by Hugo Navikov
One of the video people (scientists? Dear God, this was wearisome) said a bit defensively, “The video quality isn’t going to be as good when the ROV isn’t tethered. We have to wait for the signal to reach us from twenty thousand feet down. The density of the water at that depth—”
“I know, very sticky indeed. Then what kind of delay are we looking at, since the radio signal is bogged down?”
“It’s not actu—”
“Or whatever. Info, now, let’s go.”
“There’s about a four-minute delay at this depth. So we’re seeing what the ROV saw four minutes ago.”
Jeffrey’s eyes widened. “So Gigadon could be eating the robot right now and we wouldn’t know it? Then we’ll never lure it up here! We’ve got to hit the rockets, start the heat trail for it to follow!”
“Sir, it’s unlikely that we’ll even encounter anyth—”
“All hands! All of the hands! Get me and the camera crew in the water now! And where’s my bloody explosive harpoon-rifle thing?”
Nigel came trotting out from the cabin. “Got it, Jeff. I’ll hand it to you once your tether is securely fastened to the boat.”
“The robot doesn’t have to use a tether, but I do?”
“Unless you want the Gigadon to drag you to the bottom and eat you at his leisure.”
Jeffrey considered this a moment and said, “But you’ll remove the tether line in post?”
“Of course.”
“All right, then.” He turned to the crowd at the monitor. “Oi, you, video people, how much time have we got?”
The tech actually seated in front of the monitor said, “Sorry, sir, until what?”
“Until bloody Gigadon is up here, you dolt.”
The tech opened her mouth to answer, but from out of nowhere Nigel the Producer was there and whispering into her ear. She nodded at Nigel and called back to Jeffrey, “We’ve got at least four minutes, sir! But yes, you should definitely get ready down there in the water. It could come, you know, at any time.”
She whispered to Nigel, “We are actually seeing some anomalies. We did a sonar scan, and even though the resolution isn’t spectacular from this depth, there is something moving around near the vents. You can’t see much except light splotches using an ROV with no data tether, but that light has been blocked a few times, and for a good amount of time.”
Nigel almost laughed. This would be like choosing a needle from a haystack on the first try. “All right, then! Camera folks are giving me the thumbs-up, looks like Jeffrey’s ankle is on the tether with the other end tight on the boat …”
One of the robot techs heard Nigel and said, “Light her up, boss?”
Nigel paused. “Light her up?”
“You know, set off the rockets to bring the dinosaur up here so Jeffrey can kill it. Make the heat trail and everything.”
“Ohhh! Now’s as good a time as any, I suppose. Yes, light her up.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” the tech said, weirdly, but another joined him at the ordnance station, and they counted from three, two, one—and mashed the big red button.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened on the monitors. Nothing moved or changed, although something big was definitely occluding the light between the thermal vents and the robot’s camera.
“Oh, right,” Jeffrey mumbled to himself. There was a delay. As in, You won’t see everything in real time. Nigel used the extra time to check in with Jeffrey, got a thumbs-up, everything good there; the camera crew and their feeds, also good; and then back to the robot camera’s monitor.
“Ooh, see that?” the video tech said breathlessly.
“I see … something, I think. What is that? Is that anything?”
“I think it’s our friend, the Gigadon,” she said through a smile. “See, it just turned, and you can see the thermal vent’s light shining on the dinosaur’s hide. Actually, if you look carefully, you can see that it’s swimming right toward the camera. I can’t believe that crocodile snout thing on a giant shark’s body!”
The onboard marine paleontologist (which is slightly different from an ichthyopaleontologist, the hairline distinction in their precisely defined fields of study making any sense to—and holding any interest for—only marine paleontologists and ichthyopaleontologists themselves) said to the video tech, “‘Snout thing on a giant shark’? Jenny, that’s not even wrong.”
“We’ll talk when you can tell me the difference between a coax cable and an Ethernet cord,” she said, and everyone around laughed, except for Nigel. Did they hit the rockets, ‘light her up,’ whatever the blazes they were supposed to do? He could see that nightmare mouth coming very close indeed to the robotic diver.
“Em, is that thing going to eat our little robot?” Nigel asked, actually expressing less trepidation than he felt.
One of the rocket boys came to look at the screen as well, then glanced at the impressive glass casing and metal indicators of his diver’s watch. “It just might, if our signal to launch doesn’t—”
On the screen, the nightmare visage of the Gigadon was flooded with light and the view from the ROV was, in seconds, above and looking down at the dinosaur.
“We have a launch!” Rocket Boy shouted, and a general cry went up around the boat. “Are the heat generators employed?”
“Yep,” the assistant robot tech said. “The water between that bad boy and our sack of rivets is getting superheated.”
“Roger that! And the monster is following. Gigadon is on its way up!”
Nigel stood, transfixed by the Gigadon—and this was definitely the same creature that was in the Bentneus footage—and even more stunned by Jeffrey Plaid getting this one so right, when usually a fish practically had to come up and hit him in the chest for him to catch it on his own.
Okay, that’s a bit unfair, Nigel scolded himself. He’s a smart guy, but his marketing abilities put his fishing to shame. That was better; Nigel was nominally C of E, but he believed in karma. No sense tempting fate.
Like swimming without, at the very least, a thick wetsuit when waiting for a vicious dinosaur to show up (the camera crew had ensconced themselves in two of the world’s strongest shark cages, but nothing like that would be allowed to impede viewers’ sight of their favorite angler). The Speedo showing off Jeffrey’s Hemingway-level hairy chest and his lumberjack muscled arms looked great on camera, but would he be too tasty to spit out?
Of course, the Gigadon had spit out Jake Bentneus inside his inedible shell, and Nigel bet the poor bastard wished it hadn’t. So what the hell. If there was one thing he had learned in his five years as the field producer of Jeffrey Plaid’s various hit shows, it was that the man was going to do whatever the blazes he wanted to do.
So Nigel relaxed. He watched both the host with his scuba tank and the film crews in their two separate ultra-strong shark cages get into the water, tethered by unbreakable carbon nanotube cables into the very structure of the ship. Nothing was going to swallow them and get away. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t get killed, but that billion dollars would go to the ROAR! Network—minus a very generous share to Nigel, thank you very much—and they could set up The Jeffrey Plaid Foundation for Kids Who Can’t Fish Good (Nigel thought the film Zoolander must have been based in part on his employer) for all he cared.
That Gary Lucas comment about being a better angler was legendary around the ROAR! offices. But getting the Gigadon—there would never be a bigger or more lucrative catch—would prove him wrong, wouldn’t it? Even if Jeffrey’s role was, essentially, being bait.
But that was thinking negatively. Jeffrey hadn’t failed to catch whatever scary and/or disgusting creatures lurked in rivers—or if he did fail, they could get him catching something else and redoing some of the lead-up—so maybe he could do this.
Yes, that was positive. Good.
“Nigel?” the video tech called. “Nigel!”
The producer zipped over to the monitors, but it took him a moment to comprehend wh
at he was seeing. More than that, actually. What it took him a moment to do was to realize he wasn’t going to comprehend what he was seeing. So he asked the video tech: “What on God’s green Earth am I looking at? What’s with the overexposure? This is going out live, you know.”
She smiled in acknowledgment. “The flare is from the rockets on the bottom of the ROV. They get it to the top faster—maybe five minutes until it hits the surface and shuts down automatically. And they make a lot of heat.”
“So where’s the monster?”
“Our sonar says it’s moving toward the surface, but I can’t tell how close behind the ROV it may be swimming.”
“Hell’s bells. What should I tell Jeffrey?”
“Um … nothing? Ask the comm tech. I’m just the video gal.”
“Right, thanks.” He crossed the ten feet to the communications setup, where the techs were just shoving a live feed without commentary or editing onto the Internet—and a lot of people were logging in to every mirror server the ROAR! Network, its parent network, and their corporate masters had running, and there was probably some slow viewing going on. “What’ve we got, Web gurus?”
“We’ve got two static shots from different angles of a hairy man in a speedo, holding a thing, the harpoon or rifle or whatever. Split screen, so we’ll catch all the action. If there is any action.”
“Oh.” Nigel didn’t know what, if anything, he should say. The whole “live” thing to win Jeffrey’s stupid pissing contest had left him right off the pitch. He had no control over anything, even if he had authority as producer. The various techs were just waiting, as they all were, to see if Gigadon was going to show up so Jeffrey could blast it.
“Whoa!” the Web tech blurted, and similar outbursts came from just about everyone on the boat. Nigel whirled around, catching exclamations of varying crudeness but all of them expressing surprise and shocked delight. He started toward the video tech’s station, but then he saw what everyone had seen on their screens just a moment before, as it made its way to the surface.
The little but super-powered ROV launched out of the water only about a hundred feet away from the boat, its magnesium rockets still blasting. The heat coming off the robot was almost painful to the crew on the boat, like they were sitting too close to a raging campfire, but in a few seconds, the rockets sputtered and died; and the ROV spun down into the water on the other side of the boat.
Nigel laughed with all of the others at the spectacular feat the ROV (and its designers and engineers) had performed. If there was anything that was going to coax the leviathan to the surface—
“Nigel!” the video tech cried, and Nigel ran from the spot he had been frozen to when the robot exploded from the water. When he got to the tech’s side, he could see that she had switched from the sonar and other instrumentation displays to the live split-screen feed. There was Jeffrey, who had his explosives-tipped harpoon pointed down and was blowing huge rivers of air bubbles from his mask—he may very well have been hyperventilating.
“Can you patch me into his earpiece? He needs to—”
“He didn’t wear one, sir,” she said. “We told him it would take five minutes to get it checked and ready—”
“Oh, in Christ’s holy name! Then there’s no way we can know what he’s looking down at. Do the camera guys have their earpieces?”
“I don’t think it matters now.”
“What? How can you—oh, hell,” Nigel said, the sentence kind of trailing off as one camera on the split screen changed its angle from Jeffrey to whatever the TV host was pointing his weapon at. And there it was: the crocodile-faced, nuclear-aberration-size shark body, all of it the size of a building higher than any in the town Nigel was from. Its jaws opened—so wide, wider than wide, wide enough to take in a PT boat, if not a battleship. Camera 2 did a good job of keeping on the important area of the Gigadon—its teeth visible in that gaping maw—while Camera 1 stayed on Jeffrey as he let loose with the harpoon.
The projectile looked top-heavy, but it was weighted properly and shot true through the water, finding its target dead-on. Jeffrey had been smart—it happened sometimes—and aimed at the end of the crocodile snout, which was the most sensitive area for crocs and for sharks and thus the most likely spot for the giant to receive an injury, maybe even a fatal one.
The harpoon hit the Gigadon square on the “nose” and blew up in spectacular fashion. The explosives first created an expanding sphere of violence through the outward force of the explosion; and then, as the vacuum created by the rush of water away from the blast collapsed, the shell contracted at the point of impact. This let Jeffrey and everyone else see what damage had been done to the monster.
Which was just enough to make the dinosaur react by closing its massive jaws about ten degrees. Then it shook it off—literally; Gigadon gave a small shake of its massive head—and swallowed Jeffrey Plaid whole.
***
Oh, you son of a whore was the exact thought that Jeffrey Plaid’s panicked brain chose for this moment. The words rushed through his mind as he screamed through his regulator; then the whole thing popped from his mouth like a baby’s Binky. His Speedo was filled. He had time for one attempt to use his arms to somehow get away, but there was no speed a human could move in the water that would have saved him.
All of this happened before he was even sucked into the prehistoric beast. The thought, the screaming, the soiling, the single futile swing of his arms. Then he was drawn in, between the rapidly closing mega—giga—jaws, and the lights were out.
He floated inside the creature, not knocking into anything even as he felt himself being swished around. Ha! his mind shouted. He can’t eat me! I’ll be spit out! All he had to do was put his regulator back in, which he did, and breathe normally. He had plenty of air left.
He felt a tug on his ankle. The tether! His leg would be ripped off before the monster got away—which he hoped meant that it would be unable to get away and be killed by some of his crew … somehow …
Oh, wait, no—it’s gonna spit me out. Right! And like magic, there were its jaws opening again. He readied himself to try to avoid any of the teeth in row after row at Gigadon’s jawline. He was pushed forward as the old water went out and the new water came in. Ha! Here we go! He hadn’t gotten so much as a scraped knee.
The jaws opened farther, he was pushed forward faster—
—and then one of the motorcar-sized shark cages (with the screaming Camera 2 crew inside) rushed in on a wave of fresh water.
A few seconds later—the son of a whore hadn’t even bothered to close its jaws—the second manned cage came in. And then the bastard shut its mouth and plunged them all into darkness. The first cage ran into Jeffrey at full speed, breaking the leg that wasn’t tethered—it hurt like the devil’s hangnail, but at least it wasn’t the tethered leg, which would have come off the bone like a boiled chicken’s drumstick. Jeffrey screamed expletives of agony but had enough presence of mind to keep his regulator in his mouth and to keep breathing.
The goddamn thing would have to spit the cages out. That’s what had happened with Bentneus—chewed almost to death first, but still—and the cages were too much nonorganic matter, he was sure. It couldn’t keep them in its belly, or its mouth, or wherever they were inside the cavernous beast. It couldn’t be totally hollow.
And it wasn’t.
One of the Camera 1 crew had calmed down enough to switch on the light on their cage, giving them all a look at the thing’s stomach. It had to be a stomach, but it was formed like a hammock instead of a wineskin.
Barely registering that he was moving at a rather high speed toward the hammock—it even was crisscrossed with “netting,” maybe so the water could flow through it and aid digestion? He had moved beyond the cage’s light—the cages weren’t being sucked back the way Jeffrey was—but he could feel himself still moving, and when he reached the stomach-thing, his front side got splayed against it like he was a spider caught in a web.
Wait … can spiders get caught in webs? his adrenaline-soaked, rapidly deteriorating cognitive apparatus wondered. Don’t they … know …what’s sticky …? Then his mouth shot out the regulator again—and for the final time—as he screamed in pain that was beyond pain. This made the pain of his horribly agonizing broken leg feel like being tickled by a feather.
That stupid jumping ass-fish slapping into his pec was the worst injury he had sustained in his five years doing the show. But now … aighhhh! … he felt burning, sizzling, that started on his skin and went deeper in a very short time. You’re digesting me? You bastard! was what his brain tried to cough out.
He was right, too. And in the moment before he was dissolved too much to live, his mind sent Jeffrey one final thought:
Gary Lucas will never let me forget this.
***
The now-late Jeffrey Plaid was right about the cages: the Gigadon couldn’t digest them and would spit them out. However, this would not be before its jaws clamped shut, teeth interlocking, and it dove back into the blackness with the practically indestructible nanotube cables anchored to the shark cages trailing from its mouth. On the other end of the cables, which were laced through the structure of the boat for extra security, was the ROAR! Network’s floating command center full of screaming video techs, babbling communications techs, and one shaking-with-fear TV producer, Nigel Tremens.
They were screaming even before the Gigadon took the shark-cage cable shut tight in its teeth and made back for the bottom. But they really screamed—not to mention clutched onto anything they could for dear life—when the cables pulled on the rod ‘n’ reel that was the ROAR! boat. First they heard a low grinding from everywhere at once, and even the video techs turned away from the screens, which were showing nothing but black with an occasional spotlight of a moist surface. (That was the camera crews dropping their cameras and the shark-cage floodlights swinging around and sometimes illuminating random nothings that were in the line of the camera.)