After hitting Michaela’s sub, the creature collected itself, the three eyes still on Varina and Jaim, as though it was focused on them through the transparency. Then the mouth opened, and the monster shot toward their rising sub. Impossibly fast. Like something propelled by a jet.

Varina gaped in stunned disbelief as it loomed. In just a matter of a heartbeat, the three claws extended, the mouth yawning as the mandibles clicked together and parted.

Huge! So . . . huge!

It filled her vision.

Jaim was screaming, crying out, “No! God’s sake, no!”

With a resounding crack it hit the transparency. Varina was slammed forward against her seat restraints. Her arms, head, and feet whipped forward and back. Pain shot along her nerves, the world blurring. She barely heard herself scream. Everything loose was bouncing around the cabin, coffee cups, the logbook, her personal pad, Jaim’s graphite-fiber bag, the lunch tray as it lost its cover and flung food across the glass and soaked her short hair.

The whine of the pumps, the hiss of air flooding the ballast tanks, along with the bang and clatter of cascading cans and personal items, mingled with an intense warbling that rose into a pulsating, almost painful squeal. The creature shook the sub as it uttered a series of crescendos and vented its rage.

Clearing her vision, Varina wiped at the soup trickling down her face, felt her heart battering against her sternum. The three mandibles were sliding across the glass less than an arm’s length from her face. Wicked things, each reminded her of a brown-freckled scythe a half meter in length. They parted, widened to encompass the submarine’s nose, and slid back together as they slipped across the glass.

“Michaela? Do you copy us? Michaela. Hello?”

Nothing.

“Kevina? Anyone in the Pod. Hello? Do you copy?”

More silence. Not even a crackle on the com. She glanced at the readout. Dead.

“Oh, God . . . Oh, God . . .” Jaim kept whimpering from the driver’s seat.

Varina felt, as well as heard, metal buckle and snap, the submarine shaking as something outside collapsed under the power of the claws. She whimpered. Grasped the chair arms in a death grip, as the sub lurched sideways, spilling the loose items along the transparency’s concave surface.

Jaim’s terror-laced scream matched Varina’s own.

One of the forward-facing lights screeched as it was slammed against the sub’s hull to shine in from the right side of the transparency. It served to better illuminate those three terrible speckled mandibles. In the light, Varina could see additional knife-shaped denticles that sliced back and forth like self-honing shears behind the scythe-like mandibles.

“We’re gonna die . . . We’re gonna die . . .” Jaim kept sobbing.

“No!” Varina screamed. “We’ve blown the ballast! Hear it? We’re going to pop up to the surface. Any second, now, babe. We’re gonna pop like a breaching whale.”