Kronos Rising_Kraken vol.1

by Max Hawthorne

  “Only the ones that are important to me, son,” Grayson said. “I’m glad you worked up the resolve to face your demons. I know it’s hard, but it’s a good thing. You’ll see.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dirk said. He plopped down in his mother’s chair, his eyes unintentionally revisiting the video icon labeled, “Garm fencing lessons.” He muted the monitor’s audio and clicked on it.

  “Derek, if you need a little time, that’s fine,” Grayson began. “Just keep in mind, Gryphon is already in the Tube, with Antrodemus and the new cow close behind. The teams are prepped and, frankly, I need you.”

  On the monitor, Dirk’s mother’s face appeared. She was wearing glasses and her lab coat and looked tense and tired. This wasn’t an old family video, he realized. It was a recent recording, a scientific presentation on--

  “Derek, did you hear me? I said I--”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Grayson,” Dirk blurted out. “Yes, I heard you.” He extracted a flash drive from his lab coat and inserted it, quickly copying the video. As he removed the drive, he spotted the archaic test tube housing the skin fragment from the original Paradise Cove pliosaur. There was a disturbance in the fine dust surrounding it; the sample had been moved recently.

  As he put the drive back in his pocket, Dirk’s eyes narrowed. The same dust film covering his mother’s desk also coated her office floor. As he cocked his head to one side, he spotted footprints – his and someone else’s. Judging by foot size, it was definitely a man. The footprints were recent.

  “Derek?”

  Dirk faked a cough. “I’m on my way, Dr. Grayson.”

  Giving the room a final, analytical eye sweep, Dirk hurried toward the exit. Inside his lab coat pocket, his hand gripped the tiny flash drive as if it was the only known antidote for a poison he ingested.

  * * *

  “Your mother’s dead?” Dr. Bane’s eyes were wide with shock. “I-I’m so sorry. But when? How?”

  “Keep your voice down.” Garm glanced back at the bridge crew, relieved that they had the decency to feign acute-onset hearing loss. “Amara Braddock’s death is officially listed as a ‘slip and fall.’ Technically, that’s accurate.”

  “That’s awful. What a tragedy. She was an amazing woman.”

  “She was, indeed.” Garm nodded.

  “But why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you knew. And frankly, it’s not my favorite topic.”

  “I understand.” Bane extracted a tissue from her lab coat and dabbed at moistened eyes. “I’m sorry for your loss, yours and the world’s.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ensign Ho cleared her throat. “Approaching the Vault, captain.”

  Garm nodded. “Good. Communications, is everything prepped dockside?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rush replied. “I just got an update from Antrodemus. They’re navigating the tunnel slowly, but so far, no problems.”

  “Excellent. Helm, light it up.”

  “Aye, sir,” Ho said.

  Like twin flamethrowers, Gryphon’s high-powered searchlights lanced through the scarlet-tinged obscurity of the tunnel, illuminating the carved-out stone, as well as the titanium-steel rings bolstering it. Despite the near-dark conditions, the Tube’s walls were alive with a thick layer of marine plants and algae, layering the hard rock. The foliage gave the passageway a softer, almost throat-like appearance, reinforcing the sensation of being swallowed.

  Some things are better left unseen.

  Ho looked up from her screens, “Distance to the Vault, 100 yards, sir. We have clearance, doors are opening.”

  Garm nodded. “Hold position.”

  The “Vault” was the 100-foot wide submarine entry gate to Tartarus. Dr. Bane stared, spellbound, as a crack magically appeared in what otherwise appeared to be a fast-approaching dead-end. With a metallic groan that could be heard and felt, even through their heavy acoustic cladding, the Vault’s immense doors began to open.

  “Now that is a serious barrier,” Bane remarked.

  “Damn straight,” Garm chuckled. “Those babies are six-foot thick titanium-steel. Each one is sixty feet high and fifty feet wide. Once they’re closed, they’re strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast.”

  “Jesus, who are you trying to keep out . . . Godzilla?”

  “More like in,” Garm nodded. “Come to think of it, we’ve never had a Kronosaurus invade the Tube. Before they installed chemo-inhibitors in the water filters, some of the big males used to come sniffing around here. One even got tangled in the net. Great press when we put him down. But now, nada.”

  “Just the bulls?”

  “It’s a mating response,” Garm said. He glanced over at Ensign Ho, who was eyeing her screens and speaking in low tones to Ramirez. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. The rumbling of the Vault’s portals was reminiscent of an approaching avalanche. “Pliosaur females secrete powerful estrus hormones that a mature bull can detect fifty miles away. It’s like Chanel No. 5 for lizards: irresistible.”

  Bane placed her palms against Gryphon’s clear prow and studied the brightly-illuminated framework that surrounded the colossal doors. “Does the Tube, or at least this entrance, have any defenses?”

  “Other than the sensors and cameras,” Garm said. “Just me.” He pointed a thumb at himself. “Garm, Guardian of the Gates of Hel.”

  Bane smirked. “I’m serious. What happens if one of those big males gets past the net and makes it into the Tube?”

  “A pliosaur trying to break through that--” Garm pointed at the Vault. “Would be like you banging your head against an armored car. Besides its sheer strength, the outer casing is frictionless. There’s nothing to get a grip on and no way to pry it open.”

  “So if one did come in here . . .”

  “It’d be a one way trip. He’d have to come back out for air at some point. And when he did, we’d cut him to pieces.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Ensign Ho announced, “The vault is open, sir. Proceed to dock?”

  “One moment,” Garm said. “Communications, update on Antrodemus?”

  Rush cupped one hand over her earpiece. “Everything looks good. The package is ‘sleeping like a baby’ and they’re holding position, 250 yards back.”

  “Good. Helm, how’s the dock?”

  Ho checked her screens and nodded approvingly. “Our timing is good, sir. It’s nearly high tide. Dock depth is thirty-four feet and receiving crews are on standby on Dock A.”

  “Excellent.” Garm gave Bane a contemplative look before turning back to communications. “Proceed inside. I’ll leave the mating to you.”

  “Very good, sir,” Ho replied, easing them forward. Her face darkened as Ramirez tried and failed to stifle a snicker.

  “Mating?” Bane asked.

  “With the docking ramps,” Garm advised. Outside, the water at the top of their bow window began to churn violently as they angled upward. He grinned and started toward the exit. “Come with me. We’re going topside.”

  Bane flushed. “You mean--”

  “Topside,” Garm repeated, pointing straight up. “You’ve been throwing up for the last two days, doc. Between that and the lack of info they gave you when they transferred you here, I think you’ve earned the deluxe tour.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Bane replied warily. She moved to catch up with him. “Lead the way.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, the two climbed the steps leading to the interior of Gryphon’s armored sail. Garm stopped at a heavily reinforced, titanium-steel door, resting on huge, hydraulic hinges. He signaled to Dr. Bane to wait as he watched a series of red LEDs arranged in sequence above the exit. There was a faint rumble and a loud whooshing sound as the LEDs transitioned from red to orange, then finally to green. Garm waited a second more for a loud beep, then grabbed the door’s actuator lever and hauled it from three o’clock to nine. With a grunt, he forced the weighty barrier open.

  Dr. Bane gasped as a warm
breeze blew her hair back and spritzed them both with cold seawater. Garm moved forward, ducking down to clear the dripping doorjamb, and then took her hand to guide her through. Together, they stood on the sail’s tiny conning deck. Dr. Bane sniffed the air, then placed one hand over her nose and the other atop her stomach.

  “Well, it definitely smells like hell.” She said, blanching. “What is that stench; is it filled with actual demons?”

  “A few . . . mainly the two-legged variety,” Garm said with a chuckle. He faced front, resting his hands on the conning deck’s armored gunwales as Gryphon emerged from the dark tunnel, chugging toward Tartarus’s main docking station.

  As the brightly-lit docks came into view, Bane gripped the waist-high barrier before her. Her neck craned forward, her eyes popping. “Wow.”

  Garm watched her with interest. The main docks were huge by any standard – big enough to house six aircraft carriers docked side by side – with a steel-reinforced stone roof that soared two hundred feet above their heads. The brightly-lit, excavated walls were lined with observation decks on each level, giving one the impression of being inside some sort of inverted hotel. Of course, the sub captain mused, there were no sun worshippers lying on those supposed “balconies.”

  Garm’s eyes dropped. Ahead, the 100-foot wide concrete passage they were floating along abruptly widened and divided, splintering into three distinctive canals that ran parallel to one another. From above, they looked like colossal rake marks in the concrete – gouges, left by some Kaiju-sized raptor’s claws. Another five hundred feet further, and the canals rejoined one another, reforming into a single channel that terminated in a partially-submerged, 150-foot wide steel-and-cement disc. In between, and alongside each canal, the sprawling docks were dotted with workers, busy maneuvering large carts, inspecting stacks of crates, and manning forklifts, tractors, dump trucks, and assorted other construction vehicles. There was a constant breeze flowing through the complex and the air, despite a series of ten-foot ventilation shafts that dotted the walls, bore the scent of diesel fumes, saltwater, and something else.

  Under Ho’s expert touch, Gryphon began to turn, inching herself toward the canal on the far right. Ahead, a crowd of nearly one hundred workers and technicians stood waiting. Garm looked them over. There were accountants, mechanics, and inspectors, eager to survey the sub, a reactor crew waiting to check for radiation leaks, and supply engineers in trucks, prepared to replenish everything from foodstuffs to ammunition. Far to the left, at the empty receiving dock, he spotted the medical team Rush recommended, as well as the crew that had been assigned to handle the incoming specimen.

  Garm glanced up as a sizzling shower of sparks spewed down and hissed into the water, ten feet from their prow. 150 feet in the air, a section of interlocking steel girders that crisscrossed the airspace above them like an impossibly large spider web was occupied by a team of welders and engineers. They were hard at work, repairing one of the huge hydraulic cable lifts that moved nimbly about above the dock and transported everything from live Naegling torpedoes to fully armed mini-subs.

  “It’s amazing,” Bane said, momentarily forgetting the smell. “What’s that huge circle with a channel cut into it?”

  Garm followed her gaze, then glanced over her shoulder and blinked as a massive form moved behind the transparent wall to their right. He shook his head and smirked. “That’s a submarine turntable,” he said. “Like for trains. It lets us spin the boats around so we don’t have to back out of the Tube.”

  “And those machines suspended overhead? How do they--”

  With a snort of exasperation, Garm reached over and did the “Jurassic Park” thing. Placing one big hand atop Bane’s head, he twisted gently to the right until she was looking at--

  “Holy fucking shit!”

  Garm’s body shook with laughter, as much from the unexpected curse as the look on the epidemiologist’s face. A hundred feet to Gryphon’s starboard, the bordering concrete dock ran smack up against the paddocks.

  The pliosaur paddocks.

  Running the length of the docking chamber, a series of gigantic aquariums had been permanently installed, each one braced against the next, with five-foot thick, stainless steel frameworks supporting them. The clear polybenzimidazole windows that faced dockside were each two hundred feet wide and one hundred feet high. Imprisoned within, the ocean’s deadliest carnivores cruised restlessly back and forth.

  As the nearest of the giant reptiles swam up and pressed itself against the thick PBI, eyeing them, Bane yelped like a frightened Chihuahua and staggered back into Garm. She stayed there, pressing back against him and neither apologizing for the mishap, nor uncomfortable with their sudden closeness.

  Garm rested his mitts on Bane’s trembling shoulders and said, in a mock Scottish brogue, “Aye, lassie. Here there be dragons!”

  Bane’s lips tightened and she wheeled on him. “You bastard!” she lashed out, ineffectually punching him in the chest. “You did that deliberately!”

  Garm pretended to be cross. “Striking a superior officer? How unbecoming of you . . .”

  Bane’s nostrils flared angrily. “You deserved it. I could’ve had a heart attack.”

  He grinned. “Ah, yes. I forgot, you are a mature woman . . . I suppose I should’ve been more careful.”

  Bane’s fists clenched and her eyes flew open wide, but to her credit, she reined in her temper. She exhaled, low and long, then redirected her gaze to the tanks as they paraded past. “So, these are the ‘Titans,’ eh?”

  Garm nodded. “That’s Fafnir,” he said, gesturing toward a monstrous, battle-scarred female with notched flippers. “Thanatos is the dark one with the green eyes and heavy jaw, and those two bulls are Romulus and Remus.”

  Bane’s head jerked back. “Two males in one tank? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not with them; they’re shell-brothers.”

  “Shell-brothers?”

  Garm pointed as the two sixty-foot bulls passed one another without a hint of animosity. “See their matched markings? They’re identical twins – two pliosaurs that gestated inside the same egg. Unheard of, until now.”

  “That’s amazing. So, they get along?”

  “Get along?” Garm scoffed. “It’s like they share the same brain. They function as a team, and a lethal one at that. Once you’re settled in, check the video library. When we captured them they were in the process of ripping the pectoral fins off a blue whale three times their size.”

  “What about that one?” Bane asked, indicating a sixty-four foot pliosaur that swam excitedly back and forth as Gryphon hove by. The giant reptile became increasingly animated and pressed its muzzle against the thick barrier, its eyes focused on Garm. “He seems to like you.”

  “She,” Garm corrected. “Her name’s Proteus. She’s an adolescent Gen-3.”

  “You guys and your names,” Bane teased. “A female, eh? I think she digs you,” she said as the young cow eyed the big submariner in a manner that could only be described as covetously.

  “She recognizes me because I’m the one who captured her,” he said, his pale eyes turning toward the bow like a swiveling battleship’s turret. “Kronosaurus’s are like elephants, doc. They never forget. Or forgive.”

  “I was under the impression you didn’t like bringing them back alive,” Bane said. “Why her?”

  Garm gave the epidemiologist a look. “In five years I’ve taken four of those monsters alive. All under orders, and because they were valuable scientific oddities.”

  “What’s so odd about her?”

  Garm sighed. “I’ll show you.” He turned to face the seventy-ton marine reptile. Without warning, he bared his teeth and raised his arms overhead like an angry silverback gorilla. Proteus recoiled and her skin color began to change. In seconds, she went from cobalt blue with white undersides to 100% mottled green – a near-perfect match for the light-dappled seawater within her enclosure. The big saurian wasn’t invisible, but she was decid
edly hard to make out. Then, as she turned on her tail and swam away, she practically vanished.

  “Wow, she’s like a chameleon,” Bane muttered. “I read that a pliosaur’s color can shift based on stress and, of course, their hue patterns alter during the mating season, but I never knew they could do that!”

  “As a species, they can’t. She’s some sort of mutation.”

  Bane stroked her chin. “Is that why you brought her in, because she’s too dangerous to leave in the gene pool?”

  Garm nodded. “That, and my superiors wanted to study her for weapons research.”

  “Weapons research?”

  “Of course,” Garm gave her an amused look. “Where do you think the technology for this sub’s iridophores came from?”

  Before Bane could reply, all the pliosaurs began to swim excitedly around their tanks. A few submerged or hovered near the bottom, while the remainder did excited loops or surfaced and stuck their huge heads up out of the water. A loud thrum resonated across the docking chamber and one of the cable lifts began to move. Like a giant black widow spider, it zipped nimbly across the network of girders, fifteen stories up, until it was situated above what appeared to be a fifty-yard swimming pool. The pool was warded by a heavy-gauge Cyclone fence that towered twenty-five feet in height.

  A warning claxon sounded.

  “That must be the ‘officers-only’ pool,” Bane observed.

  No sooner had she spoken, when the SUV-sized assembly, complete with a set of hydraulic powered pincers reminiscent of the ones junkyards used to dispose of cars, plummeted toward the pool. It was tethered by thick steel cables and, a moment before it hit the water, the pincers opened wide.

  “You wouldn’t want to do the breast-stroke in there,” Garm remarked.

  There was a prodigious splash as the pincers vanished into the deep water. A moment later, the partially lax cables stiffened and began to twitch. Another claxon sounded and the cables started to retract. The water around the lines churned violently. Seconds later, the metal jaws broke the surface, tightly locked onto the tail section of a ferociously struggling, nineteen-foot Xiphactinus audax.