The chopper closed in on the land mass. Marten had to increase their altitude; the center of the island was covered in hills and mountains. Mountains. Even the geography here was alien. The terrain of the island shifted from sand, to grass, to jutting rock, as if God couldn't make up His mind when He was trying to decide what kind of island to make.
“Ain't that something?” Marten asked.
Reiner reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick of gum. He offered Marten a piece, but the pilot shook his head. He pointed down to the buildings on shore. “You recognize 'em?”
The satellite photos had shown as much: concrete walls, metal bunkers, and rotted tarp that had all but disintegrated. Further up the coast, Reiner knew they could expect a group of warehouses and a small factory from an industry long dead. But they weren't going in that direction. They were going towards the… well, towards the source.
The executive said they had detected half a dozen fissures beneath the surface of the water. The largest of the underwater fissures, of course, was directly beneath The Aeschylus. The largest fissure of all — the source—as it had been called, was on the island. Reiner didn't know if that meant that this place was just the biggest, or if it had actually seeded the other spots, and he didn't care. Their job was to have a look, and that's what they were going to do.
As the chopper crested the next set of hills, he saw it.
Marten's mouth hung open. “Good God…”
The thing on the island was not a fissure. Set between the mountains, it looked, at first glance, like a crater. But it was a crater without a bottom. Where the earth should have been, there was only an empty void of black, endless space. It looked like it could very well go to the center of the earth.
“That's not possible,” Marten said. His face was white. “There should be a lake there. That thing descends below sea-level for… who knows how far. It's like the earth just… goes straight down.”
“How far south to solid land?” Reiner asked. He couldn't quite keep the shake out of his voice.
Marten shook his head. “Two hundred miles, maybe. We're close to the coast but this doesn't make any sense.”
As Reiner looked at the edges of the crater, however, he thought maybe it did. There was no rock. Where the hole opened to the mountains, there were only more of those strange, black tentacles. They reached up and over the sides, covering the edges and extending onto the hills beyond. From their current position, they looked enormous.
“A Scotia Plate anomaly,” Reiner said. It sounded even crazier out loud. “Well, shit on toast.”
“What?”
Reiner shook his head. “Never mind. Call the boss, hoss.”
Marten flipped another switch and put the chopper into hover. They were directly over the center of the hole now, the sea barely visible over the tops of the hills. He hit the radio button, but shut it off an instant later. The static that came through the speakers nearly blew their eardrums. He tried again and got the same result.
Reiner yanked his headset off. “Goddammit, boy.”
He noticed something else strange, then. It was very warm inside the chopper. He and Marten were outfitted for freezing weather — it was still only about twenty-five degrees at this latitude, even at the height of the summer season — but he realized he was sweating. It was the air. It was as if the thing below was breathing on them. It sounded absurd, but as he looked at Marten and saw the flush on his face, he knew he wasn't imagining it.
They stared at each other a moment, their minds reaching the same conclusion.
“Let's you and me get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Marten said. “Yeah, I think that's a good idea.”
He flipped the switch to take the chopper out of hover, then pushed down on the foot pedal.
Reiner could hear the blades speeding up. “Come on!”
Marten looked at him. The color had completely drained from his face. “It's not moving.”
Reiner looked out of the window. He could see the blades spinning, could feel the S-70 trying to move, but it wasn't.
A noise came from below them, something like a hiss from the bowels of the earth. And then, the chopper was spinning downwards, spinning and spinning into a vacuum. Reiner screamed.
In seconds, the chopper had descended into the blackness of the pit. Looking at the crater, you would never know it had been there at all.
Chapter 6: Deep Waters
1
“Are you coming?” Jan asked.
He knows, Lucja thought. He knows and that's why he's grinning. For a brief moment, she considered telling him no, to shut the door and lock her family outside. Instead, she got to her feet and bristled.
“Of course I'm coming. I'm just grabbing my coat. It's cold on deck, you oaf.”
She expected a retort, but Jan only looked amused. Not because he was making fun of her, she realized, but because in some way, he understood the frustration of it all.
Ari and her father were well ahead of her by then. She put her head down and slunk after, not wanting them to see her face. If they did, they would want to know what was wrong, and of course, she would tell them. Her father would see it as just another headache, more like than not. Worse, it would give him an excuse to blame her emotions on her woman problems. How could she not be emotional? Things were getting worse by the day. She needed someone to talk to, and the only person she could trust was now in prison on the other side of the ocean.
Once she reached the deck, Jan shut the trap door behind her and went back to doing whatever it was he did down there. The previous night, she had seen him writing a letter. When did he intend to send it? He was a strange man, not that the other soldiers were any better. The fat one — Sealer or Seiler, or whatever his name was — he frightened her. And the lieutenant was… well, he was hard to figure out. She supposed he was the only one with manners though, and that counted for something.
Her father stopped ahead and waited for her. “Lucja, are you all right?”
“I'm fine.”
“Stay close tonight. You know, some of the men on this ship haven't been home to their women in a long time. You're getting to the age where…” He paused, looked embarrassed, then said, “Just stay close, all right?”
That was almost funny given the circumstance, but she nodded. If he had meant to tell her that men could not control themselves around pretty young women, he had done a poor job of it. Her mother had put it much more eloquently. “Always be careful when you're alone, darling,” she had said. “A man in the heat of passion has less sense than a dog.”
And what would her father do if she were attacked? Very little, she thought dismally. Looking past him, she caught sight of Ari and Zofia stargazing over the bow.
“You see that constellation up there?” he asked Zofia.
“Where?”
Ari pointed, and Lucja followed his gaze to a cloud of magenta hanging far above.
“It marks the great table constellation, Mensa. You see it? Those stars form the shape of a table cloth. You can always tell where it is thanks to the Magellanic Cloud. A Portuguese poet called it The Spirit of the Cape, Adamastor. It was supposed to be a storm that would destroy any ships venturing too far south. Of course, they never got far enough to see exactly what it was.”