Suddenly, a two-hundred-fifty-pound body shot out of the sea, flapping rapidly, clumsily, rising diagonally and throwing torrents of cold water everywhere. Then, feeling a gust of wind, the creature angled its horned head parallel to the ocean and, like a seagull, surged into a wind-assisted glide. It coasted for nearly fifty yards, gradually dipping lower, then nosed horns first into a large breaking wave. Then another body splashed out. Then another. Then fifty more. Within moments, thousands of juveniles were shooting out. Fully exposed, they revealed how much they’d grown, larger animals now, all with fierce builds made of solid muscle.
It was an explosion of activity, each creature doing its best to fly. Many failed, but others succeeded. With ferocious, awkward flapping, several hundred gradually climbed to heights of nearly two hundred feet before coasting back down. Others focused less on distance and more on learning a specific skilclass="underline" the first thrust from the water, the first flapping motion once they emerged. Some tried to fly with the wind. Others against it. Others waited until there was no wind at all. Some tried to turn in the air. Others simply flew straight. A few tried nose-diving. Each tried something different. Like a flock of newborn birds, they continued to experiment.
A THIRD of a mile below the surface, the adults lay at the bottom, unseen. There were fewer of them now. Within just the past twenty-four hours, another 1,500 had died. Some from starvation. Others from a virus.
Two had died for another reason entirely. A shark had killed them. A dozen of the creatures had drawn the animal—a nine-hundred-pound hammerhead—into their darkened lair and attacked it. The shark had thrashed violently, biting anything and everything, and gashed two of them. Both rays eventually bled to death, but not until long after the shark itself had been ripped to shreds and eaten alive.
These predators had devoured tens of millions of sharks during their lifetimes. They’d tasted every type imaginable: hammerheads, requiems, carpets, goblins, great whites, and so many more. Each shark species has its own hunting style, and these creatures knew every one.
Some sharks rely strictly on sound or vibrations to hunt. Others rely largely on sight. Some hunt by locating electromagnetic pulses. Some by smell. Some use every one of those senses and more to varying degrees.
Some sharks approach prey quickly. Others are slower and circle around, sometimes for hours.
Some sharks are very finicky eaters and have sensitive noses. Others can’t smell at all and will eat anything.
Some sharks are small, not weighing more than twenty pounds. Others are huge, weighing three tons.
The sharks vary greatly, but they share one defining characteristic. They are stupid. They always come when they sense prey. This fatal flaw has caused a number of their species to be hunted to extinction. Like terramouth and megalodon. Man will never find either again because they no longer exist. They’ve been hunted far too efficiently.
These predators still bait sharks, just as they always have.
One was doing it at the moment.
Unseen in the blackened waters, it floundered frantically twenty feet above the ocean floor, contorting and twisting in every direction. The animal appeared to be distressed and out of control. It was anything but. Every one of its movements had been precisely choreographed, designed to generate vibrations that varied in frequency from ten to eight hundred hertz. The creature didn’t understand the concept of frequency bandwidths, per se, but what it did understand was that sharks use their senses to locate wounded fish; and that wounded fish move in a certain way and at a certain frequency. When that movement and its resulting frequency are duplicated precisely, the sharks always come. They swim right in, hungry and ready to eat their prey. Only when it’s too late do they discover who the prey really is.
The creature and more than one hundred others like it continued to shake. With vast numbers of other hungry animals lying in wait, the hope was to attract an entire shark school, perhaps numbering in the thousands. Nothing came. Not a school, not a family, not even a lone rogue. The thrashing ray was exhausted. It had been writhing for more than six hours. The sharks had been coming less and less often in recent months, and now they weren’t coming at all.
Normally, a shark swimming in the illuminated waters above would detect a large, apparently wounded fish thrashing in the depths. With short, rapid sweeps of its big tail, the shark would dive down to find it. As it descended into the darkened waters, however, its vision would disappear and it would sense several peculiarities. The most prominent was that there’d be no blood. But even without blood, the vibrations would continue, and the tiny-brained hunter would blindly swim closer.
The attack would come in one of two ways.
Sometimes, the shark would realize something was wrong when it was only ten feet away. Suddenly the wounded animal would be perfectly healthy—and swimming right for the shark. The shark wouldn’t see it in the darkness, but it would feel its watery wake from its massive pumping wings. Unable to slow down—sharks possess no form of braking mechanism—the shark’s momentum would carry it right into the animal, which would simply open its massive dagger-filled mouth and bite down. The bite, which was more powerful than the crushing mechanisms of most garbage trucks, would sever the entire upper third of the shark’s body. Then the others would join in.
More commonly, the predator pretending to be wounded would continue its act until the last possible moment. Sometimes, it would even allow the shark to bite it. The ray knew from experience that the shark’s teeth wouldn’t pierce its tough armorlike skin, at least not with a single nip. And a single nip would be all it would get. By then, the other creatures the shark had just swum right over would have risen from the bottom. If the shark had been paying attention, it would have known they were coming for it. But the shark never paid attention. Six or more would surround it and tear away pieces of its body, eating it alive. The bloody feast would finish in seconds.
But there were no feasts now. The sharks weren’t coming. Nothing was.
The writhing predator froze and floated down, joining the others. They were all still hungry. Unlike the growing juveniles, these animals had spent their entire lives learning how to hunt a certain way, in a certain place. But the juveniles were different. They weren’t learning how to bait sharks, read ocean currents, and hide in the depths. They were learning entirely different skills in another place.
No longer could these elder animals stop them by killing them. The younger rays regularly escaped their attacks simply by swimming into the higher waters—and staying there. The juveniles spent very little time in the depths anymore. Even at the moment, they were at the surface, more than a third of a mile away. They were too far to be seen, too far to be heard, but the animals here were watching them.
They were watching something else, too. They’d stopped their migration because of it. Food was coming. The juveniles didn’t know it yet, but that would soon change. The adults were incapable of catching what was coming; they were too large, too slow moving, and too far away. But the juveniles were none of those things. Perhaps they’d find a way to eat.
THE SMALLER rays continued shooting out of the sea, zooming everywhere. Then one of them jerked its horned head to the north. Suddenly detecting what the adults had just sensed, it pulled its wings in tight, dove back into the sea, and didn’t return. Instantaneously, the others did the same. In less than a second, the entire ocean plane was deserted.
They hung listlessly below the surface, every sensory organ tuning in. They’d just picked up a group of fifty animals, still a great distance away but swimming in their direction.