AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It bulged upward at one point, breaking through the broken coral, shrugging the tonnage aside. Its dark skin pulsed with a deep glow. It wasn’t the bright bioluminescence of the creatures inhabiting the forest. Instead, there was an ancient quality to it, the glow of a dying sun. It shone from deep within it.
Still, there was no mistaking what it was.
Phoebe admitted as much. “It’s a tentacle.”
At the edges of the forest, shadows shifted, shining with the same somber glow, marking the locations of other tentacles. The lead one reached to the sub and shoved it away. It then retreated, curling as if repulsed. The inner glow dimmed. Even it was struggling with the level of radiation.
Another limb snaked out, no longer hiding. Its length was heavy with patches of rocky carapace. Still, it took its turn to push the submarine farther out into the open. Then spasmed back, burned by the radioactive ember.
They watched as this effort continued. Tentacles pushed, then retreated, again and again, slowly shifting the submarine across the hellish landscape.
Phoebe was the first to understand the ploy, noting the determined trajectory. “They’re trying to drive it into the molten lake. To destroy it.”
Adam glanced to Datuk, remembering his claim that the local quakes might not have been random, but purposeful. That the shaking could’ve been an attempt to drive out the hot splinter that had lodged in their forest—and when that didn’t work, they broke the crust under it and dropped it into this hellscape.
Is that what we’re witnessing?
Datuk seemed to believe so. “It looks like a toxic clean-up job.”
“But what isit?” Adam challenged them. “Those tentacles down there. They look somewhat like those octopus-like creatures, those overgrown coral polyps. But it’s clearly different.”
“It must be far more ancient,” Phoebe said. “Maybe a great ancestor. It could be hundreds of millions of years old.” She turned to Datuk. “I wager if you tested its DNA, you’d find many more silicon-based sections.”
“What do you mean?” Adam asked.
Phoebe returned her attention below. “I think we’re looking at a blurring of geology and biology. A mix of silicon and carbon life.”
Adam wanted Datuk to argue with her, but he remained silent.
Phoebe continued, “Over untold millennia, the polyps of the coral forest probably started shedding the silicon in their DNA, the stone from their bodies, evolving and becoming more free swimming.”
“Until there were just traces of silicon in their DNA,” Datuk mumbled. “Enough to sustain them at these depths.”
“Then eventually those last vestiges were cast off, too. As life swam freer, venturing into less hostile waters, the silicon DNA and its proteins were no longer needed.”
“Until the creatures became the baffling oddities we know today,” Datuk said. “The octopus.”
“Or possibly they’re the source foralllife,” Phoebe expounded. “Either way, some of that past has endured. Down deep. And I wager even deeper there could be greater mysteries, ones that we may never fully comprehend.”
Adam remembered her description.
A blurring of geology and biology.
As they watched, those rocky tentacles finally rolled the submarine to the edge of the molten lake. The boat’s weight cracked through the blackened crust at the rim. It slid down into the depths, vanishing beneath the sulfur.
Adam pictured it falling ever deeper, rolling toward the molten rock at the center. That realization sat him straighter. “We need to get out of here.”
“We have a few more minutes before we have to leave,” Bryan said, still transfixed by the sight.
“No. We don’t.”
Bryan glanced at him.
Adam pointed down. “The Chinese sub was likely armed with ballistic missiles.” He faced everyone. “Equipped with nuclear warheads.”
Datuk gaped at him. “Will they explode?”
“It’s not likely, but let’s not take the chance.”
