I emerge back into the daylight five minutes later with an SI trooper propping me up on each side and a whole squad shielding us to the rear. When I am out of the tunnel and back on the icy slope of the glacial river, the sky is overcast, but everything is still bright enough to hurt my eyes. I open the face shield of my helmet and breathe in the fresh Greenland winter air, even though it’s so cold that now my lungs hurt as well.
Up on the top of the slope, the military presence has at least doubled since we descended into the tunnel. Over by the command mules still lined up in a firing line of four abreast, I see the platoon sergeant of our ill-fated recon platoon, standing in the middle of a cluster of SI troopers, presumably Third and Fourth Squads. They see me and rush to assist the SI troopers propping me up on both sides. With the heating element of my suit off-line, the residual heat isn’t quite enough to keep me warm in the cold wind up here, and I start to shiver involuntarily.
“The lieutenant needs a medevac,” the corporal on my left side announces. “He’s banged up pretty badly.”
“Never mind that right now,” I say. “Sarge, I need to go see the CO and plug my suit in. My TacLink is down.”
“Make way, shitheads,” the platoon sergeant addresses the troops between us and the command mule. The crowd parts to let us through. From one of the other mules, the HD major in command and the Icelandic Eurocorps captain come trotting over to meet us at the back of the command mule.
“Pull the guys out,” I say to the major. “The Lankies have figured out how traps work. We won’t do much good down there with just infantry.”
“It’s all we have right now,” the major replies. “Can’t get armor down there, as you’ve found out.”
I pull off my helmet and toss it aside. When it hits the ground, I see dents and scrapes in the formerly smooth surface of the alloy.
“Get me a data plug, and hook this armor up to the console,” I say. “I was down past the ambush, down where they built their shelter. If the suit was recording, you’ll have another way.”
CHAPTER 5
UNFRIENDLY TRAFFIC
I’m injured, and my suit needs to be within a meter of the tactical console’s data jack, so they let me have the seat right in front of the mule’s main command console. The major and the Eurocorps captain are standing to either side of me, and there are half a dozen other officers watching from the open rear hatch of the mule. I hardlink my suit and initiate the download from the console, hoping that the central processing unit and the memory modules of my armor survived whatever smashed the TacLink transmitters and half the sensor suite.
The display above the command console pops into life and shows three separate feeds. One is the recording from my helmet cam, one shows my vital signs and environmental data, and the last is a positional marker overlaid on a map of the area. The feed begins in the drop ship right before the landing, and I scrub the timeline in fast-forward through the relatively uneventful parts. When we start descending down into the tunnel and my helmet vision turns green with the image-intensification filter, I slow the footage down to normal speed. On the small monitor above the console, the tunnel looks much more narrow than it did in reality.
The attending officers watch the next ten minutes of footage, the recording that chronicles my platoon’s descent toward disaster. I can’t quite remember how long we were in the tunnel before the trap snapped shut, but I recognize the long, straight passage of tunnel about five seconds before the footage goes all chaotic. I switch my filter to the heartbeat detector and spot movement behind the wall of the tunnel. There’s a loud cracking sound, and the view from my helmet camera pans to the right. My helmet light shines on a long, wide crack in the tunnel wall, and just before the wall explodes toward us, it seems to bow out, and the crack widens. Then the footage gets jumbled as I get pushed around and turned upside down. The Icelandic captain watching the footage next to me lets out what has to be a quiet curse in his own language.
“Son of a bitch,” I concur quietly. In just one moment, two full squads are wiped off the roster, buried under hundreds of tons of ice, and a few moments after the rumbling subsides, there’s nothing but heavy silence on the sound feed.
For the next fifteen minutes, the camera view shows only darkness. I scrub through the black screen footage at fast-forward, amazed at the time I was buried under the ice rubble. It’s a surreal experience to watch myself digging out of the ice and breaking free on the far side. The filter switches back to night vision, and the field of view starts bobbing slowly as Andrew from an hour ago starts his short trek down to the mouth of the tunnel. I remember that my helmet display was flickering on and off at the time, but the footage on the memory module of my armor is uninterrupted.
“Here it comes,” I say.
When the camera’s field of view pans over the interior of the Lanky cave, everyone in attendance reacts with gasps or muttered curses. The Icelandic captain and the HD major move their faces closer to the screen to make out more detail. I move the chair back on its sliding mount to give them some space. I don’t need to look at the footage any more closely. They watch, with fascination and repulsion on their faces, as the Lanky curls up into the recess on the cavern wall and the other one continues its slow walk around the miniature terraformers in the middle of the huge room.
Andrew from an hour ago is looking around in the cave for less than a minute before the audio feed picks up Private Cameron’s call in the tunnel. The camera view shakes and whirls around.
“Hang on. Replay that. The last twenty seconds,” the HD major says. I oblige, happy to be able to delay seeing the footage of Cameron and me trying to get away from the Lanky. I stop the stream and go back to the moment I have eyes on the Lankies and the entirety of the cavern.
“Stop it right there,” the major says. “Freeze frame, at thirty-seven minutes, fifteen seconds.”
I freeze the feed at the ordered time coordinate. Past Me is looking at the central terraforming spire where it meets the ceiling, a good fifty meters above.
“Cross-check the coordinates, and compare it to the map,” the Icelandic captain says in his strongly accented English.
I let the map display take up the whole screen. If my suit was tracking true through dozens of meters of solid ice, my little blue position dot on the overlay map is smack in the middle of the frozen glacial river, almost at the point where it comes off the main glacier, half a kilometer upstream from where we are standing.
“How high do you think that cave ceiling is?” the HD major asks.
“Fifty meters, give or take ten,” I reply, and the Icelandic captain nods in agreement.
I reset the screen to quadrant view and zoom in on the location data in the lower right corner. My little blue dot is in a spot seventy-one meters below the surface of the glacial river, plus or minus half a meter.
“That spot right there,” the major says, and points at the ceiling of the cave where the terraformer spire meets it and branches out like an upside-down tree sprouting roots.
“That spot,” I repeat. “There’s only twenty meters of ice over their heads.”