“How did we read this place so wrong?” Michaela glanced up at him. “Are we that stupid? These submarines are state of the art. Seascapes are used on every ocean on Earth.”

“We were watching on telemetry.” Yosh pulled over a chair and dropped into it, his eyes on her countdown to disaster where it flashed on her monitor. “That . . . thing just rose up out of the depths. We couldn’t believe the way it looked, I mean, wow, what a fantastic evolutionary solution to aquatic design.”

“But what the hell set it off? Why’d it go for the second sub instead of mine?”

“Best guess? The scream that ‘spear-tree’ made when you wounded it attracted the tri-lobster. Varina and Jaim panicked.” Yosh’s brown eyes softened. “From the telemetry, the thing went for them when they went positive buoyancy. Maybe it was the pumps, maybe the sound of the compressed air driving the ballast from the tanks. It could have been the movement. Did the creature think they were fleeing, so it was a predatory response? Like running from a lion?”

“As hard as it hit us, the impact should have stunned it, slowed it down.”

“Didn’t. We had a clear view through Varina’s cameras. It bounced off your sub, and just kept right on coming. Didn’t matter that it bent up a lot of metal, the collision just put scratches in that thing’s armor. And it hit Varina’s sub like a ram.” A pause. “That’s when the telemetry cut off.”

“So you had nothing after that?”

“The feed went totally dead.” He shifted on the chair. “Listen, Michaela, maybe that’s a godsend. Just between the two of us? Given what the alternatives are? Let’s hope that thing hit them so hard it killed them on impact.”

“Yosh?”

His gaze hardened. “You know as well as I do that if something wasn’t horribly wrong, they’d have surfaced by now. Since they haven’t, I think it’s pretty obvious they can’t.”

She pursed her lips, struggled to come up with anything reasonable. Fact was that yes, the subs couldn’t be crushed, but if that accursed lobster thing had mauled the tanks, battery packs, lights, and propeller modules, it could very well have damaged the sub beyond any chance of survival.

“The Seascape is the best,” she admitted painfully. “But it’s not designed for this. Who would have thought? Where the hell was the engineering that would anticipate creatures like we’re seeing here?”