Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  He would figure out what to do once he got there.

  ***

  Vanessa almost got her face whipped off by the suddenly loosened cable, the winch whirring at high speed now that its cargo had been cut loose. She fell backward as Toro ran forward, the two of them slamming together and knocking the wind out of both of them.

  “Jesus God, what the hell did you do?” Slipjack shouted at them, running from the bridge, where he had listened to Mickey break the bad news to Muir. Of course Muir didn’t believe anything Slipjack had to say, but Mickey? The boss thought Mickey Luch was against him? And what was with that whole going back to prison ‘forever’ shit? Slipjack had no idea what was happening, and seeing the winch go crazy just made it worse.

  He knew Vanessa and Toro hadn’t done anything—the cable must have snapped when they followed Mickey’s order to stop the descent immediately. Toro had been at the controls and Vanessa had been doing the observation of the cable and winch to make sure it was actually stopping the submersible’s downward progress. When the cable became separated, the winch was still pulling, and with nothing to provide an opposite force, the whole thing went into the serious recoil that almost removed Vanessa’s face.

  Mickey’s face went slack, his mouth actually hanging open for a moment.

  “What happened? What just happened?” Holly said as she rushed up to confirm what the instruments all told her—that they had lost Ocean Vengeance. The instruments had told her by all going out at once; the cable carried all data and communications, so now they had no contact and no way of knowing if Sean Muir was alive or dead.

  “How will we know when the Gigadon is coming?” Holly asked Mickey and Popcorn and anyone else who might know anything at all. “We have to light up the maser, right, Mick? We have to get the cannon loaded with the Honeycomb, don’t we? It could be here any minute!”

  Mickey grabbed the panicking scientist by the shoulders and held her still. “Let’s do all that, okay? I’ll get Crockett on it right now, all right? But that’s just to make us all feel better, Hol. I really don’t think Gigadon is coming. Sean won’t be able to leave a heat trail now for it to follow. Unless one of the other competitors is baiting … it …” He looked out through the window at the empty sea around them, not another vessel in sight, no fishing boats, no well-equipped academic teams, no (other) rich asshole’s fleet of expensive ships … nothing. “Except there are no other competitors.”

  They were alone. They were the only ones left, and they weren’t going to win the Bentneus Prize, not with Sean Muir joining his wife at the bottom of the ocean, trapped in a bathysphere that would, like Kat’s, serve as his coffin.

  “Still, let’s get Crockett to arm everything we’ve got. Why not?” He made the calls on the comm to get the ordnance teams ready; it wasn’t like it was going to hurt anything … so long as Crockett remembered to keep that anti-feedback switch turned on. “It’s too late to save Sean and the rest, but …”

  Tears streamed down Holly’s face as she silently wept. “Every time … every time … I can’t do this ever again, Mickey. They just keep dying.”

  Mickey put an arm around her. “This is dangerous, experimental work. These things happen. We … we …” he said, trying hard to keep talking, to comfort Holly, but he broke down and sobbed with her, leaning on her as she leaned on him.

  With no information coming from the submersible, the bridge was as quiet as the deep.

  “This mission is cursed,” Popcorn said in a low voice, the first nonmaterialist opinion he had ever expressed.

  ***

  Freedom.

  Sean Muir didn’t know how drifting to the bottom of the ocean was freedom, but it felt that way nonetheless. The liquid he was breathing inside the bathysphere would stay oxygenated for several more hours, at least, before he used it all up. So he could watch the sinking biomass pass by in the aphotic darkness, lit only by the lamps of Ocean Vengeance.

  Because of Jake Bentneus’s brilliant vertical design of Ocean Victory—on which Sean’s own submersible’s was of course directly based—the submersible stayed almost true as it fell and fell. Sean saw on the monitors from the cameras on the bottom of the vessel that it was still pitch-black below him, but soon enough he would see the pale yellow of the hydrothermals that were home to his dinosaurs.

  His dinosaurs. Not Jake Bentneus’s, not Kat’s, not Mickey’s. He knew they were there long before anyone else. He knew.

  He would join them soon. If only for a few minutes before the vents boiled him or he settled down on the bottom and ran out of oxygen, he would join his discoveries, extinct and yet still alive. Then he would die, join Kat in death, and the creatures would continue their impossible existence, the best-funded expedition ever attempted unable to reduce their number by even one.

  It was a shame he never got to use any of the toys built into Ocean Vengeance. He had lasers, concussion-grenade mini-torpedoes, even missiles pointed in the eight cardinal directions, at the top of the submersible, and even a couple on the bottom.

  Smiling a dreamy smile, Sean broke the darkness of the deep for a few seconds by shooting the laser in a random direction. The true extent of the drifting organic matter was revealed by its reflecting the laser’s path all the way to the vanishing point. He knew the laser wasn’t powerful enough to kill, although it could burn the flesh of anything coming too near, make the curious or hungry creature back off and give him up as a bad job.

  He shot it a few more times, aiming it here and there in the darkness. It was entertaining … but there were other ways to pass the time until he joined his friends at the bottom. He armed and sent off a concussion torpedo. Unlike the laser, it was invisible after it shot out of Ocean Vengeance’s sphere of light. He knew it went off only when he saw the slightest flash of light—

  —and seconds later his hands flew up to his ears as the concussed wave slammed into the submersible, the loudest thing Sean had ever heard. His hands flying to his ears actually flew to the sides of his helmet, but thank God he had that on—it absorbed enough of the vibration to spare his eardrums from bursting and leaving him in agony for the last hours of his life.

  “Note to self: Concussion torpedo bad,” Sean gurgled through the water, making him laugh at the sound of his own garbled voice.

  His course to the bottom had probably seriously deviated from true, but it didn’t really matter; he’d get there eventually. However, he was always a scientist first and foremost—hell, wasn’t that why he had taken the fall for the exercise-yard stabbing in the first place, to get his own little research office?—and so he checked the instrumentation to see what the craft’s attitude was, its temperature, its distance from the bottom.

  It seemed that the concussion had in fact put Ocean Vengeance at a 25-degree angle from the vertical, but even as he watched, the attitude monitor showed that he was drifting back toward the true. That was interesting—he must’ve been falling faster than he realized, which meant the depth meter was malfunctioning and he was closing the distance between himself and the hydrothermal vents.

  To test this hypothesis, maybe the last of his life, he shut off all the lights inside and outside the submersible.

  And there it was, something he had never seen with his own eyes: the sickly yellow glow was just visible at the bottom of his porthole. The bottomside camera confirmed it, giving a view of that beautiful tear in the fabric of mundane reality.

  But why wasn’t he burning up? Now that he knew the heat vents were not far below him, he did notice that he was slightly warm, but the interior temperature gauges showed a level just one degree Celsius above the norm. However, the external thermometers showed 27 degrees Celsius (80°F) and visibly climbing, just as in the Bentneus dive.

  Then it occurred to him that while water (or any similar liquid) was an excellent conductor of heat, it also warmed very slowly. He thought of the frogs in the pot, who stayed quite comfortable during the gradual increase in temperature—until they boiled to
death. However, in this particular pot, the temperature had risen very little because the entire bathysphere—and his lungs—were filled with the liquid perfluorocarbon.

  If he kept dropping pretty much straight onto the 700-degree vent, the temperature would probably go up a tiny bit higher. Like hundreds of degrees in less than a minute. It wouldn’t be a pleasant way to go, but it would be unique, that was for sure.

  A shadow blocked the brightening yellow light for a few seconds. Sean’s eyes turned immediately to the monitor of the camera at the bottom, and that was definitely a large shape passing below Ocean Vengeance. It wasn’t a tube worm or the other chemosynthetic life that fed the marine lizards; this was a marine lizard. This was a dinosaur.

  But which?

  He flipped on all the exterior lights and scanned each of the monitors. He had never seen one of “his” creatures with his own eyes and hoped one would swim past his porthole. If he could just see one, no matter which, he could die happy as a poached human.

  And there it was. There it goddamn was!

  Megalodon.

  He watched it glide by the porthole, its near-albino stripes beautiful in the yellow light from below and the white light from the sub. Sean felt tears welling in his eyes, but he didn’t know if they came out in the liquid environment. But no matter—he cried at the beauty of what he had always hoped to see. He was freer in the six-foot ball of iron than he ever was in his 9' x 11' solitary cell, or at the university, or when he was a child with the whole world in front of him.

  He was with his friends. He was free.

  Then a massive concussion struck Ocean Vengeance, much louder than the little torpedo grenade he had set off earlier. The sub was forced hard sideways, and Sean could hear the strain on the structure. His death might be more imminent than he had even expected. The Megalodon was gone. His ears were in agony.

  A quick look at the external thermometer showed a temperature spike far above what should have been the 32 degrees Celsius (90°F) of his current location several hundred feet above the vents; the temperature was remaining in the 50s Celsius and not cooling down, being more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

  What in the holy hell was that shit?

  ***

  “What in the holy hell is that shit?” Mickey shouted from the bridge of I Spit on Your Grave. Water swelled not 300 feet from the ship—and right beneath Sea Legs, which rose fifty feet at the crest of the sudden prominence. The shock wave of the swell rocked Sharkasm and Spit almost onto their sides but passed, and they righted themselves.

  When the ships regained their upright positions, those topside could see the swell deflate like a popping air pocket on a baking pie, and Sea Legs essentially dropped straight down, unsupported by any water, from fifty feet in the air.

  Popcorn watched with horror, calculating in an instant that (not taking any wind resistance into account) Sea Legs would hit the water at almost forty miles per hour.

  He couldn’t even form a first word to tell the others before the fleet’s communications ship smashed into the water, immediately broke into shards, and exploded into a mushrooming fireball. This told Popcorn that the fuel tank had been breached and blown up and had almost immediately ignited the many onboard oxygen tanks, which also erupted. That created the yellow ball of flame. The heat generated from such a blast, not to mention the outward force of the hot gases, followed quickly by the collapse of the vacuum formed when …

  It was not always easy being Orville Blum.

  “Mother of God!” Mickey screamed, instinctively throwing a forearm in front of his face. The heat from the explosion—Sea Legs had been just a football field’s length away—singed the hair on his arm. Veteran seaman that he was, he immediately scooped up the general comm and shouted for the watch chief to radio Sea & Air Rescue now!

  Holly, intelligent woman that she was, hit the deck immediately. She didn’t need to watch Sea Legs hit the surface to know that it would explode and that all of the friends she had made on that boat were now dead.

  Popcorn’s glasses steamed, and his face heated unpleasantly as if he were staring at the sun, but the glass installed to protect the computer setup from the corrosive salt air also shielded the scientist from the worst of the blast … at least physically. His mind was abuzz with grisly details about explosions and bodies, and those bodies were of people he knew.

  In seconds, however, Mickey’s question came back around: What in the holy hell was that?

  “Chief Luch,” Popcorn said, “can you feel that? The heat isn’t abating. The surface thermography readout indicates this heat source—not the one from the explosion, right?—is coming from below. Something is causing a widespread temperature spike that … sweet flying spaghetti monster, WHAT THE FRAK IS THAT!?”

  Even in the shocked and emotional state Holly Patterson found herself in, she very nearly laughed at Popcorn’s words, which were possibly the nerdiest thing she had ever heard—and her world was nerds. But her slight amusement gave way to jaw-dropping awe as she looked out at the water. What in the hell …?

  “Hol, you know what that is?” Mickey said.

  Astounded, Holly shook her head, her gaze never leaving the sight in front of them.

  “It’s the North Koreans.”

  The submarine must have been rising at a steep angle, because its nose burst out of the water first, followed by the rest of the gray cigar shape as it evened out, making a grand splash. When it had settled, a head popped out of the top hatch, and the sailor raised two small flags.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Mickey said, and found a pair of binoculars. He put them to his eyes. “Goddamn if they aren’t using semaphore.” He had used semaphore many times on fishing vessels and during replenishment operations on larger ships, but what was this, 1950?

  “What are they saying?” Holly felt like her mind had been stretched like a rubber band and had now snapped back. Two minutes earlier, she had watched two dozen friends die; now she was looking at a Communist country’s Soviet-surplus submarine that apparently wanted to chat with them.

  “He’s repeating an ‘X’—that means ‘Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals,’” Mickey said, remembering the old codes like you remembered how to ride a bike, the International Signal Code flag positions, which didn’t rely on a common language.

  “‘Stop carrying out your intentions’? That seems a bit … presumptuous,” Popcorn said with an offended air.

  The sailor now signaled a ‘U.’ Mickey had to think for a moment, then he remembered: “They say ‘You are running into danger.’ I think we done run into it there, son.”

  “Wait a minute,” Holly said. “They’re competitors for the prize! Are they trying to scare us off?”

  Mickey kept the binoculars pressed to his eyes and waved for quiet. He mouthed words with a lack of comprehension. “Okay, they’re making no sense now. ‘L’ means ‘You should stop immediately.’ But ‘E’ means they’re turning to starboard. ‘A’? They have a diver down? From a sub?”

  “Oh, no,” Holly moaned into the hand covering her mouth. She saw where this was going.

  “What the f—‘V’? Now they say they require assistance. It’s all contradicting itself, it’s gibberish. And another ‘E’—they didn’t even make the first turn to starboard!”

  “Mickey,” Holly said.

  “Now he’s gone back to telling us to stop immediately. We’re not moving, you stupid asshats!”

  “Mick.”

  “What is with the starboard shit? Are they cra—?”

  “Mickey!”

  That snapped him out of his loop, and he pulled the binoculars from his eyes. “What, for Chrissakes?”

  “They’re telling us to leave. L-E-A-V-E, get it? Leave.”

  “Wh—ohh, I see.” He smiled, then realized what she was saying. “They’re telling us to leave? Do we have any semaphore flags? I’m gonna tell them to shove it up their ass!”

  “Um, Chief? Hold on a mome
nt, please. I don’t think that would be the wisest course of action,” Popcorn said, motioning for them to come look at his bank of monitors.

  “I was just kidding,” Mickey said.

  “I see,” Popcorn said. (He did not “see,” but that was not a pressing matter.) “Look here on the thermography—there is that heat rising from below, as I said. That is a mystery for the moment, yes?”

  “Yes,” Mickey and Holly said as one.

  “No, it is not!” Popcorn corrected. “Correlate the ocean swell that took out our frien … um …” He cleared his throat and finished, “… our communications vessel.”

  Holly smiled a little. Orville really was very sweet.

  “Correlate that swell with the sudden rise in heat coming from below the surface and now the appearance of our North Korean Gigadon-hunt competitors, who are telling us the area is dangerous and commanding us to leave immediately.”

  “I’m correlating … I think. I got nothing. Holly?”

  Their chief scientist looked like she had seen a ghost.

  “Jesus, Holly, what is it?”

  “The North Koreans have a fission bomb,” she said.

  “Exactly right!” Popcorn said with enthusiasm. “It’s pretty weak. It’s not even as strong as the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Judging from the displacement of the water and the fact that the submarine that exploded it is still in one piece although almost directly above the heat source, I would estimate the explosive power at about ten kilotons. Not very powerful compared to fusion weapons or even modern fission devices, it’s true, but it gives off a lot of heat.”

  “A lot of heat,” Mickey repeated.

  “Yes,” Popcorn said. “There is only one conclusion I can make from this evidence—”

  “The North Koreans are calling Gigadon,” Holly said.

  ***

  Seven miles below the standoff, Sean Muir was almost becoming used to being buffeted around. The concussion grenade, the giant whatever-the-hell-that-was explosion that damn near shook Ocean Vengeance apart, and now … now his submersible was being spun around by the very close passing of something beyond huge, something he couldn’t really take in through his porthole or the camera array.