Protocol 7 at-1 Page 26

  “Collision alert!” the voice of the Spector called. “Collision alert!”

  CENTRAL COMMAND STATION

  “Sir, we just lost a drone,” the Surveillance Officer said, sitting in front of a holo-display.

  Roland spun on him. “What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted. Before the officer had a chance to respond, the commander continued. “How could you lose a drone? You’re sitting right there navigating it.”

  “I think I hit something, sir.”

  “You hit something?” Roland bent over his shoulder and peered at the display. “Get the rest of the drones on its tail. What were your coordinates?”

  He reeled them off without taking his eyes from the screen. “At 1,032 feet, sir,” he said.

  Roland turned to the digital holograph of Fissure 9, thinking it still displayed the beacon of the intruder. But the tiny blinking light had disappeared.

  “God damn it,” he hissed. The vessel it represented could be almost anywhere in the labyrinth by now, but given its last known location, its direction and speed, he knew exactly where it was going. “Whatever the hell this is, it’s made its way to the loading station,” he said. Then he turned to his team. “We’ve got to get there as soon as possible.”

  He tapped his shoulder again, trying to connect to Central Command. After relaying his password he asked, “What’s the status on Dragger Pass?”

  Mathias came on immediately this time. He didn’t sound happy. “We’ve dispatched four units, fully armed. They’re on their way to you now. ETA is twenty-eight minutes.”

  Too damn long, Roland said only to himself, then tapped his shoulder and disconnected. Once again, he turned to his team. “We don’t have a goddamn half an hour,” he said. “Load up the DITVs. We’re going to take care of this ourselves.”

  The officer in charge of special operations stood up suddenly. “Sir,” he said, crisp and cool, “if I may, it will take us more than twenty-five minutes to reach the loading station ourselves with the DITV. Only the third tunnel up to the Dragger Pass is available. Tunnel Two has caved in.”

  Roland was furious. “Damn it!” he said again, and smashed his fist against the console. Then he spun away and stalked from the room, throwing his last command over his shoulder with venomous contempt. “I’m getting the goddamn flares!” he snapped.

  * * *

  Three thousand feet below them, four CS-23s, the dreaded Crevasse Spiders dispatched from Central Command, crawled through a pitch-black opening to Dragger Pass. They were marvelous machines: 160-foot wide, eight-legged robotic transport and weapons platforms, designed to travel everywhere and anywhere through the deep ice. Each robotic craft housed a crew of eight special operations soldiers in the main cabin; that spherical cabin rotated 360 degrees, keeping the crew level while the main body of the Spider violently twisted and turned on its sixty-foot expandable legs, rotating and extending for extreme flexibility and speed. This CS-23 could climb any icy terrain by compressing against the walls or stretching across wide crevices; it could travel vertically with ease or streak like lightning along a flat horizontal surface at more than thirty miles an hour. The tips of the retractable legs even had specialized heated anchor joints that could penetrate the ice and lock the leg into place, allowing the robot to hang from no more than three of its eight legs if necessary.

  Only the cockpits were illuminated as the Spiders pressed against the walls of ice and crawled upward at tremendous speed. Below them, the dark fissure of Dragger Pass dropped another several thousand feet straight down to the ice-locked bedrock below. The Spiders looked like apparitions coming up from the depths of Hell itself; even their mechanical sound was no more than a whisper; a subtle mechanical hissing made by the constant rotation of their arms.

  They were closing in. Fast.

  * * *

  Roland wasted no time. He made his way to the armament room and pulled down a crate of the special rifles that Vector5 had nicknamed “flares.” The long-barreled weapons, stored in racks of twenty with thirty-cartridge magazines, were designed for illumination more than offense; they actually shot luminescent bullets that, once in the ice, could be turned on remotely to make the translucent walls glow with a penetrating, bluish light. Although these were not used as standard rifles, they had powerful destructive potential as well; the shells could easily pierce the armor of any sub-ice vehicle.

  Roland wanted a full rack of flares in his DITV, along with two extra crates of ammunition. He was certain of his goal: he needed to stop whatever had entered Fissure 9 before whoever was inside got a look at the loading cranes above the dome. He knew that the fate of the planet rested on the secrecy of the operation. He knew there could be no half measures.

  He didn’t like it, but Roland was prepared to take lives if he had to. There was no other solution.

  Six Vector5 soldiers under Roland’s command followed him silently onto the Deep Ice Transport Vehicle. The transport looked like something out of a science-fiction movie: three gigantic tires, bigger than a jumbo jet’s-two in front, one in back. The two front tires extended outward through a complex structure protruding from the central part of the body like a cat ready to lunge forward. Below the main cabin that hovered eight feet above the ice was a ramp that lowered to make an entrance into the vehicle. But what made the DITV unique was its fragmented surface, as if it had been covered with the shards of a shattered mirror. It was stealth technology-a variation on the same stealth-tech that every Vector5 vehicle employed.

  Although the depth of their operation was too great for satellites to detect, Vector5’s engineers were taking no chances: the surfaces of all its vehicles were broken up into polygons, making radar detection almost impossible, and they were covered with non-reflective, sound-absorptive coatings to make them even harder to scan. What’s more, they were silent, powered by tremendously efficient batteries that allowed them to generate great power and speed. A sophisticated AI unit ran the entire vehicle without any help. It was almost entirely self-guided, requiring only audio commands but rarely needed physical manipulation of certain components.

  As the Vector5 team entered the vehicle, the commander took the central seat. It offered a 360-degree view of his surroundings through digital displays. The DIT Vehicle had no windows; they were unnecessary. The crew had better visibility with the advanced camera systems on board.

  Roland shifted restlessly as the crew ran through the standard systems check. There was no time to waste; he knew that. It would take them more than twenty-five minutes to ascend the thirty-degree incline, up through Tunnel 3 to the loading station at Fissure 9-where the mysterious visitor would be waiting, he was sure.

  The vehicle’s door closed with a hissss, compressing the atmosphere in the airtight cabin even before the soldiers had taken their positions. The pilot, his eyes fixed on his guidance console, spoke the words: “Destination: Loading station. Via: Tunnel 3.”

  In less than three seconds, the DIT Vehicle adjusted its wheels and rotated toward the direction of the specified tunnel. The movements were so fluid the crew could barely feel the turn of the wheel from inside the compartment; the first clue was the sudden, serious push of the invisible hand of momentum on Roland’s chest as the DIT accelerated swiftly and smoothly, like a rocket-powered tank, moving with eerie silence into Tunnel 3 without hesitation.

  “Let’s have the readout of the drones,” Roland said, still restless. The DITV’s AI instantly connected him to the recon station they had just left.

  One of the soldiers on board, deep-scanning their destination, raised his head. “Sir, I’m spotting an unusual type of submersible, in Fissure 9, not far from the loading station,” he said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Roland shouted. “Are you sure it’s not one of ours?”

  “Sir, the computers have cross-referenced all possible embedded codes given off by our subs. Nothing is showing up.”

  Slanting forward and adjusting the handgun on his side,
Roland said, “This better not be the Chinese! If it is, their goddamn military satellites have already followed the entry.”

  “Sir, the submersible gave off no signals, not even to our own satellites,” the surveillance officer said. “If they did, we would have picked up the incision ourselves.”

  “Nothing can be that stealth,” Roland said flatly. “Check for anomalies in the Southern Sea within the past month. Look for sighting, undocumented arrivals, unexplained sinkings-anything.” Something would give away the source of the intruder. It had to.

  “Sir.” It was one of the soldiers, working on a handheld device the size of a lighter. “Central Command has given us three anomalies. The strategic AIs give low significance scores to two of them. The third is a freighter called the Munro; it foundered and sank at the sixtieth parallel at approximately 1100 hours yesterday. There are no codes assigned to it, but standard satellite surveillance logged a rendezvous with the Chilean Coast Guard just a few hours before it sank.”

  “Sank?” the commander repeated, analyzing the situation. “Interesting. Send me the data.”

  The tactical officer who had started the discussion touched his device in the corner, and Roland’s own handheld buzzed and showed him the Munro’s stats: length, draft, age, registration. “Sir,” the tactical officer said, “the boat has been traced back for two months. Origin seems to be a port in Portugal-Tavira-and seems to have docked several times, disappearing for a month in Argentina at San Sebastian, before making its way through the Straits of Magellan.”

  “That’s our bogie!” Roland said. The size of the ship, the size of its hold, its utter lack of shipping manifest. Fishing boat my ass, he thought. They brought that damn intruder in from Portugal or farther north. “Check the probability of speed from the sinking of the boat to Fissure 9.”

  “Sir,” responded the soldier…and a beat later with all efficiency, “Central Command suggests a possibility but low probability. The reason given is that the speed of the vessel would be too high to reach us in time.”

  “Oh, I think that little bastard can go just about as fast as it wants,” he said and glared at the display that showed his intruder as a three-dimensional blob, moving closer and closer to the central lake so far below the ice. “I bet it can do almost anything.”

  FISSURE 9

  The Spector VI missed the wall of ice by thirty feet. Max could read that measurement quite clearly on the holo-display in front of him. That had been more than ninety seconds ago; now they were speeding away from the side of the tunnel at an oblique angle, moving laterally with great speed and carefully, carefully, even deeper into the tunnel.

  On the bridge and in the ready room, the team members tried to gain their composure while Hayden hunched over the tactical console and focused frantically on controlling the new exterior functions of the Spector. Max, intense and committed as ever, simply concentrated on keeping them all alive.

  Simon sat next to Max in the co-pilot’s chair and tried to watch the console, the holo-screen, and the crew all at once. He cast a long look over his shoulder and called out, “Is everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Ryan replied as he helped Samantha to her feet. The Spector was swaying side to side, fighting the invisible currents of the tunnel’s treated water. It was difficult to stand while the craft gained its equilibrium.

  “We’re reaching the end of the tunnel,” said Max, frowning at the forward deep-scan. Not all that deep at the moment, he told himself. This ice interferes with all the passive scans. Might as well be concrete. Not knowing enough-hell, he corrected, not knowing much of anything in this environment-was frustrating and unfamiliar to him. Max was used to being on top of the situation; he was trained to think three steps ahead. But this constant, knife-edge improvisation was wearing on him.

  “You have an idea what’s above us?” Hayden asked, still peering at his version of the scans.

  “No,” Max said flatly. “My visibility is about three hundred feet. Yours?”

  Hayden scowled. “No better.” He spun in his chair and confronted both Simon and Max. “But look,” he said. “The invisibility functions are up and running. All of them. We are now invisible to just about every sensor spectrum known to man: radar, sonar, visible light, infrared, acoustic, even mass spectrography.”

  “Very impressive,” Max said.

  “Yes it is,” Hayden replied, trying not to sound proud of himself. “But more important, it means we can use the active sensor array and not get caught.” He glanced sideways at the console and allowed himself a small shrug. “At least, we can do it in microbursts, fractions of a second every ten seconds, so that no one can get a lock on us.”

  Max grinned as he piloted the vessel toward the end of the tunnel. “So lots of quick peeks are okay, but no staring allowed.”

  Hayden nodded eagerly. “Exactly.”

  Simon thought it through. “Okay,” he said. “We really do need to see farther and deeper than three hundred feet in any direction. Give it a try. And look for an approaching…anything…at the same time, okay?”

  “Done,” Hayden said and spun back to his console. Another hologram block, this one far longer than it was wide, blossomed on the left side of the bridge. “Engaging deepscan burst…now,” he said.

  The new image of the world around them snapped into place. The Spector was a tiny glowing button in the middle of a huge-an unbelievably huge-network of tunnels and basins, carved out of the ice of Antarctica. The channels and fissures and caverns and alcoves stretched off in every direction-above, below, forward, aft, left, right-in a 360-degree view that moved slowly as they skimmed down the tunnel.

  Even Hayden was amazed. “Mother of god,” Hayden whispered, unaware he was speaking aloud at all. “What’s going on in this frozen hell?”

  Simon and Ryan noticed the movements in the tunnels at the same instant. “Forward, about twenty degrees right and…am I reading the scale right?” Simon said. “About half a mile away?” He jumped up and pointed at the blue-diamond blob in one of the approaching tunnel projections.

  “Right,” Hayden said. “About three thousand feet as the laser scans.”

  “Oh my god,” Samantha said, putting her hand on her stomach, terrified. “Whoever’s out there-they can see us.”

  “No,” Simon assured her, “they’re just heading to our last known location, before we disappeared from their scans. Which means we should be somewhere else.” He cast a hard look at Max who nodded without looking back.

  “No worries,” he said. “We’re out of here.” He ticked up the power to the thruster, and they surged forward, finally emerging from the endless tunnel that they had entered fourteen miles earlier, back at Station 35, and flew into a vast basin, half a mile deep.

  The holo-display showed it clearly: The Spector had burst into a large bowl-shaped depression several hundred feet in diameter. Above it was a gigantic dome and a thin blue plane just a hundred feet over the Spector itself. It took Simon a moment to realize it was an indicator of the water/atmosphere interface.

  “So…some of these tunnels are dry?” he said. “I mean, above the water line?”

  “By my estimate,” Ryan said, “most of them. We’re more than ten miles inland, remember. We may have entered at four hundred feet below sea level, but we’ve gradually-very gradually-been moving upward. And now, we’re at sea level.”

  “It’ll take us a few minutes to breach,” Max said. “Assuming we want to. Then we’ve got to find a way to take cover and quick.” He glanced at the deepscan holo-display and scowled. “Whatever is in that tunnel,” he said, referring to the Dragger Pass, “is approaching us pretty rapidly.”

  “I agree. I don’t want to introduce us just yet,” Simon added.

  Everyone on board knew the consequences. If they were discovered, their careers and possibly lives would be short-lived.

  They ascended to just a few feet below the surface in silence, every eye focused on the deepscan or the flat-scree
n, trying to draw more information-or even a solution-through sheer force of will.

  Hayden was gazing into the infinitely complex maze. “Simon,” he said, “Whatever Oliver has told you must be true. We’ve stumbled on to something dangerous here. Too dangerous for us to be a part of.”

  Simon looked at Nastasia, trying to guess at what she was thinking. “I can’t tell you anything that will help you, Simon,” she said. “To my knowledge, there is no technology that can create these tunnels, let alone survive this deep within the ice. These are not the tunnels I spoke of.”

  Ryan nodded in agreement. “Way beyond anything I’ve seen. And I’d have to agree with Hayden, this is definitely something we shouldn’t be a part of. It’s just too unbelievable to be true.”

  Samantha was shaking her head in astonishment as she stared at the approaching blobs of light. “It makes no sense,” she said. “The Madrid Protocol is still in place, not to mention that Protocol 7 was just initiated. There is an absolute quarantine in Antarctica. No one should be here. No one. This is a violation of global magnitude.”

  Simon took it all in, thinking furiously as the Spector pushed toward the open air above them. He tried to take in everything they had learned, everything that had happened in the last few weeks-even in the last few hours. He wondered if Oliver had been dragged down here knowingly or by force. But it didn’t matter-his father was in danger, and he would find him.

  Whoever was down here, whoever was running this mad operation, knew where Oliver was and what had happened to him, and Simon would find him and find out for himself.

  A small, sudden movement made him turn to look at Nastasia. That mark on the back of her neck, he thought. What does it mean? What does it have to do with my father-with Nastasia herself, and her reason for being here? Does she know I saw it? Why would she have that symbol on her neck?