Although the deck lighting which burned constantly—didn’t dare turn it off, God no-lit up things pretty good, it was still shadowy out there with the mist snaking along the plating and drifting before the mounted halogens. Orr pulled out his flashlight and played the beam over the equipment and derricks crowded everywhere. Shadows danced around him.

He swallowed, found his voice. “If you’re out here, show yourself.”

His voice echoed off and was consumed by the fog, buried alive in its weight. The fog was thick, white, and fuming. It did not seem to move really. It shivered, trembled, but that was about it. It almost seemed static. A great, dense pall that was somehow ghostly and oozing like ectoplasm, not really solid, but not really gaseous either. It was created by the cold air of the glaciers striking the warm surface of the lake. If you stood on the decks and watched, you could see it rising from the black water like steam off a pot. It was blank and eerie.

He’d seen something out here.

He knew he had.

And something substantial this time, not just some fog-phantom like you saw if you stared into mist for any length of time, your mind creating shapes where none existed. No, this had been real. Again, like so many times before, he had caught it out of the corner of his eye. But this time, there was no denying its reality.

It had been there.

A black, nebulous shape fading into shadow.

The bank of compressors on the far end of the LSB started up and he nearly jumped out of his skin. They cycled on and off at regular intervals, sending oxygen down to the Neptune.

He waited for about five minutes and they turned back off.

He moved around the ROV, his light reflecting off the mist, shining off the water that was flat as the surface of a mirror. He saw a few looming shapes out there and his heart began to pound…but they were just the DSSD engineering floats moored to the LSB.

“I feel like a kid in a haunted house waiting for a ghost,” he whispered.

And that was pretty much it: he knew the spooks were here, he could feel them, sense their closeness…just not see them. He panned his light over the mist. Nothing. The beam picked out the shape of the AUV Orca tethered to the LSB. A lingering, acrid smell came off the lake. He wrinkled his nose.

Water dripped somewhere.

His heart began to race. He wasn’t sure what it was at first, nerves maybe, but it did not subside: it increased. In his gloves, his hands felt sweaty. Teardrops of moisture ran down his face. A dank chill moved up his spine.

He heard a sound that made him turn around fast: a low droning sound like a swarm of midges.