Matthew Reilly: Ice Station

The two divers stared at the water's surface from below.

It was dark, the water calm. Unnaturally calm. Not a ripple broke its glassy, even plane. In the glare of their military-spec halogen flashlights, the ice walls around them glistened like crystal. They swam upward.

Suddenly they heard a noise.

The two divers stopped.

At first it was just a single haunting whistle, echoing through the clear, icy water. Whale song, they thought.

Possibility: killers. Recently a pod of killer whales had been seen lurking about the station. A couple of them?two juvenile males?had made a habit of coming up for air inside the pool at the base of Wilkes Ice Station.

More likely, however, it was a blue, singing for a mate, maybe five or six miles offshore. That was the problem with whale song. Water was such a great conductor, you could never tell if the whale was one mile away or ten.

Their minds reassured, the two divers continued upward.

It was then that the first whistle was answered.

All at once, about a dozen similar whistles began to coo across the dense aquatic plane, engulfing the two divers. They were louder than the first whistle.

Closer.

The two divers spun about in every direction, hovering in the clear blue water, searching for the source of the noise. One of them unslung his harpoon gun and cocked the hammer, and suddenly the high-pitched whistles turned into pained wails and barks.

And then suddenly there came a loud whump ! and both divers snapped upward just in time to see the glassy surface of the water break into a thousand ripples as something large plunged into the water from above.

The enormous diving bell broke the surface with a loud splash.

Benjamin K. Austin strode purposefully around the water's edge barking orders, a black insulated wet suit stretched tight across his broad barrel chest. Austin was a marine biologist from Stanford. He was also the chief of station of Wilkes Ice Station.

"All right! Hold it there!" Austin called to the young technician manning the winch controls on C-deck. "OK, ladies and gentlemen, no time to waste. Get inside."

One after the other, the six wet-suited figures gathered around the edge of the pool dived into the icy water. They rose a few seconds later inside the big dome-shaped diving bell that now sat half-submerged in the center of the pool.

Austin was standing at the edge of the large, round pool that formed the base of Wilkes Ice Station. Five stories deep, Wilkes was a remote coastal research station, a giant underground cylinder that had literally been carved into the ice shelf. A series of narrow catwalks and ladders hugged the circumference of the vertical cylinder, creating a wide circular shaft in the middle of the station. Doorways led off each of the catwalks? into the ice?creating the five different levels of the station. Like many others before them, the residents of Wilkes had long since discovered that the best way to endure the harsh polar weather was to live under it.

Austin shouldered into his scuba gear, running through the equation in his head for the hundredth time.

Three hours since the divers' radio link had cut out. Before that, one hour of hands-free diving up the ice tunnel. And one hour's descent in the diving bell....

In the diving bell, they would have been breathing "free" air?the diving bell's own supply of heliox?so that didn't count. It was only when they left the diving bell and started using tank air that the clock began to run.

Four hours, then.

The two divers had been living off tank air for four hours.

The problem was their tanks contained only three hours' worth of breathing time.

And for Austin that had meant a delicate balancing act.

The last words he and the others had heard from the two divers?before their radio signal had abruptly cut to static? had been some anxious chatter about strange whistling noises.

On the one hand, the whistling could have been anything: blues, minkes, or any other kind of harmless baleen whale. And the radio cutout could easily have been the result of interference caused by nearly half a kilometer of ice and water. For all Austin knew, the two divers had turned around immediately and begun the hour-long trip back to the diving bell. To pull it up prematurely would be to leave them stranded on the bottom, out of time and out of air.

On the other hand, if the divers actually had met with trouble?killers, leopard seals?then naturally Austin would have wanted to yank up the diving bell as quickly as possible and send others down to help.

In the end, he decided that any help he could send?after hauling up the diving bell and sending it back down again? would be too late anyway. If Price and Davis were going to survive, the best bet was to leave the diving bell down there.

That was three hours ago?and that was as much time as Austin had been willing to give them. And so he'd pulled up the diving bell; and now a second team was preparing to go down?

"Hey."

Austin turned. Sarah Hensleigh, one of the paleontologists, came up alongside him.

Austin liked Hensleigh. She was intelligent while at the same time practical and tough, not afraid to get her hands dirty. It came as no surprise to him that she was also a mother. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Kirsty, had been visiting the station for the past week.

"What is it?" Austin said.

"The topside antenna's taking a beating. The signal isn't getting through," Hensleigh said. "It also looks like there's a solar flare coming in."

"Oh, shit...."

"For what it's worth, I've got Abby scanning all the military frequencies, but I wouldn't get your hopes up."

"What about outside?"

"Pretty bad. We've got eighty-footers breaking on the cliffs and a hundred-knot wind on the surface. If we have casualties, we won't be getting them out of here by ourselves."

Austin turned to stare at the diving bell. "And Renshaw?"

"He's still shut up in his room." Hensleigh looked up nervously toward B-deck.

Austin said, "We can't wait any longer. We have to go down."

Hensleigh just watched him.

"Ben?," she began.

"Don't even think about it, Sarah." Austin began walking away from her, toward the water's edge. "I need you up here. So does your kid. You just get that signal out. We'll get the others."

" Coming to three thousand feet ," Austin's voice crackled out from the wall-mounted speakers.

Sarah Hensleigh was sitting inside the darkened radio room of Wilkes Ice Station. "Roger that, Mawson ," she said into the microphone in front of her.

"There doesn't appear to be any activity outside, Control. The coast is clear. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we 're stopping the winch. Preparing to leave the diving bell."

One kilometer below sea level, the diving bell jolted to a halt.

Inside, Austin keyed the intercom. "Control, confirm time at 2132 hours, please."

The seven divers sitting inside the cramped confines of the Douglas Mawson looked tensely at one another.

Hensleigh's voice came over the speaker. " I copy , Mawson. Time confirmed at 2132 hours ."

"Control, mark that we are turning over to self-contained air supply at 2132 hours."

"Marked."

The seven divers reached up for their heavy face masks, brought them down off their hooks, clamped them to the circular buckles on the collarbones of their suits.

"Control, we are now leaving the diving bell."

Austin stepped forward, pausing for a moment to look at the black pool of water lapping against the rim of the diving bell. Then he stepped off the deck and splashed into the darkness.

"Divers. Time is now 2220 hours; dive time is forty-eight minutes. Report," Hensleigh said into her mike.