The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Page 9

  I glanced sideways at Hal’s face, and he seemed like he wanted to murder her. I held my hands out and at the ready in case he acted on his impulse. Outside the submarine, the lake revealed its secrets. Long trenches of rock and sediment flashed before us. Thousands of fish and other sea creatures floated through the miniaturized ocean. I realized that the whole scene before me was supposed to be impossible, but I nonetheless marveled at it all. Ten meters out from our vessel was a group of perhaps five trilobites scattering along the bottom of the seabed. Ancient mollusks and arthropods, some of whose forms I have never seen before, chased after smaller prey and silent sea spiders scampered around in all directions, barely disturbing the sediment below them.

  “How in the hell can all these things live down here without any energy? Without the sun to give life to the plankton and other things that fish eat?” I marveled.

  “We don’t know Jake, but we have some ideas.”

  “I’d love to hear them,” I said bewildered. I had never expected to see so much life in this dark submerged lake. As far as I knew there was simply no way for all of these living creatures to be down here.

  I put my befuddlement in check and glanced around. Many of the forms were foreign to me. Despite all of this, however, all over, I could see the huge presence of one variant of a species that was somewhat familiar to me: the jellyfish. Only these jellyfish were no ordinary ones of the tens of species I was familiar with. They seemed foreign yet familiar at the same time. They were all over the place, and I knew that they could not survive without oxygen. I did not know what the source of the oxygen was. Maybe there was enough sealed down here? But that required a connection to the atmosphere. Did phytoplankton, which produced oxygen from carbon dioxide, exist in this submerged lake? If so, how did they produce energy without access to the sun for photosynthesis?

  I knew that this was no lake, but a bustling sea in its own right. How the size and vivacity of the life here existed under such high pressures eluded me. It was another mystery I would have to investigate this matter further. It was like walking through a museum and seeing the fossils come to life in front of me, but I knew the environment was much more dangerous than what I knew so naturally in the everyday world.

  We emerged from the tunnel and the display panel seemed to indicate something important approaching near the exit. There was no light in the tunnel or anywhere else in the lake, of course. The display panel seemed to use radio waves, infrared waves and other frequencies of the wave spectrum to indicate objects of importance.

  “There it is,” Jen said, motioning towards an object directly in front of us. Perched on some stilts, it was a large steel donut object that seemed to be illuminating a dim light. There was a strange feeling that something eerily evil about this research laboratory existed that I had read about from Kraftberger’s reports (it was about one of the only things he had clued me in on with any level of accuracy). Here was an object that was designed to live on one of earth’s most tucked away places, a vessel so compact it could withstand thousands of pounds of force here underneath the massive Antarctic ice glaciers, but it somehow belonged here as if it, most of all, despite all of the ancient sea creatures around us was meant for this icy tomb. I knew as soon as I saw it that I would be lucky leaving that place alive. Indeed, I expected that it would somehow capture me as quick as any underwater sea predator, and I became ever determined not to let it capture me within its deathly contraptions.

  Chapter 5

  “Who are they,” the voice demanded upon entering the laboratory. It came from a rather short, but nonetheless prominent man of perhaps sixty. His eyes had a fishy quality about them as if peering from within crystal balls, and yet he wore no glasses that I could see. His mouth was a near slit that slid down as if pulled by gravity more so than the rest of his face, and he didn’t seem to be very concerned with the fact that there was blood on some of us. It was obvious that we had survived some kind of struggle, but his countenance merely gazed at us as if we were invading bacteria, readily exterminated by medicine. “And did you find out about getting us more oxygen?”

  The man was Dr. Stephen Kranehouse, whom I knew before as a cantankerous old scholar schooled in microbiology. I learned He was more interested in scientific discovery than the society that he was reporting his findings to. He wore a thick diving suit that had various instruments attached to it as well as a curious instrument hanging from his back. I later learned that he carried extra oxygen to help him cope with his asthma through the machine. I gathered he did not recognize me, but I remembered him from an earlier conference we attended.

  “They’re here because they were sent to help us,” Jen said, taking off her outer suit. It was extremely cold there, despite the heaters, which seemed to be on very low settings. I had been lucky enough to have several layers and was just beginning to come out of the shock of the previous near disaster. “And no, I didn’t find more oxygen. By the way, the elevator’s not an option anymore.”

  “Well then. It seems like they’ve done a poor job,” Kranehouse said as he threw up his arms. “Now we’ve got even less air to breathe than before, and every hour—every minute it gets worse. And what do you mean, the elevator is not an option?”

  “What’s he talking about,” Hal said, speaking for the first time. “Why is there less air to breathe?”

  “Because,” Jen said, “we’ve had an accident, and our supplies have dwindled since then.”

  “Accident?” I said. “How much air do we have left?”

  “Your second question: I don’t know, but it’s not much. Perhaps a few days, a week, I don’t know,” she said looking at me in silence. We were all stunned at this. “And to your first question, I’ve got to show you to explain it,” Jen said. “There’s something very definitely wrong about this place, but something so wonderful too.”

  “You don’t say,” I said in the most sarcastically flat voice that I could muster. “I just saw a creature that shouldn’t have been alive for three hundred million years just float past like—I don’t know. It was normal or something.”

  “Well to them, maybe, it was,” she answered coolly. I looked back at her and realized that she was under a lot of stress too.

  “Jen,” a visibly angry Dr. Kranehouse said. “You didn’t answer my question. What happened to the elevator? Why is it not an option? That was our hope of getting out of here.”

  “Because it was blown to shit,” Hal said. “OK? Satisfied? And it nearly got us too.”

  Dr. Kranehouse gaped at Hal.

  “Did you bring anything? Any supplies?” asked a man who had just entered. He was carrying a large wrench in his hand, and he had an unassuming face, but I could tell that he had authority. He was well muscled and had brown hair that was meticulously combed.

  “We brought a few things, but a lot of our equipment was lost when the structure we were in collapsed. Also we lost a lot of gear on the elevator, which is now submerged in the ice and surrounded by sea demons,” said Alex in an incredulous voice. “I was trained to fight people, OK? I didn’t go there to fight these little sharkazoids or whatever you scientists call them. I got zero training for this sort of thing.”

  “Well, I imagine you point you little gun at them and pull the trigger just like anything else,” said Dr. Kranehouse walking towards us again. He was animated once again.

  “Who are you guys anyway? Scientists? Engineers?”

  “We’re the rescue party, but we don’t exactly have anything we can do to help you get rescued at the moment—anyway,” said Hal. “We’re working on it though. The situation is quite dynamic.”

  “I’d say,” replied Dr. Kranehouse. “As far as I see it, it’s getting a little too dynamic, especially since you all stepped in here.”

  “Lighten up Stephen,” said Jen.

  “Jen, I won’t have you addressing me in that tone. I’m the senior scientist of this project, and I call the shots. Remember, we’re in a life or death situation here
and these people are not helping.”

  “Look doc—Kranehouse is your name, right?” Hal said. “I can assure you, we’re going to do what we can to get us out of here as soon as possible. There’s another way out of this lake right?”

  “Actually, we’re in more of what we could call a subterranean sea,” replied Dr. Kranehouse with a flat expression. “And you are?”

  “I’m Hal—the leader of our team. We’re one man short unfortunately.”

  Dr. Kranehouse studied him and said not a word. He gave Hal a suspicious look.

  “Whatever you want to call it. Have it your way—a sea. I need your help in finding a way out of here. Now, I’ve lost a good person on my team like I said, and I want to make sure that death is honored. I don’t need some smug scientists hindering my progress on something that we can achieve.”

  I watched this exchange in silence. It was quite a scene since I knew both had big egos.

  “I think we should all focus now on how to get out of this mess,” I said in a voice that was not too loud, nor too soft. “Isn’t that the best approach? Like you said Dr. Kranehouse, we are running out of time, our oxygen is limited, and we need to do something about it.”

  They all looked at me as if for guidance—or as if I were crazy—I couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Well, I’ll just say it. Since you didn’t come here with much more equipment, I don’t see how we’re all going to get out of here alive. I’m Bernie Ziller, and I’m the captain of this rig. We’ve been attacked, and the hull of this ship is severely damaged so that I don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

  I looked at Jen. She shrugged in a way that said, “I was going to tell you but…”

  “Are you saying we have another problem on top of the air?” I asked Ziller. “This ship is going to breakdown at some point?”

  “Worse than that,” he replied. “We’ve got so much pressure down here that any dent in the hull causes a process to occur where eventually the whole thing collapses in on itself. I can show you if you like.”

  “Yes, please, but later,” I said. “What caused the dents in the hull.”

  “That,” said Jen. “Is a whole other story.”

  “And one we don’t have time for,” said Dr. Kranehouse in a harsh voice that was barely above a whisper.

  At that moment a loud metallic crash rang through the room. It was like the sound a steel tower would make if it fell over. We all rushed towards the room where the sound came from. We crowded into a room, which had three others whom I hadn’t seen until that point. Looking through the display panel, I saw that one of the arms of the lab we were in was being twisted. There were dark shapes swirling around it, and it seemed that they were attempting to rip it from the main hull.

  “What’s going on?” Hal demanded.

  “What’s it look like,” said Dr. Kranehouse in response. “Those things are going to take down our tower.”

  “We’ve got to stop them,” Jen said as she pushed me out of the way. I followed soon after.

  She dashed into another room where two men were already sitting down. They were operating some control panel. There were several beams of light of all colors aimed at the area of the tower, and then I saw what they were really up to: mechanical arms shot out from the hull of the laboratory and reached for the dark shapes, which I couldn’t quite make out exactly what they were. Then I looked down on a monitor and saw them: they looked exactly like dinosaurs with fins. In fact, I knew from my graduate study days in paleontology that they were liopleurodons, aquatic beasts that stretched up to seven meters long. They were long slender beasts, which looked similar to giant underwater alligators. There were at least four of them out there swimming around the extension tower.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I stood there stunned for several moments. Luckily, the crew of the ship did not remain static. Two guns carrying harpoons were extended and fired at the sea creatures. The first one struck through one of the beasts full on. It turned limp and floated away. The other harpoon struck but did not get a decisive blow as its target swam off with the harpoon sticking through it. The others, enraged by the darkening pool, started to attack the laboratory itself. The reloading of the harpoons was a laborious process that proved to be too slow.

  One of the sea creatures came for us in a direct line for us.

  “Hurry up, it’s coming for the hull,” said Jen.

  It got to about five feet from the panel where I was standing before another harpoon shot off towards the closest beast and got a direct hit. There was one more remaining, but it seemed to lose its appetite and disappeared.

  “Was that a liopleurodon?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

  “You bet it was,” said one of the men seated. He had a friendly look, and he had long brown hair tied in a ponytail and a long beard.

  “Hi I’m Jake, by the way,” I said simply. To my surprise, he turned around and shook my hand.

  “The names Mitchell McKenzie. You can call me Mitch,” he said gripping my hand firmly. It felt like he had done at least one hundred hand crunches, and shaking my hand was one hundred and one. “We may seem a little calm, but we’ve had a bunch of close shaves these past few weeks,” he said, wiping away the sweat that had gathered on his brow. He definitely had an easy face—the kind that everyone wanted to have around during high school or college. With bushy eyebrows and a body that was a little pudgy, he seemed friendly and harmless.

  “What do you do Mitch?” I said with a grin. I had almost always felt closer to scientists than the military guys. We spoke each other’s code.

  “I’m the resident physicist down here. I’m sort of the mechanic too since we’ve lost part of our crew. And this gentleman next to me here is Dr. Robert Skinner. He’s the medical doctor when he’s not busy playing psychologist and helping us keep our sanity.”

  “Where do you hail from Jake?” said Dr. Skinner who had been sitting next to Mitchell. He turned towards me. His glasses gave off a rather refined look.

  “Seattle,” I said. It was a lie, but I didn’t feel like disclosing anything about myself just yet. I didn’t know who to trust and the upstairs incident had played on my suspicions about people I didn’t know. They didn’t really seem interested where I was from anyway and they had other pressing matters.

  “So, you’re a geologist, is that it?” Dr. Skinner asked me.

  “Yes, I study ancient life. Technically, I’m a paleontologist, but the military defines me as a geologist. I don’t argue. I’ve got training in both biology and geology since it kind of falls in the middle.”

  “Oh! That’s very interesting because you see, we’ve got a specimen that is very interesting that I want to show you and get your opinion on.”

  My heart leapt at this. Could he be referring to the specimen I had read about in the report? I was very eager to see it, but I didn’t want to show this.

  “That sounds interesting Doctor. Yes, I’d like to see it if you have a moment to spare.”

  “Sure, we’ll do it later. Right now, I’ve got to help with this situation first,” he said going back to the panels. I could see that since they were short-staffed, they had Dr. Skinner play many roles.

  “They’ve done a lot of damage to that thing. We’ve got to get out there and fix it,” said a man with a buzz cut who was twitching nervously with a cup of coffee, seated at one of the control panels.

  “With those things out there?” I asked.

  He turned to look at me, and his expression was not kind. He glanced at me as if I were a microbe being studied in a petri dish, one that had no interesting properties and could be flushed aside at any time.

  “Who the hell are you to speak up when I’m working?” he said.

  “That’s Jake. He’s a geologist, and he’s come to—”

  “I don’t care who the hell he is. He seems like he has no idea of what the situation is down here,” he said to Jen. “Jen, who the hell did you bring? The last thing we ne
ed is some fresh out of the laboratory idiot who thinks he knows everything coming down here and telling us what to do.” He was scared, and I could see the sweat on his pasty face. He had the look of a man who was overweight and overworked, the kind of man you would imagine ended up with a heart attack at age forty. He looked to be close to forty with thinning hair, and the hairs that were left were gray and dangling free on his side like a silvery magnetic field.

  After Jen rolled her eyes and walked away, he turned towards me. “And how the hell did you get here, Jake?” he said my name with particular scorn, as if it were a word he could spit out of his mouth and be done with.

  “Look,” I said. “First thing I want to say is, I’m not here to tell anybody what to do. Second thing, I’m not just a geologist—though that is helpful down here—I’m trained as a military surveillance expert,” I said.

  “That’s Doug Morgan,” Jen said. “Don’t mind him though, he’s harmless. His bark is worse than his bite too.” At this, Doug gave her a look that she smiled and shrugged off.

  Doug turned to me again. “You’re what? A soldier and a scientist?” he asked, dropping a pen he was carrying in his hand. He had been clicking it unconsciously until that moment.

  “How could you be both?” said the man to his side. “I’m Bruce Kraznow, by the way.” We shook hands, but his eyes remained fixed on mine. There was distrust in them and something else I couldn’t work out. “I’m the mathematician slash numbers and data expert on this rig. I also program the scripts and do the system administration around here, so if you forgot your password, don’t ask me. I don’t want any dipshits logging into my system, and it means you failed the basic test of keeping your password safe.”

  I ignored his curt introduction, which seemed half-jest and half-annoyance pent up over years of frustration.

  “I went to college, joined the ROTC, and it went from there. I served in Afghanistan, came home and then I got my Ph.D. in paleontology, then went back into the service. There, how does that fit for you?”