He had retrieved nuclear warheads from sunken Russian subs and vials of weapons-grade anthrax spores from a Lebanese freighter a U.S. Navy hunter-killer sub had sunk in the Gulf of Aden (said spores were bound for the New York subway system to be released in aerosol form by agents of the Islamic Jihad). And once, he’d been part of a team that went down to the bottom of the Bering Sea to grab a crashed interplanetary probe that had returned from the orbit of Venus with samples of a life-form from the Venusian upper atmosphere that were considered “biologically unstable and potentially pathogenic.”

He had always kept his mouth shut and so had the others or they wouldn’t be here.

“All right,” Orr said, “now let’s get to the meat of this boondoggle.”

The lights dimmed and all eyes were on the big screen up on the wall. He punched a key on his laptop and a photograph of a man appeared on the screen. He was thin with a craggy, windburned face and a thick mop of back-swept silver hair that made him look like some emaciated version of Charlie Rich.

“This is Henry Charles Gundry, deceased. Gundry was a Caltech glaciologist who was in charge of Project DeepDrill here at Kharkov some five years ago. He helmed the original team that drilled down to Lake Vordog and released the ATP cryobot into the lake itself,” Orr told them.

Project DeepDrill had been a NASA operation. Part of the same overall project called the Kronos Experiment that the Cassini 3 spacecraft was involved in as it mapped Jupiter’s Jovian moons and dropped the Callisto probe into the trench south of the Valhalla impact basin: laying the groundwork for one of the most impressive deep space missions NASA had yet undertaken, the exploration of the subsurface oceans of Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io. A wholescale search for extraterrestrial life that would culminate with the Europa Ice Clipper mission which would release high-tech crybots that would melt through the ice of the moons down to the oceans themselves. The ATP—Active Thermal Probe—cryobots were, essentially, robotic submersibles guided by advanced AI packages that would seek out life in those black depths. Gundry had tested several cryobots before he was given the Lake Vordog job. His cryobot worked perfectly. It melted through the ice from the original drilled borehole and descended into the lake itself.

That much was a scientific feat that NASA applauded.

But what it found down there, locked away beneath the ice for forty-million years, was what had scared the shit out of everyone.

“The following images I’m going to show you are from still photos and images captured from live video feed,” Orr said. “They were taken by Gundry’s cryo over a mile beneath our feet.”