Rolling in the Deep Read Free Page B

your orientation packets are in your rooms, and my crew will be escorting you there shortly. In the meantime, I’m going to go get us moving. Mr. Curran, if you want to film our departure, I recommend getting your cameras in position.”
    Then she was gone, leaving the rest to scramble for the doors.
     

     
    It was an iconic shot even before the weight of what was to come was laid behind it: the Atargatis , resplendent with her white sides and her brightly lit windows, pulling away from the dock and sailing toward the distant sunset. The cameras on shore caught every glimmer of light off the glass, and lingered on the silhouettes of the scientists and crew who crowded the deck. None of the Blue Seas mermaids were captured in those lingering images; the only proof that they ever came aboard was a signed contract and a single picture snapped by one of the Imagine interns. In that digital photograph, the eleven women are smiling, laughing, clearly excited about their upcoming adventure.
    None of them would ever be seen again, of course, just as none of the scientists, interns, Imagine camera crews, or ship’s personnel would be seen again—not alive. But in that moment, as the Atargatis sailed, none of this was known. They saw a great adventure. They saw a glorious and entertaining hoax. They saw profit, ratings, everything but the disaster that awaited them.
    The Atargatis sailed blithely on, out of the harbor, and into history.

According to the official manifest, the Atargatis sailed with over two hundred people on board. The captain, Jovanie Seghers, and her first mate, David Mendoza, had been operating the liner for eight years with no recorded incidents. The majority of their crewmen had likewise been with them in excess of five years.
    Imagine personnel included six scientists, thirty graduate students employed as scientific interns, one “television personality,” thirty-five camera operators and sound engineers, five personal assistants, three dive instructors, two safety monitors, and one producer. Additional personnel included the eleven-person Blue Seas mermaid troupe.
    Only by looking at the numbers involved can we get a feeling for the true scope of the Atargatis tragedy. To lose a man at sea is a terrible thing. To lose a crew of this size, with all hands, is to strain the boundaries of belief.
    —from Modern Ghost Ships: The Atargatis , originally aired on the Imagine Network, December 2017.

 
    Part II 
     
    Sails of Silver

 
    It took ten days to travel from port to the Mariana Trench. They could have made the voyage in nine, but the itinerary provided by Imagine included a stop in Honolulu, where the ship’s “official guide” and her cameraman visited a local aquarium and filmed some talking head segments with local marine biologists and oceanographers who were willing to have their names associated with the documentary, but weren’t willing to risk the reputation hit that could come from being on board. Alexandra sat by the rail, recording chemical readings and privately hating them. Lucky, tenured jerks who had forgotten what it was like to live in the trenches of “publish or perish.” For them, the Atargatis and her quixotic mission was some sort of joke. For the scientists on board…
    Alexandra had known most of them for years. Oceanography was a big field, but like all arenas of scientific inquiry, it was plagued by nepotism, rivalry, and the vague belief that whatever your peers were doing, it had to be more interesting than whatever you were working on. It was only natural that people who were working in similar channels would cross each other’s paths from time to time. Every single person on the Atargatis science team was hungry, one way or another. Hungry for data, hungry for results, and hungry for publishable papers. Tenure wasn’t an impossible dream—not yet—but they all knew all too well that they could only chase the rabbit for so many years before it ran out of their