Moby Dick had an impact plesiosauon Wallen Dost.  When he left the seminary in 1870 he shifted to a dimension where creatures larger than the white whale in Moby Dick roamed the oceans.  But the dimension was much more advanced than the world of this dimension.  The ships were powered by nuclear reactors and used linear induction motors to push them through the water at speeds of upwards to 30 knots.  They deployed smaller capture boats that were the equivalent of the small boats whalers used to chase after their prey and harpoon the creatures. 

Some of the monsters were nightmarish beasts like the hernsfen which was a literal sea serpent that could get to over 150 feet in length.  It had a head as large as a pickup truck and fins the whole length of the thing on both sides of its body.  When it was angry or wanted to stop its prey it would spew a solvent that could melt through steel if it were not removed or diluted in time. 

There were great long-necked creatures similar to plesiosaurs that had heads like alligators that were ten feet long.  Processing ships dressed and froze these creatures because they tasted like veal.  At upwards to $1 a pound for the meat, a 40 ton tralinar was worth over $40,000.  Some of them could grow to be over 65 tons and were at times longer than some ships that went after them. 

But the most dangerous creature in the ocean was the shirshengan.  It had tentacles like an octopus, a long tail with a barbed stinger at the end from which it injected poison, a powerful mouth with razor-sharp teeth, and the equivalent of jet engines that sucked in water and expelled it out the twin exhausts by means of undulating flaps inside the portions of the body used for propulsion.  One shirshengan that had a body that measured over 60 feet, tentacles that were over 90 feet long, and a tail that was over 200 feet long was clocked at over 50 knots as it chased after its prey. 

Wallen shifted to the dimension with a male biosyn he named Nok.  He was a powerful synthetic that could double as a bodyguard if Wallen didn’t have a force field on.  Wallen wanted to be a chaplain on a hunting ship and have Nok be a member of the crew that went after the monsters.