The Triangle

It's standard operating procedure.

"I hope your will is in order."

The first time you fly into the Triangle, you get some friendly ribbing. When the weather moved in and the compass began to fidget, the jokes resurfaced.

"What did we tell ya?"

Then the radio died, and the GPS. Visibility dropped to nothing. The control panel went nuts and we were flying by inertial navigation only. Then it wasn't funny anymore.

When the rain broke and we could see again... the sight was completely out of my experience and beyond my imagination. There were... millions of them. They filled the sky like a slow rain of birds. But they weren't birds. I had the high powered scope out now. It was easy to line one up—they were everywhere. They looked more like... jellyfish. There was nothing else you could call them. Except the dangling arms were green filaments. The tips sprouted a dendritic branching, like pale roots. The trailing bottom halves resembled—yes—hanging plants! But the billowing, translucent canopies were those of jellyfish. When the sun broke from the clouds the jellyplants became diamond sparkles. It was stunning. Eerie, unearthly, beautiful.

"What the hell is that?"

There was a dark shape drifting through the cloud of plants. A shiver raced up my spine, a primitive, subconscious attempt to reboot my senses. It looked like a dirigible, but molted and leathery. And the thing had a wide maw, like a baleen whale. Distances are hard to judge with nothing but the horizon for scale, but the plants seemed tree size, and they were just dots against this thing. It was a behemoth. The floating sparkles disappeared inside like so much plankton.

We should have been over the Keys by now, but we couldn't see any land.

"Mayday. Mayday. Please respond!"