Protocol 7

ANTARCTICA

The Command Center

Blackburn wasn’t quite as alone as he preferred to be. He could hear the buzz of activity in adjacent rooms, the occasional and unwelcome sigh of a footfall nearby.

This was not like the room of ice where he preferred to work. There was a desk here and a full communications system that linked him with the rest of the world. A great advantage in some ways; a curse as often as not.

A soft female voice whispered in his ear: Takara, reporting in on her way to Corsica.

“I’ve lost them,” she said.

“Damn. The tracker?”

“We’re scanning, but…they may have found it.”

“May have?” This wasn’t what he wanted to hear, Simon Fitzpatrick and a handful of his compatriots, completely off the charts.

“Shall I get back to London?” Takara asked.

“No,” he said. “You have your mission on the island. That’s where you’re needed.” He cut the connection with a sharp gesture and not a single word.

They’re afraid, he told himself. Terrified. Simon’s oldest friend, murdered by an unseen hand. All of them chased by some shadowy government agency, and they don’t even know why. They’ve run to ground. They’re hiding. Cowering.

Whether that was true or not, it didn’t matter. He turned away from the annoying little episode and put his mind elsewhere.

He had far greater matters to deal with.





THE SOUTHERN SEA

Fifty Miles from Antarctica

The Spector cut through the blackness of the ocean at blazing speed. Simon sat staring wordlessly at the holo-screen and engulfed in deep thoughts.

I wonder if we’ll find him? he asked himself. What if he isn’t there at all? How will I explain all this—justify it? What if the entire mission was for nothing? He played the worst possible scenarios over and over in his head, accompanied by the discordant rummmmble of the Spector’s engines.

The coordinates scrawled on the back of the envelope still haunted him. They persisted in his mind’s eye as if he had looked at them mere moments before, rather than a week in the past and thousands of miles away. He had not shared the last number in the coordinate sequence with anyone; he knew the last of the coordinates signifying the depth would startle the team. It made no sense. He wondered if it was a mistake. How could the last coordinate be over a thousand feet below the ice? And how did Leon know?

The rest of his team sat in silence as well, each submerged in their own grim worlds. Simon watched as Andrew twiddled idly with the sensor controls and Samantha dozed. Nastasia, both nervous and bored, dug into her satchel and pulled out what seemed to be an asthmatic inhaler. Absent-mindedly, she flipped the mouthpiece’s cover open and closed.

“Oh, wonderful,” Ryan said from his station. “Just wonderful.”

Simon roused himself from his bitter reverie. “What’s up?”

Ryan signed bitterly. “Icebergs ahead,” he said. “Lots of them.”

“What?”

“Blame global warming,” Max said from the console. “The glaciers and permafrost on the continental masses have been calving icebergs at a huge rate; both poles have a ring of icebergs floating around them just offshore. Huge navigational hazard.”

Simon seethed. “And you didn’t think to mention it until now?”

“Well,” Max replied acidly, still not taking his hands from the holographic controls or his eyes from the visual and sensor display, “I’ve been a little busy recently, and I was rather hoping that she would be a bit easier to steer so it wouldn’t be such a task.”

There was a low, deep, monotonous beeping sound—not deafening, but impossible to ignore. A shapeless mass appeared on the sonar display and started pulsing a dark, dull red.

“Ah,” Hayden said, recognizing the tone. “Proximity alert.”

“Apparently I was wrong,” Max said through clenched teeth.

He moved his hands almost gracefully, guiding the Spector ten degrees to the right and a gentle five degrees downward. The red blob of the iceberg drifted away from them on the display, fading out of range.

“Problem solved?” Sam asked hopefully from her seat at the environmental station.

“For the moment,” Max said. “There will be others.”

“Lots more,” Ryan said. “I just upped the range on the forward sonar/radar scans, as far as I could. There’s a goddamn forest of these things. The closer we get to the ice wall, the worse it gets.”

Hayden squinted first at the sonar display, then the front-facing holo-screen. It was difficult to see anything through the unadjusted cameras, even with the high-intensity lights on. “Are we still on target for Station 35?”

Max responded without moving his head, “I’m not sure. My instruments are showing a different depth than the Spector.”

Simon saw Nastasia stiffen in her seat. Her eyes narrowed. She tucked the inhaler into her satchel and looked grim.

Hayden scowled at Ryan and Andrew. “I don’t like this,” he said.

“There must be an explanation for it, Hayden,” Ryan said. “I know you believe the instrument cluster over the jerry-rigged holo-display cameras, but—”

“You don’t understand the amount of sensors this thing has,” Hayden said. “They work independently of each other; then the information is cross-referenced and reanalyzed in a thousand ways before you get a signal. Even in its dumbed-down state, the Spector wouldn’t give a warning signal or suggest a course of action if something wasn’t drastically wrong.” He glanced from one instrument set to another, glowering at the console where he was sitting. “But this data is crazy, Simon. I don’t get it. Feels like we’re in the goddamn Bermuda Triangle.”

Max shook his head, trying to make sense of what was going on himself.

Andrew called from the navigation array. “Guys,” he said, “the computers are freaking out. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Hayden,” Max said, “I’m going to adjust course, get us back on track using the instruments only.” The team looked on with growing concern as Max navigated the vessel back on course, ignoring the warning signal.

“You’re going to kill us!” Hayden shouted. “You just can’t ignore the information like that! It—”

“Hayden!” Simon snapped. “We made a decision in Chile to trust Max and his experience. He knows what he’s doing.”

I hope to hell you’re right, Max thought silently. Because at the moment, he felt as if they would be very, very lucky if he didn’t drive them directly into a rogue iceberg and kill them all.

“This is what it shows is directly ahead of us,” Max said. “We’re really traveling at a depth of six hundred meters, down from 350. I’m sure of that. I can see that on the front-facing cameras. No digital interference there. And it shows us nothing but clear sea for at least two hundred feet above us, while the instrument cluster shows…chaos.”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. The instrument holo shows icebergs; my eyes see open water. The holo gives six different depths a minute; I see 350 feet. The cluster shows the opening of Station 35 in one place; the map shows the opening in another place. Strap back in.”

The last comment caught Simon by surprise. “What?” he said.

“Strap back in!” Simon clutched at the belt, clicked it shut, and Max pulled the Spector up into a seventy-five-degree tip, as he avoided another iceberg, shot forward past an oncoming chunk as big as a skyscraper and tipped level again.

The entire team stared at the flat-screen, then at the holo, then back at the flat screen again. The black octagonal dot of Station 35 was growing slowly, steadily larger on both. They all frowned or cursed quietly in confusion.

Nastasia turned back and said, “It’s the same opening.”

“But—”

“It is the same opening!”

Hayden cursed. “Listen! We need to make a decision, there can’t be two Station 35s…we need to make a choice now! We are less than three thousand meters from site one, and five thousand from site two! It’s do or die, people!”

Or both, Max told himself as they surged forward, closer and closer to the final decision point.

Years of covert operations had taught him not to expect the expected. He was convinced that one of the two sites that appeared on the navigational instruments was a decoy, a fake…and he was determined to plant the Spector in the right tunnel, the one that would save their lives.

Max pushed on. Simon watched the octagons of the two Station 35s grow and grow.

“None of this is making sense,” Ryan said. “None of what I’m seeing is what’s displayed in the satellite maps, and the depth that we are looking at is completely different than what I’ve studied.”

“Okay,” Max said. “If we can’t trust the sensors…we trust my gut.”

Simon said, “Max…”

Max said, “Do or die.”

“MAX!”

Max stood up suddenly, threw his arms out, and pushed to the left and up as hard as he could.

The Spector rushed toward the opening that the map didn’t show, the one the instrument cluster insisted wasn’t there at all.

Do or die, he told himself one last time.

Little did he know that the Spector had already passed the threshold of an invisible security parameter deep underwater. Soon, whatever was down there would know that they’d arrived.





VECTOR5 COMMAND POST

One mile below the frozen surface, in the depths of the Antarctic ice, an officer turned to his Black Ops commander and said, “Sir, we’ve got an incision in Fissure 9.”

The commander’s neck almost cracked as his head spun around to face the officer. He never wanted to hear the words “Fissure 9.” Hearing “incision” was bad enough.

The Black Ops commander, designated “Roland” (everyone in Black Ops had strict orders to use aliases), was an impressive—even intimidating—man in his late forties with graying hair shaved barely above the skull and a tall, athletic build. His military presence and strong frame overpowered the small control room.

He and the men who surrounded him had the most important secret in the world to protect—and they would fight to the death to keep it.

Roland’s approach was instantaneous upon hearing the officer’s report on Fissure 9. He walked to the console where the officer was sitting and told him, “That’s not possible.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the extreme weather rig he was forced to wear made from a heat-equalizing polymer that could function in temperatures from thirty below to 120 above; it wore like a body suit that was half a size too small, complete with ribbed sections running the entire length of the limbs. A highly sophisticated heating system transferred the body heat through the suit’s internal channels, keeping the temperature at a comfortable level in the freezing cold.

The mission patch on his right shoulder read “Special Ops—Fissure 9.” The insignia above the patch read “Vector 5.”

Roland knew that an unauthorized “incision”—their official term for entry into the ice shelf—was not only impossible, it was unheard of. He had never known of such an incident in the seventeen years that he had been commander of the unit. It was particularly impossible now. Antarctica was in an absolute quarantine, which prevented anyone landing on the continent. And even before the total lockdown, no one had made an entry through Fissure 9 in twenty years—since its creation.

Fissure 9 did not exist, according to any maps. To make things even more obscure, the depth readings near the ice shelf were manipulated by a set of dedicated computers so all incoming vessels were remotely guided away from the entry through false readings.

As he stood above the officer, Roland realized that if this young man’s report was true, it could be one of the greatest security breaches in history, and it was NOT going to happen on his watch.

He had to do something immediately. Not only could his job and possibly his life be in danger, but the political stability of the entire world—precarious as it was at the moment—was at stake as well.

No one could know what Vector5, the nebulous, nefarious organization for which he worked, was doing deep inside the Antarctic ice. Not now—not ever.

Roland composed himself and calmly asked the officer, “Did you check the log? Is it one of our subs scheduled for a pickup that managed to enter with an AI malfunction?”

“No, sir,” the officer replied. “We aren’t due for a transfer until the thirtieth at twenty-two hundred hours. And the uranium capsules won’t even be ready to transfer until the twenty-fifth.”

“What the f*ck is this, then?” the commander said, raising his voice for the first time.

The officer gulped. “I…don’t know, sir.”

“A whale? Some sort of…giant f*cking squid?”

“Negative, sir, we’ve scanned for that,” the officer replied instantly.

The commander turned without another word and walked into the adjacent room. Like all the chambers of the station, it had no real corners, just a flat ceiling above and a flat, pitted floor below a circular wall that curved at the junctures, as if they were standing inside a large square that was trapped between two plates of ice. The shape had something to do with the technology that built the labyrinth; he had heard the explanation about “unusual inflatables” and “induced crystallization” and never understood a word of it. He didn’t care; as long as they held up and prevented millions of tons of ice from burying him, he could live with them—cold as they were. Most of the time his surroundings reminded him of the interior of a submarine—curved, windowless spaces connected by hatches and narrow corridors. Except, of course, this “submarine” was thousands of feet below the ice.

The monitor room he had entered was the largest in the station. It was filled with officers carefully studying hundreds of security cameras placed throughout the continent, both above and below the ice. From the outside, the station looked like a cocoon tethered under a huge dome of ice that curved five hundred feet into the frosty air, like a subterranean football stadium. The structure was designed as one of Vector5’s key control and command centers—this one chiefly responsible for Fissure 9—and connected to it through several tunnels of various diameters meant for various purposes. These days, since the total quarantine, the primary function of the station had been logistic coordination for incoming submarines picking up minerals, including uranium. The minerals were packaged in special containers and transferred up to Fissure 9 from various locations around the continent.

The entire operation was incredibly efficient, absolutely controlled, and highly secretive, and it had run without accident, incident, or security breach since its creation.

At least, the commander thought bitterly, until today.

Over the years, Roland had come to hate and respect Fissure 9. The massive tunnel led to three dozen entry points in to the Southern Sea, and stretched for fourteen miles under the ice, to another gigantic dome, far larger than the one that was home to Roland’s own recon center, approximately five thousand feet below the surface of the ice. The far end of Fissure 9, so distant from shore, opened into a large underground basin at sea level, where submarines docked to drop off and pick up valuable resources and minerals. But that was all miles away.

The center’s unique placement and design allowed it to be heated during construction, so it could penetrate the dense ice and then be frozen solid in place. Its sophisticated anchoring system allowed Vector5 to create a network of structures that attached themselves throughout the icy continent thousands of feet below by a series of intricate tunnels. Here in Roland’s three-level recon station, sixty officers carefully monitored the entire length of the construct and carefully accounted for all the submersibles that came to pick up and deliver tons of illegal uranium, and other valuable resources that’d since become scarce.

Roland stopped for a moment and contemplated the motto etched in the wall over the door to the monitor room: Abditus perpetuo…Forever secret. Ultimately, secrecy was the motto of Vector5, a privatized military force designed for this—one of the greatest heists in human history. Its primary mission was to extract valuable minerals from the core of Antarctica, exporting them to a classified location in the US and covering their tracks forever. Vector5 was so secret that not one of the leaders of the Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, or the Chinese Central Committee knew of their existence. Not even the world government in waiting that called itself UNED had a clue.

It was the most daunting international smuggling operation the world had ever known—vast and deadly in its scope and sophistication.

If the rest of the world—especially China, with its great interest in Antarctica—discovered what was going on in Antarctica, it would mean instant, inevitable, and unending global warfare. This wasn’t simply an economic scandal of monumental proportions; the scarcity of minerals and the planet’s depleted resources made this exploitation a matter of life and death for billions of people. It would not go unpunished.

So it could not be discovered. It was that simple.

Roland shook off his rare contemplative mood and turned back on his team. He was the very picture of barely controlled rage.

“What are the f*cking cameras looking at here? Tell me what the hell has entered Fissure 9!”

The officers monitoring the information scrambled to answer the question, but nothing made sense. Some of the digitally enhanced images of Station 35—one of twelve separate entrances to Fissure 9—were absolutely blank. Others showed ghost images, or flickers of heat that disappeared as quickly as they came. One radar scanner showed a blob as big as a beluga whale; another showed a writhing tentacular thing that looked like a weather balloon with fingers.

No one wanted to tell Roland that they had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

Finally one of the specialists at the far end of the room cleared this throat and said, “Sir, I think I’ve got a prelim signal, but the cameras are having a hard time reading it.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Roland replied. “We have the most sophisticated camera system in the world, and you can’t tell me what the f*ck has entered the tunnel?”

“It seems to be iridescent, sir—almost invisible. The computers cannot analyze the exact material makeup, or even gauge its size or mass.” He dared to glance at the commander, and then wished he hadn’t. “Assuming, ah…assuming it’s there at all.”

“Invisible?” Roland asked and pushed the officer to one side as he moved closer to the console to check the screen himself. He tried reading the information for himself, but he wasn’t satisfied by the answer. The holo-display didn’t make a damn bit of sense, and he had more than thirty years of experience reading output like this. It’s beyond them, he realized. Instead, he turned toward the center of the room where a large table showed the sophisticated tunnel system in a ten-by-twenty-foot holo-display.

“Expand Fissure 9 five to one, Station 35 to three miles.” The AI responded to his verbal command instantly, and the image zoomed forward and in, bringing the long tunnel of Fissure 9 into sharp relief.

This section of Fissure 9 looked like a digital worm ten feet long floating above the surface of the table. There was the entrance in question: Station 35, one of the digitally camouflaged entrances to the Southern Sea.

“Give me an infrared readout and locate movement of anomalies,” said the commander. Instantly, the computer analyzed the tunnel, showing a small speck of…something…moving at a rapid speed, deeper down the submarine feeder-tunnel toward the main corridor of Fissure 9— moving toward them, as it happened.

Roland tapped a small patch on his left shoulder and spoke distinctly, “This is Fissure 9 Command. Connect me to headquarters.”

He heard the response in his ear through the tech implanted there years ago: “Roger that.”

Two seconds later, he heard the voice of the computer on the other side, “Central Command, verify password.”

“Fissure 9, 9005105,” said the commander, looking at the tunnel with the flickering things moving forward at a steady—and impressive—speed.

“Hold on, sir,” the computer said, instantly analyzing the password and connecting him to the voice on the other side.

“What the hell are you doing going audio?” the voice on the other side asked.

“We have an incision,” said the commander. That was all the explanation the other side would need.

The voice belonged to the man designated as Mathias, the commander’s counterpart in Central Command. Although Central Command was miles away and over five thousand feet deep in the ice, it was also the point where everything converged. Most of the transport tunnels that crossed underneath the ice connected there, and Mathias would be just as displeased at hearing that word as Roland had been. The moment Roland pronounced it, the other man’s tone changed.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” replied Roland. “We’re still working on the recognition sequence, but I’m convinced it’s not one of ours.”

Roland hadn’t taken his eyes off the multiple screens, but he was no closer to understanding what he was seeing than he’d been five minutes ago. “Command,” he said, hating the decision even as he made it. “I am requesting a dispatch.”

Mathias responded immediately, “You do realize how long it will take for the DITVs to get up there?”

“We’ve got a situation up here,” Roland said, biting it off. “I need assistance.” Dispatching Vector5’s Deep Ice Transport Vehicles (or DITVs) were the biggest, most decisive response he could think of. It was important to hit hard and hit fast. But that wasn’t all.

“Central,” he continued. “Can you send the Spiders up Dragger Pass as well?” Dragger Pass was a three-thousand-foot-long crack in the ice, an incredibly dangerous crevasse as wide as two-hundred-feet in certain areas, which opened on the Fissure at various points along the way. The CS-23s, or the Crevasse Spiders, were the perfect tools for forcing unwanted intruders to stop or die, and the only machines capable of navigating the vertical fissure.

Mathias humphed at the request, thinking it through. “We haven’t used Dagger Pass in years,” he said. “There are easier ways to travel now. It’s going to take some time.”

“We don’t have time,” Roland said. “While you’re deploying, I’m dispatching the Drones to get a better visual of what this thing is.”

“I haven’t said if we’re deploying—”

“Roland out,” he said and tapped his shoulder one more time to disconnect from Central Command. He didn’t have to repeat himself; he saw the surveillance duty officer was already at work.

“Sir, I’ve dispatched eight underwater drones along the cord,” he said, referring to the Fissure 9 tunnel. The tiny robotic cameras no larger than baseballs would travel to their assigned destinations at speeds exceeding thirty miles an hour. Once they reached their goals, they would dig in and remain dormant until activated.

Roland nodded and allowed himself a tiny moment of satisfaction. He walked outside of the monitor room in search of a decent cup of coffee. “Good,” he muttered to himself. “Once we get a look at this thing, I’ll know how to deal with it.”

He only knew one thing for certain: whoever, or whatever, had entered Fissure 9 had a death wish…and he was more than sure he would make it come true.





FISSURE 9

Twelve miles from the open water, deep in the dead-black tunnel of Fissure 9, the Spector pushed on until Max, terrified beyond thought, stopped dead.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t drive this thing blind.”

The bridge was lit only by the dim blue light of the instrumentation. They had doused all the other illumination, as well as the high-intensity external lights to avoid detection.

Max and Simon were both convinced they were being watched—or at the very least, being sought. Sonar and radar—active scanning of the outside world—would draw attention like moths to a flame. So they made themselves absolutely blank…and absolutely helpless. Without the external lights, even the front-facing flat-screen was useless. It just showed black on black on black.

“We have to figure something else out,” he said as he slowed Spector VI to a barely suspended state in the middle of the tunnel—or what he thought was the middle, based on what he had seen just before he slowed the vessel down. He had to keep the vessel moving. There was a hint of a current outside, and holding it in almost the same place would be virtually impossible without power. He just hoped it wouldn’t run into anything before they figured out what to do next.

No one could guess that a military force was already on its way, or that they were less than twenty minutes from the vast central dome of Fissure 9.

Hayden’s depth indicator, working from passive pressure readings, was still functional. That told him how deep they were, and Max could tell from that input alone that they had been traveling in a straight, level line for more than fourteen miles; but that was it. Otherwise: he was blind.

Hayden sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said, “enough with the ‘run silent, run deep’ game. We have to turn on the AIs. It’s our only chance of understanding what’s going on, or we might kill ourselves against the tunnel wall.”

“And if we do, we’ll bring UNED to us within hours,” Simon said.

Andrew was staring at the console, deep in thought. “Can’t we engage just a few of Spector’s outside components?” he asked. “Without turning on the AI module?”

“Like what?” Hayden asked.

“Like the intelligent skin that Simon here created. It ‘sees,’ doesn’t it? It gets a ton of optical, sonic, pressure-wave information over every centimeter of its surface, and uses that to make itself invisible. So if we activate just that, and channel the data through our captive processors here, we can see clear as day without so much as striking a match, or waking up the AIs.”

“And,” Simon added, suddenly realizing the possibilities of Andrew’s plan, “it will make the Spector closer to invisible at the same time. Almost impossible to detect.”

“Well, crap,” Andrew said. “Hit the switch!”

Hayden and Andrew exchanged looks. They had worked on this prototype together for months; they both knew every inch of it, including maintenance tunnels and access tubes.

“Oh, no,” Andrew said. “Please don’t say it.”

“I can’t do it,” Hayden said, “or you know that I would.”

Andrew seemed deflated. “Crap,” he said and lowered his head.

“What?” Simon asked.

Hayden sighed deeply and ran his fingers through his long silver hair. “There’s only one possible way to make the passive aspects of the smart-skin active without AIs,” he said. “It requires some gross rewiring right at the juncture of the dataflow and the skin itself.”

“It ‘requires,’” Andrew echoed, mimicking his boss’ words with a slightly corrosive edge, “crawling on your elbows and knees through an access tunnel about eighteen inches high for about sixty feet. Right under here.” He pointed at the deck’s floor plates and stomped down with the flat of his foot for emphasis. “Great fun.”

“Well, if the treads were out, you could walk through standing up!” Hayden said, sounding oddly defensive.

“Well, the treads aren’t out, are they? And can’t be if we don’t want detection.” He pulled himself up short, raised a hand to stop the response before it began. “No. Wait. Sorry. I just…I really don’t want to do this, mate. That’s all I’m saying.”

Hayden nodded and looked away. “It’s almost impossible to maneuver underneath the cabin while the treads are retracted,” he said. “In fact, we’ve never actually tried it with the treads pulled in and the ship underwater, so…”

“So, no time like the present,” Andrew said. He levered himself out of his seat at Navigation and moved into the ready room. A central floor plate had a ring set into it; it was the work of seconds to pull the ring up and open the plate like a trap door.

Simon saw that the two scientists hadn’t been exaggerating. The plastic-lined crawl-tube that ran the length of the room—and probably the length of the submersible itself—didn’t look wide enough to accommodate a ten-year-old boy, much less a man in his mid-twenties. But Andrew already knew that. He simply disengaged a small flashlight from a wall console, slung it around his neck by its halyard, and sat down on the edge of the access hatch.

Samantha, always concerned about other people’s safety, was the first to speak out, “Andrew,” she said, “are you sure you’re okay with this?”

He shrugged. “It won’t be so bad as long as I can maneuver my way through the madness down there.”

Simon knelt down next to him. “You’re sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” he said. “Besides, let’s get serious, we’re blind. We’re dead in the water. Our only chance of surviving this god-forsaken place is to get the sensors on the outside of the vessel working. Then we’ll be able to see miles into the ice.”

Simon forced a smile and stood up, watching carefully as Andrew slid into the access tunnel, turned over on his belly, and—just as he had described—crawled away on his elbows and knees. He waited until he was completely out of sight before he turned back to Hayden and asked, “Have you ever run the smart skin without an AI involved?”

When he heard no response he looked up and caught Hayden staring back at him.

“No!” Andrew called from under the floor. His voice sounded tinny, but otherwise he might as well have been in the ready room with them. “But it’s worth a try!”

They returned to the bridge, following the sounds of Andrew snaking his way under the floor. Max was still in the pilot’s seat, staring at the motionless console, ready to jump at a moment’s notice.

He glanced around as Simon and Hayden reappeared. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I think you should all put on your cold suits—those lovely outfits Nastasia brought for us, Simon. If we hit something or spring a leak before we get sensors back…well, it could get ugly.”

Samantha made a face, as if she had just tasted something very bitter. But then she took a deep breath and said, “I’ll help break out the gear.”

As she stood, Max turned to Nastasia. “You’re a scientist specializing in ice, right?”

“You know that I am,” she replied calmly. “Why?”

“Then maybe you can tell me why we are traveling in a tunnel miles under the ice shelf of Antarctica without it freezing over.”

She paused for a long moment and then said bluntly, “I’m honestly not sure.”

Max just stared back, his suspicion growing deeper.

Hayden made a surprised sound from his post at Engineering. “Huh,” he said. “What a good question. Wonder why I didn’t think of it.” He powered up a small sampling station to take a half-liter of seawater for analysis.

Sooner or later, Max told himself, I’m going to find out who you are, Nastasia.

Nastasia looked away from him. A moment later she got up and moved back to the ready room.

They could all hear Andrew clanking and grunting as he wedged his way forward, threading through the maze of electrical and mechanical components that were the heart of the Spector. The specs were right, he told himself. At some junctures, there really was less than ten inches of space—barely enough for a human body. Some of the nodes and connectors he was passing were sharp-edged or jagged; others were just plain deadly. He knew that the high voltage, produced by the hydrogen reactor and relayed through some of these components, could kill him instantly if he came in contact with it, and there were points where the up-thrust gears and spokes of the tread system made it almost impossible not to touch a live spot.

Andrew was starting to sweat, and he knew he wasn’t halfway there yet.

“Huh,” Hayden said. “I’m looking at the results of the seawater analysis, and I’m picking up something…unusual.”

“What do you mean, ‘unusual?’” Simon moved over to see for himself.

“I’m not sure.” He glanced at Nastasia, who had just re-entered the bridge. She rushed to his station and looked at the data.

“Perhaps,” Hayden said in a concerned tone, “it’s some sort of chemical additive. It does, in fact, resemble the molecular components of a type of retardant.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the sampling system,” Nastasia said frowning. “This isn’t the kind of stuff you’d expect to see in Arctic water…though, I admit, it could explain the lack of ice.”

“What are you suggesting?” Simon asked Hayden. “That it’s a type of anti-freeze? That’s crazy.”

“I agree, crazy. But it sure as hell isn’t a compound that would exist naturally.”

Samantha was pacing directly over Andrew’s last known location. “Andrew?” she called down, worried about his safety. “Are you all right?” She turned back toward the rest of the team and said, “I’m not sure what’s going on down there, but this is taking far too long.”

Hayden nodded in reluctant agreement. “Let’s give him a bit more time. The space is impossible to maneuver.”

“Maybe everyone should suit up right now,” Max suggested without lifting his eyes from the holo-display in front of them. “If something comes for us, or we drift into an obstacle.”

The team members rose and moved quickly to the sleeping quarters at the aft of the Spector to put on the suits. Nastasia explained that the outfits were meant for deep subsurface work and were waterproof; they would stabilize the wearer’s metabolism while the batteries supplied enough heat to survive, at least for a few hours before they needed to be recharged. Without them—on land or underwater—it would be impossible to withstand the sub-zero temperatures of Antarctica. The safe phones that Andrew had given them weeks and thousands of miles earlier were going to be useless now; they would never stand the extreme cold. But each of them activated and tested the wrist communicators Andrew provided that resembled watches—the ones that would work at subzero temperatures.

As the team members pulled on the three separate layers of the suits and attached the communication devices to their wrists, the stark reality of being hundreds of feet below the ice became a real notion to them for the first time.

“Hayden, I need you in the front while I suit up,” Max said.

The inventor goggled at him. “No!” he blurted. “I mean…I…I’m not a pilot. I don’t actually drive these things, I just build them.”

“So who better to sit behind the console?” Max said, standing up. “Look, there’s nothing to it; we’re barely moving at the moment. Just watch this indicator and this attitude gauge, and adjust as needed. Easy as that.” He didn’t wait for an answer; he just stood up, pulled Hayden into the command chair, and slid back toward the ready room and beyond.

For the first time in his life, Hayden was in command of one of the ships he actually built. A sense of claustrophobia set in. He questioned why he had gotten himself involved in the operation in the first place. I’m a goddamn reclusive genius, he told himself, not Indiana Jones.

Meanwhile Andrew had wormed his way to the crucial juncture between the smart skin and the datastream connectors, just below the command console of Spector VI. Ironically, he was the only one not wearing one of the temperature-regulating eco-suits, but he was the closest to the freezing water rushing past, literally inches away and making the chamber icy cold. He shivered as he lay on his side, barely holding onto his flashlight, desperately wishing the fuselage lights hadn’t been turned off.

This is it, he told himself. His hands were only twelve inches away from the fiber optic connectors, each one as thick as a finger, but they were almost completely surrounded by silver contacts, sizzling with discharge from the smartskin. Any sudden move, any momentary contact, would end his life instantly.

Twelve inches, he told himself. Might as well be twelve miles. He pushed his body forward slowly, very slowly, stretching out one arm, extending three fingers to reach the connection. Careful…he told himself. Careful…

Above and behind him in the ready room, all but two members of the team had suited up and returned to their work on the bridge. Simon and Nastasia still remained.

Simon was cinching up his boots when he saw Nastasia struggling with the third layer of her rig, getting it twisted and putting it on half upside-down. He moved over and took the limp sleeve from her. “Let me help you with that,” he said.

“I think I am all right,” she responded.

He ignored the stubbornness and moved closer. “Here. The battery pack connects with the exterior suit like this,” he said. He took it gently from her fingers, reversed it, and plugged it effortlessly into the socket she’d been struggling with for ten minutes.

“Hmm,” she said, quirking her mouth. “I suppose I could use some help.”

He tried to untangle the connector as she pulled her hair up through the suit…and in that moment, Simon’s childhood flashed in front of him.

He caught a quick glimpse of a tattoo on Nastasia’s neck, right at the nape, just below the hairline. It was a hauntingly familiar design—identical to the one he had seen since he was boy on his father’s briefcase, identical to the one on the door to his father’s mysterious study in Corsica—the symbol that had haunted him all his life.

Simon had always associated the symbol with his father, but Oliver had never explained what it was. And now here it was again—on Nastasia’s neck. A chill ran through him.

Nastasia sensed something had changed. She turned back to him and frowned when she saw that he was white with shock.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You look as if you have seen a ghost.”

He stared at her for a long time and then nodded. “I’m fine.”

He noticed something more as she looked at him: her eyes. It wasn’t their shape as much as the color—a strange light blue, pale and almost colorless in certain kinds of light.

The only other person he knew who had eyes that color was his father.

Ryan interrupted the moment with a nervous call to Sam, who was still hovering over the open maintenance hatch. “Sam!” he said sharply. “What’s going on with Andrew downstairs?”

Before she had a chance to respond, Andrew’s voice came up through the deck-plates: “We’re good to go!”

They could hear him rattling and scraping, crawling back the way he had come. Hayden began to activate the holo-displays and monitors immediately, one after another, moving into the seat next to Max to begin the calibration process.

“Andrew!” Hayden shouted, “I’m not getting a thing! Which channel did you use, there’s no—”

Andrew’s head popped out of the maintenance hatch so suddenly it made Samantha jump back in surprise. “Use the standby mode! That should work!” He lifted his arms, and Ryan and Samantha helped pull him free of the tunnel and close the hatch, while Hayden struggled to reconnect the passive sensor functions to the displays.

It happened all at once. The display in front of Max flickered and burst into brilliant full-color life, showing the view in front of the ship as clearly as a well-cleaned picture window. Three different hologram displays—one complete sphere of the space around the ship out to three hundred feet, one deep scan aft, and one deep scan forward—blossomed to life in an almost blinding rainbow of color, filling the entire forward section of the bridge.

And all of them showed exactly the same thing: they were drifting nose-first into a solid wall of ice.

“Brace yourselves!” Max bellowed and lunged at the command console. Before the team had a chance to react, he reversed the thrusters and tilted the submersible violently upward, throwing everyone off balance.

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