Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #1)

by Mira Grant

“So we leave,” said Tory. “We can … we can tell the navy, and they’ll come back with bigger guns.” “They’d come back to drop a nuke into the Challenger Deep, and you know it,” said Theo. He sounded tired more than anything else; this was not the first time he’d considered this. “They’d set the seas to boiling before they’d share them with a hostile sentient race, and when that made the weather even more unpredictable—when that killed the fish and destroyed the people living on the local islands—they’d say all of that had been unforeseen. Even though anyone with eyes could have seen it. No. We need to go back with as much data as possible. We need these creatures protected.” “Protected?” Tory stiffened. “Why would we want to protect them?” “Because waging war on things that normally live a mile below the surface of the sea does no one any good, and could do us quite a lot of harm,” said Dr. Toth, stepping in before Theo could open his mouth. “Because they represent something otherwise unknown to science, and studying them could tell us things about our planet that I never thought we’d have the opportunity to learn. But most of all, we protect them because it’s our job. We don’t just conserve the things we like, or the things we find adorable. We conserve everything. We take care of the planet. We’ve been doing a piss-poor job so far, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get better.”