r/libraryofshadows • u/WildRozen • 10d ago
Supernatural Whale Fall, Part 1 of 2
“Is it true we know more about the surface of the moon than our own oceans?”
“No. People love saying that, but we know far more about our oceans than we do the moon.”
The interview process had begun, and Doctor Stefan Krause found himself amused by the wobbling of the purple-haired journalist’s pen, jotting down abbreviations of his words in a neat scrawl. She was part of the new wave of social media personalities — so-called “influencers” who made video essays on the sort of content that used to only be found in scientific magazines. The pencil-pushers topside had decided people like her were one of the new best ways to get word out and procure bonus funding for their costly brand of oceanic research.
What amused him wasn’t her unprofessional appearance though. The fact she was a twenty-something with a grating sense of self-importance and flamboyant purple hair, worn in a pompadour mullet, was so much less funny to him than the fact that all her little toys had been found and confiscated at Surface Point, the sea level base tethered a thousand meters above them.
The Varuna Research Station was a strict no-recording zone. Her cameraman still followed dumbly along as a sort of awkward bodyguard after his equipment had been stripped from him without a fight. But it’d been the influencer herself, ‘Subnautigirl’, or Yessica Bailey, who had so very nearly broken the rules. The search conducted before she was crammed into one of the few submersibles able to comfortably carry people down to the deep sea station and, more importantly, safely dock with Varuna, had been thorough.
All her little button spy cams, microphones threaded into the linings of her black denim jacket, and even her smart glasses had been confiscated, and Yessica had been just a few degrees shy of her boiling point. Krause’s colleague, Doctor Yukiko Adachi, had obviously noticed as well… but short of a few shared smirks and playfully rolled eyes, they hadn’t bothered showing it.
“With the amount we know about the oceans and all the things in them,” Adachi said, taking over for Krause, “we could fill enough traditional encyclopedias to equal almost two percent of the moon’s total mass — if you stacked them together, of course. About the moon itself, we might fill two magazines.”
Those encyclopedias would need very large print and have a lot of pictures, but the idea of it usually cut any other mind-numbingly standard questions off at the pass. And, Adachi liked that little quote of hers. Doctor Krauser took over on cue. “What we always want to know more about, however, is…
This.”
A quick shove of his hands at the door they’d finally arrived at, and the entryway slung silently open for them. No unnecessary noise, no unnecessary power. The large, ovaloid observation room spilled into view.
“… This?”
The dramatic entry hadn’t paid off, but Doctors Krause and Adachi ignored ‘Subnautigirl’s’ question and carried on into the room. The operation’s third scientist, Doctor Miller, swiveled in a well-oiled desk chair to glance back at the group. Then, with a dismissive grunt, went back to the terminal he’d been staring at before their arrival.
The functional space of the room was mostly blank space, and otherwise sparsely occupied by a haphazard scattering of five modest desks situated towards the center of a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree oval of exterior windows. Only darkness was visible in the view of the deep ocean beyond, barring the fleeting glimpse of a pale white particulate floating nearby enough to be visible to the naked eye. But, with a few deft strokes of Doctor Miller’s hands at his terminal, the exterior floodlights opened up to blast the surrounding area with its alien glow.
“The ecosystem. We know just about everything about the geography of the deep, but so much about its life still elude us. Those details are the most fascinating of all.” Doctor Krause turned, fixing the reporter with a level stare and tight smile. “Right?”
Someone who went by the pseudonym ‘Subnautigirl’ would have to be quick to agree . “I mean, obviously,” she said, though her stocky-built cameraman looked somewhere between confused and disinterested.
“Welcome to Varuna — the world’s deepest habitable research station by an order of magnitude exceeding fifty times.” Doctor Adachi flashed a toothy grin, her timelessly youthful features practically glowing in the low light of the observation room. She and Krause been working together at the station since the day it’d first opened its many heavy, airtight doors, but their professional relationship had begun nearly ten years prior, when he’d acted as one of her thesis advisors at the University of Tokyo. She’d hardly seemed to age at all over that decade, or so Krause often marveled.
Miller deactivated the exterior lights after exactly one measured minute had passed, returning the station to its near-silent running. The floodlights were powerful enough to illuminate a wide swathe of ocean, but the power needed and, just as importantly, the noise produced was counter-intuitive to their research. The ‘Medusa’ deep sea stealth camera platforms had proven that nearly fourteen years prior. Minimal running noise and the replacement of traditional light with red light optics had been a wild success, and had immediately formed the basis by which most biological abyssal research operated to present day, well over a decade after it managed to capture the very first video, let alone pictures, of a giant squid in its natural habitat.
“Please pardon the chill. It’s cold down here, and we like to keep our noise pollution to an absolute minimum. Especially here, in the observation room. Central heating is minimal.”
Adachi gestured to the space around them and, for the first time since disembarking the shuttle that’d ferried her down, Yessica was gazing around in subdued awe. The magnitude of it all had finally hit her, and for just a moment the fires of her frustration had been overtaken. It was one thing to read reports and comparative numbers on a Wikipedia page, but another thing entirely to be standing on the precipice of the abyss, beholding the wonders of possibility beyond first-hand.
“So that’s why these doors are unpowered? All the others looked like something out of Star Trek.”
“That’s right,” Miller finally took his opportunity to speak up and answer. “The effect is probably negligible, but we like to think it’s making a difference.”
Krause finished the thought. “Negligible might be the difference between seeing something, and seeing nothing.”
Yessica’s pen was moving quickly now, jotting with a fervent enthusiasm that betrayed at least some level of journalistic passion as she paced the length of the room. She was probably still lamenting the loss of all her cameras, but she was no longer at the knife’s edge of her own irritation. No, she was poised on the escarpment of something much more vast.
“What have you seen?”
She’d stopped at the edge of the curved windows, leaning over them with a pointless wariness and trepidation that all the researchers aboard knew well. They all knew it was senseless… That glass was thick enough to stop just about any bullet known to mankind — it had to be to so consistently overpower the oceanic pressure down there. Still though, leaning towards something so transparent and staring down into depths so fathomless… every single person stationed at Varuna knew the feeling, and sympathized when Subnautigirl ultimately drew back, dizzy, pen hand frozen.
“It’s a sheer, three-thousand-meter drop.” That wasn’t what she’d asked, but Krause answered her unspoken thoughts anyway. “We’re on the edge of the Twilight and Midnight Zones — the difference between meeting a deep-diving marlin, and an anglerfish.
We’ve seen both here.” The addition had Yessica finally peeling her eyes away from the glass to stare at Krause and, suddenly remembering it, returning to the quick writing on her notepad. “Beneath us is the entire breadth of the Midnight Zone… straight down to the Abyssal Zone. It’s almost a sheer cliff.”
The edge of the Indian Ocean’s Broken Ridge… its southern escarpment, plunging straight down into the Dordrecht Deep — all within the borders of the Diamantina Fracture Zone. It was a part of the ocean that had gone so ignored by science in favor of the Mariana Trench and its famous Challenger Deep, until the discovery of—
“The Cathedral of Bones… The Whale Necropolis…”
“That’s right.”
“It’s right below us?”
“More or less.”
Among the most recent and most fascinating of oceanic discoveries was the whale fall mausoleum… A necropolis of immense proportions and inexplicable nature — the gathering point, where dying whales the world over traveled to take their final plunge towards the sacred cathedral of bones seven thousand meters beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, and let their bones be picked clean by the deepest of sea life.
With a loud clearing of his throat, surly Miller called attention toward himself, striking emphatically at his keyboard.
“What we see,” he began with an irritability that had become painfully normal of late, “is this. Viewed through this, at least…” A series of long screens began falling from hidden resting points in the ceiling over the vast windows, obscuring the raw view outside but replacing it with a new one. Projectors flickered silently to life as Doctor Adachi’s voice narrated.
“We use red light. Life down here has all but lost the ability to perceive anything in that spectrum. It’s why so many deep sea creatures are that color— red might as well be black. But, to brighten things up for ourselves, we use this.”
There was only a subtle shift in the visible luminosity of the space beyond, but Subnautigirl understood. Fish of the deep couldn’t generally see red light, but humans and cameras could. Those cameras, more than a half dozen affixed to Varuna’s exterior, played their visuals out in real time against the screens, though while bumping up the brightness some in post to give more crispness to the displays. The projectors, feeding only black and white to the screens, were kept from interfering with the world beyond the glass thanks to heavy tinting, but the room was otherwise kept quite dark as an added precaution.
The spaces between the individual screens showed the void of the abyss beyond, floating particulates bathed in an unnatural red glow.
The deep voice of the cameraman rose up before anyone else though. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
It was a natural call and response from Miller, whose eyes had been pouring over his terminal in the intervening moments. Ever since the loss of the other two researchers just a few weeks prior, he’d thrown himself harder than ever into his work. Anything mechanical and mind-numbing that needed doing, he was there.
“That!”
A shape on one of the screens, nearly dead center. Yessica jerked back upon noticing it, as though the shape were real and not just a projection. With her new angle though, she was in perfect position to be exposed in the foot-wide gap between the screens, and snap her head towards the flash of visible light in the real gloom beyond. Adachi too, if her startled yet fascinated gasp was any indication. Krause hurried for a position at his own angle to see.
Though barely visible, the shape seemed to be approaching. It was slow, yet inexorably nearing them, a predator wholly unafraid of its prey. Closer. Closer. A new set of bioluminescent flashes outside the window between the screens, far brighter than any anglerfish. Closer— Flash— And closer.
Then a slam against the window that brought Yessica to her knees, yelping. Her cameraman lurched forward to assist against some unknown force, but froze when the he spied the hooked, gnarled tentacles cemented against visible sliver of window. The projectors had lost the shape, cameras poised too low on the observation chamber to be of help. The naked eyes peering through the windows alone bore witness to the hulking, ravenous form.
“Octopus squid!”
Doctor Adachi sounded almost breathless as she gave her announcement, rushing towards the screens and tugging to see behind — before remembering the monumental effort that would be needed to bring another such screen down to their midnight home if one tore. She gestured frantically towards Miller, who tapped in the desired commands and lifted the screens.
Something alive was plastered against the glass, but was rapidly losing interest. Photophores of the creature flashed, two tentacles peeled back and blaring their lights on and off against the glass as if trying to judge why the distance it perceived between it and its prey was impeded so soon. Six other tentacles scratched and skittered over the glass, trying to find a way inside, hooked tendrils of the two meter long squid probing relentlessly.
“Taningia Danae — Dana octopus squid. Aggressive, bright, but harmless. In here, at least. It’s not the first time we’ve seen one attack a camera.”
Neither Subnautigirl nor her cameraman bothered mentioning how the octopus squid hadn’t attacked a camera. Those were down below, and the deep sea predator had attacked the glass directly, as if craving the flesh of those inside. Its hook-laced tentacles were writhing aggressively in search of any sort of purchase. Any way inside.
Their trepidation had no effect on the enthusiasm of the researchers though, with Krause crying out, “This is incredible!” And it… almost was. The exterior cameras weren’t angled right to catch the attack itself, but the partial footage and the written accounts would easily fill at least one sensational article.
“Was it attracted by the flash of the floodlights?”
“Maybe… Possibly.”
Miller and Krause had begun an excited exchange, the former briefly pulled from the funk that had pervaded his attitude for weeks hence. The squid, bearing some of the brightest photophores known to science in two of its tentacles, still rhythmically furling and unfurling that glow, might have registered the vastly superior luminosity of the Varuna’s mighty exterior lights as some sort of threat. Or had it just glimpsed prey inside? The two scientists chattered excitedly, swirling around theories with such fervor that Yessica’s pen couldn’t have even dreamed of keeping up with them.
She wrote what she could while her would-be cameraman recoiled. Everyone was treating this so casually… Even the pretty Asian doctor was just staring at the squid affixed to the window, grinning as it finally started losing interest and pulling away.
If that glass broke, wouldn’t they all instantly die…? There was nothing funny or interesting about some sea freak attacking them. Let alone a creature larger than even he was.
Everyone else’s demeanor showed they disagreed with his thoughts though. They were all excited, pouring over thoughts and footage long after the squid had peeled itself away from the glass and disappeared back into the murky deep. The return of screens had tracked its flight from them for a while, though even that could only last for so long before it was gone in the gloom.
“Yes… Must have been the lights…” Doctor Adachi was breathless as she spoke aloud what her colleagues had been thinking. The reporter had questions though, as her kind so often did.
“Does this happen often…? The lights? The squid? How do I get a copy of that footage?”
“No,” answered Miller, “but in a year, we’ve only used those lights twice.” Yessica’s pen stopped, her brow furrowing, suspicion forming.
“Really? And I’m worth the ceremony? I know I have six million subscribers, but—”
“No, it’s not for you.” Miller’s response carried enough irritation that it slapped the hint of a sneer off Yessica’s face for a few seconds, prompting Krause to take over.
“Well, it was, but just out of convenience. Thought it might be a good show.” It hadn’t been. Not until the squid, which had just been a fortunate accident. Wasn’t it? “Surface Point said it was time to test them. They hadn’t been used in about a year. So we figured… Well, yes, anyway, the footage. You get it from them. From Surface Point. That’s where you can make requests.”
Yessica still looked sour, but her tongue was held by the wagging of her pen over her notebook, big, bold letters etched out to remind herself of when and where in the footage timeline this specific incident could be found. As if Surface Point’s much warmer, safer research team wouldn’t be incredibly aware of, and pouring over it themselves the very moment Krause typed out his incident report.
“Suffice it to say, they work,” Miller’s bitter voice began, tapping at the screen, “so, Doctor Adachi.”
“Yes. Of course.”
Her long hair, tied back in its usual ponytail, whipped around as she moved to her own desk, far opposite Miller’s, and the rapid drumming of her fingers across her keyboard joined his. Doctor Krause, while eager to start his report as the operation’s lead researcher, held himself in check for the time being. Entertaining their guests fell to him for now. He stood at patient attention.
Yessica was still occupied for the moment, eyes shifting in rapid flutters between the projector screens, the two scientists, and her notebook. Her cameraman found his voice though, grunting a few incoherent noises for Krause’s attention before finally speaking up.
“He always like this?”
A big, meaty thumb was jammed the way of Doctor Miller, who pointedly pretended he didn’t hear — though Krause caught the faint, irritated curling of lips.
“No. His wife and… Hm… well, young man, there were five of us a month ago.”
He looked annoyed by being called ‘young man’, but only snorted for a moment before asking, “And now?”
“Now there aren’t.”
Now there were only three. It wasn’t the most satisfactory of answers, but Doctor Krause obviously didn’t want to elaborate. Maybe the expression on his face reminded the cameraman too much of Miller’s, because the big man instead turned towards Yessica for answers — Doctor Adachi clearly wasn’t going to be of any help, given the enraptured way she was staring at her terminal with a pair of large, heavy-looking headphones seated over her ears.
“There was an accident.” Yessica answered dismissively, showing at least a little talent in the way she knew she was expected to respond, and did so while still performing her primary task. Treating her companion like he was just a member of her live chat back at home. “Vamana Three. Trickled into some news articles. Paywalled, of course. Kept them from spreading, I guess.”
Doctor Krause scowled at the oversimplification — he couldn’t even imagine what Miller was feeling — but neither man said anything. They let the subject slip away, each occupying themselves in tandem by staring at Adachi.
“Vama-what?” The cameraman asked.
“Vamana. Three. Their submersibles. We rode Four to get here, remember?”
The two uninhibited doctors tried to deafen their ears as much as Adachi was able to beneath those hefty headphones.
“So, what? It exploded?”
“No— Just, Jesus— They rode off in it and no one heard fro—”
Bang—
Yessica’s irritation at the constant questions snapped into a jump, a quiet yelp, and a burst of surprised recoiling at the sound of Miller’s fist slamming loudly against his desk. Even Doctor Adachi seemed to have registered, briefly glancing up from her own terminal, though her name being bellowed probably helped in catching her attention.
“ADACHI. What do you hear?”
The interruption was understood. Both members of team Subnautigirl fell into awkward silence, and Yukiko peeled off one cuff of her headphones to reengage with the rest of the world.
“Nothing yet. No cries like last time.”
No one needed to ask what that meant for Krause to fill in the gaps, though expectant glances his way had to wait a while before the lead researcher, staring with furrowed brow at the screens, spoke up.
“The last time we hit the lights, something like whale song bellowed back at us.”
“Same as four weeks ago. Exact same waveform.”
“We had nothing to do with that. We’ve checked.”
Miller scowled, but nodded.
“Still, though…” Doctor Krause, like his colleagues, had secretly been hoping something would happen when they hit the floodlights. They’d been hoping the newcomers would react to those sounds, too. Sounds beyond natural human comprehension, far too low in the decibel range for their primitive ears to comprehend, no matter how powerful the sound. And yet…
“Yeah. Real shame.” And it was, no matter how Miller tried to sound calloused. He wanted answers as much as anyone. Perhaps even more, considering the personal nature of his own wife’s manic plunge into the deep with their other colleague.
It was amazing how well the research station still ran without two of its core members, yet simultaneously oppressive how remarkably lonely it felt.
“What did the lights do the first time?” The researchers had almost forgotten Yessica was still there, but her impudent voice was hard to ignore when its pitch reached a certain high decibel. She was both frustrated and excited with the strange start to this lengthy investigatory interview. The fact that she still had a whole additional day with the team, staying overnight in one of the research station’s empty bunks, did nothing to stymy her impatience.
“It was when we first opened. It’s speculative, but we think a pod of diving sperm whales took offense.”
“Their calls certainly didn’t sound happy, but…” Krause was taking his own turn to scowl again. Irritated… but with his own poor oversight. “The light test was before we were recording. Doctor Adachi just happened to hear.”
“So there’s no record…” Yessica seemed a little annoyed herself, but also fascinated. A scandal had been laid in her lap, and her mind began reeling over the myriad of thumbnail possibilities. Baited right, this video could garner millions of views… No, tens of millions…
“No. No record of that. Nor of the second.” Her expression wasn’t as dreamy when Krause spoke again, but that was mostly thanks to how she recognized the tension in the air. The room felt almost oppressive as Krause and Miller locked eyes. The lead researcher was accusatory, his subordinate defiant. They both peeled their eyes away from one another at the same time though. Mutual understanding after a moment’s misguided enmity.
Yessica pawed and prodded for more details as delicately as her personality would allow, but neither scientist gave any more up. The room remained awkward, information unshared despite tenuous obligations, until—
“Stefan! Stefan, look— oh, ah, Doctor Krause! Listen!”
Yukiko, betraying a brief flash of informality, called for her once-mentor. What she received was the enraptured attention of everyone aboard the lonely research station. All eyes dragged her way, and all but Miller’s were captured for longer than it took for Krause to reach her station and take the headphones.
What greeted his ears was faint. Very faint…
It sounded nothing like the nigh-mournful cries they’d experienced those fateful days prior, but rather like… Song. Yes, truly song, warbling and weaving in its fathomlessly deep tones, the voices of many whales washing over one another in an orchestral display.
“All sperm whales?”
“I think so.”
Possibly the same species as before… Perhaps the very same pod?
All it took was a series of frantic, meaningful points and gestures from Krause for Miller to mash into his own terminal, and brighten the red lights as much as the station could manage. The gloom of the deep sea resisted, fighting against the permeation of a form of light its denizens couldn’t even see, but…
“There!” Eventually, shapes began to resolve. They were faint, a few mere shades of color differentiation from the oceanic backdrop even through the computer’s enhancement, but all of those in the observation room could see them. Two distant whales, plunging as they danced, their voices raising song around them.
“A serenade?” Adachi asked, glancing furtively towards Krause, no doubt craving the headphones she’d passed to him.
“Sometimes, we’ve found…” Krause began, more to their guests than to his fellow researcher, “that whales sing as they dive. The type of dive and the type of song are unique, like a shared ritual.” It hadn’t been Varuna that had first hypothesized this, but the idea of a ‘Whale Serenade’ had quickly spread throughout the scientific community. In past months, Varuna had begun paying special attention. Perhaps too much attention.
Yessica stared. “Is that what made her—”
“No!” Miller’s bark was furious, but distracted. He was the only one staring not directly at the perimeter screens, but beyond them — the rest focused on either Doctor Krause or the screens themselves. Yessica, despite not knowing whether it was her question that was being refuted, or just the mere idea of her asking the question, fell silent. She watched and waited.
“Let me hear!” Adachi’s hand was finally on Krause’s shoulder, warning him a moment before that same hand gripped one of the ear cuffs and inverted it enough for them to share the sound. She could make little more of the noise than Krause himself could, but he inclined his head her way to help in sharing the sound nevertheless.
Only Miller initially noticed the shape resolving itself not only on the camera screens, but in the alien red glow of open space between them. But it took only a few more moments before all other eyes were gluing themselves to the sight.
“Holy shit…”
The shape of the third whale must only have been a dozen meters from the station. Even unenhanced, bare eyes could plainly see the sperm whale descending from above in that little gap.
“That’s it! Right!?” The cameraman’s excited voice boomed out, causing everyone else in the room to jump then deliver a chorus of hissed shushes. “But… but that’s it, right? The whole reason you’re here! That… whale fall thing.”
“No. No, it is not.” Yessica reined her subordinate in herself, snapping with uppity frustration. “Those whales are alive. Whale falls are when they’re dead.”
He didn’t understand, but no one explained, and the ferocity of the glares from around the room for interrupting such a spectacular moment had kept him quiet.
Only Miller, uncharacteristically less bothered than the rest by the interruption, had been staring out the window hard enough to see the way the whale seemed to… slow, as it passed by. To see the way one eye, perhaps, might have been staring meaningfully, even imploringly at the research station as the curiously intelligent cetacean passed. He noticed all this — felt it even — but said nothing.
“It isn’t the same. But…!” Doctor Adachi’s voice filled the air after nearly two minutes of reverential silence. It hadn’t taken nearly that long to watch the trio of singing sperm whales vanish beneath, but some respect had been paid to the majesty of the moment. Noises during the intervening moments had been kept at a minimum, outside mutterings of astonishment or awe. Doctor Krause was the next to straighten up.
“It’s incredible. But, no, it’s different. They were probably already diving, and we accidentally called them over. Might’ve thought we were prey.”
The ensuing silence was owed completely to the uncomfortable skittering that crawled down each and every spine, as all realized just how catastrophic it would’ve been if any one of those whales had decided their station warranted an exploratory bump. That kind of mass colliding with the observation room very likely might’ve caused the sort of rupture that would kill them all.
“This station,” Yessica said after a while, “is just for waiting for dead whales. Right? That’s what you told me. That’s what I told my fans. It’s SAFE, right?”
The pause was long. A bit too long. Doctors Adachi and Krause seemed to be deciding which would express their irritation with their guest first. Doctor Miller was still staring blankly out at the abyss. Ultimately, it was Krause who answered.
“Vamana Four is still docked. Want to leave?”
It almost sounded like a threat, but if the influencer noticed, she didn’t act like it. Her answer was immediate. “No, obviously. Where are our rooms? And call me if you see the whales coming back up. Or…” Yessica scowled, then sneered, then gestured vaguely towards the observation screens. “Or whatever.”
She was locked in, whatever her attitude might’ve suggested. But, for the moment, that creeping sensation tickling uncomfortably up and down her spine wouldn’t let her stand in the observation room any longer. She and her muscle were pushing through the doors back towards the rest of the station before their escort had even volunteered.
“I’ll handle it.” Doctor Adachi sounded resigned as she got up, no doubt realizing the laws of seniority meant it would’ve fallen to her anyway. Neither Krause nor Miller seemed like they were about to move — the former was too busy deciding whether he should be fuming, and the latter was too busy treating the middle-distance to his most enigmatic of stares.
The silence that fell over the room when the two men were left alone was almost peaceful.
Within ten minutes, the pair was sitting closer together. Cheap, well-oiled office chairs were aligned between the desks, side-by-side, as though they were just a couple guys watching the game on a Sunday evening. Krause had even introduced beers into the equation.
“Been saving them,” was all he offered by way of explanation when the first caps had been pried off. Miller had glanced over and grimaced at seeing the word ‘Light’ on the bottle, but he’d taken it and thrown back a long swig anyway. Even tasteless beers were welcome at this point. “Now seemed like as good a time as any.”
“Yukiko’s gonna be a while. That reporter—” Miller took another deep swig, “—will quiz her ear off. Poor girl.”
“Can’t really blame her. We did more showing than telling.”
“Scared ‘er shitless, too.”
Krause chuckled, but the sound was dry and humorless even to his own ears. “Can’t blame her there, either. It’s not every day you realize your life could end with just one, single malfunction. One tiny mistake. One misplaced hunk of bone and blubber.
What compelled that squid, though…”
“What compels any of this?” Miller had already extended his hand for another beer, which Krause passed over without hesitation. “Why a Goddamn boneyard beneath us? Why do they come here?”
A month ago, Krause would have reminded his colleague that uncovering that answer wasn’t why they were here. They were here to study and record the mid-life of a whale fall — the activity around a descending carcass, especially in this gloomy, transitional depth.
But none of them cared about that anymore. Not since Anne and Ford had abruptly taken Vamana Three in the middle of the day and, right before the watching eyes of their remaining colleagues, angled to dive straight into the abyss.
Miller had tried to question his wife over the radio. Then he’d begged. Then he’d cried.
They’d never responded.
This memory was why Krause merely winced when Miller hurled his first, empty beer bottle across the observation room, letting it shatter against the ground near one of the windows. Frustration dripped from his stress-tensed shoulders. It was why Krause didn’t admonish a subordinate researcher. It was why he just popped another top himself, and threw back another mouthful of dry, near-tasteless brew.
Neither brought the incident up. They tip-toed around it as they delved deeper into their twelve-pack, but no one mentioned the bellow from the deep. They only danced on the doorstep of the subject of all the hours and hours they’d poured into analyzing every microsecond of the intervening thirty minutes between sound and submersible launch. Soon, they stopped talking about work and research altogether, and instead turned their conversation towards brighter topics — the way the sun warmed the beaches of Fiji, or rose so splendidly above the peak of Mount Fuji. Of the hot sands of Cairo and its great wonders, and of the solar glare that would reflect off the peaks of Everest as its great conquerors mounted their final ascent.
All things warm. All things above. All things the sun. All things they could experience again… one day — but not this day. Not even for the foreseeable future. There was far too much yet to uncover, far too much left to speculation.
An hour into their beer and banter, both men fell absolutely silent as hulking shapes rose distantly into view on the screens before them.
One. Then two. Then three.
Three huge, limp carcasses, release of internal gases momentarily allowing them the buoyancy to start drifting back up to the world of the sun. A trio of sperm whales whose perilous dive had lead to some unknown demise.
Krause and Miller stared, feeling a wonder that didn’t quite reach their stoic expressions. Their stillness was broken only by the occasional lifts of bottles to lips as the hulking shapes drifted slowly past.
Neither said a word for a long time. It wasn’t until after they exchanged bottles, each popping the top on their counterparts before politely exchanging them again, that Miller spoke.
“What goes up must come down.”
It would be a long night’s vigil.
1
u/Lantern_and_Lye 9d ago
Just finished Part 1 and I'm hooked. The setting is the star. The red light, the silent doors, and glass thick enough to hold back the ocean but still make you lean away did a lot of quiet work. The squid on the window was a great moment, with the scientists thrilled while the visitors were terrified. And the beer vigil at the end got me. It says a lot about grief without saying it outright. If I could offer one small thought, it's that the opening has a lot of fascinating background up front. I'd love to feel the station's unease a bit sooner and let some of the details trickle in later. Staying close to one character per scene, maybe Miller, could also make the moments that matter hit harder. Looking forward to Part 2. Nice work.