The heart of the mountain was a place of quiet, controlled tension. In the dim, blue glow of the Global Command Center, hundreds of men and women monitored the silent dance of satellites and aircraft, their faces illuminated by screens displaying the heartbeat of a world on high alert.
Airman First Class O'Malley was the first to see it. His job was to monitor deep-sea acoustic sensors, a mind-numbingly dull task of filtering out whale songs and seismic rumbles. But this was different. A new signature had appeared off the coast of Baja California. It wasn't a submarine; the acoustic profile was biological. But its scale... the scale was impossible. It was a sound with mass, a rumble so profound it felt like the planet itself was groaning in its sleep.
"Sir," he said, his voice tight, "you need to see this."
Within minutes, the quiet tension of the command center had curdled into sharp, anxious alarm. Satellites were redirected, their high-resolution cameras peering into the Pacific. The first images that came back were met with a stunned, disbelieving silence.
It was a whale, but it was to a blue whale what a mountain is to a stone. It was over three hundred meters long, a living island of blubbery, barnacle-encrusted flesh. Its hide was a patchwork of scarred, dark grey plates, and a row of bioluminescent sacs pulsed with a sickly, blue-green light along its colossal flank. It moved with an unnatural speed, its immense tail propelling it through the water like a biological torpedo. It was the first confirmed B-Class Aberration.
And it was pushing a wall of water ahead of it.
The news broke across the world like a tidal wave of its own. On screens from Tokyo to Berlin, frantic reporters showed the satellite tracking data. Buoys in the Pacific were screaming, registering a displacement wave of unprecedented scale. A non-survivable tsunami was racing towards the North American west coast.
Panic, a beast that had been sleeping uneasily for weeks, awoke with a roar. The freeways out of Los Angeles became parking lots of terror. Sirens wailed a constant, mournful dirge as the city tried to flee from the ocean itself.
USS Ronald Reagan, Carrier Strike Group 5
Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, the mood was tense, but confident. Rear Admiral Marcus Cole stood on the bridge, his jaw set, his eyes fixed on the tactical display. "It's a big fish, people," he said, his voice a low, steady growl that cut through the hum of the ship. "And we're the biggest fishermen on the planet. Launch the fighters. I want torpedoes in the water in five minutes. Let's show this thing what happens when it swims in our pond."
The response was a textbook display of overwhelming naval power. F/A-18s screamed off the flight deck, their afterburners tearing holes in the sky. Submarines lurking in the deep launched a spread of heavy-duty torpedoes. The first missiles struck the creature's flank, exploding in brilliant flashes of orange and white.
They might as well have been firecrackers. The explosions barely seemed to scratch the creature's armored hide.
The Deep Sea Giant Whale did not even seem to register the attack. It simply continued its relentless advance. Then, as the next wave of jets swooped in for a strafing run, the bioluminescent sacs along its body began to pulse faster, the blue-green light becoming an intense, blinding strobe.
It released a sound.
It was not a sound that could be heard with the ears. It was a physical force, a focused, high-frequency ultrasonic wave that hit the strike group like a hammer blow. On the bridge of the Reagan, the reinforced windows didn't just crack; they exploded inward in a shower of crystalline dust. Every screen on the bridge shattered. Admiral Cole screamed, clutching his head as blood streamed from his ears and nose, every vessel in his brain feeling like it was about to burst.
Across the fleet, it was the same story. Metal shrieked, stressed to its breaking point. Sailors collapsed, their internal organs turned to pulp by the sheer vibratory force. The torpedoes, still in the water, were detonated prematurely by the sonic wave. The jets, caught in the blast, were shaken apart in mid-air, their engines failing as their delicate electronics were fried.
Back in Cheyenne Mountain, they watched in horror as the IFF tags of Carrier Strike Group 5, the most powerful naval force in the world, winked out one by one, like candles being snuffed in a hurricane. The last transmission from the Reagan was a single, garbled, inhuman scream.
The massive biological signature on the screen did not slow. It did not deviate. Its path was set, its destination clear. The last line of defense was gone. The whale was coming for Los Angeles.