Vostok (29 page)

I unclipped my harness and leaned over the back of my seat to his console, grabbing his wrist before he hit the device again. “Are you nuts?”

“Take me home!”

Leaving me no option, I punched his wound, the pain rendering him unconscious. Wheeling back around, my eyes focused on the sonar monitor as my hands worked at re-securing my harness.

They had been sleeping upright in the water like sixty-foot logs. Now, as their brains awoke, the pods of
Livyatan melvillei
mothers and calves began bombarding the river with bursts of echolocation that rattled the sub like a giant tuning fork.

Zzzzzzzzzzt… zzzzzzzzzzzzzt…

I turned to starboard as a two-story, charcoal-gray head charged out of the murk. The creature’s ivory-colored lower jaw was stretched open, its conical teeth as big as dinner plates.

Stomping on the throttle, I shot away from the monster’s maw a split second before it snapped shut on the
Barracuda
.

The depths before me were a swirling freeway of converging masses, impossible to track on sonar or see through my night vision.

Operating purely on adrenaline and fear, I executed a tight U-turn and raced back in the direction we had come from, drawing the chaos behind me into an angry pod of Miocene sperm whales. Sonar quickly distinguished parent from calf, and I realized the pinging had disturbed a sleeping nursery. As the cetaceans closed behind me into a protective pod, I dove straight for the bottom, executing a tight barrel roll into a 180-degree turn, slingshotting past the confused behemoths, just missing being swatted by a fluke the size of a garage door.

With nothing but open water ahead of me, I raced over the plateau’s cliff face into the northern basin, feeling giddy over having survived yet another confrontation with death.

“This is Schager. That was some maneuver. Now, if you are through teasing the wildlife, come to course zero-three-seven. The extraction zone is less than six kilometers away.”

Seeking to gauge the ice sheet, I surfaced. The frozen ceiling was sloping closer to the water line, but was still forty feet overhead.

“Schager, the ice is too high to reach.”

“Be patient. You haven’t reached the extraction zone. Stay on course. The ice sheet will drop, and the external pressure will rise. When your gauge hits 3,100 psi, the ice sheet and the lake’s surface waters will be separated by less than five feet of air space. Dive the boat to a depth of three hundred feet, then ascend on a ninety degree vertical plane with both Valkyrie lasers on high. As soon as you pop up out of the water you’ll melt ice, and the external pressure will force the
Barracuda
up into the hole you’ve created and drive you straight up through the ice sheet. By the time the water freezes behind you and reseals the hole, you’ll be halfway home.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!

The acoustic jolt was far more powerful than the others, reverberating inside my skull and throughout the
Barracuda
. I searched for the source on sonar, but it was too late.

The bull leviathan breached beneath the
Barracuda
and took the submersible sideways in its powerful jaws. I experienced the sensation of being lifted into the air as our exterior lights illuminated a pink mouth and rows of brown-stained teeth.

And then a deafening
craaaaaack
popped my eardrums, and a shock of icy water blasted me in the face as I was tossed sideways into death’s crushing embrace.

“Life, what is it but a dream?”

—Lewis Carroll

I opened my eyes to warmth and shadows, and then a single indigo candle flickered to life, revealing a wall of books and the alien resembling Joe Tkalec.

“Welcome back.”

“I died again, didn’t I?”

“A skill you have become quite adept at. So far you’ve bled to death in the ice tunnel, frozen to death resting in one crevasse, broken your neck when you fell into another, drowned twice, and now been eaten by a giant aquatic mammal. Six wavelengths, six multiverses to alter your destiny—all resulting in six deaths.”

“Maybe if you actually allowed me to retain the slightest bit of memory … ”

“Zachary, I’ve explained the rules regarding free will. Vostok is a test, to see if you are worthy of accessing the portal.

“Once more into the breach?”

“Isn’t there something you can offer me?” I asked. “The slightest clue? Even the real Joe Tkalec wouldn’t sit back and watch me suffer like this. I feel like an animal caught in a trap.”

“Then act like one! An animal caught in a trap would chew off its leg to free itself.”

“Is that it, then? Is that the secret to our survival as a species?”

“No.” The entity appearing as my mentor stopped rocking. “Zachary, do you remember how you used to solve a Rubick’s Cube? Six sides, kept in flux, each move affecting at least three
other sides. In every moment of existence there are varying moments within the spectrum of free will. You can remain in the mainstream or venture out into the radical, but each decision will create a domino effect upon the next. To survive Vostok’s darkness, you must figure out how to curve the elements that have brought about your death into a pathway that leads to your survival. That is the means to revealing more light, more energy. You’ll need this light to access the portal.

“You’ve methodically exhausted six of the seven accessible dimensions of the energy spectrum, leaving only violet, the last wavelength. The ice tunnel will collapse behind you as you leave, sealing off further communication. If you perish this time around, I cannot save you.”

My heart pounded with adrenaline as I moved through the ice tunnel, my eyes darting from the pulsating indigo light ahead to the Geiger counter in my hand.

Just a quick look. One quick look and I’ll have enough information to theorize cause and effect. Then I’m up the rope and climbing out of the chasm, and we’re back in the sub and en route to the north basin. Up the ice sheet and I’m done. Done with Vostok, done with Antarctica and its insane cold. Then it’s home to Brandy and William
.

Wary of the time, I started to jog, counting each ice-crunching stride to gauge the distance back to the rope.

Twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…

The indigo hue deepened to violet, reminding me of my fateful descent into the Sargasso Sea three years earlier, a mission that had led to my second drowning—a near-death experience that had changed my path in life.

Would this present decision alter my path again?

Not likely, it seemed. The tunnel simply dead-ended in a slab of volcanic rock.

I switched the Geiger counter to the magnetometer, the
needle going haywire.

A magnified asteroid impact crater, just as I thought. What a waste of time. You let Ben and his crazy stories get inside your head
.

Without warning, the violet light disappeared, and the tunnel swallowed me in its all-consuming blackness. I fumbled with my night-vision goggles. My surroundings reappeared in a faint olive-green, but everything felt different—cold, dead—and a surge of claustrophobia unleashed a wave of anxiety that sent me sprinting back down the tunnel.

I made it to the rope and immediately started to climb. I was halfway up when the bear-dog revealed itself to be alive, raising its head and upper body off the ice, crying out in pain.

The animal’s hip was broken. Had I delayed my ascent it might have caught me in those sharp canine teeth.

I left it there, howling in the darkness, its cries of pain echoing through the ice tunnel. It was still crying out as I reached the hole in the crevasse.

I paused. Even though the animal had intended to kill me, it was clearly suffering.

How could I just leave it like this?

Easily, I told myself. If you climb back down to put it out of its misery, you’re using up precious energy. Think about William.

I did.

And that’s why I climbed back down.

The bear-dog seemed to sense that I was there to help. It laid its head down, panting in pain.

Trembling, I gripped the axe.

The first blow caused it to spasm.

The second ended its suffering.

The ice tunnel began to reverberate.

I leaped for the rope, a rush of adrenaline driving my arms and legs. I saw ice collapsing around me like a shattering mirror as I
pulled myself out of the tunnel and up into the crevasse. Dragging myself to my feet, I swung the axe, burying its blood-covered spike into the rock overhead, climbing up the parallel walls with my boots.

I felt the tunnel collapse beneath me, swallowing the floor of the chasm. I cursed my foolishness, an insane act of kindness toward an animal that had been crippled as it had tried to eat me.

Managing my way out of the fissure, I hoisted my quivering body onto the snow-blanketed mountainslope. Shaking with exhaustion and spent nerves, I retraced my footprints to the remains of the rope and pulled myself up the steep incline through waist-deep snow until I was standing at the base of the mountain. Heading southeast, I set off at a quick pace, my feet numb beneath me.

I covered the distance so fast that I actually passed Ming’s sensory device. It was only after I came upon Ben’s spikeprints that I realized I had gone too far.

I was surprised to come across a second set of boot prints.

Ming? Why had she set off after Ben? Maybe she had been too scared to descend through the fog alone?

I followed the pair of footprints another thirty yards in search of return tracks, but found none.

That was a problem. If they had gone off together and still hadn’t returned, then something had happened to them.

They probably planted Ben’s device together, then found another way back to the sub after the crevasse opened up
.

Wanting to believe that, I retraced my steps and descended into the fog bank.

I was fifty paces in, working through three feet of snow and near-zero visibility, when I caught a whiff of something that smelled like rotten eggs.

Sulfur?

I turned away from the scent, diverting down another path, a
shortcut that brought me out of the fog. Below were the dark waters of the bay. As I began my descent, I saw the light.

At first I thought it was the
Barracuda
, only the light was moving, following a course parallel to the shoreline. Removing my backpack, I located the night-vision monocular. Powering it on, I slid my goggles down to my neck and held the lens up to my right eye, zooming in on the light.

It was Ben, and he was dragging something behind him.

Ming?

Tucking the lens in my jacket pocket, I returned the night-vision goggles to my eyes and hurried down the slope, my galloping movements through the snow startling a harem of forty or fifty female sea elephants lazying about the shoreline.

A chorus of belches and burps alerted the male. The ten-ton bull charged out of the shallows, a rolling mass of angry white blubber.

Seeing the beast, Ben ducked behind a boulder.

I stopped running, my heart racing as I found myself confronted by a creature roughly the size of a cement mixer.

The animated mammal pounded its fore flippers in the slush and shook its head, so that its three-foot-long proboscis sprayed me with snot and salty lake water, but the bull never advanced.

Nor did I.

After several bouts of snorting and belching, it rambled off to join its harem.

I met up with Ben, who was kneeling by Ming, checking her pulse as she rested with her back against the rock. “Is she alive?”

“Barely. Let’s get her inside the sub.”

“Ben, you’re bleeding.”

“Huh? It’s nothing. I packed some snow on it. It looks a lot worse than it is. Grab her other arm.”

He tried to lift her as he stood, only to drop to one knee.
“Guess I hurt it worse than I thought.”

“Wait here.” I half-dragged, half-carried Ming to the sub. Laying her down, I activated the hatch, then stripped her of her backpack and lifted her into her seat, buckling her in. I tossed her pack in the storage compartment and went back for Ben.

He had stripped off his own pack and was examining his wound. Blood was everywhere, dripping from a jagged six-inch incision along his upper left thigh.

“Looks like you nicked your femoral artery; we need to get a tourniquet on this. How’d you do it?”

“Fell on my climbing axe.”

I shouldered half his weight, hustling him over to the sub, fearing what the scent of his blood might be attracting. He moved to climb inside the middle cockpit, only I stopped him. “You can’t operate the thrusters with one leg. Get in my seat; I’ll man the master control.”

I helped him into the bow cockpit, then foraged through Ming’s backpack to find something to make a tourniquet. Removing her rope, I tied three feet of cord tightly around Ben’s wound, the pain causing him to pass out.

Moving to the bow, I struggled to push the
Barracuda
backward down the shoreline and into the water. I made it halfway to the waterline before I had to rest.