Well-deck attack and casualties aboard the Independence

The well-deck attack aboard the Independence turns a bid to study a strange marine organism into a deadly breach of the ship’s defenses. Mick Rubin urges Judith Li to open the sluice and draw a sample from the luminous mass below; once the hatch is open, an orca smashes through it, the Deepflight is wrecked, and the people at the basin are caught between the whale and the organism forcing its way aboard.

The decision to open the sluice

Rubin sees the presence of the jelly-like creatures beneath the ship as a rare research opportunity. He proposes opening the hatch in the keel, attracting some of the organism into the well deck, then sealing the sluice and keeping the captured material for testing. Sal Peak objects that anything could enter, and Luther Roscovitz reacts with disbelief when Rubin calls for the hatch to be opened. Rubin nevertheless presses Judith Li over the ship’s microphone, arguing that they may not get another chance to collect a significant sample.

Li gives permission, with a warning to be careful. Rubin’s confidence rests partly on the assumption that the closed glass flaps will keep the well deck safe while the hatch is open. He then orders Roscovitz to operate it, while Leon Anawak, Jack Greywolf, and Alicia Delaware are underwater, occupied with unharnessing the dolphins and unable to hear Rubin’s calls to hurry. The decision is therefore made above them, without their immediate awareness of the danger.

Underwater, Delaware sees the steel flaps swing open and realizes that the sea below the basin is glowing vivid blue, with flashes of light cutting through it. An approaching shape resolves into an orca, rising vertically at speed. Delaware recognizes its massive rounded head, black beak, white chin, and rows of teeth; its size and momentum make the armored-glass plug vulnerable to a direct collision. She tries to get clear, but the whale strikes the hatch like a torpedo, shattering the glass and tearing pieces from the metal rim. The impact and surge of water spin Delaware through the debris, and she is struck between the shoulders as the orca drives through the opening.

The breach jolts the people on the jetty as well as those in the water. The wave lifts the Deepflight, and the orca’s head rams the submersible, hurling it into the air and breaking its chain. Browning is thrown onto the control panel; the Deepflight then fills with water and sinks. Rubin shouts for the sluice flaps to close, but the wrecked vessel obstructs the mechanism. As Delaware struggles beneath the hatch, the falling submersible crushes her torso and pushes her through the opening. The steel flaps strike the trapped craft and stop its descent, but Delaware continues falling into open water. An orca bites into her chest, killing her before the luminous mass reaches the sluice.

The organism overwhelms the well deck

With the hatch jammed by the Deepflight, the sluice could no longer be closed cleanly. Greywolf, swimming toward the gap after Delaware disappeared, saw a vast mass force its way through the half-open opening. It rose not as a recognizable animal but as a column of jelly roughly three metres across, streaming toward the well deck and branching into slender, luminous tendrils. The image of a single creature gave way to something larger and less stable: the mass changed shape as it entered, its edges extending into the ship’s artificial harbour.

The attack continued on two fronts. As Rubin tried to escape, an orca surged from the water and caught Roscovitz in its jaws; the whale dropped back, leaving Roscovitz’s torso dangling above the basin. Rubin could not look away, and only gradually understood that the scream he heard was his own. The human attempt to collect a sample had instead exposed the people on the deck to the force they had hoped to study, while the orcas moved through the same confined space as the advancing jelly.

The mass’s movement became a violent assault on the well deck itself. Peak saw tendrils lash the walls and jetty, soldiers thrown into the basin, shelving collapse, and equipment fly. The organism’s extensions did not keep a fixed form: one stem changed into something fish-like, then sprouted fine feelers, while fins and misshapen heads surfaced and dissolved back into shapeless material. The scene offered no secure boundary between a single body and many apparent animals. What had entered through the sluice behaved as a shifting aggregation, filling the basin and striking whatever lay within reach.

The turning point came when the USS Independence began pumping water out of the well deck. As the ballast tanks emptied, the ship’s stern lifted and the basin drained into the sea. The organism’s tendrils retreated with the falling water until the mass vanished beneath the surface. In the wreckage, Greywolf found Peak and carried him along the jetty toward the embankment. The ship’s pumps, rather than a weapon, had checked the immediate assault by removing the water that allowed the organism to surge through the deck.

The drained basin left the immense mass stranded, pale, and dying. Judith Li recognized that it was not one organism but a conglomerate of billions of amoebas, and moved to save as much of it as possible. While searching the wreckage, she found Browning beneath the jelly. Anawak helped pull the technician’s body free, but the material clung to her legs; her corpse was unusually heavy, and a shiny coating on her face began to run over her shoulders and neck and into her ears.

Li and Anawak understood the movement as an attempt by the jelly to control Browning’s body. Anawak reasoned that the mass was spreading through her and encountering the structure of a human body, but that Browning was not a whale: residual electrical activity in her brain was reacting to the attempted control. The jelly was testing functions in her brain without understanding how humans worked. Browning was already dead; what Li and Anawak witnessed was the final stage of an experiment gone wrong. The attack thus ended not with the organism’s successful use of a human body, but with evidence of both its capacity to enter one and the limits of that capacity.

Counterattack and the human cost

Jack Greywolf’s attempt to reach the sluice brought him into the organism’s path. Tentacles wrapped around his shoulders as Alicia Delaware’s death replayed in his mind; he tore at them and tried to escape. At the hatch, he saw the steel flaps close across the jelly’s trunk, cutting through it. The organism’s response was immediate: water surged upward as an orca burst from the basin, while enormous strands of jelly spiralled toward the ceiling, struck the walls, and swept the jetty. Soldiers were thrown into the water amid screams and gunfire.

Sal Peak was knocked into the basin and found himself facing the orca at close range. A shimmering coating clung to his legs, holding him until he stabbed at it with his harpoon gun. When the whale’s jaws sprang open less than a metre away, he thrust the weapon into its mouth and fired. Around him, the organism kept changing shape: a translucent stem became fish-like and sprouted threadlike feelers, while apparent fins and heads rose from the water and collapsed into shapeless matter. The encounter made the well deck a place where neither a stable animal form nor a clear boundary between attacker and environment could be trusted.

The ship’s effort to drain the basin finally gave the survivors a way out of the immediate assault. As the water level fell and the organism retreated, Greywolf found Peak and carried him along the jetty to the embankment. Peak had entered the water as the officer attempting to contain the crisis; he left it injured and dependent on the man he had to be rescued by. The episode’s losses and wreckage remained, but the draining well deck interrupted the organism’s advance and allowed the struggle to shift from survival to the aftermath.

The failure of controlled observation

The attack exposes how little control the sampling plan actually secured. Rubin treats the glowing mass as material that can be lured through a hatch, captured, and tested; instead, opening the sluice brings the orcas and the shifting aggregation into the same confined space, while the Deepflight’s wreckage physically jams the barrier meant to contain them. The attempt to separate specimen from environment collapses: the hatch, submersible, basin, and living mass become parts of one unstable mechanism, each affecting what the others can do. The Independence’s pumps can interrupt the organism’s advance by draining the well deck, but they cannot restore the scene to a controlled experiment. Li’s effort to preserve the dying aggregate, followed by the discovery that it had entered Browning’s body, leaves the researchers with evidence of a capacity they did not understand rather than the safely isolated sample Rubin had imagined.