Area 51: Earth Abides by Bob Mayer

Author:Bob Mayer [Mayer, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-19T22:00:00+00:00

MPONENG GOLD MINE, SOUTH AFRICA

The species Halicephalobus Mephisto is named after Mephistopheles, the Lord of the Underworld in Faust. It had been discovered in 2011 because the roundworm lived deeper inside the planet than any other known animal. No other multicellular organism had ever been found deeper than a mile; but these existed over two miles below ground in veins of groundwater three to ten thousand years old. They feed on subterranean bacteria and reproduce asexually. The discoverers speculated that they had originally been like their surface cousins but had been driven deeper underground by rainwater and gradually adapted to the extreme temperatures and pressures.

The first miners who saw the tiny creatures were frightened because they had assumed nothing could be alive in these dark depths. Even with this discovery, though, few thought anything could live deeper inside the planet. At least nothing like what we knew as life.

The miners had never suspected that they, and their families, would end up living in these tunnels. But the approach of the Swarm Battle Core had led to desperate action all over the world and the miners had sought refuge in the safest place they knew.

They had originally hidden at the bottom of the mine, two and a half miles beneath the surface. It took over an hour via a series of elevators to get that deep. But when the power to the slurry ice pumper had gone out, the temperature had begun to rise without the artificial cooling. Since the unaltered temperature at the bottom was 151 degrees Fahrenheit, the miners and their families had begun a slow, but steady ascent, using the rungs on the sides of the shafts to climb given the elevators didn’t work, but staying as deep as bearable. They were now a mile and a half below surface.

The miners were armed with shovels, picks and crowbars. The weapons they’d used to overwhelm and kill the guards at the entrance to the mine when the Battle Core came into orbit. They’d guided their families in, shutting gates and vault doors behind them. The latter designed specifically to keep people out of one of the world’s most valuable gold mines. To protect riches that were no longer worth anything.

Besides the rising temperatures, they were low on supplies, especially water. The miners had tapped into some of the concrete barrier walls which contained pockets of water designed to cool the working areas, but those bled out quickly. It also increased the temperature by degrading the shielding.

The leaders of the two hundred South African natives were arguing about what to do, although the course of action was inevitable: they would eventually have to go back to the surface. The fact no one had come down after them given they’d killed the guards and were ensconced in one of the richest places in the world indicated things up there were not good. An apocalyptic Catch-22.

The arguments ceased when a woman screamed. She was joined by several others as the walls of the mine shaft secreted hundreds of thousands of Halicephalobus Mephisto.

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