Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Slipjack’s skin was sun-beaten, almost leathery; but Sean’s was as pale as milk, not having the sun on it for so long. He had to apply sunblock on any and all exposed skin now that he was out in the open, or he would pay painfully for his carelessness.

  They spoke about some technical details regarding the launch mechanism and how the weight of the various weapons was balanced in such a way that Ocean Vengeance would descend straight down, and fast. Once the baiting job got done in the depths, then the submersible would jettison God knew how many dollars’ worth of lethal hardware as ballast and rise to the surface to share in the Bentneus Prize.

  If they could somehow bring Gigadon’s head up to show to their benefactor. How were they going to do that, even if they could find and then kill the beast?

  “It’s a special … cable …” Slipjack answered with discomfort about discussing custom diving cables with the man who had been convicted of sabotaging an earlier custom cable to kill his darling Kat. He shook himself out of it and continued, “It threads through the sub, so the sub doesn’t bear any of the weight of the fish head. It’s all on the A-frame and threaded through the boat.”

  “Jeffrey Plaid did the same thing with his cables on the shark cages,” Sean said, wanting to be contrary but forced to do it passive-aggressively when he would have loved to just do it aggressively.

  “Jeffrey Plaid shoulda stuck to rivers.”

  Sean let out a huff of amusement, then stood in silence, his eyes pointed at the A-frame but not really looking at it.

  It was the same with Slipjack. Silence. Not sure how to continue the conversation or to wrap it up.

  “Look,” Sean said, “before we’re in any life-or-death situation, I’m just going to say to you what I think. Then you tell me whatever might be rattling around in your head, keeping you from focusing 100 percent on the mission. All right?”

  Slipjack paused to look like he was considering the idea, but in fact he thought it an excellent suggestion. “All right, then. Shoot.”

  Sean said, “I think you were having an affair with my wife—how that could have come about, I have no idea, but it came about. I think you used some kind of sleight-of-hand with that key trick the lawyer talked about, did it somehow to enter the expedition building and sabotage the cable to be used for the second dive. I don’t know you would’ve done it, but I believe in my heart that you did it. You knew I was supposed to do the second dive, and you wanted me dead and out of the way so you could have Kat all to yourself. As weird as that concept even is to me.”

  Slipjack nodded while chewing on his lip the whole time Sean was speaking to him. “That it?”

  “You don’t think it’s enough?”

  “I don’t think nothing when it comes to what you say or don’t say. I just let you say your piece and try not to punch you in the throat.”

  “Yeah, all right, same here. Go, talk, this is your one chance … no bull.”

  “Okay, fine. I didn’t know nothing about some ‘key trick,’ and I think that lawyer pulled the whole thing out of his ass to confuse the situation, okay? Second, I think you messed with the cable so it would come apart on the second dive, the dive you were supposed to be on. You faked getting your fingers hurt—funny you didn’t say nothing about that until you needed to get into the sub—so that Kat would take your place and die.”

  “Why? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t need to defend what I said. I just said what I think, same as you.”

  “Fair enough. But will you tell me why you think I’d kill my own wife, who everyone knows I loved more than anything in the world?”

  Slipjack balked dismissively. “She told me things. We talked a lot.”

  “Between banging sessions.”

  “Damn straight.” Slipjack spit over the side. “You wanted to know why I know you killed her—that’s how.”

  “That wasn’t anything to do with why, Slipjack. What did she tell you that makes you so sure I sabotaged my own chance to make scientific history and prove all my naysayers wrong? What could she possibly have said—if she said anything in the first place, which I highly doubt she even did.”

  “Doubt it, believe it, I don’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other.”

  “What did she say, goddamnit?”

  Slipjack smiled and spit into the water again. “All right, you wanna know, here you go: She said the hydrothermal-dinosaur idea was hers, and you used it so you could get tenure at San Diego. She was already tenured there, and she wanted you with her. So she gave you the go-ahead to take her plumb-crazy idea to impress the committee over there.”

  “That’s insane—”

  “That ain’t all, boss. When you finally got the funding to go looking for the prehistoric beasts, she was gonna take half the credit since it was her theory in the first place. There was no way you were gonna let that happen—you wanted the spotlight all for yourself—and so you set up the ‘freak accident’ that killed her.”

  “None of that is even remotely true. If you are telling the truth, then Kat was lying to you. Maybe she was mad, maybe she wanted you to feel like you should hurt me, but I was the one who got it all started—I was the hero. I was the one who would secure complete academic freedom for both of us!”

  “You wonder why she started taking me into her bed? There’s your answer. She loved you, but you were shutting her out from the glory and fame and such. Maybe you loved her, maybe you just used her, but you frickin’ murdered her to get all the attention for yourself.”

  “I guess it worked, then.”

  “Just not like you thought, huh?” Slipjack said with a sneer. “Anyway, there, you got it; we told each other what we think. Now can we work together to get rich enough to never have to see each other again?”

  “I said what I wanted to say. So, yes.”

  “Well, I could say a hell of a lot more, but why waste my breath when we both know what really happened? One of us is lying, and one is telling the truth, and we both know who’s who and what’s what. I can work near you, I guess, for the money up for grabs.”

  “I’m not going to say what I really want to say right now,” Sean said.

  “Yeah, me neither. But we both know what we’d say, anyway. Now go to hell and let me do my job.”

  Sean continued to not say what he really wished he could say, because Slipjack was right: they had a job to do, and the sooner they did it, the sooner they would each be done with the man he’d most love to see die in pain.

  ***

  It took most of a day to get out to the coordinates of Challenger Deep, the three boats of the expedition—if it could be called that instead of a hunt for monsters—traveling in a line, like the fleet of a military blockade.

  The travel time wasn’t wasted time for the crews and the scientists aboard Sea Legs, Sharkasm, and I Spit on Your Grave, however. Aside from the equipment check after redundant check for the techs and the actual sailing activities of the boats’ professional sailors, Sean Muir spent hours with the scientific crew on Sharkasm, making estimates of how much heat needed to be distributed where, how big Gigadon actually was, and how to best kill it and drag it back to Guam for their payday.

  Initial answers to these questions were “A lot,” “twice the size of a blue whale,” and “no friggin’ idea.” Unhelpful as these were, they were at least a start, because they now knew what they didn’t know and could therefore take action to learn it.

  Holly Patterson—now Doctor Holly Patterson, having been just a last-year graduate student when sailing on the Bentneus expedition—ticked off a few reasons why they were as clueless as they were: “It seems that Gigadon spends most of its time near the bottom, where the hydrothermal vents are. This makes sense, since Jake Bentneus encountered the dinosaurs, including Megalodon and Gigadon, just fifty yards or so above the newly discovered vent.

  “The problem we face is that the creature is too deep for our sonar and other equipment to see fine enough detail to know wher
e Gigadon might be.”

  Sean said, “So we’ll know when it’s coming only when it’s well on its way.”

  Holly nodded. “We should have our plan ready to go as soon as Gigadon registers on our equipment, which will be sounding the area all the way down.”

  “So, how long do we have from first seeing that it’s headed our way to when it comes to kill us?”

  “That’s the thing,” Holly said with a twist of her lips showing annoyance with how little they knew. “The creature has surfaced only twice that we know of. The first time, perhaps without any idea of what it was doing, Gigadon spiraled up in the warm wake of Ocean Voyager for the whole time it took to winch Jake back up to the surface, a couple of hours. It was very slow, even careful. It didn’t know what to expect, or maybe it didn’t even expect anything in the first place. But when it reached the surface, ancient genetic memories—that is to say, instincts—got triggered and sent it into attack mode. Poor Jake was the worm on a hook hanging from Piranha II, and the fish took the bait.”

  “The second time didn’t take as long, and Gigadon took down an entire boat that time,” Mickey said with arms crossed, glad to be included in the scientists’ meeting, but in no way making any claim to being one of their number. It took a mariner’s cojones to speak up among the geniuses with even this bit of observation.

  Holly was quite fond of Mickey and was glad he gave a bit of input—eyewitness evidence from one of the Gigadon’s appearances at the surface. Not only that: it was Mickey who busted his ass to get real-time intelligence on what happened to end the hotshot mission of Jeffrey Plaid and his entire ROAR! contingent and sailing crew. “Exactly, Mickey—I mean, Chief Luch—”

  “You mean ‘Mick,’” Mickey said.

  Holly laughed. “Just testing the waters, so to speak. But Mickey is right—that first attack took hours to occur, Gigadon finally going for the submersible only once it was in the bright sunlight. But Jeffrey Plaid’s fate was sealed in, what, minutes? Half an hour?”

  “It learned. Two interventions into its territory and it learned, it remembered, that following a heat source would bring it to a place to exercise its destructive skills,” Sean said, almost not believing his own words. “Anything we send down there that heats the water—once Gigadon feels it, he is going to follow it.”

  “Question is,” Slipjack said from the doorway, making the five people in the room jump, “what do we do with the goddamn thing once it gets here?”

  “This is a science meeting,” Sean said firmly. “What are you even doing on this boat? Crew meeting is at 1300 hours on Spit.”

  “Yeah, well, I ain’t just crew, am I, Doctor Muir? That winch don’t run right, trip’s over. You seen what happens when the winch and cable don’t work just right, haven’t you?” He actually feigned disinterest, cleaning under his fingernail. “I mean, I don’t care, but, if you think about it, you need to know what I can lift and what I can’t, am I right?”

  Sean checked the gaze of the three scientists and his mission chief. Each of them gave a reluctant nod, even if these were accompanied by a rolling of the eyes toward heaven. “All right, Slipjack, come on in.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” the winch boss said, and stood at the large table covered with various indecipherable (to him) charts and readouts and such. “Besides, I got something juicy to share with the big brains anyway.”

  That aroused their interest, each man and woman eagerly giving Slipjack the floor.

  “The winch and cable setup on Spit is the best money can buy. Hell, everything we have is the best, except maybe our commander—”

  “Say something we need to hear or shut your mouth and get the hell out of here,” Sean said to him.

  “Fair enough,” Slipjack said, holding out his palms in mock surrender. “So, we got the best winch ever on Spit, one able to lift and lower the most weight of any boat on the ocean ’cept oil tankers and aircraft carriers. But what are we gonna be trying to lift with this son of a whore? How freakin’ heavy has that thing gotta be? How are we supposed to drag it back to Guam?”

  “All we need to bring is the head,” Mickey said.

  “Yeah, but how heavy is that? Even the Spit winch has a limit. And, who knows, maybe something could go wrong with the cable?”

  “Get your ass out of here, right now.”

  “Sean, wait,” Holly said. “He’s the chief of the winch team. He’s raising important questions, ones we don’t have the slightest idea how to answer. There’s just so little data about Gigadon—we know approximately what its size is, but is it really mostly hollow inside?”

  “It has to be, in order to survive at those depths,” Sean said. “And we saw evidence from Plaid’s video that this is mostly right. It seems to have some kind of organs—which it would have to possess, obviously, to live—but they are gossamer things, able to withstand the pressure, so we can’t really establish a useful estimate of Gigadon’s weight not knowing what its internal structure is like.”

  “Agreed,” Holly said, her voice betraying that her mind was off chewing on the problem and wasn’t 100 percent present. “We’ll need to drain the water out of it somehow. Actually, we’ll have to force it out of Gigadon to have any chance of pulling it out of the water. And how will we cut off his head? Do we have anything capable of doing that on board? A giant saw or something?”

  “We’ve got everything in our little convoy here,” Mickey said with a big smile. “Jake really left no stone unturned. Guess what we have from War-Mart, Holly.”

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “Nice guess. We have a maser. Do you know what that is?”

  Everybody was listening intently, even Sean Muir, who of course had been with Mickey when Abu al Khayr had shown it off amid all the other super-advanced weaponry. It wouldn’t be “sharks with frickin’ lasers,” but something even better: a 360-degree-swiveling maser cannon that used the newest applied science to operate in temperate conditions instead of supercooled laboratory environments.

  “It’s like a laser, I believe. I didn’t get my doctorate in physics, Mick,” she said with a smirk. “Or from a subscription to Discover magazine.”

  Even the responsible adults in the room made sounds to indicate that perhaps Mickey would be in need of aloe to soothe the pain of the sick burn Holly had just laid down on him. He laughed and said, “It is like a laser, but instead of being amplified light, it’s amplified microwaves.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I forgot—biologist, not physicist. Well, the intensity of an electromagnetic wave is in direct proportion to its frequency. Like their name says, microwaves have very small wavelengths, and thus high frequency, much higher than that of visible light in lasers, and so they are a lot more powerful and destructive.”

  Holly blinked at Sean. “Did he do a home-study course or something?”

  Sean said, “I think I’ve heard these exact words before, but it’s hard to tell for sure without hearing it with an Arabic accent.”

  Mickey roared with laugher and said, “You get the point, though.”

  “Not really,” Holly said.

  “A laser might be useful for putting a cigarette burn on Gigadon’s tough exterior. But specially if the dinosaur is mostly hollow, a maser will slash right through its hide and innards and burn its way out the other side.” He waited for Sean to jump in or for Holly to ask more questions. When they didn’t, he finished: “We can cut the monster’s head off and bring it to shore. For our billion dollars.”

  “So much for science.”

  “That’s not totally correct, Hol,” Sean said. “The knowledge of every scientific savant on Sharkasm is going to be needed to kill this son of a bitch. It’s not being done for new science, that’s true. But we’ll learn enough to rewrite the marine biology books, just by figuring out how to destroy Gigadon.”

  Three bells rang, an old-fashioned touch on this most advanced vessel. “That’s the first crew mess,” Slipjack said. “You gonn
a talk, Boss Man?”

  “If you’re asking me if I’m going to address the crew as the director of this expedition, and chiefs always address the sailors and scientists and everybody else working with them, then yes, Slipjack, I am. You’re asking this why, exactly?”

  “’Cause I wanna address everybody, too.”

  “The hell you will.”

  “See?” Slipjack snapped at Mickey, who had no idea why the question was targeted at him. Slipjack then turned back to Sean. “‘The hell I will?’ I’m the goddamn winch chief on this mission. Holly’s gonna speak, ’cause she’s the science chief, right? And Mickey—I don’t know what the hell he’s chief of—”

  “He’s mission chief.”

  “—’cept stroking your ego. I’m the winch chief. I’m gonna talk. Or I’ll go put my feet up for the rest of this thing, and you can operate the winch yourself. It’s really advanced, and I’ve learned it inside and out while you were still cooling it in solitary. But you go ahead, asshole, don’t let me talk, and you have fun with the winch.”

  Sean literally bit his tongue to keep from saying anything that would destroy this mission and send him back to prison as a “cho-mo” for the rest of his life. No. Don’t take the bait from this piece of garbage, he told himself. Breathe. Calmed as much as he was going to be right then, he said evenly, “You’re right, Slipjack. I apologize for letting my personal feelings cloud my judgment.”

  Slipjack seemed a little taken aback, even though he knew Sean Muir would never call his bluff, and so the result wasn’t a total surprise. “All right, boss. Apology accepted.”

  They didn’t shake hands or any of that crap. But Sean did shake hands with Mickey, Holly, and his communications chief, Kevin. “Mess time. Let’s get to it.”

  ***

  Night was falling by the time just about everyone pushed into Spit’s mess area, which was big enough to accommodate all of them, since it was also set up as a last-resort staging area for equipment if the weather turned too disagreeable for that work out on the deck.