Blink: Leviathan (Book 2)

23

For a moment Darien just stood there, staying absolutely still. There was no way he'd imagined it. The very rock beneath him had shifted, but it hadn't been the violent tremor of a quake. The motion was too smooth for that. He looked at Hekket.

"You felt that...right?"

His companion nodded, a look of apprehension stamped on his face. Slowly Hekket stood up, edging away from the spot where he'd taken a sample. The ground moved again in an almost gentle motion, and the deep bass note again throbbed agonizingly in their ears. Clenching his jaw tight against the pain, Darien concentrated on keeping his feet. A grinding sound reverberated through the water as whatever it was scraped against the walls of the Coring Well.

Something was very, very wrong.

He could see more expulsions of bubbling water coming out of the crack he'd been examining. They were coming more regularly now, increasing in tempo, and he could feel the faint tug of the current even from several meters away.

"Darien..."

Hekket's hoarse gasp made him swing back to look. The other boy was staring with a look of horror at the spot where the sample had been cored from. Following his gaze, Darien was shocked to see a strange, oily fluid seeping in wisps from the incision, weaving up through the dark water like a phantom.

"What's happening?"

"That's not rock."

"Then what..."

His voice trailed off at the sound of a low muffled rumble in the water. He looked up into the darkness that they'd passed through just minutes before. He couldn't see anything definite, but the water was moving, shaking.

"Hekket," he said quietly. "Get off the surface. Follow me."

Kicking the micro-jets into gear he propelled himself up off the slowly rotating surface and started swimming, a horrible feeling taking root in the back of his mind. He prayed that his guess would be wrong. But then a lump of stone the size of his torso sank past him and his heart sank with it. He cast the beam of his torch through the dark, towards the place where the collapsed pillar had been. He suspected that if the surface they'd been standing on wasn't rock, then that support was not a support at all.

Sure enough, his blood turned to ice at the sight that met his eyes.

What they'd thought was a pillar was currently being pulled from where it had been driven into the wall, and its segments bent in a motion that was horrendously life-like. Slowly, inexorably, it retracted, pulling lumps of debris from the wall as it moved.

"Impossible."

"That's not a support strut," Darien gasped. "It's a leg."

"That message – the warning – and all those carvings." Hekket didn't sound calm anymore. He sounded utterly shocked. "You don't think...the Leviathan that alien talked about, could this be...?" It was almost like he didn't want to finish the sentence, letting his voice fade out into a numb silence.

Darien braced himself for the worst and looked down.

As a Blink Operative, Darien Flint had seen a lot of strange and frightening things, but nothing even approached the dumbstruck horror that gripped him when he found himself staring down at the Leviathan of Marianas. The head alone was dozens of meters across and eyes as wide as he was tall stared into the gloom. A jaw that could have swallowed a house hung open, bubbling and frothing as the water around it churned, and it was filled with two matching rows of fangs. The head also sported two scarred, grey tusks, each one as long as a truck.