Kraken

The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Except that, today, there weren't any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the international oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere. The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you.

Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing. This was unreal. There ought to be something.

The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.

"Honorable sir?" he said.

"What is it?" said the captain testily.

"We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred
meters."

"What of it?"

"I'm reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling."

"That is foolish. There is no such depth."

The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting-edge technology, and thumped it.

The navigator gave a nervous smile.

"Ah, sir," he said, "it is shallower already."

Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, as Aziraphale and Tennyson both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea/The kraken sleepeth. And now it was waking up. Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.

"See," said the navigator. "Three thousand meters already."

The kraken doesn't have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.

"Er," said the navigator, "one thousand meters?"

The kraken is not amused.

"Five hundred meters?”

The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.

"A hundred meters?"

There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.

And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.

***

Good Omens - Saturday