Leviathan, p.3
Leviathan, page 3
“All the way under the continent,” Andy suggested. His eyes burned as he watched the cave mouth. He glanced down and could see the blip was closing in on them.
“This thing is bigger than we are,” Heather said. “Wait, there’s two of them. I think we should –”
Andy nodded. “Move out of the way. Yeah, on it.” He moved the joystick and gave them some thrust. “Phil, moving Krill-1 out of the mouth of the cave.”
“Good idea, Andy. Not sure what these things are, but the first is around forty feet, followed by another that could be around –” Silvers whistled. “– sixty-five to seventy feet. And there are no metallic signatures. They’re probably biological, and both traveling at around twenty knots.”
Andy stared straight ahead. “Phil, they’re coming at us like freight trains, and they both have significant mass. I think we should evac.”
“No.” Heather reached over to grab his arm. “I think we’re about to find out what secrets this cave has been hiding.”
“Hold it, hold it,” Phil said. “Signatures are four hundred feet out but are merging.” Seconds later, he added, “And merged.”
Over the external microphone Andy and Heather heard a thump. It created a small shock wave that was big enough to push the submersible in the water.
“They’ve stopped,” Phil said.
“Whatever those things were, when they hit it was like a bomb going off,” Andy whispered as he checked the sonar. “No forward motion. They stopped inside the cave at –” He checked. “– three hundred feet.” He looked up. “Jesus, they’re just in there beyond our light.”
“I don’t think it’s they anymore,” Heather said. “I think the big, fast guy caught up with the slower, little guy.”
“By little you mean forty feet,” Andy said. “That’s nearly as big as a humpback whale.”
“Something interesting is going on in that cave.” Heather folded her arms and then turned to him. “We should go in. Just to get some images. Besides, whatever’s going on in there between object A and object B, I think they’re more preoccupied with each other.”
From over the external microphone, they heard some crunching noises. Andy turned his head slightly. “Hear that?” He listened for a few more moments.
“Yeah,” Heather replied. “Like, ripping and tearing.” She half turned. “Or maybe feeding.”
“This is not good.”
“We’ve got to see,” Heather urged. She tilted her head to the console. “I can’t hear anything anymore. We’re going to lose them. We’ve got to hurry.”
“Okay, okay, maybe just a peek.” Andy switched on the mic. “SeaTayshun, permission to take us in a hundred feet – be good to get some footage.”
“Negative, Krill-1,” Phil Silvers replied. “This might be more complex than we expected.”
Andy shrugged and sat back, but Heather craned forward. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”
The warm current from the cave was drifting by them. But now it contained something other than 72-degree seawater. The clear current water was tinged with red. Then fragments of flesh started to drift by.
“Something in there just got its ass handed to it.” Heather sighed. “Shit, I’ve gotta see what’s going on in there. The curiosity is going to kill me.”
“It might indeed.” Andy let out a gentle laugh. “Something forty feet long, and way bigger than Krill-1, just got toasted. I’m not sure we want to be around when that big badass finishes its snack.”
Heather continued to stare at the red tinged water. She spoke without turning. “This is blood, so we now know it’s a biological entity – one was approximately forty feet, and the other around seventy.” She shook her head slowly. “Just what the hell is in there? It ain’t no orca pack.”
The image slowly receded on their sonar.
“Going, going . . . gone.” Heather sat back and then threw her hands up. “What a missed opportunity! Probably the biggest missed opportunity in the history of missed opportunities.” She turned; her arms now pressed tightly over her body. “Fuck it, Andy, I didn’t spend four years studying marine biology and sign up with the Mironov Marine Research Group to study krill populations. I want to push the ocean’s boundaries, find something unique, make a difference.”
He nodded his head. So do I.
He switched off the communications link to the SeaTayshun. “Some mysterious questions were just posed to us and I think we owe the world some answers.” He turned to her. “So why don’t we just take a little looksee. Just a few hundred feet further in. Who’s gonna know, right?”
Heather grinned from ear to ear. “I won’t tell.” She crossed her chest. “Promise.”
Andy turned back. “Okay. Let’s take her in, nice and slow. And let’s stay close to the wall and be invisible.”
***
“The hell? What just happened?” Phil Silvers frowned at his screen. “Is the Krill-1 advancing? Who gave them authority for that?”
He opened the mic. “Krill-1, this is SeaTayshun command, please respond.” He waited a few seconds. “Krill-1, return to your position immediately, that is an order. Krill-1, please acknowledge.” He swore under his breath. “Come on, Andy, this is not a joke.”
Benny Harmon seated just across from him spoke. “I’m betting they’re doing what you would have done if you were down there – gone ahead to investigate.” He turned back to his screen. “And they didn’t want Daddy to overrule them.”
“This is dangerous, Benny,” Silvers growled. “Tell me we’re at least still receiving data from the submersible.”
Benny nodded. “Oh yeah, we’re getting everything. We just can’t talk to them.” He grinned. “Kids gonna be kids.”
“They’re not teenagers.” Silvers scowled. “And they can’t do whatever they want in a sixty-million-dollar submersible. I’ll kick their asses when they get back on deck.” He leaned toward the monitor screens. “But I am interested in what they find.”
The small team in the SeaTayshun control room watched as the video feeds from the bow of the small submersible fed the data back to them. It measured everything from chemical analysis, thermal, and a range of light spectrums. Phil would have liked the audio on so he could pose questions, but he expected that Andy was recording his observations for future analysis. Or at least he’d better be.
The team sat in silence, watching the silent film roll on, and monitoring the plethora of new data. Benny pushed his seat back.
“You know, that cave’s been covered up ever since the glacier grew over the top of it. Given, the glacier has been around for fifteen million or so years, that means whatever is in there has been sealed off from the outside world for that long too.”
“Yeah, I get it, Benny. I’m interested to see what’s in there as well. But we are not currently set up for anything above scooping up brine shrimp and small crustacean samples.” Phil raised a single eyebrow. “You saw the size of the signatures just before, right?”
“I wonder what they were,” Benny said thoughtfully. “We should take bets. My money is on some sort of monster kraken.”
Silvers snorted. “You’ve been reading too much fiction.” He turned back to his screen. “So far the only thing they’ve discovered from all the buried lakes they’ve drilled into across Antarctica are ancient algae, bacteria, and various species of blind copepods.” He smiled. “But sure, be kinda cool if we were able to find something other than a basket of prehistoric shrimp.”
“They’ve found something,” Sotomeyer, who had been sitting with his back to them, said.
The group of marine research scientists immediately spun back to their screens and watched as the camera feed approached the underwater cave bottom. The water was still clouded with blood and fragments of flesh swirled around them, churned by the K1’s propulsion jets.
“Holy shit, is that a fish tail?” Benny asked. “Damn, I shoulda bet on a big fish.”
“More like half a fish.” Silvers took a still image and then accessed the satellite link to enter it into the marine database. He got an answer almost immediately.
“Shark.”
“What sort?” Benny asked.
“Big one,” he shot back. “Closest match is Carcharodon carcharias. Weird, very pale. Almost an albino, but not quite.” Silvers turned back to his screen. “We need something for scale.”
“Is this the sucker that got attacked by something bigger?” Benny asked. “I mean, what could take on a shark that size?”
“A bigger shark?” Silvers shrugged. “Something we haven’t met yet?” He pointed. “And don’t say a kraken again.” He leaned forward and then nodded. “Here comes our scale.”
The submersible approached the tail-end of the shark. They saw the claw extend. It clamped onto the tail and lifted. The propulsion units strained. Even though the weight wasn’t significant under the water, it was still a twenty-foot object that probably weighed as much as the mini submersible did, and the shape made it difficult to work with. As the claw dragged on it, more blood entered the surrounding water.
The Krill-1 team were determined to bring it back though. And Phil Silvers was onboard with the idea.
Everyone in the room watched silently as the small craft continued to back out of the huge underwater cave with the tail.
Then Benny broke the silence.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! We’ve got some big signatures, incoming – two thousand feet inside the cave and coming fast. I got two – no, three of them. The first two are giving me a sonar impression size at around fifty to fifty-five feet.” He stared, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “Holy shit, third one is even bigger – maybe seventy feet plus. And they’re doing thirty knots.”
Sotomeyer spoke over his shoulder. “Maybe the big guy from before is coming back.”
“That speed’s impossible,” Silvers replied.
“Nope, they’re doing it. And they’re on direct collision course with our guys. ETA in –” He turned. “Twelve seconds.”
“Shit.” Silvers grabbed the mic. “Krill-1, come back! Krill-1!” he yelled as if his loud words would be heard over the dead communications. “This is an emergency!” He swore and one of his hands curled into a fist. “Come on, Andy and Heather, turn your damn mic on.”
“Do you think they’ve seen it?” Benny asked.
“How could they miss it?” Silvers seethed. “At least drop the damn chunk of meat.”
He turned about, desperate to do something. He could think of only one thing. He hit the internal mic to the wheelhouse. “John, bring us in closer to the glacier. If they surface, then I want –”
“There’s something there!” Benny shouted.
Silvers swung back to the Krill-1 image feed, just in time to see the lead two objects explode out of the darkness. They shot past the Krill-1 so fast it was impossible to make them out. But they were big, clay-colored, and the turbulence they created buffeted the small submersible and pulled it away from the wall.
The objects, or creatures, kept going out into the freezing sea where they peeled off, one going one way, the other in a different direction.
“Whatever they were, they were scared shitless,” Benny said. “Hold the phone, here comes the last one. Here comes big daddy.” Benny’s voice was high.
And then the thing filled their world. Unfortunately this time Krill-1 wasn’t hovering safely out of the way.
On the screen, something that might have been a mouth opened and then the camera simply whited out.
Phil Silvers shot to his feet. He just stared, his mouth working uselessly for a moment. After a few more seconds he pointed at the screen. “What happened? What just happened?” He reached forward and his hands flew over the multiple keyboards.
“Lost camera, lost forward and aft sensors, lost sonar images. Oh god. No signature.” Benny turned, his eyes wide. “They’re not there anymore.”
Silvers felt like his brain was short-circuiting. He stared at his own screen, not wanting to believe what it was telling him.
Benny turned slowly. “Did they just get eaten?”
Silvers rounded on him. “Don’t you dare even fucking think that,” he yelled. “It was – it was a cave-in.” Silvers frowned. “That’s what happened. That’s what she’d want us to say. Until we know more and analyze our data, we keep this under wraps. It’s too important to share with the world, just yet.”
The ships alarms blared, and Silvers cringed from the sudden excruciating noise. “Jesus, what is that?”
“The big one. It’s coming back,” Benny said. “Those first two signatures are still out in the open ocean too. They’re all out here. With us.” His fingers were a blur over the keyboard.
Silvers paced, trying to think. He folded then unfolded his arms, and then turned to Benny. “Where is it? The big one?”
Benny grimaced. “It’s, ah, it’s circling us.”
“Oh Jesus.” Silvers breathed. “She’s got to be told what’s happening.” He turned back to his keyboard and opened a direct link to the head of Mironov Marine Group. He rapidly composed a message and linked in all the data, film images, and sensor information from Krill-1, and then sent it.
“Still circling,” Benny said, and then spoke through fear-clamped teeth. “Boss, are we in trouble?’
“I don’t . . .” Silvers straightened from his screens. “Fuck it, we’re out of here.” He touched the mic button. “Engine room –” He began.
“Oh no.” Benny grabbed his head. “It’s stopped circling. And it’s turned. Toward us.” He let out a sound that might have been a sob. “It’s going to ram us. If we go in the water here, we’re dead. Fucking dead,” Benny shrieked.
It won’t be the cold that kills us, Silvers thought. “Hold it together, man,” he said. “We’ll be fine. This ship is double hulled and made from toughened steel to break ice packs. Nothing is going to damage us.”
Silvers flicked on all the external underwater cameras and instructed their programming to send their images over the open communication’s link back to home base as well.
“Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes,” Benny’s voice was so high it was almost a shriek.
The seventy-five-foot creature accelerated, bearing down on the equal-sized boat. Silvers knew that, even though the SeaTayshun was made of hardened steel, it was primarily hollow. What was bearing down on them was probably a solid mass of bone and muscle. Plus, all the ship’s reinforcement was in the bow, not the sides.
And that’s where it struck – the collision to the starboard side was like a bomb going off. Everything inside the boat was thrown to the port side at such high velocity that the men’s bodies were crushed, and everything else shattered beyond recognition.
The SeaTayshun broke in half. There were sparks of electricity, a few fires and secondary explosions, and a shower of debris that rose a hundred feet into the air. But then the vessel sank quickly.
The last image sent back to the Mironov Marine Group was of the thing at the moment of impact. After that, the frozen sea returned to being as cold and silent as the grave.
CHAPTER 04
Edge of the Southern Ocean, aboard the fishing vessel, the Boris Yeltsin
Yuri Zagreb had the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the smooth waters of the Southern Ocean. He knew they were coming up on the Antarctic Exclusion Zone, a no fishing border, and so far they had caught nothing. It was as if the ocean had sent out a warning to stay clear of his fishing boat.
He lowered the glasses. “Are we that fearsome?” he exhaled through a large and weather-beaten nose above a salt and pepper whiskered lower face. “We only want a little.”
At eighty-seven feet, steel hulled, with two net cranes, and rising forty feet from hull to wheelhouse cabin top, the Boris Yeltsin was thirsty and drank a lot of oil. Even sitting idle, she burned through fuel as the engines needed to run continually to heat them when in the frozen south.
And the cost of fuel was criminally high right now, so if they went home with nothing, Yuri knew he would be dripping in red ink. Possibly drowning in it. It would be a dour voyage knowing that the next trip wasn’t for profit, but to pay debts. Or worse, just to accrue more.
He sighed. They needed something. Anything.
And then the fish gods answered.
“Whale song,” Belsky, his sonar operator, said while holding the earpiece tighter against his head.
Yuri turned. “Single animal or pod?”
“I think it’s a single animal. Sonar image says it’s perhaps forty to forty-two feet, and only moving at four knots.” He fiddled with a keyboard and then let a computer system analyze the noise. “Got it. Cetacean database says it’s a female humpback.”
“Good size, and slow moving.” Yuri turned back to the window, scratching his chin as he thought. He spoke without turning. “Where is it?”
The sonar operator checked and then slowly shook his head. “Unfortunately, it is within the Antarctic Exclusion Zone.”
Yuri nodded, and let his mind run. They had zero catch and were burning fuel with no return on his investment. He needed something to sell when he got back. Whale meat still had a few markets he could sell into. He made a snap decision.
“Turn off the transponder,” he said evenly.
“But, that would –”
“Turn it off.” Yuri’s voice was low and had an edge.
Without the transponder, his ship would vanish from the international satellite database. If there was ever an investigation, the rationale for it would be obvious. But by the time anyone noticed something was wrong, he’d be back out of the exclusion zone. With his prize.
He turned to his second in charge. “Mr. Chekov, plot me an intercept course with that whale.”
“Yes, sir.” Chekov grinned at him.
“Good man.” Yuri nodded. He knew Chekov understood his pressures, that’s why he liked and trusted him.
Belsky whistled. “Moving fast now – sixteen knots.”
“Maybe it knows what’s on our minds.” Chekov said.
“It’s doing sixteen knots?” Yuri bobbed his head from side to side. That was odd as humpbacks usually only did around five. This big mahmochkah was in a hurry. “Then we better do twenty. But don’t worry, it’ll tire soon.”
