Caught

by Deborah Cullins Smith -

“Is something wrong, Cassie?”

The gentle voice spun the girl from the observation window.

“Oh, Master Ambrose! I’m so sorry! I’ve done something terrible and now he’s going to murder one of the angels.”

The thin, stooped wizard raised both eyebrows as the torrent of words poured from his young assistant. A trainable and obedient girl, but far too easy to rattle, he’d noted in his journals.

“Now really, my dear. What could you possibly have done that’s so terri…” his voice trailed off and shock washed over his ashen face. His eyes widened in horror at the window just beyond Cassie’s stricken face.

Cassie turned and her scream ripped the air just before she slid to the floor, unconscious and finally silent.

The sea monster was unlike anything ever observed before. Water pumped through its mouth and over its gills as the mottled black and brown body charged toward the human figure in diving gear. A wide, flat snout opened and caught the man in its jaws, thrashing it back and forth like a rag doll. A flash of steel slashed at the snout, but broke against the tough hide like a toothpick against steel.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack stopped. The monster released its prey and retreated, paddling swiftly through the murky silt. The human slowly sank to the ocean floor; bubbles still rippling from the air hose told Ambrose that he lived. However that could change any minute if they couldn’t get him inside. But how? To scramble divers would take time—time that the unknown person outside did not have.

Then Ambrose saw the angel. He’d seen this one before, always watching from a distance, curiosity etched in those shiny black eyes. It focused thoughts toward the figure on the ground, but the aged master, an adept empath, heard the projections clearly.

Though you sought to kill us, I will not harm you.

Kill? Ambrose cast a frown at his assistant’s limp form crumpled below the window. Is that what she meant? That she had been party to an attempt on an angel’s life? No, she couldn’t have known. She’d shown curiosity—even awe—at the shimmering beings residing in the sea. He would reserve judgment until she was able to state her case. But he would almost certainly have to terminate her employment. Trust was a primary concern in these labs.

Ambrose peered back out the window and saw vague shapes in the swirl of sediment. The angel scooped the diver up, balancing the limp body on his wide tail fin, and deposited him carefully at the lab’s pressurized chamber door. Tentacles of the angel’s “hair” snaked forward to skim over the panel beside the door, as the angel cocked its head and studied the buttons. Ambrose stared, fascinated at this turn of events, then projected the numbered sequence in his mind. The angel turned to meet his eyes through the window and a tiny smile curved the lips below the mammalian muzzle. Turning back to the panel, the tentacle-like appendages skipped over the buttons. With a whoosh and a blaring alarm, the door opened. The angel shoved the limp body into the chamber with a flip of his strong tail fin, and closed the door. Ambrose knew he should move quickly to assess the damage to the person in the diving suit, but he remained riveted at the window.

The angel swam forward, closer to the glass than he had ever come before.

Why am I so sure this one is a male? We so often think of them as female...

Ambrose felt his heart thump in his chest. Contact! But the angel wasn’t looking at him. He stared through the window at the girl huddled on the floor. Then he raised soulful eyes to meet Ambrose’s.

Sorrow! The empathy was directed at Cassie!

No blame.

A glow enveloped the girl’s body, and her face no longer bore the trauma that had sent her into a dead faint. Her features relaxed into peaceful repose. Ambrose stared into those deep eyes, strangely flecked with a deep sea green around the edges of the dark iris, and felt a tremor of exhilaration. He’d never been so close to an angel before. Details flashed as his mind recorded them: the tentacles of hair that worked like fingers when necessity dictated, the blue-green tinge along the white wings that reminded him of ancient Earth’s manta rays, the lower face that resembled a feline predator but without the elongated fangs. His eyes were drawn back to those amazing orbs, mesmerizing, alien—and his amazement grew as he felt the angel’s sympathy for the child at his feet.

In a flash of shimmering light, the angel darted away from the window and disappeared into the swirling silt.

It defied all reason. It was inconceivable—in view of the diver’s actions. And Cassie had to have given him access. But in spite of these facts, Ambrose knew that the angel did not want Cassie held accountable for this incident. His mind churning over the ramifications, Ambrose took a lab coat from the back of a nearby chair, folded it in a small square, and placed it gently beneath Cassie’s head. He stared down at her for a moment, then rose to tend the person in the entry chamber.

Attack

by Deborah Cullins Smith -

Cassie’s hands clenched at the railing along the observation window.

Jacian’s up to something. The words played and replayed as she watched his progress along the ocean floor.

An angel floated toward the window –toward Jacian—its fins raised and motioning him back. The angel’s features twisted in alarm and Cassie heard the words echoing in her own mind.

“No! Go back! Danger!”

Angels had not proven to be hostile. Yet this angel projected warnings to them both, fins waving frantically as though pushing little wavelets in Jacian’s direction would prompt him to turn back.

Jacian headed in the angel’s direction, pulling something from the side of his air tank.

Images of Jacian’s face close to her own in the observation room flashed in Cassie’s mind.

'Just a quick visit,' he pleaded...

‘A stroll in the park…’

Her hands pushing against those rock hard chest muscles.

‘Holding out for an underwater lover?’

Eyes like two ice blue diamonds…

Cassie swallowed hard, a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. She knew he was lying even as he whispered in her ear. Why had she allowed him access to her lab? Why did she allow herself to believe he might be sincere? The credits he had thrust into her pocket felt heavier in her conscience than they had been in her pocket. She brushed the tears from her eyes and locked her attention on the figure buffeted by the sea’s deep pressure. Then she saw a glint of silver through the murky water.

A knife? Cassie’s breath caught in her throat. He went out there armed? Why?

Horror dawned in her eyes.

This isn’t contact –it’s murder!

“NO!” she shrieked, banging the glass with both fists. “Jace, you can’t!”

A Creature of Words

by Jeff Chapman -

A rocksnout slithered over the rocks on the eastern lip of the Zircon trench, a rift in the ocean floor that plunged for kilometers and yawned to a kilometer at its widest point as it zagged along the edge of the continental shelf. Four legs on the rocksnout’s underside ended in four-fingered feet that gripped the rocks on which the female rested while she pumped water through her mouth and over her gills. Her mottled black and brown body tapered for two meters from a wide, flat snout, one meter across, to a forked tail only centimeters wide. Three dorsal fins rose from her back and a pair of pectoral fins jutted from her sides. Bony crenellations that mimicked lichen-encrusted stone covered the top of her snout and at its tip three luminescent tendrils wiggled with the current.

The eyes on either side of her snout took in the smallest specks of light and tiny holes arranged across the underside of her snout picked up the electrical impulses of beating hearts. She was ninety seasons old and ready to mate for the first time. She heard the low thrumming of a male somewhere in the deep ocean night. She picked out the subtle variations of tone and rhythm in his thrum, a rocksnout’s version of speech. She responded. She called herself Thrawto.

With a swish of her tail, she glided over the ocean floor. It seemed odd to swim, to fly over unbroken fields of sediment. She spent most of her life crawling over rocks on the wall of the trench, searching for caves and crevices that afforded a lair to wait for prey to investigate the glowing tendrils at the tip of her snout. There was no room to swim in the caves and it was not wise to swim in the depths of the trench.

Thrawto swam for hours until hunger gnawed at her stomach. Something glowed on the horizon to her left, a gathering of the bright, winged ones, she assumed. Their accumulated light would blind her and she would not eat them. They passed their thoughts and meant no harm.

She sank to the bottom behind an outcropping of rock encrusted with the browns and greens of sea lichen, a favorite of the grazing fish on which rocksnouts thrived. Thrawto nestled in the silt to wait.

A heartbeat, large and strong with an unfamiliar rhythm, approached. Thrawto tensed, ready to attack or flee or hide. Tremors rippled through the silt. This creature crawled over the ocean floor, a lumbering target.

It emerged from behind the rocks in front of her. An odd creature, she thought. A pulsing stream of bubbles rose from its bulbous head. A single, glowing eye stabbed the night. A hump protruded from the creature’s back and a limb emerged from each corner of its body. No wings, no webbing, no fins or tail. Thrawto readied to strike. She had eaten stranger animals in the trench.

The creature leaned toward her, peering at Thrawto’s worm-like appendages with its single eye that emitted a shaft of blinding light. Her eyes squeezed shut on impulse. In perfect coordination, her legs pushed and her tail snapped. She shot forward, grabbing a lower appendage near the body, hoping to sever the limb and immobilize the creature before it fought or fled. Her jaws worked from side to side and her rows of serrated teeth cut like a double-edged saw. The flesh tasted strange and no sweet blood flooded her mouth. It grunted and thrashed and slapped her bony snout, but amid the screams, she heard sounds and rhythms repeated.

“Kazzeee. Kazzeee.”

Words?

Thrawto relaxed her jaws and the creature fell away, flailing its arms, trying to swim most ineffectually. No blood fumed from the jagged wounds in its hide. How curious. A storm of silt enveloped the struggling animal and snuffed its light. Thrawto gave a kick with her tail and left the odd creature to its fate in the deep ocean night.

The Ultimate Trophy

by Deborah Cullins Smith -

Jacian slipped into the bulky protective gear for his trek into the world beyond Zirconia’s shell. His heart pounded and his blood sang with anticipation of the venture before him. Cassie had bought that sappy line about making contact—she bought it hook, line, and sinker, as the old earth saying went. If all went well, she wouldn’t know his true intentions until it was too late. He smirked as he snapped and zipped his way into layer after layer of the pressurized gear that would enable him to walk on the floor of the ocean.

Cassie stuck her head in the changing room.

“Are you ready, Jace? We’ve got to hurry if you’re going to make it out there and back before the first shift arrives.”

Cassie had arranged to work this midnight shift alone, but it would only be seven hours before her relief crew started showing up. She had insisted he must be back—and gone—well before anyone else could find him in this restricted area.

“Yeah, Cassie,” he said, forcing that beguiling sweetness into his voice, even as he secured a short harpoon and a hunting knife to the side of his air tank. His body faced away from Cassie, so she couldn’t see what he had done. He still needed her to work the control panel and open the exit valves. Once he was beyond the city limit, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. If she called for help, she’d be in trouble for her part in helping him get outside. But she wouldn’t raise the alarm. Jacian had chosen her carefully. He had watched her for several weeks before trying that abortive attempt to sweep her off her feet.

She’ll never know what she missed, he thought contemptuously.

His thoughts turned to the hunt before him. After all, they were just beasts out there. No matter what the scientists and wizards said.

Jacian thought of the mounted insect heads on the walls of his father’s office. There were huge horned creatures, some with enormous glassy eyes; others sported pincers jutting from armored jaws. His father boasted to his business associates of his hunting prowess, but Jacian knew that his father had never killed in his life. The trophies—and the stories of the hunts—were bought and paid for. His father was a liar—a phony.

But Jacian was going to outdo him. Jacian was going to bring back a trophy for his own wall that would put his father’s collection to shame.

Jacian wanted the head of an angel.

Secret Rendezvous

by Deborah Cullins Smith -

Jacian gazed through the observation window in the intimate bar he had chosen for this rendezvous. The intensity in his eyes frightened Cassie. She had just begun working in the undersea lab and now he was begging her to sneak him inside for a stroll—outside Zirconia’s walls.

“Just a quick visit,” he pleaded, turning up the dial on the quicksilver smile that usually gained him whatever conquest he sought and earned him the reputation of a playboy. “Think of it as …. A stroll in the park.” He had her backed against the window, one hand on either side of her body, his face inches from hers.

“But Jace, I could lose my job,” she protested, pushing both hands firmly against those rock hard chest muscles.

Jacian’s eyes blazed, but only for a split second. Obviously he was accustomed to girls melting into his arms. He didn’t seem to understand—or accept—Cassie’s ability to hold out against his charms.

“OK,” he said, pulling back and assuming a more business-like stance. “No romance, eh, Cassie? Holding out for an underwater lover?” His tone teased, but his eyes sparkled like two ice blue diamonds. The controlled rage she saw burning in that blue fire scared her to the core.

Reaching into his pants pocket, Jacian pulled out a wad of credits that could have supplied Cassie and her mother for the next 20 years. His eyes never left her face.

“How about it, Cassie? I’m willing to pay if this suits you better.”

She gulped and turned away from the sight of so much temptation. Her mother had contracted ash lung on the planet surface, and the medication she needed was expensive. Her father’s death benefit had provided their passage to Zirconia, but it now fell to Cassie to provide a living so they could remain in the safety of the undersea city. Jacian’s proposition could spoil everything.

Jacian’s father wasn’t the wealthiest man on Avenir, but he certainly fell within the top ten. His son learned early how to manipulate people, and he rarely ever lost in a contest of wills. How he managed to flit between the space station and the planet for these little excursions was beyond Cassie. But he had managed. And he would find a way to get into her lab too. The question was should she play a part in his scheme or let him find another gullible patsy for his plans?

“Why do you want this so badly, Jace?” Cassie whispered, turning her back on him and leaning her head against the cool glass wall. She felt Jacian loom close to her back but she didn’t turn around to meet those cold eyes—she couldn’t.

“It’s the experience I want, Cassie,” he said softly. “To go out there and try to make contact. Why shouldn’t we try to meet those creatures on their own turf?”

Cassie wanted to believe him. But even with the fistful of credits bulging in her coat pocket, she knew.

Jace was lying.