The Trench Read online

  Brubaker just stared at Michael, his face cold as stone.

  “Holy shit… that’s impossible. I mean, there’s never been anything like that recorded or known to science.”

  “Well, if you can confirm what it is, maybe they will name it after you.”

  Michael shrugged. The idea of being published and famous, even in academic circles after this, seemed unlikely.

  “Bernard, one of the onsite researchers, said that level three labs were where they kept all incoming specimens. He said whatever is going on, probably came from here.”

  “Is Doctor Saul also dead?” Brubaker asked.

  “No, I mean, I don’t think so? He was taking the stairs.”

  “We didn’t see him, so he must be in here somewhere.”

  “We haven’t been in any of the other labs. We don’t have access.”

  Brubaker fished a plastic card out of his pocket. “This will get you into the other labs.”

  Michael took the tag and hesitated. “When we find a viable sample, what then?”

  The marine medic regarded him steadily. “We go home, Doctor. All of us.”

  That same chill rippled down Michael’s spine again. The door to the bathroom opened and Nicole stepped out, her wet hair slicked back and a military-issue jumpsuit hugging her body.

  “Where’s Sergeant Nolan?” she asked.

  “He’s doing his job, elsewhere,” Brubaker replied. “If you have any questions, you can refer them to me.”

  “And will you answer our questions?”

  “If I can.” Brubaker smiled.

  “Do you have any way of getting us into the secure labs on this level?”

  Michael held up the plastic access card. “Already taken care of.”

  “Well, we should get on with it then.”

  The marines stood in silence while the scientists left the room. “Get me an inventory of this ordinance,” Brubaker ordered.

  *

  “I guess we start with door number one,” Michael said. He pressed the card against the sensor. It beeped twice and the LED switched from red to green. The magnetic locks clicked, and they pushed the door open.

  “No pin code required?” Nicole said. “That’s a pretty special access card.”

  “Lucky for us,” Michael replied.

  “Oh man… This is the kind of lab I dream of,” Nicole said. Michael had to agree; the room gleamed with brand new equipment of all kinds. In a place like this, you could do chemical analysis, computer modeling, genetic manipulation to sample quarantine and containment from innocuous organisms to level four biohazards like weaponized smallpox.

  A search of the room turned up nothing, except the airlock entrance to a higher-level hazard protection chamber.

  Nicole opened a cabinet and removed a full-body pressurized suit. Slipping into it, she turned around so Michael could seal the suit and connect the air hoses. The suit inflated with filtered air, the pressure helping to minimize exposure to anything should the material get punctured.

  Once Nicole gave him the thumbs up, Michael dressed in his own high-level protection. In ten minutes, they were both ready to pass through to the next room.

  The pass card unlocked the door, and they went through the airlock.

  Michael connected the air hose in the lab to his suit. Fresh, filtered air flowed over his face and he breathed slowly. The same tube had a communications cable attached. He connected Nicole to the same system.

  “Can you hear me now?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  They started the same search, examining liquid-filled containers of biological specimens and accessing computer log files after the white card gave access to the password locked terminals.

  “Find anything?” Nicole asked after skimming through folders and files.

  “Lots and lots of data, computer models of what I think are protein variants, and absolutely nothing that could be causing the kind of problems we are seeing.”

  Nicole came over and leaned in to review the screen. Even through the two atmospherically sealed suits, Michael imagined he could feel the heat of her body. The weird realization made him flush with guilt. Gretchen had just died. He shouldn’t be feeling this way about someone he had only just met.

  “It’s a computer model all right. Genetic manipulation of proteins. Cheap food synthesis through rapidly growing base mediums.”

  “You can live on it, but it tastes like shit?” Michael suggested.

  Nicole shrugged. “Add some chemical flavoring, it can be made to look and taste like anything.”

  “Nothing here to help us then.” Michael turned his chair and stood up.

  “Wait,” Nicole called. “There’s a reference to something called Project Galahad?”

  “Does it say what Project Galahad is?”

  Nicole remained silent as she clicked her way through the screens of data. “Holy shit…” she muttered.

  “Found some crazy anime porn?” Michael asked.

  “This has to be theoretical…” Nicole brought up another document, this one labelled TOP SECRET.

  “Fine, theoretically speaking, what have you found?”

  “Someone was doing a lot of very serious work on cellular immortality.”

  “Ha! That’s hardly surprising. I mean, shit people have been looking into that since Paracelsus.”

  “Well, someone was making headway. They had isolated the genes responsible for cellular regeneration in Turritopsis dohrnii.”

  “No shit?” Michael came back and pulled a second chair over to the screen.

  “The Immortal Jellyfish,” Michael said. “Technically, it’s a hydrozoan, but they only live in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Japan.”

  “This is the result of genetic engineering. Michael, this is state of the art gene-manipulation. Someone has been splicing Turritopsis genes with human DNA.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit. You may as well try and make a human-potato hybrid.”

  “We share at least twenty percent of our DNA with potatoes and a helluva lot more than that with jellyfish,” Nicole said.

  “It’s still bullshit,” Michael insisted.

  “What if they found a species like Turritopsis and edited the gene sequencing on that?”

  “They?” Michael looked at Nicole. “Excuse me, lady, your paranoia is showing.”

  “Fuck off,” Nicole snapped. “Someone killed the helicopter crew and stopped them ever being able to report that we were dropped off next to a nuclear submarine! That’s the they I’m talking about.”

  “Of course! The video, remember? Bernard said something about the Galahad Project not being affected by the weird shit going on?” Michael patted the inflated protective suit he was wearing.

  “Shit, unplug me, quick.”

  “It might not be safe in here,” Nicole warned.

  “Fuck that, I found some papers; they’re in my pocket.”

  Nicole unsealed Michael’s suit and he emerged with a hissing of pressurized air. Digging in his jacket pocket, he pulled out the crumpled sheets of paper.

  “Project Galahad,” he said, holding them up.

  Nicole took the paper and flicked through them. “Michael, this is half-burned, shredded, and the rest of it is blacked out. It doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “Sure it does. It tells us that Project Galahad was top secret and someone tried to destroy documentation on it either before, or during, the current crisis.”

  “The current crisis? Is that what we’re calling it now?”

  “I don’t know what we call it. But there’s some shit going on here that goes beyond some kind of Ebola outbreak.”

  “Why us?” Nicole asked.

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Bullshit. Think about it. Your specialty is hydrozoans. Mine is genetic evolution. That Mister Suit guy, he knew what was going on here. He wanted us to come in and get data and get out alive.”

  “Then why did they try and kill us on the helicopter
?” Michael finished stripping out of the hazard suit.

  “Maybe we weren’t the target?” Nicole swallowed hard. “The chopper went down after the sub was there to pick us up.”

  “Didn’t that guy try and kill you?”

  “I… I think so? He shot the pilots and then I stabbed him with a knife.”

  “Well, if we ever get out of here, we can ask Mister Suit what his evil plan was.”

  “Can we check the next lab?” Nicole asked.

  Michael disconnected Nicole’s suit and went out through the airlock. Nicole unsealed the bulky hood of her suit and pushed it back.

  “May as well keep your suit on and go through to the next lab,” Michael said.

  “That is an awful breach of every safety protocol I have ever known.”

  “I agree, but right now, I don’t think we have the luxury of time.”

  Without further comment, Nicole followed Michael through the lab and out into the hallway. They entered the second lab. This one showed signs of live animal research. Aquarium tanks filled with frogs, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks lined the walls. The briny smell of sea water lay heavy on the air, and the brisk bubbling of air pumps oxygenating the water made the room hum.

  Michael inhaled and grinned. This was his environment. The hiss and bubble, the silent lives of a hundred specimens from a dozen environments all living in close proximity, the secrets of their lives finally able to be observed and documented.

  Nicole turned in a full circle around the room. “We don’t even know what we are looking for.”

  “Brubaker, the marine? He said his men saw a jellyfish crawl inside Nolan’s head.”

  “They saw what?” Nicole stared at him.

  “A jelly, or hydrozoan, crawled into Nolan’s head. Through his ear, or up his nose or something. I suggest we start looking for any signs of jellys.”

  “Jellyfish do not crawl inside people’s heads!” Nicole laughed in a shrill sound at the lunacy of what Michael was suggesting.

  “Oh come on! You’ve studied evolution at a genetic level. You know more than anyone here how minute changes in DNA can lead to abrupt changes in species. There could be any number of unknown species at depth. We just have to see what they brought on board and what they did with it.”

  Nicole turned away. “Fine. I’ll check the computers, you check the tanks.”

  Michael started with the first aquarium. It was a tightly sealed Perspex tank, a gauge on the outside confirmed the pressure was set to match a depth of 12,000 feet. The creatures that swam, crawled, and waved, blind and colorless. They came from a world without light, where energy was limited, so they had adapted to drifting, or sitting and waiting for energy in the form of food to come drifting past.

  No jellyfish, Michael confirmed after a minute of staring into the still waters.

  He moved on to the next tank, sealed and pressurized for a depth of 15,000 feet. The pressure at that depth would be unimaginable, and yet, based on the samples in the tank, life thrived down there. Michael watched, fascinated as a pale anemone the size of a football dragged a transparent fish marked with flickering dots of luminescence into the fleshy sphincter of its mouth.

  Moving around the tank, Michael heard water splash under his boots. He looked down at a spreading pool of cold sea water. A small tank of thick Perspex had cracked, releasing water onto the floor. A plastic tag still hung from one of the locking bolts on the container. PROJECT GALAHAD. Hydrozoa. Species: Unknown. Dive: G36A7 Depth: 30,000 feet. The date had been recorded too, but the writing had smudged too much to be legible.

  “Hey,” Michael and Nicole both said at once.

  “I found something,” they both spoke again.

  “Quit repeating everything I say, and get your ass over here!” Nicole scolded.

  Michael gave up and returned to where she sat in front of a computer screen.

  “Ten days ago, a remote submarine dived to thirty-thousand feet, nearly to the bottom of the trench. It collected mineral, biological, and plant samples. The onboard computer recorded collection of what was identified as a snailfish specimen at twenty-eight thousand feet. Specimen was captured alive and secured in pressurized tank for return to the facility along with other specimens collected.”

  Michael frowned. “That can’t be right. There’s fuck-all life below twenty-thousand feet. It’s beyond the Hadal Zone.”

  “Well, the team who identified the fish were surprised too. They decided it might be a new subspecies.”

  “Snailfish don’t do the shit we have seen,” Michael said.

  “There is more,” Nicole said, irritated at Michael’s stating of the obvious.

  “The snailfish was transferred to a holding tank, with pressure set at the maximum possible. The fish seemed to be fine. It ate, swam around, and generally did fish stuff.”

  “Fish stuff? Is that in the report?”

  “No.” Nicole waved a gloved hand. “You can read all the technical observations on your own time. There’s hours of regular observations and it’s all the same; fish stuff.”

  “Sure, fish stuff. What else?”

  “Ahh… the specimen died two days after being put into the tank.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. Christ, Michael, you really need to learn to shut up and listen.”

  Michael gritted his teeth. They needed answers and the methodical approach Nicole was taking to sharing what she had found was driving him nuts.

  “The rest of the log is deleted. The login that deleted the remaining information was Doctor Bernard Saul.”

  “Hey, is there anything there about Project Galahad?”

  The lights flickered for a moment and then the power went off, plunging the room into darkness. The air pumps whirred to a halt, and the only sound was the steady dripping of water.

  “Still have your flashlight?” Michael asked.

  “No, I think I dropped it.”

  “I lost mine too. The emergency lights should come on again in a second.”

  “The marines will be here before then…” Nicole found herself whispering in the darkness and shivered.

  “You cold?” Michael asked.

  “Cold and terrified,” Nicole admitted.

  “Me too,” Michael said. “Okay, more terrified than cold.”

  Michael slipped his arms around Nicole, the hazmat suits she still wore crackling as the plastic crushed between them.

  After a moment, Nicole felt a warm drip on her neck. “Are you okay?”

  Michael made a wet sniffling noise. “Yeah, just ahh, shit. Just thinking about Gretchen all of a sudden.” He pulled away, wiping his eyes and blinking away his sudden tears.

  “Crying is normal. Screaming, curling up in a fetal position and howling like a wolf would also be completely normal. A person you loved just died. If that had happened to me, I’d be a complete wreck.”

  “I keep seeing it…” Michael whispered, the cracks in his voice clear in the darkness. “She looked at me when I was pulling you up through the hatch. She looked me right in the eye. She’d made her decision. She was going to sacrifice herself to save us.”

  “She was incredibly courageous,” Nicole said softly.

  “Who the fuck does that?” Michael’s grief burst out in anger. “It’s the kind of thing you see in movies. Some hero sends the others on while he stays behind, wounded with fuck all ammunition and he dies, but the chosen few get home because of it.”

  “Life is stranger than fiction,” Nicole offered. “Sometimes, people do things we would never expect. Gretchen gave us the time to escape. She saved our lives. Now we have to find a way out of here and make sure she didn’t die for nothing.”

  “Ha.” Michael wiped his face with his sleeves and stood up. “With inspirational speeches like that, you should be coaching baseball. Little League, anyway.”

  Nicole smiled. Sitting there in the dark, with death and horror all around them, she almost giggled. It felt strangely cathartic, or an admiss
ion of insanity.

  Chapter 16

  “We got eight M16A2s, hundred rounds for each, in twenty-round mags. Two M911s, two spare mags for each. Four MPs, six mags each, and a Mossberg, with about thirty cartridges.”

  “Alpha team was prepared for anything. So why did they leave their extra ordinance here?” Lewis asked.

  “I’d say they arrived, confirmed that everything was secure, placed their gear in a secure location, and went on to complete their mission.”

  “They didn’t leave anyone on guard?” Nato looked around the room once again, as if checking to see if he had missed an extra marine.

  “They would have. My guess is he got called up to action. No other reason to leave his post.”

  “Ooh rah!” the squad echoed.

  “Lock this stuff away, secure the room, and on me.” Brubaker checked his rifle and moved to the door. When the room plunged into darkness, Brubaker clicked on the lamp attached to his helmet. “We good?”

  “Aye,” the squad replied. The shadows fled as each man clicked the lamp on his helmet or flashlight on his rifle.

  “Utility pipes should be secure against flooding,” Nato observed. “If the place is flooding, it shouldn’t affect the lights.”

  “Roger that,” Brubaker agreed. “Someone’s fucking with us. Let’s go, Marines.”

  In formation, they exited the room, beams of light sweeping the hallway and reflecting off the frosted windows of the labs.

  “The squints should be behind one of these unlocked doors. Find them and keep sharp.”

  The marines paired off, and in less than a minute, they found the two civilians.

  “The lights went out,” Michael said, shading his eyes against the bright beams of the headlamps.

  “No shit?” Menowski replied.

  “Any idea why?” Michael asked, ignoring the sarcasm.

  “I suspect sabotage,” Brubaker said. “The power generators are robust and have backup systems for their backup systems. Without electricity, there’s no air recycling. Without air, we all die.”

  “We found some stuff on the computer,” Nicole announced. “Logs from a remote sub dive. They found some weird shit and there was an accident. After that, the logs were wiped by Bernard.”