by Greig Beck
About Abyss
Cate Granger is chasing ghosts.
The monster shark she once encountered was a remnant of the ancient world – one that had escaped an underwater lair previously sealed off for millions of years. At great cost, Cate and her allies had killed the beast.
So, no more ghosts, no more shadows. All gone.
Or so Cate thought.
A research ship is sound-blasting the deep seabed looking for petroleum signatures. But in doing so they disturb something that has been hiding in the trenches for countless millennia.
What Cate thought was dead rises from the cold depths of hell. She, Jack Monroe, a Russian billionaire and her team of marine biologists are forced once more to enter the abyssal zone of the deepest ocean trenches, to confront a creature from the Earth’s distant past.
Contents
About Abyss
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: CHASING GHOSTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
PART TWO: THE ABYSS
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTES
About Greig Beck
Copyright
To my father, Barry, and his beloved wooden boat, the Nellie. Both gone now, and both left me with wonderful memories. Whoa, Nellie!
“Some monsters, once seen, become less monstrous.
And some become so much worse.”
Catherine Granger, Evolutionary Biologist
The Coelacanth (pronounced seel-a-canth) is a bizarre lobe-finned fish that was thought to have become extinct sixty-five million years ago, until they were discovered in 1938, alive and well, off the coast of South Africa. The Coelacanth, a prehistoric fish referred to as “the living fossil”, is unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, and shows us that sometimes extinction is overrated.
PROLOGUE
North American coastline, continental shelf edge, two million years ago
It glided through the water just off the edge of the shelf, parallel to what would one day become the state of California. The male Carcharodon Megalodon continued to travel southward at a depth of about 500 feet, where there was just the faintest trace of sunlight penetrating down to create wave-like ripples on its blue–gray upper body. Below it, there was nothing but the utter darkness of an abyssal plain.
The creature was big at fifty-five feet and just on seventy tons, but it was by no means the largest of its kind. The super predator had not eaten since it had risen from the depths to ambush a nine-foot bluefin tuna two weeks ago. The massive blood-rich pelagic fish had been swallowed whole before it could use its great speed to evade the monstrous ambush attack from below. But now the Megalodon was ravenous again.
The great cetaceans it had dined upon in its early days were becoming scarce, and as the waters grew colder, their squeaks and clicks had vanished to the frozen north and south, perhaps where they knew they were safe. But the Megalodon was a survivor, and had ruled the world’s oceans for nearly twenty million years. It was evolution’s perfect hunting and killing machine on a grand scale.
It swam effortlessly, still tracking the huge mammals, using senses packed into its massive snout which could detect a single drop of blood or urine in sea currents many miles wide. As it swam, its huge head swung from side to side, not out of ungainliness or lack of a streamline, but so its snout could pass back and forth through the faintest of scent trails. On each side of the ten-foot wide head were two nostril-like nares that drew water in and over the olfactory lamellae, a huge sensitive area that registered smells and then sent directional signals directly to the brain.
The cavernous mouth gaped open, showing five rows of teeth, 276 of them, the largest rising eight inches from the gumline, and each a serrated cutting and tearing tool. Above the maw, the snout had a bank of nerves that were sensitive enough to detect electrical fluctuations of just ten millionths of a volt, meaning it could sense the flutter of a heartbeat, the slap of a tail or the wading of land creatures crossing an estuary mouth many miles away. Each of those stimuli was like a blaring siren calling on the giant to feed.
Its vision was also a triumph of evolutionary design, but one that it needed least. The Megalodon’s eye structure contained a layer of mirrored crystals that lay behind the retina. It shared this ability with some nocturnal mammals and reptiles. The inner reflective surface gave it excellent vision in utter darkness, which allowed it to hunt at night or in the abyssal depths of the deepest ocean trenches. Its final visual advantage was an eye that also saw perfectly well above water. The Megalodon hunted in every layer of the ocean’s depths, but the abundant life on coastal shorelines had also caught its attention. The massive shark could lift its huge head from the water to watch as lumbering creatures tried to cross river-mouths, or entered the surf. And the kingdom of water belonged to the Megalodon.
The Megalodon shark was Earth’s biggest and most powerful predator that ever lived or ever would. Its only threat came from others of its own kind. Until now. Now it faced something it could not outrun or defeat with its great strength, speed, or massive teeth. Its world was shrinking as glaciers locked up more of the sea, cutting off breeding estuaries and seaways and disrupting ocean currents.
It was compelled now by hunger; if the great, warm-blooded swimmers were heading to the freezing southern waters, then it would too. But it had an advantage; where they needed to surface, it did not. And when they dived deep, it would be waiting.
Another reason compelled it southward. The sensitive olfactory organs above its massive gaping maw had detected traces of another of its kind, a female, also heading southward on the cold currents.
The Megalodon continued on in the deep, dark waters, heading to either a last refuge, or a final frozen graveyard.
PART ONE
CHASING GHOSTS
It rises from the wells of hell to feast, and leaves no trace of man or beast
CHAPTER 1
30,000 feet, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean
“Chasing ghosts”, that’s what Jack Monroe said she was doing. And I probably am. Cate Granger sighed and settled back into her seat.
She wrinkled her nose a couple of times, feeling the crustiness inside due to the dry atmosphere of the airplane. Sometimes chasing ghosts, or leaping at shadows, was what her job as an evolutionary biologist demanded. But this shadow had meat on its bones: she’d seen one – a Carcharodon Megalodon, the largest and most ferocious predator to have ever existed on Earth, land or sea – and though she wanted to believe it was an aberration, a one-off, she knew she couldn’t.
The monster sh
ark she had encountered was an evolutionary remnant that had escaped an environment that had been sealed off for millions of years. Outside of that environment, evolution, competition, climate change, and continental geology had all conspired to send the monstrous animal to the great extinction trash can of life.
No more ghosts, no more shadows. All gone.
So why did she still feel haunted by it? Being an evolutionary biologist also meant her work was sometimes like playing detective. When a species went extinct, she could usually determine how and why it had happened – with a bit of forensic analysis, and sometimes with some good ole legwork.
But the evolutionary rationale for the Megalodon going extinct was a little more tenuous. The monster shark was from a line of ultimate survivors called the elasmobranchii – cartilaginous fish that had been around for 420 million years. Many of the species had gone extinct for good reasons, but the Megalodon, a recent arrival of only twenty million years ago, and the greatest predator to ever live, was unparalleled in size, ferocity and territorial coverage. Though it had environmental preferences, it was untroubled by water temperature variations, light or darkness, food sources, and even variable water depths. Added to that, the massive beast was spread across the entire globe. Favored breeding grounds changed or vanished, but even then, less favorable ones remained.
She also knew from recorded data, as well as from her own work, that creatures were only ever extinct until someone found a living one. The coelacanth was the most famous example. The lobed fish was thought gone for sixty-five million years, and then one day it turned up on a reef in the West Indian Ocean. Apparently, the locals had been dining on them for years.
There were also giant earthworms, nocturnal ants, tiny seabirds, long-legged shrews, prehistoric pine trees with bark like rice krispies, and insects longer than your forearm and as heavy as a cat; the list was growing year by year. Each of the returned species was found in some remote or hidden place, unchanged and untroubled by our modern world.
Cate knew that the key to finding these hidden species was, firstly, to start looking, and secondly, start looking in the right places. There was always a trail of breadcrumbs, and the key was spotting it.
Chasing ghosts. She grinned to herself as she remembered the look Jack had given her when she told him she was heading to a small fishing town on the eastern coast of Australia.
“Let it go,” he had said.
“I can’t,” she had replied with a shrug.
Because the ghosts still haunted her.
She looked down at the open folders spread on her lap. There were microfiche images and stories dating back hundreds of years – her breadcrumb trails.
She was the top evolutionary biologist working at Stanford University, and given the amount of grant money she had brought in to their coffers, she could basically write her own ticket when it came to attending faculty meetings, giving classes, or undertaking fieldwork – which this definitely was, she had argued.
She spread some of the microfiche printouts on her lap. The reports of sightings went back years, centuries even. She had filtered out the tales of strange snake-necked leviathans and coiled krakens dragging down ships; what she had collected were just the stories of the monster sharks. In every tall tale there was a kernel of truth, she knew that to be true, and had proven it herself.
She lifted the top printout and read; in 1875, the HMS Challenger brought up several huge shark teeth of a double handspan width from the depths during a routine deep-sea dredge. The seabed in that area contained sedimental debris that was between 10,000–15,000 years old. And, apparently the teeth were still predominantly white. It meant they weren’t fully fossilized and were way too young. Megalodons were supposed to have died out 1.5 million years ago. Ten thousand years ago was a single tick on the geological clock.
Unfortunately, the teeth were rumored to have been given to the sailors, used for scrimshaw carving, and of course, eventually lost. Result: case unverified.
There were many other similar tales – interesting, credible, but no real proof other than eyewitness accounts. Even more recent tales were frustrating, such as the search for the South African Monster of Bird Island that was undertaken by a shark hunter as recently as 2012. A group of local fishermen claimed there was a monster shark in the area as big as their forty-foot boat. After weeks of searching by professionals, nothing turned up. Once again, case unverified.
And so it went. She rifled through page after page, until she came across the tale of the fishermen from Australia. The far-flung continent was an old land; geologically, one of the oldest in the world. Added to that, just to its south, off the continental shelf, was one of the world’s deepest ocean trenches.
Cate looked at the grainy picture from 1918 – beside an old clinker boat stood bearded men in hats with suspender belts and sleeves rolled up on brawny forearms. Exactly 100 years ago, a group of fishermen kept their boats out of the water as they said a monstrous shark, over seventy feet in length, was taking their fully laden lobster pots – each being three feet across and weighing close to eighty pounds. The shark started to harass their boats, and when one boat went missing, the remaining men refused to go to sea for an entire month. Considering that no fishing meant no income and no food, this was an extreme decision to make.
Once again, there were only antiquated eyewitness accounts, but what had caught Cate’s eye was that boats were still going missing today, and rumors persisted. She’d reached out online and found some locals willing to talk. Now she was on her way to meet them.
Cate shut her folder, checked her wristwatch and then closed her eyes. There were still eight hours of flying time to go. She wrinkled her crusty nose again, longing to pick it. It was no wonder they called Australia “Down Under” – the place was basically at the ass-end of the world, and you spent an entire day getting there.
She drifted off, and dreamed of deep, dark water. And then the ghosts from the depths returned.
CHAPTER 2
Pacific Ocean, Mexico, two miles north from the Middle America Trench
Thump!
Scott Markesan groaned on his bunk and threw a forearm up over his eyes.
Thump!
Every ten seconds of every minute of every hour of every goddamn day for twenty days, they’d be hearing the rubber mallet on wood sound of the sonic air blaster.
Thump!
He groaned again and worked to mentally shut the noise out while he tried to take his mid-afternoon nap. He had signed up for this – the money was good, and the work was easy; in fact, combating boredom was his main challenge.
Scott was a diving engineer aboard the Kanaloa, one of Nexxon Corporation’s oil exploration vessels. Nexxon was an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It owned a fleet of ships whose sole job was to find the best places for the company to invest in its drilling operations with the highest chance of a profitable return.
This was achieved by two methods: the first was satellite stratigraphic analysis, and from there a suitable geology was identified. Then, the exploration ships were deployed to pinpoint the raw petroleum beds via seismic blasting.
It was a terribly simple but effective method of exploration – a floating device was towed behind the ship and it would shoot a bolt of compressed high-speed air through the water at the ocean floor that would drive down miles into the seabed. The impact echo would reflect information about buried oil and gas deposits, which were then captured by a school of sonar buoys.
Thump!
But, damn, was it ever annoying, he thought.
And the job wasn’t just stuffing his sleep routine; the environmental groups were at war with Nexxon, claiming their work harmed sea life, deafened the great cetaceans, and even disrupted the fragile creatures in the deepest areas of the ocean because the vibrative waves penetrated down even to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches.
Nexxon had invested millions in public relations, political lob
bying, and under-the-table donations to make its case, and prove there was little danger or truth in these claims.
Thump!
But, the fact was, the blasts struck like a freaking hammer, and they were repeated every ten seconds, twenty-four hours a day, for weeks at a time. If it was this loud above water, he couldn’t imagine what it must be like down in the deep.
But he could guess. The whale pods had scattered, and anything else that relied on sound, vibrations, or other stimuli he couldn’t even contemplate, would be either driven away, driven mad, or ravenous with hunger at finding its prey gone from the entire area.
Thump!
Scott gave up trying to sleep and switched on his bunk light. He reached for a book instead. The cabin digs aboard the Kanaloa were pretty good, with a good-sized bunkroom, coffee facilities, and even his own washroom. Not unexpected as the ship was one of the newest of the Nexxon fleet. She was 413 feet long, 105 feet wide, and was a stable platform for all weather conditions. She even had a scientifically designed bow and hull to reduce slamming in waves to maintain stream control and reduce noise when collecting the echoed seismic data.
Well out behind the Kanaloa, and being trawled at a depth of 6000 feet, the seismic gun blasted out its compressed air “shells” at the seabed. The gun was actually a silver torpedo shape, twelve-feet long and studded with sensors and maneuverability fins and jets so it could be controlled from above. Though they had several of the blasters onboard, the devices were worth a cool twenty million bucks each; probably why they were attached to a cable one and a quarter inches thick with a tension strain of 120,000 pounds.
It was also why Scott was onboard. Though they never encountered anything at the depths they were currently exploring, and they always stayed well up from the seafloor where there was debris and obstacles that didn’t show clearly on sonar mapping, if they ever did run into a snag, it would be Scott’s job to investigate and repair the issue.
