Below by Ryan Lockwood

what she had been hoping it would do.
    In a gentle burst of soft bioluminescent light, it flashed once at Val.
    She smiled awkwardly around her thick rubber mouthpiece, and turned her light on again, then off almost immediately. The alien creature’s body glowed again in response.
    They were communicating.
    Okay , Val thought, let’s see if hundreds of hours studying tape will finally pay off. With her modified flashlight, Val sent out several brief flashes in slow succession. She paused. Nothing. The small male simply hovered in front of her. Next, Val attempted longer flashes of light, in more rapid succession. Still nothing.
    Over the next few minutes, Val continued a series of simple flashes of various intensities, durations, and frequencies. The attempts weren’t random patterns, but predetermined sequences she had rehearsed after studying her previous tapes of this species’ behavior—her own attempt at mollusk Morse code. After several minutes, the smallish male never responded again. He appeared to lose interest and slowly descended into the darkness below her.
    Val cursed into her regulator.
    She decided to ad-lib. Pointing her light down toward where the male had disappeared, she emitted an erratic series of flashes. Still nothing . . . no, wait. A distant glow. Then the water all around Val lit up as the shoal responded with bursts of light, revealing a multitude of the creatures nearby. Val’s heart leapt at the unexpected spectacle. She felt as though she were surrounded by a swarm of giant fireflies.
    Then something rushed toward her.
    Before Val could react, the creature closed on her. It shot out its two long tentacles like twin pistons and struck her violently in the chest, knocking the air out of her lungs. As she struggled to inhale, something wrapped around her calf. Then it began to pull downward.
    She had somehow provoked an attack.
    Val tried in vain to kick at the two or more animals now clinging to her legs. She felt one of her fins get jerked off her foot. Using her camera to fight off the predatory advances of the large individual in front of her, Val didn’t realize how quickly she was being pulled down until the tether at her waist grew very taut, cutting into her abdomen.
    Valerie Martell was not a woman who panicked. On the contrary, she was more than accustomed to hair-raising situations. She prided herself on her ability to remain level-headed and slip out of each and every potentially dangerous situation unharmed by thinking clearly and objectively, putting her emotions aside. It was time for that sort of thinking.
    Although the animals were pulling down on her with incredible force, she was tethered to the boat with a thick nylon rope. The tether should hold. Just don’t panic .
    Suddenly the animals released her and she felt herself drawn upward as the strain left the rope. Val drew a deep breath from her regulator. That was close. She had witnessed random instances of aggression in the past, but this hadn’t been random. She had somehow triggered it with the light. I need to watch the footage and figure out what I did.
    A ring of powerful arms wrenched the camera from Val’s grasp. She watched helplessly as the latex tubing that attached the camera to her wrist tore free and followed the camera, which was now being assailed by several members of the shoal. It vanished in the darkness below Val as it and the animals clinging to it left the range of the bright surface lights, far above.
    Val hovered in the darkness for a minute, straining to see if the camera would float back up. It was time to surface. She hadn’t seen it reappear, or any of its abductors. She looked above her to the lights of the boat and kicked toward it.
     
     
    Finally, a breakthrough in her research, and the bastards steal her camera. Something Val had done tonight had worked. But what? If she’d only been able to recover the footage . . .
    She left the bathroom of her hotel room and put on a dry bra and