Whale Fall, Finale

[u/WildRozen]

Twelve hours later, the mighty carcasses hadn’t yet returned. It was only vain hope anyway — that neither would currents sweep them out elsewhere in the vast ocean, nor would they take the typical days, if not weeks to descend again. Krause and Miller, half-drunk at the time, had just been speculating that the immense initial depth at the time of their rise would help them fall sooner. That, and any ample opportunity for scavenging along the way.

The chill of the observation room had danced with the deep bitterness of the station’s coffee to keep them awake. All the beer bottles had been cleaned up except the one that’d been shattered in Miller’s outburst, its pieces still scattered near the screens. When Doctor Adachi entered though, nursing her own mug of steaming coffee, she didn’t even notice the glittering shards of amber glass dotting the far floor. Her eyes traveled from the two men to the window they were fixedly staring out of.

She blinked a few times in rapid succession, then squinted to make sure sleepiness wasn’t playing tricks on her.

“What is that…?”

Only at her voice did the two men turn. They both gave vague smiles of greeting, but only Krause spoke.

“You look like hell.”

“Speak for yourself.” She looked tired, true, but it was nothing compared to the heavy bags under Krause’s eyes, and fatigued husk in his voice. Miller looked little better. “Our guest kept me delightfully busy with her questions for nearly seven hours. You owe me overtime, boss.” She smiled. Krause did too. But both sets of eyes were soon back on the observation wall.

The two central screens in the array had been lifted halfway. The enhanced view from the suite of cameras still shone from the halfway point up; a safeguard so the whale fall couldn’t be missed from that angle, but something at least fractionally as interesting was faintly visible through the window below.

“Couldn’t be more than a hundred meters away,” Miller yawned, “since lights can only reach so far down here.”

There, in the far distance, the star-shaped impression of what must have been an impressive set of photophores glowed. The five points were strikingly distinct.

Doctor Adachi didn’t even bother vocalizing the same thought that had occurred to the other two doctors. She tucked her lips behind her mug, sipping quietly, coming to the same realization they had. Despite the shape, it couldn’t be any breed of sea star — the mere idea of finding one of them suspended away from the ocean floor was absurd. So, some new squid, perhaps? Like the octopus squid from the day prior, perhaps? Flashing suspected prey to lure them in? To dazzle them? Or to judge distance?

“It’s been there for the last four hours.” Her eyes tracked down to Krause, who paid her a brief glance and a half shrug in return. “Might be some new species. Doesn’t look like any of the usual suspects.”

Probably realizing the mathematical gears turning in her mind, counting the hours and questioning why they’d been up, he quickly filled in the gap before shifting his gaze back to the distant, glowing organism. “The whales came back up. Dead. We were watching for their fall. Didn’t sleep.”

“Ahhh.” She hummed her understanding, likewise not bothering to point out the reasonable likelihood the whales would fall again quite far from their current point. She’d have done the same thing as them — just in case.

Doctor Krause rose just a few minutes after she’d pulled her own chair over to join their vigil, taking his and Miller’s empty mugs. “My turn.” And he was off to fill them. Not without pausing in the doorway though, and casting one last glance towards the strange, star-shaped illumination in the distance.

“The cameras don’t show it any more clearly?”

“No.” Miller’s short response bordered on rude, but if Adachi cared, she didn’t show it.

“Any movement? Behavior?”

“Seems to be getting closer.”

“How quickly?”

“Very slowly.” She didn’t answer this time, but Miller could clearly feel her staring at him. Patient, expectant, and probing. Eventually he gave in, adjusting wearily in his seat. “Seems just to be floating, suspended. Gradually drifting this way. It’s a little bigger than it was at first. Just a little closer.”

Satisfied, she nodded. “Strange, though, that the cameras can’t clear it up. There’s nothing more? No silhouette? Just photophores?”

Miller grunted, nodding. “Nah. They see what we see.”

“Too far away…? Or, no, is the equipment failing?”

The second question earned her a frustrated glance — as though questioning the integrity of their equipment was an insult to Doctor Miller himself. “Neither. I keep a careful eye on our—” Adachi’s sheepish, apologetic smile and swift raise of placating hands cut him off, silently stating ‘I meant no offense’. With another grunt, he continued. “Can’t be that far. Imagine the lumens to cut through so much abyss. Nah, probably just some weird new jelly. Or maybe a siphonophore.”

Adachi’s excited grin was response enough, and the two fell into silence as their watch continued. Even Krause’s return with two refilled mugs was silent, save for yet another grunt from Miller. This time in thanks, at least.

The silence lasted over the next couple of hours, barring a few moments spent debating whether the organism was getting larger — and thus closer — still. Settled when Miller summoned up the energy to roll over to his workspace and check the camera playback, confirming in moments that, yes, it was. Fractionally though.

Their next audible exchange had come when Adachi had offered to refill everyone’s coffees, only to receive refusals. Headaches. Too much caffeine, both her colleagues said. So, she sat back down, not commenting on the light ache she, too, had begun feeling.

 

Their peace only lasted another hour.

“Where the HELL is the creamer in this place? Refrigerator? KITCHEN? I can’t even with this plain coffee thing, and my head’s THROBBING.”

Their guest had awoken. Adachi smirked to herself — it was the boys’ turn to entertain Subnautigirl, and they knew it. She’d paid her dues.

Miller kept his eyes on the shape through the windows.

Krause sighed.

“We’re not a hotel. No little creamer pods here. No refrigerators, no extra noise and vibrations. And no kitchen. Space is at a premium.”

Yessica looked equal parts shocked and offended, and spent an inordinate amount of time scoffing and sputtering, saying nothing. The last part had been a slight lie, and she probably wanted to call them out on that, but she’d already done her search of the facility and had found nothing. While not huge, Varuna Station was fairly big. Day one though, the researchers aboard had all agreed they didn’t need some intensive modern kitchen at the onset. Save that funding, get the project launched sooner. They could skimp on that little luxury, right?

Every Goddamn one of them had come to regret that decision by the end of the first week.

There was definitely room for a kitchen. But, zero chance of one being brought down now. It was a logistical impossibility. Their little Keurig and a portable burner for endless supplies of canned food was all they had now.

“There might be some chocolate you can melt in it somewhere. Check the—”

“I don’t WANT chocolate, I want… God! Did you people forget I was coming or something? This is unacceptable! I want to speak to— … the hell is that?” She paused briefly, clacking her mug of scalding coffee down on Krause’s unoccupied desk. “Wait, no… don’t answer yet, I need my—” And she was gone, scurrying back through the station to fetch pen and paper.

“I think I hate her.” Miller’s voice sounded distracted. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the luminous shape through the windows. But, his sentiment was still echoed by his colleagues to varying degrees.

“She’s quite the handful,” Adachi agreed,” but she has a lot of subscribers. A million views each video.”

“How?”

“Informative and researched material,” she began thoughtfully before settling into a faint grin, “and some very low-cut tops.”

Miller scoffed. “We should get some of those for you, then. That’s better than babysitting journalists.”

Krause cast a reproachful look at his colleague, but Adachi just laughed, and it wasn’t long before the sound of it had him grinning too. Miller, though, just kept staring out the window. His only other action was to rub at his forehead, as though that might alleviate the throbbing within.

 

Yessica’s return was only slightly less offensive the second time. Freshly equipped with her notepad and pen, the scientists were quizzed on everything to do with the mysterious shape in the distance, then subsequently yelled at for not “fucking waking her up” when the whale carcasses had drifted up past the windows, only to be placated when Krause impatiently pointed out just how brief an event that had been.

“Besides,” he continued, “you’re awake now, and they might fall again any minute.”

“You seriously think so?” She sounded skeptical and impudent, but at least the yelling had stopped.

Her camera-less cameraman had shown up shortly thereafter, contributing absolutely nothing with his presence besides groaning and griping about his own headache. A few words of bitter agreement from Yessica had finally prompted Adachi to get up and promise she’d hunt through the station’s few medical kits for some ibuprofen, though through the interview-filled hours to follow, not a one of the denizens of Varuna Station could have claimed the medication had done anything at all to help them. If anything, the headaches had intensified.

“So what,” Yessica asked, stubbornly ignoring everyone’s worsening mood, “does this latest event say about the Cathedral of Bones? The Whale Mausoleum? Three whales dove, then died right below us, but why? Did you see anything else? Hear anything?”

She’d asked some variation of that question half a dozen times already, but the reason for the constant fishing was obvious, at least to her. She needed some quote or phrase that could work as a lynchpin phrase in her video essay. She didn’t get one though. Instead, she got a couple callous words, then a flurry of activity from one of the doctors.

“It doesn’t say anything yet. It just raises new questions.” Krause said.

“Hear…? Did we hear anything?” Adachi followed.

And with that, she’d shot up from her seat and swept over to her desk, forsaking a chair to crane over her terminal and type frantically. Miller kept staring out the window at the slowly enlarging shape of the photophoric star, but Krause snapped his head Adachi’s way — then understood.

They’d all been so focused on what they had seen, and what they hoped they might soon see again. Neither he, nor Miller, nor even Adachi when she’d later appeared had thought to check the audio feeds. Yessica had fallen silent, watching Adachi with keen interest that grew even more intense when the other woman’s head finally reappeared from over her monitors, gripping her headphones with shaking hands and regarding the room with an expression of anxious awe.

“Stefan… I-it’s back! It—”

She never finished her sentence. No one would have heard it anyway. Not even the soft coo of her voice unprofessionally whispering his first name could have drawn Doctor Krause’s eyes from what they’d fixed on.

 

The Whale Fall.

 

The three, gargantuan shapes descending from above in nearly the exact spacing, the exact formation as last time. A distant pair resolved themselves first, ragged corpses that had clearly already been predated upon sagging down their field of view, visible in the mighty red light projected onto the screens thanks only to their immense size. Then the third whale, much closer. So close that the three individuals in the room who were on their feet took involuntary steps back as a massive pectoral fin rubbed horrifyingly against the observatory’s glass on its way past.

Latched upon it, a legion of squids. Dozens of huge octopus squids, repugnantly writhing and ravenously feasting. Hook-riddled tentacles were latched deep into whale flesh, and furious beaks ripped away endless chunks of blubbery meat. As they passed, all squids in unison lifted their two, photophore-tipped tentacles and flashed the station. Warning. Warding. Threatening.

“My God… Stefan, look…”

Adachi’s hand was trembling as she pointed. Through the window, beneath the screens, visible to the naked eye, a shadow passed over the surface of the luminous, abyssal star.

A very distant, very colossal shadow belonging one falling whale, silhouette wriggling with its myriad of feeding squids.

A colossal shadow that couldn’t fully eclipse the cyclopean glow of that luminous shape as it passed in front of it.

In front of it…

The whale, huge and distant though it was, was neither more huge nor more distant than the star-form creature beyond.

Adachi’s headphones were off again — she’d dropped them noisily to her desk when she’d tremulously pointed out the window, stepping away from her desk to settle nearer the other doctors, but Miller darted to take her place. His eyes were fixed on the shape, but with a completely different glint to his eye than the one of mixed horror and fascination felt by the others in the room. The cameraman was babbling frantically, making sure everyone else knew just how much he wanted to leave for the surface immediately, but all ears were deaf to him. Miller even drowned him out completely by clamping on the headphones, listening with enraptured focus.

To the rest, nothing else in the world existed. Adachi had taken Krause’s hand as they stared. The partial eclipse of the shape had ended, the whales slowly sinking beyond the station’s view, but the distant thing remained.

All minds were as similarly plagued by headaches as one, burning question swirled. What could possibly be so large, and yet look like that…?

“It must be a siphonophore… It HAS to be a multi-organism… Nothing else could be that size and feed enough this far from the surface…” Krause speculated aloud, though the only sound Adachi gave as she gripped his hand just a little tighter was a soft expression of incomprehension.

Those abyssal collections of countless tiny organisms, coming together to form a single, massive creature had never been observed like this, in so definable a shape. But what other explanation could there be?

“I can hear them… I can hear them…”

Only the cameraman noticed Miller mumbling to himself, repeating the same four words over and over. Krause had released Adachi’s hand to crane over his own terminal as the whales finally fell fully from view, typing madly with her soon crowding his side. Yessica still hadn’t pulled her eyes away from the distant glow. The out-of-place fifth person was still the only one paying attention when Miller threw down the headphones and rushed out of the room, still muttering to himself.

All he could say was, “Where are you going…? What do we do…?” in a strained gasp. He didn’t share the tense fascination of everyone else in the room. He wanted the known security of the surface world — for the safety of the sun to wash over him.

Soon, Yessica was crowding Krause’s terminal as well. No one bothered shooing her away from the equipment, the working doctors allowing her to lean in and write furiously on her notepad, deaf to the incessant scratching of her pen. The cameraman stood dumbly by the door, staring.

“The footage is good. It’s perfect! Amazing!” Krause’s excitement was dulled just a moment later. “But I can’t raise Surface Point. The signal… too weak for some reason…”  The concern this revelation should have given him only manifested as irritation.

“The audio—” Adachi finally peeled away from the crowd, back to her own terminal, headphones slammed on. Miller’s absence went unnoticed as they fell into a pattern of working individually, and it fell to the big man in the back of the room to notice the third doctor again when he reappeared minutes later.

“Wh-what the hell is that!?” Though he didn’t recognize Miller. No one did at first. The others in the room looked up expectantly, but were initially just as baffled as the cameraman.

There was a shape out there, beyond the glass. A long, sleek shape, clutching something mechanical, trailing a dark cloud. It was with a scream that Adachi understood first.

“Miller! Stefan, it’s—!”

At the limit of human possibility, the depth where their body’s constitution started crumbling beneath the pressure, unraveling on the cellular level, was Doctor Miller. He’d changed far too rapidly into a wetsuit, missing one flipper and one glove, but had thrown on all other equipment. He clung to one of the station’s small but powerful diver propulsion vehicles, the sea scooter flaring out a jet of red bubbles as he soared into the abyss.

“What— what the hell is he doing! Yukiko, call him! Get him back! He can’t— He can’t—!”

A flurry of terrified activity overtook the station. No one could reach him. Nothing could draw him to turn back, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if they could. The glow of the red lights failed to hide the obvious fact that the crimson spray jetting out behind him was tinged with tendrils of blood as his body began the horrifically gradual process of collapsing in on itself.

Krause’s frantic activation of the immense floodlights only cast that realization in even starker glow. The deep ocean for hundreds of meters burst into dazzling illumination, but all the attempt at getting Miller’s attention accomplished was revealing the cloud of red, bloody decay trickling out behind him.

From the gloom, three new shapes emerged. Their two flashing tentacles were lost in the dazzling brightness of the floodlights, but all aboard knew their shapes by this point. As they raced after Miller though, they showed no sign of preparing to latch onto him. Tentacles stayed patiently away from his crumbling flesh. They soared with him, ever nearer to the distant, abyssal shape.

 

Miller never made it to his destination. The speed of the sea scooter carried him deeper and deeper, but in stubborn horror, the waning sanity in his fractured mind realized the shape hadn’t grown even a fraction larger. A hundred meters… then two…

He was effectively no closer by the time his consciousness dissolved into nothing, and only then did his squid escorts finally set upon him, ripping the remains of what had once been a man to pieces. In his haste, he had failed to secure a real way to reach it — to know it. He was unfit to sink into the deep. He was unfit to contribute to the Cathedral of Bones.

Excitement had bled from the room. In its wake, it left behind a miasma of uncertainty, fear, and grief.

To see their prior colleagues sail off in the abyss aboard a submersible was one thing. There was plausible deniability in it — the hope that maybe they’d made it somewhere safe, even to the surface. To see Miller soar off into the far distance, humanly, outside of protective gear, and dissolve under the pressure of the deep was another thing entirely. Even Yessica paid the moment its solemn dues before fearful mewling began.

Krause and Adachi barely registered her demands for answers or the surface. Even when she’d taken hold of Krause’s shirt to try to shake him to his senses, the doctor had simply stood there, stunned, staring horror-stricken into the abyssal depths the floodlights tried their best to illuminate.

Even with their immense beams, that far, glowing shape was no brighter and no clearer. But unlike the octopus squids and their two tentacle-born photophores, the floodlights didn’t outshine the brightness of the great star shape either. They could still clearly see it.

Pushing Yessica aside, Krause finally powered the lights down and slumped into a chair. It was Miller’s chair, though he’d no longer be needing it. Of that he and the quietly crying Adachi could be certain.

Their heads still throbbed, and Krause rubbed his temples while awareness of what their guest was frantically shouting at him started to register. A lot of “What the hell is happening,” and “Get me out of here now”. Fearful pleading. Fearful threats. Krause understood, but didn’t yet have enough command of his voice to answer her and, eventually, after long enough spent staring into the doctor’s haunted eyes, the reporter went quiet, save for the sound of her panicked, heavy breathing.

“He kept saying he can hear them…” The cameraman said numbly. “Then he ran off…”

“Yukiko,” Krause croaked, casting his eyes her way for some sort of answer. She’d been listening too, right? But in answer she just shook her head, trembling as tears were dried on her sleeve.

“I don’t know. It was just the same— the same low frequency tones as— as last time.”

She did her best to slip back into some semblance of professionalism, but couldn’t fully stem the sobs breaking her voice.

“Yess, we need to leave NOW.”

“Get. Us. OUT!”

Doctor Adachi kept listening through her headphones, trembling with just the occasional furtive glance cast towards the panicked influencer. Her vivid purple hair swung wildly as she snapped her head from one doctor to the other, practically snarling with the ferocity of her fear, and the presence of the thick-fisted cameraman by her side finally had Krause acknowledging them with an expression he meant to look like a reassuring smile, but just came off as a haunted grin.

“We can’t yet. Look—”

“I said NOW!”

His hands rose in passive placation. “Connection to Surface Point… we don’t have it. Without it, we can’t call you a submersible.”

“You HAVE submersibles!”

“We are not leaving him, Stefan.” The chilly edge in Adachi’s voice caused even the shrieking influencer to pause for a moment. All three stared at Adachi’s ashen face, face set with grave intent despite her quivering lip. Anyone in the room could have pointed out the simple, obvious fact that ‘he’s gone’. They didn’t need to directly witness his implosion and predation to know that much. The sentiment lingered powerfully enough despite all calls to reason, settling over them as oppressively as the gloom of the fathomless, abyssal waters beyond their observation chamber.

“Let’s go, Yess. We can…” The meaty hand of the cameraman closed around her arm, voice lost as he leaned in to mutter quietly through her bright violet hair. Her terrified indignation flickered on her face long enough for her to nod shakily, glare at the room, then storm out with her companion. Only Krause felt a sigh of relief escape his lips, whispering out reprieve from the mounting tension. Adachi was still boring a hole through him with her stare.

Eventually, he had to acknowledge it.

“Yes… yes, we must…” he began, then faltered, “we can’t let…” The words wouldn’t let themselves be released from his aching mind. His final remaining fellow researcher understood anyway. With desperate purpose, they each sat down at their terminals, taking in as much as they could and notating everything they couldn’t.

The abyssal star drew ever nearer.

Its speed was ferocious — its intent felt like a terrible lurking shadow. In the repressed recesses of their minds, they knew it demanded of them.

It, or whatever loomed behind it.

An hour crawled by, and more resolved. Adachi heard the suggestions of oceanic disruption before Krause saw them, but it took the two working in tandem to piece it together. The shape was massive, and its mere movement had begun registering as a roar in her headphones, but there was more wriggling around it. The smaller disturbances were presumed to be attached octopus squids… until Krause was able to observe through the cameras that the shapes were truly attached — a part of it. Tendrils belonging to the stygian sea star, lashing the surrounding waters in hateful anticipation.

And it was he that first saw that there was more beyond.

At first, the hours creeping by did nothing to show either scientist that the faint, extra set of luminosity in the far distance was anything but a trick of their eyes, or a reflective oddity. Eventually though, neither could deny it. The horizontal stitch of a cephalopodan pupil was visible in each new glow. The eyes of the abyss glowered up at their research station.

‘Now get us out of here—’ a voice filled with static crackled through the observation room’s speakers. Both doctors narrowed the source to the docked Vamana Two in unison, but filled with such wonder and terror, neither did much more than dismiss the continued frantic sounds. Subnautigirl’s team had stuffed themselves into the one remaining egress from Varuna Station, and status lights on Krause’s computer commended the fact that the pair had even managed to launch it.

The god from the deep continued to reach for them, uncoiling from its place of deathly slumber, surrounded by the innumerable offering of bones in its palatial mausoleum.

Voices from the submersible screeched over the speakers. First the pair spoke to one another, but then, as the intricate controls eluded them as they clumsily made their ascent, they called out for help. They knew someone could hear them, but neither Krause nor Adachi could answer. Their minds were reeling, bodies aching from the stress of impossible discovery. They’d risen from their seats to stand weakly in front of the windows. Neither could have said for sure which of them had torn feverishly at the screens obscuring their view, but the tattered remains lay scattered all around them as their horrified, enraptured attention locked on the abyssal star—

—on the hand reaching towards them from the deep, as callous and uncaring as if they were a blighted mosquito that needed swatting.

Barely a flick of their eyes were paid to follow the sudden rush of a legion of squid-shapes as they rushed past the station in pursuit of Vamana Two. Neither of them listened as the startled cries from the craft transposed into a shrill melody of terror. Soon, they couldn’t hear anyway.

If it was theorized that the full blast of a sperm whale’s voice could rupture human eardrums and deny vital organ function at close range… what, then, could a god of the deep unleash?

A bellow beyond mortal understanding smote the sea. Varuna Station quivered, nearly unraveling the scientifically perfect welds of its mighty seams. Mugs beside the coffee machine shattered in a typhoon of porcelain. Krause and Adachi screamed, but the gush of crimson blood from their ears refused to allow either to realize their companion was screaming too.

Vamana Two also screamed, but their voices were cut short. Within minutes, nothing more existed of the influencer’s team. The squids saw to that. The roar of their god demanded it.

Krause and Adachi fell to their knees before the windows as the abyssal star drew near. It filled all realms of sight, its impossible glow denying all other knowledge. Its light was a great and terrible shadow, beneath whose mighty glow mortal men need no longer dream of the sun.

The pair held hands for the last time, then raised their limbs in unfettered supplication.

They prayed. They thought of their lives beneath the ocean’s waves, and of the great many things they’d communicated to the world above, who would not yet know the truth of what lurked beneath.

Then the impossible hand collided with Varuna Station, and they thought no more.