A Murmuration of Opas, page 1
Praise for William Meikle
One of the premier storytellers of our time
—Famous Monsters of Filmland
Big beastie horror seems to be all the rage right now. Unfortunately, very few authors seem to know how to do it right. They need to take lessons from Meikle. He’s at the top of his class.
—Into the Macabre
The Dunfield Terror is... another masterpiece from Mr Meikle – one that should grace the bookshelf of any fan of those genres, or simply those who appreciate fine writing.
—The Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer
Fungoid is... a fast paced ecohorror thriller that delivers on all fronts. The large cast of characters combined with Meikle’s tight plotting and a keen eye for dialogue bring a real cinematic feel to the narrative. By focusing more on the fast based plot rather than getting bogged down by over characterisation Meikle has created a real page-turner.
—Ginger Nuts of Horror
Weird House Press eBook Edition © 2023
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
All stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Text © 2023 by William Meikle
Cover art and interior and cover design © 2023 by Cyrus Wraith Walker
Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey
Weird House Press
Central Point, OR 97502
www.weirdhousepress.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
About the Author
About the Artist
For Ray Bradbury, John Carpenter, Ray Harryhausen and Ridley Scott, all of whom went into the Opa soup.
CHAPTER 1
When the submersible descended out of the tube on the twenty third of October, in the year twenty one eighty, Jodge Chong became the first human to travel under the ice on Europa. He was more aware of history at that moment than he’d been in all the years it had taken him to get to this point.
“That’s one small drop for a man, another giant leap for mankind,” he said into the com, and heard the others laugh in his ear. It did a lot to relieve the tension that had been building since he’d entered the tube half an hour earlier and ten miles higher.
Conjecture about Europa and the possibility of life there had been going on for two centuries. A variety of unmanned spacecraft had mapped and photographed and surveyed over the years, and several robots had been sent down to the surface to collect and retrieve samples but although they had found complex hydrocarbon molecules there had never been any proof of life. They needed a manned mission, and they needed to drill, for if there was life on the moon, it was going to be in the ocean, locked away under miles of ice where it might have been floating there for millennia.
Jodge was involved from the start, as diving consultant at first while the Earthside administrators and scientists tried to come up with a plan, then more directly after the Io mission was done and he could be spared. He had just made it home to Mars from that one by a month when they recruited him for Europa. He hooked up with the outgoing mission in the asteroid belt, and spent some time getting to know the others in the long dark stretch between there and Jupiter while Anna built her team and Jodge built his submersible.
Now here they were.
Making history.
It hadn’t been an easy mission, having been a political and logistical nightmare from the start, fraught with difficulty, and turned out to be the longest, most expensive, most dangerous scientific mission of all time. Lives had been lost, companies had prospered, folded and prospered again, and all manner of scientific breakthroughs had, of necessity, been made on the hoof. All to bring Jodge to this point, hanging at the bottom of a drill hole ten miles down in a small submersible as it passed beneath the ice and reached the Europa Ocean proper.
He was thinking about the long line of those who had gone before: Magellan, Amundsen, Armstrong and Tsung and more, all the way back to the first human to look up, wonder what was beyond the horizon, and decide to go and have a look. He felt he should say something more, but it was Armstrong’s words that continued to echo in his head.
Besides, this mission was already deemed a success before he’d even gotten into the sub; samples taken by a bot they’d sent down the tube first had proven that life was not merely an earthbound phenomenon. After all the disappointments of finding nothing but dust on Mars and only saturated salt water on Ganymede and Io, here they had finally found proof that humankind was not alone in the solar system, never mind the Universe.
The fact that it was, in Jodge’s mind, a slightly disappointing proof was neither here nor there; although they’d only found a single species of unicellular life, they’d found an abundance of it in the samples taken so far by the bots. Davide and N’tini, being biologists, had given it a double-barrelled Latin name, but everybody else just called them Opas.
Now Jodge was here to see if they could find something else, maybe something a bit more complex. The Opas were making him work for it. They swarmed around the submersible, as ephemeral as smoke rising from a fire, swirling in an intricate dance that threw up patterns and curves in dizzying washes of bioluminescence. Davide and N’tini had a word for that too; murmuration. It was a word generally applied to massive flocks of small birds back on earth. Jodge, who had never been Earthside, only had holovid clips to compare with. The ones on Earth didn’t match up. The swirls around the submersible pulsed and glowed in an ever-changing blue-green aurora that, after some initial disorientation, he found almost calming.
It was all very pretty, but Jodge was here to go deeper, to see if there might be more to the ecosystem than just one dominant species. He was going to be sorely disappointed if all there was to see was a lot of Opas, a pretty dance, and nothing else. He also wasn’t about to get too excited until he had proof; back on Io he’d gotten everybody’s pulses racing when he’d reported seeing something moving purposefully in the water; it had turned out to be a lump of ice caught in a current, and he was still trying to live that one down.
“Are you okay?” a voice spoke in his headset.
“In the pipe, five by five,” Jodge replied, knowing that he’d be the only one on the mission to get the antique reference,
“So that’s a yes, then?” Anna Kaminski asked.
As Mission Commander Anna was his sole contact with the surface for the duration of the dive. Everybody else up there would be gathered round the holovids viewing the feeds he was sending back from the various cameras and sensors, hoping for a glimpse of something wondrous.
But only Anna can understand how it feels.
Like him, she’d been a diver, and they’d worked together on Io during the explorations there more than a decade previously. Where Jodge had never grown out of his love for the quiet solitude to be found on a solo deep dive, Anna had moved on, through various administrative levels, until now she outranked him by quite some way, her being commander of the mission, him being general dogsbody when he wasn’t in charge of the sub.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Are you ready to take her down?” she asked.
There were a multitude of questions wrapped inside that simple one, and an equal multitude of answers came to mind, but he settled for the simple one.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. Dropping her by five.”
The sub responded to his neural link and descended five meters. The Opas moved with him, as if including him in some intricate dance to which only they knew the steps. Their color shifted towards a more yellow edge of the spectrum before settling back to the now familiar blue-green.
“Is this all getting recorded?” he asked.
The A.I. spoke in his ear.
“Ten channels, fore and aft, above and below. I’m getting everything.”
They’d long decided not to give the A.I. a name; mainly because it was just too close to being human and at least half the mission team were uncomfortable with anthropomorphizing it any further than calling it ‘her’. Jodge had long been one of the uncomfortable ones. Mars hadn’t progressed as quickly technology wise as Earthside; he’d grown up with robots, sure, but not with a tech that could second-guess him at every turn, and was faster at the basics of the day-to-day stuff required to run a complex research station. It did its job well enough though, and Jodge was grateful it was keeping an eye on him down here in the dark.
Does
As the sub descended through them the Opa appeared to swirl and coalesce into a slightly more coherent form, and not for the first time Jodge wondered if there was more to them than just a swirling mass of cells. At times he thought there might even be some attempt at communication going on in the patterns and swirls, but as yet the A.I hadn’t been able to make any correlations.
Jodge concentrated on taking the sub deeper. There might be all sorts of wonders out there beyond the blue-green aurora.
But I’ll never see it if I never get clear of the Opas.
He descended another five meters, then five more.
“Steady,” Anna said in his ear. “Easy does it.”
The sub creaked and groaned. The pressure was enormous down here, but he knew the sub’s limits better than anyone; he’d designed it himself and, along with the team’s technicians, Rohit and Mark, had spent countless hours building, refining, testing and refining again during the long flight from the asteroid belt to here.
“She can take it,” he replied confidently.
“I’m not sure I can.”
“We’re getting somewhere. The Opas are thinning out. Just a bit deeper.”
He descended five more meters. The Opas finally gave up on him and hung in a swirling swarm above the sub. He couldn’t see his descent hole through them, but the sub’s beacon to the dome high above would steer him home even if he went blind.
He ordered the headlights to full power. The water was clear around him and the beams gave him a view a hundred meters ahead. It looked like open water, no sign of life save for the ceiling of swirling Opas overhead. His sensors told him the water was getting warmer as he descended; now at two degrees Celcius where it had been just a fraction above freezing in the drill tube.
“Temperature consistent with the theory,” he said. “That’s a point to the folks at NASA back in the Twentieth Century.”
“Almost cozy compared to the surface temperature,” Davide said in his ear.
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I might stay here a while.”
“Let’s keep the chatter down, boys,” Anna said. “We’re on the clock here. You’ve got half an hour then it’s time to come home.”
Time to explore.
He started the sub forward, no more than a slow walking pace. His sensors recorded every small variation in pressure, temperature, salinity and oxygen content of the water around him, streaming the data back up top to the A.I. for processing. All he had to worry about was steering the sub and keeping his eyes open. He swept a wide area under his drop point in slowly increasing circles until he was at a widest point some four hundred meters to the north. There had been nothing but open water, then his lights caught a darker shadow ahead of him. His sonar pinged at the same moment, confirming that there was definitely something there. He couldn’t make out what it was, but it didn’t look like an Opa swarm; it looked like something more solid.
What if it’s just ice again?
He kept his voice noncommittal.
“I may have something here,” he said. “Moving in for a closer look.”
“Remember, slow and steady,” Anna said.
He had to remind himself of her remark as he closed in on the object for the more he saw of it, the more he wanted to see. The thing was bioluminescent, although not to the same degree as the Opas above; a bluish haze hung uniformly six inches around an amorphous body that was almost globular. A visual estimate had it at some three meters in diameter and it didn’t appear to have any means of propulsion, traveling at the mercy of whatever currents were in the area.
At first glance it looked like a tangled mass of free-floating kelp, but as Jorge got closer he saw long trailing tendrils hanging from beneath it. They were so long that they trailed away into the dark depths beyond the range of his lights, and they too glowed faintly with the same blueish luminescence.
As he approached his lights washed over the dangling tendrils. The aurora changed to an almost golden color and the tendrils wafted and grasped, as if seeking the light.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked.
Anna came back immediately.
“There’s some pretty excited people up here. It looks like some kind of jellyfish analogue. Or maybe a filter feeder do you think?”
“I’ll need to get closer to find out. I’ll get a sample of tissue if I can.”
She didn’t say it, but he heard it anyway… be careful.
He took the sub in slowly. The thing was drifting away from him. He circled and came up behind it and slightly above to ensure he kept away from the hanging tendrils. As he got closer and his lights caught it, the creature’s surface trembled, almost like a shiver running through it. He backed away and approached again, with the same result.
“It must have sensory organs,” Anna said. “It’s light sensitive. It knows you’re there.”
“So now we’re even,” Jodge said. He extended the sampling arm. The creature shivered again, and recoiled when the arm touched it. Its aurora flared, almost as bright as the sub’s headlights. Before he could back away the mass of tendrils whipped up in the water and wrapped tightly around the sub, blocking Jodge’s view. They immediately started to squeeze, as if trying to crack the sub like an egg.
Jodge attempted to dislodge the thing. He still had propulsion, that was something, but the thing came with him as he tossed the sub first one way then the other. It gripped the vessel tighter. Jodge pushed the speed to maximum, and headed upwards; maybe the Opa swarm would distract it.
Red alert, Red alert. Hull breach imminent.
The warning echoed around the small cabin of the submersible.
“Get out of there,” Anna shouted in his ear.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
He headed upwards at high speed, following the beacon, flying blindly due to the writhing, squirming mass of tendrils that fought against him all the way. He looked down at the monitor; he was approaching the Opa layer fast, but the tendrils still refused to loosen their grip. The Opa cloud went into a frenzied, swirling dance, sending out rapid pulses of multi-coloured lights in a dazzling aurora. The tendrils responded by gripping the sub even tighter.
He could feel the pressure build now, and had to equalize by holding his nose and blowing into his ears. It helped, but not much.
The sub, and the beast holding on to it, entered the Opa cloud, and the light show got even brighter, a swirling rainbow dance of color. Jodge piloted the sub on instinct alone, trying to follow the beacon. He made for the drop zone and the tube up through the ice.
“I’m coming up,” he said. “And I won’t be taking my time.”
The trip back up the tube seemed to take forever. The red alert message kept blaring, Anna kept asking if he was okay, the tendrils didn’t loosen their grip…but the hull held, and they kept rising, although it was slow going.
The A.I. came through at about the halfway point.
“I’ve been analyzing the data collected so far. The creature is clearly light sensitive.”
“So where does that get us?” Jodge asked.
“Well, I’ve been wondering what might happen if there was no light.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Jodge said.
“I guess that’s why they pay me the big bucks,” the A.I. replied.
Jodge switched off all of his lights, both headlights and cabin; he was flying blind anyway so it wasn’t a problem. He got a reaction almost immediately. One by one the tendrils loosened their grip and fell away from the hull. He saw the bioluminescent aura of the creature drift away, heading back down the tube while the sub took Jodge upwards.
b
There was a reception committee waiting for him on his return to the dome. Anna was the first to reach him once he’d gotten out of the sub. He didn’t have time to get out of his suit. She punched him, hard, on the shoulder.
“You nearly got yourself killed.”
“Nearly,” Jorge admitted, and held her at arm’s length. “But look, I’m still here. And I got a sample.”
“You got more than that,” a voice said at his back. Anna’s head biologist Davide Thibaut was beside the sub, scraping organic material off the hull. “This merde is all over it. It’ll need to be decontaminated.”
