Vostok (47 page)

My chest tightened. “What’s wrong? Is Claire all right?”

“It’s not the kids.” She searched my desk for the remote and turned on the television
.

The news was on every station, the story coming from the States. Reporters talked over fluctuating images: lava as wide as a river, swallowing a neighborhood; collapsing bridges and billowing chocolate-brown smoke; highways backed up in traffic as far as the eye could see
.

While I slept, hell had opened its gates beneath Midwestern America
.

Brandy paused from channel-surfing at a newscast featuring an animated aerial view over a national park
.

“ …to recap if you’re just joining us, at approximately 4:47 a.m. Wyoming time, the Yellowstone Caldera, an underground magma chamber fifty-five miles long, erupted beneath Yellowstone National Park. Categorized as a supervolcano, the Yellowstone Caldera has erupted three times in the past 2.1 million years, the last major eruption occurring 640,000 years ago to form the crater beneath the park. Experts say this morning’s blast was two thousand times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption
.

“Dawn Marie Hurtienne is a volcano expert working with the U.S. Geological Survey. She joins us now from Wyoming. Dr. Hurtienne, this is Melody Matney. Thank you for taking time to speak with us. We understand you are in the process of evacuating your family. Was there any warning this eruption might occur?”

“Scientists began warning Washington about this event as far back as 2004, when the ground above the caldera began rising at a rate of 2.8 inches a year. Yellowstone trails had to be shut down when ground temperatures exceeded 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet they never took our warnings seriously.”

“Was there anything that could have been done to prevent it?”

“We proposed several potential solutions to deal with the caldera threat, including the construction of a deep-well venting system. Congress vetoed the deal three years ago, claiming the $23 billion price tag was far too excessive for a tourist attraction. When we protested, news pundits on one politically slanted network accused members of the U.S. Geological Survey of using scare tactics to fund our department.”

“Obviously, a blast of this magnitude striking so early in the morning represents a worst-case scenario. We’re getting death estimates ranging from eight to ten thousand—”

“Ms. Matney, I don’t think you comprehend the magnitude of this event. It’s not the initial blast or the lava flow we have to fear; it’s the ash cloud. As it rises into the stratosphere it will span the entire globe, blanketing the atmosphere and blotting out the sun’s rays. Photosynthesis will cease, which means crops will fail, leading to mass starvation. The Earth’s temperatures will plummet, initiating another ice age. What we’re looking at is the opening act of a planet-wide cataclysm—an extinction event.”

The announcer couldn’t find her voice, forcing her colleague to take over the interview
.

“Dr. Hurtienne, this is Tyler Bohlman. How long will this theoretical ice age last?”

“I can assure you, Mr. Bohlman, the ice age is not theoretical. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid struck the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs. It wasn’t the impact that caused the mass extinction, but rather the ash cloud that caused a radical change in climate. As for how long the ice age will last, the answer is anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand years.”

“Huh!” My eyes snapped open, my heart pounding in my chest. For a distressing moment I felt lost.

Jonas was snoring softly in his command chair, his congested breaths nearly concealing the faint sound of rushing water. Locating my headphones, I listened in on the sonar.

The sound was coming from the riverbed below the Manta, along the base of the ice sheet now walling us in. Deciding not to wake Jonas, I restarted the engines and dove the sub to the bottom.

The subglacial waterway hadn’t ceased; its outflow had been dammed by ice extending from the bottom of the glacier to within seven to ten feet of the riverbed. Reduced to a narrow bottleneck, the current was rushing beneath the ice sheet at a swift twenty-three knots.

It would be a tight squeeze, but the Manta could slip through. The danger lay in the fact that the extended bottom of the glacier was essentially river water that had frozen, rendering it unstable.
Traversing the passage could cause the ceiling to collapse on the sub and trap us for all eternity.

The
Tethys
had most likely forged its own tunnel through the glacier, its superheated bow plates eliminating any risk. I thought about searching for their borehole, but we were already six hours behind.

Gritting my teeth, I guided the sub through the horizontal channel.

It took full throttle just to enter the restricted passage. The ungodly current rocked the sub, slamming the cockpit repeatedly against the ceiling of ice and grinding its undercarriage into the gravel riverbed.

Jonas woke up. Taking command of the pitching submersible, he powered up the Valkyries and ignited the lasers, creating a vacuum effect that accelerated the Manta smoothly through the widening crawl space.

“Guess I should have used the lasers to begin with, huh?”

He shot me a pissed-off look. “Next time wake me.”

“I was afraid you might not risk it.”

“Obviously you have me confused with someone who has something to live for.”

“Be careful what you say. I had another dream.”

“Which planet were you visiting this time? Uranus?”

“The dream took place on Earth, about twenty years from now. Brandy and I were still married, with three kids and a slew of grandkids. Not sure what year it was, but it was Christmas, give or take a day—the day the Yellowstone Caldera erupted.”

Jonas looked at me, incredulous. “Was this real or just one of those multiverse things?”

“There’s no way to tell; it hasn’t happened yet. Obviously. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it parallels the event that must have destroyed Charon.”

“Zach, scientists have known about the Yellowstone Caldera for decades. You think a dream is going to convince the authorities to take the threat any more seriously?”

“No, but I do think the dream serves a purpose. I just haven’t figured out what that is yet. What’s our ETA to Vostok?”

“How the hell should I know? We’re still over two hundred miles away. Who knows if we’ll even get out from under this giant ice cube?”

As if the glacier heard him, the passage suddenly reopened, depositing us back in the main river.

For the next thirteen hours, we forged our way to the southwest, averaging eighteen knots. We stretched and ate and relieved our bowels and bladder, and we watched movies over the computer and alternated piloting duties with restless catnaps. Finally, the waterway twisted to the north, the riverbed dropping away several hundred feet as the ice sheet receded overhead, creating a six-foot space of air into which we surfaced.

Lake Vostok. The northern basin.

We had arrived.

“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

—Lewis Carroll

Migrating from the ocean, a salmon will fight its way upstream to return to the river where it was born so it can spawn and die, completing its circle of life.

My circle had begun seven years ago when an alien entity had redirected my life, sending me down a multiverse not of my choosing. Now I had returned, hoping for a do-over at the point where my consciousness had jumped the tracks into a radically different reality, which had somehow become my destiny.

Multiverses.

Ten dimensions of existence.

The theory that started it all originated in 1997 when a physicist by the name of Juan Maldacena introduced a model of the universe in which gravity arose from thin microscopic vibrating strings residing in nine dimensions of space, plus one of time. Quantum theory became a mathematical Rosetta Stone, filling in key gaps within Einstein’s theory of gravity. More unnerving were Maldacena’s implications—that the nine upper dimensions were the true reality, while our physical lower dimension of time was the equivalent of a hologram.

In 2013, two physicists from Japan’s Ibaraki University made huge strides in proving Maldacena’s theory when they discovered that the internal energy and properties of a black hole precisely matched the internal energy of our physical universe—that is, if there were no gravity.

Was our physical universe simply one big holographic projection?

Was time an illusion and gravity its shepherd?

Seeking to rise above “the hologram” and rediscover my life, I had returned to Lake Vostok, arriving nine hours after Colonel Vacendak and his MJ-12 maniacs.

Having entered the northern basin, I instructed Jonas to take us deep and go active on sonar, warning him that the lake’s bull sperm whale population was extremely aggressive when it came to safeguarding their pods. My concerns seemed unfounded, as we made it all the way to the plateau without a single sonar contact.

It took Jonas twenty minutes to locate the river we needed to follow inland. Reducing our speed to five knots, we entered the
Livyatan melvillei
nursery.

“My God… how could he do this?”

The Tethys had shown no mercy. The tributary flowed red with blood, the shallows clogged with the butchered remains of the Miocene whales. Beached cetaceans lined the snow-covered banks, bleeding out from laser burns that had effortlessly sheered blubber from bone. The dead were too numerous to count; those few still dying slapped the surface with their flukes as a warning, and the survivors clicked the waterway in search of their missing calves.

The scene sickened us. Once more, man’s ego had blinded him to recognizing that there was a universal consciousness in play; every negative action causing a ripple that would one day come home to roost.

The E.T.s were here as mentors, reaching out to those who demonstrated purity of heart. As such, I knew the Colonel and his fear-mongers would not be granted access into the alien vessel. And that would lead them to desperate measures.

“Jonas, we have to hurry before there’s no vessel left to access.”

Thirty minutes later we were moving through the partially frozen waters of Lake Vostok’s bay. Jonas used the ice floes as sonar camouflage as we progressively made our way toward the shoreline—like everything else about the island— was undergoing beyond which we would find the extraterrestrial vessel.

Aided by night-vision binoculars, I located the Tethys. The nuclear submarine was anchored offshore, only the shoreline, like everything else about the island, was undergoing a rapid transformation.

Teams of men dressed in ECW gear and wearing chemical tanks strapped to their backs were using flamethrowers to melt the ice and snow, exposing sections of what appeared to be a metallic, saucer-shaped vessel, whose diameter rivaled that of an aircraft carrier. While most of the crew focused on clearing fifteen million years of packed snow from the floating alien landscape, a dozen men had forged a path to the base of the mountain, their wall of flame focused on the summit. The intense heat caused great swaths of ice to fall away from a four-story dorsal-shaped mast, partially concealed behind swirling curtains of steam and fog.