Hive

This really got everyone excited and particularly Campbell, the team’s microbiologist. He got so excited, in fact, he forgot that Hayes was the guy who ran the generators and boilers and not a brother scientist. In the control booth, as all that wonderful info came up from the cryobot and began appearing on the computer screens, Campbell grabbed Hayes by the arm and started babbling on like a kid talking about presents under the Christmas tree. Except what he was talking about were molecular biology studies, forensic biology, and ancient DNA protein analysis. Hayes acted like he knew all about that stuff, smiling and nodding happily as Campbell filled his head with the specifics of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) using gene-specific and random primers, PCR amplification of evolutionary conservative genes and microbial metabolic activity, and, of course, the wonders of cyanobacteria and paleo-indicators.

An hour after the cryobot had entered the lake, it released the secondary cryobot on a cable which then descended to the bottom, some 900 feet below. Gundry and the others had chosen this location because the lake was over 2000 feet deep in some spots and it was near to that perplexing magnetic anomaly. When Hayes got back to the drill tower again, the secondary cryobot was on the bottom and had been for the past thirty minutes.

“You’ve come just in time,” Gundry told him. “We’re about to release the hydrobot. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Hayes did. He was keeping a lot of things crossed. He was glad they were finding what they had hoped for . . . more, even . . . but there was still that worming tension in his belly, that almost superstitious dread at probing around down here at something that had been sealed away from the world for almost forty-million years . . . like they were picking the scab off a sore and there was a danger of some infection running rampant as a result. Now and again Gundry would look over at him and something would pass between them, some sense that they were on the verge of big things, things that might crush them.

At least, that’s how Hayes was reading it.

When the hydrobot was released successfully, there was just Gundry, Campbell, Hayes, and Parks, the geophysicist, in the booth. People had been coming in all day long to see what was going on, but it was a long process and most left soon after they arrived.

But Hayes, in-between his rounds of the power station and boilers, hung on like a tick and now here it was, the moment they’d all been waiting for. When the hydrobot was released and started to send back data everyone cheered. This was going to work, all those millions of dollars were going to pay off. Today Lake Vordog and tomorrow, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It really was an incredible moment and Hayes was almost wishing Lind could have been there. He would have appreciated the historical significance of it all . . . and his part in it, too.

Campbell and Parks sat before monitors, gathering data, and Gundry and Hayes stood behind them. There was a video screen above, but as yet there had been no video feed. The screen flickered a few times, but nothing. Hayes could sense the heavy hearts of the scientists over that.

“I’m reading water temperatures of sixty degrees, with currents up over a hundred. Wait now . . . okay, okay,” Parks was saying as the numbers came in from the hydrobot. “Yeah, picking up chemical signals . . . magnesium and iron smoke . . . manganese, zinc . . . copper sulfides, sulfur dioxides . . . carried on the warm currents. Okay, got a hot plume here . . . almost 200 degrees. We’ve definitely got ourselves a smoker down here, gentlemen. Hydrothermal vents . . . gotta be . . . yeah, more than one. Several sites, I’m guessing.”

Campbell was equally as happy for his bio-sensors were picking up all kinds of goodies from both the secondary cryobot on the bottom and the hydrobot. Analysis of water and sediment were showing bacteria, yeasts, archaea, algae, even grains of pollen.

“Diatoms . . . shit, I’m getting indicators of rich plankton fields here.”

“Outstanding,” Gundry said.

Parks was nodding his head. “Come to papa . . . oh yeah . . . chemical enrichment of water almost two million times that of normal seawater or fresh water.”

“Meaning what?” Hayes asked.

“Meaning,” Gundry said, “is that the buffet is surely open. You’ve got smoker vents down here, Jimmy, spewing chemical nutrients into the water that heat-loving bacteria feast upon. The buffet is open.”

Parks started fooling around with the uplink to the hydrobot and the video screen flickered, flickered again, rolled and went black. Then it came on and they were seeing . . . well, huge clots of sediment drifting up from the muddy bottom in the powerful halogen lamps of the hydrobot. They were now seeing what it was seeing.

“Incredible,” Hayes said without being aware of it.