Cate climbed down the side of the vessel, and leaped across a two feet gap Yegor had left between them and the rock shelf. She had her flashlight on, and all around was a pervading darkness. Looking back at the Prusalka, she was taken by how alien the thing must have looked to the other creatures below the surface – the bulbous and striped submersible had a single, bulging eye that glowed a dull red from the inner lighting. From inside Jack waved at her, and beside him the huge motionless form of Yegor. Greg jumped down and joined her.

Cate lifted her light to the dark stretch of sea just past the submersible. Where it was illuminated by the sub there seemed an endless flat and oily-looking surface. Vapors of mist rose from it, testament to the warmth of the water. Even if she hadn’t already seen the weird and wonderful things below its surface, it looked primordial and threatening, and the thought of being in that water, and not surrounded by all of Prusalka’s armor plating made her stomach do a little flip.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” she whispered.

“Down here it feels like we’re not on Earth anymore,” Greg said floating the beam of his light back along the shelf.

She smiled. “At least not today’s Earth.” Cate closed her eyes and inhaled again. “I imagine this is what the world was like when it was young and raw.”

“Ready?” he asked.

“Huh?” Her eyes snapped open. “Of course, and be careful. Looks slippery.” She pointed her light down at the rocks. Small, ghostly, crab-like creatures scuttled away from her as she shuffled her way forward, careful not to crush any of them. Behind her, a crackling sound told her Greg wasn’t so particular.

They had to cross a few hundred feet of the rock shelf to the pile of cables and pod-like containers sitting on a mound of fallen debris. Cate could see why they termed them buoys – they were like stubby, three-foot vitamin pills, each attached by cables that hung from somewhere up in the dark high above them. She marveled at the skill of the engineers who had managed to drill through the thousands of feet of rock, and then place them right where they were supposed to be.

Closer now, she saw that one of the buoys had an image of head phones stenciled on its surface, and additional cables sheathed in rubber attached – these would be the optical fibers that would relay messages back and forth between them. Cate knelt beside it, her mind whirling – she’d need to be succinct, and organised her thoughts in preparation. She wondered who it would be up there waiting for her.

She unlatched a small door, and then also an inner watertight compartment. There was a panel of dials and a single switch, also a headset she immediately placed over her head. She switched it on.

Nothing.