It fell without cease, each “flake” composed of lace-edged rags of flesh and bone and gut. Looking at it, Luke thought back to that first night with Abby—the snow falling from a coal-dark Iowa sky. He tried to isolate the details of Abby’s face but they slithered through his mind, eelish and ungrippable.
Al toggled the joystick, angling the Challenger slightly downward.
“We’re here,” she said quietly.
Luke squinted through the porthole. Darkness thick as grave dirt. Then, permeating that darkness, the tiniest speck of light.
This speck attached to another speck, and another. From these specks, a rough shape resolved and the Trieste came into view. Luke sat by the window, jaw open, staring.
It was repulsive.
The blood backflowed in his veins, the strangest sensation—like a clock running backward against its mechanics, stripping gears and snapping springs.
We need to ascend now, he thought wildly. Seek the sunlight, fast, and never come back.
PART 3
THE TRIESTE
1.
LUKE COULD ONLY GLIMPSE the Trieste in sections. Whenever Al swung the Challenger around, illuminating a section he’d already seen, it looked different to Luke—as if it had shifted subtly, somehow reconfiguring its arrangement.
Luke’s mind continued to fight the reaction of his initial horror. It was nothing but steel and foam and space-age polymers. A marvel of engineering. It of course had no mind, no will. And still…
It was awful. He couldn’t isolate what repelled the eye, the revulsion that squatted so leadenly in the lizard brain. It was snakelike, for one—of course it was: the Trieste was all tubes. They spooled along the ocean floor, which was clad in a powdery drift of marine snow. The tubes were oddly segmented, branching off at unnatural angles, as to appear vaguely arachnid: long dark legs extending from a central hub.
There was a manic union between its various parts; it shouldn’t cohere as a structure. Its angles were bizarre and somehow despairing. Some tubes appeared to end abruptly… that, or they burrowed into the sea floor like an enormous worm.
Maybe the pressure exerted the same warping effect it had on Challenger 4, bending each angle slightly out-of-true—which, cumulatively, made the Trieste look disgustingly alien. Or maybe it was the fact that the bulk of it hadn’t been assembled by human hands: robots had no sense of beauty or symmetry; they simply slotted link A to coupler B. The structure throbbed with a numbing hunger—but for what? Luke was overcome with a sinister shrinking sensation, as if his soul had dwindled to a pinprick and the Trieste had swarmed in to fill that space, reducing him under its brooding, inanimate power. Luke couldn’t shake the ludicrous sense that the Trieste had built itself to serve a purpose known only within itself. It seemed sentient, watching like a snake coiled in placid contentment under warm desert rocks. Knowing, in the seething core of itself, that it need only to wait.
“It’s got a certain look to it,” Al said.
“You’ve been inside?”
“A few times. Not for long, and only to drop off supplies. To speak the truth, none of us like spending all that much time down here. Docking’s the trickiest part.”
She edged them toward the Trieste. The Challenger swayed under the enormous pressure of water, which no longer shushed and gurgled against its hull but instead pushed back with leaden insistence as if they were moving through hardening concrete.
As they approached, Luke saw what had made those initial pinpricks of light: windows, same as the porthole on the submarine, dotted the length of one tube. Weak fingers of light spilled from each.
One of Al’s navigational tools pinged as she zeroed in.
Five feet, four, three, two…
Al guided the sub to the porthole and cut the engines. The Challenger met the Trieste with the sound of a locket snapping shut.
Other sounds: whirrings, clickings. A pneumatic whine—the noise you’d hear in a mechanic’s shop when they’re tightening the lug nuts on your all-seasons.
“It should be sealed now.”
Luke said, “And if it’s not?”
Al gave him a grim smile. “We won’t feel a thing.” She unsnapped her belt. “You’re going to have to step through first.”
“Me? Why?”
The flesh tightened around Al’s eyes. For the first time, she got that mildly irritated look a person gets when they’re dealing with a newbie.
“I’ve got to keep an eye on things from this end, Doc.”
There isn’t anything on the other side of that hatch, said an unsteady voice in Luke’s head. Nothing but your brother and another wonk and a few dogs and bees.
Luke wondered: had Dr. Westlake told himself the very same thing the first time he stepped inside?
“Once you’re through and I’ve shut things down, I’ll follow,” said Al.
Luke laid his hands on the hatch. The metal thrummed with an odd tension, as if a heavy motor was running behind it. His biceps tensed in expectation—but after the slightest strain, the wheel turned easily.
“That’s good.” There was relief in Al’s voice. “The seal’s tight.”
The hatch swung open. The thinnest trickle of saltwater beaded along the upper curve of the hatch, a single drop falling—plip!—to splash the metal. The light inside the Challenger wept into that hole of darkness. A smell perfumed the air. Cavelike and slightly alkaline, as Al had mentioned. The foreign odor of the deep sea mixed with something else, something unnameable.
A high note of dread sang through Luke’s veins—a mocking aria that sent a shiver through his bones.
What are you so afraid of? said that same voice inside Luke’s head.
Everything, another voice answered.
There was no reason for his fear, other than the obvious ones: they were eight miles underwater, about to enter a station built on the structural principles of an egg.
“Go on,” Al said. “I’m right behind you.”
Luke could make out the insides of the Trieste: the dim slope of a wall, the dull wink of metal.
He reached out to anchor his hands on the hatch. Then he saw something. His breath caught.
What the hell was that?
2.
WHEN THEY WERE BOYS, their father used to take Luke and Clayton for a haircut at the Hawkeye barbershop. Give ’em a high and tight, he’d tell Vince, the old Italian barber. That, or These boys are getting shaggy. Give ’em the ole whitewall. It was the only place in town Luke had ever seen his father get even a hint of respect, and even then it seemed grudging.
Luke remembered the ancient magazines with names like Men’s Adventure and Rage: For Men, their lurid covers featuring men wrestling bears or coldcocking alligators, their cover lines reading: “Swastika Slave Girls in Guatemala’s No-Escape Brothel Camp!” and “Rabid Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” He remembered how the barber’s scissors would snip around his ears with the speed of hummingbird wings.