Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-ahhhhhhhh!” a voice from the stern shouted like a banshee, and the torpedo magically split right down the middle, each side angling sharply and in different directions underwater, the explosive warhead going off deep and still distant enough to rock I Spit on Your Grave while not causing a scratch.

  “Yeah, baby! That is what I’m talkin’ a-bout!” Slipjack screamed with triumph, his hot maser spent and smoking from having let loose the intense, radiation-boosted, amplified-microwave beam of destruction. “Slipjack saves the day, bitches!”

  The winch chief was loud, but the cheers and hollers from everyone else onboard drowned him out. He strode on the deck with both arms raised and a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  But the cheers were instantly replaced by shouts of shock and awe, eyes widening and hands covering mouths as they looked back to the submarine and the surfacing Gigadon. It breached almost half its body—its tremendous, aircraft-hanger–size body making the submarine look like a toy floating in a bathtub.

  The gigantic dinosaur turned as it breached—maybe turning to expose more of itself to the hot sun—and fell mightily back toward the water, its untold tons of flesh crashing down directly on top of the North Korean submarine.

  “It was too much heat—Gigadon went into a frenzy! The fission heat and the lingering radiation rising just under their sub—they made themselves Gigadon bait!” Popcorn yelled as he simultaneously whooped and checked his computer readouts.

  “Will the submarine just come back up and shoot at us again? Or maybe it’ll just get the Gigadon now?” Holly said to Mickey, her eyes not leaving the spot where the DPRK submarine had been just a moment ago.

  “No, no, no,” Mickey said, a big and possibly inappropriate smile on his face. “That sub is squashed flatter than a cardboard box with an elephant standing on it. Not one commie survived that, I guarantee you.”

  “What is with that ‘Commie,’ Mick? You running for Congress in 1954 or what?”

  He laughed. “Actually, it’s a funny story with me and the Commu—”

  “Chief Luch,” Popcorn said as calmly but firmly as he could manage, “it’s turning around.”

  Mickey squinted out at the 10-foot “ripples” radiating from where the dinosaur had come down. “What? There’s no way the sub could have survived—”

  “Not the submarine, Chief—Gigadon. It’s coming our way.”

  Into the comm, Mickey shouted, “Crocket! Get shooting, man!”

  POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW

  Then, to Holly, he said, “Can we stop it before it rams us and eats us?”

  Holly shook her head. “Not according to Newton’s First Law of Motion: A body in motion will tend to stay in motion. Gigadon has seen us, yes he has, but he’s a big son of a sea cow. It takes him time to build up momentum. But yeah, Mick, without a countervailing force, he’ll bust us up in 60 seconds or so.”

  POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW

  It was like they didn’t even hear it anymore; the machine-gun fire certainly wasn’t doing anything to discourage the floating island from moving toward them.

  Popcorn said, “You’re kind of conflating the First Law with the Second Law there, Holly.”

  Both Holly and Mickey looked at Popcorn in unmistakable expressions of threatening serious violence upon his person.

  “Um … but Newton’s laws really are intertwined, you know, so, no problem. What we need is a force traveling at a velocity opposite that of Gigadon’s vector, but it might be enough if we could introduce even a perpendicular force to arrest its vector progress toward us. Its, um, linearly increasing vector progress toward us. T-minus 30 seconds, I’d say.”

  The comm still in his hand, Mickey flipped a switch and called with a smooth and calming voice to everyone aboard, “May God and the Spirit of the Sea bless every one of you. It has been an honor—”

  “Chief Luch,” Popcorn said from his place at the sonar monitor, “we got something shooting up toward us.”

  He took his thumb off the mic button. “Something? Shooting up? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” Popcorn said. “It just is.”

  “A missile or torpedo from another sub down there?”

  “No, nothing like a submarine is appearing on the sonar. Just the bullet.”

  Mickey turned away to watch the beast closing in. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll be dead before whatever the hell ‘it just is’ gets here. Goodbye, guys.”

  Holly was too choked up to respond, and Popcorn didn’t even hear the farewell, so engrossed was he in his final seconds on Earth trying to figure out what that weird bullet was that was currently rocketing in a straight line toward I Spit on Your Grave.

  ###

  The last two rockets, the ones at the bottom of Ocean Vengeance—which Sean had now renamed Ocean Vindication in his mind—ignited right after the third set of two spent their fuel. He was just entering the euphotic zone, and Sean didn’t know if he had ever seen such beautiful light. The pressure was far less now than it was from the hadal depths, and the two last missiles were accelerating him to the surface so quickly he was actually pulling an extra G or two inside the submersible.

  The light was enchanting, the sun making the small choppy waves above into a sparkling promise. As he got closer to the surface, however, two objects above blocked some of that sweet light.

  One was Gigadon, its size and shape like nothing else in the sea.

  The other was a boat. It was the only boat he could see anywhere in the area above.

  Gigadon was moving toward the boat, picking up speed as it swept the water with its forked tail. This decided it.

  He would die a hero. For science, but also for the two things he was about to do, now just 50 feet from the surface and the shapes upon it.

  The first thing he did was hit the release switch for the portside bottom missile, uncoupling it from the sub. It zoomed off into a random direction away from the monster and ship above, harmless since its explosive payload was not armed.

  I can spare that one. There’s a lot of BOOM left for you, big boy.

  This made the submersible move at a sharper angle to starboard, aiming the tip of Ocean Vindication—which was as sharp as an arrow—right at the middle of the continent that was the dinosaur’s body.

  The second thing he did was arm every one of the seven remaining missiles. As soon as they struck anything solid, it would be “Smile, you son of a bitch” time for Gigadon.

  He hoped. The thing was essentially hollow, so it wouldn’t suffer the destruction that ensues when solid muscle (or fat, for that matter) got hit by a bullet, sending out liquefying shock waves to all organs in the area.

  But it was hollow: a sharp violation of the monster’s bodily envelope (as Popcorn would say—in other words, stabbing that mother) would shoot the explosives right up into that envelope, and he was hauling ass toward it.

  Five seconds to impact, Sean thought with excitement and pride. Five seconds to freedom.

  By the time he finished his thought, the final missile rocket pushing Ocean Vindication shoved the sub’s sharp tip right into the center of Gigadon’s massive body, violating the hell out of its bodily envelope, and all the missile payloads exploded as one inside the beast, lighting up the cavernous darkness with an intensity the formerly smiling but now vaporized Sean Muir would have very much appreciated.

  ###

  With no time to save or rescue anyone, the SAR helicopter crew still hovered in the same spot all through the unfolding events. They were tuned into Spit’s radio frequency and heard what was being said and how people were screaming, but they couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

  They did see the Gigadon hurl itself halfway out of the ocean, breaching right onto the North Korean sub and creating a noise of such volume that it made the helicopter wobble in the air. And then they saw Gigadon itself—the largest thing short of a battleship either had ever seen in the water—come about and target the re
maining boat in Jake Bentneus’s fleet. There was nothing the crew could do that wouldn’t kill themselves and destroy the ’copter, and that wouldn’t rescue a soul.

  So they did the only thing they could: they watched in horror, and captured the whole thing on video.

  ###

  From the bridge of I Spit on Your Grave, Mickey Luch listened to Orville Blum narrate the impending T-bone collision of the rapidly rising mystery object and the leviathan rushing toward them. “The bullet”—he called it that because damn if it didn’t look like a bullet shooting up from the deep—“is five seconds, four, three—”

  “Holy shit!” Holly cried as she got a look at the sonar monitor, “That ‘bullet’—it’s Sean Muir! That’s Ocean Vengeance!”

  They all could recognize it now, their leader somehow not only alive but rocketing—

  “—zero.”

  A muffled but still massively loud explosion swelled the central body of the Gigadon even larger. This explosive expansion tore its flesh, and the body collapsed in on itself. This forced tons upon tons of foul water and air out of the dinosaur’s mouth, creating a loud lowing from the beast. It was an otherworldly sound, haunting, fit for this nightmare from another world.

  Gigadon was dead.

  Cheers erupted on Spit, and Sean’s name was shouted from high and low as if this were a wake in his honor already.

  Acrid black smoke poured from the dead dinosaur’s mouth and from where its eyes had been before they were blown out of its head. The stench of burning chemosynthetic biomass was unreal—

  Popcorn said in a low voice, “It’s still coming at us.”

  —but worse was that the entire momentum of the dead Gigadon still kept it moving swiftly at them, like the world’s largest barge about to break Spit into very small pieces. Its speed had been only partly arrested by the arrow shot into it from below and the pressure of the explosions.

  “Oh, goddamn, man!” Mickey groaned at the giant carcass. “Give us a break already! Holly, we—”

  But the scientist was gone, only her sneakers squeaking on the steps to the weapons area indicating what direction she was headed.

  On the comm, Mickey said firmly, “Prepare for impact! All hands, brace yourselves!”

  The fast-drifting carcass was only 20 feet away now, and even though it wasn’t moving at terrific speed, its tons upon tons would broadside Spit like it was a locomotive striking a ’78 Pinto stuck on the tracks.

  Kerploop! A round turd from the sky splashed into the narrowing gap between the drifting carcass and I Spit on Your Grave.

  “What the hell was—ohhh!” Mickey said, his brain shutting off his mouth as he watched the Honeycomb cannonball bob on the water for a moment.

  “She tossed it—she didn’t even need the cannon!” Popcorn shouted in a bit of hysterical glee. “Brilliant!”

  Almost instantly, its coat eaten by the salt, the sphere ripped open and honeycombing nanofoam expended and multiplied to fill the gap, pushing the boat sideways to starboard gently as the honeycombs surrounded it and held it fast.

  On the other side, the foam pushed against the Gigadon, first bringing it to a halt relative to Spit, the whole mass of carcass-foam-boat now drifting to starboard as one unit. Then, having expanded as deep into the water and under the floating objects as its nanofoam could reach, the Honeycomb had created a de facto “underground sail” that dragged in the water and brought everything, finally, to a stop.

  Completely spent, Mickey dropped into his seat. Popcorn rested his hot forehead against the cooler metal computer rack. Holly came shakily down the spiral steps. The crew was cheering and letting out its pent-up energy. So much—so many—had been lost … but the battle had finally been won.

  The radio crackled and the pilot of the Sea & Air Rescue helicopter called, “I Spit on Your Grave, come in, please.”

  Mickey switched his comm channel to the right frequency and said, “We read you, Sea & Air. We’re all alive down here. Well, except the Gigadon.” (And Captain Looper, and Sean Muir, and the crews of Sea Legs and Sharkasm, and and and …) “Over.”

  “Do you require assistance? Over.”

  Mickey thought for a moment as he took it in the extent of the buoyant Honeycomb surrounding them and actually lifting their boat a few feet out of the water. “We could use a tug,” he said. “Our whole little island group here, just to the beach, where the boss can see what we caught for him. Over.”

  The pilot laughed and said, “Roger that, but I don’t think there’s a tug powerful enough to drag that whole monstrosity anywhere. We can send a boat out to pick up you and the other survivors. Over.”

  “No, thanks—just send the best tug you’ve got. We’ll think of a solution. Out.”

  “A solution?” Holly said, sitting down now herself, her leftover adrenaline keeping her shaky.

  Mickey smiled and switched the comm back. “Slipjack, read me?”

  “That’s an affirmative, Ghost Rider.”

  “You got the maser primed again yet?”

  “Naw,” Slipjack said with lightness, “I was too busy trying to apologize for every bad thing I’ve done in this life before I died. I don’t think I made much of a dent in the list.”

  Anyone within earshot of the comm speaker laughed at that, some because it was exactly what they were doing in the face of imminent death, others because they bet Slipjack had a list of sins he couldn’t finish in a day, forget about 30 seconds.

  “I can prime it now, though. Take five or ten minutes. What do you need the maser for? It’s dead, ain’t it? We’re gettin’ our billion dollars, right?”

  “Yeah, we are—if you don’t mind doing some wet work. The whole carcass, which we are connected to by that foam what won’t let go, is gonna start sinking very soon, and it’ll pull us down with it—unless you can use the maser to slash our trophy’s head off its body .”

  “Haw! Consider it done, Chief.” There was a moment of silence from the comm, and Mickey was about to put it down when Slipjack added, “Um, everybody, I’m sorry about Doctor Muir. I thought he killed his wife on account of me. He thought I was trying to kill him on account of my being in love with her. But neither one was true, you guys, okay? We know that now. It was an accident.

  “It was an accident and I’m sorry,” he finished with a tremulous voice, then said, “Sean Muir is a hero.” Another pause. “Anyway … maser time.” He clicked off.

  “Tug’ll be here in a few hours, I Spit on Your Grave,” the pilot called on the overworked comm. “They’ll get you to shore. Over.”

  “Roger that, and thank you, Sea & Air. Over.”

  “We might go sell our footage to FoxNews or CNN or somewhere—let’s make that our ‘cut’ of your prize money, yeah? And you guys are all going to be famous.”

  “And rich,” the copilot said. “Over.”

  “Yeah, right now we’re still appreciating being alive. Thanks for everything. Spit out.”

  Popcorn giggled. “Spit out! An infelicitous double entendre there.”

  The high-pitched whirr of the maser started up, and within two minutes, Slipjack had sliced through the tough but empty hide of the Gigadon, the dinosaur’s head floating atop where the Honeycomb had expanded underwater. The body was not thus supported and so was already drifting away and slowly sinking.

  “All we have to do now is wait,” Mickey said, letting out a huge breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Then he reached into a drawer under the command station and pulled out a sealed bottle of Kraken Dark Rum. “And we’re not driving, so …”

  Everyone on the bridge got a cup and they all drank to their colleagues’ safe passage into the next world. All onboard who were with the expedition crew thought of their lost friends on the other boats, and then of Sean Muir, who had single-handedly saved their lives and won them the Bentneus Prize.

  Even Slipjack McCracken, still out on the deck in the front of Spit, raised his trusty flask of whiskey to the man he had wrongly hated
for so long.

  “I hate to be mercenary,” Popcorn said to Mickey and Holly, who believed him without hesitation, “but do you have any plans for your … em … well, Doctor Muir has passed, and we have 23 people left onboard, so … what are you going to do with your roughly $45 million cut?”

  Mickey smiled at this. It was always the conversation after a commercial (or perhaps mercenary) job had been done, although this was a historic amount, to say the least. He thought and said, “I’ll have freedom to do whatever I want, right? So I’m gonna start my own charter boat service. That takes tourists to an island I’m gonna buy. That would be a different island from the one I buy to live on, of course.”

  “Of course,” Popcorn said. “I’ve been thinking about it, too, and my plan is to take some time off from computer work.”

  “What?” Mickey and Holly said in unison.

  “It’s hard to believe, I know, but I’m leaving computer work behind me. I need to be free of the grind of sitting at a screen all day. No, ahead of me is building my own hyper-parallel quantum-based neural-net computer system.”

  Holly was stunned … but she also wasn’t. “So, you are leaving computer work to do different computer work.”

  “I know, it sounds crazy, right? But now I will have the money!”

  Mickey said, “Well, at least you’ll be able to spend less hours at it than you work now.”

  Popcorn laughed, but then saw that Mickey was serious. “Fewer hours? No, this is my chance to spend more hours at it, no interruptions except for meals with Mother and the Sunday RPG. It’s going to be more fun than one man should have!”

  His compatriots blinked a few times, then smiled and raised a cup to him.

  “How about you, Holly?”

  “I am going to create, endow, and then chair a new Department of Oceanography at whatever college is nearest Rugby, North Dakota. Total academic freedom.”

  This made Popcorn almost laughed grog through his nose, just managing to get out, “That says a lot!” Holly joined him in laughing.

  “What … what am I missing?” Mickey asked, completely confused. “North Dakota? That’s about the farthest away from the ocean as you can get!”