“It was very important since we have a lot of knowledge on human behavior, and how to control them. As long as the electrical fields within Typhon Base were working properly, then it wouldn’t have escaped.”
Liger shook his head. “You can’t blame my dive team for what happened! There was a storm, remember?”
“Yes. I don’t blame your people at all. Just bad luck. But it is imperative that we get to the subject and disable it. The attack and sinking of that diving support vessel is actually good news for us.”
Liger was flabbergasted. “Good news? The company lost over a hundred crewmembers on that ship! Mr. Morgenstern was apoplectic when he heard about what happened.”
“Of course that part was tragic, but it’s good news in the sense that the subject has not gone away and instead continues to remain in the area,” Yamamoto said. “Now I have thought up several theories as to why, so it means we are progressing.”
“And what, pray tell, would be the reasons why this monster would stick around here?”
“My first hypothesis was that it was due to being familiar with the area and therefore treating this part of the world’s oceans as its home territory,” Yamamoto said. “Now I believe that it may be searching for something.”
“What could that thing be looking for? A meal?”
“Well, it does seem to feast on human flesh since there are no living survivors from the sinking of the Aurora, but I believe it is after something that is dear to its heart.”
Liger gritted his teeth. “I haven’t got all day. If you have a theory as to what it wants, then you need to spell it out. Right now.”
Yamamoto swiveled his chair ninety degrees to his left, and tapped a key on the console behind him. The wall monitor now showed an image of a number of spherical purple objects encased in a cylindrical container. “That is what she wants.”
Liger raised an eyebrow. “You just called that monster a ‘she.’ Did I hear you right?”
“Although the body we built for her has no reproductive organs, the transplanted brain is female,” Yamamoto said. “And she went into cardiac arrest while giving birth to a deformed baby, as I recall.”
Liger pointed towards the images on the screen. “Are those things… eggs?”
Yamamoto nodded. “Correct. I now believe she’s continuing to stay in the immediate vicinity because she wants to have offspring. She desires to have children.”
“But you said she can’t reproduce.”
“Yes, but her thinking must be to possess the eggs and adopt them, so to speak.”
“Then this monster is as crazy as you are!”
Yamamoto let the obvious insult go. “Whatever the case is, we now know what she’s after.”
Liger moved closer to the screen and studied the objects suspiciously. “And where are those things located?”
Yamamoto chuckled. “Why, they’re still inside the undersea habitat, of course.”
Liger cursed loudly. He already knew what the next step would be, and he didn’t like it.
35
THE MOMENT SHE OPENED her eyes, Chloe made her way up to the Wanderer’s bridge and stationed herself near the helm controls. Using a pair of binoculars, she scanned the early morning horizon, hoping to spot any signs of the Skandi Aurora.
Captain Owens had managed to relieve his night watch crew just minutes ahead of her, and he continued to sit in the captain’s chair as the helmsman in front of him made slight adjustments to the ship’s heading. He had greeted Chloe the moment she walked into the bridge, and only got a dismissive, silent nod in response.
Chloe squinted as the reflected sunlight along the sea’s surface played havoc with her eyes, but she continued to diligently observe the area around her.
Another crewman entered the room carrying a plastic tray and set it slowly down on one of the side counters before heading back downstairs. After walking over and taking a sandwich and a cup of coffee, Owens slowly made his way forward until he stood beside Chloe and held the grub out in front of her. “How about some breakfast?”
Chloe turned and was momentarily startled, yet she quickly recovered and acknowledged him with a smile as she took the cup along with the bacon and egg sandwich from him. “Thanks, Deke. I’m sorry for being rude to you earlier.”
“Nah, you weren’t rude at all. I get what you’re feeling, but we all still need to have some food to keep our energy levels up.”
“That we do, thanks again.”
“Don’t mention it.”
As Owens went back to the tray to get his own meal, Chloe bit into the sandwich. The crispy saltiness of the bacon was complemented by the subtle, buttery texture of the scrambled eggs, all topped with creamy mayonnaise slathered along the insides of the bread. Chloe hadn’t realized how hungry she was, but she wolfed it down in just a few bites before taking a long, resuscitating draught from the coffee mug.
The captain of the Wanderer chuckled as he sat down in his chair and gestured back at the tray. “There’s still one more for you if you’re hungry, Chloe. I can also ring up the dining hall to get us some additional food if you’d like.”
Chloe blushed when she realized that the other crewmembers were looking at her and smiling. She hadn’t eaten like that since her time working as a saturation diver. “Thanks, but I think I’m full now.”
“You sure? It looks to me like you could eat two more.”
“I’m good, I’m good.”
“Okay then, so I’ll be—”
Owens’s words were interrupted when the intercom started beeping. The captain of the Wanderer gestured at a nearby crewman to put it on the loudspeakers.
The voice belonged to one of the female members of the lookout crew stationed near the prow of the vessel. “Cap, I’m seeing debris in the water just ahead.”
“Slow us down to five knots,” Owens ordered. Within a few seconds the Wanderer began to decrease speed. The once smooth watery surface was now studded with a number of floating objects all around the vessel.
Chloe bit her lip as she held the binoculars in front of her eyes and began to look at the debris more closely. It was apparent they were seeing the remains of a ship that had gone down quite recently.
Ethan had just finished grabbing some breakfast from the downstairs galley, and now he stood right by the door leading to the outside of the bridge wing. Stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth, he quickly moved sideways and stooped towards the open doorway leading into the radio room. “Rob, tell everybody what we just found.”
“You got it, Mr. Riis,” the radio operator said.
Owens had moved closer to the side monitor and began to activate the hull-mounted sonar. “We’re getting some pings. If she’s been sunk then the Aurora would be in pretty deep water.”
Chloe made her way to where the captain was and began typing in commands on the console. The towed sonar array at the stern of the ship was immediately deployed, so that it trailed the Wanderer by at least twenty meters to get a better analysis without interference from her own propellers. Chloe also activated the MAD, or magnetic anomaly detector, a magnetometer used to identify metallic objects in the ocean.
Tapping the intercom button by the wall, Owens placed the microphone close to his mouth and started speaking into it. “This is the captain. It looks like we’ve come upon some debris from a possible shipwreck. And it looks like we’re the first ones to arrive and we need to do an immediate search for survivors. I want the aerial drones deployed ASAP, please.”
Ethan shuffled over to where the two of them were standing, just as the computer generated image on the monitor displayed an updated graphic representation of the sea bottom. “Oh my god.”