‘You okay?’ Nina asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, looking anything but. ‘I . . . don’t like being on a ship.’
Eddie chuckled. ‘You wait until now to tell us?’
‘It makes me feel sick. I don’t like high places either.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Nina. ‘You haven’t thrown up so far, after all.’ A mournful look from Cheng. ‘Oh. You have?’
‘In my cabin,’ he admitted, a little shamefaced.
‘Hope you mopped it up,’ said Eddie with a smile hardly brimming in sympathy.
The ship continued on. After twenty minutes, Tate leaned closer to the radar screen. ‘I think we’ve got something!’
The iceberg was now a ragged sweep across the screen’s right, still fuzzy as the radar return bounced off different layers of ice, but a harder shape beyond its boundary had come into view. ‘Is it the Dionysius?’ asked Imka.
‘Can’t tell,’ Tate replied. ‘Might be two things close together; almost looks like they’re overlapping.’
‘Take us in closer,’ ordered Vorster.
The captain turned the Torrox towards the iceberg. Everyone else went to the windows to gaze at the frozen cliffs. Even Cheng left his computer, transfixed. ‘It is beautiful!’
Nina could only partially agree. In terms of colour alone, it was spectacular. The ice ran in stunningly vivid strata of white and turquoise and cyan, their steep angle confirming that D43 had indeed rolled over. It had shed some of its bulk, but was still over a mile and a half long. But the iceberg itself was only beautiful in the same manner as a painting by Francis Bacon or H. R. Giger, something dredged up from the darkest depths of the subconscious. Pillars of glossy ice resembling melting candles rose skyscraper-high above the water, leaning at impossible angles or merging together in unsettling primordial conjugations.
And according to Stapper, there was something even more bizarre inside. She turned her attention back to the radar. Tate was right: there did indeed seem to be two distinct objects within the frozen wall, but like the ice pillars, they were blended into each other, the radar struggling to differentiate them.
As for what they were, she couldn’t tell. Neither looked like a ship – or a spaceship, for that matter . . .
Vorster still had the binoculars, staring intently at the base of the cliffs. ‘I think . . . Yes! I can see an opening!’
‘Big enough for a ship?’ Imka asked hopefully.
‘No, but . . . it goes into a cave. I can see waves inside.’
Nina and Eddie searched for what Vorster had seen. It was revealed as a low, dark mouth in the wall. ‘Definitely too small for a ship,’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘If that’s where the other one went in, it must be a lot bigger under the water. Good job it stayed at sea level when the iceberg rolled, or we’d never have seen it.’
‘Yeah, lucky break,’ said Nina, faintly puzzled. The topography visible in the picture sent to Imka was now part of the nine-tenths of the berg hidden beneath the ocean’s surface, but if the odd radar return really was the Dionysius, then it was still roughly at sea level. The iceberg hadn’t simply flipped over, but had rotated around an axis that somehow kept the cave containing the ship at the surface. She couldn’t wrap her head around the complexities of motion that would have required.
Not that it mattered. The cave would be accessible by the Torrox’s boat, and according to the radar, whatever lurked inside was not too deeply buried.
‘Okay, Al,’ said Vorster, ‘bring us in to five hundred metres, then heave to. We’ll get the boat ready.’
Tate nodded. ‘Who’s going with you?’
‘Imka, Professor Wilde and Mr Chase . . . and I think Mr Cheng is keen to set foot on something resembling dry land.’
‘It’s Mr Hui,’ Cheng corrected.
Vorster spoke over him. ‘Who’s your best man with experience on ice?’
‘Marc Naider,’ said Tate. ‘Good climber, knows his stuff.’
‘Great. Hopefully we’ll find the Dionysius – and everyone aboard it too,’ he added to Imka. ‘And Professor Wilde’s archaeological discovery, whatever it might be.’
They all started to file from the bridge. ‘Yeah, whatever it might be,’ Eddie echoed in a whisper to Nina as she fastened her hair into a ponytail. ‘You didn’t mention the whole spaceship thing to them?’
‘It won’t be a spaceship,’ was her taut reply. ‘Besides, if I’d told them that was what we were looking for, they probably wouldn’t have let me on the boat! As for what it actually is, well . . .’ A glance at the opening in the ice. ‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough.’
The explorers donned cold-weather gear, loaded the Torrox’s boat, then set out towards their destination.
Imka sat at the bow, staring at the cave mouth with both hope and trepidation. Eddie and Nina were behind her. ‘Christ, it’s nippy,’ the Yorkshireman complained, pulling his woolly hat lower.
‘We’re near the South Pole,’ said Nina. ‘What did you expect?’
‘We’re not even that near,’ pointed out Vorster. ‘We’re only a few hundred kilometres closer to the pole than to the equator. Shows how bloody cold Antarctica is, hey?’
‘Between the pole and the equator, I know where I’d rather be,’ Eddie told him. He checked on Cheng, who was beside Vorster, clutching his backpack and looking extremely unhappy. ‘And I bet you’d rather be literally anywhere else right now.’
The RIB both pitched and rolled as it powered through the waves. ‘I really don’t like boats,’ moaned the young Chinese.
Naider slowed to guide the craft around some bobbing chunks of ice, then brought it into the cave mouth. The growl of the outboard echoed back at the group as the walls closed in. The ceiling was about fifteen feet above; high enough to stave off claustrophobia, but far too low to accommodate the Torrox. If its sister ship was inside, it would have been unable to sail back out.
The light in the tunnel took on a sapphire hue as it cut through layers of dense ice. Ahead, the cave began to widen out. ‘We’re almost inside,’ said Imka, turning her head to search for the Dionysius. ‘Where is it? It was on the radar, we should be able to see it!’
Vorster used a walkie-talkie to call Tate aboard the Torrox. ‘Al, how deep in were those radar signals?’
‘Hard to say exactly,’ came the crackling reply, ‘but less than two hundred metres. The radar can’t penetrate ice any deeper than that.’
‘Then where is it?’ Imka demanded in frustration.
Nina looked past her. The cavern became discernible as her eyes adjusted to the low light. The rear wall was well over a hundred metres away, but there was nothing there except ice. The wall to her left curved upwards out of the water until it became practically vertical, a sheer swathe riven by cracks and protrusions; at its far end was an ominous field of spikes. Icicles once hanging from the ceiling now stabbed upwards after the iceberg’s roll. The right side of the cave narrowed to nothingness.
The water inside was calm – and empty. So where were the objects on the radar?
The answer came as they cleared the tunnel and entered the ice cavern proper.
The first thing Nina spotted made her blink in surprise at its incongruity: a ship’s anchor, dangling from its chain about forty feet above. But surprise turned to shock as her gaze followed the chain upwards – and saw it was still attached to its vessel.
The Dionysius was embedded in the cave’s ceiling almost a hundred feet over their heads.
The survey ship hung inverted, loose lines and chains hanging from it like vines. Metal and wood alike were coated in frost and ice. A ghost ship, suspended precariously from the roof of its frozen tomb.
Everyone stared in amazement at the gravity-defying sight.
‘Oh my God,’ Imka gasped. ‘Look at that!’
‘Definitely not something
you see every day,’ said Eddie. ‘Even for us!’
Naider stopped the engine, the RIB coasting slowly into the cave. ‘How did it get up there?’
‘It must have gotten wedged in the ice,’ Nina said. ‘When the iceberg rolled over, it went with it . . . and then froze in place.’
‘Not frozen enough,’ Eddie observed. The glassy blue ceiling was split by numerous cracks around the Dionysius, icy fragments dropping in a faint but continual rain as the ship’s weight pulled ceaselessly at its prison. With the outboard shut down, they could also hear noises from above. A low, creaking rumble formed a rolling bassline to intermittent cracks and bangs. ‘It’s going to break loose, and probably sooner rather than later. I don’t want to be under it when it falls!’
Naider made a hurried course change to angle the boat out from beneath the suspended ship.
Imka cupped her hands to her mouth. ‘Hello!’ she cried. ‘Can anyone hear me?’ Her own echo was the only reply. ‘Arnold! It’s Imka! We’re here, we’ve found you! Please, please answer me!’
Still no response. Eddie and Nina exchanged grim glances. After four months, the chances of the crew surviving were already slim, and now looked to be non-existent.
But they still had to be sure. The ship was here, but as yet there was no sign of people, alive or dead. Maybe they had found refuge deeper in the cave . . .
The drifting boat cleared the Dionysius to provide its passengers with an unobstructed view of what lay beyond. They all reacted with shock.
The research vessel was not the only thing trapped in the ice.
Startled gasps came from the explorers. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Eddie. ‘You know what I think that is?’
‘I do,’ Nina replied. ‘And the worst part is . . . I’m not sure you’re wrong.’
If it wasn’t a spaceship, she struggled to think of any alternative possibilities. The object was easily as big as the Dionysius, but it was hard to be certain of its exact dimensions; a large part of it was embedded in the cave wall, dimly visible through the stressed ice. The iceberg’s roll had also left it lying at a steep angle. What she could see of it was a flattened cone in shape, jagged strakes and fins on its skin sweeping back into the cliff. Unlike its fellow prisoner, which was coated in frost, the metal hull was clearly visible. The kind of metal was a mystery, though. It had an oily sheen that her gaze almost slid off.
She shivered, not just from the cold. The object had an animalistic quality, reminding her of the head of a snake – or more fancifully, a dragon. Two elongated slits in its upper surface formed eyes, staring menacingly back at her. Windows? A pair of long, spear-shaped protrusions beneath its nose took on the role of fangs, increasing the resemblance.
She saw as they drew nearer that it was damaged. The hull was split and crumpled where it had succumbed to the pressure of the ice during its long entrapment.
But what was it? Had they really found a UFO?
‘It does look like a UFO,’ Cheng said, as if reading Nina’s mind.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Vorster. ‘And it’s deep in the ice. How long has it been here?’
The astonishing sight had distracted even Imka. ‘We . . . we estimated the deepest ice at over a million years old,’ she said. ‘This cave was at sea level when the Dionysius found it, and nine-tenths of an iceberg is underwater, so it’s been buried for at least a hundred thousand years.’
‘Same age as the UFO in The Thing,’ Eddie noted with amusement.
Nina didn’t smile. ‘I was thinking more the same age as the Veteres,’ she whispered to him.
‘You’re saying they built spaceships? Bit of a stretch.’
‘This hasn’t been into space. But we know the Veteres made it to Antarctica. It’s got to be something they built. An outpost, or a ship.’
Vorster caught the end of the muted exchange. ‘It’s not a ship,’ said the former naval warrant officer with professional certainty. ‘Not one you could take across an ocean. It’s got a flat bottom, no prow, no keel. You couldn’t sail that across anything more choppy than a paddling pool.’
‘Do you think we can reach it?’ asked Imka. ‘Arnold and the others . . . they might have taken shelter inside.’
Eddie surveyed the ice wall. The field of inverted icicles stood directly beneath the strange object, and the cliff leading up from them actually went beyond the vertical in places, overhanging the glinting needles. ‘Wouldn’t recommend going that way,’ he said. ‘I could do it, and Marc, you too?’ Naider nodded. ‘But probably not the best idea for the rest of you to climb a vertical line hanging over a load of six-foot spikes.’
Cheng regarded the icicles unhappily. ‘I did tell you I’m not good with heights, didn’t I?’
‘So how do we get up?’ Nina asked.
The Yorkshireman’s gaze swept back across the cliff. ‘There,’ he said, indicating a jutting nose of ice rising from the water not far inside the cave entrance. ‘We can get onto solid ground there, and I’ll climb up to that ledge.’ A ragged rift cut across the wall about sixty feet above until it met a thick, near-vertical pillar of ice standing out several feet from the face. ‘There’s a rope ladder in the gear. I’ll haul it up, unroll it, then everyone else can climb up after me.’
‘What about the rest of the way?’ Imka said dubiously. ‘The cliff’s almost vertical, and there is that big column in the way – how will we get across to the spaceship?’
‘It’s not a spaceship,’ Nina insisted.
Eddie smirked at her before answering the other woman’s question. ‘I’ll set up pitons and ropes so everyone can get around that pillar. Once you get to the other crack,’ he pointed out a weaving line beyond the obstacle that crossed the cliff almost the whole way to the mysterious object, ‘it should be pretty straightforward to sidestep along it. I’ll put in lines you can hold.’
‘You make it sound so easy,’ said Nina. She didn’t doubt that the climb was well within his capabilities, but the constant creaking of stressed ice reminded her that they were in a cave that was slowly but inexorably melting. Surfaces that seemed solid could give way at any moment.
‘Oh, you’ll hear me complaining all the way up. But I think everyone’ll manage it. Even you, Cheng.’ The young man did not look reassured.
Naider brought the boat to the starting point. Eddie hopped out and the pair unloaded the climbing gear. The Yorkshireman donned a harness and equipped it with a light, an electric Fast Ice drill and several racks of six-inch ice screws, plus a set of foot-long ones. He then put spiked crampons over his boots, slung a coil of rope on one shoulder, and donned a climbing helmet as protection against falling debris. Finally he hefted a pair of folding ice axes. ‘Anyone wants ice in their drink, just ask.’
‘Mine’s a double,’ said Nina, amused. Then, more seriously: ‘Be careful.’
‘I somehow made it to fifty, so now I’m pretty determined to reach sixty!’ He kissed her, then clomped to the cliff’s foot. ‘All right, let’s go and meet the aliens!’
Nina’s only reply as he started to climb was a long-suffering sigh.
7
Eddie’s initial climb was straightforward. The ice was firm enough for his axes to bite deeply into, supporting his weight. A minor scare came when a tray-sized scab of ice sheared away as he dug in his crampon spikes, everyone below jumping back as it smashed at the bottom. But that aside, he reached the crevice with no difficulty.
He secured the rope ladder’s top and let it drop down. It ended about six feet above the ground, but with Naider’s help, even the non-climbers would be able to reach it. ‘Everyone set?’ he called to them.
All acknowledged in the affirmative, though Naider asked Cheng a question, pointing at his feet. ‘I’m okay, I know what I’m doing,’ the student replied impatiently, taking experimental steps on his spiked crampons.
‘Shall we come up?’ Nina asked.
Eddie pointed at the ice pillar. ‘Give me a minute to get started on that, then yeah.’
He sidestepped to the column and crouched, using the powerful Fast Ice drill to screw one of the twelve-inch rods into the ice to act as a foothold. Once it was in place, he drilled in shorter screws higher up, then attached carabiners and fixed a rope to the first one before threading it through the rest. He then clipped the line to his harness and stepped on to the long peg, driving in more screws as he gradually worked his way around the obstacle.
A clatter and huff from the ledge announced Nina’s arrival at the ladder’s top. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that,’ she panted.
‘Have you missed it?’
‘I would say no, but . . .’ She pointed. The object embedded in the ice was partially visible beyond the outcrop. ‘There’s that.’
‘Still don’t think it’s a UFO?’
‘I don’t think we’ll find little green men in it, no.’
He lowered his voice; Imka was starting her ascent. ‘What about the ship’s crew – Imka’s fiancé?’
A grim shake of her head. ‘I can’t imagine they’re still alive – not after whatever the hell happened here.’ She looked up at the Dionysius. Dark portholes stared back like empty eye sockets. ‘If anyone’s here, alive or dead, they must be in . . . the other thing.’
‘It’s never a good sign when even you don’t know what something is. Usually means we’re going to find trouble inside,’ he said, before quickly changing the subject as Imka neared them. ‘Okay, I’ll put ropes and pitons around the other side of this pillar, then go across the cliff. I’ll shout as soon as I’ve got all the lines in place.’
‘Don’t go inside that thing without the rest of us,’ Nina warned.
‘Are you kidding? I’ve seen way too many movies about people who wander off on their own inside alien spaceships!’
‘It’s not— Oh just get going,’ she said with amused exasperation.
Eddie laughed and continued around the outcrop.
The Resurrection Key Page 9