Page 39 of Clive Cussler Desolation Code

“Two hundred yards,” Paul said.

There was nothing on the monitor, but that didn’t mean anything. Water absorbed and scattered light with great efficiency. Gamay figured they’d need to be within a hundred feet to see anything more than a blur. She slowed the ROV and took it a bit deeper. If it was a school of fish, she wanted to sneak up on it and get a good look at the species and number before she scared it away.

A quick glance at the sonar readout told her it hadn’t moved.

“One hundred yards,” Paul said.

“I’m going to slow a little more and come up to their depth.”

As Gamay adjusted the thrusters and dive planes, the cameras captured their first sign of something that wasn’t open water. A small glowing blob passed in front of the lens.

“Did you see that?”

Paul nodded. “What was it?”

“Jellyfish?” Chantel suggested.

Gamay hoped not. Another blob passed by and then several more. Seconds later the ROV was swimming in them. Hundreds of dimlyglowing blobs of gel. They swirled in front of the camera by the hundreds and then the thousands. Gamay tilted and panned the camera. It was a dizzying display, with depth and width in all directions. Like being in a field surrounded by a million lightning bugs.

Most were pushed aside by the flow of the water as the ROV moved through, but like a swarm of insects encountering a car on the road, some of the globs hit the lens, sticking and smearing.

Paul was surprised. “Who knew we’d need windshield wipers on an ROV.”

Gamay slowed the vehicle to one knot, creeping through the swarm of glowing blobs and trying to get a good look at them through the smeared lens of the main camera.

“Could they be globs of bioluminescent plankton?” Chantel asked.

Gamay didn’t think so. She’d never actually seen anything like this before. “I don’t know what they are.”

Suddenly the camera jerked to the side. The ROV had bumped into something. The view turned suddenly brighter. Instead of hundreds of drifting globs spread out across the camera view, there were now thousands up close and packed in together.

“Reminds me of the time I backed our riding mower into that hornet’s nest.”

“My only memory of that is you running at full speed and screaming, ‘Save yourself,’ while I watched from inside the living room.”

“You followed that instruction quite well if I remember.”

“I was watching one of my shows.”

For all the kidding around, the pronounced impact and the sudden increase in the number of drifting orbs did suggest she’d collided with some sort of nest. She panned up and around with the camera, but it was now so smeared with gel and iridescent goo that it had become unusable. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say these things are trying to coat our ROV with their secretions on purpose.”

A new idea came to her. The ROV had a third camera. It was attached to the robot arm and designed to allow for precise operation of the pincers at the end when picking up or manipulating small objects. When not in use, the arm remained folded, and the camera hidden away.

She activated the arm, brought the camera online, and tilted the ROV upward, toward whatever they’d bumped into.

A terrifying site came into view. The open jaw of a great white shark.

“This is why we use ROVs,” Chantel said.

Gamay pulled the arm back instinctively, but the jaw didn’t close; instead it remained suspended above the ROV, its jagged teeth pointing in all directions, its exposed gums bleached white and eroded down to the bone.

She backed the ROV off to get a wider view. The shark was drifting nose down, its eyes gone, its gills ripped apart, its skin torn open in places, and blistering and bulging with decay in others. The open jaw was without a tongue.

The shark’s flesh and organs were mostly gone. The tougher structures like ligaments and tendons were holding the cartilage that acted as a skeleton in place, but everything else had been corrupted or consumed.

“I have to see something,” Gamay said. “Turn away if you’re squeamish.”

Paul had an idea what she was up to. He was glad he hadn’t just eaten lunch.

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