DEMONS

The booming in the water creeps over my head… slows… and goes silent.

I don't hear the monster moving.

Has it found out where I am? My only weapon is for ghosts.

How can it sense me? Can it see my body heat? Can it hear me? Does it smell fear in the water?

In the silence, my breathing seems deafening, as loud as if I were calling out. I override my body's desire to hyperventilate and force myself to sip in a single deep breath, and hold it.

Usually, when I'm safe in my own bath, I can hold my breath for six minutes. But with my heart thuttering like this, I'll be lucky if I make it four.

What prey does it think I am? What kind of hunter is it?

One of the carnivores Soto had warned me about chases its prey by swallowing water and jetting it out in bursts. The booming I'd heard might have been that. If so, then I remember what species this is.

A stricthys.

Dimly, I recall the predator's silhouette from when Soto had briefed me. The stricthys had been a camouflaged shape in the blackness between the stars, drifting toward me silently, its mouth agape.

Soto had warned me: it is a stalker that evolved on an ocean moon wracked with tidal forces and volcanic upheavals, a place of staggering environmental variety and chaos. Volatility and radiation had accelerated the pace of evolution there by a factor of eighty-three. Before its biological self-destruction, the moon had harbored hundreds of times as many species as Earth. It had been a seething womb-world, a sunless killing field, a freezing, boiling, pitch-black hell.

The stricthys, which at any moment might wrap one of its glue-secreting tongues around my neck, is the inheritor of an evolutionary lineage that is, in effect, forty-six billion years long, as opposed to my human lineage of half a billion.

I can't think clearly when my blood is thundering with adrenaline, so I make an effort to become calm, still holding my breath, reassuring myself that billions of years of evolution do not necessarily make a predator more lethal, only better adapted to its environment. Dolphins, before their extinction, had evolved many times farther from their evolutionary roots than sharks, but were far less dangerous.

But it is a hollow comfort, because I know that some adaptations grant advantages at little cost, and once an organism acquires such an adaptation, it tends to keep it. The more ancient the evolutionary lineage of an organism, the more chances it has to accumulate adaptations that are more efficient, more powerful, more versatile.

Like desert locusts. They were only a kind of grasshopper, but they harbored a physiological trigger which transformed them in response to drought, twisting them into aggressive black-and-yellow gluttons, distorting their behavior, making them teem in hordes of millions, a plague-swarm, a destroyer of nations. How much did it cost those little grasshoppers to harbor the potential to become demonic? Was there any evolutionary pressure to lose that ability, or, if Earth had survived, would they have kept it for eons?

In forty-six billion years, how many such instincts might a predator hoard up? How many behavioral modes, how many instinctive strategies just waiting for their trigger?

The stricthys could have an instinct for everything I might try. It has evolved alongside every kind of prey: if I dig, I am a worm; if I try to jet away, I am a fish; if I play dead, I am a camouflaged mollusk. Its ancestors have encountered novel species so many times on that womb-world, it might even have instincts for hunting a completely unknown creature.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

So it's possible that if I ask myself, 'What kind of prey does it think I am?' the correct answer is that it knows what I am: an alien.

I, with my complex brain, and my opposable thumbs, and my digital implants, may be less intelligent, in this situation, than the small-brained predator with billions of years of instincts on its side.

My mind is invaded by an image of the stricthys that makes my skin crawl: it is hovering mouth-downward directly over my head, letting air seep gradually from its blowholes so that it begins to sink. Slowly. Silently. Mouth agape.

Or, for all I know, it could have moved away.

I run my mind over my options, listing the numerous functions of my evo-suit: hyperbaric pressurization, cryonic stasis, aerosolized stimulants, etc. Then there are the tools in my equipment kit: surgical scissors, tape, a short crowbar, my favorite flashlight. If the stricthys is sensitive to visible light or UV radiation, my flashlight could drive it away. But on the other hand, maybe the fish on its world were bioluminescent, and it's waiting for a flash of light to tell it where to strike. Maybe it spotted me originally by the tiny spark of the bionic projector shining on my retina.

The only certainty is that the voice which warned me to swim downward also told me to hold still, and I have been holding as still as I can, and I have not been eaten. As tempting as it is to break the tension by firing all my jets or attacking with UV light, my wisest course is to grit my teeth and bear the stillness. This isn't a ghost. Think defensively.

I use my implant to shut off my night vision goggles, since they emit infrared light that may be visible to some species. My retinal display goes next. The purple afterimage of the oxygen meter, a vague smear in the pitch darkness, seems to read 68:02:34.

I blink to clear my vision, but the 68 refuses to become 98. I double check it on my implant.

There's no mistake. I have lost thirty-two hours of air.

Very calmly, I count to ten in my head, and then check again: 67:46:55.

Behind the oxygen mask, a trickle of wetness threads down my forehead and drips onto my cheek. It's not sweat. It's water.

I swallow hard, wishing I could risk a breath, struggling against the urge to simply burrow under the hot muck and hide. Instead I lock down every muscle. For all I know, the muck might be too shallow, just a thin layer of slime on the inside of the hull. My back could be inches from the suffocating abyss of space.

Now that I'm paying attention, I feel wetness seeping in from half a dozen different areas. I had assumed I was sweating, but there's too much. I can hear terrible trickling sounds, and the pitch darkness is thick with a stomach-churning, alien stink.

No emergency patch is going to fix this many leaks.

Whether the stricthys is there or not, I have only one option left: cryonic stasis. I have to put myself into a coma.

I send a digital message to the area where the man's voice had been transmitted from, but there's no response. Maybe it's audio only, like an old radio.

As quietly as I can, I release my breath in a whisper, "Losing air. Have to go cold. Pick me up."

Sipping in another breath to hold, I wait for a response.

60:12:02

I send the message again, and wait.

56:39:51

Struggling not to shudder, I wait.

49:59:20

The leak is accelerating. The water is rising around my neck.

I whisper my message one last time, as loudly as I dare, and then retrieve a screwdriver from my kit and begin to undo the bolts of my evo-suit control box. The most extreme functions can't be activated via wireless signal, but must be started manually.

My fingertip finds the switch for cryo.

I'll be helpless after this. I'll be a cold scrap of flesh in predator-infested water. If the person on the transmitter can't pick me up, or won't, then there's no one else who will come looking for me. Soto has no body. Everyone I know is dead. I'll just drift until my evo suit runs out of power, and then I'll warm up, and I'll rot. I'll never even wake up to feel myself die.

This is possibly my last conscious thought. When I press this switch, I may become a corpse, nonsentient matter, no longer human.

Something slimy drifts against my suit. It's not strong like a predator's tongue, but fleshy, soft, loose. The yasod corpse, perhaps. Why is a yasod in the Abyss? I don't understand. I can't even begin to understand.

So that's my last thought. Yasod. Yasod. Yasod. It's fitting.

I do not remember signaling my finger to press the switch, but it does so. The temperature of my suit drops from warm to cool to icy. A puff of vapor hisses over my face, stinking of acid, burning my eyes. A narcotic. I inhale it in through a stinging nose.

The patient shouldn't be too alert, while they're being cooled to the temperature of a corpse.