When the hatch opened and the elevator raised him above the module, Jack was engulfed in darkness, a black infinity which seemed to imprison him with no hope of escape. He activated the floodlights.
The view was like nothing he had seen before. It was a world lacking all standard points of reference, one where the normal dimensions of space and shape seemed to continuously fold in on each other. The beam lit up luminous clouds of silt that swirled in all directions, slow-motion whirlpools that undulated like a multitude of miniature galaxies. He extended the manipulator arms and watched the silt separate into tendrils and streamers, shapes that soon gathered themselves together again and disappeared. In the harsh glare it seemed deathly white, like a pall of volcanic ash, the beam reflecting off particles a hundred times finer than beach sand.
Jack knew with utter certainty that he was the only living being ever to have penetrated this world. Some of the suspended sediment was biogenic, derived from diatoms and other organisms that had fallen from above, but unlike the abyssal plains of the Atlantic or the Pacific, the depths of the Black Sea lacked even microscopic life. He truly was in an underworld, a lifeless vacuum unparalleled anywhere else on earth.
For a moment it seemed as if the swirling mass would materialize as ghostly faces of long-dead mariners fated to dance a macabre jig for all eternity with the ebb and flow of the silt. Jack forced his mind to concentrate on the task at hand. The sediment was settling much faster than he had anticipated, the particles compacting with the glutinous density of mud in a tidal flat. Already it had buried the top of the command module and was creeping alarmingly up the legs of the ADSA. He had only seconds to act before it became an immovable sarcophagus on the seabed.
He engaged the buoyancy compensator and filled the reservoir on his back with air, quickly reducing the suit to neutral. As the readout turned to positive he pushed the joystick and twisted the throttle. With a lurch he moved upward, the sediment cascading past with increasing rapidity. He switched off the water jet to avoid clogging the intake and continued his ascent using buoyancy alone. For what seemed an eternity he rose through an unrelenting maelstrom. Then almost thirty metres above the wreckage he was free of it. He rose another twenty metres before neutralizing his buoyancy and angling his lights down towards the ooze that now entombed the wreckage of Seaquest.
The scene was impossible to fix to any kind of reality. It was like a satellite image of a vast tropical storm, the eddies of sediment swirling slowly like giant cyclones. He half expected to see flashes of light from electrical storms raging beneath.
He turned his attention to the sonar scanner he had activated moments before. The circular screen revealed the trench-like profile of the chasm, its features more sharply accentuated now the sensor array was clear of silt. He called up the NAVSURV program and tapped in the grid co-ordinates he had memorized for Seaquest’s final surface position and the north shore of the island. With known reference co-ordinates NAVSURV could plot present position, lay in a best-fit course and make continuous modifications as the terrain unfolded on the sonar display.
He flipped on the autopilot and watched as the computer fed data into the propulsion and buoyancy units. As the program finalized, he extracted the headset from its housing and pulled down the visor. The headset was hard-wired to the computer via a flexicord umbilical but still allowed complete freedom of movement, the visor acting as a see-through screen so he could still monitor the viewports.
He activated a control and the visor came to life. His view was filtered through a pale green lattice that changed in shape with every movement of his head. Like a pilot in a flight simulator, he was seeing a virtual-reality image of the topography around him, a three-dimensional version of the sonar display. The softly hued lines were a reassurance that he was not trapped in some eternal nightmare, that this was a finite world with boundaries that could be surmounted if his luck continued to hold.
As the water jets fired up and he began to move forward, Jack saw that the metallic joints of the arms had turned a vivid yellow. He remembered why the depths of the Black Sea were so utterly sterile. It was hydrogen sulphide, a byproduct of bacteria decomposing organic matter that flowed in with the rivers. He was mired in a vat of poison bigger than the world’s entire chemical weapons arsenal, a reeking brew that would destroy his sense of smell at the first whiff and kill him with one breath.
The ADSA had been designed to the latest specifications for chemical and biological exposure as well as extreme pressure environments. But Jack knew it was only a matter of time before sulphur corrosion ate through a joint where the metal was exposed. Even a tiny ingression would prove deadly. He felt a cold wave of certainty pass through him, a sure knowledge he was trespassing in a world where even the dead were unwanted.
After a final systems check he gripped the throttle and stared grimly into the void in front of him.
“Right,” he muttered. “Time to revisit old friends.”
Less than five minutes after emerging from the silt storm Jack had reached the western wall of the canyon. The three-dimensional lattice projected on his visor melded precisely with the contours of the rock face now visible ahead, a colossal precipice that reared four hundred metres above him. As he panned the light over the wall he saw that the rock was as stark as a freshly hewn quarry face, its surface untouched by marine growth since titanic forces had rent the sea floor a million years before.
He powered the transverse stern thruster and brought the ADSA round on a southerly course parallel to the rock face. Twenty metres below him the sediment maelstrom seemed to seethe and boil, a forbidding netherworld halfway between liquid and solid that lapped the wall of the canyon. By maintaining a constant altitude above the slope he was steadily climbing, the depth gauge registering a rise of almost a hundred metres in his first half-kilometre along the canyon wall.
As the gradient angled more sharply, a sector of the canyon floor appeared that was entirely denuded of sediment. Jack guessed it was an area where sediment had accumulated and then avalanched down the slope. He knew this was a danger zone; any disturbance could dislodge sediment further up the slope and engulf him.
The exposed sea floor was covered in a bizarre accretion, a crystalline mass stained a sickly yellow by the hydrogen sulphide that poisoned the water. He bled the buoyancy reservoir and sank down, at the same time extending a vacuum probe to sample the accretion. Moments later the results flashed up on the screen. It was sodium chloride, common salt. He was looking at fallout from the evaporation thousands of years before, at the vast bed of brine that had precipitated into the abyss when the Bosporus had sealed off the Black Sea during the Ice Age. The canyon Jack had christened the Atlantis Rift would have been a sump for the entire south-eastern sector of the sea.
As he jetted forward, the carpet of brine became patchy and gave way to a contorted landscape of shadowy shapes. It was a lava field, a jumble of frozen pirouettes where magma had welled up and solidified as it met the frigid water.
His view was interrupted by an opaque haze that shimmered like a diaphanous veil. The external temperature gauge soared to a horrifying 350 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead. He barely registered the change before he was jolted violently forward and the ADSA spiralled out of control towards the canyon floor. On impulse he switched off the thrusters just as the ADSA bounced and then came to rest facedown, the forward battery pod immobilized between folds of lava and the visor pressed against a jagged eruption of rock.
Jack raised himself on all fours inside the ADSA and crouched low over the control panel. He saw with relief that the LCD screens were still functioning. Once again he had been incredibly lucky. If there had been significant damage he would probably have been dead by now, the external pressure of several tons per square inch bearing down on any weakness and guaranteeing a swift if hideous end.
He put a mental block on the nightmarish world outside and concentrated on extricating himself from the lava folds. The propulsion unit would be of little use as it was mounted on the back and only provided lateral and transverse thrust. He would have to use the buoyancy compensator. The manual override was operated from a two-way trigger on the joystick, backward pressure bleeding air in and forward pressure venting it.
After bracing himself, he squeezed hard. He could hear the burst of air entering the reservoir and watched the dial creep up to maximum capacity. To his dismay there was absolutely no movement. He emptied the reservoir and filled it again, with the same result. He knew he could not repeat the procedure without depleting the air supply beyond safety margins.
His only fallback was to wrest the ADSA physically from the seabed. So far he had only been deploying the ADSA in submersible mode but it was also a true inner-space suit, designed for the underwater equivalent of moon walking. Despite its cumbersome appearance, it was highly mobile, its thirty-kilogramme submerged weight allowing movement that would have been the envy of any astronaut.
He carefully extended his arms and legs until he was spread-eagled. After angling the pincers into the seabed and locking the joints, he wedged his elbows against the upper carapace with his hands splayed below. Everything now depended on his ability to rip the battery pod from the vice of rock that was holding it.
With every fibre in his being Jack heaved upwards. As he arched back into the harness he was convulsed by pain from his gunshot wound. He knew it was now or never, that his body had been pushed to the limit and would soon lose the strength to do his bidding.
He was about to collapse in exhaustion when there was a grinding sound and a barely perceptible upward movement. He threw in all his reserves and strained one last time. Suddenly the ADSA broke free and sprang up on its feet, the jolt throwing him against the console.
He was free.
After flooding the buoyancy reservoir to prevent the ADSA from rocketing upwards, he looked around him. Ahead were undulations where slow-flowing rivers of lava had solidified into bulbous pillows of rock. To his right was a huge lava pillar, a hollow cast five metres high where quick-flowing lava had trapped water which had then boiled and pushed the cooling rock upwards. Next to it was another eruption of igneous rock, this one more like a miniature volcano that showed up yellow and red-brown in the floodlight. Jack guessed that the scorching blast of heat that had jolted him had come from a hydrothermal vent, an open pore in the seabed where superheated water belched up from the magma lake below the rift. As he looked at the miniature volcano, the cone ejected a jet-black plume like a factory chimney. It was what geologists called a black smoker, a cloud laden with minerals that precipitated to blanket the surrounding sea floor. He thought back to the extraordinary entrance chamber to Atlantis, its walls shimmering with minerals which could well have originated in a deep-sea vent thrust upwards as the volcano formed.
Hydrothermal vents should be teeming with life, Jack thought uneasily, each one a miniature oasis that attracted larval organisms drifting down from far above. They were unique ecosystems based on chemicals rather than photosynthesis, on the ability of microbes to metabolize the hydrogen sulphide from the vents and provide the first links in a food chain utterly divorced from the life-giving properties of the sun. But instead of armies of blood-red worms and carpets of organisms, there was nothing; the lava chimneys loomed around him like the blackened stumps of trees after a forest fire. In the poisonous depths of the Black Sea not even the simplest bacteria could survive. It was a wasteland where the wonder of creation seemed to have been eclipsed by the powers of darkness. Jack suddenly wanted to be away from this place that was so utterly devoid of life, that seemed to repudiate all the forces that had brought him into existence.
He tore his gaze away from the bleak scene outside and scanned the instrument display. The sonar showed he was 30 metres from the western face of the chasm and 150 metres shallower than the wreck of Seaquest, his absolute depth now reading just over 300 metres. He was a third of the way to the island, which now lay just over two kilometres due south.
He looked ahead and saw a milky haze like a towering sand dune. It was the leading edge of a drift of unstable sediment, an indication that the area of substrate exposed by the avalanche was coming to an end. All round him were scour marks caused by previous slides. He needed to be above the zone of turbulence in case his motion triggered another avalanche. He closed his left hand round the buoyancy control and his right hand on the thruster stick, at the same time leaning forward for a final look outside.
What he saw was a terrifying apparition. The wall of silt was slowly, remorselessly swirling towards him like some vast tsunami, all the more horrifying because there was no noise. He barely had time to press the buoyancy trigger before he was engulfed in a whirling storm of darkness.
COSTAS BLINKED FURIOUSLY AS THE SCALDING water dripped off his face. He had been sent sprawling on the rock floor after being thrust for an appalling moment into the vapour column, the vast pillar of white that rose in front of him to the oculus far above.
He was back in the audience chamber, back where he had last seen Jack. He had passed out so many times over the last few hours that he had lost all measure of time, but he guessed that a night had gone and it was now a full day since they had stumbled out of the labyrinth into the glare of Aslan’s searchlight.
He steeled his mind for what would come next. How did you get from the submarine? Over and over again, so often his body had become a continuous mass of welts and bruises. Yet Costas was a born optimist, and each time Aslan’s thugs beat him he felt a sliver of hope, a hint that Ben and Andy had stayed the course and were still holding out against the intruders.
With his face pressed against the floor he could just make out a veiled and blindfolded figure seated on the throne a few metres from him. As it came into focus the blindfold was ripped off and he realized it was Katya. She looked at him without recognition, and then her eyes widened in horror at his appearance. He gave her his best effort at a smile.
What happened next sent a chill of helplessness through him. A short, stocky figure came into view, wearing the standard black overall but clearly identifiable as a woman. She held a vicious curved knife of Arab design against Katya’s throat, then slowly trailed it towards her midriff. Katya shut her eyes but the whites of her knuckles showed where her hands gripped the throne.
“If I had my way we would end this now.” Costas could just make out the Russian words spat into Katya’s face. “And I will have my way. That veil will be your shroud.”
With a sickening jolt Costas realized it was Olga. The drab, yet handsome woman he had seen on the helipad at Alexandria, whose voice he had heard so many times over the last hellish hours. She must be a monster. As Olga continued to taunt Katya, Costas struggled to raise himself but was brought down by a paralysing blow to the back.
There was a commotion at the edge of the chamber where sunlight streamed through the entranceway. With his one good eye Costas saw Aslan heaving into view, supported on either side by a black-clad figure. He shuffled down the steps until he stood panting and wheezing in front of Olga, waving away his two helpers impatiently.
For a second Costas caught Aslan’s eyes darting to and fro between the two women, a hint of doubt in his expression before he settled on Olga. At that moment Costas realized she was no mere minion, that she held more sway than Aslan could ever have acknowledged. Katya’s expression showed that she too knew the truth, that his megalomania had been stoked by another evil force that had twisted the last vestiges of fatherhood from him.
“You will leave now.” Aslan spoke in Russian to Olga. “Fly Vultura’s helicopter back to Abkhazia and contact our customer. I believe our merchandise will be ready for transport shortly.”
Olga casually swept the knife past Katya’s face as she turned and mounted the steps with the two men. She was shaking slightly, her lips trembling with the sick excitement of what she had nearly done. Costas stared in horror, marvelling at the malevolence that emanated from her.
After they had gone Aslan laboriously bent towards Costas, his face now a terrifying image of rage. He yanked Costas’ head up and held a pistol under his chin. Costas could smell his breath, like stale meat. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, his skin oily and deadened. Costas recoiled, but returned Aslan’s gaze.
“Before you emerged yesterday I sent three of my men down the same tunnel,” Aslan hissed. “They have not returned. Where are they?”
Costas suddenly remembered the bubbles coming up from the volcanic vent in the final stretch of underwater passageway.
“Took a wrong turning, I guess.”
Aslan whipped the pistol across his face and Costas jerked back in agony, blood spattering over the throne.
“Then you will lead us the right way.” He waved the gun over the diving equipment now arrayed on the floor, then gestured towards the adjacent throne where Katya was struggling against two of his thugs. “Or my daughter will be initiated into the rites of sharia rather earlier than she might have expected.”