Campbell and Parks sat before monitors, gathering data, and Gundry and Hayes stood behind them. There was a video screen above, but as yet there had been no video feed. The screen flickered a few times, but nothing. Hayes could sense the heavy hearts of the scientists over that.
“I’m reading water temperatures of sixty degrees, with currents up over a hundred. Wait now… okay, okay,” Parks was saying as the numbers came in from the hydrobot. “Yeah, picking up chemical signals… magnesium and iron smoke… manganese, zinc… copper sulfides, sulfur dioxides… carried on the warm currents. Okay, got a hot plume here… almost 200 degrees. We’ve definitely got ourselves a smoker down here, gentlemen. Hydrothermal vents… gotta be… yeah, more than one. Several sites, I’m guessing.”
Campbell was equally as happy for his bio-sensors were picking up all kinds of goodies from both the secondary cryobot on the bottom and the hydrobot. Analysis of water and sediment were showing bacteria, yeasts, archaea, algae, even grains of pollen.
“Diatoms… shit, I’m getting indicators of rich plankton fields here.”
“Outstanding,” Gundry said.
Parks was nodding his head. “Come to papa… oh yeah… chemical enrichment of water almost two million times that of normal seawater or fresh water.”
“Meaning what?” Hayes asked.
“Meaning,” Gundry said, “is that the buffet is surely open. You’ve got smoker vents down here, Jimmy, spewing chemical nutrients into the water that heat-loving bacteria feast upon. The buffet is open.”
Parks started fooling around with the uplink to the hydrobot and the video screen flickered, flickered again, rolled and went black. Then it came on and they were seeing… well, huge clots of sediment drifting up from the muddy bottom in the powerful halogen lamps of the hydrobot. They were now seeing what it was seeing.
“Incredible,” Hayes said without being aware of it.
It was like some alien world and, in effect, that’s exactly what it was. A sunken, ancient plain of murky waters and sediment drifting about like motes of dust. It was thick and grainy on the screen.
Hayes swallowed, struck somehow by the eerie stillness of that place. He was seeing flitting shadows at the edges of the light and it could have been the motion of that suspended sediment or something else entirely.
The hydrobot descended again, closer to the lake bottom and Campbell started getting really excited. “Look there, do you see it?” he said, squinting through the ooze and sediment as if it were his eyes seeing this and not the hydrobot’s forward camera. “Right there… those marks in the mud, those snaking ruts… those are the marks of deep crawlers — maybe shrimp or brittle stars, sea spiders. Hard to tell this deep, could have happened yesterday or two hundred years ago. Really hard to say.”
The hydrobot roamed ever forward, the screen almost black at times as it pushed on through clouds of silt.
“Any chance it’ll get stuck in all that?” Hayes said.
“No, it has a seriously advanced AI package on board, same sort of stuff we use on space probes and the Martian rover, except better. It’s doing most of its own thinking right now. It has sonar to avoid large objects and infrared to hone in on living things, an on-board lab to analyze just about anything.”
“Why does it keep pausing?”
“It’s using its robotic arms to take samples. It sucks them up, analyzes them and feeds the results to Dr. Campbell here.”
Gundry told him the hydrobot worked much like an ROV with a prop at the rear to pull it or push it or turn it around and in any direction. It could rise or hover, do whatever its software package demanded of it.
“Magnometer’s picking up some strong fluxes,” Parks said. “Jumping a thousand, now two-thousand nanoteslas. Five-thousand. Jesus. Strong and steady.”
Gundry explained that a nanotesla was the standard measure of magnetism. That the norm here at the Pole was in the vicinity of 60,000 and now they were getting nearly seventy. The hydrobot was reading it and gradually honing in on its source. If it lost it, it would go back to tracking the hydrothermal vents.
The hydrobot climbed and the silt thinned considerably. It went from a blizzard of flakes the size of quarters to a flurry with flakes the size of beads. The light penetrated better now. Suddenly, there was a storm of bubbles coming at the camera and then the hydrobot was buried in them… pulsing membranous bubbles that were purple and blue, sometimes orange and red, indigo and neon green.
“Jellies,” Campbell said. “Will you look at that! Like comb jellies… ovoid with frilled plates to propel themselves. But I’ve never seen any like this… we seem to be in a massive colony.”
“Can they hurt the hydrobot?” Hayes asked.
“No… see, the hydrobot has slowed down now. It’s concerned about hurting them so its passing through their ranks very slowy.”
It was a world of jellyfish, thousands of them like champagne bubbles. But pulsing and rippling, veined with brilliant bursts of ever changing color like fibre optic lamps. You could see right through them. It was hard to say how big they were, but maybe the size of softballs with lots of little ones, some no bigger than marbles. They seemed unconcerned about the hydrobot. After about ten minutes the colony passed away and the hydrobot dove down into the sediment again, detecting something interesting.
Hayes saw what looked like a gigantic albino crab picking its way through the mud. Its body was jagged and thorny, about the size of a wash tub — Campbell said — with spidery limbs reaching out three or four feet beyond. It had something like black eyes on two-foot stalks and Hayes pointed it out.
“No, not eyes,” Campbell said. “Receptors of some sort. It would be totally blind like everything else down here. A new species, though, without a doubt.”
The hydrobot passed over it, deciding wisely not to tangle with it, and darted down into a chasm filled with sea grasses and then up again, scanning the bottom and finding the shells of dead mussels and crustaceans, hundreds of them tangled in a bony carpet. Then a gully spread out, dropping maybe five feet below the level of the lake bottom. It was filled not with grasses, but white bloated things that had to be ten or fifteen feet in length, coiling and writhing. To Hayes they looked like thousands of blunt and fleshy hoses with pink suckers at the end that expanded and deflated.
“Tube worms and like none I’ve ever seen before,” Campbell said.
The hydrobot was interested. It inverted itself above them and slowly passed over them, panning them and giving what information it could on them such as their temperature and what the chemical composition of the water around them was. Hayes had seen tube worms on the Discovery Channel, but not like these… not moving and undulating, reacting to maybe both the hydrobot and its light. These didn’t look like harmless filter-feeding animals, but things that were hungry and predacious.
“This is simply amazing,” Gundry said.
Hayes was speechless. What he was seeing… no man had seen before and the impact of it all had quieted that feeling in his belly that there was something terribly wrong about this ancient lake.
“Shit!” Parks cried out. “Did you see that?”