The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Read online

  “Do you think it’s going to survive the explosion and coming collapse?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s our only chance now.”

  “That’s true.”

  “2 minutes, and we’re going to feel Frosty the Snowman breathing down our necks.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said.

  “Here it is,” Alex said. Since the gap allowed two people at most, we moved in two lines, single file through it right when it was high enough to let us through.

  The platform was perhaps five meters from the bottom when the explosion went off. A deafening roar took hold of the entire passageway, and we ran towards the entrance of a passage that slowly opened up as we got lower.

  I was barely able to clear the platform when a loud crash came behind me. Clumps of ice fell over me, spilled through the door even though it was shut. The platform was entirely engulfed, but apparently the entrance was sturdy enough to protect us since we huddled together while the ceiling held. It was low, perhaps about two meters at most, but very sturdy looking.

  The room was about ten feet long and contained only a few items in it. Besides the dim lighting, which was still on at the top, there were a few crates strewn along the floor. None of them appeared to have anything inside them, and some of them were broken apart.

  “Thank god. This whole tunnel is supported by some pretty strong infrastructure,” said Hal.

  “Let’s hope it lasts,” I said, rising to my feet. There was nothing wrong with me, but I was shaking from nearly being crushed by the collapsed elevator shaft.

  I looked up. The end of the hall was sealed by a metal door that seemed to be slightly open and had no lights coming out of it. That wasn’t good.

  “How many people are supposed to be down here?”

  “At least around ten or so,” said Alex. “But we’re not sure about the exact number since there was an accident and reported casualties.”

  “What?” I said looking through the semi-lit room. “You never said anything about this.’

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re here now, and part of our job is to figure out the situation. We didn’t know the Russians would be onto us. We’re going to just have to find the crew and then get the hell out of here.”

  “How do you propose that? We’re trapped under a few billion tons of ice and snow,” I said.

  “I know, but there’s another way out. I was briefed on the alternate exit plans.”

  “But those other exits might have been damaged in the explosion.”

  “Perhaps,” Alex said.

  I studied Hal’s face. He was the leader of this operation, but he seemed to have less intel than Alex did. Hal had on one of those Why do you know more than me? looks. He likely shrugged it off since we each came from separate groups, and our superiors weren’t noted for their liberal use of information dispensing. There was no time to investigate further though. We were in a dangerous situation.

  “Maybe that was what the Russian’s plan was all along. They knew they couldn’t get down here without our help, and so they thought they could just sabotage the whole thing by destroying it—perhaps they figured our government would write it off as some huge accident.

  “It’s not really worth figuring out what their plan was or wasn’t,” Hal said. “For right now, we have to find the others and then find another way out. Let’s just focus on our objectives here now.”

  “And we might need your help since you’re a geologist,” Alex said to me.

  “What can I do? I don’t have the equipment to get us out of here. It doesn’t exist. Not this far down deep.”

  “Well, we’ll figure something out,” Hal said. “Come on.”

  We moved towards the metal door at the end of the room, and Alex peered through it, holding a gun in the process. It had a long handle that appeared to be well-worn. Hal backed him up and a few of the other soldiers held combat stances as well.

  I was about to speak, but one of the others urged silence.

  Hal opened the door slowly, peeking through as much as possible as he did so, but nothing happened. Eventually, he swung the door nearly fully open with a loud creaking noise, but I couldn’t make out what was past it because the lighting was so poor. It looked like it was some kind of storage room past it, but I couldn’t be sure. Possibly, it served as some kind of holding ground for gear to be used later, added to the stuff to be put on the research vessel. It was held up with powerful looking beams. Whoever the engineers were that built this place, my hat’s off to them.

  “It’s clear,” Hal said. He had poked his head through the door and came back to face us.

  I noticed that it was oddly warm, much warmer than it should have been. However, at that pressure and depth below the surface of the tundra, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I felt the sweat beneath my heavy coat as I got up to move. Some of the other soldiers gingerly got up and moved towards the door. There was barely any light, but the floor was not impeded in any way. All of the light came from our flashlights, and the light shined annoyingly off of metal surfaces scattered throughout the room, causing us to squint. The room’s structure was built with a portable tiling similar to the kind that filled every standard office building.

  When I got to the door, I was slightly dazed and thought for the first time since arriving that perhaps I had been injured from the fallout from the explosion. Hal checked my face and didn’t say anything, so I figured I was OK. The room smelled like salt and faintly of rotting fish.

  Through the door there was quite a mess. On the other side, there were papers, desks, chairs and books that were thrown around at random. It seemed that there had been a flood. That’s how bad the disarray was. Most of the things in the room seemed to be more or less misplaced rather than drenched or ruined by water.

  Someone found a light switch and hit it. The light was filtered through some kind of bluish filter. With it on, I could discern its contents much better than the hallway we had been in, and I could see my surroundings through the blue lighting. I turned my head to the right of the entranceway, and it was then that I saw it for the first time: through a very well reinforced window, objects of shadow and light flowed back and forth in a huge body of light purple effervescence. Lake Victor called to me with a voice that was partly the voice of an ancient siren, and part a long lost atavistic urging that connected with a more primitive side of my being. I was drawn to that window, awed by it and terrified in equal parts. The blue light was just enough to illuminate its closest depths. This was no small lake, but something much larger. How it was possible when the area should have been much smaller was beyond me.

  I was mesmerized by the scene I saw through the window. Fish and other sea creatures of all shapes and sizes moved back and forth within my field of view. Some were familiar like the ice fish. Some were foreign and possibly ancient—they shouldn’t have existed. They were these old looking armored fish that hadn’t existed for millions of years. Dangerous predators moved through the water with tentacles, claws, jaws, spears, poison and stingers that unfolded into a veritable contest for survival. I saw why they had used the blue lighting so as not to upset the sea creatures that were moving back and forth.

  “Holy shit,” someone said. “It looks like we’re in the world’s finest aquarium with an entrance but no exit.”

  As a scientist, I was supremely awed by the body of water that could be an entire ocean locked under an icy depth. How big I couldn’t guess from the mere view I was looking at, but I knew then that humankind had been totally wrong about its calculations. There were undiscovered regions out there, and here was one of them.

  “Jake,” a voice called. So absorbed was I in the spectacle that I didn’t notice it at first.

  The rough hand grabbed me next, and I turned towards it with a primitive vicious anger. I was forced out of my reverie.

  It was a face I hadn’t seen for a long time. Jen Li stood in front of me and shook me heavily, saying something that I coul
dn’t comprehend. She looked shaken and starved, dressed in a heavy parka, and I realized that the loud crash of the explosion had taken some of my hearing away.

  “Where is our rescue? And where is the oxygen that we requested nearly a million times?”

  I looked dumbfounded back at her. Then I looked at Hal and Alex who weren’t paying attention. They had something else on their minds far more important. The room we were in, perhaps a square twenty foot by twenty foot, was becoming flooded with water.

  “That goddamn explosion must have let some of the water in,” Hal said. He noticed Jen, and I gave my nod of recognition, and he relaxed somewhat. The others gave her a glance and little else. The entire focus was on the new threat.

  Either Jen understood that I was as confused as she was, or the pressing need of the situation finally ended her effort to get information out of me. For the first time, she too realized the severity of the situation—perhaps better than any of us. She moved back and screamed, “Watch out for the water. I think I just saw something. There are creatures in that lake that are deadly. We’ve got to get out of here.” The water was now up to a quarter of a meter—enough to reach our knees.

  But before she could finish one of the soldiers with us screamed, and I saw something that I made me shudder in horror: a long, gray aquatic creature, perhaps six feet long, had attached its long tentacles around him and was slowly working its huge jaws towards the man’s head. It was a cross between a squid and some kind of lobster, but unlike either as it had two very large eyes that seemed to nearly bulge out of their sockets. It had a long-winged gait, and pulled itself along with two enormous tentacles that propelled it onto the hapless soldier, who at this point was screaming, frantically trying to remove the creature from its awful grip. The soldier, I saw through the blue light, was Ross.

  The others were too afraid to fire, as was I. He was twisting too fast, and the shot was too narrow. “Get this fucking thing off of me,” he said. Hal and Bret were moving in to help him, but the creature was determined. Others were making their way for us. They had detected prey, and now they were moving in.

  The speed of those things was unreal. It slithered around him, and as I moved towards him to help, I felt a bump on my leg and saw another of the creatures—this time smaller—slither by.

  Through the noise and confusion, I heard Jen yell, “Anomalocaris. Ancient sea creatures. Deadly. They’re everywhere. We have to get out of here. Follow me.”

  I got moving after that. Some of the soldiers started shooting at the monsters. I followed Jen towards another room which seemed slope upwards. Hal and Alex followed along with two of the others. They were all shooting, and I cursed myself for not being able to find a clear shot.

  As soon as we entered the other room, Jen pushed a red button that chimed an alarm and shut the door we had come through. Ross was being tended to by Bret and Hal. He was screaming in pain. One of the things huge teeth, which looked like a curled sword made of bone, was stuck in his chest just below the shoulder.

  “How do we get out of here,” Hal barked. “We need to get out of this place. Where is the back door to get topside?”

  “Topside?” Jen asked incredulously. “You’ve got to be kidding. This fucking room and the elevator beyond it was the plan A, B and C. There is no other way up there. You guys blew the whole thing. We were hoping you would find a way out for us.”

  “We didn’t blow anything, honey,” Hal snapped. “It was those goddamned Russians.” He looked ready to shoot somebody. Ross was still screaming out in pain. I would be too if I had an ancient predators tooth stuck into me like that.

  “So what do we do now? Is there anywhere else to go?” Alex asked.

  I looked at Jen and then back to Alex and Hal. The area we were in didn’t look too promising as a place to hold out. The room itself served as perhaps a workshop and repair area and was dark and bare, little more than a few pieces of rusty equipment, some drilling equipment like spent drill bits for exploration as well as some clothes scattered around. It looked like there had been chaos recently, something I would have to ask Jen later about. It was certainly something I wasn’t expecting. I thought it would be a boring run of the mill research operation on a classified site. Instead, I got the Wild West mixed with some kind of war zone involving ancient monsters.

  “I came here in one of the subs,” Jen said. “I wanted to scope out the equipment and hopefully make contact above originally, but I didn’t expect to rescue people, so it’s going to be a tight fit. Oh, and there’s one other problem,” she said. She pointed over at something, and we all looked. Not far from the door, there was a small crack appearing in the wall. Apparently, the little worm creatures were eating their way through the metal compartment that we were in. The crack was widening and from what I could tell, it was letting in water from the lake. It couldn’t have been directly connected, I figured because the pressure was so high. They must have come in from an intermediary chamber. Otherwise the water would have gushed in almost instantaneously due to the enormous pressure.

  The creatures that were chewing through the wall were about two to three feet long and looked like some kind of mixture between a Venus-flytrap, a sponge fish and a shark.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Jen. “Today’s not my lucky day. We really don’t want to come into contact with those things.”

  “Agreed,” Hal said. “Let’s move.”

  Hal, Alex, Bret, and even Ross all drew their guns, and I drew mine. We fired off a few shots, aiming low in order to not hit the walls. I don’t think any of mine connected. Those damn things could move. They were slithering wildly though as if unsure of this place that had lots of air in it. Nevertheless, they inched closer to us by the second.

  “Where do we go?” I asked.

  “Follow me,” Jen said. She had been putting something into her backpack. It looked like a few items that had been lying in the room, but I couldn’t make out what they were.

  We moved quickly towards the opposite end that we had come in. Jen pushed a button on the wall, and a small portal that was perpendicular to the ground opened up. It was perhaps a little over a meter high, so we all had to duck down to move through it. A small amount of water flowed through it, and I noticed that the water felt quite warm, warmer than I would have expected anyway, considering we were under about a mile of ice in the heart of Antarctica.

  “This way. We’ve got to get to the sub before they swim through. I didn’t realize they had infested this place so bad, or I wouldn’t have risked it.”

  “Why did you come here at all?” Hal asked.

  “Like I mentioned before—checking out the situation here. And because I thought someone might at some point come to rescue us. I wanted to set up some kind of way to send them a message. I found you guys and found out that you were the ones needing the rescuing,” she said in a sardonic voice.

  “Rescue you from what?” I asked.

  She turned towards me then. “In about four days, we are going to run out of oxygen. Now with you down here, it’s going to pass even quicker, so I’m not so sure about how I feel about having you down here. That and you managed to blow the only escape route out of here, and it’s amounting to be a pretty bad day for us.”

  Then she moved into another room, one which was much more massive, and we followed. It was some kind of landing area. There was a large craft in the center of the room, partially submerged in water. I knew that it was our destination.

  Jen moved towards the craft without hesitation, opening a panel on the side and then gestured for us to follow. It was about meters long and made of some combination between metal and thick transparent material—perhaps reinforced glass or plastic (I later learned that it was a kind of metallic glass, one of the strongest substances known). The vessel had a long, sleek look to it, and it certainly didn’t seem old or outdated—far from it. Its long high-tech yellow and black design had an elegant flair to it that gave me the first bit of confidence since we had l
anded into this awful situation. There were cameras all around it behind the glass, making it an excellent observation craft.

  In no time, she had the main portal open on the side, and with the sounds of rushing water behind us and those slithering demons not far behind, we didn’t keep her waiting long. This whole nightmare didn’t give us a chance to slow down. We quickly made our way into the craft. She was right, it was pretty tight inside. Nonetheless, we each had a place to sit. There were view panels all around the craft, and we each had a wonderful view of what was happening outside.

  “EROS, take us back home,” Jen said to the panel in front of her.

  “Very well,” replied a female voice. “You shall arrive in approximately twenty-two minutes, thirteen seconds.” The vessel started to move.

  “What do you mean the only way out? I was told that there was at least one more passage back to the surface,” Alex said.

  “There was until the collapse of the B and C tunnels,” Jen said. “I checked their integrity with the cameras on the way in. That wasn’t your fault though entirely.”

  “Oops,” Hal said. “Looks like we’re stuck down here. Right?”

  “Well, ask the expert here,” she said, turning towards me. “He’s the geologist.”

  I looked at them all, dumbfounded. Jen started moving towards a seat at the front of the craft. Behind us, I could hear the squishing sound that had accompanied the creatures that had attacked us before.

  “I don’t even know where we are,” I said. “I’m sorry to be so helpless, but I wasn’t expecting this. Once I have a chance to read the maps of this area, then maybe I can figure it out.”

  “That’s going to be a little bit hard,” Jen said. “Considering there are no reliable maps down here to begin with. We discovered that soon after we arrived. Didn’t you get our messages about this?”

  “What messages?” both Hal and Alex said in unison.

  She simply looked back incredulously. “You’re joking right,” she asked them, but the unpleasant realization that they were not joking slowly crept into her face, and she turned away disgusted and for a time—afraid.