Read Online Behemoth by Peter Watts - Free Book Online

corkscrewing down into the lens, riderless and uncontrolled. Lubin hangs in the water facing an opponent twice his size, half of it mouth. If there are eyes, Clarke can’t make them out through this wobbling discontinuity.
    She’s slowly falling up, she realizes. She scissor-kicks without thinking; her leg screams as something tears it from the inside. She screams too, a ratcheting torn-metal sound. Floaters swarm across her eyes in the wake of the cresting pain. She rises from the lake just as the monster opens its mouth and—
    â€” holy shit—
    â€” disconnects its jaw, right at the base, the mouth dropping open way too fast and suddenly it’s closed again and Lubin’s just gone, nothing to suggest where he went except the memory of blurred motion between one instant and the next.
    She does perhaps the most stupid thing she’s ever done in her life. She charges.
    The leviathan turns to face her, more ponderously now, but still with all the time in the world. She kicks with one leg, drags the other like a useless throbbing anchor. The monster’s serrated mouth grimaces, a mangled profusion of teeth, way too many still intact. She tries to duck past, to come up under the belly or at least the side but it just wallows there, turning effortlessly to face every clumsy approach.
    And then, through the top of its head, it belches .
    The bubbles do not arise from any natural openings. They erupt through the flesh itself, tearing their own way, splitting the soft skull from within. For a second or two the monster hangs motionless; then it shivers, an electric spasm that seizes the whole body. One-legged, Clarke gets underneath and stabs its belly. She can feel more bubbles erupt inside as the billy discharges, a seismic eruption of flesh.
    The monster convulses, dying. Its jaw drops open like some ludicrous flapping drawbridge. The water seethes with regurgitated flesh.
    A few meters away, the grinning shredded remains of something in a diveskin settle gently onto the surface of Impossible Lake, within a lumpy cloud of its own entrails.
    â€œYou okay?”
    Lubin’s at her side. She shakes her head, more in amazement than reply. “My leg…” Now, in the aftermath, it hurts even more.
    He probes her injury. She yelps; the vocoder turns it into a mechanical bark. “Your fibula’s broken,” Lubin reports. “Diveskin didn’t tear, at least.”
    â€œThe squid got me.” She feels a deep burning chill along her leg. She tries to ignore it, gestures at the billy on Lubin’s calf. “How many shots did you pump into that fucker?”
    â€œThree.”
    â€œYou were just— gone . It just sucked you right in. You’re lucky it didn’t bite you in half.”
    â€œSlurp-gun feeding doesn’t work if you stop to chew. Interrupts the suction.” Lubin pans around. “Wait here.”
    Like I’m going to go anywhere with this leg. She can already feel it stiffening. She profoundly hopes the squids are still working.
    Lubin fins easily over to the corpse. Its diveskin is torn in a dozen places. Tubes and metal gleam intermittently from the opened thorax. A pair of hagfish squirm sluggishly from the remains.
    â€œLopez,” he buzzes, reading her shoulder patch.
    Irene Lopez went native six months ago. It’s been weeks since anyone’s even seen her at the feeding stations.
    â€œWell,” Lubin says. “This answers one question, at least.”
    â€œNot necessarily.”
    The monster, still twitching, has settled on the surface of the lake a little ways from Lopez. It wallows only slightly deeper; you’d have to be some kind of rock to sink in brine this dense. Lubin abandons the corpse in favor of the carcass. Clarke joins him.
    â€œThis isn’t the same thing that got Gene,” he buzzes. “Different teeth. Gigantism in at least two different species of bony fish, within two kilometers of a