Chương 302: ??? - ?.?

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We were hunched over a kill — still feasting and feeding, with teeth and claws and wide-hinged jaws all bloody and coated with gore — when the submarine found us. Of course we didn't know it was a submersible, not at first. We assumed it was another predator, a very large predator, so big and so confident and so powerful that it needn't concern itself with such petty matters as stealth or subtlety.

All we could be sure of was that a presence was approaching us, as if stalking for prey among the jagged rocks of the ocean floor, with their coating of mushroom-pale aquatic mosses and sticky sallow-skinned mold, hung with dense sheets of thorny seaweed and encrusted with horns of diamond-hard coral. Whatever manner of creature was slamming through the waters above the tangle of rock, it put out so much noise and light that even the slowest and most inelegant of our peers could have avoided it with ease.

It sang out a chorus of little vibrations into the pitch darkness, peering about itself with flickering pinpricks of dark red light, sweeping over the broken landscape in which we hid. In truth, those who designed and crewed the submarine had intended it to be both quiet and covert; they thought they were being furtive, slicing through the freezing pelagic depths like a silent knife cutting cold flesh, safe and sound inside a sealed bubble of light and air and pressure, totally invisible to the void beyond.

They had leveraged the most advanced expertise, employed the best quality materials, and armed themselves with knowledge few others could imagine, let alone put into practice. They had gone to lengths almost none had attempted before — pioneers down in the dark, in a way that should have been impossible. To our senses they were blundering about, broadcasting power and threat, clueless and blind. No technology could match the perfect processes of personal transformation.

No book or account or second-hand information could substitute for raw physical experience. Nothing could prepare one for exposure to the abyss. So, we made the safe assumption — we were being set upon by a predator, either to steal our kill, or to pick off one of us as live prey, to snatch the weak from our seemingly ragged edges.

With a little rapid discussion via flickers of tendril and tentacle and claw-signs and a few squirts of water-borne pheromone, we agreed that this was, unfortunately, entirely our own fault. We had been very hungry for rather a long time, despite our constant grazing on the thin flora and translucent slime of the ocean floor.

The huge half-eaten corpse we were devouring now had been an overconfident predator itself; it had tried to attack one of our number, then learned its mistake far too late, when we — all of us, all together, all working as one — had turned on it and brought it down in a flurry of wounds and blood loss and overwhelming numbers. That was how we had survived down here for so long despite our rather conspicuous behaviour and fuzzy biological footprint — by applying principles that were almost alien to the abyss.

Teamwork and cooperation and pack behaviour was difficult to beat. We had done our usual best to avoid the scent of bloody streamers floating off into the water. But perhaps we had missed a few particles of gore slipping past our teeth. Perhaps our warning clouds of toxin and poisons squirted out into the dark had not been enough to dissuade any eager scavengers. Maybe this thing which approached us simply did not care about the wounds we might inflict. Perhaps it really was a leviathan, even compared with us.

Or maybe it simply did not comprehend our numbers and our unity. We had to flee. We had to abandon the kill. Very disappointing, but the abyss was still the abyss, pressure could not be avoided entirely. We agreed upon a direction. We would head deeper into the tangle of crumbling rock and twisted little undersea valleys across which our kill lay draped. Among the drowned canyons and long-cooled magma-tubes was the perfect place to lose a pursuing predator, especially one of such apparent size.

Whatever it was, it could not follow us down there. Most of us grabbed a final few mouthfuls of hot and steaming meat, some even carrying it away in specialised pouches or bodily cavities, developed for precisely this kind of eventuality, this kill-stealing opportunist.

A number of small arguments broke out; the newest and least experienced of us had to be restrained from darting upward for the open water, which was no escape at all, or else pulled bodily away from the kill as they attempted to cram meat into their jaws right up until the very last second. We could hardly blame them; such a grand and filling meal was a rare treat, and it was such a shame to return to the grind of chewing seaweed and cracking open the occasional crab for petty morsels of pale flesh.

But I — we, us, me and me and me — was the authority among the others. I was the only one with the size and weight and lethality to truly determine our direction, not to mention my wealth of experience from the sheer amount of time I had spent down here in the dark. If I said go, then we went, because the alternative was being left behind. And we did not ever leave anybody behind.

So off we went, fleeing the remains of our kill in a swift cloud of elegant tendons and tightened sinews, fins and flippers and sharp-edged tendrils cutting through the freezing currents. Some of us wriggled through the water with sheer muscle power, while others jetted on streams of water expelled from within their light-drinking shells; others still pulled themselves along the rocks with masses of sticky tentacles, clinging to others of the shoal when they had to cross open water.

A small number of us flitted and flew with methods even I did not comprehend, seeming to flicker or jump through the water at great speed, propelled by stutters of something that was not light, shrouded by invisible colour which opened holes in the ocean. Those few had come from parts of the abyss I had never seen, from far-off climes and reaches beyond even my storied imagination. We — me, I, myself — lingered last, floating in the churned-up waters just off the kill.

We left behind thin trails of blood and the scent of fresh meat, so I covered our tracks with squirts of mucus-laced ink, clouds of paralytic toxins, and minefields of sticky burrowing burrs. I waited until the very last second, listening to that incessant ping-ping-ping from the approaching mega-predator. I watched the way those tiny red light-feelers crawled across the rocks, mapping and groping and squeezing the ocean floor with flickering crimson beams.

The mass of the leviathan was leaking sound and light in such chaos that I was stumped, overawed by a display which had no place in the cold and dark of the deeps. Did I have some inkling of what it really was? Was that why I paused, on the very rear of my own pack, to watch it crest the nearest rocky outcrop? Perhaps part of me knew it was a submersible. But that didn't matter. Survival was paramount.

I lingered just long enough to see a sliver of this strange and noisy predator as it crested a rise, still hundreds of meters away. Metal skin was coloured a deep sunburst yellow, studded with glass eyes and darkened lamps and a face of steel feelers. We squirted one last warning directly into that distant face — a cloud of ink and toxic mucus laced with a thousand tiny lances, enough to sting and burn and make it clear we were capable of more.

We did not wait to see how it reacted, or for it to reveal more of itself. We turned and fled, following the rest of our shoal down into the ragged rocky underworld of the sea floor. Months passed by down there. We travelled far, moving fast. We flitted through ridged tubes of igneous rock, swam along the bottoms of vast crumbling canyons, preyed on the pale, scuttling, soft-bodied things which lived in the cracks and hollows of the abyssal trenches.

We crossed a distance further than all of planet Earth's oceans, keeping our heads beneath the rocky crust, but always angling upward — never down, never descending into those ancient volcanic vents. We were heading upward, you see? Always upward, always higher, always toward that distant surface, that sunlight zone which still lay lifetimes away. We had been heading in that direction since the moment we had plunged into the abyss, though we struggled to recall exactly where or when that had been.

Our reality was darkness and cold and the shapes of the sea floor. We were strong and swift and beautiful, wrapped in a yellow membrane of our own, powered from within by special reactors, the product of a perfect evolutionary process; we often felt at home in the limitless black of the waters, tempted to stay, to abandon the journey, to embrace the rightness of our own form and place. We were euphoric with ourselves. We felt 'complete'. But I knew this was not an end.

This — the abyss — was merely a different place. Another stage of being. And after this, there was more. Up there. Beyond the surface. In the open air. Not all of us believed in this vision, this promise, this strange echo of a memory. Some of us were simply along the ride, for very different reasons, for self-interest or safety or the novelty of the new or simple survival. I was the one making the journey, and I would gladly continue making it all by myself.

But I had accidentally shown others the way to their own salvation. I should probably define 'us' and 'we'. I'm being very confusing, aren't I? I do apologise, but I cannot help myself. Describing this is almost impossible as it stands. To be more specific is a challenge my mind can sorely afford. But I must try. I must attempt the impossible, a second time.

We — me, I, us, singular and unitary and yet nine-in-one — had swum the waters of the abyss for years, perhaps longer, so long that we had forgotten more than we recalled. We had started our solitary journey down somewhere very deep, very dark, and so very empty, at the absolute bottom of some trench utterly devoid of life, empty of whale-fall or discarded bones, where even the marine snow was absent.

Our earliest memory was of a great crack in the ocean floor itself, which had been recently sealed over with a plug of rapidly cooling magma. We had been alone then, alone and cold and confused. But we were also perfectly suited for this environment; we were leviathan, we were sharp and swift and smooth, with many claws and a great maw of teeth and more eyes than we needed and an array of tentacles on all sides. We had powerful flippers and many siphon-jets and armour all over our body.

We were graceful and fast and unmatched by the things which came near as we began to explore. We were warmed by our internal reactors, and saved the need to stave off starvation by the anaerobic processes within our own body, filter-feeding off salts and grit in the water itself. We had swum in those empty waters for a very long time, slowly climbing the deep valley in which we had begun. We ate rocks and sand. We floated on tiny currents in the dark. Whenever we rested we stared out into the black infinity.

We felt complete, as if we were the product of some divine process which we could no longer comprehend, now that it was done. But we had to go up. That instinct was enough to drive us. Up, up, up. Eventually we left that trench behind. The first thing we found beyond those secluded waters was a hydrothermal vent — a cloud of black particulate rising into the dark from a little field of cylindrical chimneys, formed from accreted mineral run-off.

We had settled there among the strange growths and pale little creatures, basking in the warmth and the nutrients, listening to the tiny chattering sounds of those others who drew life from this crack in the earth, watching their little dramas and discoveries, hovering over them like a moon in their tiny world. We stayed there so long that we became part of their mythology, part of the ecosystem ourselves, as we ejected spent reactor cores and grew new ones inside our body.

The spent cores turned into new oases of change and mutation. We watched the processes with fascination, as the field of hydrothermal life spread outward with our additions. But in time we grew restless — because rest and time had allowed us to recall. Another set of memories lay heavy and dense within us, as if our abyssal body existed only to protect and cradle those recollections, but also as an outgrowth of them, as if we were both seedbed and plant in one.

The memories were of an ape, all gangly and clumsy and gormless, not elegant or clever or swift at all. But she was beautiful too, in her own way, even if we could not quite see it. She had a name — 'Heather'. And that was our name. She was us, we were her. She had brought us to the surface once before, and made us a part of her, and now she had returned to the abyss, and remade us from herself. So the abyss was not an end. It was just part of a cycle. And Heather had to get home, because she had a sister to see.

After many quiet and happy years around that hydrothermal vent — and many creatures which were perhaps the children of our cast-off parts — we left, heading out and away into the dark waters above, the first step on a journey to the surface. Over time, we made friends. This was a difficult concept in the abyss — friendship, comradeship, mutual cooperation of any kind, any meeting of minds or bodies which did not involve a contest over who was going to eat who.

The scarcity of resources, the struggle for survival, the crushing pressure of water and darkness and the ever-present unknowns lurking out there beyond reach of sonar or feelers — a cocktail of danger which discouraged anything but tooth-and-nail competition. But it was not impossible. My time around the thermal vent had taught me that.

Another abyssal presence had taught me that too, though she was also a strange and ape-like memory — a mother in whose arms I had felt accepted and safe and secure, who had not eaten me or rejected me. And was I not living proof myself? For I did not need to kill; my reactors kept me fed. The first friend I made in the abyss was a mollusc. We met over her own most recent 'kill' — a nice juicy piece of slime-soaked moss she had wrestled off the surface of a particularly jagged rock.

She was terrified by me, though all I did was watch her from a polite distance. One can hardly blame her; she was smaller than the size of my clenched fist. A leviathan like me could have scooped her up and eaten her in a single mouthful. She sprayed the water with toxic mucus, shot at me with paralytic spikes, and turned her shell a kaleidoscope of the most wonderful warning colours — deepest red and poison orange and evil sickly purple.

She smashed into me with her coiled shell and ran from me when I did not fight back. She threw rocks and bits of bone when I followed. I shadowed the little mollusc for months — not because I wanted to torment her, but because I did not wish to make this ascent all alone. That was one of the truths of the abyss which we had not understood before.

It is loneliness and isolation which makes this dive so difficult; when together, the beauty down here becomes so much easier to endure, so much easier to bring back, so much less final. Eventually the little mollusc accepted that I was not trying to eat her, though this was not easy. The process only worked because I was obviously not eating anything else either — not other creatures, not the leftover scraps of her food, not bits of myself.

She would bob in the water, watching me in return as I lounged on some outcrop of rock, my presence so obviously keeping the larger predators away from her vulnerable little shell. One day, when the waters were very still and calm and we had not seen a whisper of another creature in ages, she drew close enough to reach out and touch one of my fingertips with a face-tendril. She didn't have a name. She hadn't possessed the concept of names until we spoke.

She asked me to name her, but the only name I had was my own — 'Heather' — and another which I could not bear to bestow upon anybody. After much discussion, she named herself after the sound made by her siphon — 'Silurt'. It was a beautiful name. It was! But that is the closest approximation I can manage, with these clumsy, inadequate, ape-like sounds. Silurt was the first. After her the process became so much easier. When one sees two creatures travelling together, one knows they are not eating each other.

After Silurt came Uurent, a mass of tentacles with a tiny armoured ball in the middle. Next was Tushkernt, then Peneil, then Fandril, then more, and more, and more; all of them named themselves, all of them joined of their own free will, and all of them found something in the group which they had lacked in their abyssal isolation.

As I rose through the layers of the abyss, swimming my years-long route back to the surface, gathering more and more friends to my sides became easy, a by-product of the journey, second nature to what we were. I offered something very simple — protection in numbers, safety when sleeping, and freedom from the cycle of predation. We became a shoal, something no predator could hope to tackle. By the time the submarine found us, all those first friends had grown great in size.

Silurt herself was now a nautilus-like leviathan in her own right, as big as my torso. I was still the true titan among us, but I was not the only one, and not the only one who understood the value of what we had become. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Of course, none of this is true. Everything I am telling you is wildly and hopelessly inaccurate. None of what I am saying is literal; it simply cannot be.

There was no ocean, no water, no perfect elegant leviathan body of my own. There was no hydrothermal vent where I remembered myself and learned how far the abyss could be pushed; there was no great shoal of friends forged along the years of journey — there were not even years, because time was not a thing down there in the space between worlds, in the capillary cavity between dimensions. There was no submarine, either. It is merely the only way I have of expressing what it all felt like.

All of this is metaphor, and none of this is adequate. I am forced to use the flapping of my meat — my lips and tongue, the bone of my jaw, the vibrating membranes in my throat — to render down a pure shining truth of starlight and atomic waltz and mathematical precision, into mere words. If this was a picture, it would be blurry beyond recognition. If it was music, it would be whispers at the edge of hearing. But it is words, and words are the only medium I have. It was the abyss, and the abyss is not an ocean.

It is not fields of fire and brimstone, or solid-packed earth filled with wriggling life, or an empty sky dense with cloud, or any of those things. It is not an infinite house filled with darkness, however much comfort and meaning my true and chosen mother takes from that particular metaphor. The abyss is whatever one brings to it, and whatever one takes away from it. It is truth and beauty untrammelled by matter, unclouded by physics. It is the abyss, and this was my second time in those other waters.

I hope my metaphor makes sense, because it is all I have. When we — us and I and we, but also my shoal of friends all about me — reached the end of that undersea landscape cut and burned and carved by long-dead volcanic activity, where the canyons and tunnels and smooth shafts ran out into a sandy floor which extended for thousands of miles, as the ground climbed once more toward that infinitely distant membrane of the surface, we knew we were still being followed.

The submarine had tracked us, across all those thousands upon thousands of miles, for months on end. We had heard it pinging and beeping and scraping far above the secluded lightless holes through which we swam; we had spotted a corner here or a sliver there, hovering over the narrow canyon-mouths as we passed below. Sometimes we had been forced to outrun the scouts and probes it had dropped into the deep — strange twitching objects which we thought were little sacks of animated poison.

The probes were machines, of course. And the submarine was no predator. But we did not yet know any of that. All we knew is that something loud and terrible and confident had followed us all the way to the limit of our hiding place, waiting for us to emerge into open water. We could not go back, because back would take us down. We needed to go up — to ascend, toward the surface, toward the membrane. We had to be Heather again.

We lingered at that boundary between cave-network and open sand for weeks, stymied by the ever-present signs of the abyssal giant in the open water above us. We hoped it would leave, drawn away by hunger and appetite and the lure of easier prey. But it didn't. It sent those incessant sonar pings roving across the boundary-line of the cave system, sweeping back and forth with red-lit laser-eyes, sending out probes to search for the trailing edges of our shoal.

We were the ones growing hungry, stripping every scrap of vegetation and slimy mold from between cracks in the rocks. I alone among our number was not beginning to starve, so I fed the others with the product of my bioreactors, nursing them from my tentacles, keeping them alive and healthy as we attempted to wait out this strange predator in the darkness. I could have escaped by myself, of course. My grace and speed and power allowed me to outrun anything. But I would not leave the little ones behind.

I would not surrender to the logic of the abyss. I would transcend it. Our patience began to pay off, slowly at first, then all at once. The great and terrible predator which had followed us all the way over the rocky landscape was forced to linger in open waters, waiting for us to emerge, making so much noise and light, making itself so very conspicuous. Other predators began to gather, out in the dark, biding their own time.

We became aware of their presence first because of the subtle scents they left on the currents, and then from the sounds of the probing attacks they launched at the submersible — only a few at first, claw-and-tooth on metal ringing out into the black waters, followed by a swift retreat when the submarine proved too much for them to handle, punctuated by the strange crump-crump-bang sounds of the machine defending itself. Within the space of a day or two, the attacks increased in frequency.

The noise of clanging and tearing and explosions shook the edge of the cave network where we still hid, rising to a crescendo over a span of five or six hours. And that was our opening. We — our shoal, hungry and tired but still alive and whole and together — left our hiding place in a great cloud of muscle and sinew and tentacle, squirting ink and toxins and minefields of spikes behind us as we jetted out into the waters above the lone and level sands.

The colossal fight above and behind us threw jagged shadows and bright flashes across the sea floor — alien and wrong in this lightless abyss, accompanied by the pressure-waves of undersea explosions and strange backwash from the battle. Several of our companions froze in unspeakable fear, or turned to look, mesmerised by this strange interloper into our dark world. I hurried them on, grabbing stragglers with my tentacles and hurling them forward, making sure that we left nobody behind.

Only when I was certain that I was last, did I turn back and look. I thought I understood the abyss. I thought that I — who had dived into these black waters twice, who had surfaced into reality and remade myself, who had returned and clung so hard to this name of an ape that I should be, who was a leviathan now in my own right, who was the equal of any predator of the deeps — I thought I knew the limits of the possible, down here in the space between worlds.

But there, hanging in the dark of the void, was an angel. Bracketed by the flash and crump of underwater detonations, haloed by a whirling ring of tracer rounds and flare-lights and torpedoes in flight, clad in a cape of ablative armour and electrical shielding and the stubs of a thousand sensory feelers, surrounded by a dark ring of predators each a paltry tenth of her size.

She — I cannot describe her as otherwise, as an 'it', not with her graceful curves of imperishable steel plate and her shining halo-rings of propulsion system and the way her body was fluted and smooth and arched — was a machine, a submarine, a submersible. Built beyond the abyss, plunged into these waters on purpose. Not a living thing, not grown or evolved or self-wrought for these depths, but put together by other hands, to dive. Such a thing was beyond my comprehension.

She was beautiful, in a way almost nothing else in my life had been, but also in a way that seemed oddly familiar, as if I had known this machine forever and ever, as if she had lived in the back of my mind since my birth. Ten thousand feet from tip to tail, painted yellow and red in the warning colours of an alien ecosystem, with great ring-sections rotating around the plump, plush, proud mass of her main body. She was armed as an armada, bristling with weapons — guns!

Another alien intrusion into the abyss, one which I felt a tickle at those ancient memories of my name. Little metal orifices flowered open to disgorge torpedoes at the leviathans which plagued and mobbed her; tiny cannons swivelled all over her hull and squirted flickering lines of bullets into the water, chasing the predators which outnumbered her singular beauty; arcs of energy crackled from projectors, turning spheres of liquid into electric death as her tormentors slid away into the murk.

And she was — to my unbridled horror — losing. The angel was far too large for any single abyssal leviathan to pose a real threat to her, but it seemed the desperate predators had learned teamwork too; they were working together to bring down this vast promise of prey. They darted in and out of her fields of fire, baiting her, goading her, forcing her to turn about and thrash at each individual attack.

They tore off her guns here and there, or slid claws through isolated plates of armour, or cracked the great rotating rings which encircled her body, trying to cripple her propulsion and her engines and the heart of her energies. Her loss would take a long time to play out. She might fight for hours yet, or drive off her attackers and limp on for days or weeks more. But if this went on much longer, she would not recover, she would fade and die.

I hung on the edge of the sandy expanse for precious seconds, staring in awe at this alien intrusion, unable to comprehend what it meant. The abyss was infinite and boundless. I had to accept that I would never understand it all. Nobody could. But this was not my fight; I began to turn away, to follow the rest of my shoal. I had to reach the surface, and breach the membrane. I had another stage of the cycle which I must return to, for this was not where I ended. I had to remember.

I had to be— HEATHER My name was etched on the flank of the angelic submersible, in letters taller than my leviathan body. I spotted it as she turned aside, to ward off another attack. Torn between our retreating shoal and this signpost of our soul, we made the only choice we could. We squirted a cloud of pheromones behind us, pheromones which said 'we are going alone, don't follow, flee, save yourselves'.

Then we kicked off from the sandy sea floor with our dozen strong legs, and shot through the freezing waters of the abyss. We swam to our angel's rescue. She — the submarine-goddess — came about as if in surprise as we rose through the waters before her, cutting off the flow of bullets and bombs so as not to harm us. One of the leviathan predators took advantage of this lapse, darting in to attack one of her rotating ring-sections.

We flew past our angel's bow and slammed into the rival creature, easily our own size. We tore wildly at its body and face, ripping off great chunks of meat, biting through muscle and bone, streamers of blood spiralling off into the water. We kicked the attacker free; the submarine responded by opening up on it with a barrage of torpedoes, forcing it to flee into the outer darkness.

But there were dozens of predators stalking the angel now, or perhaps more, all leering maws and pinprick lights in the closing darkness of the abyss, barbed tentacles and poisonous feelers and corrosive tendrils tightening a noose around us. My angelic namesake was scored and burned and wounded in so many places, she would not survive this fight alone. I squirted clouds of toxic ink and lashed the water with my own hundred tentacles and made my sleekly muscled body flash with bright red-pink warning lights.

But I was only one leviathan myself. The circling sphere of predators edged closer, ignoring all my threats. They knew that they outnumbered us, and that if I wanted to live, I had to abandon the machine to her fate. I twisted and turned, refusing to run, unwilling to give up this angel which bore my name. Hissing, screaming, thrashing at the water — none of it would work.

This divine machine had broken the rules of the abyss, attempted to survive outside of the balance of the ecosystem, and now she would be destroyed and eaten and forgotten. Then all the other members of my shoal rose from the waters below — all the dozens of friends and allies I had gathered over my long sojourn in the abyss. They had ignored my instruction to carry on without me. They had disregarded the need to flee. We were breaking the rules of the abyss, too.

Dozens of abyssal creatures rose from beneath us, a cloud of tentacle and claw and flashing shell-patterns, hissing and warbling and filling the water with bioluminescent warnings, squirting toxin and ink and paralytics and worse, shooting invasive bone darts and packets of corrosive enzyme and puffing out their tentacles and flesh to make themselves as big as possible. My friends and companions stood around me on all sides, a sphere of protection around my metal angel.

Most of the predators scattered, fleeing this inexplicable group behaviour. A few lingered for several moments, attempting to pick off a weaker member, or flashing their own threat-displays on the assumption that the shoal would break in terror; they got seared snouts and bleeding limbs and flash-burned eyeballs for their trouble. A couple of the largest and boldest of the predators attempted more — darting in to finish the kill, despite our superior numbers.

The first of those two was driven off in a cloud of its own blood; the second punched deep through our protective sphere, only to find out that the machine angel was not yet helpless. The submersible vomited up a barrage of torpedoes and bullets, wounding the final foolish predator so badly that it sank, limping off into the very same canyons and caves in which we had hidden for so many weeks. And then the dark, the quiet, and the pressure of the abyss.

When the fight was over, we were left hanging in the open waters, surrounded by clouds of blood and messy gobbets of fresh meat. The stench would soon bring scavengers. All our shoal knew we had to move, and yet all eyes turned with infinite curiosity toward this submarine angel which we had saved, this machine which bore my name upon her side. The angel's only method of communication was via her own sensors. She had no windows, no viewing ports, no true commerce between inside and out.

She ran laser-light mapping lines over my body and face, over each of my many dozens of companions, and flashed little pinpricks of illumination in complex sequences, attempting to make sense across this gulf of embodiment. I spent a few moments trying to decipher those symbols, then gave up and did things our way. I closed the gap between myself and the angel, embraced the side of her body, and held on tight.

Scaled flesh against smoothly curved metal; twitching cannons against curled claws; coiling tentacles around glowing haloes. She was a hundred times my size, hot with the internal fires of reactor energies, vibrating with the power of her engines and her many weapons, creaking softly beneath the terrible pressures of the abyss.

We pressed our chest to her steel, feeling the flex and flow of her body; we stroked her with our paws, learning the way she cut through the water, running a fingertip along the letters of my name etched into her flank; we pressed our lips against her many parts, learning her seams and secrets, and lay our ears to the flat places where we might hear. By holding her tight and listening to her insides, I began to understand what she was.

She was filled with familiar sounds, cradled in a bubble of air and light and pressure, protected within a hundred layers of steel. Even if the leviathans had disarmed her, she would neither have sunk nor been truly breached. Those inside her rode in perfect safety, in a manner no abyssal creature could comprehend, because they were untouched by the black and the cold and the infinite waters. I heard the scuff of footsteps, the murmur of voices, the rustle of clothing. Somebody laughed.

Somebody else made a sound which was my name, spoken by flapping meat. A third person banged on the hull, to let me know. Alien beyond words, down in the abyss. These things should not have been dragged that deep. I unwound myself from the angel's embrace and floated back a little in the waters, so I could look at her full length once again. I cooed and purred and let my chest vibrate, speaking words across the liquid medium.

"You didn't need to come down here and get me," I said.

"I'm on my way home. I'm not lost. I just … wandered, briefly." The red pin-lights on the angel's exterior flashed and blinked; I understood them now, because I understood who was inside the submersible, who had dived into the abyss protected and cradled by technology and machine, by steel and plastic and rubber — by magic. The flashing lights were angry and short-tempered. You absolute incorrigible idiot! the lights said. You're taking forever! You can't blame us for panic— The lights swirled and settled.

Tell Heathy I'm saying hello! Can you tell her?! Hello, Heathy! Can she actually, like, hear us? Is that how this works? I have no earthly fucking clue! Let me concentrate— Abyssal journeys do not work like that, human. She is not experiencing what you experience. Her own mind will filter for her. As it did for us. Yeah, what the freaky plant-barrel said. Abyss ain't like that. Thank you, goat meat. Everybody stop! I'm the one channelling this, let me— Hey, Heather.

That final voice was so full of sunlight that it almost lit the abyss, beaming with confidence. The voice which had first pulled me from the deeps, from the long darkness of my own soul.

"Yes?" I said. Take as long as you need. We've got you. No need for executive decisions here. If I had tear ducts, I would have cried. Instead, I reached out to stroke the steel angel, running the edges of my claws along the eternal metal of her body.

"Everything is going to be okay," I said.

"I promise. I'm on my way home." We — me, myself, and I, plus all the abyssal companions of my shoal, joined now by the dented and damaged but still hale and hearty machine-angel sent by my friends — descended together, back toward the sandy floor of the abyssal ocean, leaving behind the cloud of blood and viscera from our fight. The ocean floor tilted upward, climbing toward the far-off sky of the membrane between worlds.

Once again, I must explain, lest I sow discord and confusion among those teeming billions who will never see the black waters so far from light; there was no submarine, no battle with torpedoes and guns and explosions, no angel of the deep made of steel and iron, no lights which spoke in the voices of my friends. This is metaphor, mere words, and cannot capture the transcendent truth of experience. My friends had sent something down to fetch me home. And they were carried within it, in a way I cannot explain.

I saw it as a submarine a hundred times the size of any ship, and it was, in another way, the greatest thing I had ever seen. But that was merely how I saw it, and this is merely the best I can do. Pardon my poor words, dear ape, or Outsider, or other, but this is the best I can do. The rest of our journey to the surface was more tale than I can possibly tell here.

We passed over empty expanses of obsidian sand which concealed great beasts a thousand times still larger than our size, predators content to await some future prey worth their stirring; we crossed fields of hydrothermal vents peopled by strange forms found nowhere else in the abyss, things which fought us off in massed waves if we dared dip too close.

We swam through coral forests which sang with tiny voices, hiding within their living hearts secret grottos where the aged and ancient progenitors of these woodlands held court. We ascended through draped jungles of pale seaweed and mushroom-like growth. We fought with predators and scavengers and strange things from the darkness which did not belong in those waters. We lost friends — not many, but some, for the abyss is still the abyss, and not all can survive the ascent.

And we made this journey with both kinds of companion at our side, abyssal and earthly. After lifetimes in the deep we reached that layer of dark green murky water, lit by the faintest trickle of sunlight which struggles down from above. It was there that we had to bid farewell to our shoal. The waters above — the zones of increasing light, though still deeply murky — were more dangerous than even the darkest reaches of the ocean floor.

Up here the greatest leviathans floated with the currents, beings a million times our size, grown vast and heavy and slow with the effort of their ascent. To lead our shoal further on would only get them all killed. Saying goodbye was not easy. Many did not want to leave, but they all understood they must. Silurt, my first friend, my little mollusc who had overcome her terror, lingered for the longest, pushing her beautiful coiled shell up through the waters alongside myself and the submersible.

But even she had to depart in the end. We shared an embrace, something akin to a kiss, and then I let her fall away, sinking back into the depths to rejoin the safety of the shoal. I had left them all with that, at least — solidarity and safety, in numbers and each other. I had left something new in the abyss. But for us, there was only up. We rose through the final layers of the abyss now, me and the angelic machine.

We stayed side-by-side as we dodged the giants, slipping past vast and terrible presences in the subtle currents of the murky green waters. Three times we were almost caught — pulled into great blind maws by fistfuls of feelers and hydra-headed tongues. But three times we squirted poison and toxin and made ourselves too nasty too swallow, and the angelic machine at our side hurled her explosions and bullets and haloed herself with electrical power, so we were spat out again, to continue onward and upward.

As we approached the surface, I went all but blind. The light was so strong that it seared my eyes. I had lived in the dark for so very long. But the machine-angel held my hands in her rings, to guide me those last few fathoms.

She led me up — up — up — My whole body felt as if it was peeling away and coming apart, but up I kicked, through the cold waters, past the thermocline, until my skin seemed to bubble and boil and slough away and— And then I burst through the membrane, thrashing and screaming and howling as water gave way to air, as my gills sucked on empty space, as I felt the abyss drop away behind. I went home. I went back, a second time. To be Heather again.