by Nick Thacker
“We’re moving.” Carter’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t argue further.
Jen opened her mouth to speak again, but was cut off by Dr. Pavan’s loud shout.
“Hey! Over here—look at these!” The man was standing on the side of the cavern, scrutinizing the cave wall. “Can someone shine their light over here?”
Saunders pointed her flashlight toward Dr. Pavan, illuminating the entire section of wall. She stepped forward, trying to see what the scientist had gotten excited about.
Carter couldn’t see anything either, but he stood his ground.
Erik and Jen both approached the wall as well, and it was Erik who spoke first.
“They’re scratches. Just like the ones on Lindsay.” He swallowed hard at speaking his former boss’ name.
“They’re all over this wall, and some of them are deep,” Jen said.
Carter was intrigued, but only momentarily. “It doesn’t matter. We need to get to that power plant and see what this is all about.”
“No, Carter,” Jen said. “I’m staying. This wall—those scratches on Lindsay—they’re not normal. These marks were caused by something, and we’ve got the evidence right in front of us to figure out what it is.”
“Why don’t we split up?” The group looked toward the speaker—Mark Adams. “We could split into two groups, one staying here, and one heading toward the power plant. There’s also a geothermal station on Level Four that I saw on the map. It’s probably tapped into the same plant, but it’s no doubt going to be more hospitable.”
Carter considered this option. He didn’t like it, but it was better than staying in one place. Jen would of course stay behind, as well as Dr. Pavan. Aside from examining the level surrounding the power plant, his mission was to find and eliminate the hostile force pursuing them. He’d need as much firepower as possible for that.
“Okay, fine. Mark, Erik, you’re with me. Mason and Saunders, you too.” The group began shuffling around, half of them preparing to leave with Carter.
“The rest—Jen, Dr. Pavan, Hog—you stay back. We’ll head to the main level first and make our way down using the stairs. Anything moves from that direction—” he motioned with his head down the tunnel,“shoot it. Ask questions later.”
He nodded once, checked over the two groups, and turned to leave. He caught Mark’s eyes as he turned—wide and surprised—and knew that the man hadn’t intended this outcome.
Jen, however, seemed fine.
“Great. Dr. Pavan, what do you make of these marks?”
24
“So you’re a computer guy, then?”
“Yep. Been working in computer security for my entire professional life; just moved into management a few years ago,” Mark responded. He focused on the back of the soldiers head as they moved upward through the cave system.
Mark had been fielding questions the entire half hour they’d been walking, except for when they stopped in the large cavern where Lindsay’s body lay. The civilians wanted to bury her, or at least move her body somewhere else out of respect, but Carter knew that wasn’t an option. The ground was solid rock, and they didn’t know these tunnels well enough to know what “out of the way” meant.
Carter approached the sprawled figure, eyeing around it for further evidence, but saw nothing. He peered around the room, looking for any sign of life or activity.
Satisfied, he nodded once, and the team continued their ascent.
Immediately after leaving the large cavern, the line of questioning continued. They asked Mark about his professional and personal life, about Reese, and about Jen. Erik seemed especially interested, but even Carter asked him a few questions. The only seemingly uninterested one of the five was Saunders.
Mark could see her slender figure in front of Mason sliding along at a steady and effortless pace. He wasn’t attracted to her, as she was cold and seemed apathetic about his personal situation, but he noticed that she wasn’t a physically unattractive woman.
Mason asked another question. “So, you work at a government place?”
Mark knew the soldiers—at least Carter—had been briefed on all of the civilians’ professional and personal lives, so the questions did seem a little forced. Is Mason trying to make friends? Mark thought.
“Uh, well, yeah, I guess you could say that,” Mark responded, caught a little off guard. “We weren’t originally. Most of our contracts were private sector security or IT companies. About three years ago we pretty much sold out to the government, though. But they don’t have a controlling interest, and we don’t do any contracting outside of their projects anymore. They send us work, sometimes their own, sometimes from companies they work with, but it’s always sourced through them.”
“Hmm.”
Mark wasn’t sure if he was being asked another question—implied in Mason’s silence—or if his answer had satisfied.
He decided to ask one of his own.
“What about you guys? What brings you to the States?”
Mark quickly rephrased his question. “I guess I mean, what brings you here—under five miles of ocean to help a scientist find her kid?”
Carter answered this time. “We were given orders from the top. My team and I usually operate like a special forces unit, and this time around the orders came from somewhere above my pay grade.”
Mark thought about this answer a moment. “Were you stationed around here? Or in the US?”
Mason answered. “Nope, we were on leave. Happens all the time though. ‘Leave’ to us just means, ‘get ready to leave again.’”
He didn’t give more details, so Mark dropped the subject and kept walking. Within minutes, they reached the cave opening on Level Four, and Carter held up his hand.
“Hold up here. Mason, why don’t you see what’s going on out there.” Mason stepped forward and crouched in the cavern entrance. Saunders fell in beside him, her gun pointed outward.
Erik and Mark waited behind the three soldiers until Carter walked out onto the concrete street of the housing district. He moved swiftly toward the first of the white houses on their right. Moving past the first floor windows facing the cliff, Carter stopped at the end of the house’s wall and looked around the corner.
“I don’t see anyone,” he said softly. He was one hundred yards away but his voice carried easily through the air. The two other soldiers waited a few seconds, then Saunders told the civilians to move toward Carter.
Mark and Erik jogged side-by-side toward Carter and joined him at the side of the house, finally followed by Mason and Saunders.
“Let’s stay between this row of houses and the cliff until the housing district ends, then we’ll move along the tracks toward those buildings in the distance.” He pointed with his gun at the large, rectangular buildings—four in all—about four hundred yards away. He started running next to the line of houses until he reached the end and crouched next to the track that encircled the entire level.
The others followed, with Mark next to Erik, followed by Saunders at the rear. They reached the buildings and Mark could see that they were each labeled with a large black number on their sides. “4” was directly in front of them, with “5” next to it. He assumed they were in a section of the base that handled part of the food requirements, as he became suddenly aware of a faint fishy odor in the air.
“Smells like dinner,” Mason said.
“These are all fish hatcheries. It’s a seafood farm,” Carter said, walking toward the first building in the block—“1,” which sat adjacent to “4” in front of them.
“Alright, let’s get to that geothermal station,” Saunders said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d left Jen and the others behind, and Mark could tell she wasn’t interested in poking around any longer than they needed.
Carter reached the end of building “1” and stopped to look around. They still hadn’t seen—or heard—anything of their earlier attackers, nor had they found any more evidence of Lindsay’s mysterious kil
ler. Carter wasn’t taking chances though, and he waited a full thirty seconds before stepping out toward a small building set a few paces away from the fish farms.
Mark noticed immediately why Carter had chosen this target. The building, raised from the floor of the base by cinder blocks, had large pipes shooting outward from the base of the building and into the ground. They were the same type of apparatus that housed his company’s long-distance cabling, meant to help them communicate on a closed network across the entire campus.
It was a communications building—small, but most likely home to some sort of station-wide schematics, internal diagrams, or something else that might be useful.
“Mark, come inside with me and Erik. Saunders and Mason, stay behind and keep watch for anything suspicious. I don’t want us to all get caught inside that building. We’ll be sitting ducks.”
Mark and Erik followed closely behind Carter and entered the small shack. It was dusty and dark, but Carter found a working light switch. Dust covered everything, but Mark could see lights blinking on and off below the thick layer of silt, and he could smell the heated electronics. This place is on and working.
He immediately started looking around. Stacks of processors sat along one wall, surprisingly small considering the decade in which the station was built, and rows of computer monitors sat on a waist-high table along another.
“Know what any of this junk is?” asked Erik.
Mark didn’t answer, but began dusting off one of the monitors. He reached below the table, slid out a keyboard, and began to examine the screen. He typed in a string of commands, then another. And another.
“It doesn’t seem to be responding. I’m not sure what it’s waiting for.”
“A password, maybe?” Erik and Carter watched over his shoulder, staring at the blinking cursor on the otherwise blank screen.
“No. At least I don’t think so. It’s a command prompt screen, like DOS or BASIC, but it’s not responding to the usual commands. Maybe it needs—”
“Hey, check this out,” Erik said from behind Mark. He spun to see the large man flipping through a book on the other side of the small room. “I found a manual or something.”
Mark joined him, and together they looked at the front cover. The first page was faded almost beyond recognition, but they could see the pale outline of some kind of computer company logo.
Erik flipped the page, the flimsy manual almost falling apart in his hands, and Mark gasped.
“Look,” he said, pointing at the bottom of the left-side page. “It’s a copyright page.”
Carter spoke from behind him. “Does that say ‘Copyright 1998’?”
“It does,” Mark said. “All rights reserved.”
“Wait—why does a research station that was built in the seventies have a computer manual from the nineties in it?” Erik asked.
“For the same reason there would be modern computers down here. Because, Erik, this place wasn’t abandoned in the eighties, like we thought. There’ve been visitors since then.”
Carter seemed to be focused on the stacks of binders and manuals resting on the table behind Mark. Mark’s eyes wandered over, and noticed the titles on some of them.
“Look at this. ‘Energy Systems, Agartha: Storm.’ You think that’s Mitchell Storm?”
Carter reached for it, dusted off the cover, and flipped it open. “Yes, you’re right. ‘Mitchell Storm, Three Mile Island.’”
Erik spoke from across the room. “I’m sorry, wait. Three Mile Island, the site of the nuclear meltdown?”
“Right. In the ‘70s, in Pennsylvania,” Carter said. “We know Storm was working there at the time of the meltdown, but we have no idea what happened to him after. We assume he went to work for Nouvelle Terre.”
Mark turned a few pages, then read the section heading aloud. “Energy Control Mechanisms and Maintenance - Section I. I think this is a good bet. Mark, want to take a look?”
Mark didn’t know anything about energy systems—certainly not geothermal or nuclear reactors—but he grabbed the binder anyway. He read for a few minutes while Erik and Carter glanced through other binders on the table. “It says the geothermal plant will be a core component of the base, basically stretching from the lowest levels—Ten through Fourteen—to the main level.”
He read on, trying to make sense of the highly technical drawings, graphs, and text. “I think the plant is the main reason the base was built. There’s a quote here: ‘Agartha Base, referencing Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre’s account of the subterranean world of the same name, will feature an enhanced machinery component larger in size, scope, and energy output than any other modern power facility of similar design.’” Mark paused for emphasis and looked up at his captive audience as he read the next part. “‘Agartha Base will, assuming positive test results, be capable of powering the equivalent of a major metropolitan area without the need for redundant or chained systems.’”
“This base, then, is a prototype?” Erik asked.
“I don’t know. So far though it doesn’t seem like it. This place has been running continuously for over thirty years, self-contained, energy independent, and without any major breakdowns. My guess is that this is the real deal.”
“Hold on,” Erik said, flipping back a page in the binder. “This is not right. I mean, this is different than what I have seen.”
Mark didn’t understand what he was talking about, but he let the man finish. The diagram in front of them was a cross-section of what looked like the base; all levels were stacked on top of one another, and with their round circumferences, the cross-section of the base had the appearance of a giant sphere, the top half of which was above ground, and the bottom half built directly into the Earth’s crust. The bottom four levels—like the map from the main atrium—contained a large machine in the center of the sections. The machine here in the book, however, was much larger than the one referenced on the map.
“I have seen a geothermal plant. This is one. See how it continues down, below the station? It is built into the crust itself, and is therefore more efficient.”
Mark and Carter saw what Erik was talking about. The plant they were looking at was shaped like a cone, upside-down, with the point of it pointing straight downward.
“This is incorrect, though. It is not useful to build one with a point like this. It makes no sense.”
“Well, I’m sure they knew what they were doing,” Mark said.
“They did, but I am not sure that the builders intended this machine to be used explicitly for energy production, at least in the traditional sense. I studied for a semester at a geothermal power plant in Siberia. A traditional plant will essentially have one pipe that carries water or steam up into the plant and another that injects the water back underground.”
“What’s the point?” Mark asked. “Maybe this one’s more powerful?”
“A larger pipe doesn’t necessarily lead to more energy withdrawal. Further, this is a completely different design. It almost looks like a corkscrew. I cannot believe it is simply a larger version of a geothermal power plant.”
“Okay,” Carter interrupted. “Impressive. But what does Nouvelle Terre want with it?”
Erik opened his mouth to offer an answer to Carter’s question, but a man’s voice yelled from outside. “Carter! Move out—we’ve got company!”
25
Dr. Pavan had spent the last five years of his professional life on the lecture circuit. He wasn’t able to pull down the same amount of money as a guru motivational speaker, but in his field—marine archeology—there was enough grant money floating around that enough of it seemed to come his way.
During his tenure at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, he’d taught a total of three classes—graduate Archeological and Geological Oceanography, three semesters back-to-back—and spent the rest of his time traveling for guest lectures.
When he’d discovered a new form of marine plant life, a bacteria that thrived equally well in deepw
ater vents reaching temperatures of over five hundred degrees Fahrenheit as it did in the chilled waters surrounding them, he chose to write his paper, to the dismay of many of his esteemed peers, in the nonacademic vernacular.
Essentially, the paper was an article fit for the cover story of a Popular Science magazine. Not surprisingly, that magazine approached Dr. Pavan and offered him a hefty sum to write another article, this time “distilling the information to make it accessible to the common hobbyist.”
He complied, and soon found himself the author of multiple pieces of popular nonfiction in competing industry magazines, trade publications, and the guest of a few TV talk shows. His fame in the academic oceanography world soon grew, as did his monthly income and celebrity status.
When he was approached by Daniel Carter and his team, he wasn’t sure to what extent he’d be useful to the mission. There was the obvious need of scientific knowledge, but most of the details he’d received were vague or altogether completely unstated. His interest in the mysterious, unknown properties of the deep ocean were what finally tipped the scales. Aside from that, his publisher, who only knew that Dr. Pavan’s leave of absence would possibly end in a commercially-viable book, urged him to take the assignment.
So he was here, under five miles of ocean, walking around freely on a patch of dry ocean rock. His initial shock of the locale was quickly replaced by the sheer amount of research he’d be able to do.
His half group—Jen, Nelson, and himself—had been studying the rock outcroppings for almost an hour. Nelson wasn’t much help, and after fifteen minutes relegated himself to fiddling with his gun at the opposite side of the cavern. He and Jen continued their scientific banter.
“Do you think the scratches here are the same? They seem to have similar properties,” Jen said.
“I do. The substantive evidence we have here—albeit not much—seems to indicate that. What I do not understand, however, is why they are here.”
