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I didn’t fight being tied, but I did ask the soldiers questions. “Who are you? Who sent you?”
They didn’t answer me, their faces kept stony silence, until they left.
“My pearl,” Cepharius thought at me, from the other side of the wall.
“This looks bad. I know. But I’ve been in rough situations before.” I thought back at him the times I’d gotten mugged—in the US, and abroad—how I’d had to bribe people for more time on sites more than once before, and a memorable prior hostage situation, out on a dig. In some countries, getting briefly kidnapped was so common there were almost rules to the game.
But those people had all just wanted money.
This was probably international conspiracy level shit, and Snout’s life was on the line—along with a few hundred of his friends.
It was way the fuck above my paygrade.
I tried to look over my shoulder out the window for Ceph. The second they’d disconnected my cable, my helmet my suit’s life support had turned off, so all the freezing chill I’d brought in me from the ocean had seeped into my bones—my teeth were chattering, and I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.
“I don’t suppose krakens have 911?”
“I do not know what you mean,” he said, swimming back and forth outside, trying and failing to keep his thoughts to himself, roiling with concern for me.
I rocked my head back, hitting the back of my suit. Even if krakens did have an emergency signal, it didn’t matter—they couldn’t come into the habitat, and if anything was breached I’d die.
“I know,” Cepharius thought with a dismay so deep it hurt me.
“It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, but I know that I love you.”
“And I love you, my pearl,” I heard him think with anguish, feeling all his painful memories merge with mine, because both of us knew that sometimes love was not enough.
I was about to respond, when my door opened up again. Hargrave came in with my tablet tucked under his arm, and two of his men dragged Marcus and Donna in behind him, shoving both of them to their knees as he leaned against my desk to face me.
“Hello again, Doctor Kepzler.”
I ran my tongue across the outside of my teeth. “It’s a little late to play good cop, bad cop, especially when there’s only one of you.”
He gave a dark laugh. “Well, things down here at the bottom of the sea are strange. For instance, there’s a gap in your recording.” He held my tablet up, using my face to unlock it. “See, we’ve got video of you going into the ship—but then everything goes blank for a day and a half, until you’re returning. So what happened during that time?” he asked, dragging his finger back and forth casually across the screen.
I shook my head. There was no denying the footage, but I’d never tell him things he didn’t know. “I blacked out.”
He responded without looking up. “Do you know how many men we’ve lost already?”
I glanced over to Donna in panic. She gave me a shrug, whereas when I looked to Marcus, he was turning bright red.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “I figured there were some, I saw the empty suit berths in the dock room, but?—”
He cut me off. “Twenty-three. You see, my group’s been looking for this quite a bit longer than Mr. Marlow has—and unfortunately for you, we’re just as well funded. But after numerous failures, we decided we’d sit back and let him take the lead. We planted this one here,” he said, pointing at Marcus, “like a cuckoo in a crow’s nest, and waited.”
I gasped and looked at Marcus with horror, as did Donna, and he had the decency to seem ashamed. “I’m sorry, they were going to blackmail me—” he started babbling.
“Shut him up,” Hargrave ordered, and the soldier nearest Marcus punched him.
“And now you’re the first human being to survive alien contact, Doctor. My group wants to know what you found, how you found it, and how we can make it ours.”
I steeled myself to not show any emotion. “I blacked out.”
Hargrave clucked, casually flipping through screens on my tablet. “I don’t think so.”
