The Deep by Nick Cutter Page A

job again, Doctor?”
    “Computational biologist,” Felz said as the cart got rolling again.
    “I got to know Dr. Westlake pretty well,” Al said. The forced jocularity was gone. In its place was somber concern. “I liked him a hell of a lot. He seemed put together. But it’s incredibly hard down there. Not just the physical pressure; there’s the added pressure of what they’re trying to achieve. Dr. Westlake surfaced nine and a half hours ago, while you were in transit. Let me ask—has your brother ever mentioned him?”
    Luke said: “I’ve never met Dr. Westlake. Never even heard his name.”
    “I believe that’s the truth as you know it,” said Al.
    The cart stopped before a building with a red cross on its exterior. Al rested her gaze gently upon Luke’s.
    “What’s behind that door,” she said, “is Dr. Westlake. What surfaced of him. You don’t have to look . . . but maybe you’ll want to, seeing as you’ve agreed to go down.”
    “What happened to him?” said Luke.
    Alice showed him her palms, same as Felz had done. A helpless gesture.
    “It’s still our world down there, Dr. Nelson,” she said, “but that’s like saying that the ice ten thousand feet beneath the arctic icepack is, too. Yeah, it is , but not anything we know. Our government has spent thirty trillion dollars on space exploration, and less than 1 percent of that to explore the world underneath us right now. But it’s just as unknown. You’ll be entering another world, really and truly.”
    “It’s Luke,” he told her. “Call me Luke. And I’ll go. I’ll see.”
    Al’s clipped nod made Luke think she wished he’d chosen otherwise.

14.
    THE AIR WAS MEAT-LOCKER COLD on the other side of the door with the red cross. Luke’s arms instantly broke out in gooseflesh.
    The room was uncluttered. Halogen lights buzzed down on a bank of steel vaults. Luke had visited morgues as a veterinarian, most recently to perform an autopsy on a police drug dog that’d died after ingesting a perforated balloon of heroin.
    “Every vault is empty save one,” Al said. “We’ve been lucky lately with the ’Gets. A few in quarantine, but none dead and no new cases reported in a week. Must be the sea air.” A gravedigger’s smile. “Sorry. Poor taste.”
    They walked with aching slowness toward the vaults.
    “Dr. Westlake and the others had settled into their roles inside the Trieste . The station was holding up. Electrical function, oxygen purification, waste disposal—all systems operational, which on the technical side of things was the main concern.
    “Mentally, the crew seemed sound. Your brother was the point man—he gave the majority of the updates, so our perceptions up here were filtered through him. But we watched the other two on the monitors. They were eating, sleeping, engaged in productive labor. You’d see them talking and laughing with one another.
    “There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then . . . well, Westlake went off the grid.”
    Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.
    “Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing . . . or what was being done to him.”
    Done to him? Luke thought.
    “We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”
    “Current ring?”
    “An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water