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They continued to drop toward the shining, unearthly landscape. As they did, the expanse stretched in all directions, fading into darkness at the edges. She pictured walls towering to either side, the cliffs of the Tonga Trench. They had dropped down its center, not wanting to risk brushing against its rocky sides.
“Is that what I think it is?” Adam asked behind her.
Phoebe remembered the spread of black oil noted on the bathymetric map of the trench. It had marked the presence of a vast coral forest, a thousand feet tall and covering two hundred square miles.
Only this forest wasn’tblack.
As theCormorantdropped toward the bottom, the bioluminescent jungle grew into focus. It was a fiery wonderland of dark branches that blinked, shimmered, and glowed in radiant hues. Trunks of coral, as thick around as redwoods, climbed from below. Their roots were so deep that not even the forest’s brilliance could illuminate them. Directly under theCormorant, the weave of branches formed a continuous canopy that rose and fell across the field of view.
“Dumping ballast,” Bryan said. “Going for neutral buoyancy.”
He hit switches, ejecting five-kilogram weights, one after the other.
As their descent slowed, Phoebe could not shift her gaze away. TheCormorantlowered until it hovered above the shimmering canopy. Past the glow, she discerned the fringes of polyps that crowded the nearest black branches.
The polyps were all a uniform emerald, sprouting from the hard black skeleton of the coral.
She flashed to the day before, picturing the lone sentinel of coral that she had sampled outsideTitan Station Down. Was this the same species? They were still too high to say for sure. Yesterday, she had judged the tree by the station to be an ancient giant. If the forest belowwasthe same species, then that tall specimen was a mere seedling.
She wished Jazz were here, to witness this firsthand, too.
Datuk murmured behind her, “Akah Bahar.”
“What was that?” Adam asked him.
“It’s the Malay name for black coral—which seemed appropriate.”
Phoebe kept her gaze outside. “Why? What does it mean?”
“It meansRoot of the Sea.”
Phoebe stared at the vast expanse and corrected him. “This looks more like the Root of the Entire World.”
15
January 23, 9:55P.M.NCT
Two miles under the Coral Sea
Jasleen Patel rubbed her eyes as she leaned back from the optical microscope. She had spent two hours reviewing slides from the seventeen specimens she had collected with Phoebe. A headache knotted behind her eyes. She blamed it on a dip in blood glucose from skipping dinner. But she had not wanted to disappoint her boss.
She stretched a kink from her neck and checked the time on the open laptop next to her. Phoebe should be at the bottom of the trench by now. A flicker of envy traced through her. She threw cold water on it.
I’ll get my own chance soon.
She reached over to the laptop and reviewed her work. She had spent the day cataloguing the specimens’ morphological and physiological details. It required delicately extracting centimeter-size cores from the chunks of coral secured inside the station’s high-pressure benthic chambers. Before they could be studied, each tiny sample had to be slowly equilibrated to the station’s one atmosphere of pressure.
The work had been painstaking.
Over the course of the day, she had studied each specimen, counting the number of polyp tentacles, noting their coloration, measuring their lengths and dimensions. She had run samples through a NovaSeq 6000 DNA sequencer. She had even used the lab’s dissecting microscope totease out nematocytes—the venomous cells—from the tentacles. The latter were all unique, like fingerprints, and could help substantiate taxonomy.
A chime sounded from her laptop, and an email alert popped up.
Finally...
She shifted over and opened the attached file. It had been sent from the team running the station’s scanning electron microscope. She had sent over samples of each coral to have their sclerites—their calcareous endoskeletons—recorded from multiple angles. It was yet another means of classifying each species. No two corals were alike in their carbonate structure.
She sifted quickly through the scanning photos, but in particular she searched for Specimen A17, named after the quadrant from where it had been collected. She pictured the towering black giant, festooned with emerald polyps, a lone Christmas tree slowly growing in darkness.
