The Gods of Gilgamesh

Author Note:Lake Vostok is an actual lake beneath Antarctica. It has been sealed for mpore than half a million years. In this science fiction story scientists seek to enter the lake - only to discover a message there that will impact all humankind.

Chapter 1: Breakthrough

It is the fate of all living things that evolve to the point of tool-bearing sentience. They find that power over other life forms brings with it the assumption of ownership. Ownership leads to arrogance and this to life and death decisions that the empowered life form is in reality not qualified to make. And thereby hangs the fate of entire worlds. None of this, of course, was even remotely apparent to the latest life form to achieve technological advancement when its scientists discovered a lake deep beneath the ice cap of the southern pole of the planet it knew as the Earth.

Breakthrough

“Heat!” Bass screamed. “Give me heat dammit, as fast as you can!” Her feet and fingers flew as she dimmed the control room lights and began venting steam from the reactor back into the nose vents of the probe. The EHNS team responded instantly and unquestioningly, bringing up the reactor as fast as they safely could. Maybe even faster than that. The umbilical was moving. The sound, the strange sound no one in the room could quite fathom, was now loud and ominous. It was the sound of splitting ice, roaring and reverberating through the surrounding ice field and the speakers on the control room. “Core head umbilical, take all stress off the umbilical, release a hell of a lot more slack. ENHS bring up the heat as fast as you possibly can.”

The orders from Bass cut through the air in the control room with an air of authority that no one dare question. She knew something that meant the situation was desperate. Instrumentation techs began reporting exterior temperatures as the superheated steam began to vaporize the water, then the ice in front of the probe.

The men on the umbilical control system were yelling in unison. “Breakthrough! Breakthrough, the umbilical is reeling out. “ Someone shouted.

“And too damn fast.” Another yelled, sounding as if he were on the verge of panic.

“Give me slack and give me heat.” Bass yelled the order.

The probe was designed to withstand immense external pressure, but now the vaporizing water around the probe was building up explosive pressures between the probe hull and the ice around it. It did not make sense to anyone but Bass. The probe was still inside the ice, yet the umbilical was unreeling as if it were plunging toward the bed of the lake below. And yet the view in the monitors was unchanged.

There was a sudden roar from the speakers that made the control room tremble.

“Cut the heat.” Bass stopped in mid sentence and overrode the ENHS controls and shut the reactor down. In the same motion she brought on the lights and video cameras and deployed the probe buoyancy systems. The techs were reporting back data she could already see on the screen, overprinted on the image of superheated gas streams and bubbles frothing in front of the cameras. The reactor was rapidly cooling down. The buoyancy systems had deployed fully and the probe was slowing down. It was at much greater depth than it should have been.

The probe’s on board main cpu was going wild. It was now superheating steam and blasting it into the compressed bag cells that created the buoyancy system for the massive device. Finally the descent slowed, then stopped. Within minutes the probe began heading back towards the ice cap above the lake. Bass now overrode the on-board computers and slowed the descent by recompressing the air and steam inside the buoyancy cells. The probe slowed its now vertical movement in time to stop smashing itself against the underside of the ice cap. “Start reeling back the umbilical. Slowly.” Bass sounded as if she were calm and completely in control of the situation. The high intensity lights were bouncing back images to the video cameras. As they gradually took form and then focussed amidst the stream of bubbles and heated water around the probe, the reason for the near disaster was plain to see. The first camera image to become clear showed the umbilical snaking upwards above the probe. As the camera followed the thick black strand everyone in the control could see it rising into a huge bell shaped cavity in the base of the ice cap. Mettinger gasped. “Jesus! We almost lost it all right at the moment of breakthrough.”

It was then that they realized what Bass had figured out far sooner than the rest of them. The image of the ice above was crossed with rainbow hued fractures. Floating into the cavity as they watched were large and small chunks of diamond-like ice.

As the probe descended through the last few meters of ice, its weight and heat was supposed to allow it to break smoothly through the ice into the lake below. A least that’s the way it played out in all the animations they had watched since early 2000s.

Bass spoke in a matter of fact tone to no one in particular. “We broke away from the ice cap inside our own iceberg! If we hadn’t used steam to blow it apart, the floatation system would have been crippled and the probe would be on the bottom of the lake right with the end of the umbilical still in it.”

As she spoke she was tapping controls on her console and manipulating a joystick with her left hand. “I’m preparing to anchor. Sonics Ops, Get ready to switch from direct to sonic communication. UMB Crew! standby for new antenna measurements. We can’t go with the original plan.”

Mettinger and Andropov both breathed out slowly, others in the control room gasped as they released the pent up pressure of the last few moments. Bass was calmly resuming the break through schedule seconds after having saved the entire project.

“That strata of ice just above the surface of the lake, it has all been fractured by shear forces as the ice above it moves across the Lake. It’s full of rock particles from the edges of the lake and does not appear to have any structural integrity. “ Mettinger nodded at Bass. “She saved our bacon, Valeri.”

Chapter Two: The Beginning

The Vostok Probe 2025: Twenty days earlier.

Valeri Andropov pulled his parka tighter around his face. Of all the places on the ice-bound continent, Vostok Station, Russia’s outpost in Antarctica, was the one where the coldest temperatures known to man had been recorded. It seemed to him that it was a place out of the mainstream of science, where only atmospheric and terrestrial sciences would be applicable. Worse, his seemed to be an appointment to a Gulag for some never to be known offense to the system that lingered on after the Soviet collapse. It began with the rare visit in 2012 from his father to his research outpost at Kholmsk. It was then that his father hinted at the truth about his appointment to Lake Vostok. And the terrible secret it appeared to hold. Andropov peeled back the thick cuff of his extreme cold weather glove to look at his watch. It had not yet frozen. He smiled. Everyone doubted it could be done, but he had brought the mission in on time and in a few minutes the Vostok probe would begin its journey through two miles of ice into the lake below.

“You should be smiling!” The comment came from Jacqueline Lukin, who despite her name, was not Russian. She was head of NASA’s Vostok-Europa project. She leaned forward to cup her hand over Andropov’s ear to be heard above the rising kabatic wind.

“I personally never thought the wrangling over how this should be done would ever end. Your ability to cut through the bullshit and force decisions got us here today!”

Andropov smiled again, this time warmed by the closeness of the American woman and her hint of perfume. Perfume. Here, out on the Antarctic ice cap. In the bars over at McMurdo Sound the women usually had skin as dry as the papers they wrote and they smelled of the diesel Cats that brought them into town. The Lukin woman paid attention to details, from the things that made her an attractive woman, to the things that made her America’s leading exo-biologist. They had met several years before at a Vostok conference in Europe. Their careers had really kept them apart. Now the Vostok project was underway. Lukin had just heliod in from Mirnyy. His arm reached around her waist as if to support her. “Let’s walk down into the pit and out of this wind.”

The kabatic wind was a super fast river of incredibly cold air that raced off the high continental plateau. It could freeze a human body solid in mere moments. A twenty-meter pit had been excavated into the ice field above the lake to provide the Vostok Project core head some protection from the wind. Now the two researchers walked down an access ramp into the pit. The huge depression was filled with buildings and covered walkways, containers bristling with radio antennas and dishes. They were arrayed around a central steel scaffold, the core head.

This was a massive structure that held the lift gear, communications cables and robotics control for the Vostok probe and its contents. The probe itself was huge. It was called the Remotely Operated Vostok Exploration Craft, or ROVEC. The water in the lake thousands of feet below them had not been touched in at least 300,000 years, maybe as much as a million. It was, as far as anyone knew, the only place on the planet that might contain unadulterated data from the far distant past. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours were invested in bringing all this international technology to this one spot in Antarctica. It would be wasted if there were the slightest contamination of the lake below. For that reason ROVEC was the most advanced and self-contained craft of its kind ever built.

Internally its many mini probes, tethered and un–tethered robots, computers, machinery and power sources, had been assembled in sterile labs in four countries. It all sat inside the ROVEC in a structure above the core head called the SteriDome. This was a clean room beyond anything NASA had ever created for its deep space probes. Even the exterior of ROVEC was to be sterilized by super heated steam during its journey through the ice cap. The intention was that once in the lake below, the ROVEC would be totally sterile.

It would then separate from its control umbilical and the connections would be withdrawn. The ice entrance into the lake would seal over, leaving only a sonic probe poking through the ice into the water below. There would be no possibility of contamination from cables reaching the surface, or from the entrance and egress of instruments and machinery. ROVEC would be much like a deep space probe, touched by mankind only through the medium of sound rather than radio waves. Initially, ROVEC would hang in the water, just beneath the ice as the initial explorations of the lake took place. As areas of interest were developed, it would re-locate itself to different parts of the lake to be within reach of them through its tethered and independent mini-robots.

Lukin welcomed Andropov’s arm as they both walked down to the core head buildings. She had instantly taken a liking to the huge Russian when they met in the US at the first joint conferences on the Vostok project. The air was still below the rim of the core head crater. That seemed to make it colder. They hurried across the wooden walkways to a large building next to the SteriDome. This was mission control. A few heads looked up as they entered, most were bent over data screens intent upon the closing hours of the pre-launch checklists.

The banks of data screens were set up in a semi-circle in front of giant digital wall screen. The space looked much like a NASA control center, which made sense since the American agency had donated most of the equipment. The banks were tiered and at the back of the room, on the uppermost tier, stood Brad Mettinger, the American project controller. He grinned broadly as the couple entered the room. Then he began to clap. More and more engineers, scientists, remote operators stood as they realized what Brad was signaling. Soon most everyone who could spare the time from the monitors was clapping too. Valeri Andropov had brought them all here. Years of wrangling between international agencies, groups and governments had finally been browbeaten, battered, cajoled and bear hugged into the single cohesive force that now gathered at the core head above Lake Vostok. Andropov had done it. Russia owned the territory above the Lake. They could have drilled their way down into the lake without any international support. Instead, patient co-operation had prevailed. A united mankind was about to begin a journey into its most distant past. Lukin stood back to let Andropov enjoy the moment as he walked to Mettinger’s control console. Typically, the Russian waved the men and women of the Vostok Project to cease and sit.

“I am just the poor bastard responsible for the millions of rubles, dollars, yens and pounds it took us to get to this moment. Now let’s earn our pay.”

“We are bringing the core up to temperature now Valeri,“ said Mettinger. “All the instrumentation has checked out. As soon as we reach systems nominal we can generate steam and start the launch cycle.” Andropov nodded his head and rubbed his chin with his hand. He had long dreamed of this very moment. His grandfather had been an officer in the KGB during the war with Germany. He came back a decorated war hero for having grabbed the few Nazi rocket scientists the Western Allies had not already swept up. His own father had built friendships with these Germans as a young man and had then become an engineer. Eventually he was part of the team that launched Sputnik. Andropov, too, had dreamed of a career in space, exploring distant worlds far away from the turbulent beginnings of the 21st century. He had, through his grandfather’s connections in the party and his father’s links to academia and engineering, gained the access he needed to embark on just such a career. He had specialized in remote instrumentation of the kind needed in space probes and robotic landing vehicles. Then the USSR collapsed, and his career with it. The USSR’s driving passion for politically important space achievement became Russia’s determination to hang on to past glory. A diminished space program had no place for ambitious robotic space exploration. Andropov reluctantly turned his passion towards inner space. He went to achieve notable success in deep ocean exploration and still secret deep earth studies inside the former Soviet Union. He had probed the depths of fault lines and volcanically active areas for new life forms and secrets of the mechanics of plate tectonics.

“Valeri! We’re waiting, give the order.” Lukin was speaking into his ear.

He cast one look at Lukin, her eyes and mouth posing the question as they looked back. He turned away, there was much he wished he could tell her. He liked the bold American woman more than he cared to admit. He raised a hand and looked at Mettinger, then across the room at the expectant faces.

“Start the count down. If all the instrumentation and equipment reports back nominal at T minus Zero, proceed to launch!”

There might have been cheers, instead heads dropped down. Fingers tapped at keyboards and threw micro switches, then glanced at screens, then to the giant display at the head of the control room.

Mettinger’s voice spoke softly. “T minus 5, All indications nominal, 4, 3, 2, 1, launch.” Andropov shuddered inwardly once more. What was he about to unleash on the world? At least for now, his thoughts were his own. Static on the screen resolved into a picture of the core head. The control room trembled gently as the massive ROVEC moved. The shining cylinder began to lower into the ice pit beneath the core head tower. Surface machinery had been circulating warm water in and out of the pit for several days. Now the ROVEC began to sink slowly into the shimmering surface of peppermint blue. Within a few minutes the rounded stern of the 20-meter long probe slipped beneath the surface of the pool.

“Cease circulation, cut off the pumps, withdraw the pump tubes.” Mettinger watched his console as it indicated the actions he asked for were fulfilled.

”Now start self-drill sequence.”

They watched on the screen as the steaming pump tubes rose out of the pit and swung to one side. The ROVEC was disappearing into the water below. The umbilical shivered as it fed down into the pit.

The self-drill sequence was under the control of the ROVEC’s on board computers. As it sank down into the water the ENHS, Encapsulated Nuclear Heat Source, was being brought up to operating temperature. Liquid metal coolant began to circulate through the reactor pile and down to the inner surface of the nose of the probe. The engineers watched as the instrumentation showed the nose surface rising in temperature. Quickly it reached the point where the water below it began to turn to steam, then to super-heated steam. The bubbles of gas burst from the outer surface of the bow and up past the probe into the water above. Soon the surface of the pool was boiling furiously, the steam instantly turning to fine snow in the intense cold, only to fall back to the surface of the pool. The machinery at the core head whined as it slowed. Several hundred feet below them, the nose of the probe came to rest gently against the ice at the bottom of the core head pool. The temperature rose even further and water exploded instantly into gas that blasted past the sides of the probe into the column of water above. At the surface of the pool, geysers of steam and water exploded into the air.

The ROVEC began to inch its way into the ice at the bottom of the pool. Anything organic in the layers of ice beneath it would be instantly burned by the intense heat. Within hours the turmoil higher in the water column would abate as the killing cold of the ice would overcome the heat from below. The surface would revert again to ice. Only the Teflon covered umbilical would be pulled through the ice and the surface of the core head pond itself would freeze. Andropov’s breath exploded from his massive frame. He did not realize he was holding it as the ROVEC began to melt its way down to the lake.

“I have work to do, Valeri, as I am sure you do. Maybe we can celebrate later?” Lukin pressed his arm gently and smiled.

Andropov smiled back and turned to where his own console was located. They both wondered, as they parted, if the rest of the room had any suspicions about the relationship. It was easy enough to make love in the researcher environs of Antarctica’s various stations. Keeping it secret was another thing altogether. The ROVEC had a journey of almost two and a half miles beneath it. It would press its massive weight through the melting ice at a rate of a meter an hour. The ice cap was about 500 meters thick beneath the core head, 500 hours or twenty days later, they would all begin the most fantastic, and perhaps terrifying, journey of exploration ever embarked upon by mankind.

Chapter Three: Burn Day Plus Five (November 5th)