After falling through the abyss for a little over an hour, they passed through a jellyfish bloom. Wavering tentacles sprouted from translucent orbs, twinkling with phosphorescent reds, yellows and greens, which gleamed like oily rainbows under the submantle’s lights. Disturbed by the wake of the descending craft, the jellies contorted into mushrooms that pulsed, squirting them incrementally in fragmented directions.
“Creepy and beautiful,” Fang said. “That’s the most alien thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Wait until you get to Jurassic Earth,” Aroon said. “The things out there will drop your jaw so low it’ll hit your cup of joe. That’s why I signed up to go back, right Fox?”
“It’s something else,” Fox agreed. “You know they were gonna charge over a hundred mil a ticket for the first tourists? You’d have to have insane money to do this. And we get to go for free. Going back a second time’s like winning the lottery twice. I’m not bragging, but man, seriously, you guys don’t even know. You are in for something else.”
“And this time we also get to ride a submantle,” Aroon said. “Billion dollar brothers, baby!”
“Too true, Roo. I’m freeeeee, free fallin’ yeah,” Fox began, singing Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’.
Molo, Schweighofer, Scarlet and Hadley joined in as they dropped into the blue darkness, spirits soaring and bonds tight as iron fists.
A short while later, with the depth gauge reading one thousand three hundred and forty-two meters, a faint orange glow appeared through the boiling water ahead, which snaked upwards in ribbons like a waterfall flowing in reverse. Robo Yamamoto busied across the controls, slowing the Yōgan Koumori, which came to hover off the shoulder of a lava lake belching clouds of super-hot gaseous emissions. Across the lake, pustules of lava ballooned. They darkened and cracked as they cooled, and folded back into the churning lifeblood leaking from the Earth’s pumping heart.
The Yōgan Koumori reversed for a couple of hundred meters and Robo Yamamoto brought them to a full stop, the hum of the twin Vulcan drives reducing to a whisper.
“That’s our gateway, the West Mata vent,” the robot announced. “In order to withstand the pressure inside the planet we need to flood the cabin. The valves at the backs of your helmets are hooked to O2, so don’t panic. The pressure in your ears is going to rise, so swallow and yawn to equalize, just like on a plane. Here we go.”
Reece squirmed as water seeped through the floor at his feet. It rose quickly past his ankles and then his waist, oozing oily blackness. He pushed his head back and gasped as water flooded past his helmet, pressure squeezing into his ears. He swallowed and tried to yawn, but nothing happened. He could hear a warped murmur which suddenly popped into a barrage of sound.
“Under de sea, under de sea,” Molotov was singing whilst laughing.
“Darling its better,” Schweighofer replied in song, “down where it’s wetter, take it from me.”
“Get a room, guys,” Fang said. “It’s bad enough listening to you two when I can get away.”
“What?” Schweighofer defended. “That’s the song, the one from Disney’s the Little Mermaid.”
“And there goes my childhood,” Fang replied. “The death of innocence.”
“Cut the chatter, people,” Commander Blake said as the Yōgan Koumori’s engines kicked in and she closed on the West Mata vent. “Save your energy. You’re gonna need it.”
Reece’s body weight pressed against his harness as the Yōgan Koumori tipped forwards and delved into the lava cauldron.
“Going down!” Molotov hollered. “All aboard for a rollercoaster ride into Hell!”
The screen flashed yellow and red as they sped through the vent whose jagged rocky throat glowed white-hot. The engine note swelled a couple of octaves as Robo Yamamoto engaged the might of the Vulcan thrusters.
“Do we really need to go so fast?” Hadley called in a strained voice.
“There could be sensors in the vent,” the robot replied. “If we go at speed they won’t be able to distinguish us from molten rock. We haven’t even hit one-quarter speed yet, but don’t worry, there’s only another twenty-nine miles to go. Hold tight, things are about to start getting exciting.”
Reece watched in amazement as Robo Yamamoto scuttled across the controls, far quicker than a human could have, manipulating dials and controls as the walls of the West Mata vent zipped by. The hull clunked as they hit patches of what the robot called triple-point lava. When the craft was at full speed, twisting and turning, shaking violently, pressing Reece into his seat one moment then flinging him against his harnesses the next, he felt like he was looking out the windows of a spacecraft corkscrewing out of control at light speed, star-trails curling by.
The ride became so intense all Reece could do was close his eyes, grit his teeth and hold onto his harness for all he was worth. He thought he heard someone retching.
“Been… sick,” Hadley moaned, his voice shuddering with the Yōgan Koumori.
“Try to let it sink past your neck,” Robo Yamamoto replied. “It’s almost over. We’re almost there.”
“It’s pooled in my helmet. It’s right in front of my face. Ach… it smells… it’s gonna make me sick again.”
“Try to tilt your head. The lining of your suit will absorb and diffuse the smell,” the robot replied. “It’s designed to neutralize sweat odours, effluents and all sorts. Give it five minutes, hold on, we’re almost in.”
“Effluent? I am holding on, dammit. The squeezing from all the holding on is what made me sick. If I clench any tighter it’ll come out of the other end too…”
“That’ll be the effluent,” someone joked, their voice shaking too violently to identify.
“Two minutes,” the robot said.
“So quick, already nearly over?” Molotov yelled. “Let’s go back up and go again.”
“Go to Hell,” Hadley groaned.
“That’s the plan,” Molotov replied.
Just as Reece’s stomach was turning over so madly he was convinced he was going to trumpet an encore to Hadley, the bows lifted and the Yōgan Koumori’s engines throttled back. He kept his eyes closed and breathed slow steady breaths. The sounds of everyone doing the same crackled through the speakers in his helmet, mixed with panting groans.
“What a ride!” Molotov cried. “Faster than a speeding comet. Get some.”
“Hadley’s vomit more like,” Fang said, panting, causing peals of breathless laughter.
“Shut up with the V word,” Hadley moaned. “It still smells in here. You don’t know. It’s not funny.”
“It is,” Fox said, chuckling, “very funny. Just not for you.”
When Reece’s stomach settled and the spinning sensation subsided, he looked up at the screen spanning the front of the craft, which yielded a vision across a hell-scape drenched in deep shades of red, yellow and orange, highlighted by the white hot outline of an upturned mountain range that seemed to be sinking its teeth into the lava ocean. It felt like the Yōgan Koumori was hovering before the jaws of Satan himself, who was rising from Acheron, the river of pain that flowed through the underworld.
“That’s the worst part over,” Robo Yamamoto said. “Sorry if I pushed too hard. It’s easy to forget the constraints of biological bodies.”
“Don’t apologize,” Commander Blake said. “You got us in in one piece, quick and painful. Squad, the next bit’s a sit and wait job. Sixteen hours of cruising below the detection depth of patrolling submantles. I advise you get some shuteye.”
“Any chance of some inflight entertainment?” Schweighofer asked. “I could go for some Avengers or something like, maybe the new Avatar if we have it?”
“The only entertainment you’ll be getting is the image of my foot up your ass when we reach our destination if you don’t quiet down and maximize this rest period.”
“Is that a promise, sir?”
“Don’t test me Schweighofer, you will not enjoy the results.”
Diamond Ocea
n
W ith the lulling hum of the Vulcan drives and turbulence being much less than he’d anticipated, Reece was surprised at how comfortable their journey towards the center of the Earth felt. The engines propelled the Yōgan Koumori at a twenty degree down bubble for the first hour, until they reached a depth of four hundred miles below the Earth’s crust. There, they transitioned from the upper mantle into a planet wide liquid ocean, which Robo Yamamoto explained contained three times the volume of water on the surface, more than all the oceans combined.
During their descent the extreme pressure required the optic arrays protruding from the outer hull to be withdrawn for protection. That’s when the dense matter sonar kicked in, which pinged rhythmically. The viewscreen displayed a surreal purple and violet expanse in which floating black chunks highlighted as each ping sent out a racing wall of sound. The scene reset with each subsequent ping, revealing new chunks, tumbling like asteroids in an ongoing stop-motion picture.
“Are those… diamonds, huge diamonds?” Scarlet asked.
“Ringwoodite diamonds,” Robo Yamamoto replied. “Bigger than a house those ones, some the size of the Ebisu according to these readings. They’re the only things down here too tough to melt.”
“How much would something like that cost?” Scarlet said. “Oh, my… I feel all funny.”
“Hard to say. Only a handful of ultradeep ringwoodite diamonds have ever been discovered. The ones that have been found are only a few millimeters wide with poor clarity. If the larger ones out there are clear, they could be worth trillions. Saying that, it would only take one diamond that big to crash global diamond markets. The reason sand is cheap is because there’s lots of it. There’s a planet out there somewhere where sand is so rare a handful could set you up for life. On that planet, their beaches are made of diamonds and lovers exchange charcoal rings bejewelled with grains of sand.”
“Stupid aliens,” Fang scoffed.
“A beach with diamond sand, now that’s my idea of a vacation,” Scarlet said. “Why don’t we come down here and grab one? We could chip bits off, sell it bit by bit, not flood the markets all at once. I mean, let’s come down here one day and get one, like seriously, let’s do it.”
“After the way my business is going that might not be such a bad idea. Yamamoto Industries stock lost almost a hundred billion in value in the last week alone. Honestly, I had no idea diamonds this big were down here, or that there would be so many. This is the first submantle Yamamoto Industries has built. It was only completed a few months ago. Much of what we’re seeing is completely new to science. We’re all pioneers together, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.”
“Wait, are you saying you haven’t tested this thing?” Razak said, aghast.
“She’s working as we knew she would, according to the specs and simulations we ran,” the robot reassured. “Long range sensors have already confirmed we’ve passed under and evaded two submantles. Nothing else can get close to this depth. We’re a ghost, quite safe.”
“Why’d he have to say ghost?” Hadley moaned. “Man, you never say ghost on a mission.”
“Don’t sweat it, Hadders,” Fox said. “It’s all cool. We’re in an untested craft in an unexplored ocean, four hundred miles below the planet’s surface, being piloted by an experimental robot that thinks it’s human. That’s what makes it so fun. You can’t feel that, that buzz, the sense it could go wrong any moment?”
“I assure you,” Robo Yamamoto replied with a note of resentment, “I have access to every piece of digital information in existence, including from the most secure, encrypted places. The biggest secrets. I’ve built the Yōgan Koumori to specs beyond anything created or imagined, based on rigorous simulations. Whilst I’m piloting, I’m running thousands of simulations a second, steering us away from problems before the human brain would even detect an inkling of threat. You know why you haven’t felt turbulence? It’s because I’m steering us around convection currents and jet streams. There is no vehicle and no pilot more equipped for the task.”
“I was just… I didn’t mean to…”
“I may have an artificial exoskeleton, but I am still human, more than just a robot. This suit merely expands my abilities, just like your survival suit expands yours.”
“Awkward,” Fang said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. “Don’t push his buttons like that, Fox. Give him a break. It can’t be easy piloting this thing, it’s a hard drive.”
Groans and chuckles rippled through the squad and even the robot’s LED lights phased, like it was chuckling.
“That’s the worst,” Schweighofer said. “A hard drive… jeeesh. You’ll always be the queen of bad jokes, Fang.”
“Very good, Fang, very funny,” Commander Blake said, almost sounding amused. “Now let’s get some shut-eye. Nothing interesting’s gonna happen for the next ten hours at least. I want you fresh when our boots hit the ground. Get some sleep. Consider that an order.”
Eventually, tired of counting diamonds drift by like sheep in an abstract realm, with Robo Yamamoto shepherding them through the ocean underworld, Reece dozed off. He dreamed of diamond beaches, of swimming in tropical lagoons beside Becca under alien skies. The turquoise water was warm and Becca was smiling. The dream morphed, the way dreams do, and they were suddenly swimming through fingers of starlight, above mercury seas.
Then they were at the Jura base eating breakfast in the dining hall, then suddenly watching volcanoes erupt from the cooksite, then on a balcony overlooking the lights of Vegas. In each location, despite all that was amazing around them, Reece found himself only focussed on Becca, her smile, her warmth, her conversation. He couldn’t get over how lucky it was, that out of all the people on Earth, she’d chosen to look upon him with those loving eyes.
He woke momentarily when Molotov snorted a particularly loud, throaty snore, but quickly dissolved back into the dream world.
This time the dreams were drenched in tooth-grinding anxiety. He was in the same locations, but couldn’t find Becca. Either that or she was standing on a horizon he couldn’t reach, disappearing into a crowd or being whisked away by invisible forces. Then he was in the control tower at the Jura base, reliving the moment the Jurassic Earth experiment had turned into the nightmare that had stolen the love of his life.
“We… we crashed, Reece,” Becca said, breathing heavily over the intercom, her voice thick with horror.
“YOU WHAT!”
“It was a freak accident. A plesiosaur attacked us. I’ve restored power and think I can get us back to land. We’re badly damaged, but can make landfall on the east coast, in line with Shark Reef and viewing platform three. I can see it above the trees. No one’s hurt… yet…”
“Look… Look!” Someone was shouting.
“I see it,” a frantic voice replied.
Reece looked around the control tower and out across the Jurassic jungle. There was no danger outside as far as he could see. He leaned forwards and looked up, thinking maybe it was a pterosaur attack.
“What the hell is that?” Someone yelled.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like it’s coming to play.”
The voice sounded like… Schweighofer! Reece’s eyes flew open.
“Brace yourselves,” Robo Yamamoto shouted.
On the viewscreen, as the sonar sent ultraviolet pulses through the diamond studded ocean, Reece saw what he could only describe as a whale sized armadillo with insect legs and a stubby trunk. The abomination was homing in on them with alarming speed. With each new pulse of the sonar the creature was closer, its snout peeling wide, baring teeth that resembled drill heads. The thing was coming faster, becoming larger, primed for a fight. Robo Yamamoto rolled the Yōgan Koumori and pulled steeply upwards, the Vulcan drives squealing.
A crunching collision threw Reece forwards with such force his helmet disconnected from the valve in his headrest, which triggered his harness to disengage and spool into his seat. The cool oxygen brushing the back of
his neck cut dead. Floating from his seat, he clutched at the glass in front of his face, horrified at how quickly the air inside his suit was turning stale. Panicking and twisting, rising towards the ceiling, he saw someone else had become untethered.
“I’m loose,” Scarlet said in a matter of fact way. “There’s someone else free too. Pretty sure it’s Reece.”
“It’s me!” Reece said, his mind full of panic. “It is, it’s me!”
“Use your emergency air,” Robo Yamamoto called, slamming the craft sideways. “I’ll get us out of here.”
“Reece, reach down to your waist and grab one of your air canisters,” Scarlet said. “Press it to the valve by your collar bone, on your front. It’ll seal itself. Relax and do what I say and you’ll be fine.”
Reece manically hunted for the canisters, gasping, his oxygen depleting fast. He grappled one of the air tanks and tore it free. A second impact bounced him into the ceiling and he fumbled the miniature tank, which slipped through his fingers and sank beyond his reach. He could hear his wheezing breaths echoing inside the helmet, fear burning through his brain.
“I lost it!” He yelled back at Scarlet, fumbling for the second canister.
Someone spun him round. Scarlet pressed the glass of her helmet against his and smiled.
“Nice day for a swim,” she said. Reece felt her press something against his chest and sweet oxygen flooded into his suit. “That’s it, just breath slow and steady, just like normal. I got you.”
Jurassic Earth Trilogy Box Set Page 32
