Within the cargo hold,MST members scurried across the floor like insects. Acetylene torches lit across the room as operatives sliced their way through crates, extracting objects for the pile of loot.

“I thought your team would recycle metals.” Nekimbe told the closest man as he began to walk out. “You are taking things from the ship and bringing them for yourself.”

“Shut up.” he responded as he walked back towards the racks of crates.

Nekimbe looked back over towards McAllan, who was examining the operation with exceptional scrutiny. “This salvage operation doesn’t seem MST-sanctioned.” McAllan noted. “Looks an awful lot like looting to me.”

As the two made their way back towards the destroyed cargo hold door, a scurry of activity to one crate drew them pause. Men trudged over to a glinting golden object, strikingly beautiful under the artificial lights that shone from headlamps.

“Damn.”

“Is that solid gold?”

“Let’s melt it down and divide it up,” One of them suggested.

Nekimbe and McAllan joined the men swarming around the object. McAllan made his way to a thinning in the crowd to examine the crate on the ground. What interested him was not the object itself; the man-sized shipping crate had been torn open.

An enormous, eye-shaped hole linked the inside of the crate to the watery exterior. Although smaller, the hole looked very much like the orifice that had been ripped into the door of the cargo hold.

A line of Arabic text ran across the steel siding. The English writing below it read, “MUSEUM OF ANCIENT HISTORY, DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES”

“This ship was bound for Dubai. To a museum.” McAllan said.

Nobody, even Nekimbe, paid him much attention. The group was utterly fixated on the statue.

It depicted a man, resting atop one knee as if rising from a fall. The statue’s base was rippled and gnarled, forming waves of golden metal across the depicted ground. The dorsal fins of fish surrounded him, encircling him as if to guard him or serve as his subjects. His head angled upwards, looking ahead to seek out a path or mark an enemy. A shield mounted atop his back was adorned with an amazingly intricate marlin design, engraved into the solid gold.

“Anyone have any clues to the historical significance of this?” McAllan gestured to the group. Most of the MST stared at him with stupid, bovine eyes.

“I know,” Nekimbe said.

His armored figure stood silent, frozen. Although the steel-encased joints of his body stayed unmoving, McAllan could see the man trembling within the structure encasing his head.

“This is a relic. Very sacred, very holy. It was going to a museum, to be displayed. I would not touch that if I were you.”

Amused by his esoteric ramble, some of the MST members turned their bodies towards Nekimbe.

“And why not?” said the closest one. Two small, piggy eyes stared back at Nekimbe through the glass porthole of his diving suit.

“This relic is of Garaa-Et Anare, the Protector of the Sea, Lord of the Drowned.” Nekimbe explained. “I knew of the god, I saw the statues when I was a young boy. Some men in my village kept altars in their houses.”

He paused, weighting the words he was about to utter.

“This destroyed the ship.”

McAllan sensed a strange presence. The feeling was not one of being watched; rather, it was one of being possessed, owned, enveloped. Nekimbe stood erect and trudged over to McAllan’s side.

“Each true relic has a Guardian: a pardoned soul from the underworld given immense power and freedom in exchange for the protection of the relic. This way, the relic would be saved from desecration in the hands of the greedy and materialistic.”

The MST men were silent. Some of them seemed to be listening, a few intently, most passively. Others didn’t seem to care.

“Thousands of years ago, The God of the Sea waged war on the Lord of the Fire, over the hand of a mortal woman.” Nekimbe assessed his audience, whose clamor was gradually simmering down. “The relics and idols of the Protector of the Sea may never touch water, for it would unleash the Guardian. One now lives inside this ship. Desecration of the relic will lead to the death of the heretic who dishonored it. A Guardian of the God of the Sea can only be killed by… a fire beneath the sea….”

Outside the ship upon the cargo platform, Stromberg switched his radio frequency to Damon’s, cutting Nekimbe’s feed. Although he had no time for ancient mythology and old superstition…

A fire beneath the sea

The words were mythology and the backbone of the warning ancient legend, but Stromberg couldn’t shake those words from the back of his mind.

A fire beneath the sea

“Look at this.” Back inside the vast cargo hold, Nekimbe aimed his flashlight at the hole torn through the door. “The Guardian made that hole… destroyed this ship, killed the crew. If you don’t put that statue down, we will all die. We are meddling with powers beyond our knowledge.” His voice began to vibrato, shaken by apprehension.

“We need to leave,” McAllan said. “Drop the relic. Get the hell out of here.” He began to run towards the exit. Nekimbe followed. The MST members watched them run across the floor, towards the hole in the door. Two or three began to edge towards the opening the MST crew had cut, warily keeping eyes on the statue.

“Are you high?” The man holding the relic said. He waved it around, hitting the edge on a shipping crate. “This is the most valuable thing in the whole ship. A fire under the sea? My ass.”

“Make sure it’s pure gold.” The closest man said.

The MST member sunk his robotic claw into the right leg of the statue, pressing the solid gold into a deformed lump. As the claw twisted and released a nickel-sized lump of gold from the calf of the statue, Nekimbe was the first to hear the sound.

Something was roaring.

A deafening, metallic crashing sound resonated through the sea, accompanied by the hellish chorus of grating steel. As the MST members panned their lights around the room, they noticed that a fifteen-foot hole had been torn into the ship just adjacent to the one they had cut. A slick, scaled black leg raced inside.

A dark figure infiltrated between the light beams of the crewmen as MST members ran for cover amongst the crates. In the darkness of the hold, the beams of the squad members began to go out, one by one.

“My light’s dead.” One of them said, his voice trembling.

A light beam illuminated three glowing yellow eyes as they came into view. Against the pitch of the cargo hold, they glowed as brightly as heated coals. The pupils flicked around the hold, sizing up the men. Dozens of silvery white claws came into view, adulating in wave-like patterns.

Somebody get some light in here. I can’t see a… AEEEGHHHH!”

A horrifying sound rang about the cargo hold, a sound of the metal joints of a diving suit being torn apart. A thick stream of bubbles sprayed from the suit as the oxygen supply became one with the sea around it.

“Get out! Get to the…” The voice went silent as the same tearing noise sounded once more. The light beams died one by one as they swung about the cargo hold, a demented display of death in a darkened world. A blob-like bubble of air grew in the upmost corner of the ceiling, a remnant of the humans beneath.

Nekimbe and McAllan pulled their suits through the door in a panic, but it pulled them back in.

The crane-like platform moved with surprising power beneath the sea. An operator stood behind a set of controls, his feet locked into a latching system in the crane’s floor. Propeller-like projections extruded from each corner beneath the platform, providing some level of control to the operator. A supporting cable rose from each corner of the platform, connecting twenty or so feet above to the primary wireline.

“Where do you reckon the sub went down?” Damon asked Stromberg.

It should be around the starboard side of the hull. They were running a perimeter around the ship,” Stromberg answered. “Last contact was right by the hole that sank the Argonaut.”

The platform swung over the starboard deck of the ship and lay suspended in the open water. Stromberg and Damon, holding on to the support cables with one hand, panned the sea floor with their hand lights.

“I can’t see anything,” Damon said. “They’ve been buried in mud.”

“Strain the floor with the arm.” Stromberg commanded. “The mud shouldn’t be thick enough to stop it from entering…”

The crane operator gave Stromberg an arm-up. He compressed a lever, and the crane arm began to descend downwards, towards the filthy swill that covered the sea floor. The platform jolted to a halt, just meters above the mud. The crane’s arm began to extend telescopically, central sections of the arm extending out from their casing.

The crane arm punched through the first layer of mud, swinging about ferociously. The arm kicked up clouds of dirt, enveloping the rescuers in a blinding haze of underwater smoke.

“Anything?” Stromberg asked the operator.

Not yet.” The operator moved the platform some distance to port, and began to dredge the mud again.

Damon looked over the sea floor from his perch atop the support cable. He fiddled with the radio controls on his leg.

“Alpha to Wolfpack. Requesting status update.”

He stood patiently as he awaited a response.

“Repeat. Alpha to Wolfpack.”

He fiddled with the radio once again, locking into the rescue group’s transmission. “We need to go back. Something’s wrong.”

Stromberg looked at him, shocked. “These rescuers might die if we don’t get to them,” he said. “The guys up in the cargo hold can wait. They’re probably too busy plundering the cargo to bother answering.”

Damon’s body language resembled that of a beaten puppy. He looked as if he were racking his brain for things to say, but failed to dredge for an answer.

“I think we’ve got something,” the operator announced. He moved the arm from side to side, and the platform moved with its motion as if something solid was restricting its advance.

“That’s it.” Stromberg smiled for the first time in hours.

Inside, the crew of the Intrepid IV had been all but dead. Dave, bundled in his emergency thermal blanket, crinkled the Mylar fibers between his fingers in an act of boredom combined with fear.

“Can you cut that out?” Katie said, pestered.

Dave didn’t respond, but stopped the crinkling.

The silence between them was gradually broken as the canisters above their head began to sound a long, protracted hiss. The last of the oxygen had been emptied into the cabin.

“We’re out of oxygen.” Katie said. “We have five, maybe ten minutes left.”

“I… I don’t want to die…” Dave whimpered.

Katie paused, scouring her mind for a comforting answer. It was unclear which one of them shouted louder when a colossal impact rocked the submarine to the side, rolling it over under the sea mud.

Back aboard the platform, Stromberg looked over the operation. The crane swung back and forth through the mud, crashing into the submerged steel object with every pass.

The operator flicked a switch, opening the gargantuan steel claw mounted on the end of the crane’s arm. With the machine-like whir of an electric motor and the creak of rusty, antiquated steel, the gripping arm at the end of the arm opened.

“Wait,” Stromberg shouted. “I’m going down. If we crush their oxygen supply, they’re gone.”

Damon looked at him incredulously. “Are you crazy?” The operator paused the grip’s opening.

Stromberg had already started scaling the arm of the crane. Even with the limited mobility provided by the atmospheric suit, he moved as easily as a macaque scaling a coconut palm. He rounded the cusp of the arm, and stood himself up on the narrow horizontal beam.

“If you fall, you’re dead,” Damon shouted. “We’re not dredging this mud for your sorry ass.”

Stromberg paid him no mind as he approached the steel joint of the crane arm. Water currents swirled around his figure, competing to knock him from his balance and fling him to his death.

The operator’s hands hovered just inches above the control panel, ready to compensate for any dangerous leaning motions. To his relief, Stromberg’s balance held as solid as iron.

Until he took one step that just barely skimmed the right edge of the beam.

Stromberg’s balance slipped downwards and sideways, his center of gravity thrown rightwards with the force of a thousand pounds of steel.

The operator’s hand darted to the joystick, jamming it to the right. The crane’s arm lurched right, moving the surface to directly below Stromberg’s core. In the water, he effortlessly righted his balance upon the narrow balancing beam that had nearly dropped him to his death.

Stromberg sunk low towards the beam, creeping forwards to where the crane’s jointed arm approached the grip. He gripped the beam with his left hand, rotating his torso downwards and reaching his right hand around. His legs latched to the beam as well, sliding down until they were resting upon the joint of the grip.

The grip opened, searching to find the submarine once again beneath the thick mud. As it found the sub, it began to pull upwards with a slow force.

As the filthy submarine cleared the film of mud that marked the separation of the sea from the earth, the yellow paint of the Intrepid IV cleaned into view.

Stromberg clambered down the crane and stood atop the submersible. He leaned towards the steel shell as he tapped out a message in Morse code.

s t r o m b e r g

Someone inside tapped out a message in eager response.

s i x m i n u t e o x y g e n

The crane’s arm moved towards the platform, with the submarine in tow. It hovered over the platform, before depositing the submarine atop it. The gripping arm stayed clamped over the hull of the submersible.

With his left hand, he gestured towards the operator to lift. The platform jolted upwards, pulled by the overhead cables.

“What the hell…”

What?” Stromberg was unnerved by the man’s tenuous tone.

“The sub…” The operator’s radio rang. “THE SUB…”

Stromberg looked down just in time to see a quarter-sized hole open to the size of a basketball. Water rushed in faster than the eye could process, and a colossal bubble of air blew from the gaping opening as the hole grew across the roof of the submersible. An oxygen tank ruptured, blowing its gaseous contents across the ocean.

Dave and Katie’s bodies emerged from the widening hole, feebly struggling for the supporting cables. Their limbs flailed, thrashing and kicking behind them at an inky black… thing.

Something was holding them back, and dragging them further away from the platform.

Three yellow eyes, glowing brighter than lanterns, materialized before the diving platform.

“GRAB MY HAND!!!!” Stromberg screamed. “HOLD…” in an instant, he realized that his team members could not hear him.

From the eyes behind their struggling legs grew something… horrible.

Spiny black projections emerged from a dark oracle surrounding the hideous eyes. A mouth, filled with teeth square and diamond-shaped and all kinds inhuman, slipped apart from a thin black line below the eyes. The eyes rolled about crazily, as if each had a mind of its own. Clawed hands gripped the crew’s legs with iron grips. From their agonized faces, the force on their limbs was unbearably painful.

“Oh… I…” Damon stammered.

A serrated spine extruded itself from the back of the creature’s head, and two arms traced directly towards the feet of the two submersible operatives. Their thrashing motions had become less animated, more lethargic. Katie was the first to lie still, her limp body hanging downwards. Her hair fluttered about her head like sea grass, gently swaying with the current. The beast released her, letting her sink downwards towards the wrecked corpse of the Argonaut.

Dave’s body followed shortly after, succumbing to the beckoning force of the salt water as it filled his lungs.

The thing turned and two long, dark, scaled legs plowed effortlessly through the water as they merged with the darkness surrounding them, disappearing into the depths.

“GET US OUT OF HERE!” Damon screamed to his crane operator. Before he could punch the lever into a higher gear, the operator flew upwards. As Stromberg and Damon looked upwards, they saw him soaring through the sea, carried by the same thing that had killed Dave and Katie. Two strange red trails followed the legs of the diving suit as they were dragged through the water. As Damon looked back towards the control panel, he saw that the man’s feet were still locked into the platform.

A voice followed Damon; he did not hear it. Rather, it possessed him, owned him, controlled him. IT rang within his head, sounding from the confines of his mind.

Never… return….

Remain atop the land

Damon hastily pulled a lever extruding from the right side of his pack. With a hiss, tools and supplies dropped to the platform as two cylindrical channels opened from the rectangular pack atop his back. The creature released what was left of the crane operator, and turned its path back towards the crane platform.

A whirring hum resonated from his pack as bubbles flew downwards, propelled by a man-made current. His feet lifted from the platform, only an inch and then a foot. Before Stromberg could cry out in protest, Damon was on his way to the surface, lifted from the back-mounted thruster.

A nerve-wracking twang sounded from the main support line of the crane platform as three threads of wound steel cable snapped and unraveled. The claw, unmanned, slowly released its grip on the submersible. A current caught the exposed lip of the sub, filling the cabin like a sail. Unsupported by the crane, the submarine shifted and rolled over the edge, a steady stream of air bubbles leaking from its ruptured oxygen tanks. The sub sank and vanished, swallowed by the sea.

The demonic blackness swirled around the supporting cable as the reinforced steel wiring unraveled and snapped, thread after thread. The platform lurched to the right, tilted downwards by the uneven support. Stromberg clutched the supporting cable, gripping the steel wire. Only the wire stood before him and an open, unforgiving ocean.

With a final, desperate snap, the primary wireline broke. The crane platform almost hesitated for a moment before screaming downwards, the thousands of pounds of steel and machinery pressing against the dragging forces of the ocean in a battle of mechanics. Stromberg’s legs lost their grip on the floor of the platform, rising upwards with the force of the rushing water currents.

With a deafening crash, the platform landed. Steel on steel.

If he had landed in the mud, he would be submerged, blind. The crash was one of metal on metal. As the light danced about the surface, he recognized the metal railway and knurled steel flooring instantly.

He had landed back upon the deck of the Argonaut.

The supporting cables and remnants of the primary wireline slipped down below him like murdered snakes, narrowly missing his head.

He fiddled with his radio, returning to the transmission channel he had used to communicate with Nekimbe and McAllan.

“Trilobite Six… Just…. Anyone? Is anyone here???”

Only the cold, silent solitude of the bathypelagic zone answered his call for distress. He was alone.

“Please…”

A darkness began to envelop Stromberg’s diving suit from above, the same darkness that had dragged Katie and Dave to their watery deaths. It swirled and shifted about him, analyzing every corner and joint of the suit.

Stromberg pulled the same lever. The pack slid to the side, and the acetylene torch dropped into his open palm.

A fire under the sea

With a soft crackle the sorcerer’s flame lit with sparklike intensity. The underwater flame threw beams of light to the darkest reaches of the ship’s deck, shearing the darkness with the relieving reach of fire.

A fire under the sea

Three yellow eyes materialized, just inches before Stromberg’s head. The joints of the armored diving suit began to creak as small bubbles of oxygen leaked from tears in the waterproof lining. The arms of the creature came into view, each clasped around one steel-shrouded leg.

With a shout, he thrust the flame into the topmost eye.

A fire spread across the face, and the thing burned, twisted, and spun as the flame seared its skin. The voice that had earlier possessed, controlled, owned him was now… screaming.

An earsplitting, hellish shriek resonated from the three glowing yellow eyes as they burst into flame. The scaled body and dangling legs shivered and shook as they burst into flames, thrashing about as short lines of fire ripped across the scaled skin. Teeth cracked, bent, and snapped into shards that dropped and swam with the currents, falling before disintegrating with the sway of the water.

The eyes disappeared first, followed by the scaled body. Shimmers of eye-burning light shirked from the writhing, spinning shade of the demon as it shrank and convulsed, growing smaller and more withered by the second. The scream slunk backwards from a deafening howl to a pathetic whinny, and hissed as it dissipated into silence.

As soon as it had appeared, the Guardian of the Protector of the Sea lay dead, burned to death by a Fire under the Sea.

Stromberg scanned the deck. The ship lay neutral, as calm and placid as it had been before the Guardian tore its way from its hull.

“Trilobite Six to Kraken Two. Threat neutralized.”

“Kraken Two. Where are other rescuers? Communication has been unsuccessful.”

“Last I saw they were in the cargo hold. I’ll check on them”

As he pulled himself through the entrance to the cargo hold, Stromberg held his breath to restrain the contents of his stomach from spilling.

Scattered limbs of diving suits lay like children’s toys about the cargo hold. Slender fingers of red discolored the clear water, trailing from the torn ends of the diving suits. Of the sixteen DSRR and MST operatives that had been deployed to the cargo hold, not one remained in one piece.

Within the pile of dead black limbs Stromberg could make out the green arm of Nekimbe, adorned with the Ghanaian and American flags atop the standard bearing of the DSRR, a blue anchor on a white field.

“They’re all… everyone’s dead. DSRR, MST, everyone. It killed them all.”

“KILLED??… WHAT KILLED THEM ALL? TRILOBITE SIX…”

“It’s a long story.” Stromberg sighed, converting it into a shudder as he turned backwards. “I’ll explain it later. I’m running out of air.”

The gauge read that he had twenty-five percent of the breathable oxygen left within his tank. He trudged from the forecastle back towards the bridge, where he had left his diving sled.

One thousand feet below the ebbing waves, the golden statue drifted downwards through undulating currents. It struck the soft silt of the ocean floor with a silent impact, sinking swiftly through meters of mud before resting upon a rocky outcrop. A black mass swirled about the statue, whipping up clumps of mud as it absorbed itself into the solid gold. The divet ripped from the statue’s leg righted itself and smoothed, and the tortured spirit of the Protector of the Dead was finally at peace.

Damon pushed his back thruster into a higher gear. The shimmers and life-saving waves grew closer into view with every passing second. As the helmet of the diving suit cracked the glossy sheen of the surface, a dozen heads turned to see the first rescuer return.

The ship’s ladder lowered into the water as lethargically as an elephant in heat. Damon scrabbled his arms across the rungs as it broke the surface, launching himself from the cursed water. He sat upon the deck of the ship, staring out into the sea that had claimed his team.

“Where’s your team? Your crane?” A short, stocky man approached, crouching to his eye level. He wore the blue uniform of the DSRR. “The team leader is the last one out.” A small boy stood beside him, soaking wet. He could not have been more than five years old.

A thousand feet away, black-uniformed MST members shouted in shock from the deck of the Buffalo as the wrangled, broken ends of the crane platform’s primary wireline broke the surface, dangling helplessly in the breeze.

Upon the deck of the Charybdis, Damon Baird sat sopping and drenched in his diving suit. The helmet had retracted by command, leaving the salt water to drip freely over the operator’s head at will.

“Something’s down there. It got the crane.”

“Something…?

“It was a sea monster.” His eyes skittered about the deck, panning the sea in nervous instinct. “I swear. It killed everyone.”

The man was frozen for a response. He considered questioning the man, but prompted the conversation instead.

“A sea monster… If it killed everyone, how did you get away?” His eyes narrowed.

“Another guy drew the flak. It followed him down.” Damon halted his speech. “It gave me time to escape.”

“And the team? Your team?” The man raised his voice to a yell. “Give me one reason we shouldn’t have you arrested for reckless abandonment.”

Damon paused, mortified. He had lost communication with his team, if he hadn’t lost the team itself.

“Alpha to Wolfpack. Repeat, Alpha to Wolfpack.”

For minutes, the radio line lay as dead and silent as the MST members within the Argonaut’s cargo hold.

“I… I…” He stammered out the start of the response as more DSRR crew members closed in, eager to hear the secrets of the deep.

“The guys down in the cargo hold said that there was a statue made of pure gold in there.” Damon said, finger instinctively pressed upon the radio’s transmission button. “Pure. Gold.”

Only the whistle of the salted sea wind and the creaks of the steel beneath his feet answered his claim.

“We have to go back.”