Steve Alten - Vostok

“Are we topside yet?”

“We’re en route to the extraction point. Be quiet. Something’s between us and the northern basin. Whatever they are, there seems to be a lot of them.”

“I’m dying back here and you’re messing with more fish? Just pound the horn and scare ’em outta the way.”

Before I could stop him, Ben overrode my sonar control, switching from passive to active a second before he repeatedly pinged the depths.

Ping… ping… ping…

I unclipped my harness and leaned over the back of my seat to his console, grabbing his wrist before he hit the device again. “Are you nuts?”

“Take me home!”

Leaving me no option, I punched his wound, the pain rendering him unconscious. Wheeling back around, my eyes focused on the sonar monitor as my hands worked at re-securing my harness.

They had been sleeping upright in the water like sixty-foot logs. Now, as their brains awoke, the pods of Livyatan melvillei mothers and calves began bombarding the river with bursts of echolocation that rattled the sub like a giant tuning fork.

Zzzzzzzzzzt… zzzzzzzzzzzzzt…

I turned to starboard as a two-story, charcoal-gray head charged out of the murk. The creature’s ivory-colored lower jaw was stretched open, its conical teeth as big as dinner plates.

Stomping on the throttle, I shot away from the monster’s maw a split second before it snapped shut on the Barracuda .

The depths before me were a swirling freeway of converging masses, impossible to track on sonar or see through my night vision.

Operating purely on adrenaline and fear, I executed a tight U-turn and raced back in the direction we had come from, drawing the chaos behind me into an angry pod of Miocene sperm whales. Sonar quickly distinguished parent from calf, and I realized the pinging had disturbed a sleeping nursery. As the cetaceans closed behind me into a protective pod, I dove straight for the bottom, executing a tight barrel roll into a 180-degree turn, slingshotting past the confused behemoths, just missing being swatted by a fluke the size of a garage door.

With nothing but open water ahead of me, I raced over the plateau’s cliff face into the northern basin, feeling giddy over having survived yet another confrontation with death.

“This is Schager. That was some maneuver. Now, if you are through teasing the wildlife, come to course zero-three-seven. The extraction zone is less than six kilometers away.”

Seeking to gauge the ice sheet, I surfaced. The frozen ceiling was sloping closer to the water line, but was still forty feet overhead.

“Schager, the ice is too high to reach.”

“Be patient. You haven’t reached the extraction zone. Stay on course. The ice sheet will drop, and the external pressure will rise. When your gauge hits 3,100 psi, the ice sheet and the lake’s surface waters will be separated by less than five feet of air space. Dive the boat to a depth of three hundred feet, then ascend on a ninety degree vertical plane with both Valkyrie lasers on high. As soon as you pop up out of the water you’ll melt ice, and the external pressure will force the Barracuda up into the hole you’ve created and drive you straight up through the ice sheet. By the time the water freezes behind you and reseals the hole, you’ll be halfway home.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!

The acoustic jolt was far more powerful than the others, reverberating inside my skull and throughout the Barracuda . I searched for the source on sonar, but it was too late.

The bull leviathan breached beneath the Barracuda and took the submersible sideways in its powerful jaws. I experienced the sensation of being lifted into the air as our exterior lights illuminated a pink mouth and rows of brown-stained teeth.

And then a deafening craaaaaack popped my eardrums, and a shock of icy water blasted me in the face as I was tossed sideways into death’s crushing embrace.

I opened my eyes to warmth and shadows, and then a single indigo candle flickered to life, revealing a wall of books and the alien resembling Joe Tkalec.

“Welcome back.”

“I died again, didn’t I?”

“A skill you have become quite adept at. So far you’ve bled to death in the ice tunnel, frozen to death resting in one crevasse, broken your neck when you fell into another, drowned twice, and now been eaten by a giant aquatic mammal. Six wavelengths, six multiverses to alter your destiny — all resulting in six deaths.”

“Maybe if you actually allowed me to retain the slightest bit of memory … ”

“Zachary, I’ve explained the rules regarding free will. Vostok is a test, to see if you are worthy of accessing the portal.

“Once more into the breach?”

“Isn’t there something you can offer me?” I asked. “The slightest clue? Even the real Joe Tkalec wouldn’t sit back and watch me suffer like this. I feel like an animal caught in a trap.”

“Then act like one! An animal caught in a trap would chew off its leg to free itself.”

“Is that it, then? Is that the secret to our survival as a species?”

“No.” The entity appearing as my mentor stopped rocking. “Zachary, do you remember how you used to solve a Rubick’s Cube? Six sides, kept in flux, each move affecting at least three other sides. In every moment of existence there are varying moments within the spectrum of free will. You can remain in the mainstream or venture out into the radical, but each decision will create a domino effect upon the next. To survive Vostok’s darkness, you must figure out how to curve the elements that have brought about your death into a pathway that leads to your survival. That is the means to revealing more light, more energy. You’ll need this light to access the portal.

“You’ve methodically exhausted six of the seven accessible dimensions of the energy spectrum, leaving only violet, the last wavelength. The ice tunnel will collapse behind you as you leave, sealing off further communication. If you perish this time around, I cannot save you.”

My heart pounded with adrenaline as I moved through the ice tunnel, my eyes darting from the pulsating indigo light ahead to the Geiger counter in my hand.

Just a quick look. One quick look and I’ll have enough information to theorize cause and effect. Then I’m up the rope and climbing out of the chasm, and we’re back in the sub and en route to the north basin. Up the ice sheet and I’m done. Done with Vostok, done with Antarctica and its insane cold. Then it’s home to Brandy and William .

Wary of the time, I started to jog, counting each ice-crunching stride to gauge the distance back to the rope.

Twenty-one… twenty-two… twenty-three…

The indigo hue deepened to violet, reminding me of my fateful descent into the Sargasso Sea three years earlier, a mission that had led to my second drowning — a near-death experience that had changed my path in life.

Would this present decision alter my path again?

Not likely, it seemed. The tunnel simply dead-ended in a slab of volcanic rock.

I switched the Geiger counter to the magnetometer, the needle going haywire.

A magnified asteroid impact crater, just as I thought. What a waste of time. You let Ben and his crazy stories get inside your head .

Without warning, the violet light disappeared, and the tunnel swallowed me in its all-consuming blackness. I fumbled with my night-vision goggles. My surroundings reappeared in a faint olive-green, but everything felt different — cold, dead — and a surge of claustrophobia unleashed a wave of anxiety that sent me sprinting back down the tunnel.