She put on insulated dive boots, gloves, and a fifteen-millimeter neoprene hood. After purging her suit three times with argon gas, a much more efficient insulator than air, she buckled two dive computers onto her left arm and a bottom-time calculator and compass onto her right. The compass would be no use here at the South Pole, but Hallie’s donning protocol never varied. Two freeze-proof, submersible pressure gauges were clipped to D-rings on her left hip, and three high-intensity, handheld dive lights were fastened to D-rings on her chest harness. She clipped primary and backup dive reels to D-rings on her right hip and snapped an Envirotainer, a flashlight-sized, stainless steel cylinder she would use to retrieve samples of the extremophile, to another D-ring.
She was impressed with Guillotte’s efficiency. As soon as she finished donning one piece of gear, she found him standing close by, next piece in hand. Experienced, skillful, attentive. Where an extra set of hands was required, he was firm and steady, not erratic and yanking. Overall, a manager she could trust. Very good to know for a dive like this.
She strapped on a rig with double steel tanks, each with one hundred cubic feet of capacity, equipped with her specialized Scubapro cold-water regulators. She put on her fog-proofed mask, and Guillotte secured her diving helmet with a headlamp that had a front bulb and single-bulb lights on either side. All told, she was now weighted down with close to 125 pounds of gear, so Guillotte supported most of the weight from behind, with his hands under the tanks, while she shuffled over to the shaft. Then he helped her sit on its edge. She pulled on fins and dangled her feet in the water. Even through double socks, insulated inner booties, and eleven-millimeter outer neoprene boots, she felt the cold.
They ran through the final predive checklist items. Guillotte raised a hand with thumb and forefinger circled. “Okay?”
His voice sounded distant through the thick hood. She returned his okay signal, placed both hands on the lip of the shaft, and eased forward and down into the water.
23
She valved gas out of her dry suit to achieve negative buoyancy, dropped to fifteen feet, hovered, and performed predive checks, testing both regulators, all her lights, both computers, her suit inflator and deflator valves.
She released more gas and sank down through the shaft. The hot water drill had left smooth walls that gleamed in her light. Dropping from the bottom of the shaft into the cryopeg, she stopped, got neutrally buoyant, and played her light over the ceiling. It was not, as she had expected, like the jagged, spiked roof of a cave. Instead, slightly concave and riddled with dish-shaped depressions, it reminded her of the surface of a vast golf ball.
She had thought that such high salinity would probably cloud the water, and indeed visibility was only about twenty feet. There was so much backscatter that her light beams looked like car headlights on a very foggy night. Her computers registered the water temperature at twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. So much salt kept the water from freezing, but fluid that cold and saline had a molten, syrupy feel. At this temperature, the thick crushed neoprene of her dry suit became stiffer and more resistant, too, so every kick and hand movement required extra effort, which meant increased respiration. Gas management would be especially critical on this dive.
Emily had placed an ice screw in the ceiling next to the shaft bottom and run a guideline from that point diagonally down to the extremophile colony. Hallie tied her own guideline to that ice screw as well. It would spool out from her main reel as she descended. If she did not do that, and anything happened to the primary, fixed line, she would have no way to return to the shaft.
Circling the main line with her thumb and forefinger, Hallie started following it down. Even with all her layers, she was feeling the cold, and more than the whisper she had experienced on entry. Now it was more like standing in damp clothes in a brisk fall breeze. She looked at her computers for a depth check: eighty-three feet. Nothing compared to some of the extreme technical dives she’d done, but it was impossible to forget the thousands of feet of black water beneath her.
She descended slowly, keeping contact with the line, equalizing the pressure in her ears with each breath. It took her almost twenty minutes to reach the vertical wall of the cryopeg, where strange ice formations sprouted and flared in her light beam. They were not the sharp, spearlike shapes of cave stalagmites or stalactites but more like ornate coral growths. Some resembled giant mushrooms twenty feet long and other bulbous domes, but most were as random as snow-flakes. Unlike cave formations, which were colored brightly by mineral deposits, everything in the cryopeg was blue. But not just blue. As she played her light over the wall and the various shapes, she saw the blues of sky, turquoise, berries, violets — everything from blue so light it looked almost white to the blue-black of a moonless night. Water this murky normally filtered out much of any color’s intensity, even in strong light, but here, strangely, the colors were sharp and intense.
There was no perceptible current, nor any sediment to stir up, and the only sounds were the hissing and burbling of her regulator’s second stage when she inhaled and exhaled. Then, suddenly, the extremophile colony blazed up in the bright spot of her headlamp. It covered the cryopeg’s wall in a foot-thick layer of matter that resembled bright orange cauliflower with irregularly shaped yellow patches. The largest extremophile colony she had encountered in terrestrial caves had been no bigger than a refrigerator. This one stretched out on the wall and down into the depths, far beyond the reach of her light. There was simply no telling how large it might be.
Establishing neutral buoyancy, she detached the Envirotainer from its D-ring on her chest harness and opened its hinged top. Using a scalpel-sharp excavating tool, she removed some biomatter and placed it inside the container, which had filled with cryopeg water. The extremophile might resemble cauliflower, but it was much tougher. Slicing through it was more like cutting canvas. She rehung her tool, secured the Envirotainer’s top, and reattached it to the D-ring. As she did so, she inadvertently hit the switch on her headlamp’s waist-mounted battery canister.
She knew what had happened and wasn’t alarmed. In fact, it was not unpleasant to hover there in complete darkness — except for the glowing displays of her computers. Any variation of pressure in her ears would tell her if she was rising or sinking. She rotated slowly a full circle, enjoying being one with this strange environment, and moved her hand toward her waist to turn her lights back on.
A faint, reddish glow began to come from the thing Fida called Vishnu. It wasn’t limited to one spot but seemed to emanate from the entire mass. She felt her respiration and pulse increase. She didn’t feel afraid so much as surprised. Bioluminescence was fairly common in the oceans, but she had not expected to find it down here. As she watched, the glow became brighter, then dimmed and went out completely.
Something touched her right knee.
She jerked her leg away, grabbed for her light switch, missed. The damned clumsy, three-fingered mitts.
She recoiled again, swiping one hand through the water in front of her knee while she fumbled for the switch with her other. Felt it, clicked it on, saw the beam shoot from her helmet. She swept it down toward her legs and spun 360 degrees, lancing the water with her light.
Nothing.