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Bryan pointed down. “Directly under us.”
Phoebe leaned forward and stared past her toes.
Ah...
The boxy lander had crashed through the top of the canopy and was lodged a couple meters down. It sat crookedly, cradled amidst broken branches. She cringed at the damage to the ancient forest—but it also offered her an opportunity.
As Bryan started a full check of their systems, Phoebe rotated their underwing lights to focus on the lander. She hoped the break in the canopy would offer a deeper glimpse into the forest. She centered a beam atop the steel of the lander.
A slight green haze clouded the water. She realized it came from a swirl of emerald polyps, the millimeter-sized juveniles that covered the canopy. They must have been shaken from their perches by the violent crash of the lander.
She pictured those same polyps attacking the ROV claw back atTitan Station Down, when she had snapped off a coral branch. Here was further proof that the two must be the same species of coral. She wondered if she had time to take a sample while Bryan worked. To do so would require them getting closer.
She reached to the controls of theCormorant’s hydraulic arm. “Could we—”
From below, a huge black eel lunged up through the break in the forest. It was as thick around as her thigh, its length pulsing with lights. Jaws opened wide, revealing a maw of three-inch-long needle teeth. It snapped in their direction, thrashing its muscular length in a display of fierce aggression.
The light beam must have lured it out.
And not just it.
In its wake, thousands of polyps swirled up in a dense fog. Already aggravated, they attacked what they could, descending upon the eel. In seconds, its black length turned a corroded green, its skin frosted with polyps. The eel thrashed even more violently, no longer in aggression, but in pain. As it did, its lights flashed in alarm, tracing up and down.
Phoebe winced at the torment, feeling guilty for luring the eel out.
Datuk spoke behind her. “I’m getting a spike in water temperature.”
Focused on his screen, the biochemist had failed to note the attack near one of the DSV’s external sensors.
“Look outside,” Phoebe ordered him. “I think you’re registering the eel’s body heat.”
Datuk bent to his window, holding his eyeglasses in place. He stared for a long breath. “Ni tidak mungkin,” he mumbled in disbelief. “At this cold depth, the metabolic heat must be incredibly intense for the external sensors to pick it up. If this was happening on the surface, that eel would be frying, if not self-immolating.”
By now, the eel’s lights had begun to dim. Its writhing quieted.
Phoebe covered her mouth, still panged by guilt. The suffering creature had survived decades, if not longer, down here—until we intruded.
From the bower, another shape coiled upward. For a moment, she thought it was another eel. Only this limb was dark green, scintillating in a spectrum of bioluminescent colors. It reached the eel, wrapped around it, and withdrew its catch into the break in the canopy. Another glowing tentacle snaked out, then a third. Their tips gently brushed across the eel’s skin.
As they did, the green frosting wafted away. In seconds, the polyps were chased off the eel’s black skin. The first arm released its hold. From its underside, smaller tendrils still connected the tentacle to the eel. Lights flashed along those thin strands, beating like a heart.
The eel slowly stirred, undulating under the other’s attention. Luminescent lines again trickled across its length. Finally, the eel broke free and squirmed back into the depths of the forest. The glowing tentacles receded with it, vanishing away.
Everyone aboard had witnessed this, even Bryan.
Monk was the first to speak. “Did that other creature nurse the eel back to health?”
“And what was it?” Adam asked. “A hidden octopus?”
Phoebe shook her head, too dumbstruck to speak, but knowing the truth. She swallowed before answering. “No, not an octopus. I think it was a polyp.”
Datuk looked sharply at her. “A polyp? From the coral?”
“From deep down,” she said. “I had already noted that the polyps grew steadilybiggerwith each descending level of the forest. Down at the bottom, they could be gigantic.”
No one looked convinced.
Phoebe didn’t care. She trusted her gut and the science. “The polyps have already shown they could be freely motile, capable of leaving their calcareous branches. And those small tendrils that pulsed outward from the tentacles, they could be adaptations of sweeper tentacles, something that I’d witnessed before from this species.”
