Besides the attack on the habitat, Javonivic claimed to have seen shadowy forms swimming past the viewport in Main Lock and Murphy claimed that there had been something huge, white, and fleshy with about a dozen eyes staring up at him from the moon pool. And Javonivic had woken at like three in the morning a few days ago, claiming something had touched her. Something slimy and cold. Just a nightmare? Well, that didn’t explain the pool of water next to her bed or that inexplicable, dank smell like rotting weeds that hung in the air.

While Murphy scouted around the legs, Bell pressed the vertical thruster footpads and went up. He looked around the bottom of the habitat. There were no signs of damage, other than a few deeply-embedded scratches that had not been there before. The shell was designed to take a great deal of abuse. So either whatever it was hadn’t been strong enough to cause any trouble or it hadn’t been trying to.

I vote for the latter, he thought as Murphy joined him and they made a trip around the habitat itself. If it was strong enough to shake the Neptune, it could have done a lot more. It was a scare tactic. But to what end? Just to take the submersible out of the picture? Or was there more to it?

The point being, they could still reach the surface, but the apparent destruction of the submersible was like a symbolic gesture to show them that they weren’t going anywhere.

They spent another hour out there making their rounds. Whatever had been at the habitat last night, shaking it out of mere curiosity or because it was directed to, it left no further evidence behind.

Finally, Javy came over the headset: “Cash it in, Chief. Nothing out there, I guess.”

“Will do,” he said.

As they made their way back to the moon pool, Bell was relieved. He didn’t like the idea that there was only the shell of his hardsuit in-between whatever was out there and himself. Maybe they hadn’t seen it, but it was there.

God yes, like a hungry tiger circling in the dark jungle, it was most certainly there.

27
DOOMSDAY

Every time they entered the city, Bell wondered if it would be his last.

As monstrous and alien as it was, it was also an absolute maze. A honeycombed labyrinth of horizontal tunnels and vertical channels, octagonal rooms and sphere-shaped compartments, oval cells and gigantic tubular amphitheaters that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Rooms terminated into other rooms. Tunnels split into dozens of spiraling burrows. Massive upright cylindrical chambers hundreds and hundreds of feet in diameter were set with thousands of cavities and very often crowded with winding helix-shaped structures or vast networks of hollow piping that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever.