The Black Knight

by Dean Crawford

  The vertiginous canyon opened up beneath him and Ethan felt its icy breath gust by as he gently descended with small jumps, letting out no more than two feet of cable at any one time. Beside him, watching closely, Saunders descended alongside him as above the SEAL team began preparing the scientists for their own descent while two more soldiers appeared over the edge and followed Ethan down.

  To Ethan’s surprise the air grew a little warmer as they descended, the endless winds at the surface falling silent. He realized that the noise of the journey out in the ski gliders and then the endless buffeting winds had been assaulting his ears for almost three hours. Now, the silence seemed deafening.

  The ice before him was perfectly blue, light from above illuminating its depths as though he were looking into a cliff forged from some exotic jewel. Light sparkled within, but below him jagged outcrops of ice as hard as granite threatened to slice his lines in two.

  ‘Stay sharp,’ Saunders said with a gruff voice that echoed alarmingly inside the crevasse. ‘Watch your route down.’

  Ethan obeyed as they descended further, and now the light began to fade as they rappelled down. Ethan reached up and carefully activated a small light attached to his jacket at the same time as Saunders, the brilliant LED glow causing the glacier walls to sparkle as though the ice were encrusted with a thousand diamond chips.

  Ethan looked up, saw more of the soldiers and scientists following them down from the bright sliver of sky above, and then the ragged outcrops of ice blocked his view and he followed Saunders down deeper into the glacier’s depths.

  They were more than eighty feet down when Ethan heard a soft hissing sound coming from far below, sounding closer than it was due to the confines of the crevasse.

  ‘Running water,’ Saunders figured as they descended. ‘Maybe the scientist was right.’

  Ethan peered down between his boots but saw nothing but inky blackness, the air frigid with cold.

  ‘Warm water my ass,’ he said finally. ‘There’s nothing warm down here.’

  They descended for another minute, two feet at a time, easing their way around dangerous chunks of ice until Ethan realized that the air had become saturated around them with a thin mist.

  ‘That’s steam,’ Saunders uttered in amazement.

  Ethan shook his head, unwilling to believe it, but then the lights from their jackets caught on something far below and he looked down to see the lights reflecting off of a rapidly shimmering surface.

  ‘Water,’ Saunders cautioned. ‘Slow your advance and we’ll try to find a place to set down. If you get caught up in that flow, you’re as good as dead.’

  Ethan nodded as below them the water channel slowly emerged from the absolute darkness. He realized quickly that the scientist had only meant that the water that had created the chasm was warmer than the ice itself, the water flowing through the channel likely sub-zero, remaining a fluid only because of the pressure of the glacier above preventing it from freezing.

  Saunders took the lead, guiding Ethan down, and then a moment later their boots thumped down onto a ledge some five feet above the water flowing by in a channel roughly ten feet wide. Ethan unclipped his harness from the rappel line and stepped clear with Saunders to provide space for the others coming down above them.

  ‘Wow,’ Ethan murmured as he looked around them, and his exclamation echoed into the distance in both directions.

  The water had carved a tunnel complex beneath the glacier that was probably twenty feet in width and height, with perfectly smooth walls of glistening ice as clear as glass. Ethan’s light shone onto the ice above his head and was both reflected by it and also penetrated at the same time, the beam a fuzzy ray piercing the ancient glacier.

  Below them, but above the flowing water, were a series of perfectly formed steps carved into the ice that led down to the water’s edge.

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ Saunders uttered.

  Ethan looked to his left and right, saw the steps follow the contours of the tunnel far into the darkness, and saw identical steps on the far side of the water.

  ‘You think that somebody hacked these steps out for access?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  Doctor Chandler gestured to the glacier walls around them, his voice echoing through the tunnels as he landed on the icy path beside them.

  ‘The water’s risen and fallen back in discrete stages recently,’ he observed, ‘and created these ledges one at a time as it eroded the walls of the cave. I suspect that this channel was the result of warm water finding a way towards the Antarctic Ocean via gravity, just as all rivers do, which means it likely follows the path of some ancient river that once flowed before the continent froze.’

  Ethan peered into the water’s depths.

  ‘But how would Black Knight have known to come down here? How could a signal have guided it? Antarctica has been covered by ice for millions of years.’

  Chandler smiled as though pitying Ethan’s naivety.

  ‘Humans have only existed for a few million years,’ he replied, ‘but throughout that history we have recorded technologies witnessed by people that exceed anything we have today. If Black Knight is thirteen thousand years old, it may be a more recent example of extra-terrestrial involvement in our evolution.’

  Ethan glanced at Saunders, who shrugged. Lieutenant Riggs landed on the ice with more scientists, soldiers and Hannah Ford alongside him, and unclipped himself from his harness. He immediately checked his radio, and Ethan saw him wince.

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said finally. ‘We’re out of radio contact while we’re down here.’

  ‘Then let’s move fast,’ Saunders suggested. ‘Sooner we’re done, the sooner we can get the hell out of here.’

  Saunders took the lead as he began following the cave upstream, still heading toward the signal’s source. Ethan turned to follow him with Hannah at his side as they walked carefully alongside the rushing water, their lights patches of illumination in an otherwise deeply black universe that picked out the glowing ice around them and gave the impression that the entire cave system was constantly moving, the ice bending and warping the lights as they walked.

  ‘How far did we descend?’ Hannah asked as they walked.

  ‘A hundred feet at least, maybe one fifty,’ Ethan replied. ‘I don’t want to think about how much ice there is above us right now.’

  ‘A lot,’ Chandler replied unhelpfully from behind them. ‘Millions of tons in fact, and glaciers are always moving so it’s generally unstable ice too.’

  ‘Thanks Doc,’ Hannah shot back, and then was cut off as she saw something poking out of the ice ahead. ‘What the hell is that?!’

  Ethan spotted a thick cylinder of some kind jutting out over the path ahead and saw Saunders slow as he illuminated it.

  ‘It’s a tree,’ Saunders said in disbelief.

  The group slowed as they looked at the thick tree trunk poking out of the ice before them, its surface black as night.

  ‘It’s a petrified tree,’ Chandler corrected them in delight as he edged forward and examined the surface of the object. ‘A fossil probably several million years old.’

  ‘What the hell is it doing down here?’ Ethan asked.

  Chandler looked over his shoulder at Ethan with a knowing smile.

  ‘One hundred million years ago, the Earth was in the grip of an extreme Greenhouse Effect. The polar ice caps had all but melted; in the south, rainforests inhabited by dinosaurs existed in their place. These Antarctic ecosystems were adapted to the long months of winter darkness that occur at the poles and were truly bizarre. Robert Falcon Scott, an Antarctic explorer, first discovered fossil plants on the Beardmore Glacier at eighty two degrees south, in 1912. Take a look up there, at that dark line up in the ice.’

  Ethan peered up into the glacier’s depths and saw a thin line running through the ice parallel to the horizon.

  ‘That’s a sedimentary layer,’ Chandler explained. ‘If we went up ther
e and excavated it we’d find soil, twigs and leaves embedded within it, all of them three to five millions of years old. The ice here is a relatively recent geological event – prior to this, Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.’

  ‘You’re telling me that Antarctica was like Brazil?’ Hannah uttered in amazement.

  ‘Scientists routinely excavate petrified logs from the depths of glaciers just like this one that must have come from extremely large trees. We’re even able to slice into the fossil trees and count the rings demarking their growth. The most amazing thing about that is the requirement for many of those species to have coped with the Antarctic winter, during which it’s dark for six months of the year.’

  ‘Trees grow through photosynthesis don’t they?’ Ethan said. ‘Wouldn’t they die?’

  ‘Experiments at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom showed that planets like the Ginkgo, an ancient species considered a “living fossil” by science, could survive in simulated Antarctic conditions quite well. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesise twenty four hours a day in the summer.’

  Saunders ducked under the tree and moved on, Ethan following as Hannah spoke to Chandler behind him.

  ‘So if Antarctica was a normal land mass before the ice, then wouldn’t it have had animals living on it?’

  ‘Many,’ Chandler confirmed, ‘and as we’re talking about a period from one hundred million years ago, then there would have been dinosaurs roaming this continent just like any other.’

  ‘Dinosaurs?’ Hannah echoed. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Chandler said. ‘Researchers at the Victoria Museum in Australia have found many dinosaur fossils in southern Australia at a location that was once positioned just off the east coast of Antarctica. Their work has shown that not only did dinosaurs live on Antarctica, but that they did so year-round. Specimens of the species Leaellynasaura showed adaptions of the skull which indicate that the animal had enlarged optic lobes, designed to offer acute night vision well suited to the prolonged winter darkness.’

  Hannah smiled nervously.

  ‘Let’s hope that none of them are left wandering about down here then, shall we?’

  Saunders chuckled.

  ‘The species died out tens of millions of years ago, and was a plant eater no bigger than a kangaroo,’ he said. ‘You’d have had nothing to fear from it.’

  Ahead of them, Lieutenant Riggs slowed as he looked down at a scanner he held in his hand.

  ‘Well, something’s ahead of us,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a much stronger signal now. We’re close.’

  ***

  XXI

  The ice channel’s water glistened in the glare from the team’s mounted flashlights as Ethan followed Saunders over a series of rugged, icy boulders blocking their path, likely deposited by the fast moving waters that had forged the tunnel.

  Ethan could see that the water itself was still icy cold, possessed of a faint blue hue that betrayed its frigid depths as not much above freezing.

  ‘This water,’ he said, glancing back at Saunders, ‘how come it’s warmer than the rest? Something must be heating it?’

  Ethan found it tough to believe that rainforests haunted by small dinosaurs once flourished where the thick ice sheets now existed, but he knew that the evidence of science never lied.

  ‘The geological record provides irrefutable evidence of dramatic climate fluctuations that have occurred throughout our planet’s history,’ Chandler replied, scrambling over a rocky boulder. ‘In the past fifty years the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by nearly three degrees Centigrade, faster than any other part of the world. These ice channels may now be common beneath the ice sheets but normally we just can’t see them, and so we can’t tell if they’re flowing in from the oceans around Antarctica somehow, or are coming from within it and spilling into the oceans around the continent instead.’

  Ethan surveyed the depths of the tunnel ahead thoughtfully.

  ‘Water doesn’t typically flow into continents from outside, it falls as rain or snow.’

  ‘Correct,’ Chandler replied, ‘and that leaves only one possible cause of the warming we’re seeing here: volcanism.’

  ‘There are volcanoes here too?’ Hannah uttered. ‘You’re really selling the place.’

  ‘Mount Erebus is currently the most active volcano in Antarctica and is the current eruptive zone of the Erebus hotspot. The summit contains a persistent convecting phonolitic lava lake, one of only five long-lasting lava lakes on the planet. Scientific study of the volcano is also facilitated by its proximity to McMurdo Station. Mount Erebus is classified as a polygenetic stratovolcano – that is that the bottom half of the volcano is a shield and the top half is a stratocone like most volcanoes. The whole system has been active for some time.’

  Ethan tried not to consider what that meant for the expedition, currently some two hundred feet beneath the ice of an unstable glacier being weakened by volcanically warmed water rushing by just feet from where they walked. He was about to change the subject when Saunders called out.

  ‘Hey, you guys see that?’

  Ethan looked up ahead, and in the gloom he saw something shimmering against the ice. The team stopped and stared ahead in silence at the glistening light, as though a star had fallen through the ice and was sparkling where it had become trapped. Ethan squinted, tried not to look directly at the glow but to one side of it where his eyes could detect it more easily.

  ‘Is it a reflection of some kind, from our lights?’ Hannah asked.

  Lieutenant Riggs called out. ‘Everybody shut off your lights.’

  Ethan obeyed instantly, turning his LED light off as did everybody else in the team. The tunnel was plunged into an absolute darkness so deep that Ethan was forced to put a gloved hand onto the ice wall alongside him to keep his balance. He peered into the distance as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and saw the soft blue glow spread across the tunnel far ahead of them.

  ‘What’s causing that?’

  Hannah’s voice sounded disembodied in the blackness, echoing back and forth within the confines of the chamber as Ethan noticed the glow getting brighter, his eyes adjusting quickly to the gloom.

  Then Saunders’ voice echoed from somewhere ahead.

  ‘It’s getting brighter, and it’s coming closer.’

  Ethan’s eyes widened as he realized that the light was closing in on them, illuminating the tunnel around it in a blue halo of light. Lieutenant Riggs reacted instantly.

  ‘Everybody down, stand by!’

  Ethan crouched down, one gloved hand resting on the 9mm pistol holstered on his belt as he watched the light growing in intensity before them. Like the hazy halo of a blue sunrise it reflected off the ice of the tunnel and seemed to sparkle as though alive, shimmering through the glassy ice. Ethan’s first fear that it was some kind of man-made light attached to a craft on the water began to dissolve as he realized that the light had no natural proximal source.

  ‘I can’t see a target on the water,’ Saunders whispered harshly, sighting the glow down the barrel of his M-16 rifle’s telescopic sight.

  It was Lieutenant Riggs who replied.

  ‘It’s not on the water,’ he said. ‘It is the water.’

  Ethan stared in amazement as from the darkness the water flowing through the tunnel suddenly began to glow a bright blue, illuminating the ice cave around the team with enough light for Ethan to make out the way far ahead.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Hannah asked, her voice hushed as they watched the bizarrely glowing water swirl past them in flickering eddies of light.

  Doctor Chandler stepped forward and crouched at the edge of the flow as he peered down into the water.

  ‘It’s mareel,’ he said as he identified the source of the glow. ‘The water’s filled with bioluminescent bacteria and dinoflagellates called Noctiluca scintillans, or perhaps a similar species called Vibrio harve
yi. I’ve heard of Navy pilots coming in to land on aircraft carriers at night being helped by this glow of the water in the wake of the ship, the glowing wake guiding them in the absence of any other light source. It’s caused by a disturbance in the water and is often seen by mariners out in the oceans at night.’

  Ethan stared down at the glowing water, which was now illuminating the team’s faces in a neon blue light as though they were all staring at computer monitors. The ice cave around them was bathed in the blue glow, the ice sparkling vibrantly above their heads.

  ‘What’s causing the disturbance?’ he asked.

  Chandler shook his head.

  ‘I’ve heard of the discharge of pollutants into water being capable of generating algae blooms that then glow as a result of the chemicals on which they feed,’ he said thoughtfully as he looked up river toward the glowing depths of the cave. ‘But the ice below this glacier should be pristine unless the volcano itself is discharging chemicals into the water.’

  Lieutenant Riggs peered into the distant tunnels.

  ‘You think that it’s likely to erupt soon?’

  Chandler shook his head.

  ‘Mount Erebus is notable for what are called ice fumeroles, ice towers that form around gases that escape from vents in the surface of the volcano. The ice caves associated with the fumaroles, like the one we’re standing in, are usually dark because polar alpine environments are starved in organics. The life is sparse, mainly bacteria and fungi which is of special interest for studying oligotrophs - organisms that can survive on minimal amounts of resources.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Riggs snapped.

  Chandler glared at the soldier, apparently unintimidated.

  ‘I hadn’t finished. The caves on Erebus are of especial interest for astrobiology as most surface caves are influenced by human activities, or by organics from the surface brought in by animals or ground water. The caves at Erebus are high altitude, yet accessible for study. There is no chance of photosynthetic based organics or of animals in a food chain based on photosynthetic life, and no overlying soil to wash down into them. Organics can only come from the atmosphere, or from ice algae that grow on the surface in summer, which may eventually find their way into caves like this one through burial and melting. As a result most micro-organisms here are chemolithoautotrophic - microbes like Chloroflexi and Acidobacteria that get all of their energy from chemical reactions with the rocks and don’t depend on any other lifeforms to survive.’ Chandler shook his head. ‘But they would not be present in such numbers and concentrations through natural sources as we’re seeing here. Something must have happened upstream to cause this.’