THE MOONLIT SHORES OF LAKE
VOSTOK
The metal pier is dry
and cold, the temperature hovering close to zero degrees
Fahrenheit. It’s oppressively dark in the cavern under the ice, and
Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of insulation, shifts from
foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to keep his ears clear
and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the artificial
bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans to
exist here, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they’ll all spend more than a
day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the
surface.
There is no sound
from the waters lapping just below the edge of the pier. The
floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going—the water in the
subsurface Antarctic lake is incredibly clear—but are swallowed up
rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky
depths.
Manfred is here as
the colonel’s representative, to observe the arrival of the probe,
receive the consignment they’re carrying, and report back that
everything is running smoothly. The others try to ignore him,
jittery at the presence of the man from DC. There’re a gaggle of
engineers and artificers, flown out via McMurdo Base to handle the
midget sub’s operations. A nervous lieutenant supervises a squad of
Marines with complicated-looking weapons, half gun and half video
camera, stationed at the corners of the raft. And there’s the usual
platform crew, deep-sea-rig-maintenance types—but subdued and
nervous-looking. They’re afloat in a bubble of pressurized air
wedged against the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them
stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.
They’re waiting for a
rendezvous.
“Five hundred yards,”
reports one of the techs. “Rising on ten.” His companion nods.
They’re waiting for the men in the midget sub drilling quietly
through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned
tomb. “Have ’em back on board in no time.” The sub has been away
for nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the
journey, and enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time
if there’s a system failure, but they’ve learned the hard way that
fail-safe systems aren’t. Not out here, at the edge of the human
world.
Roger shuffles some
more. “I was afraid the battery load on that cell you replaced
would trip an undervoltage isolator and we’d be here ’til Hell
freezes over,” the sub driver jokes to his neighbor.
Looking round, Roger
sees one of the Marines cross himself. “Have you heard anything
from Gorman or Suslowicz?” he asks quietly.
The lieutenant checks
his clipboard. “Not since departure, sir,” he says. “We don’t have
comms with the sub while it’s submerged: too small for ELF, and we
don’t want to alert anybody who might be, uh,
listening.”
“Indeed.” The yellow
hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears at the edge of the
radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters undulate, oily, as
the sub rises.
“Crew-transfer
vehicle sighted,” the driver mutters into his mike. He’s suddenly
very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air into ballast
tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his number
two. The crane crew is busy too, running their long boom out over
the lake.
The sub’s hatch is
visible now, bobbing along the top of the water: the lieutenant is
suddenly active. “Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left and center!”
The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over the sub,
waiting to bring it aboard. “I want eyeballs on the portholes
before you crack this thing!” It’s the tenth run—seventh
manned—through the eye of the needle on the lake bed, the drowned
structure so like an ancient temple, and Roger has a bad feeling
about it. We can’t get away with this
forever, he reasons. Sooner or later .
. .
The sub comes out of
the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a cyborg whale designed
by a god with a sense of humor. It takes tense minutes to winch it
in and maneuver it safely onto the platform. Marines take up
position, shining torches in through two of the portholes that
bulge myopically from the smooth curve of the sub’s nose. Up on
top, someone is talking into a handset plugged into the stubby
conning tower; the hatch locking wheel begins to turn.
“Gorman, sir.” It’s
the lieutenant. In the light of the sodium floods, everything looks
sallow and washed-out; the soldier’s face is the color of damp
cardboard, slack with relief.
Roger waits while the
submariner—Gorman—clambers unsteadily down from the top deck. He’s
a tall, emaciated-looking man, wearing a red thermal suit three
sizes too big for him: salt-and-pepper stubble textures his jaw
with sandpaper. Right now, he looks like a cholera victim; sallow
skin, smell of acrid ketones as his body eats its own protein
reserves, a more revolting miasma hovering over him. There’s a slim
aluminum briefcase chained to his left wrist, a bracelet of bruises
darkening the skin above it. Roger steps forward.
“Sir?” Gorman
straightens up for a moment: almost a shadow of military attention.
He’s unable to sustain it. “We made the pickup. Here’s the QA
sample; the rest is down below. You have the unlocking code?” he
asks wearily.
Jourgensen nods.
“One. Five. Eight. One. Two. Two. Nine.”
Gorman slowly dials
it into a combination lock on the briefcase, lets it fall open and
unthreads the chain from his wrist. Floodlights glisten on
polythene bags stuffed with white powder, five kilos of high-grade
heroin from the hills of Afghanistan; there’s another quarter of a
ton packed in boxes in the crew compartment. The lieutenant
inspects it, closes the case, and passes it to Jourgensen.
“Delivery successful, sir.” From the ruins on the high plateau of
the Taklamakan Desert to American territory in Antarctica, by way
of a detour through gates linking alien worlds: gates that nobody
knows how to create or destroy except the Predecessors—and they
aren’t talking.
“What’s it like
through there?” Roger demands, shoulders tense. “What did you
see?”
Up on top, Suslowicz
is sitting in the sub’s hatch, half-slumping against the crane’s
attachment post. There’s obviously something very wrong with him.
Gorman shakes his head and looks away: the wan light makes the
razor-sharp creases on his face stand out, like the crackled and
shattered surface of a Jovian moon. Crow’s-feet. Wrinkles. Signs of
age. Hair the color of moonlight. “It took so long,” he says,
almost complaining. Sinks to his knees. “All that time we’ve been gone . . .” He leans against the
side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond his years. “The sun was
so bright. And our radiation detectors.
Must have been a solar flare or something.” He doubles over and
retches at the edge of the platform.
Roger looks at him
for a long, thoughtful minute: Gorman is twenty-five and a fixer
for Big Black, early history in the Green Berets. He was in rude
good health two days ago, when he set off through the gate to make
the pickup. Roger glances at the lieutenant. “I’d better go and
tell the colonel,” he says. A pause. “Get these two back to
Recovery and see they’re looked after. I don’t expect we’ll be
sending any more crews through Victor-Tango for a
while.”
He turns and walks
toward the lift shaft, hands clasped behind his back to keep them
from shaking. Behind him, alien moonlight glimmers across the floor
of Lake Vostok, three miles and untold light-years from
home.