Vostok

by Steve Alten

  The payload was a thirty-seven-foot submarine named the Tethys, the very ship described to me seven years earlier by Ben Hintzmann. She had been named after the Titan goddess of freshwater rivers and streams, and the ancient sea that harbored prehistoric life 200 million years ago. The vessel had been designed for one purpose: to access Lake Vostok by traveling beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet through a network of subglacial rivers.

  To accomplish this, the sub housed two ice-melting elements in its reinforced, chisel-shaped bow. The first was a Europa-class Valkyrie laser. Like the two Valkyries that had been mounted on the Barracuda, it was designed specifically for Jupiter’s frozen moon. The E-class, however, was three times the diameter of its predecessor and was powered by a nuclear reactor.

  To help the sixty-three-ton ship’s twin engines propel the Tethys through the ice, the sub had been equipped with a bow and flat bottom composed of a calcium isotope, the plates of which could be superheated to temperatures exceeding fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The end result was a dagger-shaped vessel that melted ice like a hot knife through butter, keeping the submarine hydroplaning toward its target.

  Technicians loaded the ship aboard the transport and secured it in chains. I boarded through the open nose to the forward passenger section, where seventy-two business-class seats were set in eighteen rows facing the rear of the aircraft. The plane was empty, the sub’s crew still finishing breakfast. The guard stopped me at the third row and motioned for me to occupy a window seat while he took the aisle. Reclining the chair, I closed my eyes and tried to settle my nerves.

  But the thought of William and Brandy held captive, along with the image of Susan’s skull splattering across the white tile floor, wouldn’t leave me. The guard’s presence only added to my anxiety.

  Unable to take it anymore, I stood and confronted the armed man. “I need something to put me out. Drugs, booze, a bottle of cough syrup—I don’t care what it is, but I need it now!”

  “How about I just punch you in the face?”

  “Do it, arse. Then you can explain to the Colonel why his lead scientist can’t function when we get to Antarctica.”

  Realizing he needed to deal with my issue, the guard radioed for a physician.

  Ten minutes later Dr. Stewart was rigging an I.V. drip to service me in the first-row window seat. “This will put you in La La Land for a good fifteen hours. When you wake up, you can take these pills, one every four hours. Just make sure you eat something first.” He slid the needle into a vein in my left forearm, securing it in place with medical tape. “By the way, I’m sorry about Susan. To waste a life like that… It’s not why I joined MJ-12. All life is sacred. No matter the species, we’re all God’s creatures. Even the bloody Irish.”

  He winked, started the drip, and left.

  I reclined my seat, pulled the blind down over my window, and closed my eyes, allowing the liquid elixir to float me away.

  30

  Susan’s soul came to me, only it was harbored in the physicality of another.

  As was mine.

  We were on a mountain bluff overlooking a tempest sea. The sky was violet, but not by dusk’s cool touch, for the sun was still high in the sky. She was picking purple flowers that grew from vines twisted around branches of a scarlet oak, and the wind kept catching her tunic, causing the sheer fabric to bloom above her hips, revealing her naked torso to me.

  “You’re using the wind to tempt my loins.” I said aloud.

  “And why would I do such a thing? This is my fertile time, and the Council has placed yet another moratorium on conception. Or perhaps you’ve spent so much time in your cave that you haven’t heard?”

  “I am a scientist, Lehanna. The decree is in response to the latest Miketz update. The magma chamber’s internal pressure has risen higher than our geologists predicted.”

  “How much longer do we have?”

  “It’s best not to dwell on predictions.”

  “Avi Socha, as your senior wife I need to prepare our home for every eventuality.”

  “The Miketz is a probability, not a certainty. It could still subside.”

  “How long?”

  “Two solar orbits, with the pyroclastic blast most likely occurring before the spring harvest.”

  The new doomsday timetable hit her hard. “And how many escape ships has the Council commissioned for Charon’s lower rungs?”

  “So far, only sixteen—just about enough for a single tribe.”

  I watched as the sadness in her eyes changed to anger. “And for the Council?”

  “They are keeping the number secret, but I sincerely doubt any of the Appointed Ones will be left behind.”

  “Sixteen ships… And the lottery determines which tribe will be saved, correct?”

  “Or which seven hundred. To the Council the twelve tribes are simply a minority to be managed. Not that it matters. The transports only carry enough supplies to orbit Charon for one solar year. Most of us scientists in purgatory agree, the effects of the Miketz will render the planet uninhabitable. We need a new planet to call home, but none of the other worlds in this star system are capable of sustaining life. And the transports lack the technology to venture beyond the asteroid belt.”

  “What about Berudim? The Council believes the third world possesses water.”

  “Berudim’s atmosphere is toxic. And the planet is far too close to the sun to inhabit. The Council is offering the people false hope in an attempt to maintain order. Lehanna?”

  She was calculating odds. “Our tribe has a one in twelve chance of being chosen. We can increase those odds with a better harvest and by obeying the Council’s new edicts. Avi, you’ve already been forbidden to practice the mystic wisdom. For the sake of our loved ones, I ask you now to end your midnight activities in the caves.”

  “It’s not mysticism, Lehanna. Soul searching is a higher form of meditation which taps into the universal consciousness.”

  “It is heresy and a violation of Council law. If you are caught, our tribe could be excluded from the lottery.”

  “What good is it to be orbiting a dead world? If I succeed in communicating with my soul’s future incarnates, perhaps they can provide me with the knowledge to prevent the Miketz.”

  “It’s utter nonsense.”

  “Not true! In the past year, I have communicated with an ancient one whose physicality housed my soul long before me. He described Charon as it was a century before the Council divided our people into tribes. He taught me about the upper worlds, a wonderful existence our souls inhabit between incarnations. Time does not exist in these other realms, which makes it possible for me to communicate with a future me.”

  “There is none after you, Avi Socha! This planet is doomed. Ours shall be the last generation to inhabit Charon. Now wake up.”

  “Hey, pal, wake up.”

  I opened my eyes. My face was covered in tears, my mind lost in a stupor. Everything was gone—the violet landscape, the ocean… the woman. Instead, four men in neoprene jumpsuits stood over me, chuckling, their presence anchoring me to my new surroundings, even as my growing wakefulness drained the memories from my bizarre out-of-body experience.

  I was confused. I felt empty inside. Wherever I had been, I wanted to be back there. I belonged there.

  I took a deep breath and smelled Susan. In the lucid dream, I had called her by another name. Lehanna. She had referred to me as Avi Socha. She had called the planet Charon. Was it a Nordic world? Had it survived the doomsday event we were talking about? Or was this a future event in a multiverse still to come?

  No. Our conversation had been vocalized; there was nothing to indicate an evolved ability to communicate telepathically.

  Try as I might, the memory of the dream dissipated too quickly to analyze. It was then I realized something was happening.

  Dozens of crewmen were hovering by the windows on my side of the plane, many snapping photos with their iPhones. I raised the window shade and looked out
side.

  Sweet Jesus…

  We were flying over water, the night illuminated by the patterns of light emanating from countless UFOs. Whether their intentions were to escort us to Antarctica or shoot us down, I didn’t know. But they were everywhere. Some flew in formations of up to a dozen, while others zipped close to our wing and hovered, only to accelerate out of view. Then there were those that preferred the cheap seats high above our altitude, their lights appearing like stars. One massive triangular craft the size of a small city dominated the heavens. Every so often it would execute an incredible end-over-end 360 as if just to show us it could do it.

  It was a mind-boggling, humbling, and surreal spectacle, and I might have actually enjoyed it had I not feared they were only here because of me.

  31

  “There is a force/energy/consciousness/divine thread that connects us all

  spiritually to something greater than ourselves.”

  —Oprah Winfrey

  Fear shuts down the mind and paralyzes the body. It unleashes thoughts that smother reason and strangle hope, reducing consciousness to a dying ember.

  Sitting on the transport, I realized that I no longer cared whether I lived or died. In truth, it was only the need to save William and Brandy that forced me to take another breath. Yet, even in my state of anxiety, I knew there was zero chance of Colonel Vacendak ever releasing any of us. The only thing keeping us alive was MJ-12’s belief that my presence was needed to access the object in Lake Vostok. When the mission was finished I, along with my loved ones, would be disposed of as collateral damage.

  Logic therefore dictated that in order to keep William and Brandy alive, I needed to escape.

  That, of course, would be far easier said than done. Besides being guarded around the clock, there weren’t many places one could hide in East Antarctica. Not to mention the interest of the extraterrestrials. They had been following our transport for the last twenty-four hours, and there was a feeling of trepidation among the crew regarding what they might do after we landed. Gazing out of my window at a spectrum of alien lights, I realized something far more important than that my miserable life was at stake, but it was unclear whether the aliens supported my return to Lake Vostok or sought to terminate it.

  As my mentor, Joe Tkalec, used to say, “Don’t accuse God of being a bad dealer until you play out the hand you’ve been dealt.”

  And then Lake Vostok anted up and the cards were reshuffled.

  We were crossing over the South Pole, passing through neon-green curtains of energy that marked the Aurora Australis. Manifested by electrons accelerated by the solar wind colliding with protons and atoms in the upper atmosphere, the Aurora danced its charged waves across the midnight sky, the lime-green color defined by the presence of atomic oxygen over the pole.

  Having passed over the bottom of the world, Colonel Vacendak ordered the pilot to adjust our course farther to the south and take the C-5 transport into a gradual descent. Many of the crew wondered why we were landing.

  Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves soaring over a seemingly endless desert of ice at an altitude of six hundred feet.

  As we passed over Lake Vostok, the buried magnetic anomaly seemed to reach up from the subglacial lake like an invisible hand. It shook the plane with vomit-inducing waves of turbulence. We pitched and dipped, our engines sputtered, and the lights went off several terrifying times. Yet this was nothing compared to what happened to our alien escorts.

  Facing backward in my seat, I saw a mega-sized saucer trailing below our plane phase in and out before it fell out of the night sky like a bowling ball. Seconds later, it smashed sideways onto the ice sheet, blasting snow a hundred feet into the electrified air.

  By the time I glanced out of the window at the other craft, it was raining UFOs.

  Unable to match the power of the force field being generated from the buried vessel, the smaller E.T. ships went into free fall, crashing to the ice with thunderous wallops that could be heard and felt for fifty miles in every direction.

  The alien craft high overhead broke formation and dispersed.

  Having flown beyond the anomaly’s reach, the pilot increased our altitude and adjusted our course to the northeast, heading back toward Prydz Bay.

  Round One was over, and it was a clear victory for the Colonel.

  We touched down on the rock runway at Davis Station ninety minutes later, everyone on board relieved to be on the ground, their fears now focused on a possible retaliatory response.

  It never came. Ground radar indicated that the surviving E.T. vessels had moved into the stratosphere. After another hour of waiting, the Colonel gave the order to unload the Tethys, a process that would take two days. Then the submarine would be wet docked by her surface ship, which was still en route. In fact, the only vessel visible in Prydz Bay was a 319-foot-long hopper dredge that was slowly working its way toward the Amery Ice Shelf.

  It was November 2, spring in Antarctica. The sun hung low in a hazy gray sky when I stepped off the plane, the sub-zero continent welcoming me back with a blast of minus-seventeen-degree wind. Dressed in full ECW gear, I followed my keeper across the tarmac like a penguin waddling after its mother, only I purposely lagged behind just to piss him off.

  I was assigned a room at Davis Station and released on my own recognizance. With a biochip circulating in my bloodstream, I was hardly a flight risk. Besides, where was I going to go?

  Yet, I did have a plan.

  The E.T. vessels had disappeared into the ether once we’d begun our initial descent over East Antarctica. Assuming they had been there to escort yours truly to Vostok, perhaps a few of the more sociable aliens might wish to communicate with me in what the Colonel had called a lucid dream state.

  Reaching out to communicate with an extraterrestrial is defined as a close encounter of the fifth kind, or CE-5 initiative. Developed and practiced by Dr. Steven Greer and his supporters, the protocol uses vedic-style meditation to initiate telepathic communication between humans and extraterrestrials, in order to forge a mutually beneficial, sustainable, and cooperative relationship between our species. According to Dr. Greer, once an E.T. exceeds lightspeed it enters a state of cosmic mind. Humans can therefore use coherent thought sequencing to interface with an extraterrestrial, causing the craft to actually vector in on the group’s location through their collective consciousness, culminating in some incredible experiences. Not only have lights appeared out of the ether to signal to CE-5 practitioners, messages of peace have been downloaded to the human participants.

  Greer found that there was a universal readiness among extraterrestrials to engage in peaceful communications with the common man rather than our appointed leaders, who have downed dozens of crafts using EMP weapons over the last five decades. There are no secrets when communicating through the conscious mind, so if a human participant possesses a dark agenda, contact is cut off. CE-5 participants believe warfare and the use of nuclear weapons have led to Earth’s isolation, our visiting E.T. ambassadors seeing humanity as an aggressive, divided civilization armed with knowledge that could lead to self-destruction. As such, these entities are hesitant to share advanced technologies until a lasting world unity and peace is achieved.

  The fact that one of them had chosen to share its knowledge with me gave me hope that I could use Greer’s CE-5 protocols to communicate outside of Lake Vostok.

  What was I hoping to accomplish? In truth, I didn’t know. I felt desperate and alone, and Susan’s murder had rattled my nerves. With my son’s life hanging in the balance, I needed something—anything—that might give me an edge, be it information or a weapon… or an alien ally whom I could convince to free my family.

  After consuming a mug of clam chowder in the Davis cafeteria, I returned to my room to change into my extreme weather gear. I was pulling on my boots when I heard a phone playing the Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter, one of my favorite songs. Searching the room, I traced the sound to a cell phone stuffed ins
ide my pillowcase.

  A text had been sent.

  Dragonslayer: FOLLOW THE SHORELINE NORTH AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

  My pulse raced. Only one person had ever called me Dragonslayer—my father.

  I quickly finished dressing. Slipping the phone inside my jacket pocket, I left my room and headed out of the nearest exit, my face cloaked behind goggles and a ski mask.

  It was dusk and curtains of green light were already forming in the eastern sky by the time I made my way down to the frozen surface waters of Prydz Bay. I followed the shoreline north as instructed, abused by a twenty-knot wind carrying a wind chill of minus thirty-five.

  I heard someone trudging through the snow behind me. It was my guard. He was following me on a parallel course farther inland, trying to stay out of sight.

  The cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out, using my body to conceal its light from my shadow.

  WALK OUT ONTO THE BAY 200 PACES AND STOP.

  The bay? They must be sending a helicopter. I glanced overhead, listening for rotary blades. Would MJ-12 shoot it down? Did my intended rescuers know I had a tracking device circulating through my bloodstream?

  I hesitated, then turned and walked out onto the frozen bay. The ice seemed plenty thick, the spring thaw having gained little traction. Counting my strides, and trembling from the cold, I continued to scan the star-filled sky for my ride.

  Two hundred paces brought me some distance from shore. The surface remained solid beneath my boots, but there was still no sign of a chopper.

  The wind howled in my wool-covered ears, sweeping snow particles across the barren ice. Tugging my jacket over my buttocks, I sat down and closed my eyes to attempt a CE-5 communication.