Protocol 7

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 f*ck 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 Sebastián, 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-screen, 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?

Her remarkable sapphire eyes revealed nothing. Her small, enigmatic smile offered even less.

Max’s voice broke the silence and brought Simon back into the moment. “Ready to surface,” he said to Simon. “Shall we?”

“Won’t we look like a big dent in the water?” Samantha said. “I mean, just because the Spector is invisible, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Hayden shook his head. “No, the smartskin samples the terrain and builds a multi-spectrum camouflage. We just look like another piece of the sea, with the right color and wave action.”

She shook her head. “Amazing.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

In the brief seconds that remained, Simon tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. He wondered if there was a connection between UNED and what was happening in Antarctica. Did they know what was going on, or was this somehow beyond them as well? Oliver himself may have been played for a fool. He was requested by UNED for the Antarctica project, but soon he was working for some “department” that had no real name, and not long after that he had “died”—or, rather, disappeared.

And then there were the rumors of all the other scientists who had mysteriously vanished in recent months and years.

Max let the Spector hover just below the surface and put his full attention on the blobs of light—the whatever-they-were who were approaching from the side tunnels. They would be arriving in ten minutes or less.

“Invisible or not,” he said, “I think we’d be much better off confronting these…people…from land. I’m going up.”

Simon turned back to Max with a new look of resolve. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Max grinned. “Thought so.”

He put his hands out, spread his fingers and lifted them both very slowly, and Spector VI rose to breach the frigid water, like some vast supernatural creature of the sea, invisible to mortals but larger than any whale. Water streamed down its glittering sides. Flukes on the left and right side opened, breathing out foul carbon dioxide and replenishing the breathable air.

They were just a few hundred feet from the edge of the icebound shoreline. The cavernous space was lit by some sort of dull illumination that seemed to come from within the ice itself. It was no brighter than the outside world would have been a few moments after sunset, but it was enough to see by. More than enough.

“Let’s get her to shore,” Max said. He snapped his fingers together, locking the console for a moment, then pulled his hands back and turned to his best friends. “So,” he said, “you want to help me engage the treads on this monster?” referring to the tracks that would convert the Spector to an amphibian transport vehicle.

Simon grinned. “What do you need?” he asked.

It took the consent of two pilots, one at either side, to convert the vessel from full submarine capacity to amphibious form. They both palmed the sensor plates at the same time, touched the approval panels when they turned green, and looked down at the floor as the faint rrrrrrrr sound grew louder. The exterior plates were pulling back and locking. The tread compartment was flooding as it was supposed to. The treads were extending downward, covering the curved underside of the vessel, then locking into place. Test lights flashed. Ready lights illuminated as the treads extended fully.

Max slipped back into the command chair and grinned. “We’re good,” he said. He looked at Simon almost triumphantly. He could barely believe what they had accomplished. “We’re going to the surface of the ice.”

For a moment Simon stood silently looking at the holo-screen in front of them. Then he said without needing acknowledgment, “Let’s go get my father.”





TUNNEL 3

“Commander,” the surveillance officer said, “I think you should see this.”

The DITV was making record speed, careening down the slick, smooth walls of Tunnel 3 at twice the recommended speed. But Roland was determined to get there first and do what needed to be done.

Screw Central, he told himself. Screw everybody. Fissure 9 is my responsibility. It has been for nine f*cking years, and I will be goddamned if anyone, anyone enters this place without my permission!

The gyroscopes that were designed to keep the transport’s cockpit steady despite its speed and attitudinal changes were whining with stress. In a normal vehicle, the passengers would have been plastered against the walls and quite likely injured already. In the DITV, pushed to the limit as it was, Roland and his men were safe enough, but they found it impossible to stand without help as they traveled at a truly insane speed. Still, Roland made it to his feet using the back of his seat and the edge of the console to stagger across the chamber to the surveillance officer’s side.

There were six different screens and three-dimensional displays arrayed across the forward half of the transport. Five of them showed the churning gray static of interference or a rock-solid, entirely believable representation of the Shipping Dome, their destination.

The Dome looked completely quiet, silent, undisturbed.

The last console, a three-dimensional hologram as large as a steamer trunk, showed something entirely different: the glowing, shimmering, oil-on-water rainbow reconstruction of an amphibious vehicle that was half-beetle, half-tank.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, both shocked and angry about what he was looking at.

“I have no idea,” the officer said. “It’s entirely invisible to every one of our imaging scans, except this new one, this gravimetric mass detector. We just installed it last month and even that is only getting partial data. This…this thing is almost entirely undetectable. I’m not even sure you could see it unless you were standing right in front of it.”

“It has to be one of ours,” Roland muttered, still having trouble believing his eyes. “No one else on the planet could do this.”

“Of course, sir,” the officer said, then swallowed nervously. “But…”

“I know,” Roland said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, either.”

The vehicle’s tapering bow was almost insectile. It swelled back in long, sinister curves, its iridescent skin almost convulsing with colors that seemed to flicker in and out of the visible spectrum. It had no windows, no visible means of propulsion, and no hatches—none that he could see, at any rate. And the mechanical arms at its side, the treads below it, made it more than just menacing: it made it an undeniable, and probably unstoppable, weapon of war.

“I don’t care what you have to do,” the commander said to his crew. “I don’t care how hard you have to push this piece of shit or what chances you have to take. Just get me up there NOW!”

They were less than six minutes from the basin. One of the soldiers made the mistake of quoting the ETA to his commander, and Roland turned on him quick as a snake.

“NO!” he bellowed. “Not fast enough!”

“Sir,” the navigator said hating the sound of his own voice, “the Spiders are trailing behind us by eight minutes but making headway.”

“Of course they are,” he said. “They’re bigger, more sophisticated, and more mobile than we are.”

He stepped forward, hoping against hope that he was really seeing what he thought he was. “My guess? Whatever that thing is, we’re going to need some heavy armament to stop it.”





SPECTOR VI

The members of the team braced themselves as the Spector VI lifted up toward a shallow edge of the submerged ice. Max had already scanned the shoreline for a thousand feet in either direction, and this was by far the most gradual and gentle slope in the visible terrain.

The treads of the amphibious vehicle were completely extended and made a slight grinding sound just beneath their feet. It was a little hard for Simon to fully visualize, but it was true nonetheless: what had been a submarine just minutes ago was now fully capable of carrying them into the open-air tunnels that lay in front of them.

Hayden, meanwhile, was studying the increasingly detailed schematic of the tunnels that his microburst deepscans were creating and updating every ten seconds. He had already succeeded in mapping the maze for miles into the deep ice, but he knew the vast network of tunnels he could see—or rather, that the Spector could see—went on for many miles more. “Maybe across the entire damn continent,” he muttered, more to himself than his companions.

“Contact now,” Max said with an almost gentle tone, and the Spector jumped and leaped as the treads grabbed at the icy terrain. This time everyone was as prepared as they could be; they were all seated, strapped in, poised. They gripped their armrests, braced their legs as the vessel grabbed at the ancient ice beneath its treads and surged forward with an awesome, rumbling skirrrl of rubber against ice.

The Spector pushed upward and forward with enormous force. Simon peered at the forward-facing holo-screen, watching the white-on-gray-on-white shoreline grow closer and more differentiated. Max, meanwhile, realized for the first time that if the Spector had been as originally described—just a souped-up submarine—they wouldn’t have had a chance of survival now. He thought about how incredible the vessel actually was as it pushed its way out of the water with no effort at all; his heart started pounding at the thought of finally being here—here, on solid ground in Antarctica, though he had never imagined he would be a thousand feet below its frozen surface.

“Where next?” Andrew said, his voice betraying the level of tension they were all feeling.

“I vote for this tunnel here,” Hayden said, pointing to a specific opening in his holographic display. “It’s wide and it’s deep, and if this imaging system is even half right, it can get us far away from here faster than anything else.”

“How so?” Simon said, frowning at the display.

“Because it’s a nearly seventy percent down slope. We can downhill ski out of the danger zone if we do it right, and leave our pursuers in the dust.”

“Or frost, as it were,” Andrew said, smiling at his own comment.

Simon had to admit, he liked the elegance of the solution: using the ice to help with the getaway. But his eye captured the pulsing red blob as it approached. “Do you think we are being detected by them? By whatever we’re looking at?” he asked. “I thought we were functionally invisible.”

“We are!” Hayden insisted. “It’s just better safe than sorry.” It sounded weak, even to him. He had built stealth systems and shields to fuddle every scanning technology and detection system known to man, but technology was always changing, always evolving—that was its very nature. There was always some smart kid with another invention and if one of them had come up with something entirely new, something different…

“Safe?” Samantha echoed bleakly. “I don’t think we’ll ever be safe again. Not in this place.”

Amen, Hayden answered silently.

Simon stuck his finger into the hologram right at the point where the down sloping tunnel opened into the dome. “Do we know how far it goes?” According to the note Leon gave, it’s better to go farther down, he thought to himself.

“I can’t tell,” Hayden confessed. “But deep, and the farther the better as far as I’m concerned.”

“What about the angle of descent? Can the Spector handle it?” Max asked, glancing with mounting concern at the red blob. It was approaching with ever-increasing speed.

“In theory it can, but it’s never been tested,” Andrew said. Then he looked thoughtful. “Of course, we’ve never tested much of anything on the Spector, at least until now.”

Hayden looked impatient. “It will be fine. The dedicated AIs will automatically adjust the handle and grab-strength of the treads while it configures the correct tolerance necessary to maximize friction.”

Samantha and Nastasia watched the forward-facing screen as the light grew brighter. The water broke over the cameras, and suddenly they were out of the basin, looking at the icy shore as the Spector hauled itself out of the water like some huge aquatic beetle climbing onto dry land. The gigantic dome above them, they realized, was large enough to contain a ten-story building and wide enough to house several submarines with space to spare for maneuvers.

“Want to see something amazing?” Hayden said. “Now that the full array of sensors is working, we can do this…” He stroked a long rectangle to the right of his console and the walls faded away. The Spector’s exterior sensors were now in full operation, and the interior panels all around them were charged with the digital data streaming into the smartskin. As amazing as it was, it looked as if the ceiling and the walls of Spector VI had disappeared, and the entire team was standing on a flat metal plate in the middle of the wide-open ice cavern. The image was only broken up in a few areas where the panel connected.

“Oh. My. God,” Samantha whispered. “This is bizarre.”

“Not exactly,” Hayden said. “It just looks that way.” He stood up and looked around at the icy ground, stretching off in all directions. “And look, just double-tap the wall anywhere you like, and a foot-wide segment will zoom forward, up to thirty-to-one.”

Nastasia was standing next to him, head thrown back, looking straight up. “Then zoom in on that, please,” she said, and pointed up. There was a complicated structure of arms and beams hanging from the center point of the dome, but it was impossible to see it clearly from so far away.

Hayden reached over his head and double-tapped the ceiling. A good-sized section suddenly zoomed forward with a nauseating suddenness; now they were staring at the mysterious technology from a viewpoint that looked no more than ten or fifteen feet away, with a crisp clarity that adjusted for atmospheric distortion.

“What the hell is that?” Andrew asked.

“I admit,” Hayden said, “I can’t fathom it.”

“There is a whole new world down here,” Andrew said, sounding awestruck and delighted at the same time. “A whole world, deep within the Antarctic ice.”

Simon didn’t care. Yes, it was amazing. No, he had no idea how deep and wide the conspiracy was—any more than he knew how deep and wide these tunnels were. And it didn’t matter. He simply felt that his father was down here, and he was going to find him. He was sure of that now: he was going to find him.

“We’ve got about four minutes until our unknown visitors arrive,” Max said with a sudden urgency in his voice. “Simon?”

“Go,” Simon said without pause. “The downslope tunnel you wanted—take it. Now.”

The Spector lunged forward, twirling on its treads, and rocketed toward the tunnel mouth Max had chosen. It moved with such speed and grace the whole internal world spun with it, and the passengers felt the force of its thrust all over again.

“Stop the exterior visuals,” Samantha said as she clutched at her seat for support. “Turn it off.”

“Ah,” Max said and dialed down the transparency feed. The walls faded back into place. Now the view was restricted to the front screen, and the movement was more tolerable.

The tunnel mouth was approaching fast.

Everyone hunkered down in the seats. Belts were fastened. Armrests were gripped. Samantha ducked her head down and held her breath as the black hole of the tunnel mouth grew larger and larger.

“Hold on!” Max shouted as the amphibious vessel took a dive into the descending tunnel. They yelped in unison as the front of the vehicle tipped down, hard, and they found themselves zooming downhill at a fifty-degree angle.

The acceleration pushed every member of the crew back into the seats. Max had to redouble the effort to lean forward, fighting the pressure to keep his hands up and steady over the holographic command console. The severe pitch felt much stronger than any of them had imagined it would. They could hear the treads below the Spector recalibrating themselves over and over, struggling to navigate despite the severe angle and shifting slickness of the ice like glass below.

New sequences of tunnels revealed themselves through Hayden’s deepscan, showing an ever-increasing complexity that stretched for miles in every direction.

“Good Lord,” he whispered. “What the hell is this place?”

The Spector suddenly sloughed to the right, then bit down again and steadied.

“Too fast for the treads,” Max said between clenched teeth. “We’re starting to slide.”

“For what it’s worth,” Ryan said, “I’m actually starting to believe these read-outs now. They tell me we’re more than five hundred feet below sea level and under more than 1,500 feet of ice.”

Max’s head was pounding. “Any chance this angle’s going to level out?” he asked Hayden.

“Not that I can see,” Hayden said.

They slipped violently to the left, lifted up almost forty-five degrees on one side…and then slammed back down to level, though they were still pointed downward to an even greater degree. It was like being trapped inside a windowless toboggan that was slaloming down an impossibly difficult track.

We have to get off this roller coaster, Simon told himself.

Max glared at the front-screen, then flicked an eye at the deep scan. “You see what I see? An alcove, off to the right? About three thousand feet ahead.”

Simon shifted his view to the right, downrange…and found it. Little more than a vertical shadow in the harsh spotlights of the Spector.

The back end of the sliding ship wagged like the tail of an angry cat. They could all hear the ice rushing under the treads now—not catching, not holding, just screeching as the whirring treads spun helplessly over the frigid surface. Max checked his speedometer readout. 60…70…80…

“Shoot for it,” Simon screamed.

“Then I’ll have to lose velocity,” Max told him as the shadow of the alcove grew closer and sharper. “If I try to turn into it at this speed, we’ll disintegrate into the far wall.”

“One hundred twenty miles inland,” Ryan shouted. “Depth is 1,782 feet below the ice sheet and increasing.”

“Hayden!” Max called. “Standard braking isn’t working for shit here! I can’t slow her down!”

Hayden frowned. “The blades—”

“I’ve reached maximum extension on the blades! We’re sliding, goddamn it!”

“That’s not possible.” Hayden pulled up the diagram of the extended tread, searching for a solution.

Max checked his velocity again: 85…90…

The surface flattened a bit, lost at least ten degrees of descent as they slipped at ridiculous speed—but it was too little and too late.

“You know what, Max?” Hayden shouted to Max, sounding somewhat terrified. “You’re right. We’re losing traction.”

“What’s next?”

Simon didn’t allow fear to take hold. Rescuing Oliver is my only mission in life, he told himself…and was suddenly struck with a mad inspiration.

“Max!” he screamed. “Heat the treads and bend their front points toward each other! Make a ‘V!’”

“That’s not possible!” Hayden snapped. “This isn’t a goddamn set of skis! You’ll destroy the integrity of the entire mechanism! Hell, at this speed, they might snap and destroy the whole vessel! You want that?”

“Beats slamming into a wall head on,” Max said. He cocked his wrists over the tread controls and rotated his thumbs inward, as if turning down two enormous dials. The tread icons above the controls shuddered for a second and then moved, slowly at first, from two parallel lines to an upside-down “V” shape.

The treads began moving together.

The Spector started to vibrate, to shudder like a derailing train. The rattling was so violent

Simon was sure the vessel was going to come apart at the seams.

“Heat it up, Max!” Simon demanded. “Retract the right blade, let the rear slalom to the right!”

Immediately, Max adjusted the controls. The Spector was slowing but still not enough, still going far too fast, and now it was turning as it slid, not quite broadside to the downhill slope but close enough to scare the living daylight out of him. If they hit a pothole or a crack at this angle, and it caught the edge of the tread, they would roll over and over, tumbling downhill like a rolling pin totally out of control.

He ticked up the heating elements as they slid. He heard the thundering grumble through the screech of the ice as the treads started digging deeper, leaving an eight-inch groove behind them as they careened downhill.

The entrance to the alcove was a narrow, gray rectangle in a raddled field of white now…sliding into view from the left, to the center, to—

Simon was staring at the screen, trying to calculate the speed. Think like you’re skiing, he thought. Timing is everything. “Ready?” he said.

“And waiting,” Max said tightly, his hands still deep in the controls.

“When I tell you, just tap the accelerator—jump us forward, fast and hard, but not too much.”

“Got it.” Max said tightly. Come on, then. They were sliding, sliding, goddamn it.

“Ready?”

“YES!”

“NOW!”

Max pounded on the thrusters, bashed them forward with a leap of thrust that shot them straight toward the opposite wall at a vicious angle-straight toward the endless white vertical barrier that grew closer and closer and—

—the gray gap of the alcove slipped into view, right in front of them, just a few feet before they hit the vertical ice. In that instant they shot through it, and Max stood on the brakes, purposely swaying them to the right and up, riding halfway up the curved wall of the alcove itself. He could feel the treads, still pointing into a “V,” dig deep into new glass-like ice, dragging them down, lowering their speed, more and more, until the Spector slid sideways one last time, back to the level floor of the alcove as the forward momentum bled away. It wallowed for a beat, rolling back and forth on its treads like a fat man on a swing, and then finally stopped. “Not dead yet,” Andrew said as he watched Samantha and Nastasia, white as ghosts, still gripping the armrests on their chairs.

“Thank god,” Samantha said.

Nope, Max thought from the front of the vessel, not yet. He eased back in his chair, lifted his arms from the console and stretched. “Take a rest, everyone. We’ll get out and explore in a bit.” He did his best not to sound completely relieved and breathless.

Not dead yet, he repeated. And I am absolutely amazed at that.





SUBMARINE DOCK

Roland ordered the DITV to halt at the end of Tunnel 3, just a few hundred feet before it opened into the dome. His hand gripped the sides of his seat until the plastic cracked like dry paper; he was that angry, that frustrated.

The goddamn Spiders had beaten him there. The DITV crew had received the CS-23s locational beacon signals just thirty seconds before, and the coordinates were unmistakable—they were waiting at the shore of the dome’s basin, deciding what to do next.

“I can’t believe they’re already here,” he spat out. “What the hell happened?”

“They move quickly,” the tactical officer said very quietly. “Even more quickly than we thought they could, I suppose.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s go. I want to see this.”

The DITV tumbled forward and entered the dimly lit dome. Flare fire and the remnants of the bullets penetrating the ice shelf gave it a ghostly level of illumination, not like most of the tunnels and chambers at this depth and below. As they entered, Roland strode to the surveillance officer’s console and hovered over him. “Show me how far they’ve gone,” he said. “They’ll reach the extraction tunnel if they continue like this down Tunnel 3. We can’t have them discover what’s down there.”

The display showed the Unknown Intruder icon slipping rapidly down a feeder shaft, far ahead of the larger, slower-moving blue diamonds of the first CS-23s.

“Get me the f*ck down there,” he demanded.

The soldier shook in fear as he responded, “Sir, we can’t enter Tunnel 3. The Vehicle will automatically abort the command because of the angle of descent—it’s past our ratings. And it’s caved in between Shelf 2 and 3. We can’t handle that grade of terra—”

“DAMN it!” he said and pounded the back of the chair. It made the tactical officer duck away, fully expecting to take a blow to the back of his head.

Roland didn’t want to hear any of it. “Stop here,” he said shortly. “Wait.”

He heard the CS-23s coming up from deep inside Dragger Pass. The ground itself shook with their approach. He knew that the Spiders would take care of whoever was down there, and that knowledge frustrated him terribly. “Get me a closed visual,” he snapped. “They’re only a thousand feet away now, just over the edge.”

His central view screen showed the Spiders in excruciating detail as they climbed the last three hundred yards. Their bulbous central bodies churned with dimly visible personnel inside; the long multi-jointed legs flexed and stretched for the best possible purchase, the greatest possible speed. They moved with an eerie combination of human intelligence and machine efficiency. Roland knew they could easily navigate the tunnel the intruders had just entered, just as easily as they could clamber up a mile of nearly vertical cliff face.

The massive size of the CS-23’s legs extending out of their bodies made them even more than menacing, and the sheer power and weight of the Spiders caused the ground to vibrate as they pulled themselves higher and higher.

They reached the edge of the precipice of Dragger Pass, a night-black cliff that fell straight down for more than five thousand feet. Roland watched with an outraged fascination as the first of them pushed upward over the edge, its huge arm digging into the ice twenty feet away from the commander’s vehicle, then pulled its metal body upward out of the fissure, limbs hissing and clanking.

The gigantic machine crawled over the commander’s vehicle, coiling in on itself to a smaller size just for a moment, then pushing forward into Tunnel 3 behind the intruders.

The two CS-23s that followed also reached over the commander’s vehicle, disappearing into the dark tunnel in a matter of seconds. The communications console inside the commander’s vehicle beeped in acknowledgment of the Spiders’ arrival, but he barely heard it. He was almost hypnotized by their passage; it took an effort of will to force himself to turn to his communications officer and ask a question.

“What’s your ETA for rendezvous with the intruders?” he asked. “For the Spiders, I mean?”

“Sir, the computer’s telling us eighteen minutes and counting, but we estimate the intruder will have to stop at Shelf 2, and we will immobilize it if it stays put. We are reading zero armament present on the vessel.”

Zero armament, he repeated to himself. So it’s not a military vehicle. It’s a spy ship. A f*cking ghost.

And now it’s haunting my labyrinth.