Deep Submersive Vehicle (DSV) Neptune.
Ocean floor.
Depth 18,129 meters.
Tuesday, July 31, 1:00 a.m.
When Clark came to, her hands were tied behind her back with electrical cable, and Polidori was dragging her through the open hatch into the diver lockout decompression chamber.
Enright was already dumped there, bound and crumpled, half conscious by the diving suit.
“Whatever you’re thinking of doing, Polidori, please don’t,” she gasped.
The groggy woman regarded the insane pilot. His body twitched and jerked as he moved like he was powered by an alien force unaccustomed to how the human body worked. His back was crooked and grotesquely hunched over, his feet shuffling. The pilot’s mouth grinned, yawned, puckered for no apparent reason. His eyes were blinking constantly, in a rapid tic.
Terrified, Clark struggled with her hands bound behind her, but Polidori easily stowed her in the upper compartment by the airlock.
His face was a greenish infected hue and his body movements were spastic, like a marionette manipulated by an unseen puppeteer.
Which he was.
She tried to reason with him. All she had was her mouth to fight with. “Polidori, this is me, Clark. You know me. Snap out of it.”
The pilot had been almost completely taken over the inhuman intelligence of the creature that latched on to him, she could see that—his body language was insectile and an alien persona glowed his eyes.
All tied up, Clark screamed and kicked and heaved uselessly as Polidori left her stuffed in the corner of the decompression chamber beside the barely coherent Enright.
“No, NO! I can’t drown!” she begged.
The infected pilot seemed to be going in and out of cognition as the intelligence of the alien life form struggled to assert itself. What remained of his human consciousness insensately attempted to articulate the transformation he was undergoing.
Polidori replied to her now in a strange voice not his own. The words seemed to be uttered phonetically.
“I don’t really know quite what I’m turning into but I think that I will be able to last a long time down here without food or water or air because it doesn’t need them and sooner or later they will come and they will find the sub and they will bring us back up and then it will get to the surface. That’s what it really wants, you know. It wants to get up where we are.”
“Why?” Clark asked, whispering for some reason.
“Because we’re up there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s been down here a long time. It didn’t come from here and it’s been around much longer as we’ve been up there, I think. Don’t know whether it will survive up there in the sunlight and the air, but it wants up, and if it doesn’t survive, it always has down here, doesn’t it? I…I think…”
“What, Polidori? What do you think? Tell me. I really want to know.”
A half-human melancholy and regret flickered in his sad glazed eyes. Something inside Polidori knew the human being was dying. “I think we never should have come down here.”
Behind her back, Clark felt the sharp metal edge of a slotted angle bolted to the steel floor. She started using the edge to try and cut through the cable trying her wrists. She kept getting the words out, doing anything to keep Polidori talking, bartering for time. “You don’t have to do this. I know it’s still you inside. The crew on Mother are coming to get us. They’ll be here any minute. When they bring us up the doctors will fix you. They’ll make you better. Please trust me on that.”
“They’re not coming. Nobody is. We both know that.” He smiled with strange empathy. “You shouldn’t be afraid, you know. It doesn’t hurt.”
“What are you talking about?”
He moved his lips to answer, but no sound came out. Then he bared a rictus schizophrenic grin. “You have no idea how good it is to be in a high-functioning human host after riding crabs around.”
Through the open hatch, several more sea parasites smacked against a porthole.
“WE want you both. WE need hosts,” Polidori said.
Clark’s blood curdled—it wasn’t him speaking anymore, but another personality not of this earth commandeering his voice box. The chilling alien voice chittered and bleated as its thoughts were translated into squeaking human vocalizations.
“Don’t.” Clark was getting a very bad feeling.
“You won’t hurt anymore. When WE are in you. No more pain. No more fear. Maybe at first, but not. For long. You won’t need food or water. No thirst or hunger. WE will take over and. WE can live on your bodies for a long time. WE. Are. WE ARE. Yes. WE think WE’LL be just fine down here.”
Polidori reached his hands over to caress Clark, touching her cheek gently at first. Her eyes were wide in panic, locking with his, afraid to break his gaze. He brought his mouth close to hers, as if to kiss her.
“Wha-?” she stammered.
Behind her back, her trammeled wrists sawed the cable back and forth relentlessly against the sharp edge of the metal slotted angle, slicing and fraying it. Her binds were half cut through.
“WE. Want. You. WE want you.”
The pilot moved his lips closer to hers. The woman clenched her mouth and jaw tightly shut. His hands roughly smeared against her cheeks, fingers brutally prying the sides of her lips apart, pulling her mouth then her jaw open. She was unable to stop him, trying to thrash her head side to side. His hands clasped her skull in a vise grip, holding it firmly in place.
Now, whatever was human in Polidori was gone and the extraterrestrial intelligence was present, his face twitching like a crab’s mandible.
Clark’s mouth was clamped open like a dental brace in his fingers. Her open throat was exposed to him behind her teeth and she tried to cover it protectively with the fragile wall of her pink tongue. Lips inches from hers, Polidori’s mouth stretched wider and wider, until the jaw disengaged, dislocating with a sickening crack. Emerging out of his gullet, the horrific, slimy, alien tendril extended out his mouth. As her eyes bulged in unspeakable terror, the tentacle slithered into her open mouth, invasively inserting itself down her throat.
He loosened his grip on her face.
She bit down furiously with clenched teeth like a bear trap, severing the sea parasite tendril in a splatter of spurting green goo!
The infected pilot screamed a hideous, inhuman, high-pitched shriek. Staggering back, covering his mouth, the dangling bitten-off stump of the tentacle hanging out his lips, he spun out of control, eyes rolled up their sockets revealing the whites, bouncing off the walls.
Gagging and choking, the horrified woman puked up the severed length of twitching tentacle lodged in her throat, spitting it out. The tendril thrashed in gooey death throes on the floor. She retched at the unspeakable taste. “OMIGOOOOOOO—! UGH! GAH!”
In a burst of adrenaline, Clark snapped the cord binding her wrists behind her back against the sharp slotted angle, releasing her hands. Quickly hiking her knees to her chin, she tore at the cord tying her ankles with her freed hands.
With a squalling alien screech of extraterrestrial rage—no human being had ever produced such an unearthly sound—the pilot dived at the woman. She sledgehammered both tied feet into his chest with desperate brute force, knocking him clear across the compartment.
Polidori crawled back down the hatch, scuttling into the cockpit, and began to close the lid for the final time.
The AUV monitors in the cockpit showed the ocean floor ledge the DSV rested on was shifting under the sub’s weight and agitation. The disturbance of the fight inside the vessel was causing the Neptune to roll, edging precariously closer to the brink above the bottomless pit.
If it fell into the chasm, the pressure would surely crush it.
In the rotation of the sub, the pilot struck his head on the askew instrument panel and was temporarily incapacitated.
The gaping inner hatch remained open.
In the adjoining diver lockout chamber, the woman struggled to her feet and used the sharp edge of a tool on the diving suit to slice the cord binding her ankles.
When her limbs were free, she cut the Captain Enright loose, slapping him awake.
“WAKE UP, ENRIGHT! WAKE UP NOW!”
He came to, groggy. “Wha-? What’s going on?”
“POLIDORI’S TRYING TO KILL US! WE GOT TO GET OUT HERE BEFORE HE SEALS THE HATCH AND FLOODS THE COMPARTMENT! WE’LL DROWN!”
Enright blinked, eyes half-focused—they both saw the pilot through the open portal reaching for the lid to the hatch.
“Move your ass!” the woman shouted.
The two of them dove through the opening into the cockpit before the pilot could seal them in.
With a shrill interstellar shriek, the alien controlling Polidori regained its senses. He attacked Clark and Enright, and all three battled it out in the rolling vessel. Fists flew, feet kicked. The revolving sphere lurched sickeningly as the crew engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the unsteady wavering footing of the rotating hull. Punches landed on flesh and when they missed, metal. Yells and shouts and extraterrestrial shrieks rang out, reverberating around the sphere. It was a knot of grappling bodies, a flurry of fists and feet in fifteen feet of enclosed space.
Clark slung her arm around Polidori’s throat and got him in a necklock. The Russian’s hand clawed the woman’s face and his fingers dug into her soft flesh like putty, savagely stretching the skin with enough strength to pull her face off. She grabbed his wrist with both hands just in time and bent the fingers back, dislocating the bones from their sockets, manually torqueing the Russian’s palm downwards in a Marine combat move. The extraterrestrial released its grip as its wrist snapped with a grisly crunch of torn cartilage. Clark staggered back, gasping in pain and nursing the livid bruise indentations of fingers left on her cheeks.
Enright jumped Polidori, pummeling him with furious blows, head butting him in the face and breaking his nose, discharging a thick interstellar snot of green goop. Polidori hit back, his mangled fist clenched, motorized by odd new ligaments bulging like puppet strings beneath the surface of its arm. The captain took an incapacitating piledriver blow to the throat and collapsed against an instrument panel, choking blood.
On the unwatched monitors, the rocking vessel slid continuously toward the edge of the drop. The argonauts’ violent struggle threatened to tip the sub off the ledge into the bottomless HMRG Deep.
Inside, a sudden revolution of the hull heaved Polidori’s body against Enright and they wrestled in a brutal clinch.
Clark grabbed a lug wrench and came up behind the Russian, swinging the heavy metal tool against his skull and spine with all her strength—the blows didn’t faze the alien even as chunks of its scalp came off, covering the wrench in red and green meat and hair.
Pinned, the captain’s eyes bulged as he saw the pilot’s mouth distend and a slimy green tendril slither up out of its stinking throat, pistoning at his face with piledriver force. Enright desperately ducked his out of the way as the tentacle punched past his head into the cockpit battery console, burying itself in the live circuitry. A firework shower of sparks cascaded. Polidori was instantly electrified as the tentacle acted as a conductor—raw high-voltage current through the tendril coming out of its mouth. The pilot’s body convulsed in a spastic dance as he got fried. His flesh was smoking as he tore the tentacle loose of the battery coil and staggered back dizzily.
In the scuffle, Clark caught a quick terrifying glimpse of an AUV monitor displaying an outside view of the submersible tipping on the brink of the chasm, about to fall off.
The gaping hatch of the decompression chamber had repositioned alongside them.
The captain shoved the pilot back through the open portal of the other compartment, slamming the lid shut and sealing it in with a two-handed turn of the locking wheel.
The sound of Polidori’s fists pounding on the other side of the hatch echoed throughout the submersible.
“HE’S SEALED! FLOOD IT!” Enright screamed.
Clark was torn with indecision. “I can’t!”
“DO IT NOW!”
The woman hit the lever to flood the other chamber.
Inside the diver lockout chamber, the vents opened and a surge of icy seawater flooded the upper compartment containing the imprisoned Polidori.
He beat his fists uselessly against the sealed hatch as the rush of freezing seawater engulfed him in a matter of seconds. Then he was floating underneath, flailing his arms, unable to breathe.
In the personnel sphere, the cockpit readouts registered the chamber filling to capacity with ocean water.
Clark and Enright listened with a mixture of raw horror and relief as the muffled pounding of fists and inhuman gurgling on the other side of the hatch became more and more frantic, then subsided as Polidori, or the thing he had become, drowned a slow death.
Soon, there was just silence.
The man and woman stared grimly at the monitor showing the camera view of the inside of the diver lockout chamber.
On the monitor, Polidori’s drowned body drifted limply in the ocean-filled compartment, head lolling.
His face, eyes shut, floated toward the camera into a tight close up.
Suddenly his eyes popped open, eyeballs white and irises erased!
At first, there had been pain.
The pain was intrinsic to the host. The alien could not drown, as the organism it inhabited did.
The discomfort had alarmed the extraterrestrial, but though acute, the pain was brief and quickly passed.
Its host had gone cold.
It knew it was dead.
This did not concern the alien, because by now it was in full control of the shell that encased it, its own biology meshed with the organism it had fused with. The extraterrestrial was fully able to pilot the host, whose extremities moved at its command. The new sense of sight, wholly unfamiliar to the alien in its original state, was an advantageous radar.
But the being was agitated.
The distress it felt was because the two other warm hosts were suddenly separated from it, and on the deepest molecular level, the space creature needed to mesh with them.
It was alone.
It was isolated.
An obstruction stood between it and the hosts it needed on the other side.
So it began to break through the wall.