The Monster Missions

by Laura Martin

  Max noticed my glance, and his lip rose in a sneer. “Before you ask, I can swim just fine, probably better than you.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” I said.

  “Easy,” Kate said, coming up behind Max and placing a calming hand on his shoulder.

  “You take it easy,” Max said, shrugging her off to go stand by the hatch door, as far from us as humanly possible.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, not sure exactly what I’d done wrong.

  “Nothing to apologize for,” Kate said. She leaned in, dropping her voice so it wouldn’t carry. “The accident with Luke was pretty bad. Max is lucky he survived it, and he’s doubly lucky that Captain Reese didn’t decide the whole thing was his fault.”

  “Was it his fault?” Garth asked.

  Kate shrugged. “Hard to say. But either way, I think Max just feels he has a lot to prove.”

  “He doesn’t have anything to prove to us,” I said. We hadn’t proved ourselves at all yet, and honestly, the only thing we’d done to earn our way onto the Britannica was avoid getting eaten. Well, that and make a sea monster mad enough to hunt down the Atlas, I thought with a wince.

  “Zip me up, will you?” Garth said, turning so I could see the wide gap between the teeth of the zipper.

  “Um,” I said, glancing over at Kate for some assistance. She took one look at Garth and burst out laughing.

  “Oh boy,” she practically choked. “They didn’t assign you the right size wet suit.” She glanced around, but there weren’t any spares hanging anywhere. “We will just have to make this one work for now,” she said with an apologetic grin. “Can you suck it in?” she asked, grabbing the two sides of the wet suit and forcing them together so I could zip.

  “I am!” Garth said.

  “Suck it in more,” Kate said. “Geez, you have broad shoulders—do you have to walk through the halls sideways?”

  “Almost,” Garth grunted as I zipped up the final few inches.

  “Okay,” I said, stepping back. “You can exhale now.”

  “Can I?” Garth said, running a finger around the neck of the wet suit. “I feel like ten pounds of tuna in a five-pound can.”

  “Funny,” Kate said. “I was just going to give you that exact compliment.”

  “All right!” Weaver called, and we went instantly quiet. I could feel the thrum of excitement in the room as though we were all rubber bands on the brink of snapping. “It looks like everyone is geared up, so I’ll go over a few last reminders before we enter the hatch.” He turned to Garth and me, eyebrow raised. “I’m told you two are experienced divers. Is that correct?” We both nodded, and he seemed satisfied. “Like I was saying, we are fairly shallow, all things considered, but you will still be exiting the Britannica at around seventy feet below the surface. Remember that once the hatch fills with water, we will remain in the hatch until we have been correctly pressurized. Then and only then will the outer hatch open, allowing us to leave the sub to investigate the claw marks.”

  I felt my hand shoot into the air almost as though it was acting on its own. “What about the cetus?” I said. “We aren’t going to run into it out there, are we?”

  Garth shifted nervously next to me, but Weaver flapped his hand dismissively. “Do you really think we’d send you out into sea-monster-infested waters?”

  “Yes,” I said, the word slipping out of my mouth with a point-blank starkness that startled even me. Everyone turned to look at me, and I felt my face turning red. “I mean, isn’t that why we’re here?” I said. “Isn’t getting sent out into sea-monster-infested water the end goal?”

  “That is a very good point, Berkley,” Weaver said. “However, this entire area was explored this morning by the Britannica’s diving crew to ascertain whether or not a cetus was still in the area. They deemed the area clear. As an added precaution we always have four scout divers—located to the north, south, east, and west of the Britannica—who will give us ample time to get to safety if they spot anything awry. We try very hard not to send any of our recruits out unprepared and unarmed.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Weaver went on, lecturing us about staying close to the group, the amount of time we would be out in the open, and procedures to follow in case any of our equipment started malfunctioning.

  “I hope the new kids don’t panic,” Max whispered behind me, just loud enough that I could hear.

  I debated letting that comment go. I had promised myself that morning to give Max and his crummy attitude some grace, but I found myself turning to face him, my own glare firmly in place. “If you need to worry about the new kids, worry that we are going to show you up and make you look bad,” I said, turning back to face Weaver, who was thankfully distracted with something on the panel that worked the hatch.

  “That was a bit cocky,” Garth whispered, “even for you.”

  “I mean it,” I said, setting my jaw. “We can do this, and we are going to do this well. Our families are depending on it.”

  “What does that mean?” Garth said. “Our families have no clue what we’re doing, thank goodness.” He gave an exaggerated shudder as he looked at the hatch door looming in front of us.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said dismissively, realizing that I had almost said too much. I wasn’t sure yet how much I should tell Garth about the hydra that was potentially stalking the Atlas, and now wasn’t the time to drop that kind of information on him. My determination to succeed here, at this new, weird challenge that had been put in front of me, solidified inside my chest. I wanted to save my family, and from the sounds of it, that meant two things. The first was that I was going to have to make it as a crew member aboard the Britannica. I wouldn’t do my family any good if I got kicked out of the program and ended up helpless on some random ship, or, worse, on a work ship. The second was that if there was a way to protect ships like the Atlas from monsters, it was going to be something the Britannica and its crew discovered by actually studying the things. I’d always been good at figuring out problems. I knew how to tinker with bits of this and that until I found something useful. This was the same thing, I told myself, only instead of bits of metal and wire and broken junk, I was going to be figuring out sea monsters.

  “If no one has any questions, please put your masks on and make sure your air converters are working before you enter the hatch.” He said this last line with a meaningful look at Kate, whose face immediately turned bright red.

  I felt all the blood run out of my face and collect somewhere at my feet as I thought about what he’d said. I checked the tiny air converter on my mask once, and then three more times, just to be safe. Standing in that hatch while it filled up with water and realizing that the machine that would convert ocean water into air wasn’t working was not something I wanted to experience for myself.

  “Don’t be so twitchy,” Garth whispered next to me, his face muffled inside his mask. “It will be fine. If you could dive with the junk we used on the Atlas, you can dive with this.” I nodded, but it made me feel better that two adult crew members walked in just then to check and then double-check each of us before we made our way over to the door on the far side of the dive room.

  “Remember to stick together,” Weaver said as we all filed into the hatch. The five of us stood shoulder to shoulder as Weaver hit the button to close the door.

  “Masks on,” he called, and everyone jostled one another to comply. “Give me the thumbs-up when you’re ready,” he said, and four thumbs went into the air. He placed a hand to his ear and looked at the floor. A second later there was a slight crackling sound in my own ear as Weaver’s voice came through my earpiece.

  “If you can hear me, hold up two fingers,” he said. Everyone put two fingers in the air. Garth and I shot each other a knowing look. This was already very different from a dive aboard the Atlas. Weaver went through a few more checks to ensure that he could hear us as well. Finally he nodded and hit another button. The room hissed as water started
pouring in from the ports along the floor. Within seconds it was up to our knees and then our waists. I bit my lip so hard I drew blood. I’d never stood in a room as it filled rapidly with water, and I could already tell it wasn’t a sensation I’d ever grow to enjoy. The water reached our necks and then crept up over our faces and heads until we stood completely submerged. The entire room hummed, and I felt the subtle pressure change begin. I cleared my ears once, twice, three times, and then it was over. A heartbeat later the door on the opposite side of the room slid open, and we looked out at the endless expanse of the ocean.

  “Move out,” Weaver said, motioning with his hand before turning and paddling out of the hatch. Max and Kate followed immediately, with Garth and me bringing up the rear.

  Everything that had tightened inside me in the hatch seemed to loosen the moment I entered the vast blue ocean. I glanced up to where the sun was turning the water into dazzling shades of aquamarine and imagined swimming straight up to feel the warmth on my face. A movement to my right brought my head snapping back down, and a swirl of silver fish went swimming past. Below, the water was teeming with life as bright, rainbow-colored fish darted in and out of the nooks and crannies of the ocean floor.

  “No stragglers, Berkley,” said Weaver’s voice directly in my ear. “Please keep up with the rest of the recruits.” I looked up to see the entire group twenty feet away, staring right at me. My face heated, and I kicked hard to rejoin them. I’d always prided myself on being a fast swimmer despite the fact that I was short, and my legs churned through the bubbles erupting from the back of my face mask.

  “Like I was saying,” Weaver said when I’d caught up, “while these claw marks are impressive, based off legend and lore, I don’t believe they are quite large enough to be from a full-grown cetus.” He ran a hand over the gouges as we all huddled closer to get a better look. The marks were even bigger up close, and I felt my heart thump at the thought of the monster that had made them. Weaver started discussing the calculations and equations used to determine the actual size of the creature, and my eyes wandered back out across the ocean. After years of working as a scavenger, it was odd to focus on just one thing. I’d been trained to notice the unnoticeable and find the unfindable, and it seemed old habits died hard.

  I wondered a bit at myself as I gently moved my arms around to stay floating beside the rest of the group. I’d expected to be scared on this first dive with the Britannica—after all, the last time I’d been in the water I’d almost been eaten, and since then I’d learned of an entire encyclopedia of monsters capable of turning me into lunch—but somehow I wasn’t. This felt a lot like any other dive Garth and I had made, albeit with much better equipment, and I decided to attribute my composure to the rock-solid determination I’d felt right before we’d entered the hatch.

  Maybe I should even thank Max for being such a jerk, I thought with a slight smile. Of course, he couldn’t have known that the best way to motivate me was to tell me I couldn’t do something. My mind flashed back to Garth double-daring me to zip-line down one of the ropes on the Atlas’s rigging when we were ten. I’d done it and gotten caught and punished. When my dad had asked me what in the world had possessed me to do something so dumb and reckless, I’d had a hard time answering. Garth would have still been my friend if I hadn’t done it, so it wasn’t that. It was that I’d had to prove to myself that he wasn’t right, that I wasn’t a chicken. This felt similar.

  In the distance I could see what used to be the shoreline of Greece, but its former life was nothing but a distant memory, and it was now just another part of the ocean. A few stone buildings remained, their windows and doors long gone. Rainbow-colored sea urchins, plant life, and sea stars had utilized the crumbling facades, and the underwater city had a beauty it never could have achieved on land. The scavenger part of my brain wondered if there was anything of value left in those colorful wrecks. In a few more years even less of it would remain. The ocean was ruthless like that. Her salt ate metal, her tides wore down rocks, and her sand scrubbed away all remaining traces. It was beautiful, though, if you could look past the sadness of losing an entire way of life.

  “Berkley,” came Weaver’s voice in my ear. “Focus, please.” I snapped my head back to look at him. “We hypothesize that the cetus is much like the other clawed monsters we’ve captured, and therefore most likely feeds primarily on sharks, whales, and other large fish, including some of the giant squid we talked about this morning.” Weaver ran a gloved hand down the claw mark almost reverently.

  I sensed a movement to my left, and even though I knew I should keep my focus on Weaver after getting reprimanded twice, I still turned to see the Britannica’s southern scout swimming in from wherever he’d been investigating. My head automatically turned to the right to see if I could spot the northern scout, and I felt my heart spasm in terror. The scout was there, swimming leisurely back toward the sub, completely unaware that she was being followed by a creature so large she was in danger of being swallowed whole.

  I screamed. Everyone around me jumped as my scream burst through their earpieces. Terror stuck the words in my mouth, and all I could manage was to flail frantically at the oncoming monster, which was definitely not a cetus. No, this was a creature I recognized, although it was so big that I was fairly certain it could eat a cetus for breakfast. Everyone froze for one agonizing heartbeat as they took in the behemoth shark bearing down on us. Weaver’s eyes went wide inside his face mask.

  “Swim for the Britannica! Now! It’s a megalodon!”

  9

  “Swim for the Britannica!” Weaver bellowed again, so loudly his words seemed to bounce around inside my head. Adrenaline ripped through my system like a tidal wave, every nerve standing on end. Everyone listened, making a beeline for the sub, but I could already tell that we’d never make it. A shark that big had to be capable of swimming at breathtaking speeds, and I glanced back to see the northern scout barely avoid being eaten thanks to some fancy maneuvering and a whole lot of luck. Suddenly the water around me reverberated as the Britannica shot something into the water. For a split second I thought they were firing on the megalodon, but whatever they shot went wide.

  “How in the world did they miss that thing?” Garth’s voice came in loud and frantic in my ear. “It’s gigantic!”

  “Swim!” Weaver repeated. “They are creating a distraction for us. We don’t have the equipment to bring down a monster that size. They’re buying us time.”

  Then the distraction detonated. A hundred feet to the right of us something erupted, sending a shock wave through the water that I could feel in my teeth, and suddenly the ocean was red.

  “What was that?” Garth said as the red bloomed through the water, spreading in inky scarlet swirls.

  “Blood bomb,” Kate rasped. Before I could wrap my brain around what a blood bomb might be, a miracle happened and the megalodon changed course, the blood a siren song it couldn’t ignore. The smooth silver-gray body passed over our heads, throwing us into its immense shadow for a moment, and despite the panic of the situation, everyone craned their necks to watch it pass.

  “The blood bomb won’t work for long,” Weaver said into our earpieces as he herded us back toward the Britannica. “Get in the hatch. I don’t want to close it until we have everyone.” He didn’t have to say why he didn’t want to close it. He’d explained before we entered the first time that it took minutes to pressurize the water and then drain it. Minutes that would leave any stragglers locked outside the Britannica with the monster.

  And what a monster this was. We were dwarfed by the megalodon—like a mouse by a cat—which took my breath away in a way the encounter with the hydra hadn’t. The megalodon was bigger than the hydra by at least ten feet or so, and there was something about the familiar shape of a shark that hit me harder than the strange snakelike hydra had. It was a predator I knew, one I’d grown up knowing, and now it was feet away from me and bigger than I ever could have imagined.

&nb
sp; The water in front of me churned as everyone paddled for all they were worth. Pinning my arms to my sides to make myself more aerodynamic, I kicked hard, my leg muscles burning. The hatch was open, a gaping square of light that promised safety, but I couldn’t help myself, and I looked back. The megalodon had turned, no small feat for an animal of that size, and was swimming toward us through the red-tinted water with single-minded focus. It knew it had been tricked, and it wasn’t happy about it. Turning again, I saw that Kate had made it into the hatch, and Weaver hovered just inside the entrance, waiting to pull each of us in as soon as we were close enough.

  The water around me seemed to reverberate as four thin black torpedoes shot out from the Britannica and hurtled toward the approaching shark. Suddenly they exploded, and four black cabled nets flew out in every direction. The black netting wrapped around the megalodon’s face and jaws, snagging on its rows upon rows of teeth before streaming back and around its fins.

  “That’s never going to hold it,” I said, amazed by the stupidity of firing a net at something that massive.

  “It’s electric,” Kate said in my ear, her breathing harsh and jagged. A second later I saw what she meant: the monster jerked sharply to the left as the nets were activated, sending volts of paralyzing electricity through their webbing. The shark thrashed, throwing its head one way and another, and shredded the net like it was nothing but a spiderweb. I felt someone grab my arm, and I turned to see Weaver yank me the last few feet into the hatch with everyone else. A quick glance showed that all four of us recruits were in, but to my surprise Weaver still stood at the entrance, his hand poised over the button that would close the hatch, his face tight behind the mask.

  Then I saw it—the scouts. Three of them were almost to the hatch, but the fourth, the northernmost scout, was nowhere to be seen. The small square of the hatch entrance showed nothing but clear ocean as the three scouts ducked inside. Still Weaver waited at the entrance, his hand hovering over the button that would seal us safely inside the Britannica.