Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  A crackle in his earpiece. “Mickey, Holly here.”

  “Go ahead, Holly.”

  “The, um, Gigadon is less than 100 feet from the sub now, and climbing at a much steeper angle than earlier.”

  It was on the video feed, its massive, spear-tooth-filled mouth pointing right into the bottom camera now. Its eyes were as dead-looking as a shark’s, but they were definitely not dead. The son of a bitch could see. He could see Ocean Victory and was swimming up at it. “A hundred feet, you said?”

  “Less than 100 feet,” she answered.

  “Jake is almost to the surface, so close. Twenty-five feet. He could get out and swim the rest of the way holding his breath.” Not that he would want to get out of the submersible while the universe’s biggest shark-thing was hanging around. But it was a moot point anyway—the hatches were bolted from the outside. “Guys, can we get him out of there fast, like now? Toro, get that winch going now. Vanessa, full speed on the cable. And where’s Slipjack? Goddamn that guy! Slipjack!”

  “Right here, chief!” And he was right there, on the other side of the A-frame and winch that was pulling Jake out of the water. “You know, bringing Jake in and all!”

  “All right. Sorry,” Mickey said, then turned again to the feed from the bottom camera on the sub that showed nothing now except gray skin and so many teeth. “What are you doing, you ugly bastard?”

  Then it hit Mickey, and he knew exactly what the Gigadon was doing. It was playing with its food. Once it saw the bright light coming from the surface, something switched on, something ancient, something that wasn’t hungry for tube worms. It was hungry for that weird, warm yellow fish slowly rising away from it.

  So the thing followed and followed, and when it sensed the prey was about to leap out of the water, it—

  “HOLY JESUS THIS ISN’T HAPPENING! This is NOT happening!”

  What exactly was “not happening” was Jake Bentneus, hands raised in thumbs-up at the crews and the on-ship cameras (and then at the camera inside his bathysphere), was being pulled out of the sea …

  … but the monster came, too, right behind him.

  The Gigadon was so large that it barely had to lift its whole mouth out of the water. It just opened those crocodilian jaws, water flooding in, and nipped Ocean Victory from its impermeable, unbreakable rare-metal-alloy tether like it was plucking a grape off a vine.

  Every single person on every ship, as well as most every single person who had been watching the simulcast or who tuned in now for the triumphant return from the deep, was shocked into complete silence. They did nothing, moved not a hair, because there was nothing to do, there was no reason to move. Also, they were watching something that literally no human had ever seen before. Really that no eyes had ever seen, because a hundred million years ago there wouldn’t have been a fifty-foot-tall submersible to be dragged underwater in the crushing jaws of an impossible dinosaur.

  And this dinosaur, this Gigadon—a name that Bentneus was right about, it would stick—was a perverse son of a whore. It stayed at the surface, its gray back longer than the three expedition ships lined up end to end, and watched the watchers as it chewed the metal and unbreakable plastic like an old man at Denny’s eating a club sandwich with his mouth open. They could see everything being crushed and chomped on, including the solid iron ball of Bentneus’s bathysphere.

  “Jake is in there,” Holly said to no one, and no one replied. Everyone knew that the celebrity explorer was right then being rolled around in the mouth of the Gigadon he’d discovered. “He could be okay if that thing lets him go in time before Jake’s air is used up! The bathysphere resists 16,000 pounds per square inch! Nothing could bite through that, or even dent it!”

  “Actually,” Popcorn said, and in his defense, he looked very sorry to be the bearer of bad news, “bite strength is a function of jaw width. A normal crocodile—which, you’ll notice, this animal resembles in its mouth area, at least—can exert 3700 psi. The … let’s call it a Gigadon for the time being, even though that’s not even close to proper Latinate termi—”

  “Popcorn!” Holly snapped, and her colleague nodded rapidly. “Sorry, time is of the essence. The Gigadon’s jaw, if it is analogous to the crocodilian jaw, is as wide as Piranha II is long. Much, much more than four or five times bigger. But even if it were ‘just’ five times bigger than a crocodile’s jaw, the arithmetic relationship in bite strength would put it at well over 16,000 pounds per square inch.”

  “Holy hell,” Sunny the meteorologist said, without even feeling his mouth move.

  “Exactly,” Popcorn said.

  As if on cue, the bastard lizard let the bathysphere roll to its side teeth and chomped it like a gumball.

  The metal—the strongest possible—crunched and folded inward. It wasn’t squashed flat anywhere, but it looked like … a gumball that’s been chomped on with a person’s molars a few times: its skin was still identifiable, and it still maintained a vestige of its original round shape, but, as in the case of the gumball, no one would say it hadn’t suffered irrevocable damage.

  Then, as if this was something the Gigadon did every day, it vomited up the pile of parts that was formerly Ocean Victory into the water and spit—hurled with an exhalation—the crumpled iron bathysphere straight onto the deck of Piranha II. Then it slipped its head back under the water and disappeared. Holly thought later that it perhaps went right back down to the hadal depths, but there were less deep hydrothermal vents in lines all down this part of the ocean.

  But at the moment, all any of them on board Sharkasm could do was observe the damage that the hurled several-ton ball made of 2.5-inch solid steel caused the deck of Piranha II and wonder if there was any way Jake Bentneus could have survived. His seat had been in the very center of the sphere, so it seemed possible—if not at all likely—that he could have lucked out and avoided the parts of the bathysphere that were coming in at him.

  Maybe he didn’t even need to be actually crushed inside the ball, though. Holly felt that she personally would have died of a heart attack, maybe an aneurysm, when the Gigadon took its first bite. And she would have been glad to go that way, too, instead of being chewed to death and then spit out like a spent was of gum.

  “He’s alive!” Mickey shouted so loudly that the crews of Sea Legs and Sharkasm heard him loud and clear.

  They had no way to get him out of the crushed metal, but their boss was alive. They called for military assistance from the base in Guam, the land closest to them, and which happened to be under American authority. Bentneus may have been of Canadian origin, but to the hundreds of millions watching the drama unfold, he had entered the pantheon of all-American heroes.

  ***

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  The entire cost of the disastrous but scientifically epochal Ocean Victory expedition was less than $60 million out of the pocket of Jake Bentneus. The other $40 million ended up getting paid for by corporate sponsorship, scientific grants, and the donation of much of the equipment from the Muir deep-sea project. The family of Katherine Muir thought she would have wanted the gear not to be sold for parts but kept intact for further scientific missions.

  Sixty million dollars was a lot of money. However, to Bentneus, it had represented less than 3 percent of his net worth. Interest alone on some of his more boring investments paid back more than the cost of the expedition in the past eight months, anyway. Bentneus was in the top 1 percent of the 1 percent thanks to his extraordinarily profitable films and investment in other studio blockbusters. He had an almost-perfect track record when it came to picking what movies to put his money behind. He had a gift for the business side of entertainment, some wags opining that it far exceeded his abilities in the entertainment side of entertainment.

  But he who laughs last laughs best. The various snarky reviewers who opposed the public’s enjoyment of spectacular, thought-provoking science fiction and sinking-boat movies had to be aware that not only did Bentneus laugh last, but he laughed a
ll the way to the bank.

  His net worth was more than two billion dollars, and while much of that was connected with investments, he maintained a great amount of liquidity in cash, gold, and bearer bonds. He could walk into the bank and withdraw a billion dollars. (Now, of course, it would have to be via a wire or other remote access, but the point was that he could have that much in cash to spend within an hour of his request.)

  He who laughs last laughs best.

  Except Bentneus couldn’t actually laugh at all anymore.

  Having a machine doing your breathing for you didn’t allow for laughter, no matter how technologically advanced the machine was. Neither did a face that couldn’t show emotion because it couldn’t move except when computer-controlled rods implanted in his jaw and sticking out through his muscles and skin moved his mandible up and down according to the instructions from the implants in his brain.

  The advanced breathing machine was controlled by the same computer, a massive parallel-processor device, and it also followed instructions to help Bentneus “talk” while also keeping his system oxygenated.

  He could move his tongue, at least, and after months of practice and therapy, his speech had become downright coherent when all of the mechanized and digital elements worked in concert with his own maximum physical effort.

  His arms and hands were gone, as were his legs and his feet; and he wouldn’t have been able to feel them even if they had still been there. His body had been pulverized to the point where a team of the most brilliant and expensive doctors on Earth actually told him that he should be glad he couldn’t feel anything, because his mangled nerves would have been firing strong pain signals constantly, trying to get his brain to notice that a whole lot had gone wrong.

  He could also move his eyes around in their sockets, courtesy of another set of rods hooked up to the computer. These rods ended in attachments stronger than steel but lighter than foam. These operated his eyelids, blinking for him so his eyes wouldn’t have to be sewn shut or removed entirely because of drying out and subsequent infection.

  His brain, however, had escaped direct injury, Bentneus managing to avoid getting his head crushed by Gigadon chewing the bathysphere and reducing much of his body to barely operative pulp. But he was lucky—ha! what luck!—that the collapsed metal ball actually held him together. This, and this alone, kept him alive while rescue helicopters used super-magnets to lift the bathysphere off the deck of Piranha II and bring it back to Guam, where Bentneus’s personal surgeons and a team hastily assembled and flown in from the best research hospitals in the world awaited him. Another team was put together as well, this one sporting beards, tattoos, and muscled arms the size of a smaller man’s legs: these were metalworkers armed with blowtorches, liquid nitrogen, and more hammers and massive tools than had Vulcan himself.

  They alternately heated and froze the thick iron until it cracked, then got into the crack with automated expansion devices that held the space open while they worked more cracks into the iron, eventually getting the cracks to meet and—with doctors who had already taken control of Bentneus’s bodily functions through snaking tubes and wires through the broken viewports prepared to transport him—breaking the bathysphere open like a Gigadon egg.

  These hardened metal men, all of whom looked stronger than the iron they forged, to a man either fainted or vomited and then fainted at the sight of what was inside. The doctors and whole medical team also felt their stomachs lurch at the sight of what had happened to Bentneus’s body, but in accord with their training, within seconds they stopped seeing the broken and squashed mess in front of them as a human being. They were able to work on extricating him by looking at Bentneus as just a body, as a complex-but-broken machine that needed to be repaired enough to keep its miraculously uninjured head and brain alive.

  It was two months before the filmmaker regained consciousness, finding himself in a private medical facility with the best of everything he would need and absolutely nothing he wanted. What was there to want, anyway? They had put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but not as a nice smooth egg—no, the shell was too badly damaged; so they did the best they could with his scrambled innards. But, like a scrambled egg, a scrambled human cannot be made whole again—no matter how much he wishes it so. That was a longing that could never be satisfied, a torture that Humpty Dumpty was spared by dying from his fall.

  He thought at first that he was blind, but the doctors who spoke into his ears told him that his lids had been sewn shut until—and if—they could find a way to keep his eyes from drying out (since he couldn’t blink).

  There was nothing for the phalanx of experts to do therapy on, really (except for the psychologist, who gave him monologued pep talks full of personal growth and self-esteem cultivation, for all the good that did for a man who couldn’t move or talk or see), so his many friends who were electronics and robotics gurus, biotech visionaries, and cutting-edge nanobot theorists got together and devised a system that would allow Bentneus to regain control over some tiny fraction of his body. Anything would be better than nothing.

  It was another two months before these tinkerers presented to the medical team the unethically human-tested (several of the gurus had areas on their heads where hair was regrowing over thin scars) but fully functional face-manipulation and brain-implant technology. The doctors were appreciative of being given a chance to do something for their patient, and they wanted to be hopeful about the results, but their knowledge and experience made them skeptical, and they had to ask Bentneus for his specific and repeated permission to undertake such a risky endeavor. This they had to do by holding his mouth open and instructing him to use his tongue to signal right for yes and left for no. The patient gave his immediate assent.

  The whole time these masters of their science-fiction-like trade (oh, the irony) worked on the equipment that would allow him some small re-entry into the world, his uninjured brain held onto one thought.

  This thought let him feel as if he had the tiniest sliver of freedom from within despite being trapped in his dark and almost complete isolation. He concentrated on this thought during sessions with “Doctor Slogan,” as he had taken to thinking of the psychologist who babbled feel-good treacle at him for two hours six days a week. He rolled it around and focused on this idea when his relatives—his parents, a brother, and an ex-wife, but no children—stopped in and sat with him. Sometimes they had long one-sided conversations with him in tones one would use when trying to make a comatose person “hear” you through their unconsciousness, even though the doctors assured them he was quite conscious, just completely “shut in.” Other times, his mother or big brother would just be there in the room sitting near him and reading or possibly doing crossword puzzles. This was actually soothing, and he appreciated it greatly. To be fair, he appreciated everything anyone was doing on his behalf, whether it was paid work for them or not. Spielberg stopped by and told him one of the funniest jokes he had ever heard—Bentneus tried to signal his amusement through wagging his tongue against his cheeks, like how an excited dog wags its tail. The nurse pointed it out, and Steven was like a marksman who was proud and pleased to have gotten a bullseye. Jerry Bruckheimer, his ex-wife, who was herself an Oscar-winning film director, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Paxton, and many others came to his room and spoke encouraging words. Tears leaked out from his stitched eyes. They say Hollywood has no soul, but Jake Bentneus knew different now, the one highly ironic but intensely lovely facet of this entire black and lonely existence. The tech guys who would give him a second birth into the world also stopped by frequently to update him on progress and tell him jokes that one could appreciate only if you knew some concepts of higher mathematics and physics. They all became friends, even though he had never looked upon them, shaken their hands, or said one word.

  But all that time, through two months of Stygian existence, the idea cooked in his brain. He went to it when he felt depressed, knowing he lacked any facility even to kill himself; when he f
elt happy after a visit from friends who had made Super 8 movies with him when they were teens; when he felt nothing at all; and, most of all, when he felt horribly betrayed by that monster from the deep … the idea gained detail and traction. He didn’t care how much it cost, because he no longer could do anything with money.

  He could no longer do anything with or without money, actually. Except for this one thing. Except for the execution of his idea. That would be everything and then his mangled body could give up the ghost, as it were.

  When the unprecedented technology was in place, the room was made totally dark. Totally dark: the door not only warned against entry, but was in fact bolted solidly from the inside. The edges of the door were sealed all around with blackout tape, and a metal cover had been installed over the room’s large window. All potential light sources such as electronic devices were removed or, in the case of his life support readout equipment, were rigged to display in infrared. The doctors and mechanics who surrounded him wore night-vision goggles to allow them to see what they were doing; it would be malpractice of the highest order to rescue a patient from blindness by immediately blinding him with light of any kind.

  Bentneus felt the rods being installed on his face, his jaw, and, once they cut through and removed the stitches over his eyes, the butterfly’s wings of his eyelid servos. This last was the most exciting to him—sight to a filmmaker and explorer was everything, and his eyes had been forcibly closed from the time he had been put into a coma four months earlier. (Like the hydraulic fluid that couldn’t keep the JSL’s clamp closed, his autonomic nervous system couldn’t hold his eyes shut when he was comatose, and leaving them open was not an option.)