The Final Depth Book 1

The hydrophone array sang in seventeen channels, and channel nine was wrong.

Priya Naicker has mapped the noise floor of the Meridian Marine Sanctuary for eight months. She knows its contours the way she knows her pulse. When channel nine shows a displacement three times the size of a blue whale - hugging the trench wall where sonar dies - she logs it as a sensor error, because the alternative is impossible.

Kit Saracen wants it to be real. The last of a family whose fleet stripped these waters for forty years, he has built a coral-restoration foundation on the coastline his father emptied - and it runs on documentary money. Rook Ferreira, his ex-military operations lead, has other opinions. Captain Ines Roque of the R/V Pelagia is not sure the ocean can be argued with by any of them.

Then a barge takes a punch from below.

Then something the size of a nightmare crosses their floodlights, and Priya says a word she cannot un-say.

By the time the Pelagia limps for open water on eight percent of her fuel, a documentary crew has framed the shot, an Authority administrator has forbidden the response, and Priya is alone in the CIC replaying an audio signature that fits nothing in her catalog.