Protocol 7

CENTRAL COMMAND

Blackburn stood alone at the apex of his empire and looked on all that he’d helped created.

All this, he told himself, in half a lifetime. And we have barely begun.

From where he stood, he had almost a 360-degree view of the buildings that hung like tethered wasp nests from the underside of Command Central’s massive dome. They were constructed completely of modules like a space station, built piece-by-piece by submarines delivering components one at a time over a twenty-year span. From below, he knew, the buildings looked like upside-down skyscrapers, unbroken cocoons, their surface soft and pockmarked, but clinging to massive sheets of ice so compressed, they were strong and durable like steel. Inside each structure was a web of interior insulating modules that kept the core temperature at a constant comfortable degree for human habitation, while the exteriors took advantage of the subzero temperature to freeze themselves immovably to the ice dome itself.

The Vector5 network was both vast and efficient. Blackburn was certain of that; he was the one who had hired or captured the scientists and engineers who made it so. He had witnessed the construction of all three phases—the first shelf at three thousand feet, the second at six thousand, and Shelf 3 at more than nine thousand feet below the ice. He had overseen the construction of the tunnels and speedways. He had piloted virtually every kind of vehicle that Vector5 used, from the personnel transports to the weapons platforms to the robotic vehicles that moved too fast for humans to pilot directly.

And he had been there on the day that The Discovery took place, and the entire world changed without knowing it.

Half a lifetime, he thought again. And tomorrow…still unknown.

Blackburn heard a discrete cough at his back, but he did not turn away from the floor-to-ceiling window that comprised one wall of Command Central’s main conference room. He knew what was waiting behind him: his commanders and advisors, arranged around the conference table, watching him, assessing him, judging his every move.

Tension permeated the briefing room. They were all in jeopardy. The world they knew was in jeopardy. They needed to find the intruders and recapture the missing scientists before they could escape and tell the world.

Blackburn still did not turn to them when the coughing officer stood up to address the others.

“We have a report from Dragger Pass,” he said. “The CS-23s have the exact coordinates of the intruder that has penetrated the network, and have confirmed reports of reconstructed MagCycles that rendezvoused with the intruder.”

Oh, excellent, Blackburn thought, burning. The invaders and the renegades have found each other. Perfect.

“Because of debris in the connecting passages,” the officer continued, “the Spiders were unable to acquire confirming visual imagery associated with the MagCycle operators, but we have a strongly held con—”

“Stop,” Blackburn said, too weary of it all to turn and confront them. “It’s the scientists. We all know it’s the scientists. Now move on.”

“But where did they find the MC-7s?” asked one of the commanders.

“The wrecks were buried above Shelf 1 in utility tunnels,” Blackburn said. He remembered the day they had abandoned the MagCycle technology in favor of the more powerful, swifter MC-9s. “Fourteen years ago. Is that not correct?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“Clever little men,” he said, almost admiring. “They’re using the old utility passages and air shafts to travel the network. No wonder we haven’t been able to locate them.”

Blackburn finally turned but not to address his followers. Instead, he looked past them at the black wall of the hologram deck that filled the opposite end of the room, beyond the conference table. He lifted his head to address the AI that ran the conference room. “Calliope,” he said, “open the old construction maps.”

Instantly, an elaborate holographic diagram appeared above the table, coruscating greens and blues.

“No,” he said, “This is too current. Go farther back, to 2021.”

The display instantly changed and a large 3-D map of the continent’s utility tunnels around Dragger Pass appeared, as they existed a decade and a half in the past.

“Go to Shelf 1 utility tunnels frame at ten cubic kilometers.” Blackburn said, concentrating fiercely. “Focus specifically around Dragger Pass and prepare digital logs showing the coring activities. I want to know exactly where these bastards can hide.”

The men in the room stood up almost simultaneously when the map displayed in great detail the old tunnels around Dragger Pass. Many of the officers had never seen these tunnels.

Blackburn rounded the table and stalked to the hologram display. He didn’t waste an instant looking at his staff; they didn’t deserve the attention. He stood in front of the enhanced diagram and held up one hand, making a circle that covered a specific section of the grid.

“Jim,” Blackburn said, “how much ammo would you need to cave in this ten-kilometer area? To dump it into the Gorge?”

The commander code-named “Jim” went bone-white. “Sir, do you mean create an internal avalanche?”

“Yes. Take the whole f*cking area—intruders, rebels, MC-7s, the lot of them—and drop it into the Gorge.”

All heads turned to Blackburn and stared in absolute shock. Jim was the head of explosives and coring activities; he had thirty years of experience in demolition and two advanced degrees in geology and structural engineering. He could barely contain his horror.

“Sir, with all due respect, the vibration would almost certainly cause the full length of the shelf to crack and cave in. That would destroy the entire…the entire, um, complex.” Now Jim was starting to sweat. He pulled a handkerchief from his ice suit and mopped his gleaming brow. “It could kill us all, sir. And—and even if, somehow, it didn’t, the seismic activity would alert every listening post and geo-satellite in the southern hemisphere.”

Blackburn waved that away. “Not an issue. We can scramble that information before they receive it.”

“Are you sure about that, sir?” the surveillance commander asked, his voice shaking with fear. “Seismic waves, too? We’ve never…”

The look the commander received from Blackburn was enough to kill. The commander stopped in mid-sentence and wilted. “All right, then. Sir,” he said meekly and sat back.

The Gorge was a horizontal fissure caused by a massive quake that had shaken the continent in 2018, creating a tremendous crack more than five hundred feet wide and four thousand feet deep. It went down to the continental bedrock—and perhaps even lower. None of the scans or camera descents had actually established its lowest point.

“You’re sure about that?” Blackburn asked sharply. “About the danger to the entire project?”

“I’m not sure about anything,” the commander said in a rare unguarded moment. “No one has ever operated in subterranean ice environments like this before. We learn something new every day, and it’s not always—or often—very good news. But the explosive release of trillions and trillions of tons of ice? The excess heat alone could generate enough melted water and steam to cook every living thing in the network—the entire network, sir.”

“So you’re not sure,” Blackburn said skeptically. It was just as he’d suspected—another coward.

Blackburn spun to the Ops commander, opened his mouth, and froze. For one horrible moment, every officer in the room was sure he was going to do it—to order a small tactical nuke into that ten-kilometer region where he thought the escapees and the intruders were hiding, just to stop the threat.

But…

“Jim,” he said, “Use whatever is necessary to cap the old network of utility tunnels. Make sure these bastards have nowhere to hide. In the meantime, Philip, start drilling toward the last known location of the intruder-vessel from Dragger Pass. I want to be able to haul the big guns up there if we need to.”

The relief in the room was like a cool breeze. Half of the officers sat back, relaxed, as if they had just been reprieved.

Not quite yet, Blackburn thought, and he swiveled to confront one of his most powerful executive officers. “Hollinger,” he said, “What’s the status of the operation at Ground Zero?”

The room chilled a second time. Most of the advisors knew little about The Nest, and wanted to know even less. It was unusual—and dangerous—for Blackburn to mention it in open session.

“Sir, we have identified more, but we cannot effectively close in to investigate. Machinery seems to shut down instantly.”

Blackburn scowled, clearly suppressing his rage. “I want an answer within forty-eight hours,” he said. “We need to get our hands on one of those f*cking things and pull it up.”

“Sir,” replied Hollinger, nodding in tight acknowledgement. He was a tall, skinny fellow in his late forties who looked like a cross between a mad scientist and a vicious special-ops soldier—an anomaly in many ways. His weathered skin and white hair, cut long and rarely combed, was unusual enough, but in recent months he had also developed strange lesions on his hands and neck that no one spoke of.

Hollinger was the king of the spooks, as far as the rest of Vector5 was concerned. He was responsible for The Discovery, the most secretive mission the enterprise had ever undertaken—the one established at a depth so low it was scarcely 350 feet above the continental bedrock. No one in the room knew exactly what the Nest’s mission was, or what Blackburn was referring to when he said “those things,” and most of them were glad to be in the dark.

“I’ll have a feasibility breakdown and a timetable in my hands by 0300,” he said.

“Yes, you will,” Blackburn agreed. And with that, he dismissed the team with a gesture and watched in silence as they filed out of the briefing room.

It had been pointless, maybe even foolhardy, to mention Ground Zero in front of the general staff. But he was burning with curiosity and impatience concerning the most recent discoveries they had made down there at the bottom of their deepest shaft. He had to know what they meant, how they were to change the world yet again.

History has already been rewritten, he told himself as the last of his lackeys scurried away. But now the possibilities are literally endless.

Oliver Fitzpatrick was the key. As much as it pained Blackburn to admit it, without Oliver’s cooperation Vector5 would never be able to reach its ultimate goal.

He wondered for the tenth time if Oliver’s son Simon was—or had been—in the vessel. If he had come here looking for his father, or if there was a far larger, far more complex and sinister plan at work.

He would have to make double-sure that Oliver was closely guarded, and that Simon would be terminated long before he reached his father’s side. Oliver lives for the hope of seeing his son, he thought to himself, if he does, I will surely loose him. He will lose all his will to live and impart the secrets that he holds.

“He’s done,” Blackburn said, though there was no one else in the room to hear it. “Done.”





THE NEST

Deep in the earth, barely five hundred feet above Ground Zero, Oliver Fitzpatrick lay in his cell and wished for death.

He struggled weakly against the restraints that tied him to his life-support system. If he could have freed himself, he would have torn the tubes and wires out of his body and simply died, but he could barely move.

He was trapped.

Oliver was almost blind from exposure to radiation. He had developed first-degree burns on thirty percent of his body from contact with unknown chemicals that flowed like polluted water in caverns close by. He drifted in and out of a dream state—wishing for death, fearing rescue, making impossible plans, and remembering—always remembering.

Memories of his son’s childhood kept him alive in his dark captivity. He tried to dream about Simon as a little boy in Oxford. His first step. His first word. Their summer together in Corsica, and the wonders they uncovered together.

Deep emotions swelled in him, and he shivered—in pride or grief, or simply as a reaction to Vector5’s harsh medications, he did not know. What a life they had lived, together and apart. What people they had known, what adventures they had shared.

And it all came down to this. This. And the awful things he had done that had brought him to this place. How could he have been so selfish all his life? What would happen to the memories, the history that man had created? What would happen to those children who knew nothing but love?

Oliver had never been sure about the existence of God. The wonders of the universe seemed too complex; too amazing to be random, but how could God justify this? Vector5 in all its evil vastness, and the things that waited beneath him, five hundred feet below. Why would the universe turn its face away from mankind this way?

His hope was fading, but a new kind of courage was rising at the same time.

Death was the answer.

The secrets—all of them—would die with him. It would be better if no one knew what was on the horizon. And death was very, very near. He could feel it—death was a heartbeat away.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, thinking of Simon playing in their cottage on that single, perfect summer day.

Thinking of the past and praying for death.





THE ENCAMPMENT

Lucas led Max and Simon to the far end of the encampment toward a meeting area fifty yards deeper into the cave. “Your people are down here,” he said.

Lucas led the two friends as they trudged toward the camp, so weary they could barely lift their feet. It had been a long, cold hike from the Spector, and the information they had been given had stunned them completely. It was hard for Simon to think clearly at all.

Nastasia was waiting for them on the edge of the camp—waiting for Simon in particular, it seemed. She was looking only at him with a wild mixture of relief and obsession, as if she had done nothing but stand and wait for him constantly since they had parted.

What does she want? he wondered as he approached. What could be so important?

He pretended not to notice her strangely intense gaze. He just nodded to her briefly as he passed and saw her turn toward him out of the corner of his eye, swiveling to face him, still staring, as if she didn’t dare to let him out of her sight now that he had returned.

Never mind, he told himself. Not now. Besides, with the revelations of a decades-old, worldwide conspiracy of politicians, business people, and scientists, he wasn’t sure he could stand talking to her at this very moment. He trusted his friends from Oxford; he had known them for years, worked with them just as long. But Nastasia had been included at the last minute, picked up along the way because of the words—or manipulations—of others. He didn’t know about her. At all.

He had to sit and think. He had to talk with Max and Samantha—the ones he could really trust—and work this out.

The rest of the team had set up a temporary encampment next to the escaped scientists. It was heated by a cobbled-together network of battered and mismatched thermal units, hastily adapted from a half dozen vehicles of different designs and haphazardly connected to create a tiny area barely warm enough to allow the opening of the masks and relatively easy breathing. That circular meeting area—a campfire without a flame—was directly in front of a dimly illuminated structure, the likes of which Simon had never seen.

The structure’s surface was constructed of a durable plastic or vinyl material that seemed to be made of a million tiny cells no bigger than a fingernail, each one filled with air and somehow stiffened or solidified. From a distance, it looked like crystalline rock with an unnaturally smooth, organic exterior. Up close it looked like a honeycomb made of artificial materials, but as rigid as stone. The construction itself was unlike anything Max and Simon had ever seen.

“It’s a Vector5 inflatable structure used for emergencies,” said Lucas as he dropped his bag on the icy ground. “We found it inside one of the larger vehicles we uncovered last week. Thank god we did; it’s no fun sleeping in an ice cube.”

The other members of the Spector VI team had gathered with some of Lucas’ scientists in that small, warm circle, making seats out of crates that seemed to be ammunition cases or empty ration cubes. Simon recognized a few of them as recent arrivals from Spector VI.

As they entered the circle, Andrew greeted them with one upraised arm. It held a nearly full bottle of scotch.

“Greetings,” he said to Simon. “Sit on down, warm yourself up.”

One of Lucas’ men, sitting heavily in a field chair near the edge of the circle, suddenly broke into a wide grin. “Oh yeah!” he rumbled. “Where the hell did you get that?”

“It was packed in a case that traveled with us in the Spector,” Andrew said, slowly opening the bottle with flourish. “Personally, I’ll drink anything that comes my way, but some people around here are a bit picky about their personal brand of scotch.” He cast a sarcastic look at Simon, even as Lucas stopped to gaze in awe at the bottle of liquor.

“Wow,” he said sounding more like a frat boy than a scientist, if only for a moment. “We haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“Well, it’s time you re-established a meaningful relationship,” Andrew said, grinning. He reached down and snagged one of a half-dozen bottles at his feet, this one unopened, and tossed it easily to Lucas, who caught it with some difficulty. Lucas, in turn, offered it to his thirsty colleague, who moved as quickly as he could to seize the prize, but as the scientist tried to take the bottle, Andrew noticed for the first time just how frail the man was. He wasn’t going to be able to stand without help, let alone have a drink.

Andrew was suddenly, painfully aware of how the extreme environment had taken its toll on these men—all of them.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Samantha, either. “Hey,” she said to everyone with a false, almost brittle cheer, “how about we open one of these ration crates and have little celebration?”

They had been waiting for the invitation. In a heartbeat, the scientists, under Lucas’ watchful eye, ripped open one of the Spector’s ration crates and pulled out bag after bag of self-contained, self-heating meals-ready-to-eat; they descended on them like ravenous animals. They just ate—without benefit of utensils or table manners. The sound alone was enough to turn Simon’s stomach.

After all too short a time Lucas called a halt. “Take it easy, guys!” he said. He pulled the last of the few unopened packs from his people—even the ones who fought him—to store them in his own bag for later. “Think about what you’ll eat tomorrow and next week. There’s no telling when we can mount that resupply operation, so this is going to have to last us until then.”

One of the men—the first one to ask for liquor—gave a sarcastic snort. “‘Resupply operation,’” he grunted. “Hitting that bunker at the base of Tunnel 5 is a pipe dream, Lucas. Never gonna happen.”

“You see the guards they have posted down there?” another scientist said. “We wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Not before, we wouldn’t have,” Lucas said, then hefted a long, heavy wooden case off the icy ground and plopped it between the men. “But now…”

The complainer glared at the battered wooden box. “Where’d you get that?”

“The abandoned weapons dump up at Tunnel 36. Remember? That’s why we went out in the first place? Well, food and new friends notwithstanding, it was worth the trip.”

He pried open the box to reveal the strangest weapon Simon had ever seen—a structured box like weapon that seemed to look like a retractable robot. The only thing he recognized was the decal of a skull on one matte-finished panel. The international symbol of deadly.

They looked too small and compact to be rifles, but far too large and complex to be a pistol. Max too was fascinated. To him, they resembled the folded gloves of an experimental exo-skeleton he had seen in a government facility years ago—multiple sections that folded out and clicked together to make…something very strange.

Lucas noticed Max staring. “What?” he said in a voice that was almost prideful. “You’ve never seen a ray gun before?”

“Come on,” Simon chuckled, just as curious as Max. “What the hell is it really?”

“I’ll be happy to show you,” Lucas said. “Follow me.”

They moved to a makeshift firing range they had created a safe distance from the encampment, and facing away into the dark far reaches of the cave. With a few gestures, Lucas indicated where he wanted the observers to stand, and Simon noticed for the first time that Nastasia had silently joined them, a look of naked curiosity on her beautiful features.

It only took a few seconds for Lucas to expand the rifle. He depressed a thumb-latch here, pulled sharply, clicked the folding stock up and then down, and twisted, and the weapon had suddenly stretched to five times its original size and locked itself into an entirely new shape—half-rifle, half-glove, wrapped around his forearm like a robotic parasite. Simon couldn’t keep from being impressed; it was beautifully designed, a compact and clever construct of multiple sections that telescoped into a weapon slightly larger than a machine pistol, with a thick, round muzzle the diameter of a broomstick.

Lucas planted a knee on the frozen ground and set his body, as if preparing for heavy recoil. He raised the weapon and pointed it toward the far end of the range at a carved target over a hundred yards away.

“Behold,” he said, with no sense of irony whatever. “The wonder of Vector5 technology.”

He depressed a side plunger with his thumb and a series of extremely bright rays illuminated sections of the weapon. A stream of glowing projectiles, each the size of a shotgun shell, streamed out of the front with a high-pitched pew-pew-pew sound, and Lucas was thrown back by the force of their flight. Before he stopped moving there was a low hissing sound followed by what felt like a small sonic boom.

A hundred yards away, the black curve of the ice-tunnel wall lit up with pure, bright light.

“What the hell?” asked Max, gaping and taking an involuntary step forward.

“Luminescent bullets,” said Lucas, peeling off the weapon with three quick moves. He handed it to Max, who took it eagerly but gingerly—exactly as one would handle a loaded weapon. “These were experimental prototypes,” Lucas explained, “designed specifically for ice exploration and, if necessary, combat. Vector5 needed something to illuminate fissures in the deep dark tunnels of the underground, so the scientists developed a gun that would penetrate the ice and make it glow internally and kill people at a considerable distance, if necessary.”

Simon stared at the brilliant light glowing from the ice. It was blue-white, without heat, and so bright it almost hurt to look at. “How long will it last?” he asked.

“Each bullet glows for approximately five minutes and dims out gradually.”

Max looked at the gun with awe and trepidation, almost as if it was his first time holding a weapon.

“It worked beautifully as a tool of exploration. Became the standard for excursion teams all over the network, I’m told. But it wasn’t until two years ago that one of these was used on a person.”

Max looked up as if waiting for him to continue, but Nastasia was the one that asked. “And so what happened?”

“You can only imagine how grotesque the effect was,” replied Lucas. “I’ve heard stories of entire bodies glowing, bones and all. It was just too…it was more than they wanted. Energy release and hydrostatic shock made them instantly lethal. You don’t get wounded by one of these ray guns. You get killed. There are no grazes or flesh wounds; you blow up like balloon of blood set on fire. In an instant.”

“How does the technology work?” Simon asked with a boyish curiosity.

“The bullets are the key. I’m not a specialist in materials, so I can’t tell you.”

“Are you serious?” asked Max.

“You bet I am. You saw the bullets fly out of this thing. What you heard was the sound barrier breaking.”

Lucas chuckled at the look of pure amazement on Simon’s face. “This is why I wanted to show it to you, Simon,” he said. “You can take a set, of course, and all the ammo you can carry. But that’s not the point. The point is, this is the stuff they threw away. As incredible as it is to you, it is yesterday’s news, out of date and out of favor with Vector5.” He casually handed the unit to one of his assistants as they headed for the main tent, ready for an evening meal made primarily from Spector supplies, and an actual night’s sleep.

“The technology being used here is light years ahead of the rest of the world. You literally have no idea how advanced Vector5 really is—you couldn’t, but one thing is certain: you are facing one of history’s most technologically advanced military machines. If you survive the journey, you will witness it for yourself. But you can’t possibly plan for it.”

He slapped Max on the shoulder and smiled. “Now let’s grab a quick bite, and I’ll explain where you need to go and what you need to do.”