Ben exhaled a sigh of relief. “I knew there was a reason I brought you along.”
Waves lapped against the Barracuda, rocking us gently. For a long moment the three of us remained quiet, listening to the darkness. A roll of thunder echoed in the distance, the ice sheet rumbling overhead as it inched its way east toward the sea.
If there were a more isolated spot on the planet, I couldn’t imagine where it might be.
After a few minutes, Ming activated her sampling unit and siphoned six ounces of lake water into a collection tube for computer analysis. “Water temperature is thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
Ben tapped his fingers. “Who cares about water temperature? Cold is cold, what did you expect?”
He was annoyed, anxious to hear back from Vostok Command. Defending Ming, I replied, “Water temperature is important because it governs the kinds of organisms that can live in Vostok. The presence of zooplankton and phytoplankton — even insects and fish — all thrive in different temperatures. Chemical reactions generally increase in higher temperatures. The freezing temperature would indicate there are no geothermal vents present in this area. Ming, what about E. coli?”
“Bacteria readings are still processing. Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations are low, as we would expect. The pH is 7.1, highly conducive for fish.”
“Fish?” Ben forced a laugh. “Hate to tell you, but I don’t see so much as a speck of pond scum, let alone a fish. Seems like your people dropped us into a dead zone.”
“Ben may be right,” I said. “Bacteria count is near zero. Sorry to disappoint you, Ming, but if there are fish in this lake, they aren’t defecating in it.”
“Maybe they’re using a toilet,” I heard Ben mutter.
“Barracuda, this is Vostok Command. We have acquired your position. You can power down your lasers. As we suspected, your trajectory was altered during your descent.”
“Altered how?” Ben asked.
“We’re still working the numbers, Captain. You were right on target for the first twenty-seven hundred meters. Somewhere around that mark the sub passed through a magnetic anomaly that veered you off-course. The affected area spans a sixty-five-by-forty-seven-mile section of the plateau that separates the lake’s two basins. There was too much interference for us to catch it from up here, and your suit sensors indicate you probably were asleep during the event.”
“How far off course are we?”
“We have you 152 kilometers southwest of your extraction point. That’s about ninety-four miles.”
Ben slapped his palms to the acrylic dome above his head. “Helluva job, amigo. Your team aimed for the moon and landed us in Cleveland. We’re lucky we even hit water.”
Ming smacked the pilot on the back of his head. “Victor, can you pinpoint the source of the anomaly?”
“We’re still working on that. I’m downloading the SAT image to the Barracuda’s computer. We highlighted your location and the extraction point as references. As you’ll see, you’re in the southern basin, separated from the northern basin by the Vostok ridge. Somewhere along that rise is the source of the anomaly. We suspect the ridge is part of an impact crater from an asteroid. Celestial impacts often magnetize the geology — that’s how they located the crater in the Gulf of Mexico from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs.”
A black-and-white photo pixilated across our computer screens. The image was generated from sensory equipment aboard Onyx and Lacrosse, a series of terrestrial reconnaissance satellites launched into orbit thirty years ago and only recently declassified. The satellites were equipped with synthetic aperture radar and other sophisticated instruments designed to see through cloud cover, ocean, ice, and even soil.
The Onyx satellite had pinpointed our sub by our lasers’ heat signature. The SAR unit had generated the view of Vostok’s topography.
“Captain, we suggest you set a course on heading zero-three-seven. If you average twenty knots, you should reach the extraction point in less than five hours. That will give your team nine hours to collect water samples and explore Vostok before you need to start your ascent.”
“Roger that, Lopez.” Ben brought the sub about until we were pointed on our northeasterly heading, cruising along the surface at twenty knots.
I laid my head back, staring at endless mist as we plowed through perpetual darkness. I could have used my nocturnal glasses, but there was nothing to see. We had just pulled off an incredible engineering feat, gaining access to a lost world preserved beneath fifteen million years of ice, and yet somehow I felt disappointed.
What had I expected? What would have made me happy? Traces of fecal matter from a prehistoric trout? Perhaps a fossil or two?
One thing is for sure: we weren’t about to find anything along the surface.
“Ben, any objections to checking out the bottom?”
“What for?”
“Maybe we can find some fossils.”
Ming raised her head from her computer. “Yes. Very good, Zachary. I wanted to collect silt samples anyway.”
“You two do realize the depths in this basin exceed twenty-five hundred feet?”
“It is a submersible,” I said, winking at Ming. “You’re allowed to get it wet.”
“Suddenly the Sargasso survivor is a daredevil? Okay, Doc. As my tenth-grade English teacher said to me before she popped my cherry, ‘Hold on, kid, I’m goin’ down.’”
I grabbed onto the padded leather support handles as the bow dropped away into a near-vertical descent, the depth gauge’s numbers advancing rapidly.
Four hundred feet…
Seven hundred feet…
“Easy, Captain, there’s no rush.”
“What’s wrong, Doc? I thought you were an adrenaline junkie.”
One thousand feet…
At 1,340 feet I felt the hull groan, the acrylic emergency pod wobbling under the sudden wave of pressure.
Ming reached forward and gripped the pilot’s right arm. “Slow it down or Zachary will pilot the sub and you can catch the next cargo plane back to Wisconsin.”
Ben eased up on the throttle, altering our angle of descent. “No worries. I was just seeing what this vessel could handle. That’s standard operating procedure on a maiden voyage — part of my job.”
“And part of my job is to minimize the risks to the crew. Zachary, are you all right?”
Ugh. “Fine, thank you, Ming.” Yes. Thank you, Ming, for emasculating me in your penis-shaped submersible. And thank you for hiring an ego-driven headcase who managed to get himself kicked out of the Air Force for mistakenly entering a sovereign nation’s air space. And thank you, Angus, for once again screwing up my life.
As we passed two thousand feet, Ming squealed something in Chinese. “Zachary, I just took another water sample. The temperature has dropped to minus sixteen degrees Fahrenheit, with total dissolved solids exceeding two thousand miligrams.”
I turned to face her. “We’re entering a hypersaline chemocline. Vostok is a mineral concentrator. Remember, it’s connected to Antarctica’s oceans by a subglacial river. Residual salts have become trapped over millions of years, concentrated along the bottom. Lake Bonney works the same way; it has a temperature of minus twenty-three. Don Juan Pond is liquid at minus twenty-two. I wouldn’t be shocked to find weird microbial communities thriving down here.”
Geez, Wallace, you are such a nerd.
The tea-colored waters in our headlights grew more turbid as we descended, and the current increased, forcing Ben to decrease his angle of descent.