“What’s happening?” Kat pressed as she bent down and snatched up her discarded tank-top. “Do you have a visual?”
Jude blew out some stress, trying to ignore his partner’s still-hard nipples. Unfortunately, it was because of pending danger, versus the passionate moment the two had just shared.
“Sharky,” Kat snapped as she glanced his way and realized he was zoned out. “Can you ID it or not?”
“Sorry.” Jude shook his head once more, this time to clear the rosy cobwebs. “Not yet. It’s still too far for our fathometer to latch onto and, with all the zooplankton, the water’s too clouded for our hull cameras to be of any use.”
Kat frowned and eyed their primary sonar screen. “Autopilot’s got us holding position on Ursula’s six, three hundred yards back,” she announced. “You’re right. The signal is definitely big. Whatever it is, it’s a half-mile out and heading due east.”
Jude sat upright and indicated an array of sonar blips moving erratically to and fro. “Look, the gray whale pod is making a break for it! They realized their predicament and they’re running full speed now, trying to get away from Ursula and whatever the hell else is out there!”
“Boy, that’s a big fucking signal. Do you think it’s another Megalodon?”
Jude’s head swiveled toward her, his surprised expression punctuating her uncharacteristic use of foul language. “I don’t know. Hormonal readings from Ursula’s gum tissue indicated she birthed her pups a few days before we tagged her, right?”
“Yes, what are you--” Kat’s lips pursed and parted. “Wait, are you thinking she’s in estrus and a big male has come a-courting?”
“Could be,” Jude said. “But it would take one hell of a stud to . . .”
His words trailed off as a warning ping emanated from their ANCILE system’s acoustic intercept. The unidentified signal they were tracking had turned. Ignoring the fleeing whales, it was arcing toward the southeast. Its speed matched the Megalodon’s as it came about. Seconds later, the giant shark altered course, turning northwest and rising in the water column, but maintaining the distance between them.
She senses something’s out there.
Jude felt a lump form in his throat. Based on its trajectory, the intruder wasn’t just circling Ursula. It was stalking her.
“She’s a lot closer to it than we are,” Jude announced. Their inability to identify whatever was prowling out of range of their equipment was beginning to irk him. “I’m going to push the locator’s zoom and see if we get lucky.”
“Sounds good,” Kat said. She bent at the waist, one forearm on the top of his chair. With her free hand, she reached forward and gently massaged the back of his neck.
Jude swallowed. Her warm touch was a welcome distraction.
“Pushing zoom to 50X.” His hazel eyes intense, he worked the keys. “She’s veering to the right . . . definitely knows she’s got company. It’s just a question of whether we can catch a glimpse while her head’s turned in that dir--”
“There it is!” Kat shouted so loudly Jude jumped.
“Jesus, you fucking scared me!” he snapped. His annoyed eyes flung back toward the overhead screen. A full one-third of the infrared viewer was occupied by the starboard side of Ursula’s broad head. On the other two thirds, there was nothing but oncoming sea – clouds of plankton and an occasional fish or jelly. Every so often, the screen went black as the locator’s strobe went off. “What? I don’t see anything.”
“Rewind the auto-recorder,” Kat instructed. “And go back a few seconds. Believe me; you’ll know it when you see it.”
Jude transferred the feed to one of their console screens and fiddled with the controls. A moment later, he saw. “Holy fucking shit.”
“Watch the language,” Kat said with a wink. “I’ve got my mother-in-law’s picture in my wallet!”
“Is that . . .”
She nodded. “A Kronosaurus imperator. Biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
Jude froze the brief seconds of footage before the scaly behemoth vanished off camera. He could see it outlined by the infrared lens, its four thick flippers undulating, pushing it lazily along. Its head was huge and knobby and its body massive and gnarled. What stood out most to him, however, was that, as far away as it was, its beady eyes remained focused on Ursula.
“It’s a full-grown Gen-1 cow,” Kat advised. “Has to be. Look at the girth.”
“Lord, she’s hideous,” Jude breathed, leaning forward. He squinted as he examined the black and white image up close. “Look at this huge dorsal mound,” he said, tapping the screen. “Some sort of deformity, perhaps? And look at her skin. Kat, what do you make of that?”
She studied the image. “Humph. The epidermis is very wrinkled and uneven-looking, like something you’d see on a burn victim.”
“The military’s not using flamethrowers on them, are they?”
“Not that I’m aware of. She probably attacked a boat and the fuel tanks exploded. Do you have stats yet?”
Jude checked the fathometer readouts. “Coming into range now. Confirmed biologic, designate: pliosaur, duh. Overall length is . . . holy fuck!”
Kat threw him a sideways glance and chuckled. “Wow, those are some stats! I’m sorry; I’m a little rusty with your new metric system. Exactly how many ‘holy fucks’ are there in a kilometer, again?”
“This . . . this can’t be right.”
“What can’t be right?” Kat’s minx grin dipped. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
Jude tried to master his shudder. “The Imperator, according to bio-mass projections, h-he’s as big as Ursula!”
“Bullshit,” Kat scoffed. “Wait, did you say he?”
Jude nodded. “System confirms an adult male. Length is nearly twenty-nine meters and mass calculated at over . . . two hundred tons?”
“Impossible. That’s more than double the world record.”
“Look!” Jude demanded, swiveling the monitor and practically shoving it in her face. “This is bad. What are we going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed at the sonar screen. The gray whales had vanished off the board, the frightened pod making tracks for Tijuana, if they knew what was good for them. All that remained were the pulsing signature readings coming from the Megalodon and the approaching Kronosaurus. Now at three hundred feet, they began to move on opposite sides of a huge circle. Actually, make that a spiral, Jude noted. Like two buses sucked up into an F5 tornado’s vortex, they drew steadily closer to one another. The distance between them was down to six hundred yards and shrinking fast.
Kat’s eyes protruded like ping pong balls. “They’re circling one another!”
Jude nodded. “Sizing each other up.”
“Are they going to fight?”
“It looks that way.”
“So, that’s a good thing, right?”
Jude looked at her as if she had two heads. “A good thing?” he echoed. “What are you talking about?”
Kat shrugged defensively. “You wanted footage of Ursula taking on a big pliosaur. So now you’ll get it. Hell, we won’t even have to go to Rock Key.”
Jude’s jaw nearly hit his chest. “Are you kidding me? I wanted our shark to fight a pliosaur she could out-mass and outmuscle, not one as big as her! What if she loses?”
Kat’s blue eyes narrowed and she pegged him with a look. “So, what do you want to do, tuck tail and make a run for it?”
Jude licked his lips, then reached forward and practically attacked his keyboard. His tapping fingers moved so fast it was a miracle the keys didn’t melt. “That would be suicide,” he muttered. “Air breather or no, that thing is much faster than Ursula. If she turns her back on it, she’s as good as dead.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m accessing her program,” he stated, his jaw muscles jutting from him clenching so hard.
Kat moved beside him, concern etched across her angular features. “Sharky, what are you going to do?�
�
Jude hit the enter key hard and spun around in his chair. “She’s already acting on pure instinct. I did the only thing I could to give her a fighting chance. I pumped her full of adrenaline and ‘encouraged’ her to engage and destroy her enemy.”
“And do you think she can?”
He stared at the giant marine reptile’s image with hard eyes. “I don’t know. But we’re about to find out.”
CHAPTER
28
With the imperiousness of a 210-ton battlecruiser, the 84-foot Carcharodon megalodon female ascended to the three-hundred-foot mark before adroitly leveling off. Despite the steely layers of sinew that coated her massive frame, she moved with deathly silence, powering herself along with slow and steady strokes from her two-story high caudal fin. Her scar-streaked snout bulled its way through the murky waters like a sandpaper-coated battering ram, while her myriad senses extended out as she closed on her target.
The gray whales she had been stalking were gone.
All that remained was her and the intruder.
Although the female had not yet discerned the identity of the mysterious creature that caused an entire whale pod to flee in squealing terror, she sensed it was a threat, and that she would soon be embroiled in a battle to the death. If so, she preferred to make her stand here, in the twilight conditions near the bottom of the ocean’s sunlit tropic zone. Sandwiched between sun and abyss, in a shadowy world of grays and reds, her vision was at its most effective. It gave her a distinct advantage over other creatures.
She had sensed the advancing carnivore from a thousand yards off as it hunted the migrating gray whales. It remained eerily silent as it approached from upstream of both her and her quarry. But despite its efforts, her sensitive lateral line detected its presence by the compression waves its huge body gave off.
By size alone, she knew she had a rival.
As she curved steadily closer, her soulless black eyes contracted in an effort to target her opponent. All of a sudden, she found herself down-current and its pungent aroma enveloped her like a blanket. Her nares flared wide, drawing in thousands of gallons of seawater in a single snort as her olfactory system worked feverishly to analyze the scent.
Its odor was reptilian but unusual, potent and reeking of testosterone, mixed with the smell of rotting flesh. It gave off an impression of being impossibly old, yet somehow still alive, like some undead crocodile. One thing about it was abundantly clear; it was big and it was hungry.
The Megalodon’s bowling ball-sized eyes narrowed as she continued to dissect the other predator’s scent. Just then, a powerful barrage of broadband echolocation clicks slammed into her. The cone of sound was reminiscent of that used by the sperm whales she hunted, only far more boisterous. In fact, the clicks were so loud they were painful. She could feel them penetrating her like X-rays, analyzing her muscles and bones, even the pulsing of her buffalo-sized heart.
With a violent gnash from her gigantic jaws, the female accelerated, her huge tail beating powerfully as she propelled herself forward in an effort to lessen the maddening racket. Her temper flared and she veered aggressively toward the intruder.
Less than two hundred yards away, she plowed through a hapless school of bell-shaped jellyfish, her serrated skin shredding them like gelatin as she continued on. On the other side of the decimated shoal, her enemy finally came into focus.
It was one of the great shark destroyers.
Brief flashes of recollection sparked within the Megalodon female’s primordial brain. Among them was an image of her sixty-foot mother, in the midst of birthing a sibling, when the Kronosaurus imperator appeared in the distance. The female shuddered at the memory and her protective nictitating membrane snapped tightly closed and opened – the shark’s version of a blink. For a moment, she was a helpless newborn once more. Trapped within the recesses of her mind, she took in the ultimate brutality as her already weakened mother was torn apart by a fang-toothed terror far larger than herself.
By the same behemoth she now faced.
She could see the pliosaur clearly as they circled one another from 150 yards out. It was huge, several times the size of the pugnacious youngster she recently faced and, judging by its glittering eyes and craggy skin, very old. As she studied it, she realized it was the alpha of its kind: an insatiable, unstoppable foe that viewed all other species, including hers, as prey.
But unlike her ill-fated mother, the giant female had not been caught birthing pups. Nor was she outclassed in size or strength. She and the great saurian were equally matched. As a cold rage took hold of her, she knew there would be no retreating back to the frigid waters she fled to as a youngling.
She would fight back. She would destroy her ancestral enemy.
Accelerating to attack speed, the Megalodon charged. Back arched and pectoral fins spread, she hurtled forward, her wrinkled lips peeling back in anticipation of delivering a devastating bite. The pliosaur appeared unimpressed and continued toward her, its speed matching her own, its scarlet eyes unblinking. She could feel its sonic pulses increasing in strength as the distance between them melted to nothing.
At the last moment, the female torqued her gigantic body into an underwater roll and threw herself at her target. Her bear trap-like jaws yawned wide enough to inhale a Cadillac and came down with enough force to flatten one.
To her astonishment, her teeth closed on nothing.
Despite its age and mass, the pliosaur was surprisingly agile and sidestepped her with a powerful thrust from its paddle-shaped fins. With viper speed, it retaliated, its crocodile-like mandibles slashing out as they passed one another, raking her right flank and just missing the blinking red parasite affixed atop her towering gill plates.
The Megalodon’s rage-ruled mind registered the impact and injury, but she ignored it. Her opponent’s ridged teeth had barely penetrated her thick skin, leaving behind only a series of five-yard white gouges, running down her side.
Fully aroused, the Kronosaurus uttered a rumbling bellow and went on the offensive. Looping around in the water like some colossal sea lion, it prepared to attack. As it circled her, the female realized the marine reptile was attempting to get behind her. It intended to use its shearing jaws to amputate her tail where it connected to the peduncle. Maimed and deprived of her caudal fin, she was doomed. Like any other finned shark, she would sink into the depths, drowning as she was ripped apart.
Swimming frantically, the female moved in tighter and tighter circles, trying hard to keep the speedy saurian from accomplishing its goal. It was hard on her heels and weaving from side to side. Again and again it came on, grunting loudly and snapping its jaws, then drifting back, only to pull rapidly ahead again as it relentlessly searched for a weak point in her defenses.
Suddenly, as her enemy drew parallel and prepared to pass her once more, the female sensed an opening and took it. Banking hard to the right, she threw herself at the pliosaur with the intentions of sinking her teeth into its gigantic rib cage.
The wily marine reptile saw the attack coming and incorporated a powerful reverse stroke from all four flippers. The tactic was sufficient to slow its forward motion, but insufficient to avoid the shark’s assault altogether. Jaws spread, the two titans crashed into another with bone-jarring force.
The Megalodon struck first, her giant jaws, lined with their rib-chiseling teeth slamming home. The pliosaur sensed the blow coming and managed to swivel its enormous body a split-second before she hit, absorbing most of the impact with its mound-like back.
The female bit down hard, her eleven-inch teeth carving their way through iron-hard scales and skin, before burying themselves in a yard of fibrous scar-tissue. As she felt her teeth grind along the behemoth’s broad shoulder blade, she began to shake her head, trying to excise a multi-ton hunk of flesh and bone.
The Kronosaurus fought back ferociously, its wedge-shaped jaws opening wide enough to ingest an Orca. Swinging left and closing with devastating force, its ridged tee
th ripped into the left side of the female’s head, directly in front of one of her twenty-foot pectoral fins.
Despite her adrenalized state, the Megalodon experienced an explosion of pain. Her enemy’s jaws had bitten a ten-foot gash in her gill plates, exposing the frilly red organs below and partially severing two of them. In an instant, a pool-sized cloud of blood spewed into the surrounding sea, turning the dark water a dull reddish-brown.
Berserk with pain and rage, the female twisted her head and, with an astonishing display of strength, wrenched the pliosaur free from her neck and flung it away. Before it could right itself, she surged forward and powered through the growing cloud of blood, barely avoiding the infuriated saurian’s follow-up strike as it tried to sink its teeth into her flesh once more.
As she increased the distance between them, the Megalodon took in the situation. The pliosaur was on the move, but it was not attacking. Trailing blood from its gaping dorsal wound, it rose to the surface to spout and replenish its air supply.
The female’s lips peeled back in a hideous grimace, exposing her triangular teeth. A moment later, she altered course and began to accelerate toward her adversary. Her mighty caudal fin beat faster and faster, increasing her velocity. Out of the corner of one eye, she could see the blood spurting from her ruptured gills. It painted her wake crimson, but she didn’t care. Her wounds were of no concern. She had survived far worse over the decades.
Up ahead, the Kronosaurus had descended to the four hundred foot mark, its vast bulk hidden in the near-darkness as it crept toward her. It was a wasted ploy; with her night vision, she could see it as plain as day. A snort of bubbles spiraled up from its blowhole and its lips curled back in a snarl-like grimace.
A second later, the pliosaur uttered a roar that shook the sea like thunder and it hurled itself forward. With its fins hacking at the water like giant blades, the beast flew at her. She could sense its fury matched her own. There would be no more feinting, no fancy maneuvering. It planned to dispatch her with raw power – an onrushing mountain of muscle, spearheaded by a maw lined with ivory machetes.
Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol.1): The battle for Earth's oceans has just begun. Page 55
