Beneath the Dark Ice

Twenty-four

Aimee’s legs were burning and fatigue was turning to nausea inside her. Matt and Monica were probably fitter than her but she could see their shoulders slumping and they hadn’t spoken for a while. Aimee knew physical fatigue wasn’t the only danger; it was the emotional exhaustion that set in after the adrenaline washed out of the muscles and brain.

“Let’s go, guys. I want to be lying on a beach somewhere by the weekend.” She sucked in a breath and smiled broadly at Matt as she overtook them on the slope.

“Go, Wonder Woman. Can you carry me?” Matt chuckled as he said it, but both he and Monica increased their pace to keep up with her.

Alex quickly caught up to the team; they had made good progress. The slope was increasing steadily and though this gave them all reason to feel they were heading in the right direction, it was proving much more exhausting than before.

Alex knew their bodies were tiring but with the creature in pursuit they couldn’t afford to rest for a moment. The cave was narrowing even more but was still easily big enough to accommodate fifty men walking shoulder to shoulder and the roof was nearly out of sight in the darkness. The cold blackness of the cave meant they had relied solely on their torches and helmet globes, and now these too were wearying and yellowing into the gloom.

For several more hours they climbed, before exhaustion demanded a break. Alex turned and listened intently. Far behind them he could just make out the sound of pursuit. His electronic movement sensors were useless in a twisting cave as the density and compression waves became distorted and muffled by the airflow and cave bends. He had to rely on his extraordinary senses alone and this was still proving difficult as the creature without its shell was almost silent and now much more cautious. Alex was also beginning to think that the thing chasing them was not just some oversized prehistoric brute but had an intelligence that enabled it to learn, plan and perhaps even try and trap them.

Monica pointed out the jumble of debris on the cave floor. It was the first sign that there had been geological movement in and around the cavern for many millennia.

“Please Lord, deliver us from dead ends.” Matt was trying to inject a little levity into their situation, but he could not have crafted better words to reflect how they all felt. The thought of having to backtrack gave them all a feeling of dread. Though they had not seen or heard from the creature for some time, they could pick up the vibes from Alex, and the way he kept stopping to stare into the darkness behind them let them know that they were far from safe.

The shards of fallen rock were growing in size, with some now the size of houses. It made the trip slower as they constantly had to zigzag in and around the debris. The slope had reached an angle of about twenty-five degrees and their thigh muscles were screaming for a break. Alex quietly but firmly urged them on; he could not let them stop until they found a spot that was concealed or at least defendable.

They were slowing and Alex decided he had to set another ambush for the creature. He needed to give them some more time. Just as he was about to disappear into the dark he heard Monica call. She had found a rift in the cave — a huge, jagged tear in the black wall with a hint of an earthen smell coming from within on the slight breeze.

Aimee used the deep earth sonar as Alex had taught her and came up with a reading of half a mile before it encountered a bend or obstruction. There was still a good deal of airflow originating from the narrow cleft so the odds were it wasn’t a dead end.

“Looks fairly new, maybe even under twenty thousand years — that’s just a few seconds on the geo-clock. This place must still be active to a degree and I can’t be sure it will be safe for us.” Monica was giving her professional speleological view of the dangers involved but they were not in any normal caving scenario.

Without a second thought, Alex just shouted one word. “In!”

Monica then Matt followed by Aimee entered the ten-foot-wide rift. Alex hung back for a few extra seconds and surveyed the entrance — it looked far too narrow for the creature to fold itself into, but without its shell or any discernible skeletal mass he couldn’t be sure exactly what it was capable of. Nevertheless, he guessed it would send one or more of its tentacle clubs into the crack to try to hook them out using the vicious talons embedded in their tips.

They were no more than a hundred paces into the rift when Alex became aware of a cessation of air movement. Without alerting the team and without slowing them, he stopped and stared intently into the dark, using all his senses to try to determine the cause of the change in air density. Though he could not see outside the rift, he could sense that a large presence had blocked the entrance they had just come through. The orthocone was trying to squeeze its enormous bulk into the small crack in the cave wall. There was a groaning and some debris rained down on the group. Monica paused and held up her hand to stop, fearing that it was their footsteps that were setting off some sort of small earth tremor, but Alex overrode the instruction and urged them on. He alone knew that the creature was trying to widen the fissure in the wall.

The liquid stealth with which the creature had pursued them so far was abandoned and replaced with a ground-shaking crashing like the charge of a hundred elephants. Matt and Monica looked at each other, then back to Alex, momentarily blinding him as they directed their torches into his face. Alex turned and closed his eyes for a second to get some night vision back, but when he opened them it became clear to him exactly what strategy the creature was going to use. A gigantic tentacle was moving quickly down the tunnel; as it came forward it knocked car-sized boulders out of the way like a child would do with its toy building blocks.

This was not the place for engaging the creature. Their armoured caving suits would either be snagged by the razor-sharp hooks on the tentacles or they would be crushed as the creature knocked a boulder on top of them. Alex fired a stream of compressed gas projectiles into the club tip, but he knew that this would only slow the advance.

“Ms. Jennings, find us some cover, double time. Everyone else follow her — now!” Alex was running and turning to fire every few seconds. He was aware they only had a few minutes before they were run down or crushed when he heard Monica call from just ahead.

“Careful under here… it’s a floating choke.”

Alex could see what she was referring to. The rift they were moving through was only about twenty feet wide, but suspended over a narrowing area was a table-shaped slab of stone of immense proportions that held tons of debris above it. Aimee had dropped back to Alex and looked at him with her determined, grime-streaked face.

“Are you thinking what I am?”

“Oh yeah, time to shut the door.”

They all passed under the choke and Alex yelled for them to keep moving as fast as they could and to stay close to the walls to avoid any falling debris. He turned and calibrated his rifle to deliver fist-sized compressed air punches to the weakest point in the choke and depressed the trigger. A constant stream of air projectiles was focused on where the choke met the wall. The high-velocity compressed air hit the rock face with the power of a pneumatic sledgehammer. In just under three seconds, Alex managed to do what the rocks had tried to do in their original rush to the cave floor tens of thousands of years before; they came boiling down with a thunderous crash. He threw his rifle over his shoulder into the backpack strapping and leaped forwards, bouncing nimbly over and through the falling stones. Tons of rock and debris collapsed around him. The impact, when it came, was like being hit by a car. The centre of his back was punched by a rock the size of a bowling ball travelling at about forty miles per hour. The breaking sound from his back was lost in the crash of the rock slide, but Alex was knocked to the ground.

He lay on the cave floor waiting for the dust to clear. His senses told him there was no more airflow and that most of the debris had fallen, totally blocking the narrow cave. He doubted whether the creature could bring enough power to bear with just a single tentacle to force a path through. They were safe for the moment.

Alex sucked in a deep breath and spat out some dust. He slowly got to his feet and flexed his upper body; he hurt and something crunched at his back. He pulled off his pack and pulled his rifle free. The once sleek M98 was a crumpled mess. It had been made from thermopressed polycarbonate — stronger than steel but as light as plastic. The impact had shattered the casing. Better you than me, he thought, and dropped the crushed gun at his feet.

Aimee was waiting just behind a large boulder with her canteen for him to take a much needed swallow.

“Well, looks like we can rule out doubling back from now on. Let’s take ten minutes.” They all fell to the floor. Now that the adrenaline was subsiding in their systems, exhaustion was taking over. Muscles screamed, feet throbbed and backs ached. Alex lay down flat and closed his eyes. He gave them ten minutes, so he would sleep for exactly eight before rousing them to continue the next stage of their journey back to the light.

“It’s a door.” Matt was dwarfed by the structure.

No one else spoke for several seconds as they looked in awe at the seamless transition from natural rock creation to man-made structure. The rift walls suddenly smoothed, and then were blocked by a twenty-foot-high stone door. The panels were intricately carved with images of kneeling human figures and glyphs similar to those they had seen earlier. The massive structure stood out from its surroundings, not only due to its size, but also because of a reddish sheen that made the doors glow even after all the thousands of years. Monica ran her hands over the stone, spat on a small spot and rubbed it in.

“This is red Aswan granite, one of the hardest granites on earth and definitely not from around here.”

Matt shone his yellowing torch onto the spot Monica had just cleared. “You’re right, it’s not even from this side of the world. This rock only occurs in the Middle East; there was a sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid of Giza made from this type of stone and when it was discovered they said it shone like fire. To this day no one knows how the Egyptians managed to work it.”

“How would it have got down here?” Aimee was running her hands over the stone as well.

“This was an advanced civilisation. I bet these guys visited all corners of the globe. I’ll tell you one thing, this door was made to keep something in or out.” Matt was shining his torch into a crack where the door didn’t fit flush with the wall. “Hang on, I think it’s open.”

“OK, everyone push.” Alex put both hands against the door and tensed his muscles in anticipation of the force that he expected was needed to move the stone monolith; however, the door swung open easily and in silence. After over 10,000 years the mechanism was still working smoothly. “They sure don’t build them like this anymore.”

“Not for thousands of years anymore.” Matt was first through the door, quickly followed by Monica.

Beyond the doorway they found themselves in a large, domed room more than 150 feet in diameter. Blackened stone urns around the perimeter once probably held oil that when lit delivered light to the magnificent carved walls, some still bearing colouration that hinted at great architectural detail and ornate artwork. A smooth ramp led up to a higher doorway that also had a red granite stone door but this one had been smashed to pieces.

“It looks like a church.” Monica stood just inside the door and hugged herself.

“Maybe, at least a place of worship, for sure,” Matt responded, moving quickly in the dark, his torch beam darting from ceiling to wall and back again.

At the base of the ramp it looked like the building of a new wall had begun. The materials used were not the finely honed blocks from other parts of the room and looked more rough-hewn, with each piece about five feet cubed and weighing many tons. This newer wall was not for decoration; it looked hurriedly built and was more fortified than its predecessor.

There were also three stone pillars, each about eight feet in height that stood facing the door they had just passed through; heavily corroded metal rings hung from their front.

“This is a wonder of architecture. You know, everyone wondered where the Romans got the skill to build a giant domed building that defied analysis for centuries. But this… this is even bigger.” Matt was twirling slowly in the centre of the room, trying to take it all in.

“It looks like some sort of arena.” Aimee was scanning their surroundings and moved to the centre pillar for a better look. Around their bases the stones were darker, stained even after all the passing millennia.

Matt was moving busily around the walls, running his hands over the glyphs and moving his lips silently as he tried to draw out their meaning. “An arena? No, but close, more like an altar — and a sacrificial one at that. Most cultures had myths and stories about creatures from their own version of hell, and the Aztlan legends don’t appear to be any different. They look like they had a rich mythology, filled with demons and gods of the netherworld. The only difference was, their monsters turned out to be real. They were offering up their slaves to Qwotoan to appease him. I’d say they came across each other when they were excavating their basements and regarded him as the ruler of the underworld — their very own devil made flesh.”

Matt read from the wall. “OK, here we go ‘Those who join with Qwotoan shall live with him forever and shall return as his servants.’ I think we’ve seen what this refers to through the ability the creature has to mimic things it has devoured.” Matt moved a bit further around the walls. “To keep him in check they tried to appease him with monthly offerings, but he became ever more demanding. That’s the problem with some gods; they’re never satisfied with just one virgin, are they?”

“Not funny, Matt, it’s horrible.” Monica hugged herself at the thought of being tied to one of the stone columns while giant tentacles came through the open doorway.

Matt reached out to touch her arm. “To us, yes. But to the Aztlan culture who saw the world as being upside down and this creature as being a god, definitely not. Heaven was below ground in an underworld of caves, guarded by fantastic beasts and gods. The caves themselves were very holy and would have been considered to be a portal of communication with their deities. I guess to them it was proof of their beliefs when they encountered this fantastic creature reaching up from the depths. It would have been a great honour to be chosen to ‘join’ with him. For all we know they may have volunteered.”

“They didn’t realise that they were creating a feeding pattern. To the orthocones they were just an easy and abundant food source.” Aimee was examining the stains on the pillars.

Monica, Alex and Aimee sat down with their backs against one of the walls and followed Matt with their torch beams to give him extra light. They drank sparingly of the little remaining water, and finished the last dusty crumbs of their dark chocolate. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

“Look!” Matt pointed to some rings embedded up on the walls and a similar one high up on the giant stone door they had recently come through. “I bet they had some form of system rigged up so they could open and shut this door from up there, probably from behind the other broken door. They lashed their sacrificial victims to the pillars and then retreated behind their own door so they could open the gateway to the underworld in safety.”

Monica brought her torch beam back down to the crude half-built wall at the base of the ramp. “They were going to seal it off but never finished. Hmm, wonder why?” Monica posed the question and then answered it herself. “Oh, shit. It must have found another way in.”

Alex pushed his hands up through his hair and expelled a long breath between his teeth. The implications of this were horrifying — they could be ambushed and now there was no going back. Best not to have them dwelling too much on it. “Perhaps. But even if that were true it was a long time ago. We’re not home just yet, but we’ll make it now.”

“I agree with Alex. There haven’t been people here for thousands and thousands of years. This would have disrupted the normal feeding patterns of the creatures and I doubt they could remember how to get into the city after all those centuries.” Aimee was doing her best to support Alex and offer some good news to the exhausted group.

“But you said it yourself. We don’t know how long these things live. What if it’s the same creature or what if they have the ability to pass on their memories like, like…” Monica was trying to remember some Discovery Channel nature program she had seen in another life, when Aimee assisted.

“Flatworms.”

“That’s them. Could it remember, Aimee?”

“We just don’t know. We don’t know how long today’s giant cephalopods live, let alone a creature that should have been extinct four hundred million years ago and may have caused the collapse of the first great human civilisation. However, I doubt very much it could live for tens of thousands of years. But the problem we have down here is that this is a very different world to ours with unique environmental effects resulting in very different natural laws. Could it find a way in? Sure, given enough time; it’s certainly smart enough. Could it remember a way in? I just don’t know, but there are studies now on cellular inherited memory where transplant patients are recollecting tastes, smells and even images from the donor. I’ve read papers on memory inheritance that…” Aimee stopped talking. She had forgotten herself; the look on Monica’s face told her the information wasn’t helping.

Alex noticed that Aimee had omitted to share her theories with Monica about the image of the girl and baby in the old-fashioned clothing. He got to his feet and walked back towards the giant stone doors. He removed his glove and placed his hand flat on the polished red stone. He felt for vibrations and more; he felt for the leviathan’s presence — there was nothing. Aimee approached softly behind him and spoke quietly when she was close.

“Sorry, I don’t think I was making things better back there.”

“Don’t worry about it; we’re all exhausted. But I’ll tell you one thing. I have no intention of donating my organs to this thing.”

“Ha, is that what they call battlefield humour, Captain Hunter?” After all they had been through Aimee still managed to laugh gently at their predicament. Alex couldn’t help resting his eyes on her beautiful upturned face, now dusty and streaked by the tracks of perspiration and tears. She made him feel at ease and comfortable; he liked that.

“So, Dr. Aimee Weir, how does a sensible, modern woman like you end up a paleobiologist working for the government?”

Aimee rested her back against the red granite and tilted her head up towards the dark domed ceiling. “Well, my father always said people with brains will rise to the top — boy, I’m glad he can’t see me now, miles below the surface of the world. Fact is, I’m a science nerd. While all my friends were going to the beach to lie on the sand and improve their tans or rub lotion on their boyfriends’ backs, I was over in the rock pools turning over stones to look at the tiny creatures. My grades were always good and after sailing through chemistry and biology, I got hooked on solving the world’s energy problems by creating a biological synthetic fuel. Except I didn’t know I was working for the U.S. Army until a week ago. Not sure it would have mattered; sure doesn’t now. Now it seems such a small issue, as if it belongs to someone else while we’re all hiding down here in the dark.”

She smiled at Alex and moved a little closer. He noticed the set of her jaw was still strong. She’s a brave woman, he thought. A strand of her hair had fallen out from under her helmet and hung across one of her blue eyes. He wanted to reach out and push it back behind her ear but stopped himself. His eyes saddened as he thought, she can never know me.

“We better start climbing again, we’re nearly home.” Alex walked away.

They climbed the ramp to the upper doorway, the silence broken only by their soft footfalls. Dust gently floated in the beam of their lights, making the rays stand out like wide lasers in the pitch darkness.

Aimee shivered — it was much colder here. “Look.” She exhaled and her breath created a small fog in the light beam. “We must be closer to the surface now.”

Alex pulled his stratigraphic sonar from his backpack and pointed it at the roof. After a few seconds the small screen lit up with the readings he was seeking. “Still says we’re about a mile down, but I can’t tell how deep we are in the catacombs, how much is rock or how much of that is ice.”

Matt turned back to the group after reading the carved glyphs in the wall. “Could be a problem — the Aztlans seem to be similar to the Olmecs or Aztecs, who made extensive use of caves. Some of their artifacts and burials have been located many miles deep inside cave systems. My guess is they had been exploring and excavating the underground cave system for hundreds of years. They were obviously adept at stone cutting, so could easily have dug down many levels, perhaps miles. They could also have found the cave system and simply modified it for their use, which means this could be very deep indeed.”

Aimee picked up the conversation. “Either an earth tremor opened the caves to the lake below, or they simply broke through on one of their daily digs. We know the creatures below are hunt-adapted for either full darkness and near dark environments, so vibrations from the digging would have been very attractive to them. They would have broken through and come face to face with one of their gods.”

“Man, I’d pay a dollar to see the look on the face of that first guy.” Matt laughed at his own joke and Monica couldn’t help giggling as well; she elbowed him good-naturedly in the ribs.

From the doorway behind them came the sound of small rocks falling. The group froze and for a few seconds stood like statues, all focused on the large entrance they had only just come through.

“Probably just some of the debris settling,” Monica said.

“I’m sure that’s what it was. Let’s go.” Alex didn’t believe their pursuer would give up. Though the man-made tunnels would give them better protection, he couldn’t help thinking that it hadn’t saved the Aztlans.