Leviathan by Greig Beck

Author:Greig Beck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The hidden sea beneath the Antarctic ice, 50 miles south of the Sea Princess position

The female Megalodon still hadn’t reached adulthood, and though she was already thirty-five feet, she still had plenty more growing to do.

She was learning where she fit in the food chain and the predator hierarchy in this warm, twilight world. Basically, she had learned that everything smaller than her was food. Everything bigger was more than likely to be deadly.

Though she had hundreds of square miles of underwater seascape, the larger denizens were territorial. The big Megalodons could patrol for dozens of miles in every direction of their territory, chasing down and eating anything they could, and fighting everything of equal size for dominance, mating, and defense of their piece of the sea.

But there were other things, things far bigger than the biggest Megalodon; things that came up from the dark, warm depths and could pulverize and shred even the biggest of them.

The mid-sized female had never encountered one of them. But with all her sensory organs she had detected them. And as soon as she did, she left the area.

She was now crossing one of the deeper chasms on her way to a far shoreline. There was a river mouth there, and some of the smaller warm bloods often tried to cross it. They’d usually be successful. Unless a meg happened to be waiting for them to be pushed into deeper water.

The meg swam with its mouth hanging open, picking up and “tasting” the scent trails. A small flick of its powerful tail propelled it forward in a silent glide. As the water passed over its snout, extremely sensitive receptors there, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, could detect a single drop of blood or even the faintest of electrical fields, as it gathered information about its environment. It could already taste the fresh water from the river mouth, still several miles way.

Its body was a mass of power, being little more than a huge pipe of muscle with an enormous mouth filled with serrated, razor-sharp teeth. She could move at up to thirty knots, with even greater bursts of speed when needed.

The mid-sized female meg’s senses went into overdrive – she felt the minuscule vibrational pressure of auditory clicks, pops, and squeaks. These odd signals were something she had never experienced before. But somewhere in her brain an ancient species memory set off clear alarms.

The meg accelerated, her muscular flanks now pumping her ahead at around thirty-five knots. Her only vulnerability was her belly because it was softer skinned than the rest of her pale body, and exposed to whatever was below.

And that was where the attack came from.

Bursting up from the impenetrable dark depths of a sea-bottom crevasse the monstrous carnivore came in a bow wave of ferocious speed and power.

The hundred-ton Livyatan whale was a remnant species from a time when it and the Megalodon battled in the world’s oceans for dominance.

To the Megalodon shark, the monstrous cetacean was a specter of death, and its jaws were larger and more powerful than a modern sperm whale.

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