This one was far worse.
It was just as long at thirty to forty feet but far thicker in girth. Its hide was covered in thick slime that reflected our lights from its dark undulating coils. A vertical fin ran the length of its chocolate-brown body to the tip of its tail. The mouth was hideous, rimmed with curved, stiletto-sharp teeth set outside the jaw like the oversized fangs of an Angler fish. The snout was square, its volcano-shaped, pale-pink nostrils opening and closing as it inhaled the current.
Like its modern-day relative, it was a species of giant eel, only it possessed fore-fins — gruesome clawed appendages its ancestors probably once used to climb onto land.
Oh, yeah, and it was electric.
From its gilled neck to its tail, along its flank it possessed bioluminescent cells that generated yellow zaps of electricity, which radiated signals like an alien vessel — a light show, no doubt, designed to mesmerize its prey.
I was already mesmerized in fear. “Ben, full throttle!”
As Ben stamped down on both propeller pedals, I powered on the exterior headlamps and aimed the beams at the creature’s eyes — only I couldn’t find its eyes. In my haste I had accidently powered on the Valkyries, and before I’d realized my error we had shot past the Miocene nightmare’s snapping jaws.
A flash of horizontal lightning revealed the second creature lurking in the darkness off the starboard bow. It was as large as its sibling and appeared to be communicating to it using its bioluminescent cells.
Life and death is separated by a moment. When predator meets prey and there is no escape — the fly caught in the spider’s web, the desert mouse stung by the scorpion, the seal suddenly crushed inside the jaws of a great white shark — the end happens in a startling microsecond.
It was as large as its sibling.
And in that microsecond of clarity, I knew the hyperflexed mouth that suddenly bloomed out of the darkness directly ahead belonged to the adult and not the juveniles. She could have been eighty feet or a hundred. It didn’t matter. The seal doesn’t think about the length of its killer when it’s being eaten; it’s more of a how-did-this-happen moment.
We were swallowed whole — shot right into the creature’s outstretched jaws and down its gullet!
Before we could scream or yell or react, the Barracuda was soaring through a river of water down the creature’s throat.
Before we could fathom where we were, we found our vessel being squeezed by internal esophageal muscles that bulged and prodded and clenched the submersible in an attempt to stymie our resistance.
Before we could sanely deal with our insane situation, the Valkyrie lasers scorched the stomach lining and evaporated the creature’s digestive organs — along with blood, arteries, sinew, all of it — as the Barracuda exploded out of our would-be killer’s new arse.
The entire journey lasted seconds.
The three of us yelled and laughed and whooped it up, leaving behind thirty tons of writhing, gurgling sushi for the monster’s two orphaned goliaths to consume — Only the creatures ignored their dying parent and came after us.
Ben quickly maneuvered the sub back into the current and accelerated. “I’m pushing thirty knots and can’t seem to lose them. Suggestions?”
Before I could reply we heard a metallic pop at the ship’s tailfin.
“We just lost our umbilical cord,” Ming announced.
My gaze shifted nervously from the sonar array to my monitor, the real-time images coming from the Barracuda’s aft camera. The night-vision lens had a restricted field of view and showed open water, but my sonar painted the two creatures as they independently swooped in and out from the perimeter, riding the current like dolphins as they gauged how best to attack their fleeing prey without getting seared by our laser’s afterburners.
“Doc, we got a serious problem. Losing the umbilical means we’re self-contained. If I don’t shut down the Valkyries soon, there won’t be enough juice left to make the ascent.”
“Do it.”
Ming’s voice crackled over our headphones. “I think that should be my decision, Zachary.”
“Actually, it’s mine,” Ben said, powering down the lasers.
Sensing the threat was gone, the two beasts grew more aggressive. Surfing the current, they attempted to snatch us in their awful jaws, each attempt inching closer to our hull.
“Doc, I can’t hold them off!”
My mind raced. They should have backed off by now. Why aren’t they tiring? Oh, hell. “Ben, get us out of this current. We need to wear them out.”
He pulled back hard on his joystick, bringing us up and out of the river flow.
Propelled by the seventeen-knot current, the two eels shot past us. I picked them up on sonar six hundred yards to the north, registering the disturbance as they left the flow to reengage the hunt.
Ben wasted no time in changing course, taking us on a westerly heading at twenty-five knots.
The creatures pursued us for close to two minutes before the costly expenditure of energy forced them to give up the chase. They faded into white noise as they headed south, no doubt to feed upon the remains of their mother.
“We lost them.”
“Thank God. So that’s what you dealt with in Loch Ness?”
“No, not quite. Ben, we’re on the wrong heading. We need to be on zero-three-seven.”
Ben banked the Barracuda hard to starboard, resuming the northeasterly course that would bring us to the extraction point.
Ming’s voice crackled loudly over my headphones. “Zachary, this is incredible beyond our wildest expectations. Did you ever imagine we’d discover such creatures in Vostok?”
Ben mumbled, “If he did, do you think he’d be here?”
Ming ignored him. “Zachary, how could anything so large have survived down here?”
I laid my head back and closed my eyes, my nerves still jumpy. “Humans adapt to new environments by using our brains; animals adapt by evolving anatomically. When Antarctica froze over during the Miocene age, it was a gradual process, not a mass extinction event. Vostok has air and water—”
“And five thousand pounds per square inch of water pressure,” said Ben, who did a double-take, squinting to read his atmospheric pressure gauge. “Correction. Make that thirty-nine hundred pounds of pressure. How’d that happen?”
“It doesn’t matter. Eels are fish, and water pressure doesn’t affect fish. Eels are also hardy creatures. No doubt they’ve become apex predators in this realm. The question is what else is out there that filled the gap between chemosynthetic bacteria and giant eels. Obviously there are still key pieces of the Vostok ecosystem that we haven’t seen.”
“What good is seen without evidence,” Ming quipped. “The videocameras missed everything. No one is going to believe what we discovered if we cannot prove it.”
“We’ve got more pressing problems,” Ben said, ascending the sub until once more we were plowing the lake’s surface. “When we lost our umbilical cord, we not only lost contact with Vostok Command, we lost our main power supply. We’ve got nineteen hours of air left, and at least five of them have to be used during our ascent. That leaves us fourteen hours to locate a section of Vostok where the bottom of the ice sheet and the lake’s surface are within a ship’s length of one another.”
The weight of Ben’s words sunk in. For the next thirty minutes we remained quiet, conserving our air supply while we watched the mist overhead, hoping for an ice ceiling to appear.
Instead, it started to rain.
12