X-COM : Terror from the Deep: Angel Diver
Copyright (1995) MicroProse Software, Inc.
X-COM Copyright 1995, MicroProse Software, Inc.
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"Don't ever go down alone," her father had told her--several times, each after
an episode of having ignored the previous warning. "You stupid, you go down
alone. No matter how good, I never went down alone."
Liar.
Where did he think she had learned it from--the joy, the utter focus of diving
without a partner? The warmth of the sea, the vastness of it surrounding you
like a mother's embrace...he was the one who had showed it to her and described
it enough times that the yearning was unstoppable. After that, he could tell her
'no' as often as he wanted, and she would do it anyway. And if she was grounded
for disobeying, well, it was only until next time. When she was an adult it was
disapproval, not grounding. Now that he was dead, she did it as much for him as
for herself.
A big fish swam by, grinning at her, and she grinned back. She was sinking
slowly, letting the bouancy control vest and the weights do their work of
dragging her down while giving her time to acclimate to the pressure. She loved
this--sightseeing on the way down in the biggest, grandest elevator in
existence. She was alone, as usual, except for her father's ghost beside her.
Since he had died, he had taken to diving alongside her with alarming frequency.
His damned singsong voice would remind her of things while she drifted and
explored, and once he had saved her life by reminding her to check her gauges.
Sure enough, she had had a leak.
"Subconscious," her boyfriend of the time had said. "You had a subconscious
knowledge that manifested itself as the voice of someone important to you.
That's all."
Probably so, she thought, but it's comforting anyway. Hey, who knew? Maybe too
much contact with those alien wrecks had strengthened her father's spirit
somehow and he wasn't entirely dead. Maybe there was a ghost named Guiseppi
Morelli out there somewhere, and it chose to visit her when she went diving.
"Wouldn't you like to know," he whispered in her ear, and she smiled.
Touchdown! Her feet blasted up milky sand, which drifted slowly but inexorably
up to her head. She kicked away and rose out of the dust-storm, inflating her BC
exactly enough from long experience; now she had zero buoyancy and was ready to
fly.
There was an interesting formation about a hundred yards to the north, so she
kicked lazily in that direction, arms gently outstretched to brush past
fish-forms that floated all around her, looking like dust-motes in the bright
light shining from her headlamp. The sheer number of life-forms down here always
amazed her: fish, shrimp, little wiggly worms, bottom-movers...you could never
dive alone, after all.
"Gauge check!" her father called cheerily, and for a moment there was ice in her
gut--was something wrong again? Turned out it was just routine, and she moved
with more vigor then, closing in on the strange, humping formation of rock and
coral and sand. Her instincts said, "Pirate ship!" though she knew that the
sea-lanes here were unlikely to have carried ships in those days. Still, drift
and time being what they were...
An eel squeezed itself like jelly from a small fissure in the stone hump, and
she greeted it with an exhalation of bubbles. So, the hill was hollow inside!
Maybe it was a shipwreck after all! She let herself drift slowly, losing
momentum as she closed in on the underwater hill, and she searched with careful
shakes of her head for any large openings in the silt. She had three small
limpet charges for emergency signals, rock-breaking, or such, but this might
take heavier tools. Maybe, she thought, I should come back with a salvage team.
Have to be sure, first, though.
"Maybe we should stay out of sight," her dad muttered, and without thinking she
kicked over and back and then down behind the arch of the hill, just as the
sweeping beam from the submersible passed over where she had been. If they saw
anything, it was a quick glimpse of flipper-tip or maybe the torpedo blackness
of the small attittude jets strapped to her ankles. They looked just like fish.
From her vantage point she watched the vehicle close in on the hill. The closer
it got, the less familiar it looked. It had a smooth exterior build that spoke
of sophisticated engineering, and strange mottled markings that shifted like
light-shadows from the surface, though there was no light this far down. Was it
some secret government vessel? Maybe it was one of the gizmos her dad had worked
with so many years ago, when they were still salvaging alien wrecks.
"Nothing I ever saw," he said. "But you know what they remind me of? Whoa!"
The hill was breaking apart as she watched! There was no beam, no drill, no
explosion, but the hardened silt and rock was lifting away like plaque, coming
free of whatever was underneath, exposing--what?
"Haven," her dad breathed. He ought to know. He'd seen plenty of underwater
sub-pens in his day, and described them to her enough times for her to know that
this submersible was docking with some sort of secret base out here in the
middle of the Atlantic.
"Not a healthy place to be," he observed. "Odds are good they wouldn't like you
being out here."
"I'm going, Gus," she muttered, the familiarity not seeming to bother him. She
danced back from the hollow she was in, trying to keep low to the ocean floor
and out of sight of the vehicle now disappearing into the giant clam-shell maw
of the docking facility. Spies, terrorists, government, criminals--whatever they
were, she wanted no part.
The boat! As soon as she was clear, she kicked up and away, carefully adjusting
the BC to give her a little positive bouyancy. Cursing, she cut off the
headlamp, but there was no obvious sign that anyone had seen it. Like an ember
she drifted up toward the surface, arms at her side, head tilted slightly back
to facilitate breathing. Time passed in ecstatic anti-gravity, punctuated with
careful pre-planned stops to depressurize that seemed to take hours.
Finally, she broke the sky and was back in the real world, swimming in a tossing
sea wearing rubber and heavy plastic oxygenators. She took a bearing from her
wrist, turned south, and discovered a slight problem.
No boat.
Never one for inaction, she struck out immediately in the direction the boat was
supposed to be, but there was nothing there--no place for it to hide, no one on
board to take it for A Quick Spin And I'll Be Right Back, Mom. There was
nothing--just the ocean and Angelina Morelli, Angelfish to her dad's Moray.
Diving alone, really, really alone, again.
Some surface-skimming fish hung in the wave before her, and she thought,
"Shark!" as her hand reached for the small bang-stick on her wrist. Then she
realized it was just a piece of driftwood bobbing in the swells. Must be getting
spooked by all this, she thought, and then the ice returned to her guts.
"Isn't that, like, your boat?" her dad asked sarcastically. "I recognize the
paint job."
"Shut up," she muttered, knowing it was true. She managed to snag the piece,
draw it to her, and use it for a moment's rest, but it was indeed a part of the
bowsprit of her ship, the Moray II. Now what the hell had happened?
There was a bubbling light from below, like every scene from a science fiction
movie where something awesome emerges from the ocean's depths. She looked down,
saw a dim, shaky shape moving up toward her, and knew.
No place to hide, here! She dropped off the driftwood and cleared her BC,
wishing for some more ballast, did a mermaid dive and ended up pointing down,
kicking vigorously as the submersible rose up to meet her. She veered and it did
not, meaning it probably couldn't see her and was just coming back to the scene
of its latest triumph: the destruction of her vessel. No sense in sticking
around waiting for rescue or a friendly word. If they were that ready to destroy
private property to protect their secret, she didn't figure her life meant
scratch.
Down some more, and then a searchlight stabbed out and nailed her like a bug on
a killing-board. She tried to veer, but it stayed with her, and the whole
vehicle stopped, spun, and started down after her.
"Time to vamoose!" Gus cried, and she concurred with a kick to the attitude
jets, ten seconds each of compressed gas that could move her at twenty knots.
Normally, she'd kick them both on at the same time, but endurance seemed more
important than speed here. So she activated them singly, sticking one leg out
and then the other, like Esther Williams doing water ballet. Ten seconds each,
and in the first seven she pulled away from the sub, jetting ahead of the
stabbing brightness of its lights and losing herself in the murky gloom.
Thirteen seconds later she was somewhere else, near the ocean floor amid a pile
of sand and rubble, and the menacing shape was above and searching, drawing
closer but not knowing where she was.
Breathing time! Gauge check showed over an hour to go, so that was only a minor
problem. Bigger one: who were they, and what should she do about it? Give
herself up? Hide forever? Detonate her signal-bombs and pray for rain?
The boat stopped about thirty yards away, drifting only slightly as a small
hatch slid open in its belly. Three divers popped out and sank slowly to the
sea-bed. They wore bulky suits that looked very strange and inefficient, except
that they seemed to have more arms than necessary...
"Holy Cydonia!" her father cried. "I knew it! It's what I was gonna say before.
Lookit them bastards!"
The aliens touched the ground and fanned out, shining small but intense bluish
lights in all directions. Now how in the deep blue hell did they get here? Last
one of these bad boys was supposedly cut up into frozen chunks about twenty-six
years ago, right when she'd been born.
"Thought we'd made the world safe for you, little one," he said. "Sorry. We
screwed up, I guess."
There they were, moving away from the boat but just barely. It was like they
were afraid of something, like little kids walking away from mommy for the first
time, ready to run right back at the first sign of trouble. Only that, except
for the bang-stick and three little bombs, she would be no trouble at all.
Not according to any of the stories she'd heard.
So she waited. They got closer to her but never too close, then they all fell
back at once like they'd just decided to give it up. They assembled under the
belly of the sub, and rode on little jets like hers back into the womb. The sub
hung there for what seemed like ages.
It was silent in her head, except for her own thoughts. Thoughts about the
stories she'd heard, thoughts about what the aliens could do if left alone,
wondering why they hadn't taken off for home in all this time. Maybe their ship
had crashed and these were the survivors, who'd altered the spaceship to work
underwater. Did they have long lifespans? Were these the last aliens left on
Earth, and if she swam away now would they venture out again in their
submersible, blowing up another boat and maybe killing someone?
Dad didn't say anything, for or against, as she suddenly pushed off from the
bottom, angling up and kicking as hard as she could for speed, arrowing at the
alien vessel as she looked for the glass portals, the jet holes, anything, while
her hands fumbled at the pack at her belt.
She thought they saw her coming, but somebody wasn't sure what she was or why
she was suddenly coming at them when before she'd moved away so fast. So they
only got off one bolt, which went wide though she felt its heat in the water
through the thick rubber of her suit, then she rammed into the ship with a
bone-jarring thud. Her hands immediately thrust into the small attitude jets,
praying they didn't fire them up right then, and then she was away and kicking
back as hard as she'd come forward, feeling the heat from the next beam sizzling
up the backs of her legs and through her spine to come out the top of her head--
--and she was down among the muck and the bottom-movers. The one bolt had gone
wide again, not searing her at all. She was still in possession of all arms,
legs, spines and so forth, but the alien vessel seemed to be having some
digestion problems. The three little limpets had gone off, and though the ship
didn't explode gloriously in pyrotechnics like in the movies, it was wobbling
and there was smoke coming from the jet. Smoke underwater always meant bad
things.
Another bolt flickered from some unseen weapons mount, but it was unaimed and
sizzled up a chunk of ocean floor ten yards away. Then the sub angled for the
bottom like it was diving forrefuge, and she thought about it for only a second
before pumping away from there as fast as her aching legs could carry her. Even
when the shock wave from the glorious pyrotechnics finally came, she kept
swimming and swimming, unconscious or not.
"Ready?" Dave Possiteur held one hand to his breathing mask as he looked over at
her, his mirror image. She nodded, and they went over the side together. "Check
check," came in her ear.
"Check check," she muttered.
"Okay, ready to follow," he said. It had taken a long time of cajoling and
persuasion, but he had agreed to come out to the site and search with her
for...for the wreckage of the Moray II, to see if anything was salvagable. She'd
looked before the rescue vehicle had come, and found nothing-- nothing at
all--but she wanted to be sure. If she was going to keep quiet about the last
aliens on Earth, she'd better be darn sure she'd done them in. No sense causing
a panic and becoming a ward of the government for the rest of her life, however
short that might have been. Better to keep the secret.
Gus must have agreed, because he hadn't spoken to her since the explosion. And
now that she had a regular diving partner, she didn't think dad would be coming
along any more.