Triton (28 page)

It must have floated free. Of course, because he and Naomi had almost gotten it clear of the bay . . . because there it was, electronics fully protected from the EMP inside an unbroken steel hull—the minisub.

The Airlock

The instrument panel
of the minisub glowed to life in front of Naomi. Twinkling LEDs filled the dome with purple light.

“It works,” Naomi yelled up through the hatch.

From the top of the sub, Cedar relayed the message to the others, his voice muffled by the thick cockpit. “It works!” He dropped into the sub next to her.

The others squeezed in after them. Jake wedged himself in next to Cedar, forcing him to the middle. Sky scooted over him and plopped herself on Cedar’s lap. And—
big surprise
—Brynn took Jake’s lap.

So it was couples night. Lovely. As fifth wheel—and the only one with hands not tightly wrapped around someone else’s waist—Naomi would therefore pilot the sub.

“How much air will we have?” said Jake.

“Well, it’s ten hours for two people,” she said, “so . . . four hours, I guess. But if anyone starts making out in here and breathing out all kinds of carbon dioxide, it’s only going to be three.”

“Noted,” said Jake. He yanked the hatch shut, muting the sounds of the wind. To Naomi, there was an unsettling finality to the action. Like if they did do it, if they really did go
down
 . . . they wouldn’t come back up.

The waves rolled the vessel back and forth, a motion she hadn’t been used to on the cruise ship.

“So . . . where to?” she said.

“Let’s go get our cruise ship back,” said Cedar.

“And the human species,” said Brynn.

“If anyone wants to back out,” said Naomi, “now’s the time.”

“And do what instead?” Sky said “Die out here? Go back and live in ghost cities and eat canned food and watch reruns for the rest of our lives?”

“That might be what we end up doing anyway,” said Naomi. “But by all means, let’s go down to the bottom of the ocean and see what the Triton’s up to.” She pumped seawater into the ballast tanks, increasing the density of the sub. Water rose around the cockpit, splashed against the acrylic sphere, and then sloshed overhead as they submerged completely.

She flicked on the sub’s headlamps, and a cone of light blazed into the murk, illuminating the endless stretch of lifeless ocean, barren but for particles of dead matter and debris from the
Cypress
, eerily suspended in space.

And down they went, willingly, into the ocean’s pitch black throat.

“Nephilim . . . I think
they were the offspring of angels banished from heaven,” said Brynn from Jake’s lap as she scanned the book of Genesis. “It says here the ‘sons of God’ had children with the ‘daughters of men,’ so they’re part human, part angel.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Jake, shifting underneath her. “Sounds badass.”

“Angels
banished
from heaven,” said Brynn. “Fallen angels.”

“So . . . Lucifer’s crew?”

“Something like that. That’s why God flooded the earth . . . to destroy them and wipe the slate clean.”

“That’s not what’s happening,” he said.

“Depth of one thousand feet,” said Naomi, tweaking the controls.

“How deep’s the bottom?” said Jake.

“Could be ten thousand feet.”

“Crap.”

“The magician said we were the nephilim,” said Cedar. “He said that’s why he stayed hidden.”

“And all that time we thought
he
was the nephilim,” said Sky.

“Does that mean we’re descended from fallen angels?” said Brynn.

“No one’s the nephilim,” said Jake. “Your magician was some crackpot who got left behind and wasn’t able to keep his head.”

“I’d give him a little more credit,” said Cedar. “He knew some kind of incantation . . . he managed to get off the ship.”

“So did Sky.”

“That’s not a counterargument, Jake.”

“You want a counterargument? Here’s your counterargument: if
we’re
the nephilim and God is trying to cleanse us from the earth, then why the hell are we the only ones still here?”

“It’s in the Bible, moron. In the apocalypse, only the worthy ascend to heaven. The rest are left behind.”

“Then why was the magician asking God to
leave
his body?” Jake muttered.

They fell silent. Only the whir of the stabilizing propellers sounded from the impenetrable murk. The rising pressure creaked the hull of the minisub.

“If we were left behind because we’re descended from nephilim,” Brynn said quietly, “then why was Dad taken?”

“Must have been through Mom,” said Cedar. “What about you guys? What about your parents?”

“Could have been through my dad,” said Naomi. “He left when I was little.”

“Sky?” Cedar raised his eyebrows.

“I was here with foster parents,” she said. “Neither of my birthparents was on the ship.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Cedar. “You’re a hundred percent fallen angel.”

Sky smirked and swiveled on his lap, draping her arm possessively behind his neck. “I think you’re a little biased,” she whispered, running her fingers through his hair.

Brynn felt her lip curl.
Gross.

“Hate to take a crap on your party,” said Jake, “but both my parents—my
real
parents—were on the cruise ship . . . and they were both taken. Now, according to your descendants-of-nephilim theory, either my mom was banging the milkman . . . or being a nephilim has nothing whatsoever to do with why we’re still here.”

In the cramped
acrylic dome, time passed like a fog for Cedar. The weight of Sky’s body pressing down on his thighs held him spellbound, and he felt the continuous surge of hot blood pumping to his face.

“Depth?” said Jake.

“Five thousand two hundred feet. Almost a mile,” Naomi answered. They’d been descending almost forty-five minutes, with no sign of the cruise ship or the Triton.

“Air?”

“Hour and half left.”

“An
hour and a half?
I thought you said we had four?”

“Because you guys have been breathing too fast,” she said. “My guess is someone in here is a little excited.”

“Brynn and Sky,” said Cedar. “They’re the ones getting all hot and bothered. Clearly we shouldn’t have let them sit on our laps.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Sky. “Cedar just wants to sit on Jake’s lap, but we all know he’d get so excited he’d hyperventilate away the rest of our air in about five minutes.”

“Touché.”

“Guys, I think I see something—” Brynn leaned forward and pressed her face to the glass. “I think I see the Triton.”

Cedar peered around Sky, and he saw it too. Through the murk, the hints of vast, rectangular lights arrayed in a triangular grid.

They had reached the Triton.

Using the fly-by-wire
joystick, Naomi piloted the sub down to the Triton’s surface. Scraps of dead organic matter blazed in their headlights, then whisked past. Beyond the floodlights’ range, the massive hulk of the Triton vanished into a black haze.

From underwater, the enormous structure was even more spectacular—and more alien—than she could have imagined. “So . . . the whole thing’s made of wood,” she observed.

“What kind of alien spacecraft is made of wood?” said Brynn.

“What makes you think it’s a spacecraft?” said Cedar.

“It was in
space
, wasn’t it?”

Jake tapped the acrylic by his knee. “Lower us down on one of those rectangular lights,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s something we can mess with.”

“What if it EMPs us again?” said Naomi.

“The minisub acts as a Faraday cage, so we’re protected . . . right, Cedar?” said Jake.

“Theoretically.”

Naomi descended directly on top of one of the lights, and its neon glow expanded around them. The sub landed with a squish.

“Some kind of phosphorescence,” said Jake, peering out the bottom of the acrylic dome. “Fluid inside a sack of some sort . . . a membrane. Appears to be organic. See if you can puncture it.”

Next to Naomi, Sky shivered.

Naomi maneuvered one of the sub’s robotic arms to the membrane’s surface and jabbed at it with the pincer. The membrane depressed, but didn’t rupture.

“Grab it and twist it,” said Jake.

Naomi clamped the membrane between the pincers and rotated the joystick. The robotic arm spun with an electric whir, twisting the membrane, winding it up like a rubber band. Still it didn’t rupture. The force rotated the sub in the opposite direction, and Naomi countered with the thrusters.

“Guys, maybe we shouldn’t be attacking it,” said Brynn. “It might attack back.”

“We’re not attacking it,” said Jake. “We’re investigating.”

The robotic arm’s electric motor lugged under the strain. Finally, with a satisfying pop, the membrane tore open and a bright jet gushed from the sack, immersing the robotic arm in an inky green cloud.

Naomi throttled back, stabilizing the sub, and maneuvered the robotic arm out of the growing pool of neon.

Trailing wisps of goo, the arm sputtered and jerked in front of them—what was left of it, at least.

Naomi stared at the mangled remains of the mechanical arm, and her heart clanged. Like bones stripped of flesh. The metal around the hydraulic pistons had eroded into twisted, black scabs. The arm, no longer attached to the sub, crunched into the dome, making them all flinch. The skeletal hand scraped the acrylic, scratched it, and dissolved into bubbles right before their eyes.

Brynn screamed.

“Back up, back up!” yelled Jake. “It’s acid.”

Jake squeezed Brynn’s
hand as the sub’s forward struts dissolved into jagged spears.

Naomi jammed the sub into reverse and they lurched away from the neon pool billowing from the punctured sack.

Wormlike scars crawled outside the acrylic dome—acid etching away the plastic. One of the floodlights popped, leaving their left side in darkness. Weakened, the dome splintered under the pressure, threatening to cave in on them.

At last, the erosion tapered off, and Jake felt Brynn let out a sigh of relief.

“New plan,” he said, breathing easier himself. “Keep our distance.”

“Agreed.” Naomi maneuvered the sub higher.

From what Jake could tell, the top face of the Triton was a shallow tetrahedron, miles across. The
Cypress
had sailed right over top and wrecked on its face. “Head to the peak,” he said. “See if something’s there.”

“What are we looking for?” said Naomi.

“A door.”

“Like an airlock?”

“Yeah, some way inside this thing.”

Cedar watched the
endless hulk of the Triton float underneath them, mesmerized. A vessel large enough to hold every living cell on earth—along with life support to keep it all alive.

They even took the bacteria
.

A few minutes later, they reached the summit of the pyramid, but found nothing. The three wooden surfaces came together at a battered point.

No airlock.

“Keep going,” said Jake. “Take us to the edge, we might find something on the side.”

“Or underneath it,” said Cedar.

Naomi pushed the sub forward, and the Triton’s peak whooshed by. A moment later, the floodlight gleamed off a steel wall rising vertically from the wooden structure. It took Cedar a moment before he recognized it as the wreckage of the
Cypress
, its bow torn loose and nowhere to be seen. Naomi swept the lights up and over a dozen decks stacked inside its gaping hull, the beams dissolving in the murk well short of the top.

“Well, here’s our ship,” she said, coasting them into the Vitality at Sea Spa & Fitness Center in the bow. Even underwater, the polished workout machines glinted, brand new. “Someone get out and start bailing water.”

“Hah! What kind of moron works out on a
cruise?
” Cedar sneered, smirking at the lines of treadmills and weight racks.

“Jake does,” said Brynn, matter-of-factly.

“Overachiever,” Cedar muttered.

“Don’t be jealous,” she said.

They left the wreckage of the
Cypress
and continued down the face of the Triton. At last they reached the edge. A cliff dropped straight down.

They descended deeper, keeping twenty feet between them and the Triton’s wooden hull. The rectangular grid of glowing acid sacks continued down the vertical face, unbroken. Another five thousand feet down, at a depth of more than ten thousand feet—almost two miles—they found what they were looking for.

Where there should have been a rectangle of light, a cave plunged into the side of the Triton, large enough to fit a nuclear submarine.

Naomi steered the sub into the black tunnel. Holes lined the floor, clearly meant to flood and drain the chamber.

Definitely an airlock.

The floodlight crawled along the grainy texture of planks until they reached the back wall, a dead end.

“Now what?” said Naomi.

“Get out and knock?” Brynn suggested.

“And hope they let us into their heaven party when they went out of their way to make sure we
weren’t
invited?” said Cedar. “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe there’s a lever or something we can shove,” said Jake.

“I believe you’ll find that
inside
the Triton,” said Cedar. “That way us nephilim can’t get our greasy little fingers on it. We may as well head back up to the surface, because unless one of us can magically teleport inside that thing, we’re dead in the water.”

Sky sighed and shifted on top of him. “You could have just asked nicely,” she said.

“You behind me
,
shut up
,” said Sky. Through her firmly shut eyelids she could feel everyone watching her, staring. “I need complete quiet.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Cedar.

“I can hear you breathing.”

Behind her, he took a loud breath and stopped breathing.

“No.
Breathe
. You’re distracting me.”

“First you want me to stop breathing, now you want me to breathe, make up your mind already.”