Through the helmet view plate, she could see something like a face, but one that was white and pulpy and blown-up to fantastic proportions. It actually filled the helmet, pressing up against the glass. She saw oozing, puffy flesh, great flabby lips, and eyes that were not eyes, but gelatinous things like scarlet comb jellies.

Then she did scream.

The suit was trembling. The view plate cracked.

It split open and white flesh oozed out like congealed fat. The aluminum hull of the suit began to squeal as it underwent intense pressure from within. It was forged aluminum and could take crushing pressure…but nothing like this. It began to expand with a shrill metallic whine of metal fatigue. Great baseball-sized lumps popped in its shell. Dozens of them. Then it sheared right open, popping like a tube of biscuits when you pull the cardboard wrapper or press a spoon to the seam…it burst open and that gelid white monstrosity poked out from a dozen places like dough.

Javonivic got her first real look at what was inside.

If it was Hubbs, then he had been infested and parasitized by morbid marine growths, becoming a bloated, spongy excrescence in the shape of a man. It dangled there from the rent hardsuit, expanding, dilating, pushing ever outward.

Javonivic could see things that were trapped in the pulsing mass—tiny transparent squid and brine shrimp, copepods and squirming ectoparasites. And the most horrifying thing was that somehow, some way, it still resembled a man. One inflated to incredible proportions, boneless and protoplasmic, yet gruesomely man-shaped: limbs moved and fingers wiggled, a great flabby mouth like that of a grouper pealed back in a sneer, and the eyes—like candied, sticky cherries running with syrup—still blinked and looked at her.

She pulled the trigger of the speargun.

There was a swishing noise as the spear shot out and sank into the central mass with a wet thud. The thing continued to grow and swell, the spear lodged in its midsection, for all the good it did. As she watched, the spear began to slash side to side as if something in there was gripping in it.