* * * *
The explosion had stirred the seabed into an impenetrable brown-green curtain. Myasi had to increase the rate of conversion on the artificial gills, and even then they struggled as silt clogged the vents. She considered returning to the vessel for an old-fashioned aqualung, but the prospect of doing so, of facing Tyet’s fury at such time-wasting, turned her stomach more than the dirt-tainted air filling her mouth and nose. If the gills failed—and even in this muck, it was unlikely—she had enough reserve to make it back without permanent harm.
A sudden, unexpected current caught her and swept her into the center of the edifice.
Where did that come from?
The seas of Ulto Marinos were usually calm. Could a sudden tidal shift have set off the charge? Perhaps swept some debris over the manual detonator, or even flipped the device over?
She switched to the schematic. A set of violet concentric rings flared across her visor, and she instinctively raised a hand to shield her eyes. Pointless. She couldn’t reach through her visor. She blinked away the afterimages, and her breath caught as the concentric rings guided her vision downward. The center of the disk had opened, too perfectly circular to have been caused by the explosion. Somehow the concussion had unlocked a door.
Excitement thrilled through her, along with a cold slither of dread. The structure’s inner chambers, if it had any, were a complete unknown. It would be insanity to risk entering.
Under the confines of her mask, Myasi grinned. She spread the webbing between her fingers and propelled herself down into the opening. Her visor etched the outline of a tubular chamber, just long enough to accommodate her body at its full extent and wide enough that she had to stretch out her arms to brush the sides. The wall slid past her fingertips, perfectly smooth and unmarked. None of the coral or other marine life had managed to penetrate the interior either. She reached ahead with one hand as the schematic showed the chamber’s end, and touched the flat surface. A dead end? What secret had opened the outer door but still kept this one locked against intruders?
She explored the edges of the circular seal with her fingertips. Nothing. She drifted backward and brought her wrist console up to her visor, cycling through various options. On impulse, she shifted her visor through spectrums invisible to the human eye. Night vision made patterns leap from the curving wall, covering every inch of its surface.
She grinned. Gotcha!
The script was incomprehensible. Even when she linked her console to the main computer on the corporation vessel, no translation was available. However, it did highlight one anomaly in the ring of script that edged the sealed door—a single glyph that didn’t quite match its companions.
Alienese for ‘open here?’
Myasi shrugged and touched the symbol.
A contracting doorway eclipsed the greenish glow of light from above, and Myasi whirled in a slow spiral—too slow. With a panicked thrust of her legs, she shot upward, but was left pummeling the hatch in rhythm with her pounding heart. Useless. The outer door had sealed and locked her inside, where she could never be found.
Stupid!
She hadn’t even notified the vessel of her intentions, the most basic of safety precautions.
Her throat thickened and seized, her breath coming in urgent gasps. She had to get out! Her wrist monitor beeped a warning, but she ignored it as she clawed at the edge of the doorway, scratching for an exit. Pain spiked through her fingers as she tried to force them into the merest crevice for leverage. She thrashed in the water, her knees cracking on the wall as she scrabbled with her feet, and swore as they slid uselessly over the slick surface. An eruption of bubbles surged around her and forced her flat against the sealed hatch. The impact jarred her from her initial panic into a new one. What had she started? The air pockets burst against her like little shots of static, and she swirled her arms in front of her to try to disperse them. Movement vibrated through the surrounding walls, white light blossoming below her feet, and the water miraculously cleared to perfect visibility.
Myasi sucked in a long, slow breath. The chamber must’ve been some kind of air lock—or, more likely, a purifying system, since water still surrounded her. As her eyes adjusted to the sudden brilliance, she took in the blue-black metallic walls of the entry tube and the opening below her feet. The inner door had opened.
She hesitated. Now that she could see clearly, the panic eased a little, and she turned to examine the wall nearest the exit. Within moments, she found the same odd glyph from the inner door that had triggered the system. So, she had the exit key if she wanted it. What now?
Myasi stared back down into the light. Did she want to know what was in there? Could she solve the mystery of the Bones of the Sea? Perhaps even stay its execution?
She pushed off from the hatch and propelled herself elegantly through the opening. A vast chamber, the width of the disk above and shaped like a slightly flattened globe, opened around her. As she reached the center, she twisted herself around so that she spun in a slow circle, surveying the edges. Blue-black shadows dimmed the curved contours, and the metal floor beneath her formed a shallow dish. Two revolutions with the night vision still on confirmed that there was nothing more to see. A few powerful arm strokes carried her to the side, and details emerged from the lightless edges. Shelves. Row upon row upon row of shelves, from floor to ceiling and the full circumference of the room. Each shelf, the same blue-black metal as the enclosing structure, stood filled to capacity by glass-like phials the size of her forefinger—perfect, clear cylinders packed together.
Interesting.
She took the nanobead scanner from her belt and aimed it at the phials. The initial reading came back as biological.
Even more interesting.
A minor adjustment to the scanner’s settings, and more in-depth information trailed across her screen in neon green lettering. Cold dread settled in her stomach. The phials held more than biological compounds. Streams of genetic code swamped the screen, matching species she’d catalogued in her pre-survey study, but with differences—some subtle, others so extreme that the current lifeforms on Ulto Marinos would be more closely related to her than to those in the phials. And yet all these specimens had similar origins to the existing forms that floated, squirmed, and drifted beyond the klingeln walls. There were mutagenic markers in the DNA, artificial constructs of a kind designed to accelerate development to help them survive, even flourish. The Bones of the Sea hadn’t been intended as a place of death, of endings then. Rather, it had been envisioned as a cradle of life. A giant seed, full of genetically engineered creatures perfectly suited to the environment of this world.
Myasi clutched the scanner to herself. A thousand new species that had never made it out into the ocean were imprisoned inside the construct. Whatever intelligence had created it, their project had, for some reason, failed. Had they chosen to end it? Had something happened to that intelligence, forcing it to give up on an experiment gone wrong? Or had it been a final, desperate attempt to perpetuate a species, adapting it for the seas of Ulto Marinos before a cataclysmic end elsewhere in the galaxy?
She glanced down at the scanner. They couldn’t destroy this place. Surely it would classify as genocide, something even Galactic Commission Law didn’t allow? But doubt nagged at the back of her mind. Didn’t that only cover sentient species? Would this vast bank of genetic material qualify? Would the potential future sentience of any one of these specimens save them all from extinction?
She sucked in a breath, her throat tight. It wasn’t her decision. She drew in a deep breath and eased it back out. Tyet was in charge of this operation. Her findings would have to be presented to him then relayed to the corporation based on Terris, and from there on to the Galactic Commission itself. It could take days, maybe even years. And in the meantime, the seagrafters would be forbidden to harvest the most lucrative seagrass plantation on the whole planet—a massive loss of profit for the corporation and a black mark against her
. It could cost her in future contracts. It could end her career.
But even knowing that, knowing it would destroy all she’d ever worked for, she might still have done it. Except…it wouldn’t make any difference. She could refuse to blow the charges now, and the corporation would just fire her, pull someone else in, and get them to finish the job. Her sacrifice would be for nothing.
A cold, hard knot of realization tightened her chest. Her discovery meant nothing. No one would care how important this could be. No one would care that some intelligence had attempted to fast-drive evolution on this world and failed. Myasi stared into the phials. Without the scanner, they revealed nothing of their true nature. A single charge in this room would shatter every one of them and spill their contents into the sea to be lost forever. The problem would wash away in the currents.
Her decision made, she took another charge from her belt and set the timer manually. Once sealed within the chamber, no signal for activation would pass through the klingeln walls. The others were set to go off in less than two hours—she could synchronize this solitary insider to match. She placed it in the center of the chamber and swam back up to the entry, pausing before she left.
Regret weighted her limbs and slowed her down. I’m sorry.
She tugged herself into the narrow tube above the chamber and touched the anomalous glyph. The white light died, bubbles cascaded over her body, and the murk of Ulto Marinos’s sea blanketed her once more. Myasi returned to the vessel and said nothing.
* * * *
Two hours later, the sea above the Bones plumed and boiled with dirty white vehemence before subsiding into murky bubbles that burst with the stench of rotting things and mud. Scans revealed the shattered debris—all that remained of the klingeln legs and discoid base—spread over the bottom of the sea.
* * * *
A few days later, among the unending browns and greens of the seabed, a brilliant orange flower bloomed for the very first time.
###
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About the Author
After spending twelve years working as an Analytical Chemist in a Metals and Minerals laboratory, Pippa Jay is now a stay-at-home mum who writes scifi and supernatural stories to engage the emotions. Somewhere along the way a touch of romance crept into her work and refused to leave. In between torturing her plethora of characters, she spends the odd free moment looking after her chickens, punishing herself with freestyle street dance, and studying the Dark Side of the Force. Although happily settled in the historical town of Colchester in the UK with her husband of 23 years and three not-so-little monsters, she continues to roam the rest of the Universe in her head.
Pippa Jay is a dedicated member of the Science Fiction Romance Brigade, Broad Universe, and EPIC, blogging at Spacefreighters Lounge, Adventures in Scifi, and Romancing the Genres. Her works include YA and adult stories crossing a multitude of subgenres from scifi to the paranormal, often with romance, and she’s one of eight authors included in a science fiction romance anthology—Tales from the SFR Brigade. She’s also a double SFR Galaxy Award winner, been a finalist in the Heart of Denver RWA Aspen Gold Contest (3rd place), the 2015 EPIC eBook awards, the 2015 RWA LERA Rebecca (2nd place), and the GCC RWA Silken Sands Star Awards (2nd place).
You can stalk her at her website, or at her blog, but without doubt her favorite place to hang around and chat is on Twitter as @pippajaygreen.
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Imprint from Tales from the SFR Brigade
Keir: Book One of Redemption
Keir’s Fall: Book Two of Redemption
Upcoming:
Reunion at Kasha-Asor (a Redemption side story)
Keir’s Shadow: Book Three of Redemption
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