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“Auribus teneo lupum.”
– Terence, Phormio
--
“Beginning the descent.”
The entire room trembles, the thump of the winch echoing across the iron walls. David’s voice crackles from the small speaker in the top left niche of the cell as Ava is jostled in her stool, the lowering felt in her gut. The blurry hunched silhouette of Jack and the rest of her crew rise away from the small porthole window, and she doesn’t have to imagine too hard to see their expressions as she disappears.
She feels the impact as the SM-14 hits the ocean’s surface a few moments later, the viscous waves bumping against the underside.
“Are you sure about this captain?” David asks again from the radio.
“Yes.” Ava replies, taking a steady breath as the waves splash across the porthole and nudge the submarine to the right.
The rumble of the slow chain continues as the surface of the ocean swells against the window. She had been down once before, but it was a long time ago, before they had started sending down convicts and instead had two pilots at a time, before resources thinned. Looking down from the tow-ship, it’s easy to think of this moon as just an ocean-tinged red. But as she watches the light of the command bay dim as the porthole is filled, her stomach drops in apprehension.
“He’s not worth it.” David’s voice rattles in again.
“I don’t care.” Comes her reply, automatic. “We need that data.”
There is a sigh.
“We had our orders.”
Ava works her jaw, beating her unease back as the layering reds darken the porthole.
“The council will understand.”
“Bullshit.” David’s reply is quick.
Ava looks at the speaker, her stomach continuing to churn as the cradle of the ocean rocks the submarine as it sinks. He can tell she’s lying, he can tell because he’s watched her lie dozens of times to every convict the council would drag out to her.
“Just do your job.” It takes effort not to let the authority of her voice buckle.
For a long time, Ava had no conscience about her job. She simply did what she was told when orders trickled down from the council. Each time they hauled the hemo-rover back up, she’d look at the mangled irradiated corpse inside and know that she’d have dinner on her tray the next evening. Survival was the only cause; calculated sacrifices must be made to serve the greater collective. This was bigger than us. The council understood that, and Ava too was a slave to that idea.
There was a pause from David before he answered, probably biting back more insubordination.
“Yes captain.”
Ava looks to the depth meter, the green bar sliding down the white, the required de-briefing of the hemo-rover expedition crackling from the knitted bowels of the speaker.
“Cruising depth in roughly forty seconds. “
She doesn’t reply, she knows this all already. She could say it in her sleep.
“Uh, we’re not seeing any irregularities on our end here for once but just keep an eye out of any sparks or flames anyway.”
Ava huffs out a small chuckle.
“Thank you David.”
The radio signal was already weakening, his voice now tinny.
“Closing porthole shielding.”
The scrape of metal is muffled as the plate slides down the small window, Ava letting out a small sigh- both relieved and more uneased.
The speaker fizzes, David’s voice scrambling.
“We’re losing radio signal n—w, you’ll…at cruising depth so—n. We’ll pull…up in a—thir—minu—…”
Then finally,
“Goo-…L—…cap—”
There is a small blip before everything goes dark. She can still feel the rumble of the descent, before the entire room jolts again. She’s swayed forward as the soft impact of the bottom echoes through the rover, the sound of the chain and all human connection cease. The depth meter fully in the red.
Thirty minutes.
The soft chittering of the navigation console powers on, the coordinates presented in green digital figures. latitude, longitude, and angle.
X:182.30
Y:116.71
A:000.00
Ava clears her throat to disrupt the stillness; the silence enveloping her as heat creeps in from the walls. Coagulations and gas bubbles bump and grind against the hull, the sound making her shudder as she leans down to the pocket of manuals and fishes out the surface map. It was thicker than paper, an artificial fabric blend that could (hypothetically) survive hull destruction and fluid absorption. Blood absorption.
She checks her watch. 029:12 and ticking down.
Easy. In and out. If convicts could operate this piece of shit, so could she, she helped build the damn thing anyway. Checking the map, she glances back at the console readings to correspond to her present location; dragging her finger from her position up the Y axis to the hard 200 line where she needed to go. No angle change needed.
Grasping the thruster and pushing it forward, the whole room trembles as the hemo-rover lurches, the screw-wheels pushing through the coagulated mass of the bottom. On instinct she looks to the porthole, used to keeping her eyes on the waves, but quickly corrects her gaze back to the console. Already she remembers how much she hated this, only being able to watch the console readings change and trust that the leaden groaning of the hull meant that she was moving. But Jack—God help him, was good at his job. His loss would be hard to bounce back from; he was one of the better engineers. Her loss too, already she can feel nausea settle in her bowels as the acute radiation poisoning eats away at her internal organs. It would be a matter of days before she was dead, weeks if she was lucky.
Best not to dwell on it, it wasn’t like Simon would live long either.
The Y values continue to climb, now approaching the end of the 180s, they were all going to die anyway.
At 200.32 she takes her hand off the thruster, picking up the map to adjust her position once again.
--
Ava had always hated quiet, even when she was little. When it was quiet it meant that something was wrong, or something had stopped. This aversion only got worse since the Quiet Rapture. Even when she slept, there was always some kind of noise in the background. The hum of engines, the rattling buzz of heating units, the pounding of distant generators, the muffled conversations of watch officers. But inside the unmoving hemo-rover, there was only the dim silence and the occasional drip of condensation onto the iron floors. There was so much she didn’t hear or see, so much she didn’t know from her vantage in the rover. But in the 12 minutes and 27 seconds she had been down, she had not taken a single picture, she knew better.
X: 527.21
Y: 321.82
A: 092.45
She was within the first large atrium of the ocean trench and chewing on the soft flesh of her bottom lip as she oriented herself. About 80 meters north of her was the second squeeze she had to maneuver through, having drawn a small dot to mark the coordinates. Simon was all the way in the Northeast corner of the map. Yet she was still chugging along the southern hemisphere, but she was almost halfway through. She had time.
A new course of about 30 meters north and 20 meters east awaited her. Ava hated that could only guess this, even with her extensive experience using grid maps, there was always ghost light of stars and the rocking red horizon to further correspond to her position. She was itching for that now, or any kind of sight beyond the piped metal barriers around her.
The mechanisms of the orientational dial click as she turns it, the hemo-rover grunting in response and scrapping across the surface. She watches the angle readings tick across the display, falling to 0 before thrusting forward again. Muttering the desired reading to keep the number in her mind as she eyes the console.
Y 350, Y 350, Y 350.
She stops at 351.02, the rover’s braking ability always on the slower side as she now turns the orientational dial back to the left, shimming into position. The gap was from roughly X: 550 to 575, and she was aiming somewhere within the range of 560.
560, 560, 560.
She stops at 561, turning back north and hesitating for a second time.
Her instructions to Simon drift back as she once again checks her positioning. “Just ram it,” She had said, begrudgingly having to talk him through the sample collection process. At the time she had thought he was just being spineless, but as she shoved the lever forward, she couldn’t help but understand his wariness.
You couldn’t see shit.
There was just the chugging of the engines and the vibration in the walls, her soft little body between them. Within the course of her navigation, the sense of her smallness and fragility became more apparent. If another surface quake occurred, or if she hit a wall, or if she lost connection to the tow-ship, or—If what Simon had rambled about was true—there was something really alive down here, her body would ricochet at the impact. Not that the pain scared her, Ava was used to pain, but the awareness that this pocket of oxygen and safety she occupied was cobbled together with nothing but scrap metal gnawed at her confidence. She was really on her own down here, and as she said herself, they couldn’t risk anymore dives.
Her mind then goes back to Simon. His desperate sweaty face in the green tint of the porthole, trying to talk his way out of his sentence. She had seen it so much before, especially in the male convicts. That pseudo-levity of tone, that hopeful tightness in expression. That kind of false care-free “hey c’mon lady, aren’t I good enough for you?” attitude. She had seen it enough that it was just more background noise, their pleas for safety and mercy blending right in with the roar of machinery. But Simon, something about Simon made her spring into action. Was it that he convinced her that he had found the SM-8? Or was it that he was still alive even after days of lost contact? Was it simple pity that drove her down here?
Why was she going back for him?
She could’ve lied, she really could’ve, he was the worst of the worst. The butcher of Filament Station who surrendered with his head bowed like a kicked child. She read the report, seen the videos of his capture. It was downright pathetic; he was a coward, a killer, Eden scum, he didn’t deserve the treatment she was giving him.
Maybe it was because he found the skeleton, maybe it was because of the way he apologized after he irradiated her and Jack; that quiet and useless “I’m sorry” that felt all too honest to be a lie, that he was just that pitifully stupid; maybe it was how frightened and disoriented his voice sounded when it fizzed back up on the radio days later.
Maybe it was because he had asked her to tell him his name.
The proximity alert chirps, Ava blinking away the fog of her thoughts as she looks to the directional dial. The front light was flickering in a slow rhythm, indicating an obstruction within 3 meters of the rover. She pulls her hand from the lever, wiping the sweat from her brow as she grabs the map.
It really was hot as hell in here. She could feel more sweat building up underneath her turtleneck and between her breasts, and she pushes some of the fabric of her turtleneck underneath her bra to try and wipe it away, the stale air scratching her throat as she reassesses her position.
The alarm stops after a handful of seconds.
Ava thinks nothing of it at first, the suffocating heat at the forefront of her attention.
X: 565.21
Y: 403.17
A: 000.00
There was no wall there. In fact, she was sitting in the center of the passage with the expansion in front of her.
Removing her bomber jacket, she tosses it aside to relieve some swelter before consulting the map once again, as if the paper-fabric would somehow change. There was still no wall in front of her.
It was probably just a large clot or gas bubble; sensors like these were always hard to calibrate, especially in the rush they were in.
Still, for a gas bubble to be so big as to trigger it? The alarms were made to sense solid barriers, not the idle movements of the ocean. It makes her skin crawl, the warnings of Simon she ignored echoing across the walls of her skull.
“There’s something alive down there.”
Something had pulled the SM-13 from the tether as they were winding it up. Something had snapped through those reinforced steel chains. Something had almost bent the solid 13-inch steel pillars of the giant winch crane so much it made Ava almost fear for the sight in her other eye.
She sets down the map, pushing up her sleeves and checking her watch. There was no time to deliberate on the potential health risks any longer, she needed to know what was outside. Standing from the stool, she crosses to the back of the rover and hits the large rectangular button, the white flash of the x-ray camera blasting 7800 millisieverts of radiation out into the ocean and back to her. On the left display, the grainy black and white image fades into view.
There was nothing in front of her.
She works her jaw, chewing her lip again as she stares at the nothing image until it fades away, not at all relieved. It was all just too damn quiet and too damn hot. Ava returns to the console with a shake of her head, slumping back into the stool. She had a job to do; to hell with mechanical anomalies.
--
Navigating through the second atrium of the trench was as tedious as it was navigating through the first, only instead of north she was heading west. This atrium, roughly 400 meters across and fifty meters wide, was less of an atrium and more of an enlarged lateral canyon. At the Northwest end of this canyon was another bottleneck, 50 meters long and 25 across before opening to the third and smallest atrium. From there she’d head east again through a narrowing path that forked north and southeast. Simon, as Ava had marked on her map with a small charcoal X, was somewhere down the narrower southeast path. She’d wait in the roughly 75 meter north-facing channel for him, and if Simon and the recovery magnet did their job, she could die in peace in her cot within the next week.
Despite the high stakes, the time crunch, the creeping sense of dread and sweat down the nape of her neck; the rumbling sound of the engines paired with the rudimentary navigation system had begun to lull her into a state of bleary numbness. She was tired, bone tired. For the past 49 hours she’d been dealing with the seeming loss of the SM-13 and the expedited completion of the SM-14 without their chief engineer. Her responsibilities doubled, but for her crew, it was worth it. Now, sitting in the boiling silence away from the noise of the control room, the rover was starting to get to her.
Both her crew and the convicts nicknamed these things “The Iron Lung.” The sensation of being sealed inside a large metal tube where you can hardly move, with constant pressure upon your chest was not far off to how it felt to be welded inside the hemo-rover. Not to mention, there was literally an oxygen meter. Ava may not have much of a sense of humor, but even she can see the irony in that. The machine was breathing for her.
She was still running at a full 4 lights, which was good. More than enough air to meet Simon and get the hell out of here. She checks her coordinates again.
X: 500.07
Y: 525.18
A: 254.56
Her watch only decayed 3 minutes after she entered the lateral canyon. Hopefully, Simon will be in radio range soon enough. It would be nice to hear another human voice, even if it was him. Hell, she’ll be happy to hear David’s bitching once they resurfaced.
Ava let herself smile just a little as she rubs underneath the cuff of her turtleneck to try and dispel more sweat, her fingers damp enough that she can suck up some water before turning the orientational dial to 270 and thrusting forward.
The proximity alarm chirps in front of her again, Ava ignoring it this time. There was no wall in front of her, and there wouldn’t be until roughly X 375.
However, it only flashes faster as she approaches, warning that she was going to ram right into something. The ocean around the hull churns, the entire room starting to quiver. Out of instinct she drops her hands from the thruster. The displacement of the ocean knocking hard against the side as it levies the impact. An earthquake, an avalanche, something.
The shrill ding of the proximity alarm compounds as the western node then starts up alongside its northern twin, the sound bringing percussion within the ear-ringing creak of the hull and the ocean spasming around her.
Ava jumps up from her seat, stumbling on the unsteady floors as she runs to the back and slams her hand onto the button of the camera, the sound of the flash lost in the din as she braces herself against the back wall to see what would show up.
A noise, a screech vibrates the entire craft, the whole rover reeling left as her ear and face clap against the wall. The hull groans painfully with Ava as she pulls herself away to try and see the image on the display, hearing muffled from the impact.
A blur of white splays across, an object in movement so large it takes up the entire screen.
All at once the awful noise fades; the heavy depths settling as the proximity alarms slow and whatever thing she had flashed moves past.
Ava slams the button down again, desperately wanting to see more as she narrows her one good eye to study the first image closer. Her chest tightens as she can recognize the thick undulations of human limbs within the mass. Nausea peaking and making her aching head swim further.
The image fades, the second picture replacing it. Once again, the grainy blackness of the ocean is in front of her, and yet there is a frozen white smudge on the left side, the end of some massive multi-legged tail in mid-flap.
“Oh my fucking God.”
Ava can hardly stand, yet she claws her way back to the console anyhow in a torrent of whimpering inhales and dry swallows, trying to keep down her intestinal lining. The ocean is quiet all around, yet the silence is somehow louder as she tries to grab hold of the map with her trembling hands. There was something alive, something huge and alive swimming around her in the mass of blood. There was really something alive in the blood.
That’s why the SM-8 had never returned. That’s why the last thing she had heard from that crew was screaming.
Suddenly the radio scratches, and Ava yelps.
“Fuck!” Ava shaking only worsens.
There was too much interference for contact with the tow-ship, unless she was somehow in range with the SM-13.
“Simon?” She calls up to the speaker.
There’s another fizz, drawn out like a mechanical sigh.
“Simon is that you?” Her voice is a trembling mess.
The radio is silent for an agonizing moment, then a new voice Ava does not recognize rasps through.
“Hello?”
Her core tightens, everything within her regretting ever opening her mouth.
“Hello?” The voice comes again, whispering for an answer.
Ava balls her hands into white-iron fists to will them into steadiness, squeezing her eyes shut until she can see the white crack of her eyelids trying to crush one another and inhaling through her clenched jaw.
“I can hear you breathing in there.”
She holds on to her exhale, her heart rate dropping in response as she pops her eyes back open. The map. Location. Location. She had to keep moving.
“…Ava?”
A chill runs through her entire body, she’s frozen again.
“Ava is that you?”
The accent, Ava recognizes it, only so many people had accents like that, and only one person with such an accent knew Ava by name.
But she was dead.
“I know you can hear me.” Ellie’s voice echoes against the walls when Ava doesn’t respond.
X: 402.45
Y: 526.05
A: 272.43
“Are you looking for Simon?”
The bottleneck--what was it? 360? 465? Fuck. She couldn’t remember now, the numbers were slippery.
She wrestles with the map, her hands still shaking as she brings it close to her face. Blinking the sweat from her lashes as she tries to clear her vision. It didn’t matter. Voices of ghosts didn’t matter. They needed that data.
X: 365.
Ava shoves the thruster forward, the Iron Lung moaning in protest as it dragged its rattled body once again.
“Why won’t you answer me?” Ellie’s voice pitches up, becoming desperate. “I know it’s you Ava.”
Ava watches the console; all her hopes betting on the falling X values.
“You left me to die down here and now you won’t even talk to me?”
Ava’s heart twists with guilt and fear, mind racked. Simon said practically the same thing to her earlier.
“You sent me down here to die, and you don’t even know my name?”
So much death. So much death without reason, without explanation. Her slippery morality couldn’t justify silence on this, Ellie deserved more than that.
“I’m…sorry, Ellie.” Ava stiffly admits.
She hears a gasp from the speaker, surprised that she really replied, then a sob.
“Ava…” Ellie weeps back. “Ava, I can’t believe it’s really you!”
The X values tick down to 378…377…376…
“Yes.” Ava replies, she can’t help but pity her.
“What are you doing down here?”
Something in Ava tells her not to say any more, not to trust the ghost with too many secrets.
“What are you looking for?” Ellie continues.
370..369…368…
“Why are you coming back for him?”
365…364…363…
Close enough. Ava lets go of the thruster and turns the orientation dial back up to 0.
“Don’t you know what he did?”
“I know.” Ava says.
“He destroyed filament station.”
“I know.”
She pushes forward, hearing Ellie’s crackled horror through the speaker. Briefly, she notices the small yellow light of reception wasn’t blinking on with the noise.
“You’re still going back for him?”
Ellie’s tone shifts.
“He’s not worth it.”
Ava chews her lip; the repetition of the phrase David had uttered to her on the descent irking her right to the core. She glances back at the map with her hand still on the thruster, quickly matching where she’d need to stop once she moves through the bottleneck.
The proximity alarm behind her starts to chirp.
“Why are you going back for him?” Ellie demands.
before Ava can respond, the alert kicks up and the rover is slammed from behind.
“WHY HIM AND NOT ME?”
Ava is thrown against the console, her face once again colliding into solid metal as everything stutters to a halt. Her teeth clamp down on her gums so hard she tastes blood, and her brain jostles within her cranium—all sound a distant agonizing throb.
She gropes for the thruster, shoving it forward and kicking the rover back into motion, the buzz of the proximity alarm echoing through her ears as she tries and fails to lift herself back up.
“AVA!”
The voice is a knife to the brain, cutting right through her muddled hearing. The shock turns her overheated blood into ice and twists her stomach to the point that there’s bile in the back of her throat. She understands now who the voice is, what the voice is.
“I know you can hear me.”
She braces her other hand on the console to use what leverage she can to pull herself back up to the stool, her vision swimming as she tries to look back to the console. But her nose twitches with a new scent in the stale air, metallic and rotten.
Blood.
Her senses wander back to themselves as adrenaline rips through her, she can hear a fatal cry of the hull as it starts to buckle under the breach. One of the upper pipes burst and a torrent of steam attacks her.
They needed that data.
She had to be in range now, she must. Her survival was now irrelevant; the entire submarine was coming apart around her. There was no more time now, she needed Simon.
Ava screams up to the radio, her voice breaking as the blood begins to pool around her feet. Corrosive and acidic and completely irradiated, but the smell hits somewhere familiar. The same smell she had pulled it from within herself every month, but now an ocean full.
“I CAN SAVE YOU AVA!”
The creature’s voice makes her panic, mind spiraling as she retches bile onto her turtleneck.
An ocean of blood, an ocean of her, of all of humanity.
The proximity alarm finally begins to slow.
“SIMON! SIMON COME IN! PLEASE! PLEASE COME IN!”
The yellow light of the speaker blips, indication of signal received.
“SIMON? SIMON DID YOU GET IT?” She screams again.
His voice blabbers from between her cries, strained and frightened.
“Ava you gotta get me outta here! I think I’m sick or somethin’ I don’t know—"
“SIMON SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME!”
Without consulting the map or any kind of reading she twists the rover 90 degrees, charging blind as she speaks quickly. If Simon really had been able to make it back to the SM-8 and download that black-box data to the terminal, then that was all they needed. They just needed that black box.
Her mind tunnels back, her C.O.I ranking barking out from her lips.
“I need you get something from the crawlspace; there’s something down there that I need you to keep safe, okay?” her words flow out of her in one long string, not even pausing to breathe. “No matter what happens you need to get it out of there safely, do you understand?”
“Ava you can’t be serious!” Simon moans in reply. “I just went through hell to get this!”
“I know what I said!” She snaps back. “It doesn’t matter anymore!”
“Just finish the plan, you are the only one that can! Everything is down there, every picture, everything! No matter what happens that data needs to survive if any of this is going to be worth anything, do you understand me?”
The proximity alarm picked again behind her, slow and steady, the stink of the ocean now to her ankles. This was it, this was how she’d go. The captain always went down with the ship.
There wasn’t a reply, yet she could hear some strange interference that was hissing through the speaker, almost like whispers. What was he doing?
“Simon?” She softens her tone, a last attempt at courtesy. “Do you have it?”
There was still no reply from him, she prods again, trying to pull any kind of answer or confirmation from him. They needed that data.
“Please tell me you have it.”
Still no reply, still no indication of movement. Just that interference again.
“Simon, you have to go, now. What are you waiting for?”
He comes through then, fizzing back to her on the yellow light.
“We had a deal…”
Ava shrieks in frustration.
“NOT EVERYONE GETS TO BE SAVED!”
“What are you talking about?” His voice is a pitiful, stupid whimper. “You said you’d get me out of here, that was the deal!”
“Simon please!”
She lets out a quiet sob, unable to think of anything else to try and persuade him. This can’t be it. This can’t be it. He can’t do this to her. The alarm quickens, the blood flowing up her calves.
“It’s worth it…” She says, choking on her tears. “You deserve your freedom, and I’m sorry that I can’t give that to you.”
She meant it this time, every word. Even after everything, he had done his duty, he had shown his worth both to the C.O.I, and to her. He, like all the others, like her, like the crew of the tow-ship she’d never see again, was a human being.
Between them was now only this hellish flooding metal cell, the void of dead stars above, and this sweltering ocean of death.
“It’s more than me.” She says it for both her and him, the comforting mantra she repeated constantly over the course of her short, miserable life. “It’s more than you.”
The northern proximity alarm blares all at once.
“it’s bigger than us—”
“Ava.”
She yelps at the voice, the hull careening in an unknown direction as she braces against the console, the map falling away into the red muck as the whole room rolls and slender white spikes pierce through both the floor and ceiling. Teeth.
“I’m sorry.”
“SIMON PLEASE! THE BLACK BOX” She screams against the crush of the creature’s jaws, needing to hear his voice, needing to know that he was listening, that he knew what to do. “IT’S IN THE CRAWLSPACE!”
Blood gushes in from all sides, blinding her completely as it sears her face. The SM-14 lets out a death-rattle, the entire ceiling and floor rushing to meet her.
“Oh my God—Oh my God!”
--
For a moment. There is only screaming.
There are only memories.
There are only voices.
Ava’s body dissolves within the mouth of the eel.
As she takes her place among the many.
All are one within the blood.