Chapter 1
“Of course it’s there!” Sam shouted “What do you mean they want proof,” she paused as she threw her hands in the air for emphasis, “what the hell kinda proof do they need? I sent them all of our data from the scans, we need money before we can dig!”
“Their investors Sam, they need something they can put their hands on, something that is proof that there will be a return on the investment. I don’t know what, but something, and soon or they won’t just pull your future funding.” Marks expression turned dark. “They’re gonna shut us down Sam.”
“What do you mean?” Sam froze as her stomach dropped. “They can’t…”
“They plan to freeze the bank account,” Mark nearly whispered as though saying it out loud would make it real, “take away our operating budget all together.”
“Get the board together.” Sam closed her eyes as she spoke. “I can get them their damn proof.”
Mark knew exactly what she was planning to do, she was going to go into the pit. Two summers ago they had discovered it, a seemingly bottomless chasm. Its mouth was already more than one mile underground, and that only after nearly fifty miles of cave travel, it was more than she could do alone. When they found it, they were using an ROV, a Remote Operated Vehicle, exploring a new branch in the cave system they were mapping when they nearly drove it off the edge and into the shadows. That would have been fifty thousand dollars down the hole, literally! Thankfully Mark was an expert at piloting the track mounted robot and was able to latch onto a stalagmite with one of its robotic arms just as the track began to tip over the edge.
As the robot righted itself and the team breathed its collective sigh of relief, the camera scanned downward and into the depth of the hole. It looked like an enormous wound in the the earth, deep and jagged as though the solid rock was torn in half to reveal the opening. And it was deep, the sensors on the ROV couldn’t detect the bottom. Even the LIDAR scanner was drawing entire sections of the screen blank, as though the data simply didn’t exist at all. The team would spend the next month studying the cave system, taking as many readings as they could to ensure safety before a single human would be allowed to step foot underground.
When the day finally came Sam led the team into the darkness, she wouldn’t have missed the chance to see it first for anything. The first trip was a four person team, outfitted in level one haz-mat suits complete with air tanks to ensure safety from airborne contaminants as well as radiation they ventured into the mouth of the cave. Each step felt foreign, almost other worldly as they traveled more than five hours in complete darkness. The floors turned from the rough floor of a cave entrance into a smooth, almost polished surface that gently curved upward and over the top before coming back down to meet the floor again on the other side. It wasn’t a lava or water tube, but it definitely wasn’t shaped like the team expected.
They had planned to be below ground for fourteen days, traveling for the first two and a half days just to reach the target, so before they left the base they ensured they each carried a sleeping bag, food, spare clothing as well as other vital provisions, climbing gear and a water purifier in their backpacks.
“Do you think we should stop here and get some rest?” Victors accent was thick as he pushed the words out, “We agreed no more than ten hours a day, and my watch has us at twelve.”
“Smart.” Sam agreed softly, already distracted with the thoughts of her next journal entry. “Alright guys, drop gear and set camp. Be careful where you put your pack, there’s something…” she paused as she searched for the right word. “Off, about this place.”
“You’re preachin’ to the choir girl!” Sofia whispered. “I normally like being underground, but this place… Can you feel it?” She gently pressed one hand against the wall as she aimed her flashlight at Sam with the other. “It’s like electricity or something, just below the surface.”
“Yeah, I feel it.” Mark hissed “Sorta feels like static makin’ my hair stand up.”
The next few hours passed in relative silence as each member of the team found a spot on the ground to call home and began spreading out their gear. Sam sat at the front of the group, back leaning against the wall as she scribbled in her notebook. She was always writing something down, scribbling in her own shorthand as she recorded everything she saw. She had spent a couple years studying languages and developed her own code to make it easier to capture everything and this day was no different, she was writing so furiously that she barely noticed when Mark dropped to the floor next to her.
“Sleep for six, one for breakfast then move out again?” He asked.
“Huh?” Sam didn’t even look up from her notebook.
“Sam?” Mark put his hand on her arm to bring her attention back to the present. “What do you think?”
“Huh?” she repeated “About what?”
“Sleep for six hours, then one hour for breakfast before we head out again. I was confirming the schedule boss.”
“Shit. I did it again didn’t I?” Sam rubbed her temple. “Sorry, you know how I get when I have something that needs to get written down. Yeah, schedule sounds good.”
“Good.” Mark said as he watched her expression.
“You need anything else?” Sam asked sheepishly. “It’s just…”
“Yeah.” Mark laughed as stood up. “Just remember to write down where we parked the universe!”
“Go to bed, smart ass!” She laughed as she shoved him away.
The next day they finished the hike through the cavern to the GPS coordinates where the robot had marked the hole. Sam could feel the emptiness stretch out in front of her before she figured out that the darkness wasn’t swallowing the light from her flashlight, but rather that the open expanse in front of her team was so vast that there was nothing for the light to show them. Sam aimed her flashlight at the floor of the cavern as they approached trying to find the edge of the hole.
It was unnerving, and from somewhere deep down into the darkness they saw a faint blue light.
“What is that?” Victor leaned over the edge as he peered down into the dark. “It’s blue, do you see that?”
“Careful.” Mark tugged Victors elbow, pulling him back from the edge. “God, wouldn’t be horrible to fall into that thing!”
“The edge is solid my friend,” Victor dug at the floor with the toe of his boot trying to kick up the dirt, but the surface was solid and swept clean of debris. “Now that’s odd.”
“Do you feel that?” Sofia was frozen near the cave wall, her eyes open as wide as dinner plates as she stared into the void. “It’s like a push and pull and the closer I get to the edge the worse it gets.”
Sam stepped toward her and reached out her hand to comfort her as she spoke. “I feel it too, but it wont hurt us.” She paused, “I think.”
“That light looks close enough to reach it with the rapelling lines we brought.” Intrigue laced Victors voice as he formed the words. “I think if we anchor into the floor about here,” he walked to a spot about ten fee from the edge of the chasm and started trying to make a divot with his toe. “yes, here. This will leave us enough room to get down there and find out what this thing is.”
“Check this out Sam!” It was Mark this time standing at the edge of the hole and dangling a climbing carabiner from the end of a short bit of rope as he stretched his arm over the edge. “Watch!”
As he spoke the carabiner began to sway out toward the hole, then a half second later it swung back away from the hole, only to move back toward the chasm again a moment later. The chasm was emitting a repetitive magnetic pulse, cycling every five hundred milliseconds. The real anomaly though was that between pulses the magnetic field didn’t collapse as expected. Instead, it inverted—its polarity reversing completely—shifting from a powerful pull to an equally forceful push. It felt almost as if the earth itself were breathing in and out, and the closer the group got to the edge the stronger the push and pull became.
“What could be causing this?” Mark asked as Sam stepped closer to him.
“I don’t know,” she began softly, “I have never seen anything like this either in practice or in study, it’s like theres a giant magnet down there or something.”
“Fire in the hole!” Victors voice broke their concentration as he announced the shot.
A moment later there was a loud crack as the .22 caliber blank fired from the end of his climbing anchor, effectively forcing the anchor pin ten inches into the cave floor.
“One down.” He said cheerfully as he prepared his anchor tool for the next shot. “Hook on and stage at the edge, we can rapel as soon as I get mine anchored.”
“You’re the climb master of the group.” Sam agreed. “We wait for your lead my friend.”
BANG! Another shot, then another and another and all four team members anchors were set and Victor was threading the climbing ropes through the carabiners and over the edge.
“Look at that.” Mark said softly as he peered over the edge where he had just tossed the ropes. “It’s not just the metal, look at the ropes.”
Sam leaned out over the edge for a look downward. “They’re moving back and forth like the carabiners. Curious that it’s not just the magnetic stuff.”
She clipped her belt onto the climbing rope and turned her back to the darkness as she watched the others prepare to join her.
“Ready?” Victor said as he clipped onto his rope, backed over the edge and disappeared into the darkness. “On rope!”
As Victors head lamp began disappear into the darkness Sofia stepped over the edge and started her descent, following Victor down into the oblivion.
“On rope!” Sofia’s voice rang through the cavern.
Sam let Sofia get about twenty feet down before she backed out over the edge and started her way down. That was the way the team had always done their rapeling explorations, they allowed about twenty feet between them to keep the ropes from tangling without spreading them too far from each other. Victor was always the first down and the last up, as the climb master he was the most experienced with rock climbing, rapeling and land navigation so it was his job to make sure the group was safe. He relished the responsibility, being the one standing between his team and the unkown dangers that so often accompanied scientific exploration.
Victor had been invited to join the team in his early twenties, he met Sam in his sophomore year when he had taken a geology class and found himself paired with her and Sofia on a research project. Sam and Sofia had known each other since their mid teens and were nearly inseparable through high school and their freshman year at Caltech, and now Sam was the lead researcher on the project where they would study a multi-spectral analysis of subsurface density anomalies in terrestrial crust models miles into a cave system. For Sam it was a jumping off point in astrophysics as she worked out how rocky planets form, how a planetary crust developes and how subsurface anomalies can indicate unusual geological histories and tell the story of the ancients.
Sofia, a geophysics major, spent most of her days studying magnetic field distortions and seismic wave patterns, mapping the invisible world beneath their feet with a GPR — Ground Penetrating Radar. She wasn’t expecting anything unusual the day she met Victor. But the moment he spoke, she froze.
His accent hit her like a memory. Not a clear one — more like the echo of a childhood dream. She had lived in the U.S. for most of her life, but she still remembered Sighișoara. The narrow streets. The pastel houses. The way everyone knew everyone, even if you were too young to remember it yourself.
And she knew instantly, without needing to ask, that Victor came from there too.
“Hello,” Victor was nearly fluent in English, though his accent made it difficult to get certain syllables to sound quite right. “I am Victor, my project sheet says I am to team with you?”
“Hi Victor, I’m Sam, Samantha Roche`, this is Sofia Petrov.”
Sam motioned toward Sofia as she spoke but Sofia was dumbstruck and only sat, starring at Victor with her lips slightly parted.
Sam noticed. “Sofia studies geophysics, if you are our third you must be our fieldwork specialist?”
“I am,” Victor said proudly, “I major in Geology…” He paused as he tried to find a more elloquent statement and failed, instead he stammered and barely managed “I like rocks.”
“Right,” Sam chuckled “Rock samples, seismic activity and subsurface formations, right?”
“Right!” Victor nearly shouted before he paused to reset his enthusiasm as his cheeks flushed. “And I know navigation, climbing, rapelling, and survival, so when we go to the field I have your back as you say.”
“You have our backs,” it was the first time Sofia had spoken since Victor arrived. “Welcome to the team Victor, where are you from?”
The two had hardly been apart since that first meeting, they were more than just engaged, they were soul mates. Sofia always said she would follow Victor anywhere, and she did so regularly on the various different exploration or study project excursions they had under taken in the years that followed. She was proving it once again on this day as she tipped backward off the ledge and into the chasms waiting maw, just twenty feet behind Victor. By the time Mark had begun his descent Victor’s head lamp was barely visible in the darkness below. It was just faint enough for him to perceive the danger that had enveloped his cohorts. Sixty feet below Victor had reached the middle of the machine.
It was enormous, Victor estimated it at more than four stories tall, cube shaped with the center hole about the size of a one story building. It was made from a smooth composite material, seamless but for a single track that ran the inner circumference of the donut. The blue light that Victor had seen from the top of the chasm was running in that track, completing a full cycle every second with the polarity reversal precisely as the light passed the twelve and six o’clock positions. Victor could feel the push and pull getting stronger even before he noticed the intensity of the light increasing, within moments it was so intense that his feet left the chasm wall as it pulled him toward the center.
“STOP!” Victor shouted as loud as he could as his feet were pulled away from the wall again. “NOT SAFE!”
He swung outward violently as the blue light rocketed past the bottom of the loop and his body started spinning as he felt the push rushing back toward the rock.
Crack! Victor shrieked in pain as his should slammed into the wall and his clavical snapped.
“GO BACK!” he shouted as he was hurled back toward the machine.
Sofia was less that twenty feet above him as she watched in horror while her beloved was lashed back and forth but she could barely hear Victor’s cries. She locked the brake lever on her rapeling harness to brace against the push and pull of the machine. Victor was spinning wildly as he was wrenched back and forth, each impact breaking another part of his body as screams poured from his mouth until finally as he swung back against the wall his climbing helmet hit so hard it cracked in half as his head was twisted backward. Sofia didn’t hear the sound when his neck broke, but she felt the moment his life left his body.
“Victor!” She shrieked.
The light was so bright now that she had to shield her eyes from it. As she turned and tucked her head against the rock, a flicker of movement caught the corner of her vision — Victor’s rope, slipping past her like a lifeline being reeled away into the dark. Her hand shot out on instinct, fingertips grazing the cord as it slid beyond her reach.
Sofia pushed off the wall with everything she had, reaching for him in one last, desperate lunge — but the light completed its cycle, the polarity snapped, and the force hurled her backward. She slammed into the rock flat on her back, the impact driving the breath from her lungs as her body whipped on the line. Her head struck stone a heartbeat later, a sharp, brutal crack — and the world went black before she could even scream.
“Sofia!” Sam shrieked as she watched it all unfold, her eyes shot upward toward Mark. “Pull her up!” she cried. “Pull her up!”
Mark scrambled back up over the ledge and quickly locked his climbing harness so the rope would act as a safety line and spun as he dropped to his knees. He frantically started working Sofia’s rope hand over hand, hoisting her higher with each desperate haul. Sam was able to reach her within seconds and quickly pulled her into her arms so she could support Sofia’s neck and head as she pumped her foot ascenders to help Mark hoisting Sofia to the top. As they reached the top Mark wrapped his arms under Sofia’s and pulled while Sam put her shoulder under Sofia and pushed one last heave. The combined effort transfered Sofia to the flat surface of the cave floor smoothly as Mark focused on steadying her head.
Sofia was bleeding from her nose and right ear, with scrapes across the back of her head and her helmet was broken where it had slammed into the wall.
But she was breathing!
“Sof?” Sam sobbed as she scrambled on all fours over to where Sofia was laying, she brushed her hair from her face as she whispered her name again. “Sof? Come back to me Sof.” She paused as she studied Sofia’s face. “C’mon Sofia, stay with me till we get you out of here. I wont loose you too!” Sam looked up at Mark pleading with her eyes, “We need a back-brace, tell me Victor didn’t have it.”
“No, I have it.” Mark said as he tore open the top of his backpack and pulled out the inflatable back and neck braces from the emergency kit and jerked the inflator cord.
“My hiking poles are over there” Sam pointed toward the cave wall with one hand as she cradled Sofia with the other.
Mark grabbed her poles and his, popped the handles off and slid them into the loops on the inflatable back-brace to make a solid frame so they could carry Sofia out. They gently rolled Sofia onto the gurney and tightened the velcro straps to hold her in place before scrambling around in the dark stuffing supplies back into their packs for the two day journey out of the caves.
“Ready?” Sam and Mark locked eyes as she spoke.
“Ready.” Mark said solemnly as he lifted.