She had been standing on the lower deck of the Skandi Aurora when it happened, doing basic repair work on her ROV’s thrusters with the rest of her team. While checking to make sure the wiring on the device’s cameras were working properly, she felt the entire deck suddenly shift beneath her. Shouts were heard coming from the lower deck, right where the moon pool was located. Izzy had started looking at her teammates, wondering what was going on, when disaster struck.
At first the noises she heard and the vibrations coming from the metal floor felt like gigantic sledgehammer blows coming from the bottom of the vessel’s hull. The next thing she knew the alarm bell was rung, and the panic started.
Izzy had made it onto one of the portside lifeboats, just as the Aurora began to list dangerously forward. As a woman she was naturally allowed to go to the front of the line, and she ended up sitting in one of the built-in plastic seats along the sides of the lifeboat’s interior. In a matter of seconds, more women quickly piled inside, filling up most of the spaces before the wounded were carried onboard.
The ship’s doctor was looking after one crewman with a broken leg as he was laid out on the narrow flooring in between the seats. Izzy could only watch in shocked silence as Captain Al Guiccione got inside and sat on the elevated conning chair at the aft part of the cabin before giving the signal for the lifeboat to be jettisoned into the water.
Izzy frowned as the davits extended outwards, then lowered the lifeboat onto the water’s surface and the cable was quickly detached. He’s the captain of the ship. Isn’t he supposed to be the last one to leave?
Guiccione noticed her incredulous stare as he started up the lifeboat’s small motor. “I was ordered to get inside.”
“By who?” Izzy asked suspiciously.
“Mr. Sandor.”
“But this boat is like, only half full. What about the others?”
Guiccione continued to stare straight ahead past the elevated windshield while speaking in an emotionless tone. “There are inflatable rafts that will be deployed too. Sandor wants me to head over to the work barge right away, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Izzy’s mouth hung open in a mixture of shock and outrage. “So you’re just gonna leave the others behind, floating out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Guiccione grimaced. “I wasn’t given a choice!”
“Yes you were,” Izzy said. “You’re the captain, and you ought to be helping your crew and passengers.”
“I work for Morgenstern Oceanic, just like you. I have to follow orders.”
She noticed that the radio beside him had not been turned on. “Did you get any replies when you radioed for help?”
Guiccione said nothing as the lifeboat continued to move straight ahead.
Izzy gritted her teeth. “Captain, did you radio for help?”
He turned to look at her, an intense sadness in his eyes. “No, I… I couldn’t. Mr. Sandor said not to.”
Disengaging her seatbelts, Izzy pulled herself to an upright position. “What?”
Guiccione’s lips trembled as he kept the lifeboat on a northerly heading. “I-I’m sure they’ll be alright. I’ll put the word out when… when we get to the barge.”
Izzy turned and looked through one the side portholes. Sure enough, several inflatable life rafts had been deployed, and she could see a number of people jumping from the rapidly sinking Aurora with their life vests on, in a desperate attempt to reach them.
Shifting sideways, Izzy now stood right underneath the captain’s elevated chair. “We need to go back there and help them!”
Guiccione simply shook his head while keeping both hands on the steering wheel.
“At least get on the air and call out for help,” Izzy said as she tried to climb up and reach for the radio set by the command console.
Twisting his shoulders, the Aurora’s captain shoved her back down. Izzy fell onto the floor, her buttocks landing with a hard thud onto the thick plastic hull.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked, tears filling her eyes.
When the captain still didn’t respond, Izzy turned to look at the others still sitting along the remaining chairs. Several members of the crew glanced up at her, only to look back down in quiet shame. Izzy quickly realized she was alone.
A number of screams were soon heard from the distance. Izzy moved over behind the captain and opened the aft hatch. The lifeboat had moved a few hundred meters away from the half sinking ship, but the Aurora’s lights were still active, and she could see what was happening to the ones they had left behind.
The Aurora’s stern had lifted itself up as her flooded bow sank deeper below the waves, the massive twin propellers visible as they now jutted out from the water. Several life rafts were floating a few dozen meters away, the occupants desperately crying out for help, when the nearby waters began churning.
Izzy screamed as she saw one of the inflatable rafts being popped open from underneath, like a plastic bag filled with air before it burst. It was soon dragged down into the black depths of the sea.
Guiccione looked over his shoulder and happened to see it at the same time she did. “Oh my god.”
Kneeling by the open entryway, Izzy held up her shaking hands. “That… that thing we built under the water. It’s not a hangar… it was a cage!”
Less than a minute later, the surface of the water around the lifeboat began to churn, as if a very powerful surge had just swept underneath the vessel’s hull. The other passengers exchanged terrified looks and several of them started to scream.
Leaning out of the hatch, Izzy stared down into the dark surface of the water. There was something huge rippling underneath them, and it somehow caught up with the lifeboat using a burst of unimaginable speed.
“No, no, no!” Guiccione yelled as he tried to increase the lifeboat’s throttle, but the emergency vessel’s small diesel motor couldn’t do more than a few knots.
Izzy’s life flashed in front of her eyes as she glimpsed a brief instance of bioluminescent blue light coming from beneath the waves, as if a demon from the depths flashed its destructive intentions out towards her in a chilling visual display.
Time slowed, and a surreal calm cascaded over her body. It seemed like she caught a brief sight of an angry, primordial demigod that sought to punish the world’s unbelievers. Despite all their advancements, humankind seemed but a tiny, inconsequential speck compared to such a monstrous, cyclopean being.
The next thing she knew, Izzy was thrown from the open entryway as the ghostly leviathan reached out and grabbed hold of the lifeboat. Izzy plunged headfirst into the dark waters of the sea, swallowing a mouthful of saltwater before she managed to come up to the surface for air.
When she opened her eyes, Izzy could only look up as she observed the lifeboat in front of her being torn open like a fragile plastic toy. The endless screams coming from the others numbed her as she continued to float helplessly among the churning waves.
Izzy closed her eyes, hoping it would all just stop. The fading moments seemed to stretch out into eternity as all the cries around her were silenced, one by one. In due time she opened them once more, only to stare back into a pair of gigantic compound eyes jutting out from the water several meters in front of her. These sensory organs looked like glittering mirror balls as the fading lights from the nearby wreck of the Aurora created tiny, scintillating reflections of herself, right before the illumination from the doomed ship finally went out, and the entire area was plunged into an infinite darkness once more.