Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Not that those things weren’t important to a crewman who wanted to keep getting hired on to cushy academic projects, but to scan the ocean with his own eyes felt more authentic, even if there was nothing to see …

  … except something was out there, impossible to see in the still-dark water, but its sharp tip—the way it swayed it had to be attached to something below—stood out against the gradually lightening sky. It looked strange, but as his eyes continued to acclimate and the rosy-fingered dawn approached, he could see it wasn’t alone. He could see now that they were everywhere, these tips of whatever, surrounding the Bentneus expedition’s ships. Everywhere he turned, he saw them, and—

  Jesus, they were boats. The tips he saw were antennas, radar dishes, and even some sails. There were dozens of small vessels dotting the water in the half-mile or so that the Sharkasm sailor could see from his position.

  Did these jackasses know what they were supposed to catch out here? There were some larger boats grouped together, definitely well-financed teams like their own. But they sat mostly silent. As the stars above were overwhelmed by the imminent sunrise, he could hear the crews of the smaller boats, shouting out to one another across the distance that separated them.

  He could pick out two words in particular: Shark and circle.

  The smaller boats chugged vaguely toward one another, and it took just a few minutes until the crewman could see that they were, in fact, trying to form a circle. Not an easy maneuver, but the boats pulled it off well. There must have been some actual experienced mariners out there, maybe professional fishermen leading “expeditions” of their own for wanna-be Gigadon-hunters who paid for the chance to land a billion-dollar prize bounty.

  Morons, in other words, he thought, but these morons were doing something very particular that he couldn’t quite figure out. What was with the circle of boats? Why did he hear, very clearly and more than once now, the word shark?

  That’s when the stench hit him, of course right when he was taking the final gulp of his coffee, making him gag and cough out the precious caffeine. The sharp, pungent, godawful smell was like he was standing knee-deep in a red-tide flood of a million different species of rotting fish.

  Then he heard a splash. Then another … and another, getting faster, sounding like someone scraping scalloped potatoes into a garbage disposal.

  He knew that sound, and as soon as his brain identified it, he recognized the stanky smell. It was chum, buckets and barrels of leftover fish parts and blood.

  Chum was used at the very break of dawn by hunters to attract sharks to the surface. Sharks hunt mostly at night, so at dawn they are still near enough to the surface to sense the bloody entrails as wounded prey, easy pickings they can’t resist.

  These assholes were trying to hunt the Gigadon like it was a giant shark.

  Now he heard splashes from numerous boats—maybe every boat—in the flotilla forming a 200-meter-or-so circle half a mile off Sharkasm’s port side. They must have all had harpoons to use together, or maybe had a net strung between their fishing vessels to catch the monstrous creature, because they were definitely working in concert to bring up the biggest shark ever known …

  … except the Gigadon wasn’t a shark. It wasn’t a fish. It was a goddamn dinosaur. From listening to the scientists strategize on board the boat, he knew dropping chum and churning water wouldn’t even be noticed by the monster, because the Gigadon responded to heat, especially when the source was near enough to tempt it to the surface. These shark-hunting techniques wouldn’t work on the dinosaur.

  But, out there in the South Pacific, this massive dumping of bait would work on sharks. On a lot of sharks, all at once.

  His cup dropped from his hand and tipped over into the water as the crewman was already running to wake the captain and tell him they were about to encounter a feeding frenzy so massive that it could capsize boats and add everyone on those boats to the blood-drenched water.

  He didn’t know what the hell to do except rap his knuckles on Cap’s door—loud enough to wake him but not such a banging that it would show disrespect—and hand the problem over to someone who would know what to do. The crewman had never been so glad not to be a captain in all his sailing days.

  ***

  The maritime captain of each of the three Bentneus team vessels was a different person from the chiefs of the main launch, science, and communication ships (Mickey, Holly, and Kevin, respectively). Sharkasm’s sailing captain was Captain Brady, who, upon assessing the situation presented to him by his able watchman, immediately contacted Captain Looper of the main vessel, I Spit on Your Grave.

  Brady hated that name for a boat—any mariner knew to avoid violent or vengeful names for ships, as that was tempting the spirit of the sea—and so called it Spit like everyone else … except when a real situation was afoot. “I Spit on Your Grave, this is Brady aboard Sharkasm. Over.”

  “We copy, Spit.” It was Looper himself at the radio, which meant he had been awakened and called to the bridge by his own alert dogwatch crewman. “Affirmative on Sharknado. We see it coming our way. Over.”

  Brady bet the other captains could hear the smile he tried to suppress as he said, “Any suggestions? Over.”

  There was silence on the radio for almost ten seconds before Looper offered, “Stay the hell away from them? Over?”

  The two other captains gave bemused chuckles before agreeing that this was the most prudent—if not, perhaps, the most humanitarian—course of action for the Bentneus vessels regarding the Feeble Flotilla. “Coming out here with nets and harpoons to catch a dinosaur the size of a small island? No amount of warning about itty-bitty great whites is going to help,” Looper muttered. “God, have mercy on Your morons’ souls.”

  ***

  On the ocean, dawn comes slowly, widening in an arc as the atmosphere refracts the sun’s light, and then bam—it’s sunrise, and the morning sun is yellow-white, raging already in its brand-new day.

  The stink, however, wasn’t of anything brand-new. It didn’t matter how many times Sean Muir had been assaulted by that stench in his time around serious mariners; he was glad to smell it now. It was horrid and made him just about gag, but goddamn if he wasn’t out on the ocean again, far away from that concrete hole. He felt alive there on the deck of Spit, watching the circle of optimistic, hard-working fishermen (and not a few weekend warriors in small but fancy sport-fishing yachts) who were busy dumping the last of their chum into the already foamy and red water inside the circle. He felt alive, goddamnit.

  But he would die again, wouldn’t he, if he failed to land this Gigadon? He had long prophesized their existence, based his ruined-then-resurrected career on them, but knowing how and why these adapted marine lizards existed didn’t do him much good in actually bagging the very largest of them. Bentneus’s Moby Dick was bigger—and a hell of a lot more willing to follow heat signatures all the way to the surface—than anything Sean had ever considered. He still didn’t see how greater size would lend an evolutionary advantage to creatures that ate the gossamer chemosynthetic life growing around the hydrothermal vents.

  There was a reason, of course, but even an ichthyopaleontologist needed data to work out what that reason was, and Bentneus’s ill-fated mission was the first to find any evidence at all. And since Sean’s earlier attempt failed catastrophically and he had been kept away from the water for four years, this was his opportunity to get some of that hard data.

  Thus, the dying filmmaker’s goal lined up neatly with his own: get the Gigadon, bring it (or at least its head) back to shore. For Bentneus, to fulfill his revenge. For Sean, to test his theories and create new ones, get back into the life that had been stolen from him and get working again. Not just logical conclusions based on data collected by others, but real hypotheses and conclusions made on his own discoveries in the field.

  All of that was if they could beat the other well-funded missions from research institutions like Woods Hole and The Field Institute, fro
m wealthy academic programs like his alma mater in San Diego—he could see their familiar boats a good distance away from Chum Central. He actually wished his boats were farther from the shark-fishing schemers, even with Spit’s new hull of armor.

  Many of the crew not on duty or asleep on each ship had come to the starboard railing of his boat, the port side of Sharkasm, the aft of Sea Legs. None of the assemblies were heavy enough to make the boats seriously list, but he hoped each mariner captain was keeping an eye on his boat’s center of gravity. Everyone watching must have known something horrible was going to happen, or they wouldn’t have been out of their bunks, away from their computers, not getting ready for the dive that would send Sean down to the exact spot where Jake Bentneus sealed his doom.

  That’s a hell of a lot of bait. If Gigadon responded to blood in the water, then even it would rise with the intention—the goddamn determination—to feed on anything it could. But everything Sean had learned or extrapolated from his own theoretical work said that a creature 36,000 feet below sea level would be extraordinarily unlikely to even sense barrels of fish and blood dumped by boats.

  Sharks, however, were quite a different matter. They can sense a drop of blood from three miles away, that three miles representing the bottom half of a sphere with its equator at the surface. In other words, a shark can sense the tiniest amount of blood in seawater over nineteen square miles at the surface and into the depths well past the euphotic zone, where all sharks (and most every kind of fish) spend their time.

  And these guys were dumping a lot more than one drop of blood into the water.

  “Should we radio them, sir? Tell them to leave off?” a female member of the Spit crew asked him tentatively.

  “Nah,” Sean said as he watched the last barrel, now emptied, tossed into the water. So they were fine environmentalists as well as savvy dinosaur hunters. “I assume they’re not in this just for the fun of it, so they signed up like everybody else … Who are we to say their technique is wrong and they have to stop immediately?”

  “Aye, sir,” she said, “but we’re just north of Papua New Guinea. That’s, like, in the top ten of shark populations in the world.”

  “Indeed, it is, sailor.”

  “So there could be so many sharks around here. SO many.”

  “Should make for a good show, right?”

  “Er, I—sir, should I get the rescue rafts ready? Or raise Air/Sea Rescue on the comm?”

  “If you want to float out to an unprecedented feeding frenzy in an inflatable boat, be my guest.” He looked at her and saw that she did not, in fact, want to do this. “We’re here to kill Gigadon. Anybody else wants to screw around with sharks or get themselves killed some other way, that’s not our concern.”

  “Aye, sir.” She hesitated, and it was as if Sean could read her mind.

  “Yes, you should absolutely check with your captain. Whatever seafaring orders he gives, you should carry those out to the letter. But I bet he’ll say the same thing I’m saying.”

  “Aye—”

  “You’re a good person. Hang on to that. The sea needs more sailors like you.”

  She bobbed her head, possibly blushing a bit, and retreated to the bridge, maybe to ask the captain about rescuing any shark hunters, maybe not. Sean didn’t care one way or the other; it wouldn’t be any of his mission’s crew going out there, that was for damned sure.

  There was chatter all down the rail, whispering in some cases, just plain talking in others, and a few were loudly jeering the shark baiters. He gazed at them for a few minutes, amused. Those weren’t his people, so Cap could control them if he wanted. But why interfere with morale? It would be quashed soon enough when the sharks started arriving, which had to be at any moment now.

  Quashed when they saw ships sustain irrevocable damage from frenzied great whites, people getting dumped into the chum-nasty water, people getting really and truly killed right in front of them and no way to do a goddamn thing about it. What, were they going to swim out and rescue the assholes? No, they were not. But they wouldn’t pull away, either, when the screaming and the dying started at last.

  Dying. It was going to be hard to look away, or would be if he didn’t already know he’d watch until the end, see what any of his fellow professional and academic contestants did about it. If the other missions lost people, so much the better for the Bentneus expedition.

  The thought of bloody death right before his eyes made him think of what he had told Mickey the night before. Why, he wondered, would he tell his mission chief such a thing? Did he think it would make Mickey more loyal or something? It was much more likely to create a distance between them, a confessing murderer and a good man who probably got into academic boat management from commercial fishing because he didn’t even like to kill those nets full of fish.

  Maybe he was testing that loyalty. Did Mickey know what Slipjack had in store for Sean when the winch chief sabotaged the cable? Did he know the cable was damaged in the first place? And if he did, why didn’t he stop everything before Sean or Kat got killed? He might have assured Slipjack of his silence in exchange for … well, for something. Let me kill Sean Muir, and I’ll give you this something. Sean couldn’t imagine what such a thing would be. But it had convinced Mickey to conceal—

  Whoa, hoss. Sean had to physically shake the thoughts out of his head. You don’t know that Mickey was involved in any way. You don’t even know for sure if Slipjack sabotaged the cable; admit it.

  That’s why you test loyalty.

  That cleared the doubts out of his mind. He’d see how Mickey acted now in front of someone he thought was a straight-up murderer. Maybe when Mickey came out to see the show.

  Then he’d do what needed to be done. If anything needed to be done. When Mickey showed his lack of loyalty, maybe he’d take a bad slip into the water, thrash about nice and violently for the sharks. Problem solved.

  If Mickey showed disloyalty, he scolded himself. If.

  “Goddamn,” Sean said out loud. “I’m not a murderer. I’m a scientist.”

  Like you can’t be both, his smug asshole brain spat at him. Like you aren’t both.

  ***

  The tip of the fin of the first shark to swim into the circle was spotted not two minutes after Sean’s traitorous brain finally shut the hell up.

  One fin. Then two. And more until it wasn’t possible to count them anymore as they crisscrossed the circle, sometimes going outside the line of the boats but always returning immediately. Some snouts were visible now, the man-eaters getting excited at all the fish and the blood and the smell. There were at least a dozen within five minutes of the first fin’s appearance.

  The water had begun to churn. There were a lot more than a dozen sharks now, some of them—most of them?—moving with agitation below the sharks appearing on the surface.

  “Now what?” Mickey said at his boss’s side, startling Sean.

  “Shit, pardner, you almost made me jump into the water,” Sean said with a laugh. And it was a laugh, not some kind of evil cackle like he was crazy. “What do you mean, ‘now what’? I highly doubt Gigadon is going to make an appearance at this chickenshit party.”

  Mickey laughed now, although concern sounded in his voice as he said, “Me, too. No, I mean, these guys have done what they know how to do, attract a whole bunch of sharks—big mothers, too. So what now?”

  Sean shrugged, but he’d seen a few induced feeding frenzies from both research and commercial vessels. “Now they swing the side of beef out into the middle and the sharks get crazy going after it. You’ve seen that, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I have, boss. But these guys are trying to attract a dinosaur—God, how many barrels of chum did they pour in?”

  “I lost count. I’m thinking as many as each of those boats could hold. A historic amount of bait for the biggest fish—well, not a fish, but—”

  “I get ya. The bigger amount of bait in an area known to harbor their target, the bigger the catch
and the greater the chance it’ll show up. But … am I wrong, or do the dinosaurs at the bottom not give a crap about shark bait?”

  “All signs point to no. But sharks sure as hell do, and there’s a lot of bait in that circle.”

  Mickey nodded. There were also a lot of sharks, now swimming quickly and aggressively among the boats. The chum had attracted, what, a hundred of them? With more to come, probably? But once the animals were in feeding-frenzy mode, you had to get that meat out there pretty fast, or all that frenzied energy was going to be directed at the only solid-looking things that weren’t sharks.

  Without actual prey provided to them, they would try to eat the boats. They would ram them and bite out the loose boards of a boat’s keel, chewing because that’s what feeding frenzies were: chewing on anything they could, trying to kill whatever was there by slamming into it, then chewing and biting and chewing.

  “Why won’t they put out the hook with the meat?” Mickey said, now seeing that exactly what he had predicted was happening more and more. The sharks nudged the boats, whipped their razor-sharp tails against the hulls, pushed up against them from below. They wanted their prey. “This is literally suicidal, man! Put the meat out already, for Chrissake!”

  If the fishermen could hear him, his words did nothing. The bastards must have been waiting for their Gigadon—how could such a giant beast refuse such a massive meal?

  “What the hell are they doing, boss?”

  “It just hit me.” Sean shook his head ruefully. “These guys know how to hunt sharks. Obviously, they do. And yet, they’re not putting the prize out there to make the sharks crowd against it where they could shoot the predators with guns and harpoons.”

  Mickey waited. “Yeah? And?”

  “They’re extrapolating their shark hunting into hunting for an even-larger predator. The sharks are the meat on the hook, Mick. We were thinking that they put out the bait to get Gigadon’s attention, but really they were drawing out the sharks so that they can dangle for a Gigadon feeding frenzy.”