Chapter 15
North Pacific Ocean
220 miles west of Port McNeill, British Columbia
October 20, 2122
5:45 am
When she came to, Angie’s first impression was like when she’d been riding back of Chase on his turboscooter and they’d run though a giant pool of rainwater covering Winter Valley Road, near that wide turn coming out of Croc’s Corner. It was much deeper than either of them realized and the scooter started hydroplaning and sliding across the top of the water, slamming them forward with sudden deceleration so hard she thought they were both going to be thrown off into the culverts.
Coming out of the Farpool was like that, only about a million times worse. The blinding roar of deceleration slammed Angie against the ship’s forward bulkhead
“Ouch! That hurts like hell!” she told herself. The little craft spun and gyrated for a few moments as it slowed down, then began drifting, gently settling downward bow first.
Had she made it? Was this Earth? The Gulf, maybe?
She craned her neck trying to see out of the tiny porthole but there was only dark.
When all the ship’s motions had dampened out, Angie repeated Pakma’s instructions on cycling the hatch. With effort, she managed to spring it open. Cold water flooded in and she sucked in her breath.
She tried to squeeze out and wound up stuck. Panic set in. She kicked and thrashed, felt her heart pounding like a jackhammer. Jesus--! Then she kicked some more, hammered with her fists…what if I can’t get out…how will I eat?…just the thought of it made her hungry. She’d developed a taste for Seomish gisu and tongpod…surely none of that would be around.
Finally, with a great straining heave, she managed to kick loose and tumbled out of the lifeship cockpit. The little craft was scorched and streaked with something…is that what I just came through?
She kicked and pulled and talked to herself. Steady girl…you know how to swim…you know how to do this…don’t panic…just do what Chase always says…think happy thoughts…only his happy thoughts…oh, never mind that—
She pulled upward, instinctively seeking the surface. This doesn’t really look like the Gulf. The Gulf was always clear, aquamarine or turquoise, sandy sea bed. She couldn’t even see the seabed and the water was dark, cold and heavy.
As she approached the surface, she heard something thrashing and honking in the water nearby. She wasn’t alone. She stopped for a moment. Then she realized it was a whale…she could sense its massive bulk close aboard. Angie kicked away from the noise and soon realized she was ascending through a gathering of whales. The water was turbulent, frothy, thick with bubble columns. Somehow, she had blundered right into the middle of them.
She breached the surface and found herself in heavy surf, with whitecaps spuming off the roaring wave tops. Winds whipped at her, but she thrashed around, mesmerized at the sight of all her whale neighbors spouting, breaching, slamming tails and flukes against the water, lifting geysers of spray into the air.
Maybe I’d better get out of here, before I get crushed. She dove back down, sensing that the pod was slowly moving off. Still hungry, she soon fell back to the rear of their formation, barely able to make out their undulating tails. She kicked and pulled hard and decided to try to follow them.
Clearly, this was not the Gulf of Mexico.
Captain Will McKinley stood against a door on the forward weather deck of the Kitticut and tried for the fifth time to light his cigarette. Fortunately, his first mate, Gallagher, was nearby and came to the rescue, cupping his hands around McKinley’s stiff fingers.
Both men were still shaken from what they had just witnessed.
“Never seen a spout like that, Gil…quite a sight that was.”
Gallagher, first name Gil, agreed. He lit his own cigarette. “Never this far north, eh? Like something out of the tropics. Sky split open, crack of lightning. It’s a wonder that pod didn’t scatter to the winds. They got up a good frenzy but they seem to be settling down. Shall I order the boats out?”
“Yeah, give the order. It’s a small pod but we might have some good ones in there. Tell the shooters to brace themselves, though. This is some fierce chop.”
It was just then that first mate Gil Gallagher, of the whaler Kitticut, out of Port McNeill, British Columbia, lead ship of the Robson Line and always loaded to her gunwales with good meat after a run, saw the ghost, the apparition, for that’s what he would insist on calling it in all the reports and debriefings that would follow.
“Cap’n…excuse me, sir…but what the hell is that?” Gallagher pointed to a form just breaching the heavy waves off their starboard bow…not a whale, not a porpoise, but something else altogether, something the two officers had no words for.
McKinley, who didn’t really mind being called “Mount—“ behind his back by the crew, peered hard at the body, the form, riding low in the surf. It was human-like in size and scale, but amphibious in appearance. Dark gray, mottled on its back, fins and flukes, but also legs and arms. And the head—
“Crikey…it looks like a bad movie…what is that? Mermaid? Monster? If I didn’t know better—“
But Gallagher was already on the bridge talker. “Shooters, all shooters, to the starboard bow! Man your stations! Shooters, all hands forward now! Target… two hundred meters abeam of the ship—“
A flurry of activity around Kitticut’s foredeck produced half a dozen men with high-powered rifles, now assembling among the capstans and bracing of the ship’s foredeck.
“Jesus!”
“God in…it’s a monster…!”
“Some kind of turtle--?”
Gallagher made his way down. “Take your best shot, gentlemen. Let’s see if we can capture that beasty and bring her in…no one’ll believe it otherwise.”
Men settled their weapons down. Presently, shots rang out, dozens, then scores of shots, as the whaleboat crews unloaded, trying to hit the ‘apparition’, but the ship was rolling and pitching too heavily for anything like a clean shot.
Gallagher went up to the bowsprit and leaned out, trying to get a better look. God Almighty, the beast looks like a raptor…like something from the past. All scales, reptilian head, fins and flukes, black button eyes….it’s a friggin’ nightmare!
“Sir--!” it was Sebastian, the Inuit crew chief. “Maybe the nets…if we could get close enough--!”
Gallagher figured it was worth a shot. He hand signaled to McKinley, still up on the bridge deck. The Captain seemed to understand. While Kitticut broke off her whale chase for a few moments and maneuvered toward the beast, Gallagher and Sebastian organized a net crew. The men sprang open lockers on the foredeck, hauled out seine nets and other rigging and loaded the mortars with shot, fastening the net anchors around the mortars. At the first mate’s signal, three mortars boomed out and flung netting over the side of the ship. The range was near perfect on their very first try and the netting descended over the thrashing beast, just as McKinley heeled Kitticut sideways toward their target. The ship slopped and careened for a moment, while the net crews worked furiously to secure the net ends, cinching up the snare by its halyards.
The beast was caught…and a great cheer went up on deck. Now, winches were started up and bit by bit, the net was hauled shipward…as the beast thrashed and flailed and struggled and cried out.
Gallagher lit another cigarette, as he helped straighten one end, trying to keep the net from tangling. By the time the winches had brought their prize catch alongside and began hoisting it on board, crewmen were already backing away from the still-thrashing beast, as it kicked and squealed and lashed out. A few kicked back at the thing, one threw a bucket.
Gallagher had the sense to go find a locker and withdrew a small gun. He loaded the magazine with several tranquilizer darts—the tray label read Impact-Actuating Inoculating Hypodermic Syringe—Maropitant citrate. He shoved several crewmen aside and c
autiously approached the beast, still writhing and squealing in its snare on the deck.
It looked like a gigantic frog to Gallagher. Spade-shaped head like a little dinosaur, long legs with feet and fins, arms with hands and fingers…it was trying to tear at the netting with its fingers. It was strong too, several crewmen ventured too close and were knocked backwards by its kicks and slashes.
Gallagher crept up, took aim and fired several times, once into the stomach, several times into the chest and neck.
The tranquilizer began to take effect a few moments later. The beast’s kicks and flails began dying off, becoming more and more intermittent, weaker, slower, until finally, after what seemed like forever, it lay still and quiet, dripping salt water puddles onto the deck.
That’s when Captain McKinley finally showed up, having made his way down from the bridge. Already, Kitticut was heeling to port, picking up speed—McKinley had ordered flank speed from the engine room, in an effort to catch up with what was left of the pod of right whales they had been about to process.
McKinley stooped down as close as he dared and studied the now-still creature.
“My God, gentlemen, what on earth have we captured here?”
Two days later, Kitticut put in at Dock 4, south terminal of Port McNeill’s harbor, loaded with whale meat, tons of oil and baleen and something else that seemed to put men at a loss for words to describe it, something that had to be seen to be believed.
Someone had given the beast-thing the name Nessie, for any Scotsman would have been proud to have corralled such a catch in the deeps of Loch Ness itself. McKinley had already informed the Robson Line dock dispatcher that Kitticut was bringing in a full catch and something unusual as well.
Less than an hour after the whaler had tied up to Dock 4, calls had been placed to the Vancouver Aquarium. The dispatcher had talked for ten minutes with Dr. Justin Fort, marine biologist in residence. Fort was on his way to Port McNeill an hour later.
It was nearly seven o’clock when Justin Fort pulled his pickup truck into a parking spot outside the Robson Line terminal above the dockyards. Fort hustled into the offices, going over in his mind the words he had heard from the dispatcher five hours before: monster…prehistoric…looks like a dinosaur…scaly…reptilian…like nothing we’ve ever seen….
Fort was already writing the introduction to the paper he knew would come out of this when Captain McKinley and Robson’s operations manager Vic Casey showed him into the storage locker, where the….thing, creature, whatever it was…had been placed for safekeeping.
Fort stood in disbelief alongside a shallow pool, surrounded by mesh netting and wire barriers. In the water lay Nessie, for that’s what everyone had come to call the find.
“That ain’t no Pacific cod we brought back, Doctor,” McKinley remarked. “Looks like a nightmare sea beast to me.”
“Or something akin to an Ichthyosaurus…some kind of refugee from the Triassic,” said Fort. He unfastened his wristpad and started taking photos.
Casey held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa there Dr. Fort…this is Robson property. I’ll have to ask you to stop with the photos.”
Fort took a few more and slipped his wristpad back on. “Right…sorry. Just a reaction…this is really extraordinary. Tell me again where you caught this—“
“Nessie,” said McKinley. “We’re calling her Nessie.” McKinley described the details of the catch.
Casey already had a calculator open on his own wristpad. “I’m guessing the aquarium is interested. We can talk terms in my office, if you’ll just—“
Fort was mesmerized by the sight of the thing. “Just look at it…reptilian head, but no real tail flukes…it’s amphibious, adapted for land and water. And the hands…it’s got fingers, fins…it’s a hybrid…an evolutionary throwback. I’ll bet this line went extinct two hundred million years ago. To think a specimen could have survived this long-“
Casey cleared his throat. “Right…as I was saying, Dr. Fort, Robson’s more than happy to work with the aquarium on details. We just need to talk terms here—“
It was only with great effort that Casey was able to pull Fort away from the storage locker. They spent half an hour in Casey’s office. Fort sent his photos to the aquarium director. Calls were made, texts were exchanged, donors and sponsors contacted. After an hour, Fort was authorized to make an offer.
Casey hemmed and hawed and finally, after some haggling, a price was set.
“Now, we just have to work out the matter of getting Nessie down to the aquarium.”
Fort already had the details worked out. “We’ll have an animal transporter here first thing to tomorrow. Nessie’s amphibious, so we need to keep her in a wet environment. Can’t say if she’s a mammal or what exactly, so let’s replicate the conditions you’ve maintained in the locker for the time being. I’d like to make a quick examination, if I may.”
Casey was already printing out the final pages of the contract of sale, licking his lips over what this little extra transaction would add to their month’s catch. A nice little bonus for me and the officers, at the very least, he imagined.
Fort and Casey signed. Casey buzzed for one of the plant catchmasters to escort Fort back to the locker. “You’ve got half an hour, Dr. Fort. Then we’ll start getting Nessie ready for her little trip south.”
The Farpool Page 16
