The Black Knight

XX

‘How the hell are we going to get down there?!’

Hannah Ford’s voice echoed down into the plunging chasm before them as Ethan surveyed its depths.

The pristine blue ice of the first couple of dozen feet changed slowly to a deep, darkening blue that finally vanished into blackness far below. Ethan judged the limit of his vision as probably no more than fifty to sixty feet — beyond that was the impenetrable darkness that had likely not witnessed light for millions of years.

‘It’s a subterranean warm water vent,’ said Chandler. ‘We’ve seen these active on Jupiter’s moon, Europa.’

‘You mean it’s not from Black Knight’s descent?’ Hannah asked.

‘The initial chasm is, yes,’ Chandler went on, ‘but this is too uniform to have been carved so recently. The object must have broken through the ice here and crashed down into an existing cavity.’

‘I don’t care what it is,’ the SEAL commander said, ‘Black Knight went down into it and we’re going down there too. Break out the climbing gear and let’s get on with it.’

With practiced military efficiency the SEAL team unpacked climbing ropes and tackle from their ski gliders and began securing rappel lines to large boulders of ice and hammering metal stays into the rock-solid glacier.

Ethan strapped into a climbing rig, fastening his harnesses into place as he looked across at Chandler.

‘We’re not on Europa,’ he said. ‘What caused this cavity, if not the satellite?’

‘It’s the result of warm water rising and weakening the surface of the glacier, which eventually breaks free and rolls back either side of the warm water, leaving these ridges either side of the breach. Somewhere down in this chasm there must be a warm water channel just like the satellite surveys suggested, and at some point it must have reached the surface of the glacier.’

Hannah Ford frowned in disbelief.

‘The ice here is supposed to be kilometers thick, right? How could warm water have made it up this far?’

‘Because the continent below the ice is solid land, just like the rest of the world. It has contours, mountain ranges, ancient forests and other debris now crushed beneath the ice that could direct a flow of water close enough to the surface to breach it.’

‘Forests?’ one of the SEALs, a man named Saunders, asked. ‘What forests?’

‘Not now,’ the Lieutenant Riggs snapped. ‘Warner, you’re a former soldier, right?’

‘Fourth Marines,’ Ethan confirmed.

‘Good, you’re with Saunders. Down you go.’

Ethan masked his own dislike of heights by turning away from the team as he clambered with Saunders to the edge of the chasm and looked down. The gloomy depths of the glacier served to conceal the true height of the fall. Ethan turned in unison with Saunders, and with a nod to each other Ethan crouched at the knees slightly and then walked backwards over the edge of the ridge, his hands controlling his descent on the rappel lines.

The vertiginous canyon opened up beneath him and Ethan felt its icy breath gust by as he gently descended with small jumps, letting out no more than two feet of cable at any one time. Beside him, watching closely, Saunders descended alongside him as above the SEAL team began preparing the scientists for their own descent while two more soldiers appeared over the edge and followed Ethan down.

To Ethan’s surprise the air grew a little warmer as they descended, the endless winds at the surface falling silent. He realized that the noise of the journey out in the ski gliders and then the endless buffeting winds had been assaulting his ears for almost three hours. Now, the silence seemed deafening.

The ice before him was perfectly blue, light from above illuminating its depths as though he were looking into a cliff forged from some exotic jewel. Light sparkled within, but below him jagged outcrops of ice as hard as granite threatened to slice his lines in two.

‘Stay sharp,’ Saunders said with a gruff voice that echoed alarmingly inside the crevasse. ‘Watch your route down.’

Ethan obeyed as they descended further, and now the light began to fade as they rappelled down. Ethan reached up and carefully activated a small light attached to his jacket at the same time as Saunders, the brilliant LED glow causing the glacier walls to sparkle as though the ice were encrusted with a thousand diamond chips.

Ethan looked up, saw more of the soldiers and scientists following them down from the bright sliver of sky above, and then the ragged outcrops of ice blocked his view and he followed Saunders down deeper into the glacier’s depths.

They were more than eighty feet down when Ethan heard a soft hissing sound coming from far below, sounding closer than it was due to the confines of the crevasse.

‘Running water,’ Saunders figured as they descended. ‘Maybe the scientist was right.’

Ethan peered down between his boots but saw nothing but inky blackness, the air frigid with cold.

‘Warm water my ass,’ he said finally. ‘There’s nothing warm down here.’

They descended for another minute, two feet at a time, easing their way around dangerous chunks of ice until Ethan realized that the air had become saturated around them with a thin mist.

‘That’s steam,’ Saunders uttered in amazement.

Ethan shook his head, unwilling to believe it, but then the lights from their jackets caught on something far below and he looked down to see the lights reflecting off of a rapidly shimmering surface.

‘Water,’ Saunders cautioned. ‘Slow your advance and we’ll try to find a place to set down. If you get caught up in that flow, you’re as good as dead.’

Ethan nodded as below them the water channel slowly emerged from the absolute darkness. He realized quickly that the scientist had only meant that the water that had created the chasm was warmer than the ice itself, the water flowing through the channel likely sub-zero, remaining a fluid only because of the pressure of the glacier above preventing it from freezing.

Saunders took the lead, guiding Ethan down, and then a moment later their boots thumped down onto a ledge some five feet above the water flowing by in a channel roughly ten feet wide. Ethan unclipped his harness from the rappel line and stepped clear with Saunders to provide space for the others coming down above them.

‘Wow,’ Ethan murmured as he looked around them, and his exclamation echoed into the distance in both directions.

The water had carved a tunnel complex beneath the glacier that was probably twenty feet in width and height, with perfectly smooth walls of glistening ice as clear as glass. Ethan’s light shone onto the ice above his head and was both reflected by it and also penetrated at the same time, the beam a fuzzy ray piercing the ancient glacier.

Below them, but above the flowing water, were a series of perfectly formed steps carved into the ice that led down to the water’s edge.

‘You’re kidding me?’ Saunders uttered.

Ethan looked to his left and right, saw the steps follow the contours of the tunnel far into the darkness, and saw identical steps on the far side of the water.

‘You think that somebody hacked these steps out for access?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

Doctor Chandler gestured to the glacier walls around them, his voice echoing through the tunnels as he landed on the icy path beside them.

‘The water’s risen and fallen back in discrete stages recently,’ he observed, ‘and created these ledges one at a time as it eroded the walls of the cave. I suspect that this channel was the result of warm water finding a way towards the Antarctic Ocean via gravity, just as all rivers do, which means it likely follows the path of some ancient river that once flowed before the continent froze.’

Ethan peered into the water’s depths.

‘But how would Black Knight have known to come down here? How could a signal have guided it? Antarctica has been covered by ice for millions of years.’

Chandler smiled as though pitying Ethan’s naivety.

‘Humans have only existed for a few million years,’ he replied, ‘but throughout that history we have recorded technologies witnessed by people that exceed anything we have today. If Black Knight is thirteen thousand years old, it may be a more recent example of extra-terrestrial involvement in our evolution.’

Ethan glanced at Saunders, who shrugged. Lieutenant Riggs landed on the ice with more scientists, soldiers and Hannah Ford alongside him, and unclipped himself from his harness. He immediately checked his radio, and Ethan saw him wince.

‘Not a chance,’ he said finally. ‘We’re out of radio contact while we’re down here.’

‘Then let’s move fast,’ Saunders suggested. ‘Sooner we’re done, the sooner we can get the hell out of here.’

Saunders took the lead as he began following the cave upstream, still heading toward the signal’s source. Ethan turned to follow him with Hannah at his side as they walked carefully alongside the rushing water, their lights patches of illumination in an otherwise deeply black universe that picked out the glowing ice around them and gave the impression that the entire cave system was constantly moving, the ice bending and warping the lights as they walked.

‘How far did we descend?’ Hannah asked as they walked.

‘A hundred feet at least, maybe one fifty,’ Ethan replied. ‘I don’t want to think about how much ice there is above us right now.’

‘A lot,’ Chandler replied unhelpfully from behind them. ‘Millions of tons in fact, and glaciers are always moving so it’s generally unstable ice too.’

‘Thanks Doc,’ Hannah shot back, and then was cut off as she saw something poking out of the ice ahead. ‘What the hell is that?!’

Ethan spotted a thick cylinder of some kind jutting out over the path ahead and saw Saunders slow as he illuminated it.

‘It’s a tree,’ Saunders said in disbelief.

The group slowed as they looked at the thick tree trunk poking out of the ice before them, its surface black as night.

‘It’s a petrified tree,’ Chandler corrected them in delight as he edged forward and examined the surface of the object. ‘A fossil probably several million years old.’

‘What the hell is it doing down here?’ Ethan asked.

Chandler looked over his shoulder at Ethan with a knowing smile.

‘One hundred million years ago, the Earth was in the grip of an extreme Greenhouse Effect. The polar ice caps had all but melted; in the south, rainforests inhabited by dinosaurs existed in their place. These Antarctic ecosystems were adapted to the long months of winter darkness that occur at the poles and were truly bizarre. Robert Falcon Scott, an Antarctic explorer, first discovered fossil plants on the Beardmore Glacier at eighty two degrees south, in 1912. Take a look up there, at that dark line up in the ice.’

Ethan peered up into the glacier’s depths and saw a thin line running through the ice parallel to the horizon.

‘That’s a sedimentary layer,’ Chandler explained. ‘If we went up there and excavated it we’d find soil, twigs and leaves embedded within it, all of them three to five millions of years old. The ice here is a relatively recent geological event — prior to this, Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.’

‘You’re telling me that Antarctica was like Brazil?’ Hannah uttered in amazement.

‘Scientists routinely excavate petrified logs from the depths of glaciers just like this one that must have come from extremely large trees. We’re even able to slice into the fossil trees and count the rings demarking their growth. The most amazing thing about that is the requirement for many of those species to have coped with the Antarctic winter, during which it’s dark for six months of the year.’

‘Trees grow through photosynthesis don’t they?’ Ethan said. ‘Wouldn’t they die?’

‘Experiments at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom showed that planets like the Ginkgo, an ancient species considered a “living fossil” by science, could survive in simulated Antarctic conditions quite well. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesise twenty four hours a day in the summer.’

Saunders ducked under the tree and moved on, Ethan following as Hannah spoke to Chandler behind him.

‘So if Antarctica was a normal land mass before the ice, then wouldn’t it have had animals living on it?’

‘Many,’ Chandler confirmed, ‘and as we’re talking about a period from one hundred million years ago, then there would have been dinosaurs roaming this continent just like any other.’

‘Dinosaurs?’ Hannah echoed. ‘Seriously?’

‘Absolutely,’ Chandler said. ‘Researchers at the Victoria Museum in Australia have found many dinosaur fossils in southern Australia at a location that was once positioned just off the east coast of Antarctica. Their work has shown that not only did dinosaurs live on Antarctica, but that they did so year-round. Specimens of the species Leaellynasaura showed adaptions of the skull which indicate that the animal had enlarged optic lobes, designed to offer acute night vision well suited to the prolonged winter darkness.’

Hannah smiled nervously.

‘Let’s hope that none of them are left wandering about down here then, shall we?’

Saunders chuckled.

‘The species died out tens of millions of years ago, and was a plant eater no bigger than a kangaroo,’ he said. ‘You’d have had nothing to fear from it.’

Ahead of them, Lieutenant Riggs slowed as he looked down at a scanner he held in his hand.

‘Well, something’s ahead of us,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a much stronger signal now. We’re close.’