He crosses the thousand meter mark just as he remembers something he wanted to ask one of the topside crew. He thumbs the microphone and asks his question and stares at the darkness outside the portal as the question is relayed to whoever can answer it. He imagines the black water around him vanishing, turning transparent by some quirk of physics. Schools of fish resembling sped-up clouds roll through the air above him, and aquatic mammals are tumbling and twisting around him. The sea is a valley surrounded by mountains, the walls of the valley dropping into a dark abyss. At the center of the void, the bottom of the abyss, there appears a single point of light. He is being lowered toward it on a cable of worrying slenderness, the research vessel at the other end a speck against the clouds.
The speaker on the instrument panel crackles. The answer comes back, and he allows the darkness to envelop him once again.
His breath is misting up the porthole, and he wipes it dry with a towel. The water outside is only few strokes above freezing. His body is slightly contorted, as it always becomes on a dive. He wants to keep one eye on the porthole and another on the instruments and another on his notebook. He does not have enough eyes, so he must hold his body in increasingly strange positions to see what he is interested in at the moment.
He reaches down to prop himself up and his hand touches a small puddle under his seat. It is not a leak. If the hull were leaking it would be doing so under enough pressure to slice through bone. The condensation from his own breath is dripping down the interior. He begins to shiver a little. He knows that he will not be warm again for hours.
A suggestion of a shape appears at the center of the port window, the light diffuse and reflected. He speaks into the microphone, asking them to slow his descent. The capsule quivers with the change in speed. Satisfied, he peers at the dim patch through the window. It is growing brighter in his spotlight as he descends, and reveals itself as the peak of a small hill. Distance is difficult to gauge down here but he would put it at roughly fifty meters. He watches it grow.
An idea occurs to him and he reaches over to switch off the spotlight. The peak vanishes. He blinks, then closes his eyes, waits, opens them again.
A suggestion of a shape appears near the bottom of the port window, the light diffuse and reflected, much fainter than the other. Something below him is illuminating the hill. He watches the light rise as he descends. He knows he should switch the spotlight back on but he simply waits and watches. When he sees the base of the hill begin to widen and spread he thumbs the intercom switch and asks them to reduce the speed again.
He watches the source of the light rise into view at last. This is the end of the pursuit, the objective of the expedition. The hull rattles and shakes as its underside smacks into the mud at the bottom of the sea. Alarmed voices hiss from the speaker. He does not listen to them. He is staring into the light, trying to understand what he is looking at.
He can judge that it is at least three meters tall. It towers over him and his pathetic little craft. It is floating just above the seafloor, bobbing in a gentle sinusoid. It is glowing, radiating, blasting light into the freezing darkness. He knows has seen it before but cannot place it, not yet.
When he was a child he had a pet cat and she once cornered a two-headed rat in his grandfather’s shed. It snapped at her with two sets of yellowed teeth and tried to scuttle past on its six legs, but she killed it with the ease of instinct and long practice. After eating one of its heads and gnawing open its belly, she sniffed at the tangle of organs, sneezed, and stalked away. The most prominent thing in the pile was a sort of conjoined half-heart and half-liver: an innard, his grandfather called it, an archaic, singular, malformed sort of word. It seemed to fit.
The thing before him looks something like that, a kind of innard. It pulsates in rhythm, modulating the light that streams from its surface. He notes tangles of blood vessels that end abruptly as if cut. It is a thing that belongs inside a living creature, and yet it is here.
There is something at the edge of his thoughts, but he cannot think it no matter how hard he tries. It may not be a thought at all.
A question hisses from the speaker. The question is shaped like a demand. He opens his mouth. “Fine,” he says, “I’m fine.” He is fine. Warm and safe. He is surprised to realize this. He puts a hand to the window glass and feels the intense chill over his fingers. The warmth he feels is not physical. It is the warmth of love, of knowing one is loved without reservation or condition.
“It loves me,” he says into the microphone. It is important to let the others know. There is a pause, then a tentative whisper from the speaker.
He closes his eyes and smiles, thinking of the cat. She was affectionate and liked to curl up beside him when he was resting. The speaker warbles at him and he answers as well as he can, but he is finding it hard to speak, to even want to speak. The cable clangs against the hull and he knows they are initiating an emergency ascent, and he wants to tell them not to bother, but then the thing at the edge of his thoughts that is not itself a thought steps into the spotlight of his mind and reveals itself.
Never mind how she gets onto the airship; it’s not important. She shoots her way through the guard and jams the bullkhead shut behind her. According to her briefing, the secret weapon is in a lab on the lower deck, and all of the EXTREME HAZARD and NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL signs point her toward it. She dashes around a corner, plugs the guards on either side of a red door with a NO ENTRY sign, and throws it open.
The lab doesn’t look like much, to be honest. There are counters and shelving along the walls, and a chalkboard in a corner with a few figures scrawled on it, and a large table to one side with some glassware strewn listlessly around its surface. None of it feels like the product of scientific pursuit. There is a real possibility that the intelligence is out of date, or completely wrong, but this doesn’t bother her. She’s feeling pretty good, as a matter of fact, and then she notices the man in the corner.
He’s sitting in a chair in profile, looking estatic about something, or maybe it’s just the way light is hitting his face. She can’t see the source of the light and realizes that the room has a screen across it to conceal something on the far side. The man has not noticed her yet, and her gun is in her hand. She steps forward, watching for movement, until she catches sight of what’s behind the screen.
She stares at it for a while, not daring to take a step further.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” says the man. He is a small man, dressed in good civilian clothes, with no visible rank or insignia. The ecstatic expression does not shift as he speaks.
“What is it?” she says, gesturing at the massive glowing pulsing thing hovering gently in the corner.
“I found it at the bottom of the sea.” It’s not quite an answer. She remembers that she has a gun, as well as extensive training in how to get people to answer questions. She looks around for a pen or some other pointy implement as he continues. “It loves. I think that’s all it can really do.”
“I asked you a question,” she says, but her heart’s not really in it. She opens her pack and takes out the bomb. She has orders to destroy the secret weapon if she is unable to smuggle it off the airship. It seems to be the most likely outcome. No way is she leaving with this fucking thing.
The man doesn’t seem to have noticed. “They were trying to make it hate. Because it’s so powerful. They thought they could make it blast hatred across battlefields. A hate so intense it would turn the enemy inside-out. Flatten cities. Poison the earth.
“It doesn’t seem to be able to do that.” The man did not seem to be bothered by this.
“So it’s a dud?” She slides the detonator into its slot and checks the fuse.
“I don’t think so. That’s just not what its for.” He appears to notice what she’s doing, though he has not looked her way at all. “I don’t think that will work.”
“Trust me,” she says, “it will.” She shoots him through the head and he slumps over.
The maximum setting on the bomb’s fuse is five minutes. It should be enough. Just before arming it she takes a step closer toward the big glowing thing. Love washes over her, love and warmth and safety like she has never known in her life, and her feet slip in the growing pool of blood from the man’s head as she scrambles backwards. It’s the most terrifying feeling she has ever had.
“Goddamnit.” She arms the bomb and drops it on the table as hurries out of the lab. The bulkhead is still jammed. She unjams it and throws it open and drops into firing position in one fluid motion, taking out two of the guards standing behind it. The other two go for their guns, but she is faster.
There is no one in the docking bay. A sleek and shiny autogyro is docked to port and she considers taking it but no, stick to the plan, stick to the plan. Her arms slide through the straps of her pack as she runs toward the edge of the bay, and she fastens the final strap just as she reaches it. Outside is pitch black but she doesn’t hesitate.
She falls. A mechanism in the pack catches the wind and yanks her parachute open. She falls a lot slower. She pulls on the straps to steer herself out of the debris zone.
When the explosion reaches her, it’s a rather disappointing pluff. She looks up to see the underside in flames. As she watches, the fire spreads to the struts, streaming up toward the envelope. Before long, there is another pluff as a gasbag depressurizes, then another. The craft begins to lose altitude. It drops below her, flames billowing in its wake.
She looks up again. High above, there is a star where no star should be, and then a voice in her ear.
I don’t think that will work, says the voice. It will outlast the sea and the stars, and when there is nothing left but dust it will love the dust. Even now, it loves you, and it always will.
When she was a child she had a sister, and the two of them kept each other alive through famines and raids and riots, and then one day she came home and her sister didn’t. Alone, she survived, and learned to distrust love and its empty promises. The voice fades from her thoughts. It is not for her.
She is falling into a dark void. Her eyes trace its contours, looking for the signal flare, for the light at the bottom to guide her home.