Kraken Rising

CHAPTER 2

Professor Cate Canning’s hands shook. “Okay people.” It felt like a thousand butterflies swirled in her stomach as her finger hovered over the button. “Are — we — re-aaady?”

It didn’t matter what the half dozen scientists and engineers crowded into the makeshift laboratory behind her said because she was ready, the equipment was ready, conditions were perfect, and she alone would make the final call. She was the leading evolutionary biologist in the United Kingdom, and it had taken a lifetime of research, planning, fundraising, politicking, and then bloody arm-twisting, to even get to prototype phase of the exploration of the subsurface lakes below the Antarctic ice.

It had been tough — there was international pressure to ban all human activity on the southern ice sheets ever since the huge, unexplained algal blooms had been seen off the coast in March. So far, the total scientific ban had been kept in check with the counter argument that the blooms were strange but a common occurrence — one theory was that there was warm water welling up from a deep fracture somewhere — and that warm water conjecture made Cate even more curious, and determined.

And then, just when the road seemed to be getting ever steeper, a bluebird of good fortune had landed on her shoulder. Just months ago, NASA reported that the Hubble Space Telescope had picked up water vapor plumes emanating from Europa, one of the tiny moons of Saturn. Up until that point, the astral body, first discovered in 1610, was of little interest to anyone other than Galileo and a few dozen astronomers. The tiny ball was comprised of silicate rock with an iron core, and an outer covering of solid ice — interesting, but unimportant. But with the water plumes there came proof of liquid below that frozen coating. And where there was water, there was life.

Mankind would send eyes to Europa in a mission due to launch in 2022. Suddenly, the race was on to see what was under the astral body’s ice. The eyes they would send would not be human, but needed to be able to see below the ice, from below the ice… exactly what Cate was working on. Suddenly people wanted in, and Cate had sewn up a funding deal with an American research company, called GBR. They’d fully funded Cate’s project for the next decade, with her having full autonomy — it was almost too good to be true.

Cate stared at the stratigraphic mapping screen before her. Of the 400 lakes below the Antarctic ice, the newly discovered Lake Ellsworth was one of the largest and deepest. It would prove the perfect test bed. Cate had seized their chance, and now they were here, at the point of launch.

“Are we ready?” she repeated.

This time, shouted assent from the assembled team.

Cate exhaled slowly, absorbing the moment. The Ellsworth project was a test run for navigating the hidden oceans of Europa. But it was more than that — the subsurface lake had not been disturbed for many millions of years; it would be a window into the Earth’s prehistoric past. Cate bet there was life down there, and more than anything, she wanted proof of life.

Cate smiled, and then pressed the launch button, wishing she could go with it.

“Good luck, Flip. Go fetch,” she whispered and sat back to wait, and watch.

The miniature probe, nicknamed Flipper, and with a picture of the famous aquatic mammal painted on its side, was only six feet in length. It was packed with instrumentation, had a heat source at one end, and also ended in a rotating diamond-tipped drill. It would melt its way through the dark ice, cut its way through the granite crust, and then drop into the liquid it found below. There, its tanks would fill, giving it neutral buoyancy and allowing it to hover midwater, slowly rotating, and capturing streaming and still images until its batteries were exhausted.

Flipper would not be coming home. Above it, the hole it had created would immediately refreeze after it had passed by, sealing it in. This was a requirement of the approval process — Flipper was fully sealed and sterile, as no contaminants must be allowed to enter the pristine environment they expected to find below the rock and ice. The gigantic body of water had lain undisturbed and unseen by mankind for countless millions of years — humans were now as alien to it, as it was to us.

Flipper’s high-speed drill went from a grinding to a furious whir as it broke through the crust of granite and then fell through space. It took several seconds before it hit water that was blacker than hell itself.

It sank twenty feet before slowing, to then hang listlessly. The water was warm and deep, and at the point where Flipper entered, it went nearly 2,000 feet. The enormous body of water was 160 miles long and 50 miles wide — it was more an underground sea than a lake.

The sterile drill tip was automatically jettisoned, exposing a bulb end that was a single curved sheet of toughened Plexiglas. This bulb was lit by a ring of halogen lights surrounding a lens that was motion sensitive. Flipper was a six-foot Cyclopean fish that watched, tasted, and listened as hundreds of instruments came to life immediately recording, organizing and assessing the details of its environment. It also began a series of pings designed to echo-map the exact size and shape of the world that had become Flipper’s new home.

The sonar pings emanating from the probe were captured and read when they were bounced back from a solid object — in some directions it took many minutes for the reflected waves to return. They were invisible, and inaudible, to most creatures… but not to all.

“Reading Flipper loud and clear; good signals, hale and hearty.” Doctor Arkson Bentley’s face creased in confusion, also making his long, thin nose wrinkle. “Hey.” He suddenly leaned forward, placing his fingertips over one cup of his earphones as he glanced at Cate. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got another signal — electronic pulse.”

“Sonar echo?” Cate asked, not looking up from her own screen. “Gotta be.”

Bentley’s frown deepened. “No, I don’t think so. It’s weird, like a beacon, keeps repeating over and over.”

“Cancel it out — must just be echo distortion,” Cate said distractedly to her senior scientist.

“You got it, boss.” Bentley removed the signal from their scanners. The scientist then ran the data through his computer, organizing the information and deriving a geological profile of the huge sea deep below them. He watched as the contours started to be painted onto his screen; cliffs, valleys, mountain peaks, and then, the geology moved. Bentley froze, and then jerked upright in his seat.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I got something else — big, distant, but it’s there.”

“What now, Ark?” Cate skidded over to the scientist’s sonar screen. “What do you mean, contact? Is Flipper going to run aground?”

“No,” Bentley said. “We’re not going to run into something, but it looks like something might bloody well run into us.”

“A jelly-sheet maybe?” She frowned and peered over his shoulder at the screen. A jelly sheet was a huge clump of free-floating algae that hung like a curtain in deep subterranean water. Some of them could be a dozen feet across and solid as pudding.

“Only if the clump has learned to swim at thirty knots,” Bentley said quietly.

“Thirty knots? Oh my god, is it proof?” Cate slowly rose to her feet as some of the other staff around them turned to look at Bentley’s computer. “No, must be a sheet of ice that’s calved; still sliding through the water.” She was playing her own devil’s advocate, but in her gut she hoped against hope.

“Not a chance,” Bentley said, his eyes glued to the screen and one hand up to the headphone cup over his ear. “The water temperature is subtropical to say the least.” He concentrated on the pulses bouncing back from Flipper’s sonar. “Closing, closing… there.” He pointed. A blip finally showed on his screen. “Still a thousand feet out, but coming in at fifty knots now.”

“Fifty knots? That’s impossible; nothing can travel that fast underwater.” Cate looked back at the camera feed. There was nothing but the halogen’s glow on a crystal clear empty blackness — the lights not even showing the snowy particle debris usually seen in warm waters.

Bentley leaned forward. “Holy shit, closing in, coming right at us.” He shook his head. “Whatever it is, it just accelerated to eighty knots.”

The other scientists jostled behind Cate, pushing and shoving like teenagers at a rock concert.

Carl Timms, lead engineer, and the only game fisherman in the group, had wide eyes behind thick glasses. “That’s an attack run.” He nodded at the screen. “And we’re sitting ducks.”

“500 feet, 400, 300, 200…” Bentley’s voice was becoming shrill. “In range of the cameras… now.” He pointed.

The crowd surged back to the screen showing the black void miles beneath their feet just as Flipper swirled as something shot past it, creating a liquid tornado around the probe. The motion sensors ignited secondary flashes as the still camera captured image after image.

“Can we stabilize?” Cate felt the knot in her stomach start to tighten again.

“No, we just have to ride it out and hope to god we don’t rupture a buoyancy tank and sink. All we can do is pray Flipper slows enough for us to… oh…” Bentley’s mouth hung open.

A huge eye momentarily filled the screen. It was lidless, round, and white-rimmed, and its pupil was a goat-like slit. Cate sat back, not being able to help feeling that there was a cold intelligence behind the momentary gaze.

The image changed to a furious, boiling movement, and then there came a sound like an electronic scream, as if the probe was shrieking in fear of its life. The screen went dark, then there was nothing.

“It’s gone,” Bentley said into the silent room. “Everything’s gone. It’s all over.”

Cate sat down slowly, feeling dispirited, but also elated. All over? she wondered. Hardly, she knew, feeling a swelling in her chest.

Bentley rewound and then froze the last of the images. He whistled. “Oh my god.” He sat back.

“Alpha predator,” Cate said softly. Framed and frozen on the small screen was the eye. There was no real way to judge scale, but she knew she was seeing something of titanic proportions.

“Now that, is an eye.” Bentley clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “That’s a big blimmin’, beautiful eye.”

“Oh, it’s much more than that, Ark. It’s proof.” Cate stared off into the distance, as she slumped back into her chair, a dreamy smile on her lips. “My proof of life.”