“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

“Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head,
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red,
Cryin’s not for me …
’Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’
Because I’m free… nothin’s worryin’ me.”

—B.J. Thomas

It began as scattered droplets and progressed steadily as we advanced on our northeasterly course. The rain, of course, was coming from the ice sheet above our heads. The question was: why was it melting?