Giona.
Maria.
Andrea…
He blinked and realized the time had come. He accelerated out of the sand, exploding a cloud of silt from around Ray as he rose. Most denizens of the sea would have turned tail and fled at the sight of Ray rising off the seafloor, but Kronos turned toward the submersible and opened its maw, ready to snatch its prey.
Atticus fired the shock cables and rocketed forward. Their aim was true; each headed for Kronos’s eyes. It would be a fatal shot. Even a beast that large couldn’t survive a jolt straight to its brain.
But at the last possible moment, Kronos twisted its head and clamped its jaws shut on the cables, quickly severing them. The electric current meant for the target alone burst into the open ocean and hit Ray and Kronos alike.
The jolt coursed through the sub, striking Atticus and nearly knocking him unconscious. But just as soon as it had come, the shock was exhausted. Ray’s internal electronics shorted and again the sub began fluttering back toward the seafloor.
As Atticus regained his wits and realized what had happened, he screamed as the sight that had been Giona’s last enveloped him. The dark, gaping mouth of Kronos opened wide and sucked Ray in. Ray’s size kept Atticus from being swallowed whole, but he had no doubt the creature’s powerful jaws could crush Ray with ease. High-pitched squeaks tore through the cabin as Kronos’s teeth etched the glass above Atticus’s head. Ray’s systems reset, and its external lights blinked back on, illuminating Kronos’s jaws. Atticus gazed at the spear-like teeth and wondered what kept them from piercing the glass and finishing the job.
Whatever the reason, he wouldn’t waste this last opportunity. Atticus prepped the small nuclear device, doing his best to not look up; any distraction might cost him the time he needed to type in the activation code Trevor had given him. His finger worked the number pad recessed in the armrest, ticking out the fifteen-digit code. Once complete, Atticus’s index finger hovered over the final key.
Then he looked up and paused.
He hadn’t noticed the slight motion of the submersible or the gentle shake as it was set down gently into the sand. But now, as the gaping jaws loosened around the sub’s hull and dim sunlight filtering down from above filled the cabin, Atticus realized what Kronos had done.
“What the hell?” Atticus moved his hand away from the activation keypad and gazed at Kronos as the creature backed away, its eyes locked onto his. Reaching a distance of twenty feet, it resumed its circular course around Ray. It was waiting for something, but what?
Atticus knew this behavior was completely unheard of in the animal kingdom. Its life had been threatened. It had been under attack, yet it didn’t fight or flee. It had defended itself, to be sure, but then it showed restraint. Perhaps even mercy.
Atticus shook his head at the last thought. He remembered Giona and the way she’d been so quickly eaten. If this creature was intelligent, it had eaten her on purpose, and toyed with him now. He reached over for the activation keypad, but froze before reaching the halfway point. The creature’s body, or something inside the creature, caught his attention.
Atticus focused on the anomaly.
A flashing from inside its body. Perhaps it was building up its own electric charge, like an electric eel? If that were true, the herring wouldn’t have been able to flee, and he and Giona would have been shocked. Then what the hell was it?
As though in answer to his unspoken question, Kronos brought his body closer, a mere ten feet from Ray. Its body filled the view. Moving out of instinct more than anything else, Atticus switched off the exterior lights, turning Kronos’s side into a dark canvas.
Then he saw it—a flash from inside the creature, emanating from a precise source. Then with a sudden brilliance, the flash repeated like a strobe light, and an image coalesced at the center of the light.
A silhouette of something at its source.
A form.
A body.
A shape that Atticus immediately recognized.
“Oh, God no…” Atticus leaned so far forward that he hit his head on the lexan glass bubble of Ray’s eye socket viewing port, which separated him from the ocean. He didn’t even register the impact.
He knew the shape, however impossible. Sadness, then rage, took hold of him, shaking his body. The beast tormented him!
Before Atticus could act and destroy them both with a small thermonuclear device, the impossible happened. The silhouette moved amid the continuing flashes. He could see her arms. He watched her knees rise up to her chest.
Still alive.
Giona was alive—inside Kronos.
Hot tears came with a torrent of emotion. Atticus pushed against the glass bubble, willing himself to burst forth into the ocean, tear Kronos apart, and extract his still-living daughter from its gullet.
“Oh, baby, I’m here .” Atticus filled his lungs and screamed. “Giona! I’m here! I’m going to get you out! I won’t leave you! Giona!”
He was pounding on the glass now, beating his fists as his heart broke for the second time in five days. Then the flashing stopped, and she disappeared, hidden behind Kronos’s black skin. Kronos slowly backed away, his body sliding backwards as his massive face turned toward Ray. Atticus felt the intelligence behind the massive beast’s eyes once again, yet more clearly. It was conveying a message with its eyes—a look of consternation, of disapproval.
Atticus slumped in his chair. How was this possible? It wasn’t! His mind kept shouting it at him.
She’s dead!
Giona is dead!
No, damn it, she’s alive!
Atticus could sense the message coming from the beast. Its eyes, once frightening, now tranquil. It bore him no ill will. And then it let out a cry, a sound so peaceful that Atticus, despite the dire situation, felt comforted. In that moment, he realized that the creature had no intention of truly devouring Giona. She lay inside the creature, yet even after days inside, was still alive and undigested.
A single thought burrowed into Atticus’s mind. What kind of creature is this?
ASCENT
35
Kronos—Gulf of Maine
The flesh supporting her body felt like a waterbed, comfortable and cozy, yet visions of monsters played behind Giona’s eyes as she slept. Her hair lay damp and matted to her face and the slick tissue beneath her body. Her wetsuit, still secure, kept the majority of her body free from moisture, but her face, long exposed to the humid air, had paled and wrinkled.
Her breaths, previously even with deep sleep, came ragged and quick. When her eyes finally opened, it seemed that the nightmare she’d just been having continued on into reality.
An all-consuming blackness surrounded her. Light did not exist. Her body didn’t exist. As Giona tried to comprehend the absolute darkness, a violation of her senses assailed her nose. The smell of rotting fish, fat, and bloated, thickened the air. She gagged and dry heaved, her stomach lacking substance to issue forth. She breathed through her mouth, which turned out to be a mistake; she could taste the odor. As her body built toward a second dry heave, she became aware of a noise, deep and repeating. It pulled her attention away from the smells.
A deep whump-whump came again and again, double beating like a distant machine, working without tire. A momentary hope tugged at her thoughts as she imagined she’d somehow been transported to a fish factory. That would account for the smell and the sound, but…
Giona rested her hands on her bed. It rolled beneath her like the massaging chairs she was fond of trying out at the mall. The surface beneath her suddenly shifted. She tumbled and fell against a wall. It, too, felt soft and smooth, like silk. She stood for a moment, bumping her head on the low ceiling. But the ceiling flexed as her head connected. She’d been trapped inside a giant balloon, or some kind of cocoon.
Panic rising, Giona shuffled around her enclosure, probing the soft walls with her hands. Since she found no method of egress, sobs wracked her body.
Trapped.
/>
“Daddy?” Giona said between vaults of emotion. “Daddy!”
But the darkness around her absorbed her voice. No echo returned. No sound escaped. The fleshy walls held in everything.
Fleshy…
Giona’s thoughts lost focus on reality as a flood of memories washed through her mind, overloading her synapses and quickening her breath. She no longer noticed the smell. A single image emerged from the deep, consumed her mind, opening its dagger-filled mouth and sucking her down. Giona opened her mouth to scream as the full realization of her situation struck her, but before the sound could escape, her body left the floor and smashed into the ceiling above.
Then she hit the floor again. Each wall greeted her in rapid succession, pummeling her body. As consciousness slipped away, Giona found breathing nearly impossible. Her body, while being twisted and jounced violently, was ultimately protected by the soft walls that formed her meaty prison. A searing pain turned the darkness all white as something solid struck her head. She blinked back to consciousness seconds later, not knowing how long she’d been out because the murk of unconsciousness was no darker than that of her current waking world. But the pain in her skull told her the impact had been real.
All that mattered was that it had stopped. She held a hand to her throbbing head and felt a warm, sticky wetness beneath her hair. A cut caused by the projectile that had struck her head had swollen and gushed, but the blood had clumped and coagulated in her hair. She imagined the sight of it would send most kids running in fear, but at least the bleeding had stopped. Then she remembered her watch. Her father had given it to her on her last birthday—a Luminox Navy SEAL dive watch, the same as her father’s. She pressed a button on the watch and its yellow face glowed to life. The little light seemed like a spotlight in her eyes, and she squinted against it as her eyes adjusted.
While the watch did the job of illuminating the time, it did little to reveal her surroundings. She checked the time—9:30 a.m. Then she saw the date and gasped. It’d been four days…four days since her dive with her father! As her eyes began to water again, she noted a slight glint of light reflecting from the floor. She reached her glowing watch out toward it and saw her camera, now freed from its waterproof casing.
Her dank cubby had stopped moving almost completely, just rising and falling gently. She slid over to the camera and snatched it up. After finding the power button, she turned it on. The view screen blazed to life, causing her to squint again; but while the screen glowed brighter than the pitch-darkness surrounding her; it could only project the light it took in through its lens, which, at the time, was none.
Giona pushed the button on her watch again and held it down, moving the watch face in front of the camera’s lens. The light of the watch magnified through the camera and bloomed from the view screen. For the first time, Giona saw her own body. Then the watch was extinguished, and the light disappeared. She needed more light. Feeling the camera’s solid frame in the dark, Giona realized she held a bright light source in her hands. Snapping a few pictures would reveal everything.
Not bothering to aim, Giona held up the camera and took a photo. The flash exploded into the small dark chamber like an atom bomb. The brightness shot stabs of pain through Giona’s fully dilated eyes. She groaned, and in the resuming dark, now colored by shades of purple dancing in her vision, she lowered the brightness and set the camera to take multiple photos. She hoped the lower light level but would allow her eyes to adjust.
With three quick bursts, she held the button down, unleashing a strobe of light on the small chamber. With each successive barrage, her eyes adjusted. Then she held the button down. The flash burst brilliantly, twice a second for thirty seconds.
Giona took in the space around her. Blue veins pulsed just beneath the pink flesh above, below, and all around her. At one end of the cavity, a large swirl of taut flesh, like a giant, muscled sphincter, emerged from the darkness. She realized that was how she’d entered the chamber.
The full weight of her situation fell on her as she saw the small chamber for the first time, realizing she was trapped in some godforsaken portion of s sea monster’s gullet. She’d either die of starvation or be digested alive. A chill enveloped her body. She pulled her knees to her chest while leaning against one of the soft walls. Having seen enough of her situation, she dropped the camera and longed for the blessed escape of unconsciousness to return.
She didn’t want to be awake when the beast began to digest her.
36
The Titan—Gulf of Maine
“Bloody hell!” Trevor shouted as he stared at the video feed transmitting to the bridge of the Titan from Ray below.
He saw it. He saw her as clearly as every other living soul standing on the bridge. In a brilliant display of light, the silhouette of a young woman pierced the skin of the leviathan just as it seemed Atticus would finish it off. The girl still lived. Atticus’s daughter was still alive, in the belly of the beast. “This can’t be happening.”
Andrea placed her hand on the screen display of Atticus placing his hand against the lexan bubble of the submersible. “She’s alive.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, tracing the wrinkles formed by her wide smile.
O’Shea was equally taken aback. He moved away from the screens, deep in thought, his forehead a crossroads of creases. “A miracle.”
Trevor focused on Atticus’s face, watching his expression morph from despair to hope. Of all the accursed things that could have happened, this was not only the most unlikely, but also the worst. His warrior, his brave hero, had been reduced to a blathering father in the thirty seconds that it took him to register the form of his living daughter inside Kronos.
“Do it, Atticus,” Trevor shouted. “Finish the beast! Finish the activation code! Do it, man!” Trevor shook the screen.
“No!” Trevor bleated as he shoved away from the offensive screen. Atticus wouldn’t act. He had the creature safely at the bottom of the sea. He could finish it without posing a danger to the Titan.
If only his daughter were still dead.
Trevor turned his eyes back to the scene going on below and felt a chill ripple through him. Staring through the central screen and burrowing into his soul were two yellow eyes.
Kronos.
The beast mocked him. Taunted him.
Damn the beast, and damn Atticus!
Trevor slipped back to Remus while the others stared silently at the screen, watching Atticus and Kronos simply sit and gawk at each other. “Are we directly above them?”
Remus pealed his eyes away from the screens. He shook his head slightly, snapped out of his daze, and nodded. Then a smile spread on his face as he read Trevor’s mind.
“Drop a spread of depth charges. Force the beast to the surface. Have a crew take the heli up with a full load of torpedoes, high-yield. Ready the antisub rockets with mortars…and load the 356mm.” Trevor glared at the screens. Atticus had yet to move. “We’re doing this my way now.”
Remus grabbed the captain and two more of the crew, quietly delivering his orders. All three nodded rapidly, mentally preparing for the tasks at hand. As Trevor watched, he couldn’t help but smile. The crew had been trained in the fine art of war as much as how to polish brass. They’d prepared for a moment like this for years. He could see by the sparkle in each man’s eyes that they were ready and eager.
Still, Trevor wished it weren’t necessary, but his hero had betrayed them all. Of course, he blamed himself for the snafu. While there was no way he could have foreseen Giona’s still being alive, it wasn’t wise to allow Atticus access to Ray alone. But the man had seemed such a competent and determined killer, Trevor hadn’t considered the idea that there might be a reason to change his mind.
But there it was.
No matter, Trevor thought. His prize was within reach, and no man, no matter how liked, had ever stood between Trevor Manfred and his goal. If the depth charges didn’t succeed in killing the beast, they would force it to the surface. Tre
vor would then unleash a barrage of torpedoes from air and from sea, followed by missiles packed with antisubmarine mortars, and if they were really lucky, they’d get off a clean shot with the big gun and fourteen-inch cannon salvaged from a World War II battleship that Trevor had refitted for the Titan. Hidden below decks, the gun had only one barrel instead of three, but it could still sink, and kill, most anything in the ocean.
Remus slid back to Trevor. “The chopper will be in the air in five minutes. The torpedoes are being loaded. The missiles are warming up and the cannon…” Remus smiled. “We’ll take care of that from here.”
Andrea gasped and spun around to find Remus and Trevor speaking in hushed voices, but she had heard them. A single word had trickled through her preoccupied mind and had shaken her out of her emotional stupor. “Did you say cannon?”
Her eyebrows furrowed angrily. She knew they had. As she stalked toward the two men, the rest of the conversation, which she’d heard but not registered, began to penetrate her consciousness.
“Atticus is still down there. His—his daughter is still alive.”
Trevor grinned. “I’m afraid—” Trevor scratched his head through his fluffy white hair, “how can I put this—not for long.”
Andrea couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She knew Trevor was evil. The man reeked of darkness, but she wouldn’t have guessed him capable of this; nor had she ever imagined that the Titan was much more than the world’s largest pleasure yacht. It was, in fact, the world’s most luxurious battleship! “You son of a—”
Remus’s backhand caught her across the cheek, nearly breaking her jaw. She spilled across the bridge, falling into a chair and slumping to the floor. She’d never been hit like that in her life, and while it didn’t hurt as much as she would have expected, it left her dazed.
Andrea stood as blood trickled from her mouth. Remus chuckled, enraging her.
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