Protocol 7 (34 page)

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.”

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.