[Original Novel] Pressure: First Encounter, Part 3

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Previous parts:} 1, 2

It vaguely resembled a country road at night, in the winter. The soft ground beneath her was just as white as snow and her boots sunk in several inches. "Let's get moving, I want to show you where the lasers come from." She obliged, noticing on the way that the beams tracked them perfectly as they trudged through the muck. Angie attempted to jump, expecting it to be something like the footage from the Chinese moon landing but was disappointed when she couldn't manage to get both feet free of the muck at the same time.

Eliot laughed. "Here, watch this. But don't you dare try it until I clear you on the sim." Just as she thought to ask "what sim", Eliot took off. For a minute or so he sailed around overhead, ignoring her barrage of questions until he swooped in and landed. "Thruster packs. Like the EVA packs Astronauts use. Except for us it's all micro pumpjets, not compressed gas."

Angie immediately intuited that the control pad to one side of her thumb, which she had neglected until then, was the thruster control pad. A gentle lurch forward as she tapped the pad confirmed her suspicions. "I said don't mess with it. We'll put you through the sim when we get back to the station. For now just leave it alone."

The first relay was mounted on the same sort of tripod as the lights. The emitters were clustered together facing outward in a circle, eight in total. Two thin wheels of photosensitive glass above and below received incoming laser transmissions, and the emitters doubled as LIDAR so that one emitter could perform tracking duties for either of the two lasers it was adjacent to.

"They're stackable in case we ever get more suits and need to network more than two at a time, but with the funding situation now that's unlikely." As Eliot spoke Angie could just barely perceive slight fluctuation in his beam's brightness. She was witnessing the sound of his voice being sent as concentrated light through near-freezing ocean water at 10,000 psi. It was sobering.

"If our suit lasers can transmit to these relays, why don't we just use them to talk to each other?" Almost as soon as she'd said it, she knew it was another newbie question. "Limited range. They run on suit batteries, you don't want those to run out since you also need them to run your rebreather. You have 12 hours of oxygen and a passive backup CO2 absorbant, but if we ever wind up using those we probably have bigger problems than not being able to communicate."

So the short range suit lasers talked to the nearest relay, and the relay carried the message via other relays to where the other aquanaut was working. The optical equivalent of cell phone towers. "What do you do if you go someplace off of the path and you need to call home?" Eliot paused for a moment as he wiped some detritus from the relay's emitter. "...Don't leave the path."

"Don't leave the path. Don't use the thrusters. If I check my boots am I going to find training wheels?" She was joking, but got a stern reply. "It's your first EVA. I mostly just wanted to help you acclimate. Don't you notice a difference? You seem a lot more comfortable now." He was right. She was moving confidently with the suit, her ear popping habit had vanished and if anything she felt invigorated. "I imagine your field is mostly men."

Eliot didn't know how to take that. "I'm not making any accusations, but it seems possible you're in the habit of assuming that women need your help." Eliot shrugged invisibly within his suit. "You'll get over it." He started back towards the station and with something between a laugh and a shout, Angie began pursuit.

He proved unexpectedly quick though, and before she realized it he was out of sight. There was a fog-like effect in the distance and the dropoff was severe. "Eliot? Eliot, I've lost you." Her beam shone forth into the darkness but she received no reply. Shortly afterward the tracking readout for the laser changed from "Searching" to "Target lost". Impossible. The range was at least a thousand feet. There was no way he had gotten so far ahead, so quickly. Unless...

"The thruster pack", Angie thought. "He's having some fun. He lifted off somewhere ahead of me and is going to be waiting at the station with a smug, shit eating grin. Or he's going to come swooping down at me from above. Something." She kept walking a ways, but soon noticed that she hadn't seen a relay or light for some time. Her suit lights were the only visible source. That wasn't right either, she’d been able to see the lit up path for hundreds of feet from the station, why would-

A loud thump sounded against her helmet. Something was swimming at the dome and striking it repeatedly, it was a blur of white that was moving too quickly to make out. It darted around the suit, thumping over and over against the hull, as if searching for a way inside. Angie shrieked, and flailed her metal arms ineffectively at the creature. The thrashing sent her off balance and the next thing she knew she was laying on her back in the muck surrounded by a cloud of silt.

She caught her breath, searching the cloud for some sight of the creature. Right on cue it slowly approached the dome to investigate. Angie stopped breathing entirely when it came into view. It was easily six feet long, as thick as her arm, and extremely pale. Bordering on translucent. Some kind of eel maybe, but with a face she could neither look away from nor bear to look at.

It resembled nothing more than the face of an old man. Tiny, beady eyes inset in a skeletal face with a bony jaw that evoked memories of her grandfather's final days. Regaining her wits, Angie screamed at the eel and jammed her thumb on the thruster control. It sent her suit spinning wildly across the ocean floor, then down a steep embankment.

It was a rough ride, thrown to one side of the suit then the other as it tumbled down the hill, but Angie's thoughts were dominated by the image of that creature's face. Finally the suit came to rest, face down in the muck. Having apparently waited for the worst possible time, her lights went out.

With no small effort she pried herself up out of the sludge, and flipped over onto her back. Her heart was thumping wildly, the stench of sweat filling her lungs with every breath. Inside the hand cavity she fiddled with the joystick that controlled the heads up display until she found the option for turning on the backup lights. They flickered to life revealing the creature's face looming above her, a thousand feet wide.

Angie fell out of bed screaming in a tangle of sheets. Within moments the rest of the crew gathered around her. "No, no no no...Not real, not real..." Tears soaked her cheeks and matted her hair against them as she violently struggled to be free of the sheets, blanket and other bedding. "It was, it was some kind of animal. It was small, then it was huge, I was out in the suit with Eliot-...Where is Eliot??"

It was all the three could do to restrain her until she recognized that Eliot was among them. "Angie, shhh." he said. "You went ahead, I lost sight of you, I think I went off the path and got lost and then-" Eliot stroked her hair and gestured for the others to leave. "Angie. I didn't go out with you." She went silent. "We found you about half a mile down the path in one of the newt suits. You were passed out on your back. Brought you in about an hour ago, you were babbling in your sleep right up until you woke just now."

A deep sob escaped her body as she clung to him. It was still fresh in her mind. The terrible, bony little face. And its gargantuan twin, staring down at her from above. Of course it had been a nightmare, sleep walking, something like that. Nothing else made sense. Eliot stayed with her until her bed was restored to a usable condition, and then lingered at the door. "It was so real. I've never had a dream like that. Everything was so detailed, I felt it all. You showed me the relays, and-"

Eliot turned. "The relays?" There was a moment of startled recognition between them. "Angie, how do you know about the relays? They're a new addition. I was going to explain them to you tomorrow." For both of them it felt as if all the heat had left the room. A moment of intolerable, oppressive silence followed. "Am I crazy?" Angie seemed too willing to ask, peering at Eliot through teary eyes, huddled beneath a pile of blankets taken from the other bunks. "No Angie", Eliot sighed. "You're not crazy. We've all been having dreams like that. It's why they sent you here."

Breakfast was a silent affair. The deceptively painted walls created a spacious, cheery impression that did nothing to prevent Angie from feeling the full force of the outside water slowly compressing her skull. Nathan spoke first. "Eliot got hit first. Then it was Leonard, I was last. It took us a day or two to make the connection that it was affecting us in order of arrival."

He looked back down at his tray, evidently expecting one of the others to pick up where he left off. Leonard looked up and glanced at Eliot, whose eyes gave quiet approval. "There's records of the same thing happening to past crews, but none of them stayed down this long. It never got severe enough that they recognized it as something other than mission fatigue. One day we found Leonard sitting in the Rat Tail fumbling with the controls as if he'd never seen them before. He fought like a cornered dog when we pulled him away, only to snap out of it with no recollection of anything since he'd gone to sleep. Whatever it is, it happens while you're sleeping. At first."

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}