The Black Knight

XL

‘What the hell was that?!’

Amy’s terrified scream rang in Ethan’s ears as he saw the huge creature lunge directly at the dome and a set of massive fangs slam into the acrylic inches from his face, a deep, red mouth lined with razor sharp teeth that scraped down the acrylic and left deep gashes in the surface.

The Seehund rocked to one side and threw Amy from her seat, her body slamming against the pressure hull as Ethan struggled to maintain control.

The fearsome teeth and massive body vanished instantly into the blackness, the submarine’s lights illuminating a vortex of disturbed sediment and phytoplankton that swirled in eddies through the freezing black water.

Ethan’s heart hammered in his chest and his breath came in short, sharp gasps as he struggled to recover from the attack. He peered out into the gloom, suddenly fearful of what might be out there in the darkness.

‘I think Chandler was right,’ he said finally. ‘We’re not alone down here.’

Amy climbed back into her seat but kept one hand pressed against the hull for balance as she sat in silence and stared into the blackness, listening for any sign of the creature that had attacked them so viciously.

The silence deepened, as did it seemed the darkness as they waited. Ethan flinched as he realized that they were still drifting with the current, the underside of the glacier moving past above them. He cursed as he realized that he had lost track of their position.

‘Can you reach Chandler?’

Amy did not respond, sitting frozen in silence inside the submarine.

‘Amy?’

She shook herself awake and turned to the laptop as she keyed the microphone.

‘Doctor Chandler, can you hear us?’

A soft static replied to her with its empty hiss. Ethan bit his lip and cursed again as he peered up at the glacier’s underbelly and sought any sign of the shaft that would bring them up into the docks.

‘Damn it,’ he snapped finally. ‘I think we’ve missed it.’

Amy began to panic, her voice trembling as she replied.

‘But what are we going to do? We can’t stay down here Ethan, our air won’t last long enough and…’

A deep boom reverberated through the Seehund’s hull as something massive slammed into them once again. Ethan’s forehead smacked into the acrylic dome as he saw something move below them in the glow of the lights. His guts convulsed as he saw the immense body of the creature move swiftly through the lights, its back a dark and mottled gray and a stream of bubbles left in its wake. Deep lesions in its surface betrayed the scars battles with other creatures both dangerous and perhaps unknown.

‘Can you see it?’ Amy asked fearfully.

Ethan nodded, his hands gripping the controls tightly. ‘It’s big,’ he replied, ‘maybe eighteen feet or more.’

Amy turned to her laptop and re-wound the footage. A silence consumed the submarine once more as she surveyed what her camera had detected, and to Ethan’s amazement she breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Thank God,’ she uttered.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘It’s a sea leopard,’ she replied.

‘A what?’

‘A sea leopard,’ Amy repeated. ‘They’re common predators in the Antarctic.’

Ethan peered out into the gloom. ‘There’s nothing good or common about that thing out there, it’s huge!’

‘It may have grown large due to the unusual amount of nutrients and food down here.’

‘We lost our chance to surface in the dock shaft,’ Ethan said, ‘and I have no damned idea where we are now.’

‘Did you see where it went?’ Amy asked.

‘The leopard seal? Yeah, south,’ Ethan replied, quickly able to orientate their position and the direction in which the animal had departed.

‘Good,’ Amy said, ‘follow it.’

‘You want me to do what?’

‘Follow it,’ Amy insisted. ‘Seals are mammals, they have lungs.’

Ethan stared down at her for a moment and then he got it. ‘They breathe air.’

He turned the submarine around to point in the same direction as the current and immediately they began to accelerate as they joined the natural flow of the water.

‘How are they getting their air?’ Ethan asked. ‘We didn’t see any of them in the submarine pens.’

‘No, but we did see one of Veer’s men dragged into the water by something,’ Amy said, ‘and leopard seals are known to be large enough to kill humans. The ice in this channel beneath the glacier is highly oxygenated, and any cavities that exist will likely have breathable air in them. All we have to do is follow that seal and hope that the cavities are large enough to accommodate the submarine.’

‘Big hope,’ Ethan pointed out, and then something caught his eye.

Through the gloom he saw a large, streamlined shape moving through the water. From the blackness emerged an enormous seal, three times as long as a man. Ethan had seen such animals on the television but he was stunned by their incredible size and he realized that they would easily be capable of taking down a full grown man.

‘That’s got to weigh at least fifteen hundred pounds,’ he said as he looked at it.

‘The leopard seal is second only to the killer whale on the Antarctic food chain,’ Amy said as she watched the animal on the screen. ‘They’ve been known to kill humans too, dragging them off the ice sheets or attacking them in the water and pulling them down to their deaths.’

‘The docks,’ Ethan realized. ‘It’s their calls we’ve been hearing, right?’

‘That and the turbines under pressure,’ Amy confirmed. ‘Leopard seals growl quite loudly both above and below the surface. Any sign of a breathing chamber yet?’

Ethan could see bubbles periodically streaming from the seal’s mouth as it swam, and then it began to ascend. Ethan eased back on the power and pulled the hydroplanes back, causing the Seehund to follow the seal up.

Almost immediately he saw a shadowy fissure above them, perhaps twenty feet wide and of unknown depth.

‘I can see surface water,’ he said.

The water rippled and glittered as the Seehund’s lights caught it, and then suddenly he saw the seal burst through the surface before diving back down into the depths again, bubbles streaming from its nostrils like shimmering chrome spheres. Ethan guided the submarine upward into the cavity and suddenly the dome broke through the surface water as the lights illuminated a concave chasm in the ice.

Ethan could tell at a glance that the formation was natural, perhaps created as the glacier had moved slowly over rocky formations on the seabed somewhere to the north and thousands of years before. Ragged, linear scars in the roof of the cave marked the glacier’s progress, dark lines scoring the ice where debris and sediments had been dragged along with the ice and frozen in time.

Ethan reached out and pulled a lever, extending the submarine’s breathing tube as he then reached out and opened a valve. He heard a hissing sound as the air outside, under high pressure from the water pinning it in place against the ice, bled immediately into the low pressure atmosphere inside the submarine.

A cold blast of pristine air rushed through the Seehund to hit Ethan’s face and he breathed it in deeply.

‘Damn, that’s so good it hurts,’ Amy gasped.

Ethan looked up at the interior of the cavity and recognized the same natural lines that adorned the ceiling of the submarine pens.

Amy joined him and managed to peer up past his shoulder to get a glimpse of their surroundings.

‘This air must be millions of years old,’ she confirmed. ‘For all we know we could have breathed in ancient pathogens.’

‘You go girl, and keep our spirits up.’

Amy did not reply for a moment, her brow furrowed in deep thought.

‘This glacier is also millions of years old,’ she said finally, ‘and glaciers move.’

‘Yeah,’ Ethan agreed, ‘so what?’

Amy dropped back into her seat as she stared at her laptop screen.

‘The Nazi base must also move with the glacier.’

‘We know that,’ Ethan said, ‘and that movement is slowly tearing up the turbines they built in the water channels.’

Amy shook her head.

‘That’s not what I mean,’ she added. ‘The Totten Glacier is the primary outlet of the Aurora Subglacial Basin and has the fastest rate of thinning in East Antarctica. Circumpolar deep water has been linked to glacial retreat in West Antarctica, so why not here? It’s been observed here all year-round on the continental shelf a few hundred meters beneath the Antarctic surface water.’

‘You’re losing me,’ Ethan admitted.

‘The warm water currents both outside the continent and coming from within it are what created these sub-glacial chambers,’ Amy went on. ‘We just saw a large leopard seal, a mammal that requires large volumes of food and a reliable air supply to survive, and yet here we are some seventy miles in from the Antarctic coast.’

Ethan realized what Amy was getting at.

‘There must be an existing channel still available to the open ocean that passes directly through the submarine pens, and it must be large enough and with consistent enough air pockets to allow large predators to reach this far beneath the glacier, perhaps even live here permanently. That leopard seal might be one of countless species here beneath the glacier, and we might be able to follow that channel out of here to the coast.’

Ethan glanced at the oxygen indicators and saw that the submarine’s tanks were full. He closed the vents and retracted the air pipe.

‘I don’t want to meet any more speciess, thanks all the same. We missed the entrance to the north dock,’ he said as he looked up at the lines running through the ceiling of the air pocket, ‘but if we orientate with those lines we might be able to pick up the main pens and surface there.’

Amy shot him a sharp look.

‘The main pens are where Veer and his men are,’ she warned. ‘We show up there, it will be like handing Black Knight over to them.’

Ethan knew that she was right, but he also knew that nobody knew anything about whether they had actually recovered Black Knight or not yet. With the device tethered below the submarine and submerged beneath the water even when the Seehund breached the surface, nobody would be able to tell what had happened to it.

‘We can’t stay down here forever, and we can’t make a run for the coast and leave the rest of the team behind in there.’

‘Riggs and his men would not hesitate to leave us behind,’ Amy pointed out. ‘That’s probably why he was so keen to lead this expedition. He could have simply sailed out of here and left us behind.’

‘I think Riggs has more humanity than you give him credit for,’ Ethan said as he prepared to dive the submarine.

‘We can escape, right now,’ Amy insisted. ‘We could reach the coast in a few hours, deny Veer and his men their prize and complete our mission!’

‘And Hannah, Doctor Chandler and the others?’ Ethan demanded. ‘Either way, we can’t necessarily sail out of here. Just because a leopard seal or two can make it through seventy miles of sub-glacial ice doesn’t mean this submarine will, and we don’t have weapons to blast our way through. Either we make it back to the base and take our chances, or we’re stuck down here forever. Which would you prefer?’

Amy scowled, but she had no alternative for Ethan as he turned the Seehund in the water and then eased the throttle forward as he aimed the hydroplanes down.

Slowly, the submarine slid back into the icy blackness below and the cave was plunged once more into absolute blackness.