Protocol 7 at-1 Page 21

  The others goggled as he used his fingers to expand the bridge into fine detail: the status panels, the navigation station, and the command chair. He looked at Max and gave him a sidelong grin. “This,” he said, flicking a finger at the padded seat sitting in the middle of it all, “is the pilot’s seat.”

  “And I presume that would be you?” Hayden said sarcastically, looking at Max with a smug grin.

  Max ignored him and looked at Simon, as the others tried to comprehend the recent development, and the surprise inclusion of Max as their guide and pilot.

  Simon had seen it all before of course, but once again he was amazed at how everything on the bridge looked bare, almost as if there was no serious instrumentation at all. He looked at Max with a confident stare. “You’re the man,” he said.

  “It’s not enough,” Max said, arriving at the same conclusion. “Look at the complexity of this thing. The propulsion units alone require a three-man crew of nuclear engineers; environmental controls for a ship going this deep is a two-person job at minimum. And the sensor matrix, the attitudinal controls, the communications linkages-this is ridiculous. Where is everything?”

  “Run almost completely by a cooperative team of AIs,” Hayden said proudly. “Dedicated to the ship and to following human guidance.”

  “But we can’t use them,” Ryan said suddenly. They turned to look at him. He was pale as a ghost, bloodless with sudden realization.

  “What?” Samantha said. This was making less and less sense to her.

  “RAI,” he said looking from face to face. “Remote Access Intervention, remember? Whoever seized control of Hayden’s robot and destroyed the other two Spectors will sense their activation immediately and seize control again. Sink the ship. Kill us all.”

  Simon frowned. “I know we’ll have to cut off some of the systems,” he said. “We’ve talked about that. The ones that link up to the satellites will have to be muted somehow-that’s your job, right-but others can surely stay in-”

  “No,” Ryan said. “You don’t understand. All AIs talk to other AIs. That worldwide noospheric matrix is what makes them intelligent, and not just old-fashioned programmed response robots. Their judgment, their language skills, their fuzzy-logic reasoning abilities, those are all grouped effects. So all of them-all of them-have to go offline or we’re dead before we start. At best, they’ll be simple servomechanisms-programmable modules, like your home computer or pad.”

  “I understand,” Simon said patiently. “But we can make it work. Max won’t be alone. We have you for sensor administration, Andrew. Ryan, you’re the data coordinator; you can query the AIs independently, without fully activating them-and Andrew’s scrambler won’t allow them to do it on their own. Hayden knows everything about the Spector; he’s an AI himself-”

  “-without the ‘A’ part,” the inventor grumbled.

  “-and Samantha can oversee the environmental and life support functions.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Hayden said.

  “No,” Simon allowed, “but it’s not impossible. We are not going to give up before we even try.”

  “Even if we die in the attempt?” Ryan said.

  No one had an answer to that.

  “The biggest problem I see,” Max said, “is the sensor array, without the aid of the visual information that it provides and translates digitally, how am I supposed to see where the hell I’m going?”

  Hayden leaned into his holo-display and frowned. “How so?” he said.

  “Because there are no damn windows in this thing,” he said. “All of your sensor input- even visual-is digitized, channeled through and interpreted by fully functional AIs before it gets to whoever is piloting this monster.”

  Hayden nodded. “We had to do it that way. The intelligent surface-the cloak of invisibility, so to speak-can’t be interrupted by windows or ports. We had a hell of time even working out the wiring shafts and hatches.”

  “I have to be able to see,” Max said. “I trust my eyes; they have never failed me. But holo-displays and wireframes only? No. Can’t work.”

  Nastasia stepped forward. “The underworld of Antarctica can be quite dark,” she said. “Very deceiving. Even when there is light, the depth recognition is impossible. It fools the eye.”

  Max interjected, “Well, it’s not the first time I’ve had to trust my instincts in blind operations.”

  “To hell with that, Maximilian,” Hayden said. “I’m not letting a man take twelve years of my life and destroy it simply because he doesn’t trust the equipment.”

  “And I’m not putting thirty-seven years of my life away in a prison cell if this operation blows up because some fucking AI has been taken over by long-distance hypnotists!” Max snapped back.

  Hayden made an angry gesture. “Don’t be daft! I-”

  “No, I am not driving this thing into the hands of the authorities!”

  “Then maybe you’re not driving it at all!”

  Simon cut in. “Hayden, please!” he said. “Max-hold on.”

  Andrew cleared his throat. “We can always calibrate the front console to display holographic readouts without AI signature or assisted connectivity,” he said.

  Max turned on him. “What?”

  “There is a straight digital feed coming from the external sensors. I can plug in a nice, dumb interpreter to throw that up on a display right in front of you. It’ll be just like an open window. And meanwhile Ryan and I can decouple the AIs, dumb them down enough to get their readouts, too, without even a whisper to the satellites.”

  Hayden rolled his eyes, “Fine. Rebuild the whole damn ship, why don’t you?”

  Simon sighed. “Hayden. Is it possible?”

  He gave Simon a withering look. “Probable,” he admitted with great reluctance. “But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s impossible to do without being inside the Spector.” He tossed back the rest of his heavily laced coffee. “I suppose Andrew and I could start on some preliminary programming,” he muttered, “but…goddamn it.”

  Max almost sneered. “And I gather you won’t have to fire up any of your AI buddies to do that,” he said. “One little signal and-”

  “You don’t need to explain my work to me,” he snapped. “I designed them. I know what they are capable of.”

  Samantha shifted in her chair. “Excuse me,” she said. “If the AIs can’t be used, how can I read the data from the bio-devices feeding info into the main frame medical console?”

  Max gave her a sidelong look. “What did you do when you didn’t have the assistance of bio-devices,” he asked her, “years ago? I presume everything was just fine back then.”

  She blinked at him in surprise, started to say something, and then stopped herself. A moment later she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. Her mouth was an angry line.

  Simon tried to bring them all back together. “Guys,” he said. “We have to operate with minimal AI intervention. That’s all there is to it. We have to operate with our gut and do things as we used to when we were kids. We have gotten used to AI-assisted devices, but the threat to the whole operation and to ourselves is too great if we’re discovered.”

  “Simon is correct,” Nastasia said, her accent broad and exotic. “You remember, the quarantine deadline was extended by two weeks? ‘Logistical problems,’ UNED told us.” She shook her head. “No. The truth is, fourteen different teams of scientists and explorers broke away and tried to hide in the ice after the quarantine was announced-some of them under the ice, in the tunnels and caverns they created. They were all caught-as far as we know. But the South American team was the last to be detected. They had managed to stay free for three weeks longer than anyone else, because they used no AIs-none at all.”

  Hayden humphed again. “They also didn’t have an amphibious vehicle with no windows, trying to navigate from ocean to ice three hundred feet below the surface,” he said. “But…we’ll manage. Somehow.”

  And that’s as close to unani
mity as we’re going to get today, Simon told himself. Better end this on as good a note as I can. He stood up and said, “All right, then. Let’s talk about the days ahead.”

  Ryan took that as his cue to stand up and pass out yet another set of forged documents and fake passports. “As you all know, we have to get to Valdivia. From there, the journey will be a little rough. According to the data Simon gave me, the Munro is currently entering the Straits of Magellan, so once we make it to Valdivia, we will have to take a short flight to Puerto Williams.”

  Max frowned at that. “That route is very carefully monitored by the Chilean military,” he said. “Trust me, I speak from firsthand experience. Nothing flies, floats, or swims in or out of Puerto Williams that the local military doesn’t see and approve of. But then,” he allowed himself a very small smile. “Luckily, I have some-let’s call it experience with these fellows; we’ll be fine-if we’re careful.”

  “It’s not this route that I’m worried about,” Ryan said looking at the holographic image of the vessel.

  “It’s the entry into Antarctica.” Max already knew where he was going with that.

  “Precisely.”

  “Are we sure there is no other was to enter the continent besides this Station 35?” Hayden asked.

  For a moment Max was caught by surprise, as Simon had not elaborated beyond what they discussed before.

  Simon tried to explain the situation so that the whole team was in sync, including Max. “Our first point of entry will be a location known as Station 35, which Nastasia knows intimately and will describe it to us. Our coordinates are deeper into the continent, and we will need to enter from inside the water to avoid detection. Station 35 is our only option for a stealth entry during this quarantine.”

  Nastasia nodded to Simon in recognition and began to describe their entry point in further detail. Station 35 was an experimental program by a special German scientific team that had dug tunnels from the top of the ice shelf to approximately three hundred feet below. Their mission had been to study possible habitation and logistics for future expeditions, and so they had developed an extensive underground network dug into the ice. During the process they had hit a fissure that had later flooded from the melting of ice, and thus the project had been evacuated. This entry through the channels of water was where Nastasia would lead them toward their coordinates with the Spector.

  Simon looked at his group with a mixture of amusement and concern as they listened to Nastasia. They still handled the papers like they were alien objects. They had become so used to their electronic helpmates, their holograms, and pads that they were visibly uncomfortable with paper and the printed word.

  “Guys,” he said, trying to sound gentle. “We have to get used to this. The way things were done in the past.” He weighted the envelope in his hand and smiled sadly. “This is the way it will be for us from now on.”

  “Welcome to the Stone Age,” Hayden muttered.

  “Or the age of tissue, anyway,” Andrew said, trying to make a joke.

  No one laughed.

  PUERTO WILLIAMS, CHILE

  8:32 AM

  The evening fog that filled Puerto Williams to the brim made it impossible to see more than ten feet in any direction. Which is not a bad thing, Simon told himself. There’s not a chance of being seen by anyone…or anything. They would each be able to approach the harbor without being noticed, and the frigid air was an eerie reminder that they were getting very close to the icy continent of Antarctica.

  Close, Simon said to himself as he moved from one street to the next, following the route he had memorized hours before. So close. He knew the others were feeling more and more apprehensive-he couldn’t blame them-but Simon could feel no fear. His father was closer than ever, and the hope in him was almost overwhelming.

  He knew that the others had their own reasons for being here: Hayden wanted his ship back; Andrew wanted to prove his tech; Sam was here to try and protect them all. But Simon had not forgotten the one and only reason he had set all of this into motion: to find his father. To save him. To bring him home safe.

  Simon was the first to arrive at Doc A-67. The hollow sound of his boots on the wooden slats was far too loud to suit him; he felt like a giant tromping on a drum skin. His father’s journal was a constant weight against his heart. As he walked closer to the water’s edge, he noticed an old freighter looming out of the sea-a black-painted cargo vessel with two huge, dormant smokestacks, dark and silent since the vessel’s energy conversion. Until all this had begun, Simon had been unaware of how completely sea travel had changed in the last fifty years, with new propulsion systems and new fuel economies. Still, a seaworthy hull was a seaworthy hull, and every ship that could stay afloat was still working, one way or another, including this barnacle-encrusted behemoth buried in the fog. He strained to find its name and registry number painted on the bow, and almost gasped when he found it.

  The S.S. Munro.

  It was the ship they had been looking for-the one whose navigation system they had already hijacked, back when they were in Corsica.

  Simon already knew how it was going to work out. It would not be pleasant for Donovan or his crew, but no one would die; if they were lucky, no one would even be hurt. That remained to be seen.

  As he approached the large vessel he noticed a wide-bodied, broad-shouldered man in a seaman’s cap standing at the bottom of the gangway, smoking a twisted cheroot and staring into the fog. Simon recognized the iron-gray hair and the hands as gnarled and scarred as an old oak. Doug Donovan looked exactly like what Hayden had described: a once-retired ship’s captain who had spent most of his career at sea in the last century, and who had returned to the sea because it was where he belonged. A man who had managed to wrangle an incredibly important contract with the military and the UK because he was one of the best damn sailors still at sea, under any flag, and everyone knew it.

  He turned and looked at Simon, his gray eyes glittering with amusement and curiosity.

  “Well, hello mate,” he said, chewing on his cigar. He looked to one side and gave the choppy sea of Puerto Williams an assessing glare. “Almost didn’t make it, the southern seas are pretty rough. Swell was pounding the whole way through.”

  Donovan pointed over Simon’s shoulder with his chin. “Look behind you.”

  Simon turned to see almost his entire team walking down the dock toward them.

  “Quite a group you got there,” Donovan allowed. “Though one did arrive a bit earlier-hours ago, in point of fact.” He chewed the cigar a bit more and squinted, deep in thought. “Quite a looker.”

  “I hope you’re not referring to my buddy Max?”

  Donovan pretended to scowl at him. “Don’t be cheeky, you know who I’m talkin’ about.” The team reached his side with Max slightly in the lead. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” he said to Donovan, as if they were old friends. “Permission granted,” the captain said gruffly. “All’a you.”

  They murmured greetings to Simon as they filed by, hefting their bags and crates of equipment as they went. Simon noticed how much more confident they all were, approaching and boarding the vessel as if they had done this before.

  “Come on,” Donovan said, “Let’s get out of here, I have cargo that needs to be delivered.”

  As Simon boarded the Munro and put his feet on the main deck for the first time, his eye tried to measure the breadth and depth of the boat. It didn’t seem nearly large enough to accommodate Spector VI.

  Donovan knew what he was thinking. “It barely did the trick,” Donovan said, waving a gnarled hand at the huge doors set into the deck itself. “The whatever-it-is takes up the entire hull. Used the biggest damn crane I’ve ever seen, at a loading station no one’s ever seen before, just to get this bloody thing on board. Not nearly as heavy as I expected, but big, Simon. All of six feet clearance front and back, and a hair more than that left and right. Extremely tight fit.” He stopped at the base of a massive winch that was bolt
ed directly to the superstructure of the boat with connectors as thick as his wrist. “My engineers tell me this here winching system will get that whatchamecallit out of here once it’s free from its wrapping-wherever or whenever that might be.” He scowled and almost bit his cheroot in half, then leaned forward and spoke in a mock-whisper, his rough voice dripping with sarcasm. “You can see, I assume, how much I enjoy being left in the dark.”

  The Spector had been camouflaged in a sealed wrap when it was first placed into the vessel-Simon knew that much. No one had seen it “undressed” yet; not even Donovan had an idea of what it really looked like, nor was anyone supposed to. His orders had been simple: get it aboard, sail at best possible speed to a particular location, and wait. Nothing more, and don’t ask questions. Donovan hadn’t even been particularly surprised when the destination coordinates had changed completely and unexpectedly in mid-mission. That kind of evasive maneuver was fairly common during black ops; he’d been through it before. As far as Donovan was concerned, Simon and his team were military personnel-that’s what he’d been told. According to the coordinates and instructions he had received, the team was supposed to rendezvous here at Port Williams. And all had gone as instructed.

  “I feel as if we’re the slaves who dragged that horse up to the gates of Troy,” Donovan said. “Some big damn piece of work, here for some big damn important reason.” He cocked an eye at Simon.

  “One of these days,” he said, “Someone’s going to have to tell me what that thing is.”

  “Oh, I think it’s better not to know too much sometimes,” Simon assured him. “But let’s just get to where we need to go and we’ll see.”

  He looked at his watch as he spoke, and Donovan nodded in agreement. “I know. We have a three-hour window starting in about eight minutes. I need to get this thing moving.”