Page 30 of Guarded By the Kraken

Nothing in the dossier had mentioned this. “I don’t understand?—”

“All information past that point is classified. We take that very seriously down here. We’ll still be monitoring every other indicator of your health, and there’s a panic button installed on your suit’s chest—and if you tap the button on your neck, we can speak to you, if it’s required.”

“But I’ll mostly be on my own,” I wondered aloud.

“Not entirely,” Cepharius said.

I shook my head rather than explain to him, and walked forward, hearing Marcus count my steps down.

“Screen black in ten . . . in five . . . screen black zero. Good luck, Doctor.”

I paused on the other side of the “line.”

“Elle?” Cepharius wondered.

“They turned off communications on their end.”

“Why?” His concern was instantaneous.

I sighed. “Because this mission is classified.” Which I understood, but fuuuuck. I turned to more profitable lines of thought instead. “What did you mean when you said it tasted weird? Why would you taste it?”

“I can taste things with my suckers—the metal tasted strange.”

“Metal?” I asked—and then the outskirts of my headlights found it.

I took two more steps forward, and then looked up, and found myself standing at the base of a wall of dull metal, at the bottom of the sea.

It was covered in the inscriptions similar to the ones I’d seen in the ROV footage. Each of them were the size of my hand, and any of them that were hit by my light began to glow a cool blue.

“See?” Cepharius said.

“Oh. My. God,” I whispered. I started walking sideways, praying the cameras attached to my helmet were taking everything in.

“It is twenty of my lengths tall and thirty of my lengths wide,” he informed me.

I risked looking at him again. “Then that’s massive.”

“Why, thank you,” he said, with a chuckle. “But yes, it is.”

“And your people have no idea what this is?”

“I haven’t gone back to ask them, since I arrived—but no, I’ve never heard anything about something like this on the ’qa.”

“Would it be possible for a find like this to be ignored—or forgotten—this whole time?”

“The bottom of the ocean is a very large place.” Cepharius’s mind gave the impression of a shrug. “I take it your people do not know what it is, or who it is from either?”

“No. But I am the best person to figure it out.” I ran my tongue along the outside of my teeth in thought. I looked back at how much cable I had left behind me. It was like a leash, and I couldn’t outpace it—which meant the top of the building was probably lost to me. It was frustrating because I needed as much data as I could get, although the thought of deciphering an entirely unknown language—by myself!—without a computer was almost laughable.

I could feel Cepharius thinking beside me. “I believe I can help,” he said, then swam away vertically.

“How?” I wondered.

“It seems my bioluminescence is enough to trigger their intrinsic light,” he explained. He was so far away I couldn’t even see him.

“How good is your memory?” I asked.

“Exceptional.”

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