Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Holly was surprised but kept herself from saying anything about it—one did not patronize Jake Bentneus, not if she wanted to stay in his good graces. But the filmmaker was correct, and the “dinosaurs surviving in deep warm water” theory had been proposed before. “That’s right. I think it was Doctor Sean Muir who first published speculation on this idea.”

  “Sean Muir? The murderer?”

  “He was also a brilliant paleoichthyologist. What we’re seeing seems to support his theories, which he has refined and published in peer-reviewed journals over the last seven years—”

  “From prison, you mean.”

  Again, Holly’s brain screamed Enough! but Bentneus was simply sharing the opinion of many in the paleontology and marine biology and oceanography communities. “Jake, all due respect, but his actions outside the paleoichthyology community don’t hold any bearing on the research he’s done. Doesn’t matter if it was from a jail cell or from Woods Hole—he explains how creatures like our ‘dinosaurs’ could exist down here! I’d think you’d want to consider his theories.”

  “Fine, good point,” Bentneus said. “Now, it’s shifting tectonic plates that create the heat that makes these vents bust open, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How long would the heat from that last?”

  Holly’s smile could be heard in her voice over the radio: “As long as Planet Earth is tectonically active—that is, as long as the continents continue to ‘float’ on the crust—the heat will continue. It started before anything had crawled out of the sea and will continue long after humans go extinct.”

  Bentneus wanted to say something about the Spaceship: Earth film he was developing at Disney (since they held the rights to that title, and he was going to use that title, dammit). It was about a “generation ship” preserving the DNA of every human on the planet and a core crew who would “seed” promising planets throughout the galaxy so the human race would never go extinct. But he held back, cognizant that they were on the live feed and people were expecting exciting science talk, not movie hype.

  “What I’m saying is that once a vent opens—and we’ve found they open up all over the ocean floor, usually in a line running along the tectonic edge—it’s not going to close for a long, long time. This is a brand-new vent, it seems, or at least new since 2008, the last time the Japanese sent an ROV this deep, but creatures that can withstand the pressure may thrive along the network of thermal vents. That’s just speculation on my p—”

  “Do you see this? Mickey, do you see this?” Bentneus interrupted, bouncing in his seat and pointing at the portside camera feed. “The big gray one is coming back! Holly, get ready to analyze the living hell out of this footage!”

  Mickey hit the video delay button to skip over the expletive, then looked closely at the monitor showing that camera’s view, and there was something huge out there. A smaller dinosaur—smaller than the original apparent Liopleurodon, which was mind-blowing when they first saw it but which now seemed like an also-ran—moved aft past the port camera and into the wide-field view of the rear camera array. Like the others, it was very nearly albino but moved around the submersible like a creature with sight.

  “Holly, get—”

  “Jake, she’s on it,” Mickey said as gently as possible. Sometimes, working with Jake Bentneus was like trying to move an ADHD child smoothly through the supermarket checkout. “Trust me, she’s on all of it.”

  A moment passed and Holly proved Mickey right by radioing, “Jake, the database calls it a match for Nothosaurus, a small predator from the Triassic period. I know this probably isn’t helpful, but none of these animals lived during the same epochs.”

  “According to scientists who haven’t ventured as deep as I have,” Bentneus said.

  “That is technically true,” Holly said, measuring her words carefully, “but the scientific community has been studying fossils for almost two hundred years. Their study has produced consistent results advancing the science—”

  “Yes, Holly,” Bentneus said, a little condescendingly, “but those are fossils. These are living dinosaurs.”

  The oceanographer/marine biologist sighed. The last thing she wanted was to annoy or even anger the mercurial filmmaker, but the second-to-last thing was for the real science of this expedition—and these creatures were going to require long study—to be buried under overexcited pseudo-scientific gibbering.

  “Okay, yes, good point, but just for the benefit of the many students and possible future scientists watching, I need to point out that technically speaking, there never were any totally aquatic dinosaurs. If we want to be exact in our language, the species of the creatures we’ve been seeing, if the database is correct in its identifications, are marine reptiles, not dinosaurs.”

  “Comme ci, comme ça,” Bentneus said, and was about to add something about the spirit of adventure being more important than this exact term or that specific distinction, but he cut himself off as he took in what was happening not fifteen feet from where he was sitting.

  The port camera, the one the Nothosaur had passed by moments earlier, was suddenly blocked by some moving thing of the nearly white, blanched color of steel, its banding barely detectable, and entered the ken of the rear cameras. Before it was finished getting all the way across, still too close to get a good look at, it turned at a sharp angle away from the camera, giving an idea of its size (colossal) but providing no view of its head.

  When it finished its maneuver and could be seen in its entirety, it opened its massive jaws, and swallowed whole the nearby Nothosaurus. They could see all of the beast now, and it looked like nothing less than a mammoth great white shark. Mammoth was almost an understatement—the 3D analysis HUD pegged it at sixty feet long, the size of a school bus.

  Mickey said with awe in his voice, “That’s got to be the biggest great white in history.”

  Jake smiled and shook his head. “Naw, Mick, I don’t even need Holly’s computer to tell me what this fellow is. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the largest predator ever to hunt the ocean: Megalodon.”

  Mickey paused, listening, and said to Jake, “Holly’s database agrees.”

  Bentneus nodded absently at his chief’s words. For the moment, he had no reply and just watched the massive predator swim around and around Ocean Victory. Maybe it was trying to figure out what it was looking at—it definitely had eyes and certainly was not blind—or maybe it was trying to check if its jaws would fit around the submersible. (They wouldn’t—a man could stand upright inside of this beast’s mouth, but Ocean Victory was, thankfully, a good bit bigger in diameter than that. However, it could probably knock the submersible over and sever its tether from Piranha II, which would be just as fatal to Bentneus.)

  The thing was grandeur itself. “This is some pulp magazine stuff going on right now. This is The Lost World.” He was able to tear his gaze away for a second to look at the camera and add, “Doyle’s, not Spielberg’s.”

  Mickey’s chuckle could be heard over the comm.

  Bentneus returned to the video. “This is amazing … we’re looking at a creature supposed to have died out 100 million years ago. Megalodon, wow. She’s so graceful—”

  Bentneus was interrupted by the graceful and grand Megalodon slowing down to convulse and vomit, propelling the still-living Nothosaurus back into the warm water and making no further attempt to eat it. The filmmaker stammered and tried to say something coherent, but he failed. After a few seconds of shocked silence, he said, “Anybody want to take a stab at what just happened?”

  The radio was silent. Mickey certainly had no idea—he was a boat and submersible engineer; everyone else on board Piranha II was a specialist in this or that aspect of sailing and/or deep-sea exploration. They made sure everything worked and the expedition went as smoothly and safely as possible. And Kevin and the rest of the crew over on Sea Legs who weren’t sailors by trade were in charge of communications, a job plenty as complex and difficult out in the open se
a as any position involved in actually operating the boat. None of them were paleo-whatever-ologists, oceanographers, or even marine biologists.

  Those folks were on Sharkasm, the science teams making measurements, filling entire servers with data coming from Ocean Victory, and, of course, identifying any unknown creatures Bentneus happened to come across. The last was Holly’s responsibility, and what a job it had turned out to be: they were expecting to see perhaps an unusual octopoid or flatfish or albino shrimp, or even nothing living at the very bottom at all. Instead, she got dinosaurs—or marine lizards, whatever. (Her boss’s sloppy terminology was trying to take over her fastidious brain.)

  But she was just one of a dozen oceanographers, meteorologists, and marine biologists on board the science vessel. She was very pretty, but like most women in the field, she eschewed makeup, and all the boys on Sharkasm had taken to affectionately calling her “Velma” because of her (sexy? She didn’t see it) horn-rim glasses. She was the one on the comm identifying the crazy creatures through her database link, but she had no more authority than anyone else on Sharkasm to speculate on the dining habits of extinct animals.

  (To be fair, her “affectionate” moniker was hardly harassment—she also had funny handles for most of her shipmate scientists, including but not limited to the bald meteorologist “Sunny,” the timid but brilliant female oceanographer “Hermione,” and the cute-chubby, astoundingly genius marine biologist “Popcorn,” among others. Ocean science seemed to attract as many women as men, and so they all became members of their own gender-irrelevant “old boys’ club.” She loved it.)

  “That’s a lot of dead air, fellas,” Bentneus said after almost a full minute of silence. The viewers probably didn’t care, and, to be honest, neither did the filmmaker. The visuals were overpowering: a Megalodon, 65 feet long if it was an inch, swimming around and around Ocean Victory, every camera catching it in 3D. Bentneus had Kevin route the microphone feed into the broadcast, so now the eerie rush of the hydrothermal vents lay a background against the odd whines of the lucky little Nothosaurus. The giant Megalodon didn’t make a sound—its movement through the water, even up close to the submersible, released no sound at all. Like its descendant—hell, Bentneus corrected himself, its exact contemporary—the great white, it was a silent hunter. It was a zeppelin-sized assassin. At these depths, with its blind fellow creatures living in the temperate, even boiling, environment around the vents, a sighted, silent killer would be impossible to avoid.

  But why had it spit out the Nothosaur? Predators ate smaller predators all the time back in the Cenozoic period. He needed to know, and he needed the millions watching to know as well, to see the science that he was helping to produce here.

  “Holly? Anybody on the S.S. Geek have any ideas at all? Anything?”

  Popcorn motioned for the handset and Holly very gladly gave it over. “Mister Bentneus, this is Orville Blum on Sharkasm.”

  Jake sighed a tiny bit. He had asked, then told, Blum a hundred times not to call him that, to call him by his first name. But he knew that the brilliant fellow was also half a seeded bun away from full-on Asperger’s Syndrome, so he let it slide. “Orville, tell me what I’m seeing here, please. You’re my only hope.”

  Blum let out exactly one chuckle, which for him was nearly hysterical laughter. Then he said, “If this is Megalodon we’re seeing circle Ocean Victory—and I’d be freaking out if I were personally at the center of that circle—”

  Jesus, Holly thought, and stifled a laugh with the back of her hand.

  “—but let’s take this piece by piece, if you will. First, in order for these creatures—or any vertebrate, okay?—to exist at these depths, they’d have to be porous, like a sponge. Otherwise the water pressure wouldn’t balance itself out and you would have a wholly different kind of flatfish.” At his own joke, he let out a snort, which none of the rest of the crew on board Sharkasm had ever heard from him. With wide grins, they looked at each other like, He’s gone mad! MAD! “Ahem, anyway, so, despite the fearsome size of, say, our Liopleurodon analogue, and certainly the massive Megalodon analogue, they probably lack any real tensile strength at all. Down at the thermal vents, there would be few other vertebrates, if any—if these ‘marine lizards’ even are vertebrates—so the albino arthropods and tube worms and other native life we’ve seen down here would be the food these giants live on. And even then, that’s not much food. Perhaps we were seeing old instincts still around when ‘Megalodon’ swallowed that ‘Nothosaurus,’ but the predator’s system isn’t evolved to eat meat anymore. This is a most exciting turn of events, Mister Bentneus, please don’t misunderstand—but these must be entirely new species descended from the marine lizards of old.”

  Bentneus blinked his wide eyes a couple of times, then said, “I wanted a scientific opinion, I got a scientific opinion. Thank you, Orville—but wait, I do have a question: why do they all still have the serrated razor teeth? Wouldn’t they have evolved better without them if they didn’t use them anymore?”

  “Heh, that is a common, but unfortunate, misunderstanding of how natural selection works, sir. If the species is under no evolutionary pressure to lose the teeth—that is, if those animals without the teeth don’t reproduce any better than those with them, then the teeth remain. Perhaps if the teeth are thin, hollow, and filled with water balancing the pressure down there, then there would be no crushing of teeth or interference with feeding. That’s what it comes down to—the teeth, especially since everything else down there is blind and can’t see these threatening teeth, serve no actual function for chewing or the intimidation of other predators. You saw how the Megalodon analogue—”

  “Stop saying that, please.”

  Popcorn abruptly stopped speaking at the interruption, and everyone in the cabin with him thought his time of speaking with Jake was through. He would go back to his desk and watch the instrumentation, responding when one of them spoke to him, otherwise lost in the colors at his end of the autism spectrum.

  But they were wrong. Popcorn rolled his head around and got some satisfying pops, then replied calmly into the handset, “I apologize, Mister Bentneus. I was trying only to keep our terminology in line with scientific protocol.” He cleared his throat and said, “Would you like me to continue or is that enough information for right now?”

  “No. Please do continue, Orville.” He didn’t do it for very long since he could barely take his eyes off the circling Megalodon—or what-the-hell-ever it “really” was—but he placed his hand over his eyes and tried to breathe himself out of having acted like an asshole in front of half a billion people.

  “I shall, sir. Now, we all saw how the, that is, apparent Megalodon swallowed the smaller marine lizard whole. It didn’t bite down; it didn’t chew. I would hazard a guess, although treating it as a hypothesis would be almost certainly premature, that those intimidating-looking teeth are, in fact, no stronger than papier-mâché. They would almost certainly crumble if these animals tried to bite anything with more tensile resistance than one of those tube worms. Does that answer the question adequ—?”

  He was interrupted by a shout, almost a scream, from Bentneus that saw him momentarily curl up onto his bathysphere seat. That wasn’t all—every person on all three ships who was watching the circling dinosaur either gasped, cursed, or was shocked into silence. It was like every bit of air was sucked up on the surface; and that was almost literally true down in the submersible.

  What made every single person watching anywhere in the world jump, do a double take, or just shout in surprise and horror was that Megalodon, the largest and fiercest predator ever to swim the sea, fell into shadow and immediately tried to swim as fast as it could before a titanic pair of jaws clamped down on it. These jaws, filled—overflowing—with teeth that each must have been as big across as a schooner’s mizzen sail and just as tall, tore through the Megalodon like a butcher’s cleaver through Orville Blum’s almost-hypothesized papier-mâché. It was impossible to even esti
mate how huge the biting creature must have been—the cameras couldn’t capture the whole thing, even though the monster stretched across three arrays. Its mouth alone looked as wide as the entire Megalodon was long.

  The gargantuan creature ripped what was left of the front of Megalodon into a rain of flesh … but not a drop of blood was released. The inside of Megalodon looked like a pumpkin’s sticky nest of tendrils, mostly empty space, making Popcorn nod with satisfaction that at least he had gotten the porous bit right.

  Then it spit out the back end of the carcass.

  “Mister Bentneus, it seems that the, um … the that wants to bite and chew, but not necessarily consume, the flesh of the Megalodon analo—of Megalodon.”

  “What the hell happened to It’s got paper-mache teeth?” Bentneus did scream this time. “Orville, answer me, goddamnit!”

  A croak came from Popcorn’s throat and that really was all she wrote for the polymath scientist as far as communication was concerned.

  Holly gave Popcorn a supportive squeeze on the shoulder and took up the phone. “Jake, how big is that thing?”

  “Holly? I asked Orville a goddamn direct question!”

  “Jake.” She waited. “Jake! This is new to all of us. Now please focus and tell me: Can you get any read of how big that … thing is?”

  For Bentneus, the bathysphere, the instruments and readouts, even the fact that he was epically deep in the ocean, all of that fell away. His knees were up to his neck, and he stared at the monitors showing the thing—dinosaur? Marine lizard of unusual size? Brobdingnagian leviathan?—blocking out three cameras at a time with its ashen gray hide—not quite albino—as it took up swimming in a circle around Ocean Victory.

  Around Jake Bentneus.

  “Jake, come on, boss, what’ve you got for us?” Holly wasn’t at all sure that he had anything for them, for himself, for his hard-working brain to keep it from shorting out. “Jake.”