Derelict

The sandy bottom breaks her descent, cushioning her head as her bow scrapes the plunging dune, guiding her cracked hull to follow suite until, finally, her stern, detached but, as always, bringing up the rear, crushes down and nestles perfectly in the fathomed valley, startling the resident Leviathan from its hundred-year slumber. It goes rocketing in a spray of tentacles across the whelmed desert, giant eye rolling over her mangled remains, astonished, before it slips beyond the depthless veil.

Alone, the Empress lays strewn across the Atlantic floor. A queen, dethroned by a tempest.

As the clouds of tossed sand drift eastwards on currents embolden by the storm another world away, the deep calm resettles, and she can breathe her final sigh through her blown portholes. Suspended and sinking about her are her most cherished possessions. Her proud antiques and beloved bell. Her colours and flags. Her crew. Her passengers. Wrought metal, twisted and wrenched, caught in the sharp elbows of bright red coral that snatch at ruffled hemlines, hooking stockings, stringing them up like a vendor’s display. Floating dolls. Wide eyed and heads unbonneted, hair reaching upwards in strung waves, her ladies-in-waiting spin at their own pace as their chaperones, weighed down by their heaviest evening coats and hubris, bury themselves in the ocean floor, ashamed.

Braver eels slither forth, inspecting their new neighbours, only to shoot back into their crevices at the sound. New sounds, from deep within the Empress.

Screams.

Pleas.

Cruelly saved by pockets of air, but no way out.

None of the lifeboats survived.

The tempest howls miles overhead, still not sated. Day has been night for hours now and she still denies the Sun. There will be no rescue for the sunken survivors.

Lionfish prowl along the promenade deck, wary of the battery of barracudas circling the decanted twin funnels. The hermit crabs pay their respects, claws bent in prayer as they hold vigils for the inevitable. Then they can feast with clear conscience.

Alone, the Empress lays, innards strewn, and wonders.

She does not belong here. Down here. Her duties are above the waves, from port to port, shore to shore, land to land. Her blues had been the forget-me-not skies and glittering stretch of open waters. The blue of her crest and her crew’s well-tailored uniforms. Never this darkest of blue, Neptune’s standard, so far beneath her reign. The crush of saline indigo lurking beneath friendlier turquoise waters looked all the same to her.

Dark. Empty.

The familiar sights of harbors and port towns and seaside markets, and, beyond, a reliable view of an unattainable horizon that promised more—all gone now. Memories currently seeping into the silt still trying to consume her, dragging her down. Gone are the skies and the piers and the people. Before her now, a rippling seabed for her passengers, her wards, to rest in the shadows of uncharted reefs and rocks. Blue and white and rust and lace and flesh and silver, shimmery and dark and bright as the glowing fish eyes of sergeant majors taking turns flitting round and round the wheel beneath the watchful gaze of the helmsman, still pinned to the ceiling, arms dangling in one last attempt to correct course.

A joyous liberation in the upper dining hall is short-lived as a mantis shrimp shatters the aquarium glass with a single punch. The ornamental koi, strangers to these waters, swarm the dance floor, gasping, awed, before violently contorting, agonized in the salinity, and die. Their seaworthy brethren's mourning is brief before a feeding frenzy begins in her bowels.

The only ones to leave on their own accord are the lobsters, having escaped their kitchen enclosure, their claws still banded shut, marching single file in determined procession. She feels their sharp feet scuttle down her side, stinging, before vanishing with a leap of faith into the blue.

The sharks—always late—finally arrive. Still unsettled, the Empress leans further portside with a groan, silt still shifting, exposing her ruptured belly. White tips catch in unnatural light as they decline her invitation, for now.

There is still someone alive, somehow, within. She feels them, treading in their flooded cabin, and it is a small mercy that the porthole is blocked by a cupboard door, sparing the poor soul the sight of their ultimate fate as dozens upon dozens of gaping jaws descend on the lifeless, the strung and the half-buried, and the watery world outside the porthole turns red.

Somewhere beyond, the Leviathan is still gliding, but it picks up the scent and shivers in revulsion, unaware in its escape that it has caught the eye of Ahab’s bane.

Alone, the Empress falls silent, despite the carnage, ignoring the thumps of tails against her rails as the white tips finally begin to bully their way in. She ignores all, except for a greeting, carried from afar on the songs of passing whales.

Nice to finally have company.

Who are you?

A day passes before the whales, joyfully breaching the thundering surface to blow taunts at the tempest still roaring, relay the reply on their subsequent dive.

I forget. Went down in ’42.

Are we alone?

The humpbacks never return, having moved on to colder waters. Trailing them by an hour, in pursuit, but no hurry, a pod of orcas briefly descends to investigate her, sending the sharks in panicked retreat. The response is guttural in their native tongue, but she can hear the smile in the answering words.

We’re not now. I’m now yours. Please, talk to me.

The life within the single cabin dims, but she feels less lonely.

For days, she describes herself through the whistles of dolphins and the stalwart barnacles crusting the leatherbacks. She learns about her distant neighbour from racing marlins and the flapping ray’s wings.

It never grows darker, nor lighter. Her clocks have long stopped, along with time. She counts the days only when she remembers them, and so estimates that no more than three weeks pass before it’s the other’s turn. Over the next month—which passes in comfortably steady communication when the orcas return, well-fed, and set up regular patrols encompassing both debris fields—she learns the other had been built for war.

They agree on the name Victory, ignoring the orcas’ scoffs.

Victory is modest. She does not believe she served in any great battle, thought admits she suppressed much when she sunk. Evident by the holes raking her starboard and the deep pit that once housed her ammunition, and which still pinches from time to time, she hadn’t gone down without a fight. All hands were lost, but she kept most of them locked in her caged embrace. Occasionally, they will stir, stand and stretch and reach for things no longer in arm’s reach, as if reliving their final glory.

The Empress imagines her helmsman, wondering if his remains still watch the wheel.

Yours will move too, Victory promises through a drowsy grouper. Once they grow bored of just lying there. It’ll tickle at first.

No longer alone, the Empress learns, leaning against the slope in comfortable decline, talking snappers and sharks and whales with Victory.

Sometimes, during a lull in conversation, she hears the drone of propellers streaming by skyward, nothing but a hummed echo by the time it finally trickles down to her post in the middle of her graveyard. Despite Victory’s warnings, she tries hailing in those early days and weeks. Her bell won’t sound, and she is distressed to discover she has forgotten the topside languages. Their surface sisters are unversed in the tongues of blue abyss. Fearing she will go silent in despair, Victory sends heartening notes in the forms of hundreds of shapeless jellyfish.

They will find us, someday. We found each other.

But we’ll never sail again.

No, we won’t.

Then what is the point?

She has counted—recollected 228 days. Lost track of dozens more.

There aren’t any bodies to recover. No remains left to return. Only items. Useless things.

A singular cuttlefish, googly-eyed and effervescent, lands, soft-bellied, on the tip of her bow, blowing bubbles containing Victory’s answer.

That we haven’t been forgotten.

Just lost.

It takes more than a week for a messenger crab to sidle along.

Just temporarily misplaced.

Victory’s confidence never wavers. She never counted her days at the bottom of the ocean and has long lost interest in the concept of time and the span of temporariness. She perseveres.

The Empress suggests they change Victory to Perseverance, and Perseverance is amicable to the idea.

More days. Weeks. Months. Dare she believe it … years?

Yes, years. She can feel the stirring within. Naked boned heels scrape and door handles are jiggled and the helmsman occasional tries turning the wheel hard to port. In that one cabin, the cupboard door blocking the porthole is floated aside to get a decent view of the nothingness. She realizes she never felt the captain.

One day, or night, from behind the depthless veil, spills the Leviathan, sporting more stumps than arms as it limps gracelessly to the shelter of her encrusted hull. Its own mantle is badly ripped, toothed, and after decades of fending off the ageing sperm whale that eventually met its own demise at the bulbous end of a tanker, it has now come to die in its former sanctuary. Its large eye, glazed, admire her as it tucks its remaining limbs beneath its tired bulk and deflates against her lettering. The eye grows opaquer and, eventually, dims without shutting. At last, it sleeps again.

Oh, is all Perseverance has to offer at the news of its death.

The ocean is unending. Uncontained. Borderless.

Life comes and goes, and Perseverance speaks to her in all dialects, from Atlantic to Pacific to Antarctic. Over time, she notices certain voices becoming less frequent. Some fall into echoing silence. Others disappear gradually, until a lone individual, desperate for friends, is ferrying their correspondence back and forth without complaint, feeling a part of something they remember cherishing. Some connections are eventually lost when a new voice replaces the previous, who never returned with Perseverance’s reply.

Everything down here dies, Perseverance admits through a troubled eel.

When will we?

She is tired. Old and wrecked. The sharks don’t even scavenge her decks anymore.

We already are.

Then why are we still here?

Because we haven’t been found yet.

The blueness is endless. Timeless. There must be an end to it.

An end does come unexpectedly, some time sooner than she’d hoped and not in a way she’d wished. She waits on Perseverance’s reply to an innocuous question about rust itch …

And waits.

And waits.

The stingray returns after days but has nothing to say. It glides off, soaring out of the valley and out of sight, unable to stand the stillness.

She repeats the question to the minke. It too brings back no advice, or even sympathy. She cranes, but after all these years she still does not know which direction leads to Perseverance.

Are you alright? she asks the hammerhead, which never deigns to return a response.

Are you there? she asks the loggerhead, who looks as dejected coming as it does going.

Say something, Perse! she begs the sperm whale, back to terrorize its long-dead nemesis. Unable to locate the Leviathan, it lifts its head tempestuously skyward and goes to sleep, drifting perpendicularly off into the abyss.

Alone at the bottom of the ocean, the Empress cradles her bored wards, the tickling of fleshless fingertips scratching at her inner walls the only sense other than the cold. A cold, she now realizes, that hadn't been there before. Not since the plunge. And the silence that has never been louder. And time has never stretched longer.

Nor meant so little.

A day without Perseverance passes. Or a week. Or a month. Or a year. Or decades.

She never got to hear Perseverance’s voice. Only her voiced replies. Yet she misses the sound of her, with every passing year. Or week. Or day.

Until one moment in time.

It could be day or night, whatever those were anymore. Time doesn’t matter.

Just this moment.

Out of the dark and cold blue, a brightness, small but growing, descending, alighting the valley as she slowly recognizes the sound of humming. Different, smoother, but familiar enough to be the telltale drone of an engine propelling the glow of light forward.

The little submersible sweeps over her, its large domed eye wide, surface reflective and unblinking. Behind the synthetic eye, large and round like the memory of the Leviathan, the researchers cheer.

At her helm, the wheel stops turning hard to port.

At last, at long last.

Unforgotten. Unforgettable.

As she allows herself to finally rest, accepting she is irretrievable but not lost, she sends one final message to Perseverance, should she still be out there, waiting, entrusting her assurance to the care of a fleeting blue whale—the last of its kind, unbeknownst to them both.

All is well. I have been found. Hope to hear from you soon. All my love, Yours.