Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [2]
After pausing halfway to re-pressurise, they had continued down to three thousand feet where they had left the diving bell and begun their diagonal ascent into the narrow, ice-walled cavern.
Water temperature had been stable at 1.9° Celsius. As recently as two years previously, Antarctic diving had been restricted by the cold to extremely shortlived, and scientifically speaking, extremely unsatisfactory, ten-minute excursions. However, with their new Navy-made thermal-electric suits, Antarctic divers could now expect to maintain comfortable body temperatures for at least three hours in the near-freezing waters of the continent.
The two divers had maintained steady conversation over the intercom as they made their way up the steep underwater ice tunnel; describing the cracked, rough texture of the ice, commenting on its rich, almost angelic, sky-blue colour.
And then, abruptly, their talking had stopped.
They had spotted the surface.
The two divers stared at the water’s surface from below.
It was dark, the water calm. Unnaturally calm. Not a ripple broke its glassy, even plane. In the glare of their military-spec halogen flashlights, the ice walls around them glistened like crystal. They swam upward.
Suddenly they heard a noise.
The two divers stopped.
At first it was just a single, haunting whistle, echoing through the clear, icy water. Whale song, they thought.
Possibility: killers. Recently, a pod of killer whales had been seen lurking about the station. A couple of them – two juvenile males – had made a habit of coming up for air inside the pool at the base of Wilkes Ice Station.
More likely, however, it was a blue, singing for a mate, maybe five or six miles offshore. That was the problem with whale song. Water was such a great conductor, you could never tell if the whale was one mile away or ten.
Their minds reassured, the two divers continued upward.
It was then that the first whistle was answered.
All at once, about a dozen similar whistles began to coo across the dense aquatic plane, engulfing the two divers. They were louder than the first whistle.
Closer.
The two divers spun about in every direction, hovering in the clear blue water, searching for the source of the noise. One of them unslung his harpoon gun and cocked the hammer and suddenly the high-pitched whistles turned into pained wails and barks.
And then suddenly, there came a loud whump-! and both divers snapped upward just in time to see the glassy surface of the water break into a thousand ripples as something large plunged into the water from above.
The enormous diving bell broke the surface with a loud splash.
Benjamin K. Austin strode purposefully around the water’s edge barking orders, a black, insulated wetsuit stretched tight across his broad, barrel chest. Austin was a marine biologist from Stanford. He was also the chief of station of Wilkes Ice Station.
‘All right! Hold it there!’ Austin called to the young technician manning the winch controls on C-deck. ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, no time to waste. Get inside.’
One after the other, the six wetsuited figures gathered around the edge of the pool dived into the icy water. They rose a few seconds later inside the big, dome-shaped diving bell that now sat half-submerged in the centre of the pool.
Austin was standing at the edge of the large, round pool that formed the base of Wilkes Ice Station. Five storeys deep, Wilkes was a remote, coastal research station, a giant underground cylinder that had literally been carved into the ice shelf. A series of narrow catwalks and ladders hugged the circumference of the vertical cylinder, creating a wide circular shaft in the middle of the station. Doorways led off each of the catwalks – into the ice – creating the five different levels of the station. Like many others before them, the residents of Wilkes had long since discovered that the best way to endure the harsh polar weather was to live under it.
Austin shouldered into his scuba gear, running through the equation in his head for the hundredth time.
Three hours since