Protocol 7 (43 page)

Right then, something clicked inside Simon’s head, as if it was meant to be. The note, the rendezvous, the sign on the back of her neck. It felt as if she was supposed to be here. He could not put his finger on it. He looked at her head on and simply said, “I know.”

Max allowed himself a small smile knowing there was more to this than he originally thought.

The room fell silent for a few seconds. Simon threw his half-filled duffel over his shoulder and said, “It’s time.”

He walked over to Samantha and kissed her. He tried not to notice how she was fighting to hold back tears. “Sammy,” he said gently, “I’m coming back. With my father.”

She couldn’t contain her emotions as he let her go; she turned from him, weeping as he stepped away and tapped Hayden on the chest.

“I’m counting on you.”

Hayden’s nod was almost too delayed, but Simon pretended not to notice. He had already moved on before Hayden had any time to respond.

Samantha turned back to look at Simon one more time. Instead, she caught a glimpse of Nastasia’s slim figure following Max and Simon toward the fleet of MagCycles at the far end of the dark tunnel, the silhouettes of their bodies growing smaller and smaller as they walked away, until she could no longer see them.

Max took only a moment to squeeze into the pilot’s seat. He was already adjusting his helmet as Simon climbed into the passenger seat, and Nastasia pressed in front of him in a space not truly meant for a third party. Seconds later, the cycle’s powerful engine fired up and an electric blue light began to glow from the sides of the magnetic wheel. Before they even had a chance to feel the vibration building beneath them, the cycle tore up the ice below its wheels and exploded into the dark tunnel at lightning speed.

Nastasia’s body pressed tightly into Simon. All Simon could think of was Oliver.

* * *

Samantha turned back to see Hayden and the men already hard at work. Exhaustion and starvation didn’t matter to them; they had been given a job: fix the Spector, find a way out, and they were going to do it. They had little time to reach the Spector before the CS23s reached it. They had to move fast. She approached and heard the tail end of an odd conversation.

“…there is more than one network of tunnels down here?”

“Precisely,” replied a German scientist named Rolfe—once rotund, now hollow-cheeked and flabby from malnutrition and stress. “High-speed tunnels, not meant for human transport. They are using special pods that travel hundreds of miles across the continent suspended magnetically from structures embedded into the ice tunnels for transport of resources from one end of the continent to the other. There are only a few vehicles fast enough to travel in these high-speed shafts, and sometimes Vector5 uses them. They are known as Ice Raptors.”

“Well, people wouldn’t need to use them for the most part, would they?” Ryan asked. “Moving resources and supplies I understand, but surely with the cameras and communication systems, it doesn’t make sense for Vector5 to have humans travel these distances at these speeds.”

Rolfe shrugged. “I agree, but sometimes Vector5 has to transport personnel. Using the Raptor is very dangerous, however. There have been more than a few catastrophes where pods have slammed into the receptors and sliced through them. We’ve heard of a few openings on the other side that are easier to escape with, but I definitely do not suggest traveling through the transport tunnels to get there!”

Hayden looked bitter—another alternative eliminated. Samantha watched the men converse for a moment longer, then turned to walk along to the makeshift kitchen area where their meager food supplies had been laid out, scattered over random cases sitting on the icy floor.

She started to pick up an unopened MRE and noticed Nastasia’s nutrition pack slumped against the back of a crate, half-buried in discarded wrappers. It almost looked hidden.

Samantha pulled it from the trash and walked over to Hayden with a confused look on her face. Hayden was still in deep concentration over the plan to restart the damaged Spector, even though it was stuck in an icy tunnel miles away. She plopped it down on the floor next to Hayden.

“She left her med-bag here.”

Hayden looked up, completely distracted. “Who left what?”

It caught Andrew’s attention. “That’s odd,” he said. “She held onto that thing as if her life depended on it.”

Samantha nodded thoughtfully, then turned the pack over, letting the contents spill onto the worktable next to Hayden’s plans.

“Hey!” he protested, but she ignored him.

She pushed her fingers through the debris that had been in the bag. Nothing important, really: scraps of papers, a pen, a bottle of headache pills. “The inhaler is gone,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “She must have taken it with her.”

“No she didn’t,” Andrew said. “She left it on the Spector.”

Samantha frowned. “But I saw her with it, just a few minutes ago—just before they left.”

“I’m sure,” he said and squinted as he recalled the last few minutes aboard the amphibious vehicle. “She was using it for whatever was bothering her. Then she shoved it into her nutrition pack and left it in the ready room. I’m positive.”

Samantha shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that? And why would she have two of them?”

“Back-up?”

She shook her head one more time. “Have you seen these new inhalers? A year’s supply or more. And still: why put it in with a med-pack of vitamins and protein powders of all things?

“Maybe she took the other one with her,” replied Ryan. “She—”

“No,” Lucas said shortly, still out of sorts from his earlier disagreement with Simon. “I helped her buckle in. She was carrying nothing—certainly not an inhaler or…or any kind of small bag. “

Samantha began to lose herself in thought.

Lucas mistook her confusion and concern for weariness—though he wasn’t far wrong.

“Here,” he said, “let me show you a place you can rest for a little while.”

She wanted to say “no”—she wanted to resist with all her strength, but she realized resting would be the smart thing to do. She was going to need her strength.

“Thank you,” she said quietly and followed him to an insulated sleeping tent.

Nastasia used all her strength to grip the armrests of the chair beneath her, steeling herself against the tremendous pressure of the MagCycle’s acceleration. She gritted her teeth as the unrelenting weight pushed and pushed against every square inch of her body.

The MC-7 was an ergonomically designed little cockpit connected to a massive ice-tire by a magnetic field, and that huge wheel carried its passengers down the cored tunnels of the Vector5 network at speeds that were beyond comprehension. It felt as fast as a bullet shot from the barrel of a rifle because of the narrow tunnels. Max struggled to control their headlong flight through a console that closely resembled the yoke of a small fixed-wing plane with foot-pedals and slide-buttons that dictated speed, attitude, and acceleration. He wore a flat-faced HUD navigation helmet that gave him a supernaturally clear view of the tunnel ahead, complete with luminous annotations on cracks, irregularities, and potential hazards. Max had used similar rigs in supersonic fighter planes over the years, but he had never seen one on a land vehicle before—and certainly never on a magnetically constructed unicycle that traveled over a hundred miles an hour.

All Nastasia could see outside the cockpit windscreen was a blur of black shadows flowing past in an endless torrent, illuminated only by the fitful flicker of the MagCycle’s own headlights. Her body swayed to one side, then the other, then back again as they careened forward through a darkness as thick as ink. And still the pressure made it almost impossible to breathe.

Max concentrated on his HUD diagram. In no time at all, he knew, they would reach the end of the tunnel, where it had been sliced open, sharp as a knife-cut from the great earthquake a dozen years ago. They would actually have to leap across that gap to the tunnel opening on the far side, if they hoped to reach Dragger Pass and below onto deeper tunnels and the elevator shaft that would take them to Oliver Fitzpatrick. He knew leaping across that Gorge almost meant suicide and they needed to accelerate full speed to even have a chance.

He did the only thing he could: he pushed his foot down even harder on the accelerator pedal and poured the last bit of power from the MagCycle’s electric generator into its wheel. He actually felt it jump forward, yet again, hitting and exceeding its top speed.

It was the fastest he had ever traveled on land.

Nastasia was painfully aware of how the massive acceleration was hurting Simon, sitting behind her, but there was nothing she could do about it. “Simon?” she said between clenched teeth. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t speak, but she felt the tight, brief nod of his head against her collarbone as he struggled to bring it forward from the pressure of the speed.

The downward angle of their headlong flight suddenly grew steeper, and the MagCycle picked up even more speed. I didn’t think that was possible, she told herself. She heard Simon curse under his breath as blood started rushing into their heads.

“Mother of god!” Max shouted as he looked into the lens of his helmet. “See the Gorge, and it’s fucking huge.”

“Think we’ll make it?” Simon shouted back, his voice betraying some of the strain of her weight on him, as well as fear for all their lives.

“We have to,” Max said simply as he steered them down one last, long straightaway. His gloves gripped the yoke more tightly than ever.

“When will we—”

“NOW! HOLD ON!”

Max stamped on the accelerator to gain the last threshold speed, and Nastasia saw the world open up, revealed in a dim gray light that fell from high above them. The end of the tunnel spread wide open directly ahead; a cliff was visible on the far side of the Gorge, absolutely uninterrupted but for one ridiculously small circle—the other side of the tunnel directly ahead and below them, their target. But she was seeing so much more: a world that went up and up and disappeared into infinity and that plunged downward into impenetrable darkness. One that spread its arms into invisibly distant corridors left and right. She gaped at the tremendous space all around her, rushing toward her, during the one brief heartbeat that she still had solid ground beneath her.

Then they were airborne, projected from one side of the massive Gorge to the other in one long, almost graceful leap from the broken edge of the tunnel to its counterpart on the far side.

Max used all his strength to pull the control yoke back toward his body, shifting it to the left at the last moment as they flew, aiming for the tiny target of the tunnel mouth on the far side. G-forces caused Nastasia’s body to multiply its weight five times more as they flew; she heard Simon grunt as the pressure became literally unbearable.

For one fraction of an instant, in the moment after the MC-7 blew out of the tunnel opening like a projectile, it seemed to fly straight and true. But then, just as suddenly, it started tilting upward, lifting their bodies while the cockpit tried to spin over its own wheel, squealing and groaning in the air as it turned.

A millisecond later, the gigantic wheel smashed into the opposite ice wall, missing the opening by no more than two feet. It dug itself into the ice, disintegrating on impact; the magnetic field blinked out of existence and the cockpit flew free, rocketing through the air in an all-new arc.

They tumbled into the tunnel, clearing the lower lip of the opening by mere inches.

The box-shaped cockpit hit the floor of the tunnel in a shower of sparks and debris. Broken pieces of machinery cart-wheeled all around them as the chamber skidded against the ice floor, screaming down the tunnel for two hundred yards, then three hundred, skirling through the frost and ice until finally, inevitably, it began to slow and finally stop.

The cockpit housing, twisted hopelessly out of shape, came to a halt with one final bone-rattling jolt.

Nastasia was absolutely astonished. They were still alive.

Everything had gone black when the MC-7 hit the wall. Now she could feel the heat of a small laceration high on her forehead; she could hear Max breathing heavily, struggling to move.

“I’m stuck,” he said between clenched teeth. “Help me! We need to get out of this thing!”

“Just give me a minute,” Simon said briefly, sounding as if he was in pain.

Thank god he’s alive, Nastasia thought. In that final tumble across the cockpit, she had lost contact with him. She had no sense of where they were, where the doors were, even which way was up.

“I’m pushing on the passenger door with my feet,” Simon told them. “I think it’s stuck.”

She could locate him now, from the sound of his voice. “Here,” she said. “I’ll help.” She twisted around, felt through the darkness until her legs were lying alongside his and found the crumpled panel of the passenger door with her feet. “Both at once,” she said.

“Do it!” Simon yelled. “One…two…three!”

They kicked at the panel together in one strong blow and the door cracked open, just a bit. But it was enough. A second combined kick, and then a third, and they were able to wriggle out of the wrecked vehicle and roll onto the iced surface of the tunnel.

Simon activated the head and shoulder lamps of his exo-suit as he freed himself. It was all the light they needed.

The heat from Nastasia’s wound started throbbing as she pulled herself to her feet. She could feel herself trembling, and the paltry light of the suits showed her Simon was shaking as well—from the cold and shock in equal measure. A moment later, Max rolled out of the crushed cockpit as well, crawled to his feet and snapped on his emergency light source as well. It cast an eerie shadow over the fragments of broken machinery scattered fifty yards along the ice in both directions.

Nastasia saw something glittering against the ice and realized the heat from the wheel housing had melted the ice below it. There was actual water flowing down here, she realized. But as she watched—in a few seconds—it grew gelid, misty, and started to freeze all over again.