My eyes snapped open, True’s voice beckoning in my ear. “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep. Where are we?”

“Fifty feet from splashdown. Command shut yer sub down half an hour ago. The borehole’s checked out solid above ye. I imagine they’ll be allowing you tae proceed.”

“Ben, wake up. We’re here.” I kicked the back of his seat with my foot. “Ming, you awake?”

She yawned and stretched as our headsets reverberated in our ears. “Barracuda, this is Vostok Command. We’re ready for you to reignite the Valkyrie units. Are you ready to make history?”

Ben responded with a yawn. “Roger that, Vostok Command. Reigniting Valkyrie units on my mark. Three… two… one… ignite.”

“Confirm ignition. Forty feet until splashdown … ”

“Zach, activate our exterior lights.”

“Twenty feet … ”

“Hey, Zach, since you’re in the nose cone, I guess that technically makes you the first man down. Since Ming’s the first woman, where does that leave me?”

“Playing for sloppy seconds, I guess.”

“Ten feet until splashdown. Here we go, people. Eight… five… two … ”

With a final craaaaack the layer of ice beneath us peeled away, and suddenly we were free-falling backward in darkness. My stomach lurched and my heart pounded in my chest as I waited for a splashdown that wasn’t coming.

Ming screamed over the whistling of the submersible’s aft wings cutting through the air.

Ben yelled, “Hold on!” three times before we finally struck water, our submersible plunging bow-first into Lake Vostok.

10

“If you drink too much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’
it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”

—Lewis Carroll

The Barracuda plummeted through a blackness that seemed to reach out at us. After what felt like a two-hundred-foot dive, we leveled off, orientated in the pitch by the soft glow of our command console’s lights.

I unlocked my seat and rotated it to face forward.

“Zach, how far did we fall?” Ben asked.

I checked my depth gauge, which was resetting to accommodate our new liquid environment. “According to my instruments, we’re eighty-seven feet beneath the surface of Lake Vostok.”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked how far we fell. In case you two still haven’t figured it out yet, we weren’t supposed to free fall out of the ice sheet. The ice sheet was supposed to be pressing against the lake’s surface!”

I realized he was right. “Bring us to the surface. Let’s take a look.”

Ben shut down the lasers and powered up the submersible’s engine while Ming tried the radio.

“Vostok Command, this is Dr. Liao. Do you have a fix on our position?”

“Barracuda, this is Victor Lopez in navigation. It looks like you may have overshot your targeted submergence point. We’re waiting for a satellite pass to track your exact location. ETA is twelve minutes. Keep your lasers on so we can locate your heat signature.”