“Hey, is back – our ghost.” Dmitry hunched forward, but clicked the sonar to speaker. They could all hear the pings.

“Where? What? Speak to me, Dmitry.” Jack stopped the submersible.

“From over the cliff edge, four thousand feet and moving parallel to Prusalka. Big, big signature – sixty feet, maybe more.” Dmitry frowned. “I don’t like this.”

“Light it up,” Jack said.

“No…” Cate spun in her seat. “Leave us dark.”

Dmitry held up a hand. “Wait. Going deep… deeper.” He licked his lips, listening for a few more moments, his forehead puckered. He began to relax. “Gone.”

They sat in silence, listening to the soft ping of the sonar. Cate could feel her heart thumping, more from excitement than fear. Jack turned in his seat, to find Cate’s eyes.

She simply stared back at him.

“What, was that?” Abby asked, eyes round.

Dmitry shook his head. “If in ocean, I would say, whale. But down here…” He made a popping sound with his lips, and then shrugged.

“Slow to stop.” Jack turned back to lean forward on the wheel, as the Priz Class deep-sea submersible glided to a halt on the edge of the precipice. Cate and the others craned to see out, but there was nothing but darkness.

“Yegor, let’s light it up – we’ll be fine.” He turned to nod briefly to Cate. “Give me a quick rotation with the spot light.”

The big Russian grunted and flicked up a few switches. The powerful beam on the top of the submarine came to life, and a huge tunnel of white light created a corridor reaching far out into the depths. Still, there was nothing to see but more utter blackness.

“Behold, the abyss.” Greg’s voice was barely a whisper. “I’ve never been in water so deep.”

“Or dark,” Abby said softly.

Dmitry stood so he could see over the top of his huge Russian compatriot. “So, we go in?”

There was silence for several seconds.

“Of course,” Cate said. “It’s why we came.”

“Good.” Dmitry clapped his hands once and sat down again. “I think now we will see if our submarine is water tight, yes?”

“How deep is it?” Greg asked.

“Deep,”’ Jack said. “I’m getting a reading of about two thousand feet, stays like that for a few miles, and then drops off my scanners.” Jack read some more numbers off his screen. “But the predictive analytics says based on the geology profile, it probably falls away to eight thousand feet – well outside our crush tolerance.”

They continued to stare in silence for several more moments. Cate could feel the fluttering of excitement in her belly and something else, a weird feeling of foreboding she couldn’t quite settle.

“Anyone else get the feeling something down there is staring back at us?” Greg looked from Abby to Cate.

“I don’t like it,” Yegor said.