The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Page 8

  “I don’t believe this,” she said.

  “What don’t you believe?” Hal asked. “We came down to help.”

  “What do you mean help? We’ve been sending messages frantically for the past two weeks trying to get someone to tell us what’s going on. We’re out of supplies, our equipment has been damaged, and we’ve lost some people. And then you guys show up and the elevator shaft up to the surface is completely destroyed. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not as happy to see you as you’d like.”

  “What messages?” Alex said, stepping forth. “We were never told about any of those.”

  “What were you told then,” she said.

  “Command told us that you needed possible evac due to some complications, but that nothing this serious was going on. We didn’t know about the Russians being murdered above—.”

  “What? Murdered? All of them? My god,” she said sitting down as if she had been punched in the gut. We were moving slowly through the dark lake. I looked through the view panel in front of me. There was some kind of visualized enhancer that was picking up the sea creatures all around us. There were crawlers, swimmers, gliders and predators all over the place. I noticed a huge jellyfish get menaced by a shark-looking creature. The shark got a bit too close, something resembling a quick slap from the jellyfish happened, and the shark took off in a hurry, looking wounded. Hands off, Buster.

  “If you were just ordered to do a ‘simple evac’, whatever that means, why would we need soldiers at the bottom of a glacier in some submerged lake that hasn’t been part of the known world for twenty to thirty million years?”

  “There were reports of activity in the area. We weren’t sure what had happened, and they told us that we lost contact with you.”

  “Bullshit. You guys broke off the contact. There wasn’t anything wrong at our end with the communications devices. From our end, we were sending them just fine.”

  “Then maybe from the receiving end?” I asked. “Perhaps someone on our side wasn’t able to receive the message?”

  She scoffed—something that was quite unlike her. She was usually an upbeat person who didn’t like to argue so directly. “That’s impossible. I was sending signals via the electronic cable that we sent through the tunnel. If it didn’t get through, there would be a message coming back saying so. And we used proper channels. Command, which originally sent us here, told us we could use the secure channels, so even if some hostile government tried to block our transmissions, it wouldn’t have worked. What’s more, we followed their instructions perfectly. No, the message was ignored. It got through all right.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would we be in the dark about all of this? That would mean that someone deliberately gave us a faulty briefing,” Alex said.

  “Or that someone lied to command about not receiving the messages and then tried to cover their tracks,” said Jen.

  “If that’s the case then there’s a traitor,” said Hal.

  “Or traitors,” Jen replied, looking at each one of us. From her look, it seemed she didn’t even spare me the scrutiny.

  “Sorry guys,” she continued, but I’m just fresh out of ideas, and the last bit of hope collapsed in that elevator shaft of yours that you came down. I’m guessing none of our Russian colleagues didn’t make it down with you?”

  “No, they didn’t,” I said with more gloom than I wanted to project. They were brilliant scientists who were wasted for some malicious scheme. She gave me a sad look and then looked away. “I know it seemed destructive, but it was our only choice. Remember, we had other Russian colleagues coming after us. It was our best chance to escape the situation we were in. We had to go down through the tunnel because we couldn’t do anything about the bomb that went off and caused its collapse.”

  Jen didn’t seem too impressed by that. “How do you know they were Russian?” she asked.

  I didn’t have an answer for that. The others simply shrugged. I was the one who spoke Russian to them, but of course, just because they spoke Russian didn’t mean they were Russian, or even from the Russian government.

  “Now, I don’t know what happened or why it came down, but that’s not what’s important now. What is important is that we’re now headed back to the main vessel, and we are not in good shape. Without the hope of getting out of here, I don’t think things are going to turn out very rosy.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s your situation,” said Hal.

  “Well, you’ll see it in a minute. We’re heading to the vessel now. We’ve got about ten people left, seven scientists and three engineers.”

  “You had fifteen total down here right?” said Alex.

  “Correct,” she answered.

  “What happened to the rest,” he asked.

  But then, before she could answer, the entire vessel that we were in shook. It felt that we had knocked into something, but looking out the view panels, I could make out no land striking the side of the ship.

  Jen rushed to the control panels and steered the vessel to a halt. We all stood tensely waiting for what would come next, not having any idea of where the trouble was coming from.

  “What’s going—”

  “Shhh—” she hushed Hal who was as angry looking as I was scared.

  We all waited there. It was then that I took the time to see who had made it with us. The vessel was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t see my companions. There were seven, including myself. Hal, Alex, Bret and two other soldiers—Lance and Carl.

  I was about to speak, when—before Jen could hush me—I heard it. It wasn’t a loud presence like a lion growling in the plain, but it was more like the silent path of the cougar who sneaks up close and only until it’s too late, let’s you know that you’re in danger.

  A glance at my companions told me that they had heard it too. We all looked at the two side view panels in utter horror at the thing. It was twenty meters and each of us knew that in an instant, it could destroy our tiny vessel. I felt my stomach shrinking at that horrible sight. It might as well have been the grim reaper floating out there, for that was the megalodon, perhaps the most powerful predator to have ever lived on the planet.

  I looked at Jen in utter horror, but she swatted me away. She was too busy waiting for something, and I looked back at the sea creature. As a scientist who understood the principles of ecology, the first thing I thought was: how could such a large creature end up in a relatively small body of water underneath an ice glacier? This wasn’t supposed to happen, but apparently the megalodon didn’t know it.

  The others, perhaps knowing of the dangers in a more vague sense, kept their mouths shut.

  We hung there, with our vessel slowly drifting in a direction I could not easily tell (though part of me guessed that we must have been going upwards since the pressure had to have been very high relative to the inside of the chamber).

  Even a few minutes after we had no more sight of the huge creature, we were gestured to shush by Jen. Perhaps she had seen the destructive power of that ancient predator that I had only gleaned from textbooks.

  Finally, we relaxed when Jen sighed heavily and relaxed her face into her hands.

  There were some muffled curse words, and nervous laughter from the soldiers, but they seemed a bit thrown off by the deadly figure that had floated past our ship. Everyone knew from what they saw that the thing out there could have destroyed us in just a few seconds. Its size alone was enough to tell us that, but what really caught us off guard was the silent nature of it. Everyone imagined ancient predators like dinosaurs as giant monstrosities that howled and made a great deal of noise and left a heavy footprint. Perhaps the terrible thing is that the ancient killer that we saw out there was silent as a mouse. Our guns and training were useless against it.

  “That was a megalodon. Where did a megalodon come from,” I whispered, as I knew it was also on the minds of my companions.

  “That is not unusual down here,” she said before giving a shuddered
laugh. Her voice made it clear that she was on the very cliff of insanity and only her survival instinct and tough character kept her from leaping over the edge.

  “What do we do about it?”

  “What can we do? I’m not an expert on ancient marine life, but it seems to me, compared with the size of this lake that it should not be able to survive that long in such a tiny environment. What’s going on down here is still a mystery, Jake. We just don’t know.”

  “What has your research found out so far?”

  “I’ll let you know when we get back to our station, or what’s left of it,” she replied.

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s left of it’?” Hal said. “Jesus, does this day get any better? Or nighttime actually.”

  “Look, lower your voice, OK? Whatever you’ve just gone through is nothing compared to what we’ve faced down here.”

  “Look lady,” Hal said. “None of this was supposed to happen. I had zero notification of the real status down here, and therefore, I just got caught completely off guard. Now I realize that some of that may not be your fault, per se, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be told to sit and listen by some goddamn scientist who seems more interested in her data collection than getting the hell out of this frozen shithole lake.”

  I knew Jen, and so her reaction was pretty predictable. She slammed her fist down on the control panel that she had been working on, swiveled around in her chair, and faced Hal directly in the face. She was perhaps half his size, as he was a pretty big man.

  “I’ve lost about three people of my team, mostly to government incompetence and ignorance by the planners up there—the same people whom you’re a part of, so if you’ll forgive me, I’m not one goddamned iota at all sympathetic to your bullshit tale there.”

  Hal’s reaction was as quick and started as a junkyard dog who has been bested by a much smaller adversary. “Look here honey, you’d better talk—and talk fast. Right now, it’s looking like we’re moving away from the only way out of this ‘situation’ and you’re not answering me is making my gun finger twitch in new and unexpected ways. Now, I’m guessing that the little control panel you’re running right now wouldn’t be that hard to pick up and—”

  “Look admiral—captain—whatever you are, you can point your gun at me, but if anything should come out of it, we’re all pretty much dead. OK? We’re at about one thousand bar down here, got it? Any tickle on these walls from your pop gun, and we’ll be crushed faster than all the beer cans you crushed in college. And furthermore, it would be a sure way to bring back that our little friend Nemo who just swam by, so while I’ll be safely in the next world, your sorry ass will be sucked out and spit into the water, and you won’t even have time to drown to death before you’re turned into man-tuna for Jaws out there.”

  Hal said nothing, but he stood facing her with a scowl that could not have been acting.

  “So if you’ll excuse me,” she continued. “And if you don’t want to help, then I suggest you shut your goddamned mouth, so I can steer us back to the only remaining place that is habitable in this ‘shithole lake’, as you call it.”

  Surprisingly Hal did something I would have never thought: he remained quiet, though his eyes seemed to light up even more fiercely. Here was a guy who could not easily turn down his temper once it had been aroused. I knew that it would come back to haunt us later, but I was not exactly sure how.

  Then she looked at me. “Jake, sweetie, where did you meet these guys? More friends from your fraternity?”

  “Hah, cute,” I said. “Where are we going, Jen?”

  “I’ve already said it. We’re going to the research facility that we built inside the lake itself away from the landing zone where you just came through. I really want to know why our messages were not listened to, and why they didn’t send the help we needed, but I think it’s best that we get back first, so that way we can sort it out together. I’m tired and scared, Jake. I can’t go through this stuff right now.

  The others simply sat there in the small swivel chairs attached to the sub. Already the shock of our situation had set in, and they seemed to be more or less resigned to it and trying in their own ways to cope with it. I did my best as well, but I had been in plenty of sticky situations that this one seemed to be just another catastrophe in my life, if not exactly just another day at the office.

  “Uh, excuse me ma’am,” said Alex.

  In response, Jen looked at him impassively from her chair. Her eyes had a kind of worn quality which I had not seen in them before. It was a bit like looking into a soldier’s eyes after they had gone away to war for a very long time. It was the face of someone who is trained away from pleasure in life and simply goes from bad circumstances to worse, as if that’s all there is in the world.

  “Can I ask where in the world we are?”

  She looked at all of us then, looking into our eyes as if checking to see if we were strong enough to receive the plain facts that she was about to give.

  “Well, all right. I guess you deserve to hear it, so I’ll tell it quite plainly. You are now in a prehistoric lake that has not been altered by our world for over twenty million years.”

  There was a collective howl of disbelief from all of us. “How could that be possible, Jen? I said There was never any way that that could be. This lake was frozen over about 30 million years ago. How could it be much older than that?”

  “I can’t explain it, but that’s what our tests showed. I’ll let the others talk to you more about it, but the creatures in this lake are somehow from all over time, and there are many types of species that we have never seen.”

  “But how is that possible? I thought you scientists figured out every creature there is like that floating dinosaur shark back there?”

  She looked at me then, as she knew I had the answer.

  “Most scientists believe that the fossil record—all of those bones that you’re talking about—is actually only the tip of the iceberg and that there were actually many, many more species that actually lived and that we have no way of knowing about since their fossils were not preserved. What’s more, Antarctica is a huge place where we have basically no fossils from.” I shifted in my seat as I talked. “We really are living in a world we know very little about. The geological record is very incomplete, at least as far as we have it now.”

  “Jesus Christ. These are some of the things I guess I never learned in school, “Hal said. “About how much uncertainty are we talking here in terms of the number of species?”

  I looked at Jen. “About one percent is what many people estimate. And again, none of that comes from this continent. This really is the undiscovered country.”

  “So you mean that ninety-nine percent of all species out there that have ever walked on the planet have never been identified or talked about even though it may have been around a long time?”

  “Basically, yes,” I said. “Except for one thing. That’s only talking about the inhabited continents. We know zero about this one. For this Antarctica, it’s a whole new ballgame. It may as well be a new planet.”

  “Holy shit. And all of those creatures could be down here?” Hal asked quickly. His voiced was getting panicked, and I suddenly became worried about his judgement for the first time. I didn’t know how likely it was that everyone would hold up to the stress.

  “All right,” she continued in a whisper. “I know it’s devastating to hear all of this right now, especially when you were all lied to by your superiors, but remember, we are in a very dangerous place here, a place where millions of years ago, creatures finely tuned to kill their prey lurked, and it’s that environment that we will be in until we get out of here.”

  “So you’ve been unable to get out of here?” I asked. Things weren’t adding up. Why would Kraftberger lie to me so thoroughly? None of it made any sense. “At least I know you’re still alive.”

  Jen hesitated before answering. She glanced back at me from the controls with a look I could
n’t read and then looked forward once again. After about a minute of silence she said, “There have been a few things going on down here. For one, there’s been an accident—more than one actually. We’ve already lost some people as I mentioned before. And we’ve got some problems, but we should really save that for when we go back. As I have already indicated, I was chosen to see if it was feasible to go up the elevator you all came down in. I need not tell you that result.”

  “What kind of problems?” Hal asked.

  Looking out of the view screen, I noticed that our view was becoming clearer of the environment we were in. There was a luminescent glow radiated from the lights of the ship we were in. I looked down at the sonar mapping panel. It looked far larger than the reports had suggested. The lake was huge. I had never been to Lake Erie, but I was starting to appreciate its size. How could this environment exist like this? Perhaps it was larger than we had thought. What I believed to be true was that it was fifty kilometers wide, two hundred fifty kilometers long and just over a kilometer deep. The mapping devices we used by satellite had been able to penetrate the ice and get accurate measurements of the floor of the sea we were in, but it was possible that errors were made when calculating the size of the lake. The readings from Jen’s data said it was much bigger than that—perhaps half again as large on all dimensions. Of course there could have been numerous explanations for the larger than expected size. One of them could have been just me blowing things out of proportion, but none of the other explanations jumped out as plausible.

  “I can’t get into the issues we’ve been having right now. It’s fairly complicated, and I have to steer us through this tunnel, and it’s going to take my concentration.”

  “Tunnel? I thought this was a lake.” Hal said.

  Without responding, she steadied the controls and we glided slowly at a reduced speed.

  “Even some lakes have underground tunnels,” I said. It hung there in lame silence and was ignored by everyone.