Oh, right,” he said. “That’s exactly what we said. Let’s go meet the locals.” Together, they turned and started toward the Melusine, leaving the porters to carry their things. They had enough weapons on them to survive until they were settled. They always did.
Jacques and Michi Abney weren’t the best big game hunters in the business. The best would never have considered going on television, allowing their faces to be plastered across vidscreens and billboards the world over. Every year brought another layer of pointless regulations to the hunt, and sometimes having a recognizable face was the difference between successfully bribing a guard to let you into the wildlife preserve and being arrested on sight as a poacher. It was all a bunch of tree-hugging bullshit as far as Jacques was concerned. The big game would be gone outside of zoos in another twenty years whether he took some of it home or not. The white rhino was proof of that. All the conservation efforts in the world, and for what? So the last wild male could die of old age, surrounded by armed guards he couldn’t understand, as much a captive of mankind as any zoo-bound specimen? At least the animals in the zoos didn’t know what they were missing.
No. Better to give the beasts the honor of a good, clean death while the wild was there to witness it. If there was a heaven for lions, Jacques had sent six of them there all by himself, and he fully expected to send another dozen to join them before he got too old to deal with the expense and difficulty of the veldt. It was the least he could do for the big animals that had brought him so much joy and given so much purpose to his life.
Michi wasn’t as much of one for lions and the like. She was allergic to cats, and thought safaris were unhygienic. Her passion was for the sea. She came from a whaling family that had hunted whales off the coast of Japan for centuries. It was only during the last hundred years that foreign do-gooders had insisted the whaling industry cut back, triggering a series of events that had led her parents to immigrate to Australia, where she’d grown up surfing, swimming, and shark fishing. Bringing in a great white wasn’t the same as taking down a blue whale, but it was close enough. And now the bastards were trying to restrict that as well, saying the seas were in a delicate phase and needed humanity to act as “stewards” to the animals that remained.
They’d met on a fishing expedition, her angling for her first orca, him looking to bring home a leopar
d seal. It had been love at first sight. Michi was open about and proud of her hunting background, and it hadn’t been long before Jacques was right there with her, trading anonymity for celebrity and the opportunities it carried. He might never sneak into another restricted wildlife park, but he’d been called by quite successful zoos to put down violent or unneeded animals—and with the amount of security in most remaining animal sanctuaries, a hunt through a good animal habitat could be better than the real thing. It was like using porn in place of traditional foreplay. Sure, it might ruin you for the old way, but since when had mankind ever been focused on the old way? Onward and upward, that was the ticket.
Imagine was paying them half a million dollars, each, to be on board the Melusine, talk to the cameras, and take out anything that attacked it. Best-case scenario, nothing happened, and they walked away a combined cool mil richer, making mocking noises about mermaid hunters who liked to throw their money away. Worst-case scenario, monsters from the deep tried to take out the ship, and they got famous beyond their wildest dreams for being the first humans to kill a mermaid live on camera. (It was difficult to call that outcome “worst.” Jacques had actually salivated at the thought of killing something out of myth, and the sex they’d had the night they signed their contracts had been incredible. This trip was going to be good for them.)
Luis and Victoria were still standing, talking to Dr. Toth, when the bounty hunters walked by. Luis’s head whipped around, eyes narrowing in wary disbelief.
“Luis?” Tory touched his arm. “What’s wrong?”
“I know them,” he said. “They have a web series about killing things.”
Dr. Toth rolled her eyes. “Of course they do,” she muttered. “God forbid Imagine send out a second ship without making a show of force. The first voyage had women paid to dress up like mermaids, ours gets hired killers. Ever wish you were on the Atargatis instead?”
“Every day,” said Tory.
Luis was just getting warmed up. “They crashed a Bigfoot convention last year. Came in with a dead orangutan and started laughing at everyone for being stupid enough to think we could share a continent with a hominid primate without them catching and killing it. People were shouting, crying, one guy threw up … It was a mess. It was just a mess. Why are they here? They shouldn’t be here.”
“They’re here to kill mermaids,” said Dr. Toth. “Imagine lost one voyage. They’re not going to want to lose a second. It would look like carelessness, and if there’s one thing James Golden doesn’t want to be remembered for, it’s carelessness. It’s—” She cut herself off in the middle of her sentence, eyes going wide and face going pale. “Excuse me,” she said, shoving her valise at Tory.
Caught off guard, Tory took the valise. She held it awkwardly as Dr. Toth ran across the dock, weaving around porters and passengers alike, toward a man who was getting out of his car. He was tall, handsome in a carefully average way, wearing a tailored suit—her own eyes widened in unconscious parody of Dr. Toth’s expression.
“Isn’t that the man who broke into our lab? Mr. Blackwell?”
Luis squinted. “Looks like it,” he said.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Whatever it is, Dr. Toth doesn’t look happy about it.” She was yelling and gesturing emphatically. They were too far away for her words to carry, but they didn’t need to: her posture was telegraphing her displeasure. Luis wrinkled his nose. “I would not want her looking at me like that. Think she’s going to ask us to help her hide a body?”
“Maybe. I hope not. But maybe.”
Mr. Blackwell said something to Dr. Toth, raising his hands, palms outward, in what may have been intended as a soothing gesture. She responded by slapping them away, pointing to the Melusine, and continuing to yell.
“Think they know each other?”
Tory snorted. “If they don’t, I think they’re about to.”
“Seriously, though, that’s not the way you yell at some corporate shill. I’ve seen my dad yell at plenty of people who work for him, and there’s a different tenor to it. Like, he’s mad, but it’s not personal. This is personal.” Luis frowned. “And now they’re coming over here. Swell.”
“Yeah, swell,” mumbled Tory. With Dr. Toth’s valise in her hands, they couldn’t flee for the safety of the Melusine—not without either dropping the other woman’s things on the dock or sort of stealing them. Neither seemed like a good idea.
Mr. Blackwell limped. Not severely; it was more of a hitch in his stride than anything extreme. But everything else about him was so carefully calibrated and designed that it stuck out, a flaw in an otherwise perfect machine.
“Thank you,” said Dr. Toth, holding her hand out for her valise. Tory surrendered it willingly. “Theo tells me he’s already met both of you, so introductions are unnecessary. Theo also tells me he’s planning to come on this voyage. This is proof that even smart people can be wrong.”
“Imagine’s insurance carriers were reluctant to approve another sea voyage after what happened to the last one,” said Mr. Blackwell. Tory couldn’t think of him as Theo. When she tried, it was like her brain shied away from the idea. “In order to get them to sign off, we had to agree to send a corporate observer on the trip. I am Mr. Golden’s right-hand man. It only made sense that it would be me.”
“You’re Golden’s chief flunky, which is why it makes no sense for it to be you,” countered Dr. Toth. “He needs you landlocked and accessible, not riding herd on this bucket of wet cats. Don’t you dare get on that ship.”
“You don’t have the authority to tell me what to do, Professor,” said Blackwell. There was a note of unfamiliar teasing in his voice, like this was a conversation the two of them had had many times. Tory and Luis exchanged a look.
“I do have the authority to push you off the pier,” muttered Dr. Toth.
“That may be so, but you won’t do it.” Blackwell nodded to Tory and Luis. “Glad to have you aboard.” Then he walked on, heading for the Melusine. After a moment’s glaring, Dr. Toth followed.
“What do you think that was about?” asked Luis.
“I think this is going to be an interesting voyage, that’s what,” said Tory. “Come on. We don’t want to miss orientation.” She started toward the ship, Luis beside her. If she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, she could pretend that Anne was there too, walking on her other side, ready to crack the biggest story of her career, ready to solve the mystery of what had killed her.
CHAPTER 7
San Diego Harbor, California: August 18, 2022
The Melusine was a luxury research vessel, outfitted with the latest in cutting-edge equipment. It had also been designed by one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, with people who understood what audiences wanted to see involved with every stage of construction. That was why, when they arrived in the main dining hall and assembly space, more than a few of the passengers gasped, looking around in wide-eyed amazement.
(Ray and the other cameramen were already there, waiting to catch the wonderment on camera. Some reaction shots could only be taken once. It was possible to stage a lot of things—more than most people would have believed possible—but genuine surprise and amazement didn’t work that way. People could tell when they weren’t real.)
The dining hall was easily the size of a high school gymnasium, taking up the equivalent of two floors at the center of the Melusine. It wasn’t just for show: that raised cathedral ceiling reduced the vessel’s overall weight by creating a bubble of open space at its center. The polished oak walls were filigreed with swoops and swirls of shell inlay that occasionally, seemingly at random, formed the Imagine logo. Each panel could be reversed to reveal a touch-sensitive work screen, allowing scientists to stream video, share data, or even call home; the Melusine, unlike the Atargatis, was equipped with the latest in data streaming and cloud technology. The ship could vanish without a trace and not a scrap of research would be lost.
Bit by bit, the room
filled with the specialists, researchers, and technicians Imagine had tapped for this historic journey. Some of them knew each other already: old friends, old lovers, old rivals. “The seas are huge but oceanography is small,” as Dr. Peter Harris once said, before he became a victim of the Atargatis disaster. Many of them were already laughing, seeming to treat the experience as more of a pleasure cruise than a serious scientific expedition.
Tory stuck close to Luis, grimacing as one of those familiar faces walked by: Jason, alongside the professor who was supervising his graduate work in photosynthesis below the photic zone. It happened—the mere existence of chlorophyll-bearing plants on the seafloor confirmed it—but as it happened in the absence of visible light, no one was sure exactly how. Jason was pursuing chemical alternatives. His advisor was pursuing a Nobel Prize for stabilizing the world’s seaweed farms. Jason didn’t seem to believe that his advisor’s ambitions posed any danger to his own work, and after they’d stopped dating, Tory had given up on explaining it to him. Let him get his research stolen because he was too arrogant to cover his own ass.
A pair of redheaded women entered, their hands flashing in rapid ASL.
A heavily tattooed, incredibly pale man in a lab coat walked in, eyes fixed on his tablet. He looked like he was supposed to be bouncing drunks at a bar in West Hollywood, not ambling around the Melusine. Maybe that was the reason for the lab coat: it made him seem more like a part of the scene and less like someone who’d gotten lost on his way to a riot.
More and more people appeared, until the sheer size of the voyage began sinking in. Even with conversation at a minimum, the noise was appalling. Whispers, sneezes, even breathing all seemed amplified by proximity.
There was a stage at one end of the room. A man in white slacks and a button-down white shirt walked onto it, a captain’s hat perched on his head and his attire carefully calculated to give him a military air without crossing the line into stolen valor. A woman in a floral dress followed him, hanging back a few feet, like she wanted to avoid drawing focus.