The seventh book in the Deep Black series, 2009

Latitude 90° N 1445 hours

IT WAS, FEODOR GOLYTSIN THOUGHT, like touching down on the surface of another planet.

“Ostorojna!” Captain Third Rank Dmitri Kurchakov warned. “Careful! Reduce speed of descent!”

“Da, Kepitan,” the helmsman replied.

“Vasily. Give me a readout on the depth below keel.”

“Deseet’ metrov, Kepitan,” the diving officer replied. Ten meters.

Golytsin stooped to peer through the thick quartz window into the alien world beyond. Another planet, yes… a very dark planet. Blacker than the surface of far Pluto, for there, at least, there was a sun, if one shrunken and wan. Here there was nothing save the luminescence of the abyssal fauna, banished now by the light the submarine brought with her from above.

A dark planet, and a deadly one. At a depth of just over forty-two hundred meters, the pressure bearing down on each and every square centimeter of Nomer Chiteereh’s outer nickel-steel hull was almost two tons.

Muck swirled up off the bottom by the minisub’s side thrusters danced in the harsh white glare of the forward lights, like drifting stars. Briefly, something like a worm, half a meter long and fringed with myriad legs or swimmerets, twisted through the unaccustomed light, casting bizarre and writhing shadows within the cold and watery haze.

Astonishing. Even here, four thousand meters beneath the ice, within this frigid eternal night, there was life.

The submarine was a new, experimental, and highly secret military model with the less-than-glamorous name of Nomer Chiteereh, “Number Four.” Twenty-nine meters long and with a displacement of 150 tons, Nomer Chiteereh could reach depths of six thousand meters and could stay submerged for several days.