“Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep; The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee.”

Extract from The Kraken by Alfred Tennyson, 1830.

100 metres.

Photic Zone (Sunlight).

20 Degrees Celsius.

Clear and bright.

There was a crackle through the comms system followed by “Far across the distance.  And spaces between us.  You have come to show me how to go on.  Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart does go on -”

“Shit Issy!  Turn that crap off,” Georgina insisted as she navigated Squid Too over the top of a guyot.  ,Her last stop before ascending into the abyss.  Celine Dion’s theme from the movie Titanic wasn’t her type of music.  She didn’t want it to be the last thing she heard.  Not that she thought she was about to die, but deep diving in the ocean was a dangerous occupation.

It didn’t help that her head was still pounding from the night before.  Not alcohol.  Bad dreams.  And one hell of a migraine.  Bad dreams suffered since she was a young adult.  Dreams of entrapment and suffocation.  With the scolding headache came nausea.  She never got sea sick, but imagined it to be something like the way she felt now.  Being confined to a bubble no bigger than would fit over a two person sofa was not her idea of a fun day.  She’d much rather be wrapped up in her cabin with dark drapes blocking out all signs of light.  But not all light.  Not complete darkness.

Unfortunately she didn’t have that luxury.  She’d just have to suck it up and get on with the job.  Every day they spent bobbing about in the northern Pacific was costing the company millions.  She had a job to do.  Besides she didn’t want to give Hardcastle any ammunition against hiring weak females; his words, not hers.

The guyot, better described as an underwater tabletop hill, sat directly below their vessel.  The Proteus, their floating research laboratory, was parked some fifty kilometres south-west of Guam in the Pacific.  Below lay the Mariana Trench - ten kilometres below - just over the side of the guyot.  Much further to the south and slightly west was Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on earth.  Sitting at a depth just shy of eleven kilometres, it had once been the pinnacle of adventures, like climbing Mount Everest, completing the Marathon des Sables, or travelling to the moon.  Advances in technology meant such feats were now only modest achievements.  Though diving underwater to depths where the water pressure was one thousand times that of the air pressure on the surface wasn’t a popular pastime.  And it was extremely expensive.  Whereas one could remain alive for a matter of hours atop Everest, or minutes in the vacuum of space, unprotected at the bottom of the ocean meant certain death.

The Celine Dion song had become an in-joke with her colleagues.  When she’d joined the crew, a year earlier, she’d made the mistake of harping on about James Cameron, the director of Titanic - The Movie.  For a long time, the man had held the record for the deepest dive, making it to the bottom of Challenger Deep in 2012, nearly a hundred years ago.  Men who had money could achieve extraordinary things.  It really pissed off Issy, who believed many brilliant people had been lost to history and unable to contribute to the advancement of humankind because they were poor.  When George had challenged him on who he thought should be the historical pioneers, Issy’d pointed out that the original astronauts weren’t chosen because they were rich, but because they deserved it.  They had the brains and had worked hard.  It didn’t really answer her question.  Issy had declared that rich men didn’t need to earn anything as they could buy it.  His argument then went on to list the rich men who’d developed space tourism and exploration.  There was very little hope anymore for the little guy to make his mark on history.  This was a real bug bear for Issy who’d been only three when he lost his dad.  He’d had to work hard to get where he was.  People who got handed it on a platter - there should be a law against it.

Issy, better known to his mother as Isaac Cooper was Georgina’s boss, the relationship complicated, at times.  He was a walking and talking contradiction, with a phobia of water only beaten by his working and answering to men richer than he.  It wasn’t a phobia that prevented him from showering or drinking, it just prevented him from being submerged.  He was more than happy to stay on the ship while George and her other colleagues explored beneath the waves.

“Seriously Issy, if you don’t turn that shit off I’m going to go silent,” she warned, shouting through the sub’s inbuilt mic.  Her temples pulsed.

“Maybe not a good idea if you’re heading down to 10 K,” Issy joked.  He knew she wouldn’t cut off communications contact on such a deep dive.

“Oh please.  I can’t stand it.  I can’t concentrate.  You really want me to damage this million dollar piece of equipment?  Won’t look good to Hardcastle,” she suggested.

Hardcastle, namely Brian Hardcastle, was Issy’s boss.  He was the fourth generation Hardcastle to own and run Terrasurv.

Terrasurv was a research and development company supplying solutions to human colonies in hostile environments.  Not the type of hostile environments peppered with threats toward life from wild animals or unfriendly savages, but environments not usually suitable for human life.  Terrasurv had developed sustainable housing for colonies on the moon, life suspension pods for long term space flight and ISRU techniques.  In-Situ Resource Utilisation was employed by pulling needed resources from the surrounding environment.  In the case of the moon colonies, this meant mining minerals from the moon itself to provide power or infrastructure.  Terrasurv was all about sustainability of off-world colonies.  They must be able to survive by drawing on the surrounding environment as much as possible.  It wouldn’t be possible to sap resources from the Earth indefinitely.  Any colony established in outer space would have to be self sustaining.

After more insistence - much more - Issy turned off the piped in cabin music.  Thank-god.  Squid Too had a built in audio system, but George preferred the silence.  Just her and the bloooop and gluurrp of the buoyancy and life support systems, as bubbles spurted and glooped up the side of the sub to freedom at the surface.

Without the annoying earworm George could hear Squid Too, groaning and straining under the water pressure as she descended.  The tiny sub, properly titled Squid 2, was an experimental submersible being trialled by Terrasurv.  It was named after its appearance - a giant squid.  But it was more like a giant squid that had swallowed a very large tennis ball.  It was a design based on the bathysphere; a large spherical cabin (big enough for one) in the front tailed by long mechanical, jointed tethers sporting a variety of tools, mostly underwater mining equipment.  They fondly called them tentacles.  At the rear surrounded by the tethers was a large propeller for pushing the sub through the water.  It wasn’t the most hydrodynamic of designs, but then it wasn’t built for speed.

George sat like a queen on her thrown in the front of the sphere with a 180 degree view.  Her vista, the sea and its colourful fish and plant life through 15 centimetre thick convex perspex.  The controls were relatively simple; left, right, up and down.  That was navigation.  The tether controls were more complex.  They were controlled by buttons and levers pressed into the wall panels behind her.  Her seat swivelled a full 360 degrees to allow her full access.

Today the mission was to take Squid Too down to 10 kilometres and pull core samples out of the muddy sea floor.  Back up top, Dale, their geological oceanographer (a mouthful of a title on any day), would look for signs of mineral deposits.

200 metres.

Mesopelagic Zone (Twilight).

15 Degrees Celsius.

Euphoric Blue.

Despite it being midday with a bright sun high in a cloudless sky, at 200 metres Squid Too crossed into twilight.  Twilight was thea zone in the ocean between 200 and 1000 metres.  After 200 metres in depth only trace amounts of blue light from the sun continued into the depths.  All the red and yellow parts of sunlight were absorbed by the level above called the Sunlight Zone.  Below 1000 metres it was called Midnight - for obvious reasons.

Beside the occasional cuttlefish zipping by or wolf eel poking its lazy head out from its hide in the rockwall, Twilight was pretty deserted of marine life.  Sunlight was so much more interesting to a marine biologist.  Teaming with corals, plants and all manner of tropical fish, the very upper zone of the ocean was a veritable smorgasbord of fish life.  George was a marine biologist.  At least that’s what she told people when they asked.  Qualifications?  None.  But no one ever asked if she’d earned her skills at university.  She preferred to believe she had a degree in Zuckerberg and Jobs philosophy.  Like the Facebook and Apple founders, George had found university studies tiresome and impractical.  Also like the afore mentioned millionaires, George had learnt her craft through hard work, experience and a little god-given talent.  What she wasn’t going to do was follow in these men’s footsteps of figuratively screwing over others to get what she wanted.  She wouldn’t screw anyone, figuratively or literally, to get to the top.  The only top she was interested in right now was the top of the ocean and respecting her current environment.

She’d begun her learning journey at Seaworld while in high school on the Gold Coast.  Born and raised on the Queensland coast she’d always had a fascination for marine life.  When she was old enough to work she approached the holiday theme park and volunteered.  Soon she had a part time job scrubbing out fish tanks and feeding dolphins.  The fish tanks were not ordinary fish tanks.  Some were the size of small lakes and required the cleaners to get inside them.  This is how she’d obtained her SCUBA license.  By the time she started university she knew more about the sea than many of her tutors.  She figured if she was going to move on with her life she could get more from first hand work experience than a book, so she quit school.

1000 metres.

Bathypelagic Zone (Midnight).

4 Degrees Celsius.

Getting dark out.

“Nighty night Big Ted,” George called over the radio as she left all traces of sunlight behind

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” joked Issy. “How are things looking?”

With the surface light quickly diminishing as she descended, George flicked on the kick arse halogens.  They lit up the water like the Glory of God.  Of course the lights were only as good as the water quality.  If a storm had kicked up silt or brought in muck from elsewhere in the water currents all the halos in the world wouldn’t allow you to see through it.  It would be like lighting up a brick wall in the belief that you could walk through it.  Luckily dirty sea water never got as thick as bricks.  And it wasn’t particularly common after crossing into Midnight.  If visibility got down to a few metres, she always had radar and sonar on board.  In all truth, she was meant to depend on the electronic readouts for navigation but never quite trusted them.  If she couldn’t see it with her own eyes, it wasn’t there.

“Yeah looks good.  Nice and quiet.”  Cool, peaceful and dark.  She took a deep breath and relaxed into her chair.  The remnants of her migraine were abating.

The side of the guyot was more the plunging cliff type rather than a gentle downhill slope.  George preferred it like this.  She could just sit back and watch the depth pressure gauge on her dash report on her descent while the bare rock face in front of her meandered passed.  There were no plants or corals here.  Nothing that required photosynthesis could live in Midnight.

With each 10 metres of depth another 100 kilopascals of pressure was added.  By the time she reached her destination there’d be the equivalent pressure from the water above, of 100 elephants standing on top of Squid Too - a humorous if not frightening image.  It would take close to two hours to get there.  That was around 48 repeats of the dreaded Titanic love song.  The fact she knew this was testament of the slow, boring journey to the bottom.  She hadn’t told Issy though, otherwise he’d have obliged by putting the song on loop and leaving it to play while he tended to other matters on the ship.

There was no Internet connection down there either.  Probably a good thing, as George was an avid amateur photographer, constantly spamming her friends on social media with pictures of odd shaped clouds, rocks that looked like they’d been arranged by aliens on the ocean bed and ugly, phosphorescent fish.  In Midnight though, all her online friends could hope to get would be desolate rock face, after featureless cleft, after plain old rock face.  None of the insides of the Squid Too.  It was classified experimental and she wasn’t allowed to photograph it, let alone share it with the world.

If her friends were really lucky - and she had Internet access - they might get a picture of a giant squid, viper fish or cookiecutter shark.  The fish and sharks she could deal with, it was the giant squid she was hoping not to see.  It could do Squid Too, and herself, some real damage.  At 13 metres in length, the giant squid, was one of the largest and most mysterious creatures in the sea.  Anything bigger than a double decker bus wasn’t something she’d want to run into at these depths - though it would certainly make for an impressive selfie.  She’d be pretty lucky to get a photograph of one.  Only a handful had ever been photographed alive and swimming in their natural habitat.

4000 metres

Abyssal Zone.

2 Degrees Celsius.

Perpetual darkness.

Black, black, black in all directions.

“Abysmal,” informed George over the radio, twisting the name of the ocean’s zone for comic effect.  They all did it.  They did it so much it wasn’t funny any more and often abysmal was used in serious settings to describe that particular sea level, without anyone even flinching.  At least on the ship, maybe not at research conferences or in official reports.

“Beware the Kraken,” Issy sniggered.

“At least it would give me something to look at,” George smiled, checking the readouts on the sub’s monitors.

It was highly unlikely she would see a kraken on this particular trip.  First because it dwelled in the seas off Norway and Greenland and second because it was a mythical being.  Such legendary sea creatures had been based on the giant squid by many cultures.  There was even on in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and Peter Benchley’s (the guy who wrote Jaws) The Beast.

Is it darker than usual? she wondered, peering out through the window into the nothingness.  How pitch black could be any more pitch black she didn’t know.  She just had a strange feeling.  Thank god for the halos.  As long as she could see something she’d be okay.  Focusing on something real was good.  It was complete, blind, blackness that she couldn’t stand.

The big halos illuminated the rockwall.  Without them she could have imagined the little sub wasn’t moving at all.  Squid Too moaned and whined a little more.  The occasional clunk and ping of metal made George jump.  It was a silly reaction.  She knew the sub would complain about the pressure.  It always did.  Must have been the human survival instinct kicking in.  In an environment not suitable for humans, fear always escalated.  Like grabbing the arm rests in an airplane for dear life on the first sign of turbulence.

She felt her heart pounding.  It didn’t matter how many times she’d been down to this depth, it always made her nervous.  She forced the logical side of her brain to pamper to the irrational.  Come on girl.  How many times have you done this before?  Fifty?  No, must closer to a hundred.  You get like this every time.  And every time you are okay.  Squid Too can do it.  She’s built for pressures far greater than this depth.  Just keep repeating ... you’re okay, you’re o -

Bang!

George jumped out of her seat hitting her head on the bulkhead.

Fuck!  Was that pressure or a bump? she thought massaging her skull.  Sitting back down she brought her hand from her head, to in front of her eyes.  Warm, thick redness.  Damn.  She reached beneath her seat for the first aid kit.  She ripped it open and rummaged for a tissue.

After tending to her wound and replacing the kit a sudden feeling of dread hit her.  The rock wall had stopped moving past in front of her.  She leaned forward and looked out of the bulbous window.  Craning her neck in all directions she couldn’t see any perceivable problems.  Nothing at the front of the sub.

As she continued to investigate, the halos started to fade.

“No, no, no, no,” she cried, flipping switches on the sub’s console.

“What’s happening?” inquired Issy cooly.

“The halos are failing.  I’ve stopped.”

“Stopped?”  Issy’s voice came back the next time tinged with concern.  “How stopped?”

“Stop stopped.  How many types of stopped are there?” she barked, trying to get the lights to come back on.  Switch flipped.  Console banged.

“Maybe it’s the kraken,” Issy tried.

“Seriously Issy?  You’re making a joke?  I’m freakin out down here,” she spat.

“I was just trying to lighten the mood.”  He sounded sorry.  “Come on Georgie.  It’s probably an electrical fault.  You can deal with this.”

She could deal with this.  He was right.  She was trained for this type of event.  But nothing she tried worked.  All she could do was sit and watch the stadium brightness of the cliffside fade to a candle glow before abating to black.

“Shit.  Halo’s are gone,” she informed.  Breathe George, breathe.  She looked at her own terrified expression peering back at her from the reflection in the perspex.  It felt like she’d been woken from a horrifying dream.  The type that kept you pinned beneath the covers and afraid to move - even when you were busting for the loo - as if the dream had leaked through into reality.  George caressed the small gold crucifix that hung around her neck between her thumb and forefinger.  She wasn’t religious, except when it suited her.  Now, it suited her.

A new voice with a Jamaican accent came over the comms.  “George?  What’s happening down there?”  It was Myra, their submarine tech.

“I’ve lost the halo’s.  Can’t see.  Can’t get them to work,” George panicked.

“Georgia?  Breath.  You are going to be okay.  It’s just the lights,” Myra calmed.  “Take a look around inside.  You can see right?  The control panels, interior lights?”

“Yahuh.”

“Are you breathing?”

“Yahuh.”

“Right.  Now try the emergency headlights,” Myra instructed.

Of course!  The emergency headlights.  George slapped her forehead with the heel of her palm.  Ouch!  She’d forgotten about the cut.

“Do you think we should bring her up?” she heard Issy ask Myra.

“No.  No.  I’m okay,” George insisted.  “Just give me a second.”

She reached for the control panel behind her and took a deep breath before flicking the emergency lights switch.

Pow!

The rock face appeared in front of her.  Not as bright as under the halos, but bright enough.

“The suspense is killing us Georgina,” Myra said.

“Oh right.  Yeah.  That worked.  I can see!” George informed, sighing with relief.

“Are you going to be okay to continue?” Issy asked.

“Sure.  Sure.  I’ll be fine,” she lied, holding her hand out palm down.  Her fingers were trembling.  She snatched them up with her other hand.  I’m fine.

She glanced across at the air quality monitor on her console.  Surely she wasn’t experiencing some kind of narcosis?  Under pressure oxygen becomes poisonous to humans and therefore very little of it was used in deep sea diving.  To make up the remaining air, nitrogen, helium or hydrogen was used.  Squid Too was pressurised with hydrogen and minute amounts of nitrogen.  So she couldn’t be experiencing nitrogen narcosis.  Maybe it was HPNS (high pressure nervous syndrome) but she wasn’t experiencing a seizure.  Not yet anyway.  But the trace amounts of nitrogen in her air mix should have been sufficient to prevent that.

No.  She was just being paranoid.  Paranoia from her lack of sleep and the niggling remains of her migraine.  Definitely not the type of paranoia that was a symptom of narcosis.  Most definitely not.  But the thoughts racing around in her head could be nothing but paranoia.  She was fine.  She would be fine.  She just needed to close her eyes for a moment and find her centre.  Chase away the demons of the depths with more logical and concrete thoughts.

Her eyes sprang open.  She’d forgotten that Squid Too had stopped.  A quick glance at the cliff outside reconfirmed it.

“I must be stuck on something,” she finally said.  “Can’t see anything out the front.”

“Must be one of your tentacles,” Myra suggested.

As George turned her attention to the control panel for the mining equipment behind her, she noticed the red flashing LED.  It had been pulsating there all along.  Its red glow had illuminated the cabin when the halos had gone out and she hadn’t even noticed.

On further inspection, George realised the irritated little light belonged to the controls for the core sampling drill.

“Ah crap!” she exclaimed.

“What?” asked Myra.

“It’s the drill.  It must be snagged on something.”  George flicked a switch on the panel that brought up a rear view of Squid Too’s tentacles on a small black and white monitor.  The drill arm was extended and snagged in the rock face.  She grabbed onto the small joystick on the panel and started jiggling it.  Outside in the cold Midnight ocean the drill arm trembled and jerked.  The end was indeed stuck.

“Yep.  It’s caught in a small crevasse.  Doesn’t want to budge.”

“You might have to eject the tether,” Myra suggested.

George didn’t like leaving equipment behind but it might be the only way she could free the sub.  She had more than one drill onboard and could still complete her mission without the jammed arm.  Still, hard-arse Hardcastle wouldn’t be impressed.

Below the control panel was a row of buttons with Eject written on them.  Each one detached a single tentacle from Squid Too.  She pressed one and in the little monitor, the stuck drill arm floated away.  But it wasn’t the arm floating away it was Squid Too moving again.

She snapped around to the front to look at the rock face.  She was descending.

Taking a deep breath in and out she sank back into her chair and decided to take a short meditation break for the next thousand metres or so.

6000 metres.

Hadal Zone.

1 Degrees Celsius.

Blind.

Hell underwater.

Before she knew it she’d descended even further into the inky black depths of the ocean.  Now there really was nothing to see.  No hope at all for any marine life.  Nothing.  She felt calm for the first time since the surface.  Pure peace.  A quick check of the monitors and back to meditating.  Ghosts of My Heart Will Go On played in her ears but it was the orchestral version.  She might have even been humming.

“Everything okay down there?” came Issy’s voice.  She sat bolt upright jolted from her peace.

“Yes.  Yes.  Everything looks fine.”

“You don’t want to come back up?”

“I’m almost there,” she informed, looking at the depth gauge.  “Nine thousand five hundred.”

“Right.  Well get those cores and get back up here.  You’ve really got me worried today,” Issy said.

“I’m okay.  Really.  Just a little irrational scare.  It was the headache last night.  Really it was.  Anyway, you don’t have to worry about me lingering too long.”  She tapped the air monitor with her index finger. “I don’t have much air left.”

“Well good,” Myra started.  “I ... I mean good that you will be back soon.  Not good that you might run out -”

George giggled.  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

For the final couple of hundred metres George turned around to the tentacle controls to prepare the equipment.  There was nothing outside through the front she hadn’t seen for the last couple of kilometres.  Or so she thought.

“How’s the backup drill?” Myra enquired.

George rotated the joystick.  The tentacle responded smoothly.  “All systems go.”

A faint alarm sounded, alerting George that the seabed was approaching.  She didn’t bother turning around.  As she continued to play with the tentacle controls she waited for the gentle thud that would indicate she had landed.  The muddy ocean floor came into view in the small monitor looking out over the drilling equipment.

She closed her eyes and waited for the bump of the bottom.

Clunk!

Her eye’s shot open, wide.  What?  That wasn’t a thud.  She snapped around in her chair to look out the window.

A woman stared back.