Myasi has been contracted to demolish a weird metallic construct in the shallow seas of Ulto Marinos. But her attempt to do so reveals something more beneath the surface...
The Bones of the Sea
By Pippa Jay
The Bones of the Sea
Pippa Jay
Copyright © 2011, Pippa Jay
Second edition May 2016
Edited by Danielle Fine
Cover Art by Danielle Fine
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Acknowledgments
With huge thanks to Danielle Fine for her typically awesome editing and fabulous cover design.
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The place gave her the creeps. Myasi could admit that to herself now, as she made her third and final survey of the site. The morbid name given to the strange construction by early explorers couldn’t have seemed more apt as she sat in the flattened base and gazed up into the lurid green glow of the water. Above her head, the metallic legs of the structure curved up, round, and then slightly inward, like a twelve-legged spider hunched in on itself. Or a clawed hand clutching at nothing in its final, fatal spasm.
She shivered and checked her wrist display. She’d only been under a few moments, but it felt longer. The water chilled her despite the figure-hugging, bespoke thermal suit that encased her generous curves. Even if corporation regulations had permitted buying one off the peg, no standard suit would’ve fit her. Thanks to her height—above average even for a human male and with the bulk to match—all her equipment had to be made specially to order. A soft collar molded around her neck, its ugly protuberances housing the artificial gills that moved in machine-regular beats and fed modified air to the mask over her mouth and nose.
A visor covered her eyes, and in it, a bright schematic outlined the murk-dimmed pillars of the Bones of the Sea so that she could see her way, despite the gloom. The discoid base of the structure measured a modest ten meters in diameter, matched by the height of the twelve arched legs. Beneath the visible structure, buried in the soft silt of the seabed, the Bones formed a huge teardrop thirty meters long. The overall shape vaguely resembled an old Terran cephalopod—a squid. The klingeln framework, impenetrable to scans, had become encrusted with the native corals and small, static shellfish that summarized the typical level of life on Ulto Marinos—nothing more complex or dangerous than jellyfish and crustaceans. No one knew where it had come from or what it had been intended for…and no one cared. It was an obstruction to the seagrafters, and the corporation wanted it removed. Destroyed. Out of their way.
And so, they had recruited her.
“Myasi, are you done yet?”
The question, out of the blue and resonating in her skull, set her heart pounding so hard within her chest that her wrist monitor bleeped in warning. Damn it! Couldn’t they trust her to do her job without firing sudden demands at her?
She forced her voice out in a calm strand. “Laying the last charge now, boss.”
A muttered curse grated in her ear, but she smiled. Tyet had repeatedly threatened to cut off her ears, or maybe just her bonus, if she called him that to his face again. So she was taking him at his word. She hadn’t said it to his face, after all. A small but pleasing payback for almost startling her into cardiac arrest.
As she’d already promised she was doing so, she took the device from her waistband, activated it so that tiny emerald lights gleamed through the murk, and set it into the mud beneath her artificially webbed feet. Things squirmed past her fingers—just mud worms, and harmless, but she jerked her hand free and shook it with distaste. Mud and a couple of hijacked worms swirled off into the gloomy water, leaving the webbed glove of her hand clear. In the odd light, the tanned skin of her bare arms looked an unhealthy greenish gray, like something long dead.
She tapped her wrist console, and the site’s schematic on her visor updated with thirteen green dots—her active charges, all signaling their readiness. Job done.
She crouched then thrust herself upward, back to the surface, back between the spires of curved klingeln for what would be the last time. In two hours, they’d be nothing but twisted metal fragments sinking into the mud of Ulto Marinos.