Beneath the Dark Ice (21 page)

Matt turned to Monica. “How can this world exist down here? It’s unbelievable. Looks like it’s been here forever.”

“Well, there are enormous cave systems all around the world that are fantastically old even by geological standards. There’s the Ursa Minor in the Sequoia National Park, St. Michaels in Gibraltar, or the Jenolan Caves in Australia that are supposed to be nearly four-hundred million years old. But this could easily top all of those.”

“It’s warm, and feels like jungle humidity. There must be geothermic activity keeping this underground water body in solution even though it’s buried under the coldest continent on earth. Or perhaps the heat from the earth’s interior is keeping the sea from freezing—a form of geothermal heat radiating up from below and warming rocks on the underground seabed.” Silex was wringing his hands and seemed to be talking to himself. He licked his lips constantly now, and they had become chapped and cracked. He rambled on.

“Hmm, yes, I’d say the ice sheet above would also be acting as a blanket, protecting the lake from cold temperatures on the surface. The heat source probably gives it the basis for its food chain in the near dark. Similar biospheres occur close to deep vents miles under the ocean, you know.”

Alex was looking at Dr. Silex with concern. “Let’s get further up onto that beach and rest—I’m not happy being this close to the water. Tank, get me some readings.” Alex needed to keep them all moving and focused on getting to the surface. As soon as someone started to give up hope, a malaise—or worse—would set in.

Tank reached into his backpack for his small radar unit and fiddled with the buttons before pointing it at the
ceiling and then turning it in a wide semi-circle. “OK, we’re just under three miles down; we have moved that much again from our initial insertion point.” Some more fiddling. “The body of water is . . . well, it must be over a hundred miles in length as it exceeds this device’s readings, and about fifty-five miles wide, depth unknown. There are . . . there are multiple movement signatures in the air above and below the water—varying sizes. Christ, some of them are huge—maybe whales, at least that big anyway.”

Alex looked at Aimee. She shrugged and narrowed her eyes—he knew what she was thinking; they still hadn’t come across the creature that attacked them and owned the rest of the tentacle they hacked off. God help them if that thing wasn’t top of the food chain. Meeting something that size in a cave was one thing; you had a wall at your back and it was defendable, to a degree. Out in the open they were just more food for the taking.

“Let’s move. Single file. Takeda, lead us out, please.”

Alex looked into the distance through his scope and used its maximum magnification to try to find a safe place to rest. He spotted a ledge about a mile down the black beach that looked like the perfect site—up from the water line, dry and with a slight overhang making it defendable. Alex’s senses tingled—they were not in their world anymore and danger was everywhere.

Viktor Petrov sat up in his king-sized bed and sipped from the gold-rimmed china cup. The black, smoky-flavoured Russian tea singed his lips and he blew across the rim to cool it. He thought deeply about the information contained in the intelligence reports that were now fanned out over his red silk sheets. The Russkaya Station in western Antarctica had indicated a seismic ripple from near the site where Borshov and his men had entered the ice. Petrov knew that ripple could only be man-made.

Petrov took another sip of tea and stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on a spot thousands of miles from his bedroom as he thought of the possible outcomes of the underground explosion. It could mean one of three things. One, Borshov had succeeded and the Americans were dead; good. Two, they were all dead—the big oaf had blown himself and everyone else up; still good. Or three, Borshov was dead and the Americans had survived. Lower probability, but the worst possible outcome for Petrov if true.

He’d put more feelers out and monitor every single blip of electronic traffic coming off the ice. But as a little insurance he’d transfer some of his accounts offshore—it might be a warm winter after all.

Monica moved up to walk beside Aimee; her eyes were wide as she tried to take in all the sights, sounds and textures
of their fantastic environment. “In all my life I’ve never seen a cave like this. No, in a thousand lives, I don’t think
anyone
has ever seen a cave like this. It smells primitive, alive.”

They rounded a small outcrop of boulders and saw a new black sand beach alive with movement—dozens of long-bodied spider-like creatures were scuttling away from the group. Each of the crustaceans was easily over three feet in length with a flat, heavily armoured insectoid-type body.

“Lobster, anyone?” asked Matt.

“Yuck, centipedes more like it,” responded Monica with some disgust. The clicking of their shells and the quick nervous way the creatures moved did remind the group of a hive of giant insects rather than some type of edible sea creature.

“Dangerous?” Alex asked Aimee as he and the remaining HAWCs kept their guns pointed at the scuttling mass on the beach.

“No, I think they’re some type of marine arthropod. I’m guessing more frightening to look at than harmful, but down here who knows?”

“They still look like lunch to me.” Though Matt had a slight joking edge to his voice, after nearly twenty hours of bitter dark chocolate the thought of real food made a few stomachs complain. None of the small group were on the verge of starvation just yet, however, Alex knew it wouldn’t be long before they would all be seeing lunch in every fish and beast. Not yet, thought Alex, but it might be a good idea soon to start working out what was edible in the event they had to spend a little more time down here than they wanted.

“Takeda, clear me a path; exercise extreme caution.”

Takeda gave a small bow and headed down the beach towards the swarming mass of scuttling chiton. Alex could
have asked Tank who would have simply opened up with his pulse rifle and blown the creatures to bloody atoms in a few seconds. However, Alex didn’t think covering the dark sand in blood and gore was a great idea given the feeding frenzy they had witnessed in the river cave. Besides being too messy, he knew Takeda loved the thrill of the hunt. He was a born hunter; many times they had been on jungle missions and he had slipped out into the darkness to return with fish or game caught with little more than his shortened hunting blade or bare hands.

Takeda slowly approached the swarming mass. Long eye stalks ending in shining bulbs swivelled to watch the small biped approach. The creatures started to part in a horseshoe shape around the man, not retreating, looking more like they were encircling the HAWC. One of the largest of the creatures, closest to Takeda, coiled its body, opened a pair of plate-sized front claws and raised a deadly looking tail spike to point it at his chest.

In one fluid motion, Takeda drew his sword and removed the tip of the creature’s tail. Whether or not it was poisonous didn’t matter, he was taking no chances. On the backward swing he plunged the blade into the centre of the creature’s head. There was a muffled crunch as its claws and tail dropped immediately; the blade must have pierced its central nervous system. Takeda withdrew his blade and re-sheathed it. The other creatures hadn’t moved and instead started to close in on Takeda once again. This time, however, it seemed the body of their fallen fellow creature was their goal.

Takeda backed up a step and looked closely at the dead creature as the rest of the swarm moved in on it. Its shape bristled with spines and armour plating; black eyes on segmented stalks grew a foot long from its spade-shaped head. Its feet were sharp pointed spikes covered in bristling hairs and what was left of the tail tapered to a point.
With its black and green mottled shell it was a fearsome-looking creature. The swarm quickly reached the body and claws like giant toothed shears chopped and tore at the gristly frame. In seconds the four-foot-long creature had gone from a boiling mass of frenzied armour-plated bodies to a blackish pool of blood staining even blacker sand.

From up the beach Matt turned to Aimee. “You said harmless, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to step on one in the shallows, but then normally you wouldn’t unless you were around about two-hundred million years ago. Looks to me like one of the extinct varieties of sea scorpion. They were normally sea-floor dwellers but they could also live on land. Still think they look like lunch?”

Takeda saw that the slaying had started a feeding frenzy among the creatures and actually drew them more tightly together. He drew his sword again and swatted one hard on the head with the flat of his blade. The clang of his toughened steel sword against the thick exoskeleton echoed off the cliff walls and was carried away into the low mist rising off the warm water. However, it worked; the creature scuttled out of the way. Takeda struck again and more of the creatures parted and slowly headed towards the water.

Whether it was the noise or the vibrations from the sword blows was hard to say, but they were moving. Not quickly enough however, and when Takeda halted for a second or two the creatures tried to move back up the beach, either changing their mind or preferring the sand over the water. Takeda waved his free hand and brought his sword down again on the tail of one large retreating sea scorpion. This time he uttered a loud “Yaa Yaa,” to try to squeeze more speed from them.

Alex and the team moved forward as Takeda finally
managed to clear the beach. Alex watched Takeda travel farther down the sand, closer to the lapping inky sea. At last the creatures were now in flight and their rapid jerking movements hinted at panic as they crawled over each other to escape. As they picked up speed and were scuttling back into the water, disappearing beneath the surface, the clacking of their spindly sharp legs was replaced by hissing as they hit the water at speed and continued on into the depths.

Alex noticed that there were large wet areas of the beach, each about fifty feet in a rough circle, that the scorpions seemed to avoid. In fact, they were taking great pains to detour around them. Some were taking longer to bypass the slightly raised circular shapes and looked to try to head back up the sand, so Takeda moved quickly to head them off. One of the larger creatures swivelled its eye stalk backwards and on seeing the two-legged predator almost on top of it, decided to cross the empty, wet-looking circle. It got no more than five feet onto the circle when it stopped dead, but not because it had decided to freeze. Rather, it looked glued to the spot.

Alex felt his heightened senses jump and they allowed him to react immediately—this was danger. He shouted for Takeda to halt; unfortunately, Takeda only heard the command after he too had taken several large steps onto the circular pad; he stopped and looked down.

His feet had sunk in and were stuck fast; it was like fly paper. Takeda tried to remove his feet and then used his sword to try and cut himself free. The pad started to draw itself towards the centre of the circle, which had dropped into the wet sand to display a ragged black-red maw. It was some type of enormous living creature that was buried beneath the sand and was using the pad as a trap for unwary animals—a trap that was now being reeled in and sucked down into the dark orifice of its mouth. As the
carpet of flesh was tugged violently from under Takeda he was tipped over to land flat on his side. Now, rising back to his feet was impossible as he found most of one side of his body trapped fast.

Alex raced down the beach. He stopped at the edge of the pad and fired his rifle into the round “tongue.” It had no effect; Takeda was now only ten feet from the centre and he could just lift his head to observe the sea scorpion disappear inside. The pad stopped for a second or two and a crunching could be heard as the scorpion was pulverised by a still hidden, powerful set of jaws beneath the sand.

Alex fired again, this time into the centre of the hole, but it still had no effect. He was about to leap forward onto the moving pad, planning to use his enormous strength to pull himself free when Aimee cried out. “Don’t, we need you with us.”

Takeda had not uttered a word or a cry. He looked at Alex and shook his head. Alex nodded, understanding the unspoken communication and said quietly into his helmet comm unit, “Farewell, my friend,” followed by a single word, “Grenade.”

Takeda reached into his belt pouch, pulling free a baseball-sized metal ball. He held it close to his chest and closed his eyes. He was roughly pulled into the maw and just as a sickening crunching began, there was an explosive
whump
from beneath the sand. A small ripple of shock-waves ran across the sand that made Aimee and Matt fall to the ground.

The dim bluish biological light in the cave immediately went out and left them in absolute darkness.

“Be patient and quiet. Wait for it. Wait.” Sure enough the lights started to wink back on. A small patch to the right, then larger, then to the left, then all back on. “I don’t think
these ancient glow-worms or whatever they are down here are used to loud noises.”

“Them and me both,” replied Matt with an ashen face.

“What the fuck was that? What was that thing?”

Tank was clearly distressed at losing another of his buddies and began pacing at the edge of the smoking hole. Alex looked around; the team was gathered down near the water’s edge, except for Silex who had remained far up the beach with his hands over his face.

Silex heard Tank’s questions and came stalking down the sand. “What is it? It’s our punishment, that’s what it is. We’re all dead and in hell, don’t you know? We must have died and now we’re stuck in hell and are nothing more than bugs in a giant spider’s web waiting to be devoured. We’re going to be pulled to pieces and eaten bit by bit. Ask that imbecile soldier.” Silex’s cracked lips had begun bleeding. With his chalky white face and the gloom of the cave, his appearance had taken on that of a mad clown.