Ming reached forward and gripped the pilot’s right arm. “Slow it down or Zachary will pilot the sub and you can catch the next cargo plane back to Wisconsin.”

Ben eased up on the throttle, altering our angle of descent. “No worries. I was just seeing what this vessel could handle. That’s standard operating procedure on a maiden voyage—part of my job.”

“And part of my job is to minimize the risks to the crew. Zachary, are you all right?”

Ugh. “Fine, thank you, Ming.” Yes. Thank you, Ming, for emasculating me in your penis-shaped submersible. And thank you for hiring an ego-driven headcase who managed to get himself kicked out of the Air Force for mistakenly entering a sovereign nation’s air space. And thank you, Angus, for once again screwing up my life.

As we passed two thousand feet, Ming squealed something in Chinese. “Zachary, I just took another water sample. The temperature has dropped to minus sixteen degrees Fahrenheit, with total dissolved solids exceeding two thousand miligrams.”

I turned to face her. “We’re entering a hypersaline chemocline. Vostok is a mineral concentrator. Remember, it’s connected to Antarctica’s oceans by a subglacial river. Residual salts have become trapped over millions of years, concentrated along the bottom. Lake Bonney works the same way; it has a temperature of minus twenty-three. Don Juan Pond is liquid at minus twenty-two. I wouldn’t be shocked to find weird microbial communities thriving down here.”

Geez, Wallace, you are such a nerd.

The tea-colored waters in our headlights grew more turbid as we descended, and the current increased, forcing Ben to decrease his angle of descent.

By the time we reached 2,185 feet, the Barracuda had nearly leveled off, the depths sweeping us north in the belly of a seventeen-knot current.

Ming aimed her keel light at the bottom, her underwater camera revealing a smooth, gray bedrock lake floor littered with fossils.

“Captain, slow down. I want to take a look. I want to collect samples.”

“In this current?”

I shook my head. “Just come about and put our bow into the current. Haven’t you ever changed a sail before?”

“Not in a sub, smart-ass.”

Ben executed a bone-jarring turn, the current buffeting our craft until our bow was pointing south, our propulsors neutralizing the force of the water. Maintaining a forward speed of twenty knots, we cruised slowly over the ancient bottom, the treasures of the long-lost Miocene era appearing on our video screen.

For the next half an hour, we worked our way over unrecognizeable shards of bone and rock that were hardly worth the journey—until the remains of an ancient water creature blanched white in our keel lights.

Its backbone stretched before our widening eyes, each form-fitted vertebra as large as a bowling ball. I estimated the spine to be forty feet long, and then I saw the size of its skull and the adrenaline started pumping.