The police turned and dashed away as Vaughn turned back to Lopez. ‘Did you get anything out of him?’
‘Wilms was here,’ she said, ‘and he said something about a satellite, called K-I-L, that belongs to Wilms.’
‘I’ll get Jarvis onto it,’ Vaughn said as he hurried away.
Lopez looked down one last time at LeMay’s body, and then with one hand she closed his eyes for the last time.
***
XXXIX
Antarctica
‘I think you might want to take a look at this,’ he said softly.
‘Already looking at it,’ Amy replied in a whisper.
The frigid blackness was now alive with billions of tiny flickering lights, as though he were witnessing the glittering majesty of a galaxy drifting past amid the blackness of space. The light flickered through the
Seehund’s
cockpit in a dazzling, silent array.
‘What are they?’
‘Antarctic krill,’ she replied. ‘They’re crustaceans that lives in large groups called swarms, sometimes reaching densities of thirty thousand individuals per cubic metre. In terms of biomass, it’s probably the most abundant animal species on the planet with an estimated five hundred million tons of them around the Southern Ocean.’
Ethan watched as the densely packed krill swarmed past, flickering lights rippling across each of the creatures’ backs, which were no longer than his little finger. Their light reflected off the submarine’s hull as if it were just below the waves, and above he could see the underside of the glacier glowing blue far above them, its surface rolling and smooth, sculptured by the unseen currents of warmer water.
‘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.
A moment of silence passed by, punctuated by loud clicks and bangs as the pressure changed slightly and the hull expanded a little as it rose up from the seabed.
Suddenly, the electric motor hummed and the lights flickered back on as Ethan heard the oxygen pumps rattle back into life. The internal lights flickered on again and he let out a loud sigh of relief as the dials and gauges appeared as a soft green glow around him.
‘Jesus,’ Amy uttered as her laptop began to reboot in front of her. ‘I could’ve done without that.’
Ethan checked the gauges and then looked at the communications screen on Amy’s laptop as it started up again.
‘Doctor Chandler, can you hear me?’
A fuzz of static was all that was returned as they waited for a response. Ethan looked up uselessly out of the dome and figured that they had been cut off for good, for now, by the thermal channel they had passed through during their descent.
‘That warm water flowing through here will rise up continuously and disrupt our line of communication,’ he said. ‘We might not be able to get it back until we get closer to the base again.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Amy said. ‘The sub’s working and we’re alive. Good work, captain.’
Amy whipped him a brisk salute over her shoulder, her smile bright in the gloomy hull, and Ethan saw her laptop screen and the signal upon it.
‘We need to figure out a way of getting that thing up to the dock without finishing off our batteries,’ he said.
Amy thought for a moment. ‘Riggs said that this submarine was originally designed to be rigged with a detachable explosive charge in the bow, right?’
‘Yeah,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘But that charge isn’t in place, only the shell and…’ He smiled as he realized what she was getting at. ‘If the charge shell was magnetic, we could tether it and lower it down.’
‘If the Black Knight is magnetic too, then the nose shell might be strong enough to pull it up to the surface on a tether. That’s why we saw all those krill blooms – there might be iron in Black Knight, and iron is magnetic.’
Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s our only chance now, so let’s give it a try. If it doesn’t work we’ll mark the location and hope that the support teams arrive before Veer storms the base.’
Amy wasted no time as she clambered out of her seat and made her way forward to the nose of the submarine. Although designed to be fitted with torpedoes, the
Seehund’s
original plans had mimicked a similar and successful British design which carried an explosive charge in its bow.
Amy could make out the charge casing before her, sitting beyond an open pressure door the size of a dinner plate. She peered inside and saw the casing, which was attached to the submarine via a series of mechanical pins, themselves connected to a lever inside the hull.
‘Seal the hull, pull the lever and she’s away,’ Amy said. ‘I can tether it to the pin mechanism in the front here.’
‘You’ll need cable,’ Ethan said as he reached down to his waist beneath his jacket and began pulling off a length of rappel line. ‘How far are we from the signal?’
‘Maybe twenty yards,’ Amy replied.
The confines of the submarine made it tough to move, but he reeled off what he hoped was something more than twenty yards and handed the coil down to Amy. She shuffled her way back to the bow and looped the rappel line twice through a hoop in the
Seehund’s
hull. She then coiled the line through the charge shell and back through the locking mechanism and finally clipped it in place.
Ethan peered down into the submarine and watched as she backed out of the nose and then heaved the pressure door shut.
‘Make damned sure that’s tight,’ Ethan said.
Amy did not dignify his concern with a reply as she sealed the door shut and began heaving the pressure wheel over and over until it would go no further.
‘Sealed,’ she said. ‘Now, get us overhead the signal.’
Ethan complied as he advanced the power lever and the submarine inched forward. He adjusted the hydroplanes and the submarine began to ascend gently through the darkness as a fresh bloom of bioluminescent creatures shimmered past the
Seehund
in the darkness, and Ethan finally caught a glimpse of something ahead on the seafloor before it was obscured by the bow of the submarine.
At first, in the brief moment that he could see it, Ethan’s brain could not quite understand what he was looking at. A trembling haze of heat seemed to surround it, the heat causing the water around it to billow and shiver in much the same way that heat bent the passage of light through the air and distorted it.
A black shape, angular, unnatural, resting on the ocean floor and surrounded by a vibrant cloud of pulsing bioluminescence. Dense clouds of krill and other marine creatures swirled around the object, which was half as large as the
Seehund
itself and enshrouded in a casing as black as oil and completely unreflective, as though the submarine’s lights did not exist despite their illumination of the object’s surroundings.
Ethan lost sight of the object as he climbed the submarine upward and over it, going by gut instinct as he tried to maintain a reasonable distance from the device and prevent the submarine from losing power again. He knew that he had very little compressed air remaining and with Black Knight shackled beneath them he’d need every last bit of buoyancy he could get.