Chapter 21

Southern Indian Ocean

Ninety Miles East of Madagascar

The hundred-and-twenty-foot research vessel carried the number 244 on the bow. The name Isabella had been painted on the stern by those at the university who thought she should have a name.

Manned by a crew of ten, including Chantel Lacourt and two other volunteers from the university, the small ship carried Paul and Gamay across the sparkling waters northwest of Reunion at a leisurely pace. The breeze was light; the swells were small, smooth, and slow. Triple-S conditions, as Paul had jokingly labeled them. All in all it was a peaceful day to be out on the ocean. Peaceful and boring.

“It would be nice if something interesting happened,” Gamay said.

She and Paul were parked inside the boat’s science bay, watching a pair of monitors. The screen in front of Gamay displayed the information coming in from an ROV operating below them while Paul studied the data coming in from a towed sensor buoy being trailed out behind them.

The sensor array was feeding them data on the state of the seawater itself. Temperature gradients, oxygen and salinity levels, and the concentrations of trace elements, organic compounds, and other chemicals. All while testing the water for any trace of two hundred known pollutants.

The ROV was traveling an oscillating path. Diving slowly to six hundred feet as it moved forward, leveling off for a mile and then pitching upward and rising toward the surface again. The extended rollercoaster-like path allowed it to traverse the entire light-absorbing zone while its cameras and sonar surveyed the aquatic life up and down throughout the zone. There was just one problem. So far they’d seen nothing.

Stretching and yawning, Gamay glanced over at Paul’s screen. “Anything interesting?”

“Not unless I can get the Red Sox game on this thing,” Paul replied. “Temperature and salinity are right where they should be. No dangerous chemicals detected, no sign of elevated radioactivity, nor is there a lack of oxygen. In essence, we’re traveling across a swath of pure, unadulterated seawater. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“I’d call a distinct lack of sea life something out of the ordinary.” Gamay said. “Aside from a few jellyfish we passed, our million-dollar fish-finder hasn’t found a thing. Are you sure the oxygen sensor is working? This is the kind of thing I expect to find in a dead zone after a massive algae bloom has absorbed all the oxygen.”

Paul had considered that a possibility, but had checked the data and found nothing to support the idea. “I’ve tested the sensors repeatedly. Both the prime O 2 sensor and the backup are calibrated and working properly,” he said. “There’s plenty of oxygen down there, and for the record, not a sign of any algae.”

“Do you two always quarrel while you’re working?” Chantel asked as she came through the door.

Gamay sighed.

Three days of this was taking a toll on her sanity. “It’s a way to relieve the boredom,” she said. “We’re not really fighting.”

“Null results are still results,” Chantel said, offering them a snack from a plastic bin she’d taken from the ship’s kitchen. “Even if we find nothing, that’s something.”

Gamay grabbed an apple. The fresh fruit would be gone soon. Much like everything in the sea. “It’s like the ocean has gone barren for no reason at all.”

“There has to be a reason,” Paul said. “We just haven’t found it yet.”

Gamay resisted the urge to hit him with a ruler. “Thanks, Captain Obvious. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Paul refrained from laughing. Previous experience told him snickering at his wife’s outbursts was a dangerous proposition. Instead, he reached for an orange. “Might as well ward off scurvy while we still can.”

Gamay shook her head, but a wry smile suggested she was in a more playful mood than it appeared. She was about to push back from her console and switch places with Chantel when an alarm began to chirp.

She slid forward again, focusing on the screen. “Sonar contact. Four hundred yards, bearing two-eight-one. Intermittent and changing shape. Looks like it might be a school of fish.”

Paul leaned closer, happy to hear they’d finally found something.

Chantel looked over her shoulder. “See, all you need is a little positive energy.”

Gamay’s joy was fading. “Contact isn’t moving,” she announced. “We should see more than just relative motion.”

“Could it be something drifting?” Paul asked. “A commercial fishing net or some debris?”

“Only one way to find out.” She tapped the keyboard in front of her, disengaging the ROV’s autopilot and taking manual control. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

Paul sat down. He felt a sudden energy surge after so many mind-numbing hours staring at the screens. He hoped it was more than an abandoned fishing net.

Gamay said nothing as she manipulated the controls, adjusting the depth and heading of the ROV, nudging the joystick until it was on the right track, and then bumping the thrusters to a higher power level.

“Three hundred yards,” Paul called out.

Gamay adjusted the cameras and lights, focusing them directly ahead of the ROV. At a depth of a hundred feet, the waters were a deep sapphire blue.

“Two hundred yards,” Paul said.

There was nothing on the monitor, but that didn’t mean anything. Water absorbed and scattered light with great efficiency. Gamay figured they’d need to be within a hundred feet to see anything more than a blur. She slowed the ROV and took it a bit deeper. If it was a school of fish, she wanted to sneak up on it and get a good look at the species and number before she scared it away.

A quick glance at the sonar readout told her it hadn’t moved.

“One hundred yards,” Paul said.

“I’m going to slow a little more and come up to their depth.”

As Gamay adjusted the thrusters and dive planes, the cameras captured their first sign of something that wasn’t open water. A small glowing blob passed in front of the lens.

“Did you see that?”

Paul nodded. “What was it?”

“Jellyfish?” Chantel suggested.

Gamay hoped not. Another blob passed by and then several more. Seconds later the ROV was swimming in them. Hundreds of dimly glowing blobs of gel. They swirled in front of the camera by the hundreds and then the thousands. Gamay tilted and panned the camera. It was a dizzying display, with depth and width in all directions. Like being in a field surrounded by a million lightning bugs.

Most were pushed aside by the flow of the water as the ROV moved through, but like a swarm of insects encountering a car on the road, some of the globs hit the lens, sticking and smearing.

Paul was surprised. “Who knew we’d need windshield wipers on an ROV.”

Gamay slowed the vehicle to one knot, creeping through the swarm of glowing blobs and trying to get a good look at them through the smeared lens of the main camera.

“Could they be globs of bioluminescent plankton?” Chantel asked.

Gamay didn’t think so. She’d never actually seen anything like this before. “I don’t know what they are.”

Suddenly the camera jerked to the side. The ROV had bumped into something. The view turned suddenly brighter. Instead of hundreds of drifting globs spread out across the camera view, there were now thousands up close and packed in together.

“Reminds me of the time I backed our riding mower into that hornet’s nest.”

“My only memory of that is you running at full speed and screaming, ‘Save yourself,’ while I watched from inside the living room.”

“You followed that instruction quite well if I remember.”

“I was watching one of my shows.”

For all the kidding around, the pronounced impact and the sudden increase in the number of drifting orbs did suggest she’d collided with some sort of nest. She panned up and around with the camera, but it was now so smeared with gel and iridescent goo that it had become unusable. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say these things are trying to coat our ROV with their secretions on purpose.”

A new idea came to her. The ROV had a third camera. It was attached to the robot arm and designed to allow for precise operation of the pincers at the end when picking up or manipulating small objects. When not in use, the arm remained folded, and the camera hidden away.

She activated the arm, brought the camera online, and tilted the ROV upward, toward whatever they’d bumped into.

A terrifying site came into view. The open jaw of a great white shark.

“This is why we use ROVs,” Chantel said.

Gamay pulled the arm back instinctively, but the jaw didn’t close; instead it remained suspended above the ROV, its jagged teeth pointing in all directions, its exposed gums bleached white and eroded down to the bone.

She backed the ROV off to get a wider view. The shark was drifting nose down, its eyes gone, its gills ripped apart, its skin torn open in places, and blistering and bulging with decay in others. The open jaw was without a tongue.

The shark’s flesh and organs were mostly gone. The tougher structures like ligaments and tendons were holding the cartilage that acted as a skeleton in place, but everything else had been corrupted or consumed.

“I have to see something,” Gamay said. “Turn away if you’re squeamish.”

Paul had an idea what she was up to. He was glad he hadn’t just eaten lunch.

Chantel stared intently.

Gamay moved the ROV to a position near what remained of the shark’s gut, just behind the skeletonized pectoral fins. Using the robot arm, she punctured a swollen area on the discolored flesh.

It ruptured as if it had been under pressure. Gallons of discolored gel and pus spewed out along with thousands of the glowing orbs. They swirled around in dizzying patterns, slowly spreading out on the current.

“What is this?” Paul asked. “An infection? A parasite?”

“Whatever it is, they’re colonizing it,” Chantel said. “Consuming it from the inside.”

Gamay had no idea. “Extremely gelatinous. Possibly a swarm of some previously unknown type of jellyfish. Or even a colony organism like the Portuguese man-of-war.”

Paul saw the look on Gamay’s face. He knew what came next. “I assume you’re going to want a few samples.”

“Most definitely.”

“I’ll buzz the captain.” He picked up the intercom phone, which rang through to the bridge. “We’ve found something. Time to pull over and park the bus for a minute.”

The captain was oddly quiet. When he spoke, there was concern in his voice. “We’ve found something, too. You’d better get up here. You three need to see this.”

Paul acknowledged the captain and put down the phone. He could feel the ship slowing to a stop. He turned to Gamay and Chantel. “They want us on the bridge.”