“Mac, get us—”
Its hide wasn't grey or white. It was a mottled, metallic black, veined with faint, bioluminescent purple lines that pulsed like a heartbeat. Its eyes were not the dead, black marbles of a shark. They were intelligent. Calculating. And scarred—not from combat, but from surgery. Neat, healed incisions ran along its snout and flank.
A pattern.
MEG2 had just begun.
Jonas Taylor knew the creak of the pressure hull, the hiss of the thermal vents, and the low, hunting thrum of a sixty-foot Megalodon. But this was different. A sharp, rhythmic tick-tick-tick , like a Geiger counter having a seizure. “Mac, get us—” Its hide wasn't grey or white
“They’re not hunting us,” Jonas said, his hands gripping the controls. “They’re arresting us.”
The female Megalodon pressed her scarred snout against the sub’s viewing port. Her purple veins flared bright. Jonas could have sworn she smiled. They were intelligent
Then the second one appeared. The female. She was larger. And on her dorsal fin, fused to the cartilage, was a piece of twisted, heat-corroded metal. The serial number was still legible: MANA-ONE-DS-01 .
A shadow eclipsed the sub. Not from below. From behind . Something the sonar had refused to see because it was made of the same density as the rock wall. Neat, healed incisions ran along its snout and flank
But it wasn’t for the crew of the Neptune’s Grave .
The sub drifted into the darkness of the fissure. Inside, the walls were not rock. They were bone. The remains of a dozen other Megalodons, arranged in a spiral pattern, their skeletons interwoven with scavenged submarine wreckage and human diving equipment. A throne of vengeance.