Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 41

The tunnel flared wider and then opened into nothing.

We found anchorage on a rock wall and played our beams in flashes and slashes, and shadows lived and died, and we found that we were anchored at the mouth of a cavern.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

And then somebody's light caught Lanny hugging the left-hand cavern wall.

He raised a hand and shielded his goggled eyes. His own glove light was off. He switched it on. Behind him on the wall was a recessed area with shelves of equipment. Some sort of control panel. He turned and opened the panel door and his glove light revealed a keypad. He punched a button and the keypad lit up.

And now more light blazed.

A floodlight.

We shielded our eyes.

When my eyes adjusted I saw the breadth of the cavern. It was large enough to moor a fishing boat.

Large and tall and wide but who knew how deep because it was bisected by a fence.

The fence rippled in the gentle current.

What kind of fence ripples?

I painted the fence with my light and saw that it was made of mesh.

Mesh so fine that my light wouldn't penetrate.

The depths beyond were unfathomable.

The fence skeleton, though, was revealed in the floodlight — a fence framed with PVC piping, fitted flush with the ceiling and floor and corner walls, a fully enclosing fence.

I wondered what the hell lay beyond.

There was a gate to the beyond but it was shut.

The gate, too, was fine mesh and it was framed within the fence.

I fixed on that gate. I saw how it worked. It was cabled to the control panel on the left-hand wall. The cable was hard to see — you had to be looking — but I'd become familiar with cables and I spotted it tucked along the frame of the fence, leading to the wall, and from there it snaked to the lighted control panel. And then I spotted the second cable snaking out of the control panel, feeding into a fissure in the wall. I knew that cable, how it snaked up through the hole in the reef up to the fake rock, and from there to the sound link on the cage.

Down here — just like up top — there was a rock-faced door, sparkling with fake crystals. This door stood ajar. Lanny must have opened it to access the control panel.

Oh Lancelot.

What are you doing here?

I went deadly cold.

His job. What else?

Tap a key, throw a switch, turn it on, turn it off, who the hell knew because Lanny sure wasn't talking.

Walter and Tolliver and I still latched onto the wall at the cavern mouth.

Lanny watched us watching him.

The floodlight illuminated us as well as Lanny. All of us revealed. Tolliver letting go of his anchor in preparation to kick off, and Lanny at the wall looking twitchy.

Tolliver made one of his diver signals: flat hand, palm down, moving slowly up and down. Take it easy.

Lanny did not take it easy.

He turned back to the keypad and punched in more numbers.

The gate in the fence slowly swung open.

I flinched.

Lanny lunged toward the gate and ventured inside the fenced-off room.

For a moment I was relieved, I thought if he's going in there that means he knows what's what. He knows it's safe in there. Safe from what, who knows, I didn't really care to know.

But he'd come here to do a job and now the job was taking him in there.

And we'd come to stop him.

We pushed off and swam across the cavern to the gate and paused there and Tolliver gave me a palm-up sign — stay here, stand guard, who knew what I was standing guard against but there was one unbreachable rule down here. Don't get stuck. Don't get on the wrong side of a gate that is wired.

Inside the fence, on the wrong side of the gate, Lanny was suspended, looking around.

Looking lost.

I understood. It was an unsettling room. Hell, the whole cavern was unsettling but this fenced-off room, more so. It was our first clear look inside — our lights did not penetrate the depths and barely pierced the murk up front, by the fence — but it was enough to see that the room was netted like a kids' indoor netted ball pit. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the entirety of this room was netted with the same mesh that netted the fence and the gate. The mesh rippled slightly.

Up front, near the fence, the murk was pierced by two dim shafts of light.

Lanny was suspended, as if in a trance, in the strange light. He looked up.

We looked up.

The light came from small holes in the ceiling and I figured they must be chimneys that punched through the body of the reef up above, allowing in light from the open sea. Degraded light, filtered light, and along with it came a soft rain of particulates, all of it filtered through mesh.

Lanny came out of his trance and headed for the left-hand wall.

A control panel was mounted there.

I thought, no no no.

Tolliver and Walter ventured into the room.

Lanny reached the wall and yanked open the panel door, revealing a keypad, a twin to the keypad panel on the wall outside the fence. This inner keypad was lighted, already activated.

I saw the power cable running along the wall, linking the inner and the outer panels.

Twin keypads, cabled, yoked. Live.

Walter and Tolliver were taking their damn time, mindful I guessed of spooking Lanny into punching the wrong keys.

Too mindful, too slow, come on come on.

Lanny was fumbling with his BC, taking something out of a pocket.

Walter and Tolliver at last got a move on, and flanked him.

Lanny let go of whatever he'd been fooling with and tried to push them away.

Tolliver escalated, grabbing him by the arm.

Lanny twisted to escape, his free hand reaching for the panel, and now Walter intercepted him. And still Lanny struggled, and for a moment I feared that hoses and regulators were going to get dislodged, that the entangling divers were going to stir up silt and blind us all here in the guts of the reef.

But it was two against one.

Lanny slumped, and the thing he'd been fooling with floated behind him, attached by a lanyard to his BC. I aimed my light at it. It was a slate with a string of numbers neatly written. A password? He'd been trying to enter a password?

Only, Walter and Tolliver interrupted him.

I wondered what the password would have set into motion.

With Lanny secured, my breathing evened out and I took the time to take note of the second cable that exited the control panel. This cable snaked along the wall deeper into the fenced-off room.

I followed it with my light, searching for an explanation.

My light found another puzzle, another gate, a small gate this time, a PVC mesh gate framed into the wall. It led off this unsettling room into another… What?

This new gate was shut.

I looked again at Lanny's slate floating like a bathtub toy. No, not at all a toy. A password to open this new gate, what else?

Walter and Tolliver began to maneuver Lanny away from the panel.

As I waited at the main fence gate — above all else making sure that gate did not close — I noticed a new light.

I froze.

The others noticed it, and froze.

We were no longer alone.