“We’re close to the extraction point, only something’s between us and the northern basin. Whatever they are, there seems to be a lot of them.”

“To hell with ’em. Just pound the horn and scare ’em outta the way.”

Before he could switch our sonar from PASSIVE to ACTIVE, I overrode his console. “Stay quiet. It could be another whale.”

In fact, there were dozens of them, and they were bobbing vertically in the water, taking long, rhythmic breaths as they slept. The adult sperm whales were all female, their hides lead-gray or black except for an albino pigment that bleached their bellies and terrifying lower jaws white. The borders where dark met light were patterned differently, serving to distinguish one Livyatan melvillei from the next.

The young bobbed next to their mothers, many suckling in their sleep.

Using only my night-vision glasses, I maneuvered between these living logs of blubber at a crawl. The females were about forty feet long, their enormous heads comprising a third of their anatomy and half their mass. Husking breaths echoed in my headphones, the sounds coming from blowholes positioned at the very upper left corner on the top of their skulls. The eyes were elliptical and remained closed, situated in the middle of that tremendous head, followed by the ear hole and a relatively small swim flipper. A dorsal hump separated the box-shaped upper torso from the powerful tail, the flukes divided by a median notch.

We passed close enough to one female to glimpse deep prune-like wrinkles running down her dark back.

The calves were longer than our sub, weighed over a ton, and were mostly albino.

It took more than fifteen minutes to pass through the forest of sleeping whales. Finally, we were through, moving past the plateau’s cliff face into open water.

“This is Schager. Well done. You’ve entered the northern basin. Come to course zero-three-seven. The extraction zone is less than six kilometers away.”

I kept the Barracuda ninety feet below the surface, maintaining our northeasterly heading at twenty knots. I was beyond tired and kept nodding off every few seconds, my drooping head snapping me awake.

“Wallace, it’s Schager. There’s two things you need to know. Dr. Liao has passed away—”

“Huh?”

“—and your sonar just detected a very large blip.”

I glanced behind my seat at Ming, then back at my sonar monitor. The blip was shadowing us, matching our course and speed as it moved along the bottom, 1,266 feet below the surface.

It was another Livyatan melvillei. A bull, most likely the elder male. Sonar estimated his length at a staggering ninety-three feet, his girth at forty to fifty tons.

“Schager, how close are we to the extraction point?”