by Hugo Navikov
When the voice came, it was reedy, almost ghostly. “It, it can’t be that near me, near Ocean Victory, you know? For it to circle as close as, like, that itty-bitty Megalodon, there’s no way. It would have to have a turning radius the size of my vertical sub here. It would have to be just wheeling around and around with no way to stay in place.”
“Okay, that’s good information, Jake,” Holly said. “So we know it isn’t right up on you.”
“But H-Holly …”
“Jake?”
“… nothing can be that big. Blue whales aren’t that big. If it’s circling and the cameras still can’t get a good look at it … it’s too big. It just can’t be that big.”
“It’s cool, Jake. This is science in action, right? Everybody around the world is seeing you break new ground—”
“Can you get Mickey back on the line, please?” His voice sounded weak; this was something that no one who worked with him had ever heard before. Holly realized as she switched the comm over to Mickey on board Piranha II that her boss, the creator and boss of this entire enterprise, was going into shock.
“Jake, this is Mick—”
“I’m turning, Mickey. Ocean Voyager is turning.”
Mickey exchanged glances with the others on the bridge. “Did he just say Ocean Voyager?”
They all nodded; that’s what he said, all right.
Jesus Christ. “Take it easy, Jake. What do you mean, Ocean Victory is ‘turning’?”
“The monster … it’s creating a whirlpool around me with its circling. Can’t you see that up there? I’m spinning around and around!”
Mickey could see it now, having taken his eyes off the instrumentation to try to see if he could tell what in God’s name that thing was down there. “Jake, here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to ping the, um, fish. Give it one sonar ping and let’s see if we can get a handle on—”
What viewers on the surface and all around the world heard next was “Get me the [buzz] out of here, goddamnit! Right the [buzz] [buzz] [buzz] now!” Kevin on board Sea Legs must have been playing the censor button and time delays like Mozart on the harpsichord. And Mickey knew he wouldn’t be able to stop his performance any time soon. “Mickey, you dumb [buzz] [buzz]ing son of a [buzz], you [buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]— holy [buzz], you can see it! GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!”
“Drop the ballast, Jake—all of it. Go!”
Bentneus had trained long enough that, even through his terror, his body could operate the machinery even if his mind had taken a (hopefully) short vacation. He hit the right buttons and turned the right knobs to shoot the blocks of sand and other ecologically sound ballast from the submersible. If he hadn’t been able to do this, no one on the surface would have been able to do anything to haul him up.
Even with the ballast successfully dropped, Bentneus knew—Mickey knew he knew, even if the aquanaut wasn’t aware of it in his panic—that it would take more than two hours to bring Ocean Victory back to the surface safely. That was more than an hour faster than the descent, but at 16,000 pounds per square inch, the hadal, then abyssal, then “merely” benthic depths fought you every inch of the return journey. It could not be rushed.
Also, getting him out of there at too high a speed would probably turn Jake Bentneus inside out from the sudden change in pressure. Mickey barked orders to begin pulling Ocean Victory back in. Maybe they would get a better look at whatever that monster was, but Mickey didn’t really give a [buzz] about that. All the data brought in on this mission would be totally overshadowed by the world’s most famous deep-sea explorer dying on a global-event broadcast. It would be like Neil Armstrong tripping off the ladder and accidentally tearing open his spacesuit live on television. Buzz would still have collected the rocks and whatever, but that wouldn’t be the headline. And DINOSAURS DISCOVERED! wouldn’t be the headline if everyone, millions upon millions of people, together watched Jake Bentneus lose his mind and then lose his life.
Over the year of planning and the months of training for every conceivable difficulty or potential disaster, the scenario of “giant prehistoric beast snaps tether, knocks submersible over, and traps Oscar-winning multibillionaire film director Jake Goddamn Bentneus at the bottom of the ocean, where he dies horribly” hadn’t come up once.
The winches were turning now at his supervision and command, albeit excruciatingly slowly, and that gave Mickey a moment to breathe. Then he remembered what Jake had shouted: You can see it! He dashed back in from the winches and instantly saw what his boss was talking about.
The leviathan, monster, dinosaur, whatever it was, had stopped its circling of Ocean Victory and moved away from the submersible. Its entire body couldn’t be illuminated all at once by the battery of floodlights, but eventually, as it swam into the darkness, parts of it were visible. As it swam back into the illuminated area—a sphere of gray that was now moving upwards, though almost imperceptibly—the entire head was visible for a moment.
That moment, time slowed by the horror of all who were watching, was quite long enough to see that it had a head the shape of a shark’s; a long rough snout, like a crocodile’s, jammed beyond capacity with a nightmare of row after row of immense, brutally sharp teeth; and, as it moved through the edge of the lights again, still too near to be taken in all at once, a body that must have been more than 150 feet long. Like a shark’s, maybe; or no, its fins were more like a sea turtle’s, even though it still had a shark’s dorsal fin and tail.
On board Sharkasm Holly saw those paddle-like flippers the thing had instead of fins and thought: This is the most powerful creature that has ever lived. It wasn’t any dinosaur, “dinosaur analogue,” or marine lizard she or anyone else had ever seen. It was something completely other. Fortunately, the mysterious, goddamned scary giant seemed not to care any more about the weird yellow “creature” that had just visited its habitat. That was good. Jesus on a pogo stick, that was better than good. Holly let out a breath she wasn’t aware she had been holding.
The world scientific community would be studying this footage, this entire expedition and its geological, oceanographic, and biological landmark discoveries, for years to come. Jake Bentneus had always maintained there was more to the bottom of Challenger Deep than just silt and octopoids, but Holly was sure even he could never have dreamed of the bounty his expedition—and it was his, even if he was a textbook egomaniac—would haul in.
Ocean Victory was moving away from where the leviathan was swimming. Holly was glad to see that Jake had stopped screaming obscenities and had even stopped gibbering now, his feet once again set down securely on the floor of the bathysphere.
He cleared his throat and said, his voice very weak at first but then growing stronger as he spoke, “Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for my … well, my freak-out a few minutes ago. Ah, some people have asked me if I feel claustrophobic inside my metal shell here, and the answer is no. But encountering what we did, and the predatory way that that thing was circling me … well, now the full documentary we make about this mission is going to have to include a psychoanalysis of yours truly. Not real excited about that, but it’s part of public record now, so shrink away at my head, I guess. I could have PTSD or something, I guess. Anyway.
“Finding this kind of sea life—finding dinosaurs—is going to rewrite a great deal of what we thought we knew about life in the deepest parts of the ocean. And as I leave this astounding biome and my gargantuan friend down there, the discoveries already boggle the mind. We’ve found new hydrothermal vents with complex life all around them. It would seem that those who theorized that hot, then warm, water would give rise to an entire chemosynthetic food chain were right.”
He very specifically was referencing the field and theoretical work of the disgraced Doctor Sean Muir, but there was no way he would mention such an ignominious name to cause himself or the expedition further embarrassment. But the homicidal son of a bitch had been right.
“I name this heretofore unknown apex predator Gigado
n. Anyone watching could tell it was considering eating Ocean Victory—and me inside of it, hence my reaction. But it didn’t. It’s like it knew I was on its turf as a peaceful surveyor.” He sighed with satisfaction. “I know the scientific authorities or whoever get to name it officially, so I’m sure it will be called something like Gigadonus bentneusii, but to me this singular creature is just Gigadon. Megalodon is named for being so huge, and this big bastard dwarfs Megalodon.”
He looked at the monitors and saw that Gigadon was cruising around at the level where the submersible had been hanging. Still swimming like a sentry, but not rising to follow Ocean Victory.
“Now we have the long journey back to the surface to reflect. The heat of the vents is still in the metal and foam and other components of Ocean Victory, according to the many thermometers we have aboard. The temperature inside here is still over 100 degrees, and it is stifling as hell. But all this heat plus our very hot floodlights mean that we can study the trail, the conical shape of the heat signature we leave behind us as we ascend.
“Every part of this journey has changed the history books, folks. I’m gonna ask my mission chief upstairs to roll some more documentary footage while we make what I sincerely hope will be an informative but uneventful trip back to the surface. When we can see light from above, we’ll bring you back to Ocean Victory and the rest of my ascent. See you soon.”
Kevin gave a thumbs-up that they were now broadcasting the documentary footage of how this historical milestone was planned out and executed. At that, Mickey said, “Holy crap, Jake.”
Bentneus laughed. “That pretty much sums it up.”
Mickey made a hmm sound and said, “Hey, something interesting is going on down there, according to our sonar. Can you aim the bottom floods straight down?”
“What’s up?”
“Maybe nothing. Point the lights, willya?”
Bentneus did and was surprised to see the huge gray shape swimming directly below them on the bottom camera’s feed. “Whoa, there’s Gigadon! The water’s a lot colder up here. I wonder why he’s following us up. He doesn’t seem to be in any kind of attack position, just swimming his giant ass in a circle below us.”
“Well, you did mention the theory about dinosaurs following heat sources.”
“Oh, yes, from the unmentionable Doctor Muir. It’s kind of tragic that we’re the ones to confirm that whack job’s signature idea. I’m sure he would have liked to do it himself, if he hadn’t, y’know, murdered his wife and everything.”
“Okay, yeah,” Mickey said, “but you also just mentioned how Ocean Victory is radiating heat from the encounter and the lights and even from inside the submersible.”
“So you think he’s following me?”
“I’ll leave that up to the science folk, Jake. But my guess is that he’s enjoying that ‘cone of heat’ you were talking about, just following the warmth. He’s rising as slowly as you are, so I imagine he’ll stop when the sub cools off enough to lose his attention.”
Bentneus liked that idea. “He’s kind of doing us a favor. We’re getting a real look at how huge this thing is, now that we can sort of see his whole body in the light. Goddamn, he’s big. I wish we had something to scale him against.”
“Maybe you could ping it again, see how far away it is?”
Bentneus should have thought of that, but instead it was his chief sailor. Great. Mickey was a smart, smart man, but he wasn’t Jake Bentneus, even if he did come up with a good idea first now and then. “Good thinking,” he said. “And then we can use the 3D video system I designed and had built to figure how big our giant is through calibration with the sonar ping.”
“Aye, sir,” Mickey said, and called for sonar to ping the beast.
Down in the submersible, Bentneus could feel the ping pass through the water, then felt it again when it bounced off Gigadon. “So whatcha got for me?”
“It’s a lot farther away than it looks.”
“That’s a relief,” Bentneus said and laughed. “I don’t necessarily want him swimming up my tailpipe. We know where he lives now—we’ve got time to put together a research plan and maybe build Ocean Victory II and III and so on. He won’t be able to elude us now that we know he’s there.”
“Jake, I know the 3D stuff that you completely designed and deployed will tell us exactly how big it is and such, but …”
“But?”
“It’s huge. Much bigger than we even thought when it was passing by the sub. For it to appear that big from this distance, it’s got to be as long as a city block.”
The filmmaker laughed at that. “You been smoking the local seaweed? There’s nothing that could be that big and survive the pressure down there.”
“I’m just telling you what it looks like from up here.”
“Good, good, that’s what you should be doing. But let me tell you, from down here, Mick, nothing could be that big. He would have to be practically hollow. And we saw how he chomped that Megalodon in half, so it’s not papier-mâché teeth we’re talking about here. I’d put him at, say, a little bit bigger than the Meg that he killed. A school bus and a half, maybe.”
“But Jake, we can’t even get a shot of its whole head! It would have to be a hell of a lot … no, whoa, that can’t be right. We’re gonna ping it again, Jake. Hold on.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Hold on, Jake.”
The ping rang twice again, once going down and once on the way back up. Only this time there was a lot less time between the two sonar signals. That meant something wasn’t as far away as it had been just moments before. “Um, Mickey? My video feed just shows him swimming in a circle still. Why was the ping so quick?”
“Don’t freak out—”
“What? I have never lost my cool on a dive, not once!”
Mickey and everyone who had heard Bentneus monumentally freak out when he was being circled by the Megalodon could have contradicted him, but there was no advantage in it for anyone, so all remained silent.
Not that the occasional freak-out was anything to be ashamed of. Little things, and sometimes major things, commonly went wrong on a ship and certainly during a dive, but Jake Bentneus had most always kept his nerve and his steely resolve. He had to smile despite himself inside the submersible: What, do these guys think getting a studio to sink $300 million into one movie is easy? He had balls of steel! So he could not freak out, because by definition steel balls prevent that.
“All right, just trying to get you ready.”
“This does not sound like good news.”
“The creature—”
“I call it Gigadon.”
“Yes, right, of course—well, Gigadon is rising rapidly, in a spiral. The ping must have hit a lower part of its body when it was at an angle to us, so it indicated that the thing was farther away than it really was. Because it’s so goddamn long.”
“What do you mean, ‘rising rapidly’?”
“It’s coming right for you. Ocean Victory is positioned directly above the center of its spiral.”
“Oh, bullshit, I’m looking at the same video feed you are, and he looks exactly the same size as before.”
“I’m switching you over to Holly. Talk to the scientist, Jake.”
“This is Holly. You copy?”
“Copy, Jake here. What the hell is Mickey babbling about?”
“Boss, the reason you can’t see all of this thing—”
“Gigadon.”
“—is because half of its length isn’t illuminated by the sub’s lights. You’re seeing only a part of it. But look closely and you’ll see it looks a little bigger with each circle it makes. That’s because it’s closer to your lights. It’s getting closer to you, Jake.”
The world fell away for a moment as it finally clicked for Bentneus. In a few seconds, he shook himself out of his stupor and did his thing: “Okay, team, what are we gonna do about this?”
“Still just Holly here.”
“Then get me
on the goddamn bullhorn—everybody needs to get their heads together on this one! Is that thing coming to the surface? Can we get the sub and me out of the water before he gets to me? What does he want, for Chrissakes?! Science people, report, goddamnit!”
The scene was chaotic aboard Piranha II with divers readying scuba suits and the winch crew set to bring Jake up this last leg a lot faster than was prudent, but at least inside the bathysphere he wouldn’t get “the bends” as they tried to pull him to the surface faster than whatever the hell this thing was.
On Sharkasm, quant nerds hustled around, tripping over one another to look at data, to check the sonar pings (Mickey had ordered another ping and the Gigadon was closer still, now only about 250 feet below Ocean Victory), to find something to do even though almost every single person on both ships couldn’t even think of anything that could possibly help in this situation except hauling Jake’s ass out of the water.
Onboard Sea Legs, which once had been the main ship of well-funded research expeditions but for a Bentneus operation was relegated to communications duty, they just kept the cameras and microphones recording. Bentneus had told them to keep going no matter what, and this was definitely a no matter what situation. In fact, Kevin made an executive decision and broke in on the documentary footage they had been showing. He took the whole show live again. Whatever was about to happen, the world was going to see it.
Kevin knew this could very well be the last time he ever worked for Jake Bentneus. Or anywhere else in the industry. But this is what Jake was talking about—showing the real adventure of a scientific expedition! Kevin would at least go out having done the right thing, even if it meant the video would steal some of Jake’s thunder … and Kevin knew he hated anyone stealing one decibel of his thunder. He put the live feed through to the broadcast channel, which then sent it worldwide with no more than a two-second time lag.
What was happening was the most incredible thing Kevin had ever seen or, perhaps, would ever see.
On Piranha II, Mickey was getting a very bad feeling indeed. The heat from the lights was attracting the monster? They couldn’t be that warm. Ocean Victory itself must have cooled off traveling through tens of thousands of feet of very cold water. Had the creature found itself in the euphotic zone and genetic memory or something triggered it to go toward the sunshine? What the hell was attracting Jake’s “Gigadon” to the submersible?