She stood there, staring down into the moon pool. The lights below illuminated the baseplate of the Neptune. She stared, almost fixated, not knowing what she was waiting for. Or maybe she did and this was what made her finally look away, her throat suddenly dry as chalk.

“Quit with the heebie-jeebies,” she told herself. “You’re here to do a job. That’s all. Just another job. Man up.”

It sounded good, at any rate. At least until she remembered the dreams she’d been having, that inescapable sense that she was being watched. Or that terrible shape she sometimes glimpsed hovering about the viewports. Imagination and stress, a little of both, but that did not dispel the awful, crawling feeling in her belly that told her that this place was akin to a graveyard at midnight and the dead were not resting easily.

She simply could not shake it.

The dreams, God, those awful dreams of pure terror. They were like a drill bit piercing her skull. Though she could never exactly remember the specifics, the awfulness of them stayed with her for hours, making her feel small and vulnerable, filled with a deep gnawing anxiety she could not shake. The only thing she could truly recall was a terrible, skin-crawling feeling of scratching in her head as if her brain was an egg getting ready to hatch, some unformed, embryonic horror waiting to be born.

She had never been neurotic by nature, but, God, it was getting worse by the day.

You need to calm down, to center yourself.

Yes, that was it exactly.

She needed to remember who she was and what she was. There was no room for superstition or childlike terrors. She cleansed it from her mind by concentrating on the job itself.

She was honored that Orr had chosen her, handpicked her from the elite ranks of the DSU. This whole op was incredible, to say the least.

The technology was cutting edge, much of it strictly classified.

This was wonderful and new.

But it did little to lift her spirits.

She just stood there, not sure what she was thinking and less sure of what she was feeling. Again, she should have been happy. This whole op was the opportunity of a lifetime for a deep submergence diver. A sub-glacial lake that had been locked away from the outside world for forty million years. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a city down here built by an alien race in prehistory. Her team was the first to make a comprehensive survey of that relic and of the lake itself. She should have been wild with excitement and scientific wonder—but she wasn’t. Because it was all wrong and she knew it. It was bad enough when she was awake, but the nightmares that came when she closed her eyes…no, this whole thing was just wrong.