by Hugo Navikov
God bless the Black AMEX card, Sean thought, mesmerized.
“Gentlemen, as you can see, we have customized the showroom with weapons and other offensive and defensive equipment that will fit onto the submersible.”
Sean and Mickey made mumbles of assent and appreciation.
Abu al Khayr said, and pointed out the first item, on a two-foot pedestal and lit from above by spotlight. The pedestal was slowly turning. The pedestal was turning, showing every angle of the martial doohickey in front of them. “This is the MAL 9000—”
Very politely, Mickey said, “My good friend”—he’d sailed with many a Muslim and knew some respectful salutations—“we don’t need the part or model numbers. Just the functions, if that would be agreeable to yourself.”
“Of course,” Abu al Khayr responded with a smile at Mickey’s care with language. He gestured to the sleek and silvery three-foot-long MAL 9000, which resembled nothing so much as a 1950s-movie rocketship. “This, gentlemen, is a missile that can be fitted to the outside of your submersible. Shoot it into the mouth or the snout of any sea predator, and that will be the last you see of him, except for bloody chunks.”
“How many could our sub carry?” Sean asked.
“To balance the weight—they’re rather heavy, although this custom design is much lighter than other underwater projectile weapons—I would recommend one on each side of the craft. Pointed in opposite directions so you can hit any unwanted visitor with no more than a 90-degree turn.”
Sean and Mickey both nodded and made notes on their paper pads, any portable device with a camera being strictly forbidden, for obvious reasons. They withheld their amusement, but making any turn to aim would end in them becoming a dinosaur Happy Meal. They would have to wait until it swam into their sights.
“And please allow me to let you in on a secret, my good friends. My team has done extensive research on how to kill mammoth sea creatures—or ones on land like Godzilla, ha ha.” He gestured with his hands as he described the strategy for which the custom weapons were designed and built:
“I understand that the physiognomy—is that the word?”
“Actually, it is,” Sean said with a smile.
“Alhamdulillah!” their host said with a proud smile. “Anyway, the physiognomy of your dinosaurs differs on the inside of their bodies. However, it is wise to treat them as one would a modern shark the size of a blue whale. This kind of musculature would be singed, even painfully burned, by a bomb or underwater mine—but not killed.
“No, what Ocean … em …” he closed his eyes to bring it up. “… Vengeance! Yes, what Ocean Vengeance needs are not bombs but missiles. A missile goes deep because of its high velocity and then explodes, doing real structural damage in the musculature as well as in their cartilage or bone structures. This is why we have no bombs for you on the show floor.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Sean said, and Mickey concurred.
“Please excuse this indelicate question, my good friends, but do we need to talk about the prices of these items with installation on the submersible?”
It tickled Mickey to flash the AMEX and say, “We do not.”
Everybody grinned at that. “Excellent!” Abu al Khayr said with joy. “So let us move to the second item, no less important that the first, but something had to be first, right?”
“Ell Oh Ell,” Sean said as awkwardly as a man with crutches getting on an escalator.
Abu al Khayr looked at him quizzically for a moment but, noticing Mickey’s valiant attempt not to laugh, said, “Thank you for your appreciation at my timeworn humor,” then gestured proudly to the new item on the second rotating pedestal. “This is an incredible weapon that is actually of my design, alhamdulillah.”
Abu al Khayr’s creation was a sphere roughly two feet in diameter, like a big cannonball or a very small bathysphere that could comfortably take a housecat to the bottom of the ocean. “For my amusement, if you will pardon it, might you like to speculate on what this weapon is? I will give you a hint: It will be covered with a ‘skin’ of organic matter before being offered to the Gigadon.”
“So the creature will eat it and not spit it out?” Sean asked, himself amused by the mystery.
“Indeed, my good friend! Once the organic skin has been eaten away through digestion and the metal comes into contact with the digestive acids, the weapon deploys. And, then, all hell breaks loose, u’dhurni.”
“You already said bombs would be ineffective,” Mickey said, musing.
“Yes, and this has proved a very effective high-tech weapon.”
“Mmm, high-tech?” Sean said. “Does it give off radiation?”
“Indeed, it does not.”
“Gah!” Sean cried in mock frustration. “I give up.”
“Me, too,” Mickey said with a smile.
“It was an unfair question,” their host admitted. “There has never been a weapon like this before. And I know you will laugh at this, but the reason it has never existed before is that it is exceptionally useless in almost any situation except for the one you—and the other Bentneus Prize competitors, of course—find yourselves in. It has taken almost 90 million dollars to bring into being.”
Silence. In other words, the sound two excited but befuddled men make when they have no idea what to say to something singularly odd. Finally, Sean said, “How did you know to create it just in time for this expedition of ours?”
Abu al Khayr smiled. “Calling us at War-Mart was the second thing that Jacob Bentneus did, instructing that this and other weapons rush through R & D and production, following his awakening from coma.”
Mickey chewed on this and said, “Wow. What was the first?”
“If it were me, screaming at how the Will of God had burdened his humble servant.” He let out a self-deprecating laugh. “Then the second thing I would do would be to beg God to forgive me.”
“So … what is this thing?” Mickey said.
“We call this ‘The Honeycomb.’ I have already explained what happens when the organic skin—which, by the way, is actual animal fat and flesh with glue made from animal sources alone—is eaten away and the creature’s digestive chemicals touch the metal surface.” Abu al Khayr clapped his hands in delight and satisfaction. “As soon as the metal is breached, a kind of foam under incredible pressure inside the metal shell expands, blasting the covering away and—um, do either of you have small children?”
“What?” they said at the sudden turn, almost in unison.
“Sorry, my good friends. I have two small children, so I am familiar with these. My children are fascinated by those toys, those things that are the size of a Tylenol capsule but, when submerged in water, grow to thirty times their size, into an elephant or a monster—or a dinosaur, in fact.”
“That’s what this ‘foam’ is?”
“Well, those silly things were the inspiration for this solution to what Mister Bentneus tasked us with, but the material and expansion mechanism are entirely different. What happens with the Honeycomb is that once the organic skin holding the material compact is breached, a chemical reaction with salt water activates the foam.
“It’s a recursive process once the foam is activated: there is a very small, solid three-dimensional pentagon made of incompressible plastics in the center of the sphere of foam. The foam closest to each pentahedron touches everywhere on that shape. Once the activation starts, it’s much the same process as when ice forms, its crystalline structure coming from imperfections in its container and undergoing a phase shift.
“In this case, our one ‘imperfection’—that is, the frame of one honeycomb cell—creates a ‘phase change’ that races through the material, arranging every group of atoms from a quasi-liquid state into solid rigidity arranged into the pentagonal shape. You recall how I said that the material is packed densely inside the sphere, yes? In fact, it is so tightly packed that a sphere the size of the one you see here has enough foam in it to impenetrably fill the Lincoln Tunnel to a
depth of almost half a mile.”
The two visitors were impressed, even awed, but didn’t see the connection.
Their host picked up on it immediately and smiled. “You’re wondering how this helps you in the hunt.”
They nodded.
“If you can get this into the mouth of your giant dinosaur, it should not spit it out because the organic shell is flesh. It should move into the beast’s digestive system—whatever its structure, every animal on Earth digests its food through some sort of corrosive effect—where it will be activated as soon as there’s a breach in the skin.
“In seconds, the phase-breaking foam will, essentially, explode into a three-dimensional honeycomb shape in which the cells multiply out from the central imperfection like ice, again, spreading over a lake. These cells will expand to fill not only the monster’s mouth and digestive system, but everywhere. Every nook and cranny inside its entire body will within seconds be filled with this. It doesn’t matter if it has lungs or gills or a direct-oxygen circulatory system like an insect.
“Needless to say, the creature will be unable to breathe, eat, even swim, since nothing within its body will be able to move as it’s held fast by this invasion of our material. It will be dead within one minute, I would estimate, inshallah.”
“Nanotechnology?” Sean asked, despite the fact that he was as stunned as if he had been whacked on the back of the head with a baseball bat.
“Indeed, Doctor Muir! Phase changes make up one of the most active research areas in applied physics, and this ‘foam’ is activated at the molecular, even atomic, scale. We are quite proud of it.”
Mickey raised his hand a bit and said, “But isn’t it dangerous? Like highly dangerous? What about when the foam fills up the Gigadon and starts expanding into the ocean, then keeps expanding and expanding until everything is smothered by honeycombs?”
Abu al Khayr gave Mickey an appreciative grin and shot him with a thumb-and-forefinger “Bingo!” pistol. “Good question, Mister Luch. In nanotechnology, they talk about ‘the gray goo problem.’ It would be a world-ending effect of nanobots that use material around them to form more nanobots, which then use the material to form even more nanobots until the entire planet has been converted into nanobots.”
“Right! That’s what I’m talking about. It would be suicidal to set this off, wouldn’t it?”
“Fortunately, no,” the War-Mart rep said. “Unlike the idea of self-replicating nanobots, our Honeycomb foam causes a phase change only in the compressed material available within the sphere. Then it stops and remains rigid for, perhaps, one week? Surely no more than that. At that point, its structure cannot hold, and it undergoes another phase change. Whereas the first was from liquid into solid, this last is from solid into gas. The dinosaur killer will effervesce and bubble up to the surface and disperse.”
Sean nodded at the sheer genius of it, but … “So this foam, this Honeycomb material, is it toxic?”
“Oh, yes,” Abu al Khayr said, widening his eyes for emphasis. “Our foam makes liquid mercury seem like Coca-Cola. Interestingly, just the toxins might be enough to kill even an enormous animal such as your dinosaur, but you wouldn’t want to just dump it into the water. It would kill everything within a square mile almost immediately. However, when it undergoes the phase change as we’ve designed it, it becomes entirely chemically inert. All the atoms are spoken for, if you will.” He beamed at the excellence of his own answer.
Sean kept nodding, as he did when chewing something over, then said, “What about when it phase changes from solid into gas there at the end?”
“May Allah forgive me for sounding rude, but what about it?”
“Well, I mean … is it still chemically inert at that point?
“Oh, no, not at all. Once it has atoms to exchange with its immediate environment, it is utterly deadly. However, at the depth this weapon is meant to be used—when your beast is no deeper than 100 meters—the bubbles will rise so quickly that most of its chemical volatility will be lost, and a harmless combination of nitrogen and our proprietary mix of carbon and oxygen will disperse once it hits the surface. Shooting it in the open air would result in the same harmless dispersion. So nothing to worry about there, I assure you. War-Mart has deep pockets, and we do not intend to give any away by being the target of any lawsuits.”
He finished with a laugh that was politely shared by Mickey but not at all by Sean. “So when the gaseous remains of the foam are rising to the surface, highly deadly toxins are being released into the water of one of the richest aquatic ecosystems on Earth.”
For the first time, Abu al Khayr’s genial manner slipped. “A thousand pardons, Doctor Muir, but do you want to kill this Gigadon, or don’t you? Mister Bentneus assured me you were both quite seriously committed to this task.”
“We are,” Mickey said, and when he looked at Sean, the former professor realized concurring would be in everyone’s best interests.
“I mean no disrespect, gentlemen, when I say that the lives of one hundred, one thousand, one million fish mean as little to your sponsor, and to myself, as would the extinction of an entire species of rainforest beetle never known to man. They should mean as little to you.”
“I understand,” Sean said. “But, if I may, hasn’t Mister Bentneus’s entire mission in sea exploration been to preserve the precious life found there?”
“My good friend, that mission ended when that thing fatally insulted him on behalf of the entire ocean. You and I are participants in his new and fervent mission, all right? Yes?”
“I see,” Sean said.
Abu al Khayr’s pleasant expression returned. “Very good. Please allow me to show you the variety of heat bombs, sonic cannons, and—”
Mickey said in his best Doctor Evil voice, “How about some sharks with frickin’ lasers attached to their heads?”
“Ah, yes, I have never heard a customer say that before,” their host told him with great restraint. “In all seriousness, the issue with lasers underwater is that water refracts light so completely that even a good-powered weapon wouldn’t do any damage beyond thirty meters or so. However, that’s why I’d like to show you our sonic cannon, which uses pressure waves that propagate especially well in water. Water itself becomes the weapon, which is ironic for this mission. In any case, let me tell you the specs—”
“That’s not necessary … um, my good friend,” Sean said. “We’ll take all of it.”
“All of it?”
“Will it all fit on the submersible?”
“No, no—some of it is meant to be mounted on the bottoms and sides of your expedition’s boats. So you want all of these goodies, even the ones I haven’t showed to you yet?”
“Yep. Be sure to include the manuals,” Sean said with a smile of his own as Mickey moved to hand over Bentneus’s black AMEX.
Abu al Khayr motioned that the card was not necessary. “We have your employer’s payment information on file, Doctor Muir, Mister Luch. We shall have everything installed at your vessels’ berth in plenty of time for you to learn how to use them, perhaps as early as forty-eight hours or, at the latest, four days.”
“Earlier would beat the hell out of later,” Sean replied.
The Arab’s smile flickered again. “Of course,” he said.
Mickey laughed at his friend’s brazen show of impatience, no doubt triggered by the cavalier way their host waved away the death of an entire ecosystem to fulfill the vengeful plans of a man driven mad by bitterness. But Sean was working to fulfill, even direct, those plans. As was Mickey himself. All soapbox talk aside, every last living thing that died in the service of their mission was a being they had all agreed to kill.
***
The week passed with not only intense slowness (typical before a major dive) but also great rapidity as they prepared Sea Legs, Sharkasm, and the boat they elected to call Spit for their martial campaign. The science folk on Sharkasm were torn, of course, between approving of the technology they we
re going to get to play with, mouths agog, and the fact that they would be using it to end a magnificent creature they would rather study than kill.
The communications techs and general support crew on Sea Legs just wanted their cut of the cash and a little fun shooting at things and dropping bombs on them. The oceanophile nerds were on the science boat, not theirs.
And then there was Spit. She had been built specifically for this hunt—that latest factoid that Sean had learned supporting his hunch that Bentneus had this whole adventure in sight from the day he awoke. Did that include springing Sean from prison?
You bet your ass it did. Personally, Sean wouldn’t have complained if the filmmaker had wanted help planning and gotten him out, like, two years earlier. Then “the incident” never would have happened, and he wouldn’t have spent a year talking to the walls in solitary. Yes, he got good research and reading done in there, but he found himself longing to hear the white noise of his cellmate holding forth on “the Jews” until Sean fell asleep.
However, Spit almost made up for it. Gleaming, resplendent in the sun, and outfitted with every gewgaw Sean ever could have thought of, let alone been given to use. Sharkasm had the scientists and the equipment, but every one of their readouts was reproduced in the large and luxurious cabin from which Sean would oversee the operations.
And there, secured fast to the A-frame that would lower it into the water, was Bentneus’s masterpiece of hatred and anger, Ocean Vengeance. The yellow submersible was indeed covered in the ordnance Sean had seen at War-Mart and much more besides that could kill Guam’s entire population of 181,800, forget about a single gargantuan dinosaur.
As was expected, as was unavoidable, as was dreaded, Sean eventually had to interact with Slipjack McCracken. They shook hands and spoke civilly, even if it was extremely awkward. The appearance of each man might make one think that Slipjack had been the one in prison. He had a haunted and gaunt look and an unhealthy-looking paunch. His hair had grown down to his shoulders and all but abandoned the top of his head. Sean, on the other hand, had obviously made the most of his daily hour of solitary exercise and looked more fit than when he was put into human storage.