Thirteenth in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
Two months before Invasion: Hawaii
The Ocean Listener was a former fishing boat, now a science vessel operated by the University of Hawaii. It took students, professors and other researchers out to the sea around the Hawaiian islands to carry out various scientific and scholarly studies. Apart from getting caught in the occasional squall, these trips were almost invariably uneventful. Things didn’t change much from trip to trip; while the students may be thrilled with the sights, sounds and events, they were only there for the one trip. Sometimes twice. But Joe Angelo, captain of the Ocean Listener, was there for every trip and had seen it all.
Except today. Today was different.
The Ocean Listener had found itself some sixty miles south of Honolulu before sunrise, around three miles above the Lana’I Deep seafloor. The hybrid gas/electric motor allowed it to travel fast when needed, quiet when needed; but as the sun was coming up it needed to be dead silent. So it sat motionless in the water, engine off. Dangling over the side were several cables, dropping hydrophones to a number of depths. Captain Angelo often listened in; he’d seen it all before, heard it all before, but the sounds of the deep sea often entranced him nonetheless.
Captain Angelo watched disinterestedly as the students ran their tests, checked their data, basically ran around like students. Enthusiasm coupled with youthful energy and the belief that the small tests they were running were actually relevant, maybe even important. Captain Angelo was quietly amused by that, remembering back to that age when he thought that he would conquer the world. And now he ran a boat.
The sun was starting to rise, always a beautiful part of the day, and that quickly drew his interest. When the sun came up some more it would warm up; the chill of an early March night did not compete with the North Dakota winters he grew up with, but it was still enough to cause the students to layer up. But once the sun and the temperature was up, the layers would come off… and the female students almost always presented a sight worth looking at. Carefully, of course… not a good idea to get caught looking. Three cheers for wraparound sunglasses.
But this morning, something unusual happened. As always, the students were wearing headphones or earbuds that tapped into the hydrophones; sometimes there were exclamations of surprise as the sound of fish chattering away or of geological movement. Small shouts of joy at overhearing whales or dolphins talking to each other were quite common. But today there were multiple simultaneous exclamations of surprise and confusion. The Captains interest was drawn when the professor put on headphones and listened intently, her eyes quickly growing wide with something that looked like a mix of befuddlement and alarm.
Captain Angelo reached up and pulled out his own headphones from an overhead cubbyhole. He put them on and dialed them into the hydrophone output. There were multiple channels, one each for the dozens of phones at different depths from just a few feet to over 15,000 feet down. He cycled through them, and they all sounded much the same. There was something… talking.
Over the years, he had grown to know many of the forms of speech the creatures of the ocean used. The mournful songs of the Humpbacks, the clicks, pops and whistles of dolphins, the buzzing screech of the killer whale. The grunts of monk seals. Some fish made chattering clicks. Even crabs and clams made their noises. But this… this was new. It was complex, like a human language, but it was no language that any human ever did or ever could speak. The voice was vast, and deep, and exceedingly powerful; it was as loud at ten feet deep as at 10,000 feet. It spoke slowly, but with purpose, almost like a chant. Captain Angelo did not like the voice. Not only did it sound out of place, it sounded angry, full of malice.
Whatever it was, it lasted for several minutes. And then it stopped. Angelo slowly took off the headphones and watched the students; most were still listening intently, though several were sending messages to compatriots back on shore, tapping on phones, pads, laptops. Angelo knew that there was now almost certainly an ongoing effort by listening stations all around the Pacific to collate data to triangulate the source of the deep voice. The race would be on to locate it, and almost certainly to be the first to put a boat or a submersible at that spot, to look underwater to find the source. Captain Angelo desperately hoped that the source was nowhere near Hawaii so that he wouldn’t be asked to go anywhere near it.
Soon, the students reported new sounds: cetaceans. Whales and dolphins were apparently chattering up a storm now; apparently they were as interested in the voice as the students were. The professor, though, pointed out that the sounds were those of fear and panic, the sort of sounds that these creatures would make when under attack by sharks or tangled in fishing nets. As the minutes rolled by, more and more cetacean voices were heard. Whale songs travel far in the ocean, at the speed of sound in water. Soon the hydrophones were nearly white noise with the overload of cetacean communications.
Captain Angelo no longer much cared if the female students decided to get more comfortable. The sun was up now, but it seemed to him that the light it gave was cold and harsh. He had the feeling that he had just heard the trump of doom and that it had come from the sea rather than the sky. He wanted little more than to simply go home.