‘The thing is,’ Amy said, ‘they shouldn’t be here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked.
‘The Southern Ocean has plenty of nutrients, but krill often struggle to survive because phytoplankton doesn’t seem to grow much despite the resources. These high nutrient, low chlorophyll regions were known as Antarctic Paradoxes until it was realized that there were low concentrations of iron in the same regions. Small injections of iron into the oceans there triggered large blooms of krill and other similar species.’
‘So there must be a source of iron supporting these krill,’ Ethan understood as he watched the swarm fly by them, so dense now that the Seehund’s lamps penetrated only a few feet ahead, forcing Ethan to slow down further.
‘Thirty eight pounds per square inch,’ he said as he glanced again at the pressure gauges. ‘We won’t be able to go much deeper than this.’
‘We’re within a hundred yards,’ Amy replied. ‘Keep going.’
The Seehund crept forward through the glacial darkness, the shimmering swarm of krill drifting away behind the submarine as Ethan guided it toward the mysterious signal lingering somewhere just beyond their sight beneath the glacier.
‘I’ve got a change in temperature readings,’ Amy reported excitedly as they journeyed through the immense blackness. ‘Ambient sea temperature is now eight degrees Celsius.’
‘It’s getting warmer?’ Ethan asked in amazement.
‘There must be some kind of hydrothermal vents ahead,’ she replied, scanning her laptop’s screen for any sign of the vents. ‘They’re volcanic, usually very hot, and usually found near deep-sea ridges and along the edges of tectonic plates, not here in Antarctica.’
Ethan thought back to what Doctor Chandler had said just hours previously.
‘There are active volcanoes beneath Antarctica, right? Couldn’t their vents have been forced sideways instead of upward by the force of the ice pressing down on the continent?’
Amy nodded, still gazing at her screen.
‘It’s possible that magma chambers and gas vents could have been diverted by the ice pressure and made it this far out,’ she acknowledged. ‘If so, that means that we’ll find life out here. Most of the hydrothermal vents have been found near the coasts around the edge of the continent, not here in the interior and not ones that might be attached to Lake Vostok. There could be a whole new food chain down here, new species just waiting to be discovered.’
‘We’re here for Black Knight,’ Ethan reminded her, ‘and we’re running out of time.’
‘Sixty yards,’ Amy reported. ‘Steady as she goes.’
Ethan experienced a transient humor at Amy’s sudden adoption of a nautical theme as he guided the Seehund along.
‘I’ve got a seafloor,’ she said suddenly, ‘maybe twenty feet below us.’
Ethan prepared for any sign of the seafloor ahead of them, peering out into the gloomy darkness where the single headlight penetrated less than ten yards ahead of the submarine into waters now filled with tiny organisms that reflected the submarine’s lights. To Ethan it looked almost like the classic image of a starship rocketing through space, stars drifting past amid the blackness.
‘Forty one pounds per square inch,’ he said as he looked at the gauges again. ‘This is about our limit.’
Amy did not respond, staring instead at her monitor in silence.
‘Amy?’
Amy remained silent for a moment longer, and then her voice reached him as though from afar.
‘I can see it.’
For some reason Ethan felt a pulse of anxiety in his stomach as he heard her words, and perhaps for the first time he realized the enormity of what they were approaching. An object from another world, something far beyond any human experience, something that could literally change the face of humanity forever.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
Amy waited for what felt like an agonizingly long time before she replied.
‘It’s…,’ she hesitated. ‘It’s a sort of, glow. I can’t quite make it out on the screen. Can you see anything up there?’
Ethan peered out of the dome into the blackness ahead and suddenly he could see the submarine’s beams of light drifting across the surface of the sea floor. But he could see nothing beyond the barren, rocky terrain long buried beneath the ice sheets. The Seehund crept closer, Ethan slowing the submarine to just two knots as they closed in on the signal.
‘Almost there,’ Amy whispered.
Ethan peered through the dome of the submarine, seeking any possible sign of the object, and then suddenly he heard the reassuring hum of the batteries die down and the submarine’s lights shut off and plunged them into darkness.
‘What happened?!’
Amy’s voice was twisted with panic as Ethan realized that her laptop had also switched off. He gripped the safety rails of the dome as he felt the submarine come to a halt in the black silence, completely devoid of power and in total and utter darkness.
‘We’ve lost power,’ he replied. ‘Everything’s dead.’
With sudden dread realization Ethan knew that coming down here had been a mistake. They should have fortified their position and awaited support and the remotely piloted vehicles that could have been sent down here into the frozen depths to retrieve Black Knight without risking the lives of the team.
‘I can’t see anything.’
Amy’s voice was suddenly bereft of the excitement and fearless enthusiasm of just a half hour before. Now, it sounded small and afraid in the darkness.
‘We could die down here.’
Amy’s voice was hollow in the blackness inside the submarine’s pressure hull. Ethan felt around for the pressure gauges, wondering how much air they had left without the pumps working.
‘Stand by,’ Ethan said as he fumbled for a flashlight.
He pulled his flashlight out of his jacket and flipped the switch. Nothing happened. He tried it again and then looked at where he figured Amy’s laptop would be. Suddenly he realized that there was no good reason for both the submarine and the laptop to lose power simultaneously unless…
‘Electromagnetic interference,’ he said to himself.
‘What?’
Ethan thought back to some of the briefings they had received from Chandler on Die Glocke and the UFO encounters reported at Kecksburg and other incidents across the United States.
‘People often report that electrical systems are interfered with during UFO encounters,’ he said. ‘Radios don’t work, compasses go awry and engines cut out. What if our proximity to the Black Knight is what knocked out the batteries? It explains why your computer isn’t working either.’
He heard the rustle of Amy’s hood as she looked down at the laptop and realized what Ethan was saying.
‘We just need to get further away from it,’ she said. ‘Everything should work again.’
‘But that means we can’t pick it up either,’ he pointed out.
‘The hell with that,’ Amy almost shouted at him. ‘I don’t want to die in this tin can down here! How can we get away?’
Ethan reached down to the ballast levers, fumbling among them in the dark and double checking that he was holding the correct ones before he released them. Immediately, compressed air from the submarine’s internal tanks was released into the hull’s buoyancy tanks and he felt the Seehund rise up in the water.