“What is this, memory lane day?” Garm asked, amusedly. “Tell me the truth; did Callahan put you up to this?”
“The admiral? What are you talking about?”
“An inside joke, Dirk. Never mind. So, you want to know what happened to poor little bully . . . I mean, Billy, eh?”
“Duh.”
Garm stuck his big head out of the shower, glancing around to make sure nobody else could hear. He caught and held Dirk’s gaze. “After I caught up with his buddies, I couldn’t have Billy-boy staggering around with his face all busted up. Even if he didn’t fess up, you know that would’ve been a green mile straight to the principal’s office. And let’s not even dwell on the beating I’d have gotten when I got home.”
Dirk’s eyes widened at the thought. “Shit, you’re right about that. Mom would’ve thrashed your ass, big time.”
Garm laughed aloud at the shared memories. Their dad had been physically imposing – a dangerous guy, to be sure. But when it came to disciplining his two sons, Jake had been a complete mush. Amara, on the other hand, was like a mama wolverine with PMS when it came to doling out punishments.
Garm kept his voice low. “Anyway, so what happened is, I grabbed a couple of bananas from the cafeteria and waited for him in the boys bathroom.”
“Bananas? I don’t get it.”
“When he came in, I locked the door. And before he could call for help, I punched him in the stomach so hard he vomited.”
Dirk winced. “Jesus. Why, so there were no visible marks?”
“Exactly. Then I yanked his shirt up over his head so he couldn’t see and dragged him into a nearby stall.”
Dirk was confused. “For what? A swirly?”
Garm wore a shit-eating grin. “Nope, I made him stick his hand in the bowl and squeeze the--”
“Holy shit! You peeled the bananas?”
“Yep. He was crying like a little girl the whole time.”
“Wow, that’s messed up. Funny as all hell, but messed up.”
Garm nodded. “Then, I pulled his shirt back down and let him see it was just fruit he was holding.” He glanced toward the door then added. “But I told him, if he ever bothered you again, the next time it would be the real thing. And he wouldn’t just be grabbing it. I’d make him eat some!”
There was a moment of silence. Then they both burst out laughing.
“I’m glad to see you boys are having a good time een here,” Dragunova remarked.
As if by magic, she appeared right outside the showers, her hands on her hips, and studying them both through those timber wolf’s eyes of hers.
“Holy shit!” the brothers yelled simultaneously.
“Nat, what the fuck are you doing here?” Garm snapped. Unlike Dirk, who was busy trying to hide his manhood behind a woefully inadequate bar of soap, his brother was quite comfortable being nude around Antrodemus’s captain.
“Dr. Grayson asked me to . . .” Dragunova’s eyes lit up as she looked Dirk up and down. “Bozhe moy! You two really are tweens!”
Garm’s face darkened. “Nat . . .”
“Oh, fine, you beeg baby,” she pouted. She turned her back to them, her defined arms folded atop her chest.
Dirk desperately wanted his towel, but he wasn’t about to go get it. “Uh, Captain Dragunova, maybe we could just see you out--”
“Sorry, boys. But Dr. Grayson eenstructed me to tell you at once,” she replied. “Wolfie, the Talos Mark VII suit for Gryphon has arrived from JAW Robotics and ees seeting een a crate at the loading dock. You need to sign for eet and oversee delivery and installation.”
“And that couldn’t wait until we got out of the shower?” Garm remarked.
“Also, Dr. Derek . . .” Dragunova’s head swiveled on her toned shoulders and she smirked as she threw him a sideways glance. “Dr. Grayson wants to start the meeting early. You two need to come at . . . oof!”
Genuinely annoyed by the way she was leering at his brother, Garm stormed naked out of the shower and grabbed her by the upper arm. Cursing under his breath, he half-pushed, half-dragged her toward the exit, with her glancing back the entire time.
“I guess eet’s not true what they say about guys weeth small hands!”
As they vanished around the corner, squabbling like an old married couple, Derek stood there with his jaw drooping. As he pondered what just occurred, it was all he could do to keep from doing a combination rain and victory dance, right there in the shower.
* * *
A half-mile behind the pod of foraging gray whales, the Carcharodon megalodon female maintained her pursuit. Several hours earlier, she had picked up the scent of blood oozing from a member of the pod and been doggedly following them ever since.
As the migrating cetaceans altered course yet again, the female’s myriad senses strained to keep pace. Moments earlier, the grays had swung southwest, entering the turbulent depths of the Windward Passage and heading for the nutrient-rich waters of the Caribbean Sea. Unseen and undetected, she hung back, trailing them like the deadly shade she was.
The huge shark was irritated. When she first entered the passage, she experienced a powerful urge to break off the hunt and maintain her original heading. It was the same mysterious summons that had drawn her from the frigid waters she called home and started her on her epic journey. The pull was strong, but for the first time she resisted. The writhing of her empty stomach outweighed the nagging stimulus. Eventually, the desire to redirect vanished and she found herself in command of her senses. The bizarre internal conflict had reawakened her hunger, however. She needed to feed soon, and the mobile mountains of flesh she was pursuing were, by far, the best prospect.
As the whales continued obliviously onward, the Megalodon felt the temperature of the surrounding sea inch upward. She knew it would soon be outside her comfort zone and spread her twenty-foot pectoral fins wide. With a powerful thrust from her sail-like tail, she glided silently downward, causing a football field-sized school of squid to simultaneously dump their ink as she parted them like the Red Sea. Descending to six hundred feet, she leveled off and held position, relishing the comforting coldness of a deepwater current.
Suddenly, a familiar odor enveloped the female and she drew copious amounts of seawater into her watermelon-sized nostrils. The infusion was a heady combination of gray whale urine mixed with estrus hormones from the adult cows. It was like a drug to her and she relished the pungent aroma, her mammoth jaws reflexively parting.
Despite the distance between them, she could sense the whales’ bodies shifting, their muscular forms moving sinuously up and down as they feasted upon the region’s omnipresent clouds of krill. Even though the pod was too far off for her basketball-sized eyes to lock onto, she sensed the compression waves they gave off, even from a thousand yards away. Although she possessed no external ears, her coarse skin was dotted with tiny, soundwave-sensing pores that sent incoming signals to her cilia-coated lateral line. The linear-shaped sensory organ was an evolutionary masterpiece that ran from the tip of her bulbous snout to the termination of her crescent-shaped caudal fin. It effectively enabled her to “hear” with every inch of her mammoth 84-foot body.
As the taste of fresh whale blood once again infiltrated her mouth, the Megalodon became aroused. She shook her massive head from side to side, her broad-based, triangular teeth gnashing together in avaricious anticipation. At an astounding 210 tons, she was a ponderous beast – too slow to match the speed and agility of a healthy gray whale. But a birthing cow or an old or injured one was a different story.
Although she was predominantly a carrion feeder who made a living appropriating carcasses from active predators, she was, above all else, a consumer of flesh. Given the chance, she would catch, kill, and devour anything she could, as slow-moving prey like sea turtles and walruses often discovered. But a fresh whale kill, coated with still-warm blubber and spurting hot blood into the surrounding sea, was a rare opportunity for her.
And she was on the t
rail of just such an opportunity.
It was an old cow, judging by the scent, and a badly injured one at that. Its dorsal was shredded by a series of ragged wounds – undoubtedly a passing ship’s prop – and the wounded baleen whale struggled to keep up with its pod-mates. The strain was beginning to tell, and every so often its wounds would reopen, unleashing a torrent of crimson that stained the nearby water a bright red and put every shark in the area on alert. But the honor of the kill, when the cetacean deteriorated to the point she could finally catch up to it, would be hers and hers alone.
Relaxing as the blood trail faded once more, the Megalodon resumed her silent stalking. Her twenty-four-foot caudal flukes swung fluidly from side to side, each stroke displacing enough saltwater to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. All the while, her forward facing eyes swept the darkened seas ahead, scanning for food or foes. She was an eating machine whose forebears had survived the dinosaurs and tenacity was her forte. She was hungry, but she was calculating. Most importantly, like all successful scavengers, she was patient.
The scabbed-over wounds she’d sustained during her brief battle with the bull pliosaur began to itch once more, and the irritated female bared her teeth. Her twelve-foot gill slits flared wide as she yawned, her mighty jaws stretching wide enough to engulf an elephant. The sudden influx of cold, oxygen-rich water invigorated her, and her protective, nictitating eye membrane blinked several times as she tore through an approaching cloud of krill.
Although she was comfortable in deepwater and saw well in the dark, the monster shark and her kind were primarily a shallow water genus. There was a sub-species of Megalodon that split off during the last Ice Age and inhabited the ocean’s extreme depths. However, they were a far different animal. With more limited food sources, they tended to be smaller, reaching a maximum length of around fifty feet, and had lost their mottled gray pigmentation. Pale ghosts of the deep, they eked out a living, scavenging descending whale carcasses and preying on, or falling prey to, the titanic squid whose hunting grounds they shared.
Unlike her deep-dwelling relatives, who relied on anti-freeze proteins in their blood to survive the freezing temperatures of the abyss, she was basically a gigantic version of her more modern cousin, the salmon shark. Warmed as they were by vascular counter-current exchangers in her circulatory system, she was one of the few fish in the world that could regulate her body temperature. As a result, she was a far more active predator than her abyssal brothers and sisters and could prowl both the surface and the icy waters of the deep.
Or in her case, the Arctic waters she called home.
A sudden noise drew the female’s attention. It wasn’t coming from the gray whales, however. Instead, the sound emanated from far behind her and high up – from the surface, in fact. As she recognized it, the great fish’s jaws closed, her thick teeth pressing tightly together in frustration.
The racket the surface vessel gave off was annoyingly familiar to her. For weeks, it had plagued her like an overgrown pilot fish, following her at a distance and shadowing her every move. Several times, she attempted to drive it off, but each time the thing came back.
The female swung sideways and glanced briefly at it before turning away. Her body shook with the shark equivalent of a shrug of futility. The boat was too fast for her. As long as it kept its distance, she had no choice but to tolerate its presence.
Turning her nose back onto the whale pod’s trail, the Megalodon continued the pursuit. Based on its movements, she could tell the injured cow was beginning to fade. Bit by bit, the distance between them gradually lessened. Soon, it would be too weak to continue and the pod would stop to let it rest. At that point, she would make her presence known. Rising up into the light, she would launch her attack while the gray whale’s pod-mates fled for their lives. Then, she would have the two things she desired most: the delicious, calorie-rich blubber that she was so often cruelly denied.
And the chance to kill.
CHAPTER
26
“How’s Ursula doing?” Dr. Katerina Feaster asked as she got up from her station and moved toward the helm. It was midday, and Insolent Endeavor’s twin 1,400 horsepower Cummins inboards were purring like gigantic kittens as the upgraded fifty-foot Monte Carlo MC5 kept pace with the slow-swimming Carcharodon megalodon.
“She’s fine,” Dr. Judas Cambridge replied, his bespectacled eyes locked onto an overhead monitor. On it, the temporal region of the giant shark’s living room-sized head could be seen as it continued tirelessly along, passing through a half-mile cloud of plankton and detritus and bumping aside the occasional jellyfish. A couple of Flagorneur fish suddenly appeared on the far side of the screen, suspended a few yards away and mirroring Ursula’s every move.
Jude made a face. He despised the yard-long Diablo Caldera escapees. They were upsized Cleaner Wrasse that latched onto large predators like sperm whales, pliosaurs, and sharks, and fed off them. Actually, not off them, per se, but off their fecal matter. They hung around their host like tilapia crowding around a hippo, waiting for it to excrete. The moment it did, they attacked the cloud of nitrite-rich excrement like hungry piranhas, burying their faces in their host’s cloaca or rectum as they gorged themselves. Once, he saw one swim completely inside Ursula’s anal cavity – not that the great fish seemed to notice. It was, after all, a symbiotic relationship, he mused. She fed them and they tongued her ass.
Jude chuckled at the visual, then blinked as the screen went momentarily black and the Wrasse scattered. It was the blinding flash of the locator’s bright red strobe, momentarily overloading the sensitive infrared lens. He looked down and checked their sonar. “We’re five hundred yards back and she’s holding at six hundred feet . . . speed is ten knots.”
“Did she finally stop fighting the implant?” Kat asked.
Jude shook his head. “I gave up and put it in sleep mode. She’s locked onto that wounded Eschrichtius robustus cow and refuses to give up the hunt.” He swiveled his captain’s chair until he was facing his partner-in-crime and shrugged. “I guess there’s no fighting hunger.”
Kat’s blue eyes contracted, the edges of her mouth dipping down into an uncharacteristic pout. “How badly is this detour going to set us back?”
“Not much.” Jude touched a toggle switch, activating the zoom on Ursula’s locator’s integrated camera. He pushed it to maximum. A second later, the rising and falling flukes of the nearest members of the gray whale pod came into view. The one bringing up the rear was obviously struggling. “With the wounds that cow sustained from colliding with the freighter, she can’t last much longer. We’re only twenty miles into the Windward Passage. Ursula will make her kill soon and we’ll document it. Once she’s got a full belly, she’ll be easier to influence. We’ll reactivate the program and get her back on track. It’ll cost us a couple of hours at most.”
“Good.” Kat leaned forward at the hip, arching her back and resting one hand on the console as she eyed the locator’s monitor. “I see her lacerations have scabbed over nicely.”
As his business partner’s baby powder-scented perfume permeated his nostrils, Jude shifted in his chair. His hazel eyes widened at the unexpected closeness. As was her habit, Kat had showered and changed after breakfast, and was dressed in a skimpy tank-top and loose-fitting sweatpants. They were the low-ride variety, and between the bright pink thong that shamelessly delved into the exposed portion of her ass and her fresh scent, he was having a tough time focusing on science. At least, any kind pertaining to marine life. “Uh, yeah . . . she’s definitely going to look good. On camera, I mean.”
Kat gave him a sideways glance and grinned. “You’re planning on using the footage as part of your pitch, I assume.”
“The footage?”
“Of her making her kill. I get it. It makes her look much more fearsome – a good selling point. That way, if Grayson throws the whole ‘carrion feeder’ angle at the Navy, you can offset it. What the hell do those guys know, right?”
>
Jude’s jaw hung partially open. “Um, how did you know I--”
“C’mon, Sharky. Give me some credit,” she said with a chuckle. “Who knows you better than me?”
Jude nodded in appreciation of Kat’s astuteness. He’d been dreading unveiling his “evil master plan” to her. Challenging one of his estranged former employer’s pliosaurs to a battle to the death was a bit unorthodox. In fact, to a scientist, it was borderline crazy. He’d half-expected her to freak out and demand they call the whole thing off. But to his relief she’d not only handled it, she agreed to go along. He couldn’t have been more grateful.
As Kat pushed herself erect and held up the tablet she had stashed under one arm, Jude worked hard at not noticing she wasn’t wearing a bra. It was obviously cold in there and he made a mental note to check the boat’s air conditioner settings.
“I’ve got good news,” she said.
“Let’s hear it,” Jude replied, clearing his throat.
“I finished my comparative studies and genetic profiles of both our fish and the abyssal Megalodon.” She handed him the tablet, beaming proudly as he started scanning her findings.
Jude licked his lips as he scrolled down the screen with one finger, speed-reading as he went. “Fascinating . . . Ursula’s gum tissue confirms it. They’re separate species that separated from the original chronospecies.”
She nodded. “A response to evolutionary pressure from climactic changes, I assume. Darwin theorized that two distinct populations of the same species, isolated from one another for only ten thousand years, could evolve down divergent paths. I’d say this proves it.”
“Yes, but with a Lazarus taxon? It’s remarkable.”
Kat moved closer, resting her hand on his shoulder as she leaned down. “Forget the DNA sequencing for a moment. Read the implications of the hematology and anatomical reports. The interspecies divergence is far more extreme than anticipated.”
Kronos Rising_Kraken vol.1 Page 52
