Bennie and Roderick arrived at the dock early that morning, in that silly pink minivan covered with rust-spots. Vera watched them from the dock, leaning against the railing to help support her weight.
She could've sworn that every time she saw that old beater Bennie found some way to make it crazier. Were those seats zebra-striped?
Bennie practically leapt from the passenger-seat, crossing straight to her. "Hey Vera. How're you feeling?"
They exchanged cheerful hugs. Her eyes settled on the fish that circled around him. Mercury looked more like a shark than Cerulean, and usually kept to the air above his humans rather than swimming along beside them. "Aching and sore, you know how it is."
"Oh, I know." He winked. "Roderick, you coming?"
He emerged from the trunk a few moments later, with two massive mesh bags of gear over his shoulders. But Roderick had the build for it. He didn't flinch under the weight. "Ready for adventure," he said, only slightly out of breath. "Maps, camera, clothes, wine... got it all."
"Like we promised, we'll cover fuel this time," Bennie added. "You got the tank too, Roderick?"
He shook his head once. "Second trip. After you."
The next few hours went just about the same as most of her trips. Fewer and fewer of her diving friends were still around to go out on the more adventurous expeditions. Some former students and other citizens of St. Agnes had joined that group, but none were ready for anything this difficult.
She didn't mind. Bennie always had something interesting to talk about, and Roderick made up for his more subdued personality with eminent practical skills. He could actually drive the boat, freeing Vera from needing to stay in the skipper's chair all the time.
The old satnav system still worked, if you were willing to trust her not to crash your ship into the rocks somewhere. Vera was—even at her most paranoid, she recognized that the evil goddess only wanted to kill in one particular way. Crushing a ship and drowning the people inside wouldn't serve her agenda, so fearing it was pointless.
They woke early the next morning, and arrived at the site about noon. The water was clear enough to see all the way down to the rocks. She imagined she could make out a cavern far below, visible somewhere below.
Roderick went down with just a weight belt, securing the anchor to a slowly-rusting tether on the rocks below. He came up grinning. "Crystal clear. Feels like sixty-five degrees... couldn't be better."
They ate lunch together, before Bennie produced an old many-times-folded map of the cave, spreading it on the mess table. "I figure we do this in three dives. Go down with a hundred-foot line and gage the interior. That should take us to this branch, here. We can follow the line back, and take more to try each side. Doesn't really matter if it's night for one of those—there's no light either way."
"That seems like a good plan," Cerulean said. Unlike Mercury, she actually came into the building. The other fish didn't seem to like being inside very much. "You should be extra careful down there. There's a lot of stone in the way... if something goes wrong, no fish will be able to reach you."
"Rock blocks the signal?" Roderick asked. They all had watches now, and she'd never seen her friends without them. Cerulean seemed able to appear to them when she wanted.
"Yeah," she said. "The dive computer is different, it can run independently. I'll double check everyone's gear before you go in, but you should look it over too."
Vera's eyebrows went up at that. There were feats of engineering advanced enough that even the goddess couldn't accomplish them? She wasn't sure she believed that.
But if the lie meant an abundance of caution and triple-checking all their gear before they went down, she wasn't about to complain. "I'm more worried about pirates. What if someone comes along and finds our ship with nobody on it?"
Cerulean giggled. "Pirates? There's nobody within a hundred miles. I'm not really sure there are any pirates, anyway. There's a whole planet of old junk for people to take. If someone can make it out here, they don't need your ship."
The first dive came about an hour later. It was everything Vera might've hoped for. The Onyx Cave began with a massive opening in the rocky sea floor at about sixty feet, creating a spectacular blue shaft of light that shone through to the cavern floor below.
The touch of pre-collapse humans was here, waiting for them. A huge white sign waited just inside, covered in skull markers. "PREVENT YOUR DEATH" read the old block letters. "GO NO FURTHER" A well-meaning warning, but they promptly ignored it. They were no visiting tourists, they'd prepared for this.
They'd all geared for the trip, and each one carried a massive cave-light. Well, except Bennie, but he had the camera.
Their first dive was like something out of a movie, gawking at the elaborate formations in what had once been a living limestone cavern before it flooded who knew how many years ago. In some ways, it was the closest to the strange worlds Vera sometimes saw in the backgrounds of Cerulean's image on her watch. Only this place was real.
They stuck to the dive plan with religious precision. The instant their line ran out, Vera tied it off to a rock somewhere, and they went no further.
Deeper darkness loomed ahead, with spectacular caverns full of sparkling bridal-veils and massive stalagmites thronging with fish. But they would have to wait for the later dives.
It was all they talked about when they got back to the boat—distinctly not stolen out from under them, as Cerulean had promised.
"No wonder there was so much written about this place," Bennie said, reclining in the sun across from Vera. Both her companions removed their wetsuits between dives, but she just peeled it down to her waist. Fighting with the harness just wasn't worth the effort.
"Well yeah," Roderick said. "So much living down there. Feels like there should be some kinda sea-monster living there too. Waiting to drag down ships, maybe."
Bennie giggled, splashing his glass towards Roderick. "The world has enough monsters in it, Roderick. We don't need to be looking for more."
The next dive was even more exciting than the first. This was the shorter and easier of the two branches, with mostly open conditions. More awesome footage for the camera.
Then came the last dive—of their trip, and probably the whole season.
The trouble started about a hundred feet into the cave, when they reached the first branch. That was when Vera's flashlight died. She rapped on her tank with the scooter to get their attention, then signed at her dead flashlight.
Her companions shared a look, before Roderick scribbled something on his slate. "Follow me? Enough light."
She sighed, then nodded, depositing her dead lamp by the end of the first line.
She wrapped their second guide-line to the rocks beside it, then started unspooling it. She had to rely on Roderick shining the light for her while she worked, but that wasn't so bad. The cave made it worth it.
Cerulean kept pace beside her, the only clear shape she saw in the darkness of the cavern. The seapony glowed with her own light, fins leaving little bioluminescent trails in the water behind them. Or maybe that was the bright yellow of her safety line.
The left fork had some of the most spectacular formations she'd seen yet, but also the most challenging conditions to reach them. Many of the rocks were sharp, protruding far enough to poke unpleasantly at them if they got too close. But there was little enough space that they didn't have much choice.
More than once Vera had to squeeze out of her BCD, pushing it through the water ahead of her to fit through a narrow gap in the rocks. Always she was at the back of the group with their safety-line, often having to signal for Roderick's attention to get any light.
I'm glad we didn't plan on a forth dive tomorrow. I think three times is enough.
Her whole body ached by the time she finally saw their destination ahead of her—the silvery underside of the water's surface. They'd finally reached the cavern on their maps. Vera squeezed the controls on her scooter as hard as she dared, surging ahead towards the rocky wall. It wasn't a shore exactly, more like a sheer cliff leading up and out.
Bennie was first up, heaving out of the water. He made several excited sounds up there, and Vera soon followed. She splashed out of the water's surface, hands scrambling for purchase on slick rock before he caught her wrist.
"This place is huge!" he said. "You gotta get up here and see it!"