by Steve Alten
And then we stopped moving.
I checked the Valkyrie gauges. “Something’s wrong. The lasers powered off.”
Colonel Vacendak’s voice crackled over the radio. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I thought we might have a private conversation before you arrived topside. Answer my questions honestly, and you’ll enjoy a steak dinner on me. Lie to me, and you’ll end up as dinner for that magnificent creature still circling below.”
The engine shut off. A wave of queasiness hit me in the gut as the Barracuda plunged twenty feet tail-first through a funnel of icy water.
The propeller re-engaged, the spinning blades halting our descent.
I heard Ben wheeze a pained breath.
“This is Wallace. Quit your head games, Colonel. Captain Hintzmann’s in no shape—”
“Captain Hintzmann is dead.”
“What?” Unbuckling my harness, I stood on my seat and leaned over to check on Ben. His face was ghostly pale, his eyes glazed over. I checked his neck—no pulse.
I flopped back in my seat, feeling numb. “Take me home… please. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“Glad to hear it, Dr. Wallace. Did you know the captain and Dr. Liao were working together?”
Don’t tell him about the photos.
“What do you mean by working together? Aren’t we all working together?”
“You’re lying, Dr. Wallace. I think you know exactly what I mean.”
Damn uniform. It’s registering my heart rate. Vacendak’s using it like a lie detector. Don’t get excited. Take slow easy breaths. Answer in truths that keep him off-balance.
“Yeah, so they had sex. So what? We thought we were going to die. Why do you give a shit? Don’t tell me you’re a jealous lover.”
I climbed back to Ming’s cockpit and glanced outside the ship at the tailfin. The umbilical gave the Colonel complete control.
Was there any way to disconnect it?
“Zachary, when you ventured down that crevasse, what did you find?”
“I didn’t venture, I fell.”
“And?”
“The crevasse led down to an old magma tunnel.”
“Nothing unusual?”
“There was a glow, I went to check it out. It was caused by a vein of sphalerite. It’s a mineral that, under pressure, creates its own illumination. The force of the crevasse opening generated friction. By the time I left, it was dark.”
“I see. And this glowing tunnel, where did it lead?”
“It dead-ended at volcanic rock. Why are you asking me this?”
I gripped the seat, clenching my teeth as the propeller ceased and the sub dropped another thirty feet.
“Are you insane? Bring me back up to the surface, you psychopath!”
“Zachary, did you know that the suit you are wearing contains sensors that allow us to track all sorts of things. For instance, changes in your blood pressure told us the moment you had descended another two atmospheres to access that tunnel. Thirty-three minutes elapsed between the time you went down and whe you climbed back up.”
“Now you’re judging my climbing skills?”
The rope!
Climbing back into the third seat, I removed the eighty-foot coil of nylon from Ming’s backpack.
“Time, Zachary, can be deceiving. As you probably know, time is a concept limited to our physical third-dimensional perspectives. It doesn’t exist in a fourth-dimensional vortex—say, a wormhole. Or, theoretically, a vessel capable of interstellar travel.”
“Colonel, no offense, but if you want my opinion about quantum physics, we could just as easily have this conversation back in the dome.”
I proceeded to loop the end of the rope around Ben’s upper body and the chair, using them as an anchor. I looked back, estimating the distance from the bow cockpit to the sub’s tailfin.
Wallace, this is insane.
“Zachary, one of the injections you and your deceased colleagues received prior to your descent was a microscopic probe that calculates blood circulation. It takes approximately sixty seconds for a human heart pumping at an average of seventy beats per minute to circulate an adult’s six liters of blood. According to Dr. Liao’s monitor, her blood circulated thirty-two times from the moment you set out to explore that tunnel until the moment you ascended. Captain’s Hintzmann blood volume circulated forty times, the higher rate due to his exertion while he was doing a bit of rock climbing.”
Measuring six armlengths of rope, I tied the cord around my chest and climbing belt.
“Zachary, your reading was quite a bit different. According to your sensor, your blood circulated 1,127 times, the equivalent of just over eighteen hours of heartbeats.”
“What?” I paused from knotting the rope. “How is that possible?”
“It’s possible only if you had entered a portal to another dimension.”
I wanted answers, but first I needed control.
Grabbing the MANUAL EMERGENCY HATCH, I pulled the lever.
A blast of icy water shot into the cabin as I dropped feet-first past Ming and into the flooded borehole, the dark shaft of ice illuminated by the sub’s exterior light and my night-vision goggles.
Dangling by the Barracuda’s tailfin, pinned between the sub and a geyser of pressurized thirty-seven-degree water, I held my breath and felt for the umbilical cable. Locating the plug, I attempted to brace my stocking feet against the slippery chassis, cursing myself for not having worn my spiked climbing boots.
Realizing what was happening, the Colonel ignited the Valkyries, attempting to toss me from the rising sub or burn me alive.
The heat evaporated the water around me and warmed my body as I yanked the plug free.
The lasers abruptly ceased.
In the same amount of time it took the Big Bang to explode in a vacuum of space, my ears popped as a vacuum of ungodly pressure flung me back into the aft compartment and slammed the acrylic cockpit shut.
A hundredth of a second later, a geyser of water erupted around the sub, launching it another thirty feet before pinning it, bow-first, against the slush-filled roof of the borehole.
22
“Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”
—Lewis Carroll
I opened my eyes to bone-chilling darkness. A sonic buzz rattled my ears. Disoriented, I fumbled my way around like the lone survivor in a plane crash, orientating myself by identifying the dead.
Persistence persevered over panic, and I managed to locate the night-vision goggles and power up the sub.
That was the extent of the good news—that I had regained control of the Barracuda. Everything else was bad.
I was trapped in a submersible, lodged in a borehole surrounded by ice. My air gauge had dropped below eleven hours. Calculated for a crew of three, I guessed my supply would last a solid day. More troubling were the batteries. Power levels were down to seventy-six percent. That was sufficient if I was merely piloting the vessel, but the Valkyries would drain that quickly.
Stay calm. Think it through. There are two ways out of Vostok. You can try ascending using the lasers and see how far you make it, or you can attempt to locate that subglacial river that runs out of the northern basin and forge a trail beneath the ice sheet all the way to Prydz Bay.
Eight hundred miles in twenty-four hours, squeezed beneath the ice sheet in total darkness without a GPS?
That was suicide.
The depth gauge indicated the sub was only eighty-seven feet above the lake, leaving 13,012 feet of ice overhead. Using the computer, I calculated the power requirements. Even in a best-case scenario, the Valkyries would run out of juice 1,244 feet short of the surface.
Either way, I was a dead man.
Frustrated, angry, and overwhelmed with fear, I pounded the back of my skull against my chair’s headrest. My decision to pull the umbilical and regain control of the ship had been foolhardy and not very well thought out. By severing communications, I had lost the ability to negotiate with the Colonel fo
r my life. In effect, I had regained control and condemned myself to be buried alive in ice.
How had I managed to find myself in this predicament? The Colonel had threatened to kill me, for what? Because a sensor in my bloodstream indicated I had spent eighteen hours hanging out in another dimension. The whole thing was so ludicrous it seemed laughable, only the Colonel actually believed it enough to erase my existence.
So instead, you did the job for him, asshole.
I glanced at Ben’s lifeless body still tied to the seat in front of me. Leaning over his body, I loosened his bonds and searched his pockets. I located the iPhone in his jumpsuit and powered it on to check the photo bucket.
As I had suspected from Ming’s images, Ben had climbed to the mountain’s summit with a sense of purpose.
There were only two photos. The first revealed an icon embedded in what appeared to be a dark metallic surface. Based upon the climbing axe in the shot, the figure appeared to be about a meter-high and featured ten glowing fist-size objects set in triangular pairings. The upper three were white, the middle six were red, and the one on the bottom was violet.
The second image was blurred and had caught the side of Ben’s face as he had fallen from the face of the summit.
I returned to the first photo.
I’ve seen this configuration before…
It took me a few minutes to blurt out the answer, my voice sounding muffled against the tinnitus. “Quantum physics… string theory. The alignment of the ten dimensions.”
String theory was an attempt by physicists to find a single equation that would unite gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. While these fundamental forces acted separately, quantum physicists believed that moments after the Big Bang these phenomena were unified through interacting strings. For their theory to make sense, existence needed either ten or eleven dimensions, with six of them curled up or compactified.
The icon Ben had photographed appeared to fit that description.
I stared at the image, my mind growing desperate.
Whatever was buried beneath the snow and rock appeared to have a power source, and power was what I needed right now.
What the hell? Freezing to death seemed a better way to die than suffocating in the dark surrounded by dead bodies.
First order of business: get out of this borehole and back into the lake.
Activating the aft camera, I zoomed in on the funnel of ice below the sub. To my surprise, the shaft had already frozen over.
I powered up the Valkyries. The lasers melted the ice ahead of the sub, but with the borehole clogged with ice, the lake and its pressure had been effectively cut off, holding me eighty-seven feet above Lake Vostok.
“I’m trapped!” I pounded my fists against the armrests, constricted by the nylon rope still tied around my chest.
The animal caught in the trap will chew its own foot off to survive…
I stopped, my mind racing.
I’ve had crazy ideas before, and almost none have ever worked out. The last crazy idea had occurred two years ago in Loch Ness when I decided the creature needed to be set free.
Correction: My last crazy idea had occurred to me when I yanked out the sub’s umbilical cord, severing my communications with Vostok Command.
Shut up and do the math. It’s eighty-seven feet down to the lake. The rope was eighty feet. That’ll leave you seven feet short, plus another few feet to bait the trap.
Step One: Attach one end of the rope to the sub’s tailfin.
Locating my spiked boots, I struggled to get them over my toes, which had become painful pins and needles. Loosening the rope from around my chest, I positioned it around my waist and then climbed back to the third seat, trying my best to avoid looking at Ming as I popped the cockpit hatch.
A shrill whistle greeted me, the pressure howling up through the borehole loud enough for even my damaged ears to hear. A cold spit of moisture rose with the updraft, convincing me the ice below hadn’t fully solidified.
That was encouraging.
Walking backward out of the cockpit, I straddled the sub’s tailfin, the ice cracking all around me. I undid the loop and secured the end of the rope to the tail assembly, then climbed back inside the sub and resealed the hatch.
So far, so good. Now for the rough part.
Climbing up to the middle seat, I leaned over the bow seat and unwound the rope from Ben’s corpse. Blood poured from the severed femoral artery as I dragged his remains into my cockpit before heaving him into the rear seat next to Ming.
I fashioned a noose out of the end of the rope and slipped it over Ben’s head first, then Ming’s, binding them chest to chest.
Then I searched for my axe.
God forgive me.
I popped open the hatch. Positioning both bodies on the edge of the sub’s chassis, I slit Ming’s belly open with the climbing spike, gagging as I eviscerated her.
The deed done, I lowered the two bleeding corpses over the side, guiding them past the tail assembly before releasing them.
The 310-pound flesh missile free-fell twenty feet before striking ice. I heard muffled crackling sounds as I hurried to reseal the hatch.
Strapping myself in my middle seat, I waited.
Eighty-seven feet…
If the ice had not fully formed, there was an outside chance the remains of my two companions could plunge all the way to the end of the rope. In that case, the tail assembly would snap and they’d drop another ten to fifteen feet into Lake Vostok, igniting a geyser of water that would free me from the borehole.
I wasn’t counting on that.
The minutes passed slowly. I had all but given up when I felt the sub reverberate. The moment passed. Then something struck the ice sheet from below with a tremendous wallop.
Seconds later, a geyser of frigid lake water raced up the shaft and plowed into the Barracuda.
I waited until the pressure equalized. Then, having already shifted the propeller shaft into reverse, I maneuvered the sub backwards down the flooded borehole.
The two corpses floated up and struck the tail assembly. I drove them back down the shaft, my eyes shifting from the depth gauge to the aft camera.
Descending to the bottom of the ice sheet, I pushed the bodies through the hole. They fell six feet into the lake and floated away while I kept the Barracuda inside the borehole and waited, my eyes focused on the video monitor.
A dark mass passed below.
It had not been the combined weight of the two bodies that had cracked the ice, it had been the Livyatan melvillei. Lured to the hole by the blood and innards pouring out of the bottom of the ice sheet, the ninety-foot, fifty-ton Miocene sperm whale had breached, bashing its enormous skull against the opening of the partially clogged shaft.
Now the bull wanted its meal.
I shifted the propeller back to FORWARD and held my breath as the rope went taut, dragging the sub backwards out of the borehole and through the lake on a Nantucket sleigh ride, as the male Livyatan melvillei swallowed my deceased colleagues’ remains whole.
23
“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass…
It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”
—Vivian Greene
The whale dragged the Barracuda backward into the depths until the nylon rope snapped and cast the sub adrift.
In darkness, kept at bay by the soft glow from my command console, in a quiet violated only by the fading buzz in my damaged ears, I found a moment’s solitude. Exhausted, beaten to the point of surrender, I wondered what more there was to fear. Not death. Death was simply a passing, the process of the soul shedding the burden of flesh and life’s imperfections with all its scars and pains and sorrows.
Death was the great unknown. It was the perpetual fear of dying that made living hard. Vostok had immunized me, for I my head I had died so many times over the last forty hours that my mind’s eye had gone blind to its anticipated horrors.
The sub drifted and so did I, in and out of sleep, until the demands of the flesh said, “Enough! Drink, eat, piss, remove these tight boots from your throbbing feet. Get back into the game, Wallace! God didn’t spare your sorry ass to sit on the sidelines and wax poetic. Find a reason to live.”
Unzipping my coat, I reached inside the breast pocket of my extreme conditions uniform and removed a wallet-size photo of Brandy holding William.
Get back in the game.
Placing the photo on my console, I stripped off the neoprene undergarment, ripping the tiny electrode connections from my skin. Shedding the undergarment meant I’d be losing some body heat when I left the sub, but it was better that the Colonel and his team believe I was dead.
MAJESTIC-12 was one threat. The other, besides my diminishing air supply, was the bull sperm whale. It was still out there, but it had just fed.
If I kept my pace slow and steady…
I redressed in my long johns and every article of extreme weather gear I could find, then I started up the engine. The GPS unit was useless, but by reversing the sub’s last course I was able to plot my way back to the bay with little effort.
I wiped blood from my night-goggle lenses and adjusted them on my face. Then I dived the sub to three hundred feet, set my speed to ten knots, and engaged the auto-pilot.
“Huh?”
Exhaustion and a steady ride had gotten the better of me. I opened my eyes, stunned to find the nose of the Barracuda beached before a restless herd of sea elephants. Having fallen asleep before reaching the plateau, I don’t know how I had managed to cross the Livyatan melvillei nursery without disturbing the females. Perhaps they had been feeding when I had passed through the channel. Perhaps it was divine intervention. But somehow I had made it all the way back to the bay.
Climbing over my seat into the aft compartment, I searched the backpacks for supplies. I had my climbing axe, magnetometer, three flashlights, and, to my surprise, Ben’s sensory device. Leaving the Colonel’s instrument behind, I packed the other items into my bag, along with water, snacks, and the two iPhones. Gingerly sliding my thawed feet into my climbing boots, I zipped up my jacket, secured my facemask and hat, and bound and wrapped every inch of exposed flesh before slipping on my gloves. Ready for the cold, I popped open the cockpit’s hood.
