Deep Submersive Vehicle (DSV) Neptune.
Ocean floor.
Depth 10,703 meters.
Monday, July 30, 1.57 p.m.
Miles down in the submersible, an uptight Polidori ignored the harassing transmissions from the surface, stalling for time. His unwavering gaze was fixed on the monitor from Enright’s helmet cam searching the moldering bowels of the shipwreck for the treasure. It was a gloomy view of murk.
“Neptune, do you read? Over.” Clark caught Polidori’s gaze and mouthed you’ve got to respond to them. The Russian grudgingly nodded and spoke irritably into the UQC. “The captain says he’s fine. He’s just a few meters from the gold. Over.”
Clark pulled Polidori aside. “Maybe Roy’s right. That ship is unstable. We can regroup and do another dive.”
Glowering, the pilot bit his tongue. Clark got on the underwater telephone connected to the diving suit. “Captain, Roy wants you to get out of there and come back to the sub right now.”
On the video screen, the helmet cam presented a shaky and grainy washed-out image of a shadowy galleon bulkhead doorway.
“Over,” she finished.
Enright’s voice came over the UQC. “Negative. Tell him I’m almost at the treasure. Over.”
Another disturbance appeared on the monitor screens as things moved and fell in the darkness.
Polidori took the microphone from Clark. “Surface, the captain wants to press on with the salvage. Over.”
The topside voice was apoplectic. “Dammit! That stubborn son of a bitch. Over.”
The captain’s chuckle was audible. “Tell my brother to have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up. Everything’s fine. I’m almost there.”
Passing through the doorway, the camera view revealed mounds and mounds of sandy silt, then something large and metallic gleaming in the searchlight on the diving suit.
“Found it.”
Closer, step-by-step, the object was revealed to be an ancient treasure chest with a huge padlock that had rusted off. Gloved hands reached for it.
Polidori punched the wall. “That’s it! That’s it!”
“Oh my God!” Clark laughed.
The captain’s voice was jubilant. “Mission accomplished. I’m coming in.”
The soaking, decrepit, barnacle-and-plankton-covered ruin of a treasure chest sat on the floor inside the sub. The ecstatic Enright, out of his diving suit, huddled around it with Polidori. Clark circled with the video camera. The close, rounded steel walls of the personnel sphere encircling them seemed to thrum and vibrate with the electricity of their charged excitement in the air.
A smear of frigid seawater was pooling around the wet treasure chest on the floor—each successive drip from the wooden lid sounding to Enright like a deafening splash in the reverential hush of almost religious silence as he and the others were struck speechless by what they beheld.
This is what discovering El Dorado felt like.
The captain’s mind reeled.
He had it in his hands.
After all these years, all the work, all the expense, the impossible mission had finally recovered the near mythic, long lost treasure that would make him richer than the Pharaohs, wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. This was the kind of fortune that drove men mad, and now he understood why. His heart pinballed in his chest and he felt dizzy, more from excitement than from the effects of depressurization since he ingressed the Neptune fifteen minutes ago.
He had it in his hands!
Enright cleared his throat. He couldn’t speak. “After all this work, the booty better be here.” The captain sputtered. Gazing at the closed lid of the salvaged trunk, he experienced a paralyzing jolt of dread. What if the gold wasn’t there? What if there was nothing inside the rotted, waterlogged strongbox but sand? What if the clandestine information they had bribed from the Spanish was false? What if the Corona had been a decoy, loaded with a treasure chest full of lead while the real treasure had been transported on another ship, as was commonplace in the 19th Century? It was totally irrational, but the grip of apprehension was freezing him into inaction, and he almost didn’t want to open the chest.
“Captain?” Enright snapped out of it, seeing Polidori and Clark’s expectant faces watching him, breathless anxiety or anticipation or both etching their features. They were waiting for him to give the order to breach the trunk and discover its fabled contents. He had to be the one to give the go ahead.
“Shall we?” whispered Enright, voice hoarse and tight.
He picked up a hammer and Polidori lifted a crowbar, each attacking the lock with surgical precision.
Care that was hardly necessary.
The lock broke right off.
Hit the steel floor with a clunk.
The men brushed off the clasp, which crumbled to rust, and threw open the chest lid.
It was there.
Sebastian Enright couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a fucking miracle.
Inside the strongbox were hundreds of gold doubloons, the corroded coins worth an incalculable fortune!
Freshly minted 150 years ago, the coins were rough and sea-weathered, but the pure gold shone in the argonauts’ eyes with a heavenly gleam. There were piles upon piles of it, some coins loose, others fused together in golden chunks.
The captain’s skull felt like it was about to explode with excitement—it was more money that they could all spend in ten lifetimes.
He laughed, running his hands through the gunked up treasure, rich beyond all measure. “It’s all here. Just like it was supposed to be.” Loose coins spilled through his fingers.
They began to giggle, then laugh, one by one, unable to stop.
“It’s a fortune,” Clark gasped. “Hey, I changed my mind, I want a share!”
The men eyeballed her. Seriously?
“Just kidding,” the woman said.
Enright handed her a coin magnanimously, just to be a dick. “Spend it in good health.”
Polidori clapped his hands. “We’re rich!
Suddenly, the bouillon moved.
Something alive popped out of the piled gold coins and the crew jumped back, startled.
A tiny creature dropped out of the treasure chest and scuttled away across the cockpit floor!
It was warm here.
Not like the cold the alien had always known, in outer space, at the bottom of the sea.
So were the three hosts it felt the heat of in the warm place with it. They were warm, too.
A fight or flight reflex programmed in the genetic code of the interstellar creature chose flight.
For now.
“Oh my God.”
Clark recognized the Neptune’s new occupant right away as it skittled between her feet and escaped—it was one of the sea parasites riding like an alien jockey on the back of a crab that had got inside of the sub. A stowaway inside the treasure chest.
Now it was running loose.
The critter didn’t scare her at all, but she saw the blood rush out of Enright’s and Polidori’s faces as they jumped back in alarm.
“What the hell is that?” Polidori shuddered, the young woman thinking it was the first time she had ever heard fear in his voice.
“Holy shit!” Enright gasped, involuntarily moving over to the treasure chest as if to protect it from the interloper.
“Relax, boys. We’re bigger than it is.” Clark smiled.
Wherever it was.
She looked around inside the submersible sphere, but couldn’t find it.
All three crew members stood frozen in place—the woman simply because she didn’t want to step on and kill it. Their eyes traveled the circumference of the sphere, but nothing moved and they couldn’t spot the little creature.
“Where the fuck did it go?” Enright squirmed. “Find it and kill it. That thing may bite.”
“It must have hid somewhere.” Polidori was perspiring.
“I don’t see it.” Clark shrugged, confused.
“Look for it!”
Clark got down on her hands and knees and started searching the tiny quarters of the submersible—it wasn’t like there were a lot of places to hide in fifteen feet of space. Her attention went to the three pillowcases containing their gear. As she did, the woman was amused how grossed out the two grown-ass men were as they squeamishly hunted for the tiny, probably harmless intruder. They looked like two of the Three Stooges with a case of the heebie-jeebies. Clark stifled a laugh, already giddy and a bit unhinged from the gold fever of a few moments before—it always tickled her how squeamish most grown men were compared to her, how the sight of blood or shit or anything icky freaked them out. Clark may have been petrified of drowning, but wasn’t scared of a little crab critter.
Now, if she could just find the little fucker.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Shuffling around on her knees, she groped around under the few pieces of cargo and went through the pillowcases with their stowed gear.
As she was about to reach into Polidori’s pillowcase, the Russian suddenly snatched it from her grasp in sudden alarm. “Give me that! I got it,” he snapped. He felt inside the sack, then shook his head, stowing the pillowcase with his gear safely beside his station.
Nothing.
Picking up a long screwdriver, Enright was poking the head behind the oxygen tanks and CO2 filters, a look of terror on his face as he nervously probed around for the intruder.
Clark smelled the body odor of fear in the personnel sphere as she checked under the floor pads. Behind her back, Enright and Polidori’s nervous voices interrupted one another.
“—Look under the instrument panel—”
“—Not under there, just checked—.
“—Use the flashlight—”
“—Maybe it crawled back in the treasure chest—”
“—Better put on gloves—”
“—Good idea—”
Pussies, Clark thought to herself, feeling around barehanded under the transponder unit. For the first time on the dive, she felt superior to the boys. Her fingers touched nothing but smooth flat steel—wherever the strange crab organism was, it wasn’t there.
So she stood up.
And saw both men looking right at her, eyes wide as saucers.
“Clark, don’t move.” Enright whispered tensely.
That’s when she felt it.
A tickle in the hair on the top of her head.
Her eyes rolled slowly up toward the rounded ceiling of the vessel, tilting her chin just enough to see it.
The crab, with its bizarre, insectlike driver, was suctioned to the roof directly above her head, a few strands of her hair caught in one of its claws.
“Clark, don’t!” Polidori put his hands out to stop her.
Clark captured it easily.
“Easy, little guy,” she coaxed.
After carefully retrieving the crab and its spooky unwelcome passenger, the apprentice pilot placed both organisms onto a steel tray and positioned them gingerly with her bare fingers.
The pilot and captain watched as the woman did a manual examination of the odd sea creature and the crab it had latched on to. “Interesting.”
“Be careful,” Enright warned. “That may bite.”
Clark held out one hand. “Give me the ultrasound unit.”
The men were more interested in the gold and turned back to the treasure. Enright waved her off. “Listen, Clark, I appreciate you enjoying your crispy critter, but you don’t mind if Polidori and me get back to our booty.”
“Work with me here, will you? Just give me the ultrasound, then you can get back to your filthy riches.”
“Sure.” The captain picked up the portable electronic device and handed it over to the young woman.
Clark placed the organism under the ultrasound stethoscope beam that displayed a see-through anatomical readout on the monitor of the device.
“What are we looking at?” Enright asked.
The parasite was clearly visible, like a second invasive endoskeleton inside the crab. A cartilage hook from the nasty creature’s beak impaled the crustacean’s brain stem, the wiry tendril branches of the strange sea parasite inserted down the legs and claws of the crab, driving the crustacean this way and controlling its host completely.
“It’s like this organism is tapping into the nervous system of its host by remote control,” Clark observed, fascinated. “Kind of like a puppeteer and a marionette.”
Polidori was having none of it. “Get rid of that thing. It may be poisonous.”
Clark persisted. “Obviously not to the crab here because it’s still alive. I think the goal of the creature is not to kill its host, but to live off it and control it.”
It made for a disturbing visual on the ultrasound.
They all exchanged glances, considering the nature of the sinister organism they were looking at, and shared a group shudder.
Clark’s eyes grew wide in wonder, the woman and adventurer in her inspired. “It looks like we’ve discovered a new life form.”
“I said get rid of it. It gives me willies,” the Soviet growled. “We don’t know what kind of bacteria it has or what infection we could get.”
“He has a point,” Enright agreed.
Clark took a glass specimen bottle, uncapped it, and dropped both the crab and the parasite inside, screwing the lid. She observed the icky creature through the bottle. “Now it can’t hurt anybody.”
“You’ll probably want this, then.” The captain held something in the palm of his hand out to her.
It was a small fragment of the glowing green rock.
She took it and turned the eerie piece of stone over in her fingers, amazed. “Wow.”
“Keep it as a souvenir of our dive.” he smiled.
“Thanks,” the woman said, slipping the meteorite fragment into the front pockets of her shorts.
A gust of current shimmied the sub.
They all looked queasily out the portholes to observe the floor of the shelf crawling with countless parasites fastened to the shells of scuttling hapless crabs.
Polidori nodded to Enright and Clark. “We got what we came for. Let’s get out of here.”
The captain nodded back. “Take us up. Mission’s over.”
The apprentice pilot manned her station. The pilot nudged his jaw at her. Getting behind the controls, he hit a switch that emptied the ballast tanks, initiating their ascent.
“Ballast purge commenced.”
All at once, the Neptune was jolted by a powerful underwater current that heaved the sub sideways.
“Look out!” Enright cried.
The monitors showed the DSV being swept out of control in the surge of current toward the hull of shipwreck.
THUD!
The sub smashed hard into the ancient vessel, knocking the crew off their feet.
Clark screamed.
Through the portholes, the ruined, sodden pirate ship collapsed onto the sub. The ground the boat rested on crumbled in a small avalanche on top of the DSV.
The external cameras and AUV monitors showed a multi-screen panorama of the catastrophe from every possible angle.
A heavy mast crashed on top of the sub like a felled tree, smashing against the hull, doing visible damage, causing debris to fly off and float in the headlights. The weight of the toppling shipwreck caused a partial collapse of the plateau by the cliff, burying the DSV under a mountain of rocks that pounded the hull and smothered the submersible under the crushing weight of rubble as everything went black.