Rolling in the Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #0.5)

by Mira Grant

Being a professional tautologist paid well enough that she was planning to stick with it as long as she could. Knowing just what shade of Felicia Day red to dye her hair, and what glasses to wear to give herself the exact right combination of cute, approachable, and “I know something you don’t know” was all part of the game.

Dr. Jonny Chen and Dr. Anton Matthews came as a package deal: the best marine phycologist in the world and one of the three best marine biomolecular biologists in the world.

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.

Alien eyes watched the strange metal object as it floated upward. There was blood in the water. Their home had been invaded. They would respond.

Humanity destroys the things it loves. Something mysterious and unique enough to be the source of mermaid legends? We’re going to be all over destroying that.”

The official record says that all hands were lost at sea. We believe that something far worse occurred. We believe that they were found.

“We’ve found—us as a collective troupe, and Teal and Jess individually—that people talk one way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because she’s a mermaid, and another way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because her legs are not quite up to factory standards,”

“Lots of things have hands,” said Peter, leaning closer to the screen. “Monkeys, otters, even some sorts of lizard. The koala has a hand with two thumbs. Nature enjoys making hands. Almost as much as it enjoys making beetles.”

Was there any reason in the world to expect a deep-sea predator with that many teeth to be friendly?

“We said ‘pretty women in the sea,’ and that was good enough, because who doesn’t want there to be pretty women in the sea? We turned monsters into myths, and then we turned them into fairy tales. We dismissed the bad parts. We were too interested in…in…in pretty women in the sea.”