Hive

The hydrobot was interested. It inverted itself above them and slowly passed over them, panning them and giving what information it could on them such as their temperature and what the chemical composition of the water around them was. Hayes had seen tube worms on the Discovery Channel, but not like these . . . not moving and undulating, reacting to maybe both the hydrobot and its light. These didn’t look like harmless filter-feeding animals, but things that were hungry and predacious.

“This is simply amazing,” Gundry said.

Hayes was speechless. What he was seeing . . . no man had seen before and the impact of it all had quieted that feeling in his belly that there was something terribly wrong about this ancient lake.

“Shit!” Parks cried out. “Did you see that?”

They had. Something gigantic and fluttering that looked roughly like a pond hydra, but grown to nightmare proportions. It had to be twenty or thirty feet in length, looking much like an upended tree with a massive root system . . . a forest of clown-white writhing tentacles. It darted away from the light quickly enough and they only got the briefest glimpse of it. But what they had seen made them pretty sure they wouldn’t be taking any dips in Lake Vordog in the near future.

“Incredible . . . a mollusk maybe. Certainly squid-like,” Campbell said with a dry voice as if the thing hadn’t scared the hell out of him.

But it had. Without really thinking, all the men in the booth had pulled away from the screen involuntarily. Something like that . . . white and ghostly and alien . . . roaming in the darkness, well, it did something to you. Made you think bad thoughts, the kind that could keep you awake at night.

The hydrobot did not go after it, which was a good thing. But Gundry explained that it was programmed to study slow-moving creatures when it could, but not to burn unnecessary energy in any hot pursuits. And that hydra . . . or whatever in the Christ it was . . . had been damned fast. Damned fast and damned spooky.

Another bottom-dweller came onto the screen and Hayes had never seen anything like it, either. It looked sort of like a horseshoe crab, but narrowed and lengthened so that it was maybe ten feet long. It was covered in a chitinous exoskeketon that was fish-belly white like most things down there. There were two pairs of spiny walking legs to either side like those of a lobster and a set of hooked chelicerae, pincers, poised out front like they were looking for something to crush. Its plated tail ended in something like a stinger. Overall, it looked like some kind of massive scorpion, but eyeless with no less than four waving antennae.

“My God,” Campbell said. “I don’t believe it. Do you know what that is? A Eurypterid . . . a sea scorpion. Obviously an evolved form, but a Eurypterid all the same.”

“A new species?” Hayes said.

Campbell laughed. “The Eurypterids are an extinct subclass of arthropods, Jimmy. They died out roughly 200 million years ago . . . or so we thought. Goddamn!”

The hydrobot passed beyond the reach of the sea scorpion. Everyone in the booth kept watching the screen, seeing more exotic aquatic plants, colonies of tube worms, bizarre giant clams, some inching worms, and what might have been a squid that ducked away quickly. Then the terrain began to grow more rugged, slashed by chasms that dropped hundreds of feet and capped with rolling submarine hills that were set with something like pale yellow kelp. The magnometer on the hydrobot was picking up higher levels of magnetism and honing in on them.

For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish . . . or what looked like fish . . . and then, Campbell saw something.

“Did you . . . what the hell was that?”

Hayes had seen something like it before.

A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn’t shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn’t dare say . . . not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or they were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive . . . which it certainly was.

“I’d like to know what those are,” Parks said. “They remind me of . . . “

“What?” Gundry asked him.

He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud.”

But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they all weren’t thinking the same damn thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.

And then -

And then Gundry gasped. “Did you see that? Looked like . . . well, almost like an arch.”

Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. “Some weird volcanic structure. Can’t be an arch down here, not down here.”