Cate enlarged the image further, and then sat back. “Oh no, no, no.” Her stomach turned. Even though the thing was little more than a pipe of gray meat, the shape of the head, the heavy armor plating and mechanized looking jaws were unmistakable – after all, she’d seen one up close and personal.

Impossible. It couldn’t possibly be that much of a coincidence. Could it?

She wished Greg were here, her ever-present colleague, friend and scientific sounding board. She folded her arms, her mind working. She should take a look at it, up close, just to satisfy her curiosity. She distantly remembered an earthquake followed by a tsunami a few months back in the northern hemisphere. She thought nothing of it at the time, but now wondered, was there a relationship?

Time to talk to the experts. But, let your fingers do the walking. She entered her browser and typed in a request for a contact number for a west coast earthquake center. The closest link returned was a seismic activity center in Colorado. She punched in the number, and let her Voice-over-Internet connect her.

“National Seismic Activity Information Center, Colorado; Frank Hennie speaking.”

The voice was laid back, but she smiled at her luck. In their website’s Who’s Who section, Frank was one of their chief scientists.

“Hi there Dr Hennie, it’s Professor Cate Granger of Stanford University calling. How are you today?”

“I’m okay. What can I do for you?”

Cate bristled; the man sounded like he had zero enthusiasm for speaking to the public. She decided to be brief and cut to the chase.

“Dr Hennie, I’m doing some research down here and wondered about a recent seismic event I believe occurred in or around the Bering Sea a few months ago. Did you guys have any more information you can share with me?”

“Not really.” There was a long sigh.

“Anything, please.” Cate ground her teeth.

Next came a pause, a grunt, and then the sound of some liquid being sipped. “It was a bit of an anomaly. Out of nowhere we got an ellipse-pattern of a seismic shock moving out from an epicenter that was some place in the middle of the Bering Sea.” Another sip. “There’s an area up there called the Denali Fault; it’s a major intracontinental strike-slip fault in western North America, extending from northwestern British Columbia, Canada, to the central region of Alaska. It’s a big one, and prone to shifting. But where this new movement came from was nowhere near that. It was weird.”

Cate smiled; Frank seemed to be warming as he remembered the scientific data. “Weird? I like weird. Tell me more.”