Into the Drowning Deep Read online

  Tory’s parents had been fresh out of the Coast Guard when they purchased their home, bright-eyed newlyweds with a decent amount in savings (and an even more decent amount in Katherine’s trust fund, left by a wealthy relative who would never have called it a dowry, even though it functionally was). They had fallen in love with the little Colonial-style house overlooking a remote strip of beach with no convenient parking lots or access roads. Their small, well-maintained property would fetch four million dollars in today’s real estate market. They intended to live there until they died.

  Both her parents’ cars were in the driveway. Tory pulled in behind them and took a moment to compose herself before she opened the door, got out, and walked around the end of her father’s battered panel van to the open garage door. The buzz of a table saw cutting through hardwood greeted her before her father himself came into view. He was bent over his equipment like a mad scientist bending over a slab, slicing a vast piece of driftwood. His goggles and heavy gloves added fuel to the mad scientist impression.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Tory.

  Brian Stewart looked up. Then he smiled, held up one finger in a “hold on” gesture, and went back to bisecting driftwood. Tory leaned against the nearest workbench to watch. Prior to his retirement, her father had been the manager of one of the local resorts, a position that paid surprisingly well, thanks to the demands put on him by his employers and his high-ticket clients. He’d been a troubleshooter, mediator, and general calming presence for thirty-five years, and had retired at the age of sixty with a healthy pension and an even healthier savings account. Of all the things Tory had to worry about in this world—and she had plenty, thanks to her fondness for causes anyone else would have been willing to let go—the future of her parents was not among them.

  The driftwood separated into two pieces, falling to the sides of the saw blade. Brian pulled his hands away and turned off the saw, waiting until it stopped spinning before removing his goggles and taking out his earplugs. Tory hadn’t noticed them before, but should have assumed they were there; years of being a woodworker at home and a perfectly groomed, coiffed manager at work had left her father meticulous about anything that could affect either his appearance or his performance.

  “Hello, pumpkin,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be on a boat somewhere?”

  “Funny story,” said Tory.

  Brian raised his eyebrows. “Suspended or fired?”

  “A suspension wouldn’t make sense this late in the season,” said Tory.

  “Neither does firing their best marine biologist. What could you possibly have done to make Jay think that this was the best option?”

  Tory’s cheeks reddened. Brian waited. Living with Katherine had been preparation for life with Anne and Tory, who never met a mountain they wouldn’t throw themselves against. He was surrounded at all times by strong-willed women, and sometimes the best way to deal with them was to step back and let them work through the obstacles they presented to themselves, rather than throwing up any of his own.

  Finally Tory said, “I told a boatful of tourists how unethical and inappropriate it is to keep orcas in captivity.”

  “See, I thought you were going to hold out until the next person asked if dolphin was good eating,” said Katherine. Brian and Tory turned. She was standing in the doorway that led into the house, drying her hands on a dish towel and smiling. “It’s all right. The season was almost over, and you have to go back to school soon.”

  “I was hoping to earn enough to buy access to a few more networks before I went back,” said Tory. “I have blind spots that stretch for miles, and every network comes with the associated processing cost. How am I supposed to monitor the water for a large, unknown marine animal if I can’t afford camera feeds?”

  “Some people would say you’re not,” said Katherine.

  Tory didn’t say anything.

  The silent standoff wasn’t new. Brian busied himself tidying his workbench, stacking the driftwood against the wall and wiping the shavings out of the machinery, leaving it as pristine as he could without breaking out the cleaning oil. They were still standing there looking at each other when he finished. He clapped his hands, the sudden sound making Tory jump and Katherine look at him reproachfully.

  “Well, then, we’re all here now, so what do you say we head for dinner?” he asked. “My treat. I’d love a nice slice of pizza at the end of a long day.”

  “Let me get my coat,” said Tory, and fled into the house, pausing to kiss her mother’s cheek as she squeezed past her in the doorway.

  Katherine waited for her daughter to pass out of earshot before she looked at her husband reproachfully and said, “You did that to distract me.”

  “I did.”

  “You know she’s wasting her potential.”

  “I do.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because it’s her potential to waste.” Brian walked over to his wife, putting his hands on her waist and tugging her toward him. She came willingly. “We made her—and God, didn’t we do a remarkable job of that?—but that doesn’t mean we get to dictate what she does. She’s looking for answers. She’s looking for peace. If this is what she has to do to find it, let her. Ahab tilted at that whale of his for a long, long time before he found it.”

  “And it killed him when he did,” said Katherine. “Are you sure that’s the comparison you want to make here?”

  “I don’t have a better one,” said Brian. He rolled his shoulders in an easy shrug, taking his hands off his wife’s waist and pressing them to either side of her face. He smiled, waiting until she smiled back before he let his own smile die and said, “Tory is young and angry and trying to figure out what she wants. Right now, she wants answers. She wants to know what happened to her sister. To be honest, I’m glad. I’d be doing the same thing if I were younger and had her training. Anne … The thought of her gnaws at me. Every night, it gnaws at me, because I didn’t save her. I’m her father. I should have saved her.”

  “If we lose Tory too, what will we have left?” asked Katherine. “She’s chasing a dream. She’s chasing a hoax. Whatever they’re covering up has to be so much worse than mermaids.”

  “She’s an adult. You can’t stop her. Learn to accept it, or we might lose her anyway.”

  Katherine sighed and pulled away. “I hate it when you’re right.”

  “I know,” said Brian. He kissed her forehead before letting go. “Let’s get ready for dinner.”

  The pizza was fresh and hot, made with local ingredients by a pizzeria that had been a part of Monterey’s landscape for more than thirty years. The price of pork had more than tripled in the last ten years, taking mainstays like sausage and pepperoni to the “deluxe toppings” menu, replacing them with salmon and ground hamburger. Brian looked mournfully at his slice of the daily special—farm-raised shrimp, pineapple, garlic, and mushroom—and said, “I would commit serious crimes for a real meat lover’s pizza.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m a doctor, and not an officer of the law,” said Katherine. “Eat your pizza and stop whining.”

  “I like seafood pizza,” said Tory.

  “You like seafood anything,” said Brian. “You’re no help. You’re a traitor to my foodie cause.”

  “Seafood has less of an ecological impact, and pigs are smart,” said Tory. “You shouldn’t eat anything that knows how to play fetch. It’s rude.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Brian.

  The pizzeria was virtually empty. The neighborhood wasn’t the sort to attract tourists: most of them would be on Cannery Row, oohing and aahing over the Steinbeck attractions, stuffing their faces at overpriced chain restaurants disguised as local color. Locals knew to stay on the side streets and in the districts well away from the water, where a pizza wouldn’t necessarily lead to bankruptcy, and where they wouldn’t have to listen to overstimulated, sunburned children whine their way through dinner.

  The bell above the door rang. Tory gl
anced over automatically, and went still as she saw the man standing in the doorway.

  Luis Martines was the sort of tall that made basketball coaches sit up and take notice, and the sort of skinny that made those same coaches sit back down in despair. It didn’t help that his glasses were too large for his face, giving him the air of a myopic, perennially confused owl. His personal hygiene was impeccable, but his grooming went through a slow cycle over the course of every school year: At the moment, he was clean shaven. By the end of the semester, he would be boasting the sort of big, bushy beard that a mall Santa would envy. As usual, he was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and an unbuttoned plaid flannel two sizes too large for his frame. His arms were loaded with folders and loose papers, and he looked like he’d wandered into the pizzeria by mistake while looking for the nearest library.

  He spotted Tory and lit up, suddenly all smiles. He was surprisingly handsome when he smiled. “Victoria!” he exclaimed, causing the heads in the pizzeria that hadn’t already turned to whip around, looking for the source of the disturbance. He ignored them, wading through the sea of tables until he reached the Stewart family.

  Dropping himself into the one empty chair, Luis thrust his armload of papers at Tory. “You need to see this,” he said.

  Tory took the paperwork automatically. Several years of sharing lab space and research projects with Luis had taught her that if she didn’t accept what he tried to give her, he’d let go anyway, resulting in papers everywhere. One cleanup too many had given her a very firm grab reflex.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “I finally got those deepwater sonar scans broken down,” he said. “You know, the ones centered on the Challenger Deep? I was able to get full analysis of audio signals going back five years—oh, uh, hello, Mr. and Ms. Stewart.”

  “Hello, Luis,” said Katherine, fighting to keep the laughter from her tone. “Would you like a piece of pizza? We have plenty, and seafood is so difficult to reheat.”

  “That’s because it has a very delicate index of ‘done,’” said Luis. “Thermodynamically speaking—”

  “Thermodynamically speaking, my partner is an enormous nerd,” said Tory, and flipped open the first folder. “Eat pizza, Luis. Enjoy not being in a lab. It’s nice to not be in a lab sometimes.”

  “I went to the wharf first,” said Luis. “I thought you might still be on the boat. But your boss said you don’t work there anymore. What happened?”

  Tory grimaced. She’d known the news of her firing would get back to her lab mates sooner or later—Jason would tell everyone the second he found out, if nothing else, and he would find out; he was doing a sampling project that brought him through the harbor twice a week, and he’d eventually notice her absence on the whale-watching boats—but she’d been hoping it might take a little longer.

  “I sort of expressed my opinion on keeping orcas in captivity over the microphone to a boatful of tourists,” she said. “Jay canned me as soon as we got back to shore.”

  “Oh.” Luis took a piece of pizza. “I guess I can’t blame him. I mean, he’d warned you like six times.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be on my side.”

  “I am on your side,” he said, looking stung. “I just brought you something that’s going to change everything, if you’d take a second and look at it. You needed to be out of that job, because you need to be free to chase this down.”

  Tory blinked, slowly processing the words he was actually saying, rather than the words her mind kept trying to supply. Finally she looked at the papers in her hands and began to read. The rest of the table went silent as her eyes got wider and wider.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Deepwater sonar was an interesting mix of junk signals and useful readings. Filtering out the inevitable beeps and bloops from military testing, oil pipelines, and other man-made structures was the work of hundreds of hours and sensitively calibrated computer programs. What was left behind fell into two categories: known and unknown. The known noises included whale songs, dolphin chatter, and all the soft, organic sounds of the sea. Even water had a sound, to the people who knew how to listen. The unknown noises were a mess and a mystery, and all too often turned out to be nothing—a military test that hadn’t been declassified until after the readings were taken, a submerged glacier collapsing in a novel way.

  But there were always a few sounds remaining. Always a few novelties. Always a few mysteries.

  Always a few runs of blips that science just couldn’t explain.

  Tory stared at the peaks and ridges of the sonar readout, feeling her heart struggle to fall out of sync with itself, excitement hastening her breath and tightening her skin. “Where was this taken?” she asked finally.

  “Twenty miles east of the Mariana Trench,” said Luis. “The ship that snagged the recording wasn’t supposed to be there. They dropped a hydrophone for research purposes, since they were off course anyway, and then they answered our standing offer to pay for anything novel from those waters. I think they were sort of laughing at us. I mean, why would a ship’s engine that big be running a thousand feet down?”

  Brian put up his hand. “Can we get this with a little less intentional obfuscation, for the nonscientists in the audience?”

  Tory swallowed hard, trying to force her body to listen to her. Years of therapy and meditation courses had left her with a few tricks; she summoned the sound of the sea, packing it into her ears until she felt her heart rate begin to drop. Carefully, she placed the paper on the table where her parents would be able to see.

  “This,” she said, touching the top line of waves and curves, “is the standard sonar reading for that area. We’ve had blips before—surprisingly little whale song, given how remote it is and how rich the water has historically been; we’d expect a place like that to be a popular feeding ground, and it isn’t—but most of the time, the water looks like this.”

  “And what is ‘this’?” asked Katherine.

  “The song of the sea,” said Luis.

  Brian raised an eyebrow. “That’s surprisingly poetic.”

  “Studying the ocean forces you to be poetic, because we haven’t worn all those ideas and concepts soft around the edges yet,” said Luis. “The language is still mired in the maritime, and I don’t know that it’s going to catch up anytime soon.”

  “Water sings,” said Tory. Luis could talk for hours about the words used to describe the ocean. If she let him get started, they were going to be here for a while, and she wanted to get to the lab as soon as possible. “It’s a function of the way it moves. Everything makes a sound, and vibrations hang in water for much longer than they can hang in air. They travel further, too. It’s why whales can communicate with each other even when they’re miles apart.” Air was too thin, compared to water, to really carry sound. There was no such thing as silence in the sea.

  “Okay, cool,” said Brian, nodding in the way Anne had always called “cool dad.” He didn’t really understand, but he was pretending as hard as he could. Tory didn’t trigger “cool dad” as often as Anne had. Tory had always been more easygoing and less likely to get embarrassed by her parents. But sometimes Brian still brought out the nod, like he was afraid he’d forget how to do it if he stopped for too long. Nothing that reminded them, as a family, of Anne was allowed to be forgotten; she was the ghost at every table, and they’d keep her with them forever if they could.

  “So the standard sonar represents the song the water in that area is usually singing. It can tell us things about the currents, the tides, the depth, and more, about the creatures that live there. Not as many marine mammals as we’d expect, for example, since there aren’t many of their songs embedded in the profile.” Tory slid her finger down the paper, to a line marked with jagged peaks and deep valleys. “We got this recording about three years ago.” Three years, two months, one week, four days. She would never forget the first time she’d listened to it, the breakthrough it had seemed to represent—or the crushi
ng disappointment it had become when no one else could hear the things she did. “A family of sperm whales wandered into the zone we’ve been monitoring. It was normal song for a few days, and then they went into distress, all of them. At least six that we’ve been able to isolate by their voices, possibly more. They screamed for about fifteen minutes. Then they went silent. We’ve reached out to marine biologists who might have encountered that family either before or after the incident; the pod has never been heard again.”

  “You think something killed them?” asked Katherine.

  “Unless aliens are stealing our whales,” quipped Luis.

  Tory kicked him under the table. He yelped. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said, as if she hadn’t just assaulted her research partner. “Sperm whales dive deep. They run into things that whales that stick more to the photic zone might never see. There’s a chance they disturbed something, and it, well, ate them. But here’s the interesting part.” She began tapping other rows of sonar readings, finger moving so fast that it was clear she wasn’t looking for the data she wanted: she already knew where it was, and was just revealing it to the people around her.

  “These recordings were made after the whales disappeared,” she said. “There’s nothing higher than the mesopelagic zone, which is interesting, because whales have to surface to breathe. There’s nothing new, either. All these sounds match up to recordings made during the period when we know the whales were present. Note for note, they match. That sort of consistency isn’t natural. It’s not the way whales communicate.”

  “Dear, we can’t look at little squiggly lines and know what they mean,” said Katherine patiently. “What are they?”

  “They’re blips of whale song, like someone—or something—had been sampling from the whales while they were in the area. And there’s nothing new. Whales sing the same songs when they’re talking to each other, just like people use the same words. But they inflect them differently. They have tones of voice, rising notes for excitement, falling notes for sorrow … Nothing in the sea is ever identical to what it was five minutes ago.”